Keeping Content Hard and Helping People Learn

[Alice_Rivers]

In fairness to the "Anyone can clear savage" argument, as someone who started savage in DT and previously "not a savage player", still don't really consider myself a savage player, I'm certainly not really good at it... Savage isn't really harder than normal, even, per se, it's just faster and more aggravating. Every error, however minor, is punished to such a degree that you will probably wipe or fail the final dps check so you wipe anyway and as a healer main I find it particularly frustrating because there's no room for healers in that paradigm but I've ranted about that elsewhere.

At the end of the day; savage is the same DDR as normal with the odd status effect thrown in to irritate you some more, resolves faster and punishes you unreasonably but if you can do normal content reliably then you are capable of doing savage, it's more a question of desire to do so. Which, to be absolutely clear, I will not fault anyone for saying they don't want to.

[Mawlzy]

In fairness to the "Anyone can clear savage" argument, as someone who started savage in DT and previously "not a savage player", still don't really consider myself a savage player, I'm certainly not really good at it... Savage isn't really harder than normal, even, per se, it's just faster and more aggravating. Every error, however minor, is punished to such a degree that you will probably wipe or fail the final dps check so you wipe anyway and as a healer main I find it particularly frustrating because there's no room for healers in that paradigm but I've ranted about that elsewhere.

At the end of the day; savage is the same DDR as normal with the odd status effect thrown in to irritate you some more, resolves faster and punishes you unreasonably but if you can do normal content reliably then you are capable of doing savage, it's more a question of desire to do so. Which, to be absolutely clear, I will not fault anyone for saying they don't want to.

It's precisely the speed which walls people, and why many cannot clear normal reliably.

[Alice_Rivers]

It's precisely the speed which walls people, and why many cannot clear normal reliably.

I don't really mind the speed in normal, you've got easily five seconds from the cue showing to the snapshot happening, that should be more than enough time for the average player to process that there's a mechanic and where the safe spot is. Most will tell you "if you have to choose between dps and the mechanic, do the mechanic first, dps after" that seems reasonable to me. For me extreme is about the right balance of speed, complexity and punishment, a good healer can save most extreme runs which makes it miles better than savage and you can still sacrifice damage for mechanics without failing at enrage (unless your party is really low dps).

[Valence]

In fairness to the "Anyone can clear savage" argument, as someone who started savage in DT and previously "not a savage player", still don't really consider myself a savage player, I'm certainly not really good at it... Savage isn't really harder than normal, even, per se, it's just faster and more aggravating. Every error, however minor, is punished to such a degree that you will probably wipe or fail the final dps check so you wipe anyway and as a healer main I find it particularly frustrating because there's no room for healers in that paradigm but I've ranted about that elsewhere.

At the end of the day; savage is the same DDR as normal with the odd status effect thrown in to irritate you some more, resolves faster and punishes you unreasonably but if you can do normal content reliably then you are capable of doing savage, it's more a question of desire to do so. Which, to be absolutely clear, I will not fault anyone for saying they don't want to.

I have been raiding since SB (and retired this tier), and I do think savage actually exacerbates the scripted part of the DDR quite a lot. In normal modes you have a lot of seemingly random mechanics even though they still follow a script (mechanic A happens, then mechanics B happens, then C, and always in that order, like in savage), because the solutions of said mechanics don't involve a single, unique, unchangeable solution where everybody stands properly in one specific spot else you wipe. In NM players don't have to follow that impetus because while the DDR is scripted at the source, it is a lot less constrained, and therefore scripted, at the resolution end.

If anything, savage isn't necessarily faster than normal modes, especially in DT, or, it really depends, but I wouldn't consider it a defining factor there. If you take a look at the latest parts of say, P4S, P8S, P12S (as opposed to the frantic doorbosses), they're excruciatingly slow in resolving things, because they're more about puzzles and debuffs and it's been like this since forever (Midas/Omega).