Quote Originally Posted by Issaella View Post
*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.