I find myself unimpressed by the savage fights on the whole after doing normal.

2 and 3 especially felt like there was a lot more dynamic movement that couldn't be planned in normal to maintain uptime, while savage m2 only retains alarm pheromones 1 and none of the random ground targeted actions, and m3 has almost no chasing the boss for uptime, no bomb layout differences and no baited ground AoEs.

I also find myself cynically thinking this is because they thought players wouldn't be able to deal with these more random mechanics without raising a big stink about it as we already see from alarm pheromone complaints. There seems to be a mentality among players that we should all be able to always maintain perfect uptime and not have to measure any opportunity costs to do so, and the devs kept designing fights in this way because it can feel bad for players otherwise, like they've been cheated or something.

It's going to take time for players to change on this because we're so used to living in our perfectly mapped encounter timelines to the point that job design has followed suit with things like 0 damage gap closers, gap closer charge accumulation, no-cost sprint, free healing almost everywhere and almost 100% effective knockback immunity.

But at least, this tier, boss hitboxes are mostly smaller, the final fight isn't absolutely riddled with 'puzzle' mechanics that are only fun to solve but not to play, and alarm pheromones at least exists in Savage. M2s and M4s pace is a little bit faster than what we often have so we're not just whacking a boss doing nothing for 50+ seconds (thanks, Brute Bomber). We're on a more fun trajectory, I think. I just hope they don't stop here because it's not quite enough as it is.