Keeping Content Hard and Helping People Learn

[Shurrikhan]

That is a very sad outlook on life.

It's really not. The conclusion it generates is simply that one's time is valuable enough to spend it where one wants to spend it, and not merely in route to whatever arbitrary milestone they could potentially reach. That doesn't make a person lazy, only deliberate.

Hell, most masters reached mastery not just because they didn't give up on what they wanted to focus on but equally because they passed up a whole lot else -- much of it not even reluctantly -- to do so.

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.

Largely this, yeah. NM tells you where not to be. The coverage of where not to be and tightness between checks in Savage, though, often means that you're basically told where exactly to be.