Hey Everyone!

I wanted to get peoples thoughts on heavensward system of two separate difficulties for Alexander. Do you think it will encourage a lot more people to dip their toe into raiding? Or do you think it will cause raid group to stop after they cleared normal?

For my part I am cautiously optimistic on the system. The storyline for the raids has been getting much better, and it would be a shame to have so many locked out of the content. As long as there are decent rewards for the savage mode I still think I can justify slogging through them…..hopefully something more than titles.

There are still some remaining questions though….do you need normal mode gear to do the savage? Will normal mode be equivalent to the tome gear you get (assuming there still is tome gear). I assume the two modes will not share a lockout

Oh and as a side note…..please revamp the secondary stats….I am not sure who over at Square thinks skill speed is the best stat for Bards…but they need a firm talking to….

you and your damn skill speed.
I hope it will bring a new set of raiders, the "try-hards" will do savage and the casuals will do normal mode. or we will go through normal and then go back to savage…like i have been trying to do if we could ever make any progress on t13. savage titles await!

While I am eager have a new crop of raiders ushered in by the two tiered system. I am afraid a lot of mid tier groups might not get along so well with this. The normal mode will be too easy and the savage mode will be too hard.

Keep in mind their new normal mode is going to be like current coil but with an echo buff. Whereas savage will be harder than our current coil.

I am really a fan how they do things now (wait a few months, add echo, wait a few months, nerf actual mechanics). This way, everyone sees the content, just at a slower pace for bad players

If they go through with this, it is really a question on how easy/hard the normal difficulty content. Any echo buff, say over 5% will really mess things up. Just think how easy T10 and T11 is now with all the new gear. Combining >5% with new gear, allows people to start ignoring mechanics much earlier in the raiding process (think T6, if more than 1 additional person got eaten, it was usually wipe when we first got in there).

I think most people would agree, Savage T6-T9 was a failure. It seems very small number of groups were even going in after the first few weeks. It may satisfy the 0.1% and pathetic content satisfies the 60-80% casuals, but that leaves a huge chunk in the middle.

well I think they used "coil with echo" as a marker for difficulty, not as a feature. You wont walk into normal moved with an echo buff, but it will be tuned to be about as hard as walking into current coil with an echo buff