Game difficulty, syncing, minimum ilvl and new players

Eh, I feel like "up the difficulty, up the reward" would be a pretty simple solution comparatively to most others. Yeah it'll take longer but as long as you get compensated for that time it shouldn't be a problem for higher level players looking to zoom through roulettes.

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Originally Posted by Payadopa

Don't worry. It'll be the same up till Shadowbringers. It's sad that SE invalidates their content like this one patch at a time.

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You mean every other MMO. I stated it in a different thread and i'll state it here. Beginning/previous content will always be made easier to catch the player up to the current content. This is standard basically in every MMO that has been out a while.

I totally get you, but right now there doesn't seem to be an easy solution.
Daily roulettes are already seen as a chore by a lot of players, they just want to hurry with it and cross that off the list.
MSQ content like the normal (and IIRC hard) trials can't be excluded from the roulette since MSQ queue time would suffer dramatically from that.

And with how gear progression works in this game even weekly tomestone gear already feels pointless outside raids due gear sync, I'm pretty sure people would be upset if they started being synced to the min ilvl in low level content of all things.

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Originally Posted by EtherRose

You mean every other MMO. I stated it in a different thread and i'll state it here. Beginning/previous content will always be made easier to catch the player up to the current content. This is standard basically in every MMO that has been out a while.

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Not every MMO has ilvl syncing. In which case you expect to make short work of the lower level content because that's how your characters' progression works.
It feels more frustrating here because this is a game where syncing is supposed to be done to pull advanced characters down to be proportional to the instance being run. However it's really redundant when said sync doesn't even prevent the content from being trivialized by gear regardless.

If you ask me, I think the final trial for each expansion should have an iLv sync equal to that of the dungeon at an equal level. It's pretty disgusting how well-hyped many of these trials are throughout the story, especially in Heavensward and Shadowbringers; just for them to fall over like a wet noodle when you come to encounter them.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

I'll never forget when I first started how underwhelming Thordan felt. While the build up towards him was fairly solid, his fight was so poorly tuned I could stand in AoEs and not worry. That didn't make for an epic, grand finale but an anti-climatic one. And this was only ten months into Heavenswards. Nowadays, so much older content is utterly laughable. I appreciate they don't want new players to be left too far behind, but it makes doing old content less fun. In fact, it's one of the main reasons I almost never touch it anymore.

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I found this post amusing.

I am part of a discord group that does the old stuff at Min I-level and no Echo and we recently cleared Thordan EX. I got to see first hand the reputation this trial got as the hardest one in FF14. Believe me, you do it with all the mechanics in play and no 'help' like the echo and being overgeared, and it is Damn HARD! Right now we are doing Nidhogg Ex. Not as hard as Thordan, we should clear him tomorrow night.

I am currently doing the whole of Coils MINE too and T9 is the Bitch. Good Lord Nael is hard! We hope to finally beat her next weekend and move on to T10.

Yeah, it's a shame newer people can't normally experience the fights like they were and see the true mechanics of it. Luckily though, there ARE groups that offer the chance if you look for them.

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Originally Posted by Wissp

I found this post amusing.

I am part of a discord group that does the old stuff at Min I-level and no Echo and we recently cleared Thordan EX. I got to see first hand the reputation this trial got as the hardest one in FF14. Believe me, you do it with all the mechanics in play and no 'help' like the echo and being overgeared, and it is Damn HARD! Right now we are doing Nidhogg Ex. Not as hard as Thordan, we should clear him tomorrow night.

I am currently doing the whole of Coils MINE too and T9 is the Bitch. Good Lord Nael is hard! We hope to finally beat her next weekend and move on to T10.

Yeah, it's a shame newer people can't normally experience the fights like they were and see the true mechanics of it. Luckily though, there ARE groups that offer the chance if you look for them.

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Thordan EX was designed to be a higher than usual difficulty as a way to bridge between Alexander Gordias Savage floor 2 and 3, so it was like a 2.5. Those i205 weapons were valuable to help the A3S Living Liquid DPS check.

Even I can admit it took my raid group getting the Thordan weapons to clear Gordias Savage when it was relevant. Not a ton of people cleared Gordias Savage, and it nearly dissipated the raiding scene in the game. YoshiP said they never wanted Thordan EX to be a regular thing. Hades EX almost had that similar feeling, a bit easier but it was just a long fight.

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Originally Posted by Jonnycbad

I am trying to get a friend to play but the issue is they get all excited about a trial as a first time player, like they have it in their head it's going to be an epic boss battle and the boss is dead in 20 seconds. I'm talking about ARR story mode trials. I wish it was the case that if there was a first timer in the fight, item level would be sync'd to the minimum to encourage the new player to learn their role properly and enjoy the fight as it was intended. I understand this would be inconvenient for people doing daily roulettes, but it's hard to get new players to feel motivated to keep playing when they get excited for this epic Titan battle and it just melts. Obviously higher level trials aren't like this, but new players forced to slog through ARR, it can be confusing.

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I feel this - especially when helping someone new in the final battle of SB 4.0 and ShB 5.0 - the boss is supposed to feel epic, but majority of our gear outscales them so much that sometimes they can't even show all their mechanics - I feel like maybe not a min ilvl sync should happen, but there should definitely lower the max ilvl sync to be much lower when you get better gear, so the content does get easier when you get better gear but not so easy that the best expansion to date feels like a joke when you outscale them significantly.

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

Not every MMO has ilvl syncing. In which case you expect to make short work of the lower level content because that's how your characters' progression works.
It feels more frustrating here because this is a game where syncing is supposed to be done to pull advanced characters down to be proportional to the instance being run. However it's really redundant when said sync doesn't even prevent the content from being trivialized by gear regardless.

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Part of the problem is that a lot of the old endgame content is level synced but not ilevel synced. Hard to take Praetorum seriously when your ilevel is synced to 250% the ilevel it was tuned for.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

I feel this - especially when helping someone new in the final battle of SB 4.0 and ShB 5.0 - the boss is supposed to feel epic, but majority of our gear outscales them so much that sometimes they can't even show all their mechanics - I feel like maybe not a min ilvl sync should happen, but there should definitely lower the max ilvl sync to be much lower when you get better gear, so the content does get easier when you get better gear but not so easy that the best expansion to date feels like a joke when you outscale them significantly.

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There’s no easy solution here. Part of it is to reward those who worked so long for their gear. Doesn’t it feel good to feel more powerful after 5 years of playing? Otherwise, is it okay to feel exactly the same in every dungeon/trial even after 5 years of playing? Either alienate newbies or alienate tenured players.

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Originally Posted by Hycinthus

There’s no easy solution here. Part of it is to reward those who worked so long for their gear. Doesn’t it feel good to feel more powerful after 5 years of playing? Otherwise, is it okay to feel exactly the same in every dungeon/trial even after 5 years of playing? Either alienate newbies or alienate tenured players.

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I don't see an issue with old fights retaining their difficulty - or at least enough of it to still feel like an epic battle and not a pushover. Don't enforce a min-ilevel sync but keep it at or not too far above the best gear you could own when the fight was current.

The "reward" of getting stronger from current high-level gear should be felt in current fights, not old ones.