The difficulty curve in the game has... problems...

[Packetdancer]

I've gone back on forth on responding to this since I saw this thread a couple days ago, but as someone who has been trying unsuccessfully work up the courage to do current Savage I feel you are wrong on a number of points. For one, I agree with the OP and others in this thread that there is no ramp-up in endgame difficulty in this game, at all. The difference between doing a raid boss on Normal vs Savage is -to use a WoW comparison- the difference between raidfinder bosses and late heroic/mythic bosses (I feel I'm being generous with later heroic), there is nothing in between.

I'm gonna second others here -- I genuinely think you're overestimating the difficulty of savage.

This isn't to say "meh, it's all easy, git gud" or whatnot; I'm not a top-tier raider. As I've said before in many a thread, I define myself as "more an asset than a liability". I will generally do at least acceptable damage for a healer, and I will do everything in my power to keep everyone alive while I do so.

(And honestly, if I were in charge of recruiting for a static, I suspect I'd prefer a healer that does solidly average but acceptable damage while keeping the party up to one who parses orange but lets people die, forcing the party to limp to a clear in the name of their parse.)

At any rate, there are many, many raiders better than me. And yet I clear content, so.

No, what I mean is that savage is not actually that complex, and people frequently overthink it. As I have noted before (albeit in reference to Bozja at the time), almost all high-end content in this game has mechanics made from 2 or 3 fairly simple pieces, even if those pieces are frequently buried in a whooooole lot of visual noise designed to mislead, misdirect, or otherwise confuse and trip you up.

But almost any "difficult" mechanic has a simple solution. People loathed the swords in Emerald Weapon EX back in ShB, but there was honestly a super simple solution to them where you had to stand in two different places -- first one, then the other -- out of exactly three possible spots. As soon as you knew how to see which one you needed to do first, the mechanic became fairly trivial.

The problem is that people often focus on "do this then this then this, except if this, then do this, etc." and end up trying to focus on the whole process, when really it's just "learn how to read one or two things through the noise, which allow you to execute the relatively simple solution correctly".

Yes, savage is far less forgiving of mistakes -- many mechanics are pass/fail, where if you get clipped by avoidable damage, even if you're healed to full you just flat out die to the next unavoidable damage due to having a debuff. Not always, but yeah, it's far easier to die in savage.

But the mechanics themselves aren't, at their heart, that complicated; they're built out of a few standard mechanics "LEGO pieces", to use an analogy, maybe with one new and unique piece thrown in. Just like mechanics outside of savage.

They simply happen faster, with less-obvious telegraphs, and the penalty for failure is much higher than in normal content. The mechanics aren't actually that different when you break them down into their component pieces.

Sure, gear helps. And obviously being able to still perform your job effectively while also reacting to things, rather than tunnel-visioning, is pretty important... but that's just a matter of practice.

But as for complexity? Once you see a mechanic well enough to break it down into those familiar ingredients and look past the "oh crap everything is fire we're all gonna die AAAAAAAAAAA" visual elements, you may find they're not necessarily that intimidating.

So if you want to do savage, I'm fairly sure you can.

[Issaella]

I'm gonna second others here -- I genuinely think you're overestimating the difficulty of savage.

I really don't think I am to be honest. For background, I played WoW from vanilla-Panda before mostly throwing in the towel on that one. For most raid tiers you got a gradual reduction in difficulty over the course of the current tier due to increased gear level making mechanics less dangerous. You would then see people near the end of the tier start moving past bosses that that previously were a wall. In short, you could brute-force the mechanics near the end with numbers at least in the heroic - low mythic range. I, personally, think this is a much better progression. If I put the time and effort in I can at least expect to get something I've been working towards for weeks/months.

From the outside looking in at current Savages that is just not something that happens. If you are at a wall, you are at a wall until the next expansion comes out and you can so heavily outgear it as to trivialize it. The number off pass/fail mechanics with instant death in the current raids makes overgearing meaningless in terms of difficulty reduction. Just looking at p2s alone (the one I would like to do for a couple glam pieces) there are 4 or 5 "screw up and die / screw up and wipe" mechanics alone. So regardless of gear, if you can't get it right every single time you have little to no chance of success. Maintaining that level of concentration and attention for hours upon hours of prog with low probability of success -since everyone else in every group you join must also be performing at the same level- is so prohibitive (IMO) as to make engaging with it seem like an insurmountable task. Especially considering that the only people doing at this point are the people who haven't been able to clear it in the 4 months since it was released. Again, making the likelihood of success, even if you can eventually do the mechanics, essentially zero in my view.

[KariTheFox]

I mean, I don't think the only people doing savage are people who can't clear. I personally know a fair few high end players who enjoy just teaching fights to players who haven't cleared them before.

I'd suggest putting up a 1-0 chest learning party on PF and see how many bored raiders you get bites from.

But yeah, at this point in the tier making learning with only people who haven't gotten a clear seems unwise.

[histoireancienne]

*snip*

Your bigger issue seems to be with the randomness of who shows up for a PF group late in a tier. It is ABSOLUTELY true that even when a tier is *current*, if you have a competent group that knows the mechs, while gear won't let you "steamroll" a fight, it can cover for everything from "oops, I put my toe in that bad puddle" to "whoops, 3 DPS are dead to one mechanic." I went & looked up the last P2S clear my static had back in March & we had 5 deaths, including one where 3 of us got nuked for reasons I'm too lazy to discern, but we cleared (and my static did not use the "braindead" PF tank lb3 solution for one of the mechs that seemed to have caused a lot of problems for PF, so).

But, contrary to your assertion, it is also absolutely true in this game that even with a new expac, Echo, and gear + levels, you will still have to know mechanics for some fights. I dare you to go into E12S right now with a fresh group of 90s who've never seen the fight & clear the first pull. I guess you might get lucky, but I went into O8S (a SB raid - so TWO expansions ago) today with some FC-mates to get UWU unlocked for someone, and we were absolutely expecting to have to at least do *some* mechanics, since you do have to know how to solve the mechanics you come up against (we steamrollered it with a full group of 8, but if we'd been 5 or 6, we'd have to have known at least ONE of the "big mechanics"). I don't think that's a bad thing - because of the way Savage fights in this game are made, as a very choreographed fight. Nothing is a surprise: it's just learning how to deal with X, Y, and Z mechanics in relation to your role & your party. But in the current tier, gear (even just the jump from 580 to 600) means that DPS can survive more, healers can heal for more, DPS is just generally higher so a death or 2 won't mean an enrage, etc.

I agree that there's a lack of ramp up from normal -> extreme -> savage difficulty in this game, as in, the game doesn't teach you how to be better. I only GOT better by stepping foot into the content and doing it (low-stakes - doing previous tiers, not current stuff, but still things within the current expac) with more experienced players who were happy to teach and help people improve. Which has been my general experience with "hardcore" raiders in this game - a lot of them love teaching. And boy, can a party of 2 or 3 experienced people willing to teach drag a gaggle of relative sprouts through "hard," mostly on-level content if need be, and then insist on teaching them how to improve. I've seen it in action. I wouldn't have started raiding if it hadn't been for experiences like that.