Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

Some people applaud the new design, others detest it. Thus the world keeps turning.

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Originally Posted by Infindox

I think having infinite revives would be bad, but possible one or two per boss would probably be better in Trusts.

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So, the Willful buff we already get in 8-person duties/trials. (Just add it to dungeons, SE. Please and thank you?)

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Originally Posted by AmiableApkallu

So, the Willful buff we already get in 8-person duties/trials. (Just add it to dungeons, SE. Please and thank you?)

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Imma be honest, I did I think Hydaelyn fight once and Mandy fight once with the system just to see the NPCs; I completely forgot that was in those. But yes, just add that to Trust dungeons.

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Originally Posted by Yeonhee

Harder content pretty much always have rather low clear rate because, well, they're harder and not everyone wants to bother with that. If you want content like savage/ultimate to have a high clear rate you would have to severely reduce the difficulty probably to normal raid level or, at the very most, extreme-level. But then you have to also reduce the actual normal-level difficulty otherwise it makes no sense. So you ends up with the high-end difficulty content to be easy and nothing in the game is remotely hard and challenging to do. You also alienate the majority of the players because all content are a snoozefest and nothing is remotely interesting to do. Overall, you end up with a dead game.

Hardcore raiders only gets 4 savages like every other patch and one ultimate once in a while, they've not remotely become the target audience. I would say that DT's target audience are the average casual people who don't necessarely want savage-level of difficulty but still don't want to fall asleep while doing every single piece of content.

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I don't see how your personal skill could affect anything - current clear rate is a complete joke and disaster for an game like this and effects of it we can see each day seeing empty towns and waiting longer and longer in queue to get any duty done.

For the harder content you only need patience to learn certain quite boring dance where they want you to stand in certain position - your personal skill is unable to save the party from a wipe if anybody does a mistake.

I would say that normal content is made out to be too easy while it's fun to avoid the orange puddles the game does not promote anything requiring "skill" more of pattern learning i felt that a change was in valigarmanda fight and it was nice.

Extremes i find quite balanced if you are into DDR fight schemes
Savages - annoying and constant wipes during the prog are meant to exteend your grind on memorizng the patterns as the dps checks what require some better equipment later on.

as for Ultimates at first i tought they are unique but it's the same as the savage but just longer so you need quite more of the patience to learn your pixel standing spots.

Right now the clear rate for an mmogame is a pure disaster the effects of it we can see each day while we wait longer and longer in queues , while watching empty towns or quite less ammount of active PF's.

The game has massive issues with scalling, boss mechanic smoothness and there is insane visual clutter to only exteend the grind.

If this won't be fixed as you see now people won't bother - even top ultimate clear teams ain't bother at least 2 of them are being caught cheating each new ultimate is being realised.
This will only promote futher growth of black market for skips and cheating.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Put of the problem is consistency. The game should have a hard rule for how markers appear. Not oh one you have to watch weapon and one look for the visual in the background. But oh this one you can follow the markers. Some systems can be unique. Some should not. I don't want to play any game where I have to guess how combat is going to work fight to fight.

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That's nothing unusual in the realm of video games. In Souls games for example a boss could telegraph its attack by raising its arm or glowing a part of its body or leaping to a certain area of the arena. Even bosses in Nintendo platformers for children have different tells and ways you have to approach the encounter. Mixing things up keeps the encounters fresh.

FFXIV also introduces you to those concepts in normal dungeons and whatnot over time. If you're in a combat encounter at level 100 you have seen bosses telegraph attacks with various markers and body language countless times before. None of it should come as a surprise outside of whatever the unique gimmick of that particular fight is, which itself is often just a spin on an existing concept you've already seen.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

I don't want to play any game where I have to guess how combat is going to work fight to fight.

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Understandable, that's a fair opinion. However, the game has always been like this, and it used to be much worse, so I'm wondering why it you didn't feel it was a problem before?
Bosses often had obscure mechanics unique to them that you may not see again for the rest of the expansion, take Diabolos's portal doors from Amdapor, or the boss before having the tank kill an add to be able to draw aggro in the first place. These mechanics could get quite punishing, too.

I think the added variety of having to figure out what the boss's choice of communication will be is fun, personally. I also enjoyed ARR+ mech design best (or what was left of it when I began playing in 2020, many old dungeons would consistently wipe careless groups when this doesn't happen anymore sadly) where things are overall slower, but there's more moving pieces.

I think placing the bigger part of the game's complexity on the jobs rather than on the fight design would allow both of us to have fun: You can choose to perform a simpler version of your rotation so you can deal with mechanics more effectively as needed and fall back into the normal rotation as you get more comfortable, and players who want to push the limits can try to reach for the skill ceiling of their preferred job.

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Originally Posted by RyoXander

This 100%. The rewards are not worth the tedious process imo; specially when they become obsolete by the next patch or two. If they were necessary for relic weapon progression, I'd be more inclined to do savage content.

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I agree, but honestly I'm quite glad savage is not necessary unless you wanna see your ilvl rise. It's a time investment I wouldn't want to do without a motivating reward, and nowadays that's the glam/mount attached to the fight for me.
Relics having multiple path options (let's say in the case of DT it'd be OC, savage or fates/roulettes as a lazy example) would allow us to work towards a goal but keep things fresh. Being able to mix and match would be fun.

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Originally Posted by Miki_L

It's harder to do ARR dungeons as a support than in Dawntrail.

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This is so true, and I find myself enjoying older content more because the combination of the lobotomized kit (not so many emergency buttons), leftover obscure mechanics from that era and potentially a sprout tank that has no idea how to split up the pulls makes for the most engaging roulettes you can get your hands on as a healer. It's that, or get thrown into a synced Shiva EX with a bunch of people who don't speak your language + don't know the first thing about the fight and figure it out from there lol mentor roulette memes are always something.

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Originally Posted by Miki_L

I tried using gear from one of the recent dungeons lately in a glam set but gave up because I couldn't get colors to match.

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In case you or others reading this later were not aware, you can use a search function in Eorzea Collection to filter for any gear pieces you're interested in using, to easily see how others put outfits together with it. It's not a solution to the root problem, but if it at least helps you wear the piece you wanted...

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Originally Posted by Myotis

I don't see how your personal skill could affect anything - current clear rate is a complete joke and disaster for an game like this and effects of it we can see each day seeing empty towns and waiting longer and longer in queue to get any duty done.

For the harder content you only need patience to learn certain quite boring dance where they want you to stand in certain position - your personal skill is unable to save the party from a wipe if anybody does a mistake.

I would say that normal content is made out to be too easy while it's fun to avoid the orange puddles the game does not promote anything requiring "skill" more of pattern learning i felt that a change was in valigarmanda fight and it was nice.

Extremes i find quite balanced if you are into DDR fight schemes
Savages - annoying and constant wipes during the prog are meant to exteend your grind on memorizng the patterns as the dps checks what require some better equipment later on.

as for Ultimates at first i tought they are unique but it's the same as the savage but just longer so you need quite more of the patience to learn your pixel standing spots.

Right now the clear rate for an mmogame is a pure disaster the effects of it we can see each day while we wait longer and longer in queues , while watching empty towns or quite less ammount of active PF's.

The game has massive issues with scalling, boss mechanic smoothness and there is insane visual clutter to only exteend the grind.

If this won't be fixed as you see now people won't bother - even top ultimate clear teams ain't bother at least 2 of them are being caught cheating each new ultimate is being realised.
This will only promote futher growth of black market for skips and cheating.

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I pretty much agreed with most of what you said. The only skill expression you have in the game is indeed pattern learning and that's a bit sad.

I don't think savage and ultimate clear rate has anything to do with the game losing players, it's mostly thanks to every other big issues the game has. Majority of the game's playerbase wouldn't be much interested in savage even if they had more skill expression or different kind of difficulty.

People using plugins in world first clears and selling clears is hardly something new. My FC was selling Titan hard clears for gils back in 2.0 and you had several website selling it and Bahamut's coil for real money. Pretty much the same for cheating plugins, the big difference now is people becoming more careless and dumb with them, streaming or screenshoting their game with visible plugins on it. Anyone seriously believing that any world first competing team doesn't use plugins is just delusionnal.

Not exactly about "difficulty" but many DT dungeon mechanics are less forgiving towards players with latency issues, indirectly making the content harder for some players despite they understand how the mechanics work.

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Originally Posted by Moonlite

Not the OP. But I feel if we time DT markers to markers before this expansion they do not line up. Either the attack is going off faster or the marker is appearing later.

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I don't know what markers you are referring to. You would need to be more specific. I haven't noticed a difference in any case.

They are trying to make fights "more exciting". But I guarantee it is nothing they haven't done before. There was a lot of "fast" dancing in Qitana Ravel second boss, Eden's Gate Sepulture (aka Titan) and Tower of Zot, which is going back to Shadowbringers. Don't believe me? Queue for them again and see.

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I am not sure which, but the margin of error is less. That I am sure of. You have to watch visual ques more instead of reacting to markers.

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As I've mentioned, there are usually clues in the environment, and that has been the case since even Heavensward and Stormblood where widescreen was the accepted norm. If you were still stuck with a square monitor you were hard-pressed to see any environmental clues at all. Sometimes you're still at a bit of a disadvantage on 1080p so you have to rotate the camera and look.

If you think that environmental clues were not relevant that far back, it's likely because the content gets melted due to excessive gear. But I guarantee there are still lots of environmental clues in old content. Take Hullbreaker Isle HM which involves looking at the treasure chests, Sophia from Heavensward which requires looking at the meteors to see how the knockback will go, or the 4th Sigmascape raid that involves looking at the environment to see what type of attack or knockback is happening. We could try an ARR example in Lost City of Amdapor that is meant to involve looking at the door symbols (but most of us just skip it with DPS).

My point is that if you think this is new, you're too used to overpowering old content and ignoring their mechanics that have always been there, and were enjoyed by older players years ago.

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Except the camera is kind of unhelpful, some bosses flash text because camera can't see the visual needed. How is that good design if the camera can't show arms being raised.

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The text is not necessary in the slightest. It was added to help "spell it out" to casual players that don't understand the game ie. people that don't look at the cast bar or chatbox and ignore mechanics. I don't pay attention to the flash text because there are other ways to identify the mechanics.

I feel that I haven't noticed it lately and I wonder if they silently abandoned the concept except to solve issues in older duties that involved the chatbox. Either that or I got very used to ignoring it.

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Now with less time and people who need to concentrate more on rotation. The difficulty scales way harder for them. You probably don't even think of what skill to use next.

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That has always been the entire challenge of the game. This is what literally made the game hard in Heavensward. The older mechanics are as simple as they are because, back then, it was hard to do those "simple" mechanics with the tunnel vision rotations we had. We had 3 seconds to continue our combo or it reset. Doing a positional wrong could wreck everything. We had to maintain a buff that expired if we didn't continue our rotation. Tunnel vision cost us a giant percentage of our damage by reducing our main stats when we died, but so did pausing our rotation.

Tunnel vision can still happen, but it's far, far less of a thing than it was in Heavensward and it's barely punishing in the slightest. So while you raise tunnel vision as a concern, you are playing a version of the game where tunnel vision is less of a problem than it has ever been in the game's history. As the game is now, you can pause a rotation for 30 seconds without consequence, pressing a button wrong is likely not going to be noticed, positionals are hardly significant now and intentionally ignorable, and rotations are simplified enough that you don't have to pay as much attention to the nuances. Buffs that are key to your whole rotation no longer expire if you stop to look at the environment for a few seconds.

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It should be easy to see how DT has been difficult for some.

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It's easy to see how it's been difficult, yes. It's the developer's intention for it to be a little bit difficult. The answer is simply to try it again. People who don't want to put in effort don't have to, really. They can just wait until the content is old and unsync it. It's a perfectly valid way to play the game, and there are plenty of people that just focus on old content they can unsync without thinking. Likewise, there are plenty of people who simply accept they die a lot and others who play a tank so they can eat vuln stacks and get a lot of mechanics wrong without dying.

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The final issue and you might have seen a post about someone failing over and over with trusts. Trusts are bad for players that have trouble with the new markers. DPS gets one hit maybe two and then they die and they have to restart the fight from the beginning.

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They should ideally make the fight not reset when the player dies with Duty Support, given how people aren't using NPCs for the challenge but rather due to a lack of confidence either in their fighting abilities or in their social abilities.

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Put of the problem is consistency. The game should have a hard rule for how markers appear. Not oh one you have to watch weapon and one look for the visual in the background. But oh this one you can follow the markers. Some systems can be unique. Some should not. I don't want to play any game where I have to guess how combat is going to work fight to fight.

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This game has some of the most consistent mechanics and markers. They reuse mechanics so much. In and out AoEs, tethers, tank buster indicators, stack markers, "shiva" patterns, exaflares, knockback indicators. To the point they can teach them in a recent revamp to Hall of the Novice, which teaches many of these indicators.

That said, they (obviously) got feedback that these markers are boring and repetitive, so I forget when but it was probably headed into Shadowbringers that they started making mechanics at least "look" unique instead of just being orange circles, which led us into having environmental clues as a main way to identify mechanics. Throughout Endwalker, dungeons weren't about looking for orange circles anymore; they were about looking at the environment for lasers, octopus arms and things like that.

Despite that, SE still has consistent telegraphs - for example, a boss will typically spin around in a circle or spin something they wield in a circle to indicate you need to be inside the hitbox. Or, they will push their arms out (to indicate the inside of the hitbox is safe). In reverse, they will push their arms out close to themselves or otherwise indicate a full circle somehow if you need to run out. This is consistent enough that I can actually guess it on each brand new boss that just released.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

Understandable, that's a fair opinion. However, the game has always been like this, and it used to be much worse, so I'm wondering why it you didn't feel it was a problem before?
Bosses often had obscure mechanics unique to them that you may not see again for the rest of the expansion, take Diabolos's portal doors from Amdapor, or the boss before having the tank kill an add to be able to draw aggro in the first place. These mechanics could get quite punishing, too.

I think the added variety of having to figure out what the boss's choice of communication will be is fun, personally. I also enjoyed ARR+ mech design best (or what was left of it when I began playing in 2020, many old dungeons would consistently wipe careless groups when this doesn't happen anymore sadly) where things are overall slower, but there's more moving pieces.

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I can't tell you definitively, but I can give you my guess.

It's a problem now because people have gotten too comfortable with bosses just doing "dodge the same 5 orange AoE patterns while it casts for 10 seconds" for 3 expansions straight.
They even went back and reworked the mandatory ARR dungeons to do exactly the same thing, or they are so powercrept that you can simply ignore the mechanic.

So most players now have never even experienced having to figure out a boss' unique mechanics from whatever obscure tells it had.
Best example is Sunken Temple of Qarn. People regularly die to doom despite there being an obvious glowing platform and nothing else in the arena, because the game no longer bothers to make them develop the skill of "look around at what is happening".

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Originally Posted by Halfrek62

However, come DT and things changed.. The speed with which aoe's are chucked out is ridiculous for some players except almost professional players. Yes, we can work out our mistakes, yes, we can move when need, but not at that speed. Not as an older/disabled player.

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The main thing that I can say about that is that the game now forces you to know when snapshots happen. In your defense, it is probably the most unintuitive system in FF14 that the game never even remotely mentions.

In FF14, there are 2 types of snapshots based on the target Info (progress Bar):

1. That happens around 80% of the castbar
2. That happens at the end of the castbar

Most snapshots in casual content and a great portion of savage are done at the end of the castbar, so you can guide yourself based on that.

The solution to your predicament is to go to HUD-> split Boss information into 3 elements-> Drag the target Info (progress Bar) in the middle of the screen or where it is easy for you to see and make it 200%.

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Originally Posted by Alice_Rivers

My problem with savage isn't the "difficulty", it's just a memory game at the end of the day, my issue is that it's just a memory game - there is no skill expression, the mandatory damage is carefully calibrated to not kill you as long as the right buttons are pressed and the fail damage causes a wipe then and there, no room for healers to save the run, no room for tanks to do anything to save the run, no room for good dps players to beat the dps check anyway just "you slipped up, back to the start." From what I'm told Ultimate is the same but longer.

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Punishing vs challenging. This is the issue I'm having right now as a person who does the savage raids. I don't mind that part of the fights is like learning a choreographed dance, I can find fun in that aspect, but when that's ALL there is, it gets grating. Hell I don't even mind a couple of body checks during a hard fight, but M8S in particular is just Netcode Bodycheck Savage. It's not a fun fight when there's little to no chance of saving a run, just hours of "nope, wipe and start over." Like sure, I can use Cover as a Paladin on a healer while the LB3, but it doesn't even feel that cool because it doesn't matter, the fact that we had to do that at all means it's most likely a lost cause because the DPS were down for 5 GCDs so we might as well give up now and wipe because we won't hit the DPS check. Savage has always been difficult, that's the point, I know, but something feels different now. I actually really enjoyed M6S because I felt like I really got to shine as a tank and manage aggro and keep enemies apart and manage my shields well, but that fight stands out as unusual in that regard.

I mostly just do normal content, and a few extremes, and I don't think normal content has gotten too hard. What's happened mostly is that a lot of the fights now assume that you know (as you should after 100 levels) to pay attention to the boss's cast bar and actually look at the boss to see for example if he's going to hit left or right. A lot of players have gotten through a lot of fights without learning to watch those things, but it's truly not too difficult for anyone.

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Originally Posted by Yeonhee

Harder content pretty much always have rather low clear rate because, well, they're harder and not everyone wants to bother with that. If you want content like savage/ultimate to have a high clear rate you would have to severely reduce the difficulty probably to normal raid level or, at the very most, extreme-level. But then you have to also reduce the actual normal-level difficulty otherwise it makes no sense. So you ends up with the high-end difficulty content to be easy and nothing in the game is remotely hard and challenging to do. You also alienate the majority of the players because all content are a snoozefest and nothing is remotely interesting to do. Overall, you end up with a dead game.

Hardcore raiders only gets 4 savages like every other patch and one ultimate once in a while, they've not remotely become the target audience. I would say that DT's target audience are the average casual people who don't necessarely want savage-level of difficulty but still don't want to fall asleep while doing every single piece of content.



And most MMORPGs have visual/audio cues for mechanics and not just a orange danger puddle on the ground for 30 seconds. And with most jobs now being braindead to play, you should be able to focus on something else than your rotation anyway.

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Sorry but the 4 savage and 1 ultimate excuse dosn't fly anymore when hadcore raiders have been eating exceptionally good in dawntrail while everyone else had borderline 0 content until Occult Crescent.

They currently have 8 savage raid, 1 ultimate, 1 chaotic, 1 alliance raid (Forked Tower) and for some reason now we also have the Deep dungeon boss accessible by que with the difficulty cranked up to 11.
Meanwhile Casual players have: 8 normal raids, 2 alliance raids, Occult Crescent without an ending because of forked tower, ill be generous and say that the new deep dungeon is casual but its actually debateable due to requirement for entry aaaaaand thats it i guess.

I always laugh when YoshiP says in an interview that they want to make content for everyone from now on and thats why we have the new deep dungeon stuff shoehorned in, while forked tower and chaotic is still unplayable pieces of...content. Somehow the content for everyone means we also get a hard version of things, but for some reason i highly doubt the next ultimate will have a normal mode when you actually survive stuff and normal raids with the savage exclusive boss forms.

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

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Originally Posted by AyumiCosplayGlam

[...] ill be generous and say that the new deep dungeon is casual but its actually debateable due to requirement for entry [...]

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You just have to finish the "tutorial floors" so to speak and beat one boss with a grand total of two mechanics which boil down to run away, come close, run away. You can literally get it done in one evening and do it fully blind. It truly doesn't get any easier than this...

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Originally Posted by CuteBucket

Punishing vs challenging. This is the issue I'm having right now as a person who does the savage raids. I don't mind that part of the fights is like learning a choreographed dance, I can find fun in that aspect, but when that's ALL there is, it gets grating. Hell I don't even mind a couple of body checks during a hard fight, but M8S in particular is just Netcode Bodycheck Savage. It's not a fun fight when there's little to no chance of saving a run, just hours of "nope, wipe and start over." Like sure, I can use Cover as a Paladin on a healer while the LB3, but it doesn't even feel that cool because it doesn't matter, the fact that we had to do that at all means it's most likely a lost cause because the DPS were down for 5 GCDs so we might as well give up now and wipe because we won't hit the DPS check. Savage has always been difficult, that's the point, I know, but something feels different now. I actually really enjoyed M6S because I felt like I really got to shine as a tank and manage aggro and keep enemies apart and manage my shields well, but that fight stands out as unusual in that regard.

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M6S is the oddity that shows that we're not playing for the same kind of game and enjoyment than what's being served sadly.
I'm actually glad M6S saw the light of day for this specific reason alone, it puts this wedge issue under the spotlight.

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Originally Posted by AyumiCosplayGlam

I always laugh when YoshiP says in an interview that they want to make content for everyone from now on and thats why we have the new deep dungeon stuff shoehorned in, while forked tower and chaotic is still unplayable pieces of...content. Somehow the content for everyone means we also get a hard version of things, but for some reason i highly doubt the next ultimate will have a normal mode when you actually survive stuff and normal raids with the savage exclusive boss forms.

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

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I would wait for now given they have just introduced quantum and seem to genuinely want feedback on it.

If for example the next variant has no criterion but scalable difficulty or the next chaotic is more accessible for nonraiders then they are on the right track.
If the whole thing boils down to hardcore raiders getting content in patches that are usually more casual and the nonraiders are being left out with either nothing or a barely existing reward structure, then yeah they deserve every criticism and hate they can get.

That's actually my greatest fear with quantum. That they only take feedback from the raiding content creators and all we are left will be mini ultimates as the only noteworthy content out of it.

I agree with your points in that raiders definitely have no reason to complain in DT (since EW to be frank).
Not necessarily because of quantity but quality.
The raid series is considered as great, chaotic was in itself a fun fight and Forked tower at least had much love put into its design at least.
Non hard content like OC has been underwhelming so far with CE even seemingly being the same thing for 4 zones.
FT's "cost" argument especially was a slap in the face.

They have to step up their game and stop regarding non raiding content as a thing "they have to do" and I think that's the actual answer to this thread.
Normal content feels like an obligation from their part while they would love it more to work on hard raiding content.
The amount of effort and love put between these two is stunningly different.

What I've come to dislike about FF difficulty in recent alliance raids, is how many fights have a tricky part near the end. Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

i had a one-handed player in my party actively playing better than the able-bodied ones. a couple days after, i had a vision impaired party member who, again, did much better than some of the well-sighted people. this is a skill issue on OP's part, stop using disabled people to pretend it isn't just you underperforming.

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Originally Posted by Shistar

You just have to finish the "tutorial floors" so to speak and beat one boss with a grand total of two mechanics which boil down to run away, come close, run away. You can literally get it done in one evening and do it fully blind. It truly doesn't get any easier than this...

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Its not about the difficulty, its the accessibility.
Lets start here: You have to be at the npc to enter the que usually in some very remote location, this is a dumb decision plain and simple. If its a que anyway, just put it on duty finder. This is not a Deep dungeon specific issue, but also true for Bozja Raids and Variant dungeons, except Variant is only hidden inside multiple menus instead of just 1 obvious place.
As far as im aware you still need to do PotD to unlock the rest of the deep dungeons which is something barely anyone does nowadays.
Then comes the dumb "save file" system, when you have to save your progress in the dungeon with specific people you will likely never meet again.

You know how this deep dungeon should have been handled?
- Unlock with quest
- No PotD requirement
- new tab in duty finder for deep dungeons
- que up for specific floor range
- when floor range is completed forced exit
- que up next floor range (give a choice for players to pick a few pomanders or whatever they are called as if they had it from previous floors)
- Profit

No dumb requirements, no save file bs, rng is restricted between every 10 floor.

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Originally Posted by AyumiCosplayGlam

Its not about the difficulty, its the accessibility.
Lets start here: You have to be at the npc to enter the que usually in some very remote location, this is a dumb decision plain and simple. If its a que anyway, just put it on duty finder. This is not a Deep dungeon specific issue, but also true for Bozja Raids and Variant dungeons, except Variant is only hidden inside multiple menus instead of just 1 obvious place.
As far as im aware you still need to do PotD to unlock the rest of the deep dungeons which is something barely anyone does nowadays.
Then comes the dumb "save file" system, when you have to save your progress in the dungeon with specific people you will likely never meet again.

You know how this deep dungeon should have been handled?
- Unlock with quest
- No PotD requirement
- new tab in duty finder for deep dungeons
- que up for specific floor range
- when floor range is completed forced exit
- que up next floor range (give a choice for players to pick a few pomanders or whatever they are called as if they had it from previous floors)
- Profit

No dumb requirements, no save file bs, rng is restricted between every 10 floor.

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There is an argument against that as well as a lot of people don’t always want to just load everything from limsa from menu’s

If it doing a deep dungeon in Ill mheg I’d like to actually be in ill mheg to get to it. This game already lacks way too much in the immersion department

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Originally Posted by Supersnow845

There is an argument against that as well as a lot of people don’t always want to just load everything from limsa from menu’s

If it doing a deep dungeon in I’ll mheg I’d like to actually be in ill mheg to get to it. This game already lacks way too much in the immersion department

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Let me put it this way, no need to protect immersion when there is none to begin with. Lets say i'll go to PoTD and it pops, what are the chances that someone in solution 9 glam, a bikini or a chocobo outfit will be in your team?

Aside from that, the vast majority of players who are eligible to do lets say Delubrum Reginae, will not go through multiple loading screens to talk to a random npc to que up for a dungeon and be jailed inside the camp.
But they would absolutely que up for it from Limsa and do whatever the hell they want while waiting. Its a huge QoL upgrade without any downsides, that is without a doubt would be the difference between a content being dead or not.
I would rather have a little immersion breaking, than having a delubrum where its becoming lore accurate in terms of "nobody has been here for years".

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Originally Posted by AyumiCosplayGlam

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

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It's definitely gone in that direction and I'm not 100% sure why.

As I have noted before I tend to keep coming back to the thought that either it's because the Endwalker launch disaster has induced them to try to focus on a more specific audience (Stormblood was def an everyone's game, Shadowbringers started out that way but the evolution was stunted by Covid, Endwalker launch showed "oops servers can't really handle being everyone's game") or because Blizzard is more aggressively currying the casual endgame playerbase (especially with the simplification coming with Midnight through the revocation of combat addons etc) and for 20 years now the MMO industry lesson has been "don't go straight up head-to-head with WoW, just don't" (I mean look at how SWTOR and LOTRO have both faded into niche status, despite having two of the literally most iconic geekly licenses there are).

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

If the whole thing boils down to hardcore raiders getting content in patches that are usually more casual and the nonraiders are being left out with either nothing or a barely existing reward structure, then yeah they deserve every criticism and hate they can get.

That's actually my greatest fear with quantum. That they only take feedback from the raiding content creators and all we are left will be mini ultimates as the only noteworthy content out of it.

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Not just raiding content creators, consider overall raiding community - while there are places like these forums and Reddit, "the community" tends to center around Discord and there are two things that one finds quickly in virtually all visible raiding Discords: Moderation is designed to actively marginalize the voice of anyone who isn't either hardcore or aspiring hardcore (others are labeled as either misinformed or "bad and don't want to improve" or other excuses to discredit and those who don't fall in line or quiet themselves are banned/muted), and forum format communities are actively dunked on with a "don't listen to them" admonition.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

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100%, this 100%. It's been the case in places since Shadowbringers actually and it's not just Alliance raids. Compare ShB Extremes and Savage to Stormblood ones for instance, in StB you almost always saw all the relevant mechanics by "halftime" (relative to enrage) and after was mainly repeats and remixes with often the final 30-60 seconds being simple raidwide spam allowing you to lock in for that last DPS push, while in ShB you got fun things like Cycles and Black Smokers to punish you for getting that far and make it far less likely you'd pull it out.

It's like they realized Skip Soar or Disband was bad when they made Stormblood and then backpedaled on it (and almost EVERYTHING that made Stormblood super chill and cool) in the later xpacs (even ShB and EW where we were still riding high and the rot was less front and center) ...

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Originally Posted by AyumiCosplayGlam

Sorry but the 4 savage and 1 ultimate excuse dosn't fly anymore when hadcore raiders have been eating exceptionally good in dawntrail while everyone else had borderline 0 content until Occult Crescent.

They currently have 8 savage raid, 1 ultimate, 1 chaotic, 1 alliance raid (Forked Tower) and for some reason now we also have the Deep dungeon boss accessible by que with the difficulty cranked up to 11.
Meanwhile Casual players have: 8 normal raids, 2 alliance raids, Occult Crescent without an ending because of forked tower, ill be generous and say that the new deep dungeon is casual but its actually debateable due to requirement for entry aaaaaand thats it i guess.

I always laugh when YoshiP says in an interview that they want to make content for everyone from now on and thats why we have the new deep dungeon stuff shoehorned in, while forked tower and chaotic is still unplayable pieces of...content. Somehow the content for everyone means we also get a hard version of things, but for some reason i highly doubt the next ultimate will have a normal mode when you actually survive stuff and normal raids with the savage exclusive boss forms.

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

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I'm sorry but I disagree. While I agree about Forked Tower, Chaotic is imo unlikely to get any more of them since it's a nightmare to do, getting 24 people together that have the basic skill to run it and that aren't prog lying isn't an easy thing to do. Occult Cresent released in 7.25 and by that point there was already 8 normal raids and 1 alliance as well as Cosmic Exploration, so I'm not really sure how it has zero content until then.

And saying that the new Deep Dungeon is for hardcore raiders just because you have to do a bunch of easy PotD floors and one laughable boss to access it is just plain ridiculous. Being a casual doesn't mean you somehow are utterly unable to Google how to access new content.

Overall, hardcore raiders have been eating a tad bit better in Dawntrail but again they only have two more raid than usual to do. For a damn long time the devs were unable/unwilling to pump interesting content in good number, it has very little to do with the big evil hardcore raiders.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

What I've come to dislike about FF difficulty in recent alliance raids, is how many fights have a tricky part near the end. Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

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The intent of that design is so people doing it when it's brand new get a bit more challenge, while players who get it in alliance roulette years from now will have a relatively painless experience (since a critical mass of players will know the fight and everyone's gear will be synced to well above the content's ilevel). I do wish the interesting mechanics happened earlier in the fights, and I think the FFXI raids have been trying to compromise on that, but yes they are spicier when players aren't as good.

I'm a weirdo who thinks alliance raids are the most fun when they turn into mass casualty events though

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Originally Posted by FuturePastNow

The intent of that design is so people doing it when it's brand new get a bit more challenge, while players who get it in alliance roulette years from now will have a relatively painless experience (since a critical mass of players will know the fight and everyone's gear will be synced to well above the content's ilevel). I do wish the interesting mechanics happened earlier in the fights, and I think the FFXI raids have been trying to compromise on that, but yes they are spicier when players aren't as good.

I'm a weirdo who thinks alliance raids are the most fun when they turn into mass casualty events though

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That might be the intent, but it doesn't work like that. If you have a bunch of savage geared players from the same time where the alliance raid was released, the team can already easily skip those mechanics. Or when people get one tier higher tome/crafted gear than when the alliance raid was released. Or even if you just have a group of mostly good players with contemporary tome gear/crafted gear.

If they want the most recent alliance raids to be a challenge, they need to restrict ilevel far tighter, and even then place the tricky mechanics a bit earlier in the fight. And they can loosen the ilevel cap when they want players to start skipping things in later patches.

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Originally Posted by RyoXander

This 100%. The rewards are not worth the tedious process imo; specially when they become obsolete by the next patch or two. If they were necessary for relic weapon progression, I'd be more inclined to do savage content.

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That goes against the idea of relics, though. They're the non-raiding alternative.

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Originally Posted by Voidmage

I would wait for now given they have just introduced quantum and seem to genuinely want feedback on it.

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I would love to comment on Quantum but it appears, from reading comments, that they have gated it badly behind multiple grinds.

1. Grind to floor 100
2. Grind aetherpool to max level to get to 100
3. Grind tokens to do the 100 fight at Quantum levels
4. Hardest of all, get a group to do all of the above

If they really wanted to get good feedback from the community as a whole, they should have made the Quantum fight unlock at the end of the story or even lower. As a result, their feedback is going to be very skewed to the hardcore players with some midcore players.

Though... while they said they want feedback, they have already strongly indicated that they are fully commited to Quantum for 8.0 regardless of the feedback they get.

I consider this more of a technology preview for the hardcore players in order to keep them around and not quit because they keep hearing we are getting "less content" because the fights are all merged due to Quantum.

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Originally Posted by Yeonhee

I'm sorry but I disagree. While I agree about Forked Tower, Chaotic is imo unlikely to get any more of them since it's a nightmare to do, getting 24 people together that have the basic skill to run it and that aren't prog lying isn't an easy thing to do. Occult Cresent released in 7.25 and by that point there was already 8 normal raids and 1 alliance as well as Cosmic Exploration, so I'm not really sure how it has zero content until then.

And saying that the new Deep Dungeon is for hardcore raiders just because you have to do a bunch of easy PotD floors and one laughable boss to access it is just plain ridiculous. Being a casual doesn't mean you somehow are utterly unable to Google how to access new content.

Overall, hardcore raiders have been eating a tad bit better in Dawntrail but again they only have two more raid than usual to do. For a damn long time the devs were unable/unwilling to pump interesting content in good number, it has very little to do with the big evil hardcore raiders.

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I really do hope you are right about chaotic, because another of those should never,ever see the light of day, all that development time wasted for a week of content for so few people.
Fun fact, it barely has a higher clear rate than Cruiserweight Savage. A 24 man fight has barely higher clear rate than an 8 man savage raid, that is rough.

Forked Tower is a travesty, they should have worked on a normal mode all hands on deck after the backlash... its currently sitting at a 3.7% completion rate on lalachievements. Ultimates have higher clear rate than that...which is beyond embarassing.

Like i said, deep dungeon is debateable, its not hardcore by any means but its definitely not casual either and not because of the difficulty, but the accessibility.
PoTD should not be a requirement for this, plain and simple. Imagine if Occult crestent would require you to complete Eureka and Bozja because it has the same structure, makes 0 sense. Its not hard to create a 5 level tutorial in the unlock quest to teach them how it works, instead they are sent out to PotD...nice one.

Aside from that dumb unlock requirement, it should be in the duty finder, because while at the moment we dont have a population problem with it and parties fill fast, this will not be the case a few weeks from now on and you will be unable to complete it in a reasonable time with the que system and fixed party will be your only option and content that NEEDS you to organize people and keep them around for a relatively long time, is by no means a casual content.

The amount of effort between eureka/bozja and PoTD floor 50 is... not comparable.

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Originally Posted by Mesarthim

The amount of effort between eureka/bozja and PoTD floor 50 is... not comparable.

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The logic is the same. PotD is a requirement because it apparently teaches the players how deep dungeons work.
Maybe the word completing them is a bit harsh, maybe i should have said reach mettle lvl 10 or reach elemental level 5 or whatever.

It still makes no sense that a content that has 0 connection between each other is requiring you to interact with it just because it uses the same progression structure. A 5 level tutorial quest would easily solve this issue if its needed at all.

Spending your entire time leveling to max in a field operation, making a relic in the process, is not the same as spending up to a couple of hours in a deep dungeon.

While I don't defend the requirement people really need to stop complaining all of the time. If you do it once you never have to do it again on that character. It's easier than it has ever been to clear it. If people can't do potd floor 50 I find it hard to believe they suddenly only have interest in the new one now.]

You know full well how SE operates. They aren't going to change it. The PoTD buff is likely as good as it is going to be.

Casual here, I've also noticed that the difficulty was ramped up in this expansion, instanced content is more stressful for me. SE also took away the option to turn off bloom (it was a part of glare) in 7.0 and all the shiny boss effects and lights give me a headache. :(

I used to sub every other month to keep my house but I gave up on it and only resub once a year to catch up on the (mediocre) MSQ. I like this game but I guess it's just not for me anymore.

If a normal dungeon is too hard for some people, then what do they want? To stand still and do nothing?

We are not going back to Endwalker. I like having fun in my video games.

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Originally Posted by Mecia

Put the ''difficulty'' back into jobs.

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Pretty much (mostly).

Are people surprised though? When you take out the difficulties from playing the job then dumps them into solely encounter difficulty, what else can they make other than increasing the amount of "stand here or die idc" and its severity?

Maybe it's cheaper for devs to do this (not enough cost lmao) because they only need to design mechanics for main tank and non-tank instead of trying to design for diff subroles but look what that has done to the rest of the game lol.

Homie really dropped this thread and never came back to elaborate.

Game doesn't need to be easier. We could use measures for people to make it through MSQ with trusts, for sure, but that's it.

Every single bit of difficulty out of DTR has been "players are required to watch their screen not their hotbar" and people just cannot seem to handle that. That's it, that is the difficulty increase.

The problem isn't even that; the problem is the scripted, lazily designed fights. The problem is the "survive damage" or "don't take damage" pattern instead of "cancel damage."

They could have created fights that were challenging and fun enough for any players to complete (turn a lever, move the boss to a specific position at a specific time so it takes damage from the outside, press a button, carry special item, kill the adds' to avoid a fatal debuff), but no. It's easier for them to speed up the pace of AoE attacks and bombard players with damage and flashes of light, rather than properly develop interactive elements in the fights.

There were fights like this in ARR and HW, but they reworked them so that now everyone is forced to just run away from AOE, or memorize their pattern, and if someone considers this an interesting challenge, I feel sorry for them, because it’s just boring to be a trained monkey, dependent on ping or reaction speed, and not on thinking with your brain and knowing the way in which the mechanics should be solved.

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Originally Posted by Halfrek62

I think that it's not only the lack of content, diffuculty of content or whatever ... I think alot of older and/or disabled players that enjoyed the game and invested a lot of money through subs and/or online store purchases, have now decided it all too much and cancelled their subs.

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It's not disabled/old people that can't do mechanics. It's people that are just bad at the game.

This game doesn't incentivize you to learn anything about the combat, and neither does the community, that's why you're left with some very astoundingly bad players at max level content.

However, considering I still see these players in expert roulette, it's safe to say even they can get through the MSQ by being carried as a dps. It's also very easy to ask people in novice network to help, or put up a PF asking for help (assuming you're not on a dead server, lmaeow)

WoW also doesn't have this issue that the game is too difficult for casuals, and it is far more reactive and fast-paced than FFXIV is when it comes to dungeons and LFR. The difference is that in that game, people don't give you a free pass for having 0 idea how to play--often even being toxic toward them for that.

However, for people with no friends and crippling social anxiety, I suppose they could add a feature like they do for solo instances, where the fight gets progressively easier with each wipe when doing trusts.

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Originally Posted by RajNish

The problem isn't even that; the problem is the scripted, lazily designed fights. The problem is the "survive damage" or "don't take damage" pattern instead of "cancel damage."

They could have created fights that were challenging and fun enough for any players to complete (turn a lever, move the boss to a specific position at a specific time so it takes damage from the outside, press a button, carry special item, kill the adds' to avoid a fatal debuff), but no. It's easier for them to speed up the pace of AoE attacks and bombard players with damage and flashes of light, rather than properly develop interactive elements in the fights.

There were fights like this in ARR and HW, but they reworked them so that now everyone is forced to just run away from AOE, or memorize their pattern, and if someone considers this an interesting challenge, I feel sorry for them, because it’s just boring to be a trained monkey, dependent on ping or reaction speed, and not on thinking with your brain and knowing the way in which the mechanics should be solved.

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In my opinion over this topic, we've been seeing a consistent crack in the community between the old design and the new and it's not going to get better over time. That's on them for changing the game's genre halfway through.