sorry for all the text LOL
This is about the current savage and ex difficulty in xiv but also a bit about the game's difficulty in general
word of warning tho: Writing is not my strongest ability and i'm probably going to repeat myself a lot in this. Also, i'm not sure if i'm going to be that good at explaining myself, I feel like the friends i've talked to have been better about explaining why xiv raiding rn feels so weird but i am simply not good at using my words. Anyways.
In the past, i'd be able to recommend people who are new to savage raiding and want to try it out to go and do an Extreme fight to see how they feel about handling mechanics, dps checks, and enrages. They would generally be a good way to see if someone is a good fit for savage raiding and see if they like how harder fights feel (it was a good way to check their game sense as well as how well they do under pressure and if they can do mechanics on their own.)
But now I can't really do that. It's not that the Extremes are bad but that the gap between EX fights and Savage fights is a lot wider now. I don't know if this is a change in game design or what but, I noticed a lot of the new EXs are very generous with their enrage and dps checks. It makes it so that more people are clearing EX fights but now they're not really the best way to gauge whether or not people are actually ready for savage raiding.
XIV players are better at the game now more than they've ever been. The amount of mechanics and quality of newer fights kind of makes it so that they're thinking more about their positioning and where to go than they ever have in the past. This is generally a good thing both for the game but also for the player base. Even normal fights now are harder than the normal fights in previous expansions.
I think at this point either the EX's maybe need some sort of tweaking, or there needs to be some form of content in between EX and Savage. Before I thought the Variant Dungeons would fill in this space (because I was thinking maybe it would work the same way mythic+ dungeons work in WoW or something) but.... that didn't really happen (and the rewards for the variant dungeons are uhm. bad.)
I dunno, the game is in a weird spot rn for harder content. And that's coming from someone who isn't like, super sweating it up or parsing or whatever. This is coming from someone who approaches savage content mostly casually.
Bc of that gap in difficulty we're getting a lot of people joining pfs or statics who don't actually play on that same difficulty level that other people who already regularly pf do. It's why pfing this savage tier has been so awful for so many and why it feels like way more statics are disbanding. (of course there's also outside things affecting this. DC travel has been affecting party finder groups in different ways depending on your data center as well as there not being an extra zone where people are doing relic stuff like eureka or bozja. I can't say for sure how many other outside factors are affecting this tier in particular but it definitely feels like more things are popping up due to changes in the difficulty of the content as well as lack of extra content to do.)
I hope ppl don't think that i'm saying the content right now is bad, it's mostly fine. But there def needs to be like, something more there. I dunno.