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

[Issaella]

Gear helps a metric ton for tanks and healers. Your first day/week of savage with the gear you have vs after you've had a few weeks of ilevel jumps...

I think what you are missing here is that if a mechanic kills you (or wipes you) regardless of gear then overgearing the raid is meaningless in terms of progressing. Getting better gear doesn't help people who are trying to get past the mechanics do so any faster or easier. Even your own argument is solely based on being able to blast through content you have on farm even faster with better gear. This is my main problem with trying to get into Savages, no matter how much ilvl I've been able to pile up (592 on my main DPS) I am still going to have to put an enormous amount of time progressing at a much slower pace with a much lower chance of success. There is no natural lessening of the difficulty that you see in other MMOs due to increased gear due to the sheer number of pass/fail mechanics where failure means death/wipe regardless of gear level. It really feels like a single mistake means the end, start over.

I think the key thing here is that you and others (Including myself when I first started) are afraid of failure and/or possibly sucking/failing...

It is less the fear of failure (granted it is that too) and more the fear of putting in dozens of hours to learn something and still having no success. It feel like Savage is really bad in terms of time investment vs reward unless you have a dedicated static. And I think that's what it boils down to. Even if you are trying to PuG the content you have to put in static amounts of time and effort, but actually it's considerably more because there is no uniformity between one prog group and the next.

So aside from EW content (which is current and SHOULD be difficult) the "early" savages aren't something you should see as insurmountable at all...

I don't see how you can say with a straight face that current Savages are not MUCH harder than Normals and significantly harder than current Ex. From the discussions I've had with other people who have cleared p3s and p4s, the only one they think is even close to Ex2/3 difficulty is p1s, anything beyond that isn't even in the same ballpark. Reiterating my previous argument it's the difference between raidfinder difficulty and mythic difficulty in WoW with nothing in between. This essentially cuts out an entire group of mid-level raiders.

I just don't feel like the odds are in my favor having any kind of success this late in the tier. Without a static you are essentially stuck in the prog stage indefinitely until you get absurdly lucky and get a clear and can move into Duty Complete parties or eventually give up (which seems more likely given the sheer number of repeat PF postings I see day after day, week after week)

[Themarvin]

Okay, enough already with the posts about the modding community and what not making tools to take down the high end content. Yes, WoW development ended up starting to build fights around the existence of these tools and it caused a ton of problems, but those tools are going to exist one way or another and SE isn't going to plant a program on your PC to scour it for third party tools, ever.

The whole reason that mods exist is to solve a difficulty curve problem that plagues these kind of games. If someone sticks a fancy reward that is unique and desirable to multiple different kinds of players at the end of some hard content that is meant for only a specific kind of player, people will make tools to circumvent the difficulty of the content.

The question that the devs should be asking themselves is this: Why are these other kinds of players that do not want hardship doing content that involves taking excessive amounts of time to complete, often at the sacrifice of newer content, for excessive numbers of weeks? This definitely didn't happen as often during Stormblood, but it is obvious that the dumbing down of jobs created a rather huge swath of middle ground that was not properly explored in the current content tier.

And FYI, I'm not even talking specifically about Dragonsong. This happens in savage as well with a lot of groups and it doesn't get publicized.

If you have played the game long enough, then you would see the difficulty curve as you name it to be that it has gotten much easier to play this game during the last 2 expansion, even Savage/EX difficulty is in decline by the extremes.

You don't need third party tools to play this game.

[Lieri]

If you want my opinion, if anything right now the players have it too easy. You know that some difficulties are there to give you a sense of achievement when you finish it and wiping multiple times before that is expected. They will remain that way during the first few days/weeks as people havent gotten used to them yet. And yet even in more difficult contents like ex trials or the first savage raid people use both the addon + voice chat, eventhough theyre not that hard. That makes coordination super easy. Now VC is never prohibited. Shouldnt that be enough? raid leader/anyone responsible will let you know what happens, you just need to carry your own weight and execute the mechanic, plus maybe a few stuffs that happen to you but not other people so you cant rely on raid leader for that. Thats part of the challenge. But thats not the case you have both people on VC and addon telling you what to do. If all you want is being told what to do 24/7 then you might as well consider idle mobile games. They all tell you what to do and the extent of their difficulties is how deep is your pocket.

The reason why WoW mythic difficulty is tuned based on addons (which make it so that only a very exclusive group get to clear it or even attempt it), is to make sure its still very difficult to do even with addons. The encounters are designed to fuck world first raiders WITH all the addons. They even have to put it on test server for world first raiders to try it out before releasing it. Thats how much DBM addon has an effect on WoW raiding. Its ridiculous.

So I can see why SE wants to make a statement about this by banning streamers that clearly showcases addons while clearing the latest hardest content. Lets be honest, if youre a streamer, chances are you are very good, you dont even need it if you really try. Now either SE let these 3rd party addons to be used by everyone and design next savage & ultimate to be more tricky to make sure addons arent very helpful or they disallow the addons and keep encounters design as it is, they can focus on creativity than working around the addons. I prefer the latter so that more casual players can still try those encounters than making it impossible just to try it e.g. need to install this addon, that addon, while also discouraging learning mechanic by yourself. Its also unfair for console players.

tldr;learn mechanics.

[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.

[KariTheFox]

I don't think addons really address the difficulty curve issue at all. I think there's just a pretty severe jump between P1S/P2S and P3S in terms of what is being asked of players.

Endsinger EX kiiiind of fits between 1/2 and 3 in terms of difficulty imo, but even then it's a still a severe jump. I wish P2S was a little harder, maybe with tougher heal checks and more for the offtank to do, then maybe the jump to p3s wouldn't feel so jarring.

[Colt47]

If you have played the game long enough, then you would see the difficulty curve as you name it to be that it has gotten much easier to play this game during the last 2 expansion, even Savage/EX difficulty is in decline by the extremes.

You don't need third party tools to play this game.

That's going to go off in a completely different direction, but difficulty is always and shall forever be subjective. If I played a game for a long time than obviously things will be easier for me, and if I played the game during HW and compare the now to then, I would likewise have the perspective that the difficulty decreased. However, if someone came in later, like in shadowbringers, than the game difficulty has been relatively static as well as what the curve is. Also it seems like you don't understand the problem being pointed out...

[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.

[Rilifane]

I'll third was Tobias and Packetdancer say. That's a lot of premature negativity for never having tackled the content and you are judging something and the people currently doing it without really having tried it.

I agree that this game has a really strange difficulty curve. Throughout the MSQ you have mostly extremely faceroll solo duties duties, then comes the odd spike that catches you off-guard and requires slightly more attention than "press any button to win" and back to facerolling. Same with the trials. Most are extremely easy but then you have the occasional trial that still trips up DF to this day like Titania or WoL.
Normal raids usually don't have any form of dps check, you can just keep throwing bodies at the boss until it eventually dies (that 14min e4n run I had being one such example). No mechanics that wipe the raid when messed up, barely any mechanics that one shot you when messing up.

While the confusion of "what's going on here?" may seem like insurmountable difficulty if it's your first tier it's in truth just a matter of getting used to a different overall encounter design. I also played WoW and it took a tier for me to really understand how endgame content here works; that's normal.
And you can get away with a lot of deaths in Savage. I had the messiest kills with deaths and mess ups on several mechanics. The only guaranteed wipe mechanic in p2s is if the dps or tank with the debuff stays in the group and yeets everyone else into the wall. No way to recover that. But deaths/ mess ups on numbers or arrows are recoverable more often than not. Gear helps a lot here with making the dps check or taking harder hits e.g. during Coherence from missing people.

And PF right now is filled with helpers. It's not all "only bad raiders are left" doom and gloom, many really good players are bored out of their minds because their static steamrolls these fights on Tuesdays so they hop into PF and teach people fights. And it's extremely effective. Most "practice from [one of the first mechanics]" groups turned out to be a kill party with only one or two other helpers.
Some mechanics are memes in PF like p3s add phase or p4s Pinax but that doesn't mean you'll be hitting a wall and be unable to clear until next expansion. You'll wipe to it a couple of times, someone may leave or get replaced and try again but it's rare to see a party not getting past the meme mechanic within the evening.
If you are interested in raiding there's nothing except your own mindset keeping you from doing it. Saying that you need a static, that you'll be helpless to progress if PF isn't at their best game, that you'll spend weeks on a boss for little to no reward is simply wrong and unneccessary doom and gloom. And definitely not fair to all the people out there constantly teaching and helping with clears or people that simply started later but are quite capable of learning.