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.