People that say this game is too easy

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MonteCristo

When zones became lifeless and no real danger presented itself

---

Eureka says hello, and wonders why it gets no love from the playerbase.

In the end a thread like this is pointless. Everyone defines difficulty their own way. You may not like that you can't control the world. That is life.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by linay

Why is that an issue? It doesn't make sense for anything to continue being hard once you've "mastered" the fight.

---

Randomized fights as opposed to scripted battles might add difficulty but i really feel this game was masterplanned as is

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Eureka says hello, and wonders why it gets no love from the playerbase.

---

I was thrilled with the idea of eureka until i realized it was a mindless fate train :(

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Elladie

It continues to entertain me that
1.) people think that because THEY find something easy - such as memorising 3x 100 boss fights perfectly - everyone else does too, and people who don't find it easy are just lazy pieces of rubbish.
2.) people don't seem to realise that if you have a natural apitude for something - your spatial awareness for example - then you are bound to improve in any activity that requires good spatial awareness and thus, after a period of time, that activity WILL seem easy. Whereas people who don't have the same natural aptitude will always struggle.

I am really good at knitting, and I love it. And it's easy. I've tried to teach my youngest daughter to knit many times. She just doesn't get it. She can't grasp what she's supposed to do, and she gets angry and frustrated. Me telling her it's easy simply makes her mad at me because it's absolutely not easy for her. I am sure that all of you have skills that you ace, no trouble, but I'm also sure you have things you're bad at. Possibly things you just can't get your head around no matter what you do. So please try and remember that okay?

---

This is a fair and valid point that I agree with completely, but I will say at least for me, when I talk about something being easy, I am just taking about myself. This game is relatively easy compared to other experiences I've had in other games, and also relatively more challenging in some ways. Point being people might not actually be trying to speak for anyone but themselves when they say they think the game is easy. I'd at least hope anyone saying people who find it challenging are rubbish are in a minority. I guess you never know though.

More generally on the topic, it's also hard to compare difficulty between MMOs across different points in their lifespan. Kinda expanding on my earlier thought and some others I've seen is that... this game has gotten 'easier' in some ways over time, via simplification and removal of certain mechanics (like skill points and the need for accuracy as a stat). I only seriously raided Savage during Gordias, and I'd say it was hands down harder than anything I ever did in WoW. More recent savage fights I've done (mostly early Omega) felt more or less on par with what I experienced doing mythic raiding in WoW legion, with the real difference being the differences in fight design philosophy and in the differences necessitated by having a different raid size (8 vs 25 people). It's a different type of challenge really. And WoW has also definitely gotten what I'd call easier over time. You used to have to be careful or at least aware of what's happening in dungeons even at low levels, but now for most things half of your group can be literally afk and the biggest problem that poses is the sheer annoyance of having someone in your group be literally afk carried through it.

I feel like this became just an aimless ramble so I'm just gonna head out now lmao

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Eureka says hello, and wonders why it gets no love from the playerbase.

---

90% of Eureka is running past enemies that won't attack you because you outleveled them, to get to places where you mass pull entire areas of mobs to mindlessly AoE down, to spawn a FATE that you can literally throw bodies at (Which you will because many people in Trains are "Low level") and because you usually had like 50-100 people coming with the train.

Unless you mean dying because you started running 0.1 nanoseconds too early and an OP dragon glomped you is supposed to represent "Life" and "Danger" as opposed to simply an annoying road bump that forces you to literally walk through a particular area...

If Eureka was actually well designed, then yes, it could have been interesting and dangerous content. But it wasn't. It was arbitrary "Leveling", boring trash mobs, boring FATE bosses and utilizing a boring "Element" mechanic while restricting mount usage to further segregate the playerbase (Beyond that of not being able to form parties because EXP Leeching due to level discrepancies)

Honestly, the game becomes too easy with one word: overgear.

If you overgear the content, any content is easy. There is a big difference on how much mobs a tank can pull at Akadaemia Anyder with gear synched down to i470 and i410. You can safely pull wall to wall with i470 without problems. Want to do the same with i410? Good luck.

Want to do it the hard way? Do it at min ilvl.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MonteCristo

I was thrilled with the idea of eureka until i realized it was a mindless fate train :(

---

That's what the community caused though.
People looked for a more efficient and more rewarding option, so the FATE training came to life.
The devs wanted us to keep killing and chaining single monsters in groups for hours, which was worse actually. I mean, all you did is running your rotations for hours and hours...
All the other things like rabbits, treasure hunting, challenge log/weekly quests, came much much much later.

It's kinda hard to decipher whether the games got easier or the players got better. I know I sucked at MMOs back in 2003 when I first started playing them. They still didn't seem that bad. Wildstar's about the hardest I can recall in recent memory but that was only when you did the hard dungeons and raid.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Valkyrie_Lenneth

I guess if you don't do any of the difficult content in xiv it's going to be pretty easy, yeah.

---

honestly yeah hard to take the opinion of someone with no recorded history in high-end content too seriously.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hydralus

It's kinda hard to decipher whether the games got easier or the players got better. I know I sucked at MMOs back in 2003 when I first started playing them. They still didn't seem that bad. Wildstar's about the hardest I can recall in recent memory but that was only when you did the hard dungeons and raid.

---

It's not just that players got better, it's that we have vast amounts more information on literally anything accessible to us. There are guides, websites, discords, simulators, ect. We can analyse and figure out anything nowadays. WoW Classic experienced this recently, people remembered it as punishing and tough, but it was figured out in days and apparently felt quite simple.

Raid encounters have had to evolve to compensate. In 2003 you could get away with giving a boss 2-3 mechanics and it would feel difficult. You wouldn't have a well researched rotation and your gear would be random stuff you picked up along the way.
Nowadays on week 1 you have videos with every mechanic explained in detail, the optimal tricks and strats figured out. The optimal rotations are all figured out too, mathematically calculated and tested. Guides are abundant and any random person in your FC, linkshell or forum can tell you the indepth workings of your class, stats and tips.
This is why boss mechanics look like a small novel in modern MMO's, where you literally had 3 basic attacks 15 years ago. The only way they can really challenge us now is sensory overload.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by miraidensetsu

Honestly, the game becomes too easy with one word: overgear.

If you overgear the content, any content is easy. There is a big difference on how much mobs a tank can pull at Akadaemia Anyder with gear synched down to i470 and i410. You can safely pull wall to wall with i470 without problems. Want to do the same with i410? Good luck.

Want to do it the hard way? Do it at min ilvl.

---

To be honest, I pulled wall to wall at i410 (Before 5.2 when they added the i470 sync) and had no problems. Same with Grand Cosmos at 430 and Anamnesis Anyder at 440 (My gear was so bad...). Heck, I was doing these as blind runs too so I was learning the tactics on the fly.

Also, people do the hardest content in the game, week 1 (So min ilvl) to boot... (Though, that seems fairly par for the course in MMO's these days... Saying that, however, WoW's Mythic raids have taken 7-13 days for world firsts...)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kalise

To be honest, I pulled wall to wall at i410 (Before 5.2 when they added the i470 sync) and had no problems. Same with Grand Cosmos at 430 and Anamnesis Anyder at 440 (My gear was so bad...). Heck, I was doing these as blind runs too so I was learning the tactics on the fly.

Also, people do the hardest content in the game, week 1 (So min ilvl) to boot... (Though, that seems fairly par for the course in MMO's these days... Saying that, however, WoW's Mythic raids have taken 7-13 days for world firsts...)

---

Yeah, and humanity went from no spaceflight to the moon in less than a decade. That means it was super easy right?

I've played World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, and Blade and Soul. At least these are the only ones I'm able to draw comparisons with FFXIV.

While this game is indeed easy to the rest in a lot of aspects, there is still a certain level of challenge to it depending on how you choose to do certain content. I'll admit the combat is probably the simplest of them all, due to the high GCD giving you a lot of time to think about your next move. Plus the lack of builds makes it so that there is really only one optimal playing style for any given class, which kinda sucks unless you're a Bard.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kalise

To be honest, I pulled wall to wall at i410 (Before 5.2 when they added the i470 sync) and had no problems. Same with Grand Cosmos at 430 and Anamnesis Anyder at 440 (My gear was so bad...). Heck, I was doing these as blind runs too so I was learning the tactics on the fly.

Also, people do the hardest content in the game, week 1 (So min ilvl) to boot... (Though, that seems fairly par for the course in MMO's these days... Saying that, however, WoW's Mythic raids have taken 7-13 days for world firsts...)

---

Eh, that says more about how good your healer is, more than anything. When a tank is under-geared, it falls to the healer to pick up the slack.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lium

So, I'm just curious. Unless you've exclusively played Eastern MMOs, which do seem more challenging, what makes you think this game is too easy?

---

The game isn'T too easy, most of the content is.
Savage has a decent difficulty attached to it and I am sure Ultimate can see to some grey hair.

Problem is: they account for a tiny minority of the content. The rest is: are you breathin? You win.

WoW, Tera and SWToR, Aion all felt similar in that regard. Only difficult in raid content, rest easily manageable.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by NessaWyvern

Eh, that says more about how good your healer is, more than anything. When a tank is under-geared, it falls to the healer to pick up the slack.

---

Pretty much. Though there is a limit. If chain casting with CDs is insufficient, you die. No matter how skilled your healer. Same if the mob group globals you or if the tank runs out of CDs because DPS is crap.

That being said: dungeon mobs hit like wet noodles.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lium

what makes you think this game is too easy?

---

FFXIV is a lot of rinse and repeat. Once you memorize the mechanics, you can go into a dungeon, raid or trial blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back. This game is a choreographed dance. Learn the steps and practice. Rinse and repeat.

Now, I played XI for 9 years so I'm used to it's endgame functionality which is very different from XIV's. Each boss fight is essentially the same, but the abilities can be very random on when/if they happen. The chat log was your indicator for everything: what ability was being used by each mob/player or what defuff landed or wore on a mob/player. You have to constantly be watching the chat log for a debuff and there were no icon indicators (back in the day) as to what was inflicted on that player like silence or paralyze. It was all in the chat log. My main was WHM. Plus, XI has so many more spells at one's disposal to use. There are no such things as rotations in XI. AOE ground notifications do not exist. The chat log was your best friend. If I missed removing a debuff (which lasts much longer than in XIV), the player would have to type in the log what debuff they had on so I could remove it.

As a tank main i can say the game has become to easy, the skill ceiling on the role has been pulled down to much this expansion making tank mechanics and complexity literally non existent, both WAR and DRK how use to be the most complex tanks now are the most brain dead ones surpased by PLD on complexity wich idk if i should laugh or cry, agro means nothing now, defensive kits has been cloned and most of the tanks have the same mechanics rotations with little variance. tanks has become boring in so many levels, the role is basically brain dead now and i no longer use my tank outside of savage bcs of all this, it's not rewarding to play and if you want a challenge and love high/medium skill ceiling jobs you won't find it on the tank role anymore, and i don't wanna start talking about healers.

if we talk about content, considering combat conten has been reduced more and more and most of then don't ask you to have even basic knowledge about you job to complete the duty it's easy to see why some call this expansion casualbringers.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by MonteCristo

Randomized fights as opposed to scripted battles might add difficulty but i really feel this game was masterplanned as is

---

I think so too and I like it as is.

Randomizing fights can be fun for the first few runs, but unless the enemies are actually reacting to you, I'd rather take a more scripted fight in the long run over simply a randomized set of mechanics. That doesn't mean there can't be randomness in the script, but order is really a good thing.

Only content that is a challenge in EX content.
All other content you don't need to care about, but the speed at which you get over-geared for content is crazy in FFXIV.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Kalise

Compare literally any jobs rotation to Feral Druid in WoW.
.

---

Arcane mage, Fire mage, elemental shaman, destroy warlock, shadow priest, arm war.

You press 2-3 buttons for the entire game, gg so much complex rotation and engaging. Complex rotation is super rare in WoW and its mainly done by a mistake by the blizzard who is dumbing down their game to the extreme levels.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SturmChurro

I was half afk tanking a boss last night, ate every single mechanic and did not use any cds, completely fine. Trash mobs, I actually pulled gigantic, as big as I could, the white mage was wasting cds and we still could pull it off. In general (and I'm talking about regular content) This game starts feeling "difficult" when you have subpar players, and a large proportion of the playerbase are not very good. It's more of fighting against the playerbase than the actual content itself.

---

https://media2.giphy.com/media/j3iGKfXRKlLqw/source.gif

I dont want to be in the skin of your healer.
You could half afk in any other game making it easy, but that only means you make it harder on everyone around you. Optimising your gameplay to the highest possible levels, increasing speed and decreasing the time spend in the dungeons/raids is what considered hard thing. Base game mechanics is simple for all the game out there, this does not mean anything.
On a healer i could spam cure I-II for the entire dungeon in FFXIV, but does that mean i am a good healer?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nedkel

Arcane mage, Fire mage, elemental shaman, destroy warlock, shadow priest, arm war.

You press 2-3 buttons for the entire game, gg so much complex and engaging.

---

I don't have a lot of expereince playing WoW and deffo didn't play every class, but from what I played I did feel like many dps specs were easier or at least less complex than most FFXIV jobs.

From what I remember though the Monk Brewmaster tanking spec was harder than any kind of tanking I did in FFXIV ever (having all tank jobs at least lvl 70), although it might have had to do with inconvenient UI for me, had to look all the way top right all the time to see if my buff was up and didn't bother getting mods to change that. Don't remember well but you had to basically constantly keep a very short buff up that shields you, and without it you'd take damage like paper, at least at lower levels. Thus had to keep level of concentration or else I would quite easily die as tank, you won't find that kind of challenge and stakes in any of FFXIV's tanking jobs.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nedkel

https://media2.giphy.com/media/j3iGKfXRKlLqw/source.gif

I dont want to be in the skin of your healer.
You could half afk in any other game making it easy, but that only means you make it harder on everyone around you. Optimising your gameplay to the highest possible levels, increasing speed and decreasing the time spend in the dungeons/raids is what considered hard thing. Base game mechanics is simple for all the game out there, this does not mean anything.
On a healer i could spam cure I-II for the entire dungeon in FFXIV, but does that mean i am a good healer?

---

God forbid a healer actually has to heal from time to time. My bad. Sorry, I forgot that healers are actually dps in disguise. I am also sorry, but when something in real life calls, and I gotta drop what I am doing, I am not going to tell the man at the door "Sorry, I'm tanking this inconsequential boss give me 5 minutes!".

Would spamming cure make you a good healer? I don't know, I don't main a healer or anything. Who could say?

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SamRF

I don't have a lot of expereince playing WoW and deffo didn't play every class, but from what I played I did feel like many dps specs were easier or at least less complex than most FFXIV jobs.

From what I remember though the Monk Brewmaster tanking spec was harder than any kind of tanking I did in FFXIV ever (having all tank jobs at least lvl 70), although it might have had to do with inconvenient AI for me, had to look all the way top right all the time to see if my buff was up and didn't bother getting mods to change that. Don't remember well but you had to basically constantly keep a very short buff up that shields you, and without it you'd take damage like paper, at least at lower levels. Thus had to keep level of concentration or else I would quite easily die as tank, you won't find that kind of challenge and stakes in any of FFXIV's tanking jobs.

---

hats why brewmaster was my class of choice in WoW because i found him the most fun, but i cant say it about other tanks in wow which are more braindead than warrior in ffxiv. Imagine warrior, but combine all his combos into 1 button, thats DH vengence for you.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SturmChurro

God forbid a healer actually has to heal from time to time. My bad. Sorry, I forgot that healers are actually dps in disguise. I am also sorry, but when something in real life calls, and I gotta drop what I am doing, I am not going to tell the man at the door "Sorry, I'm tanking this inconsequential boss give me 5 minutes!".

Would spamming cure make you a good healer? I don't know, I don't main a healer or anything. Who could say?

---

I had an entire team of headless chickens in ESO as a healer, they ran into everything, the dungeon took 1 hour because they were just facerolling the keyboard guess what.
I was able to keep them at 90%+ HP all the time using 1-2 buttons, does it mean 4 year old kids could play the game and be end game pros?
I will tell you more, i was able to heal entire party in raid as a lonely healer in veteran rank raid in ESO, and used only 4 buttons because the healing in this game is/was so OP, no one never died or had hp below 50%.

Too many pages.
FFXIV is harder than most mmorpg, if anything because you have to actually do "significant" content to advance your MSQ. In most, you don't have to do any group content at all until endgame, and even then you can just gear up while ignoring it. And open world content is generally easy, as well as story instances, because they're meant to be the basic layer anybody can do, even with half a brain. For example, if I think of Aion, which I played for long, you could even farm the best gear set by simply doing daily and weekly quests, which were just open world kills, and only the weeklies actually required you to group. I had the best armor without ever having to do any dungeon. And even when you'd actually do dungeons, they were mostly about stats. No stuff to dodge or such things, not much mechanics to know, except things like "at this boss use this buff" (buff with 30mins cooldown so to be kept for the hardest bosses). Trash was so useless we just trained it, instead of fighting it. I played with 250 to 500 ms ping and it was still fine for PvE.
If I think of challenging MMORPGs I think of the action ones, but even then for example in Tera the huge difficulty was the ping. in BnS some classes were hard to play, some braindead, and the dungeons were such that a healer role didn't even exist and tanking was not even always necessary. I don't know about now because I haven't played either for years (same for Aion).
If I have to go to western ones, I think of Rift, which I was playing recently, where again you need 0 dungeons to progress and story is super easy. The only time I had trouble with a boss I levelled a bit more, geared up, and it became a joke. You can even get good gear by just doing IA/any reputation thing, which is really braindead, you can literally AFK it and nobody will notice, and people can just get in, get their xp and go out at any time.

These are just a few example, but really, in my experience FFXIV is the only one you have to really put some brain in. And not everybody is naturally good at dance dance revolution.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Lium

It was chaotic but fun. But even then, I had no worries of ever dying. And I didn't. Not once.

---

It depends on what kind of content you are talking about. If you're talking about veteran flashpoints in SWTOR, yes. But if you are talking about master mode flashpoints — no. Try more complex content, HM and NiM raids in SWTOR, MM flashpoints (like Copero and Umbara) and you will see that FF 14 is much easier. This is not bad, just these games are really different. In addition, in SWTOR there is a lot of stupid grind now, I am happy that this is not in FF 14.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nedkel

I had an entire team of headless chickens in ESO as a healer, they ran into everything, the dungeon took 1 hour because they were just facerolling the keyboard guess what.
I was able to keep them at 90%+ HP all the time using 1-2 buttons, does it mean 4 year old kids could play the game and be end game pros?
I will tell you more, i was able to heal entire party in raid as a lonely healer in veteran rank raid in ESO, and used only 4 buttons because the healing in this game is/was so OP.

---

Well, I am sorry that we all aren't as good as you! Even so, a player as bad as me still thinks this game is easy!

ESO? I didn't know people actually played that game seriously! Only PvP is half decent in that cash sho.. game.

Lack of staple RPG tactical elements. This isn't just limited to MMOs. Things like elemental resistances and weaknesses and Physical damage type resistances and weaknesses, which could effect how you would gear for an upcoming piece of content. I mean seriously fire spells do as much damage to a magical entity of living flame as it does to a doll made of paper.

The game literally tells you exactly where to go for every quest objective outside of a handful of quests they intentionally designed to not fully track in the quest tracker. Most the time you don't even need to bother reading the quest dialogue. You can just open log and click button to see where the next marker is. At this point you can just disable your brain because its no longer needed.

Outside of a small handful of attacks every AoE is telegraphed long before it actually happens. Add to it content outside of savage raids and trials or ultimate with a handful of exceptions isn't really punishing to the people that get hit by it. Add to it a non existent penalty for dying and we now have little incentive for people to actually learn a fight because its not needed for progress. Additionally they nerfed content making it even easier just because people didn't want to learn how to do it right and weren't happy they couldn't just die 5 minutes into the duty and wait for the other 7 people to clear it for them.

The secondary stats for the most part have so little influence on a build that a majority of the time it has no actual effect on gameplay or performance. They could rework this to make things like skill/spell speed, tenacity, and piety be far more impactful to the actual game. Then maybe we'd see melds other than DH, crit, det on everything by people that want that extra 1% hypothetical DPS output they'll probably never achieve because they haven't developed their player skill to a level that it will actually matter.

4man duties are far too linear and basic in general. Visually they are quite well done. However from a gameplay standpoint they pretty much feel like 1 straight line with occasional doors or barriers keeping you from trying to sprint to point B while ignoring everything. IMO many of the duties in ARR are far better designed from a gameplay prospective than the ones that came out from HW and on. They need to drop the slot car race track design then throw in more instances of interesting dungeon mechanics. Add to that the only Raids that felt like actual raids to me were the ARR ones for the coils of bahamut. The ones afterwards just feel like having a second set of trials.

I'm a bit of a connesurier of MMO's Having played numerous both free and paid over the span of about 25 years. I've been gaming in general for close to 40. Games in general have been getting easier and that decline really started when companies started pandering to noisy minorities of their playerbase that wouldn't stop crying on the internet.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SturmChurro

Well, I am sorry that we all aren't as good as you! Even so, a player as bad as me still thinks this game is easy!

ESO? I didn't know people actually played that game seriously! Only PvP is half decent in that cash sho.. game.

---

You are ignoring the point i was trying to tell you, and it was not about me being good or anything like that.

My point is, the game is as hard as your will to push the boundaries of the game as far as possible, all games are easy to play but a lot of them are hard to play them as decent level, league of legends is super easy game and its not at the same time.
Its not easy to hit purple/orange performance in this game, as its not easy to speedrun supermario games or any other games. For instance BLM is easy to play, slow CPM but its pretty hard to pull out a decent percentile with him in raids.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Nedkel

Its not easy to hit purple/orange performance in this game, as its not easy to speedrun supermario games or any other games. For instance BLM is easy to play, slow CPM but its pretty hard to pull out a decent percentile with him in raids.

---

So, I fact checked you here, looked at my performance. Apparently, I pull purple pretty regularly. I am not sure if you are making a joke here! It is easy otherwise I couldn't!

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by SturmChurro

So, I fact checked you here, looked at my performance. Apparently, I pull purple pretty regularly. I am not sure if you are making a joke here! It is easy otherwise I couldn't!

---

Do it on ninja hehehe

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Darsien

It's exceptionally easy to hit purple/orange in this game, especially on casual content because so few players care about their performance. All it takes is a small drive to improve and a willingness to put in the minimum to research this game's fundamentals.

---

Everything is easy if you do it for OVER 7 YEARS, lmao.
Try out other games.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Darsien

It's exceptionally easy to hit purple/orange in this game, especially on casual content because so few players care about their performance. All it takes is a small drive to improve and a willingness to put in the minimum to research this game's fundamentals.

---

Can confirm, I am not that good at the game, even after 7 years, and I have quite a bit of ping, and even I managed to pull an orange deeps in casual content, which I don’t use food or pots for.

I am kinda depressed that my only orange (I think) is on ingles, of all things, lol

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by miraidensetsu

Honestly, the game becomes too easy with one word: overgear.

If you overgear the content, any content is easy. There is a big difference on how much mobs a tank can pull at Akadaemia Anyder with gear synched down to i470 and i410. You can safely pull wall to wall with i470 without problems. Want to do the same with i410? Good luck.

Want to do it the hard way? Do it at min ilvl.

---

Yeah seriously,

Its "easy" when you're doing it with Max gear that's way over the content level. Hmm Imagine that. Try doing it at the iLvls it was originally and its a whole different story.

Another one... especially older and higher geared players... (yes I realize I am included in this) but newer players have never had to go though the content the older players have. So some of the people saying it, went through all the stages of slowly ramped up difficulty in raids and dungeons alll the way up through each expansion as they came out. Try completing the Omega Raids which are just last expansions raids... you'd never complete them because no one plays them anymore so you queue for hours and no one joins them.

All these mechanics that older players did over and over again with each expansion that got increased in difficulty slowly and over time... they were there for the changes. Most newbie players will NEVER get the chance to get the slow increasing difficulty of stepped up mechanics through the expansions the older players did.

So of course the new mechanics are "easy" to them because they've been there from the beginning while the mechanics slowly ramped up in difficulty... while a New player gets thrown in the deep end right off the bat without any of the previous lessons learned.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by hydralus

Wildstar's about the hardest I can recall in recent memory but that was only when you did the hard dungeons and raid.

---

I loved WildStar with all my heart; I very nearly moved to California to take a job at Carbine. So I say this with deep and abiding affection for the game...

...but WildStar's content difficulty wasn't a hill so much as a wall.

People sometimes say that FFXIV's jump in difficulty between Expert content and Savage is too much (or between normal and Expert), but honestly it's just a little hop over a puddle compared to the yawning chasm that WildStar's difficulty jump could be. The normal content (at least up to a certain point) was reasonably easy to play, and then you had better bring your A game for any content beyond that; there was no gradual ramp up to get players going on progressively harder difficulty, and for many people it was just rounding a corner and slamming face-first into a brick wall like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon. (Meepmeep. Pthb.)

To put it in context, for many of them it was like if ARR had gone up to Aurum Vale and then jumped straight to T9S without passing through any other content between the two points.

I know people who relished that, but I also know people—a lot of people—who slammed into that wall and moved on to other games. And the second group was too large to be healthy for WildStar's survival.

That said, I just started savage stuff in FFXIV and I'm still not great at it. Nor do I think I'm anywhere near ready for Ultimate. Is this because savage is harder than WildStar was? I honestly can't answer that objectively, because 'difficult' is relative; I'm not even sure if it's subjectively more difficult for me so much as still unfamiliar. But it's definitely different in what's difficult about it.

FFXIV has a much higher predictability of mechanics in fights—after the boss casts this, they will cast this, etc.—but what also feels like a much greater variety of mechanics than I've encountered in other games recently.

In some games, difficulty is about reaction time; the boss might only have four or five real mechanics, but they could come in any order at unexpected times. In FFXIV, it feels more like difficulty is about precision and choreography; it's not that you have four or five different things to react to on-the-fly, but that you have 3 variations of 5 different potentially-complicated mechanics—some of which which folks who are newer to the game may be learning for the first time if they didn't go through previous expansions' savage content.

I tend to think of FFXIV battles as timed collaborative puzzle games, baked to a golden brown and seasoned with just a pinch of periodic semi-random obstacles to resolve for spice. ("Okay, so, the main tank just took a third vuln stack and the other healer was trying to slow-rez the RDM and just ate a mechanic to the face and there's about to be a mechanic that requires all 8 of us to be up... #thisisfine") They can be challenging, but they also have a solution you can find like any puzzle.

When everybody plays their part perfectly and has all mechanics for all the fights memorized? When, as it were, the dancers have the choreography perfected? Yeah, it's probably easier than WildStar was. Heck, it's probably easier than The Secret World's 'Nightmare' mode content was, though to be fair half of that difficulty was less by design and more because TSW's combat system was objectively godawful.

But getting to the point where everyone has all those memorized? For some folks that may be far harder than reacting on the fly to a smaller number of less convoluted mechanics.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by NessaWyvern

Can confirm, I am not that good at the game, even after 7 years, and I have quite a bit of ping, and even I managed to pull an orange deeps in casual content, which I don’t use food or pots for.

I am kinda depressed that my only orange (I think) is on ingles, of all things, lol

---

Yep, exactly! I use food if I have it in my inventory, I'll buy them for farming extremes, but regular content? NAAAAH.. I think most players are literally pretty much just autoattacking to do so bad. :p

Double-posting, because I'm a Wordy McWorderson.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by RitsukoSonoda

The game literally tells you exactly where to go for every quest objective outside of a handful of quests they intentionally designed to not fully track in the quest tracker.

---

To counter-argue, I will point to investigation missions in The Secret World.

Now, I loved those. When you figured out the answer to a riddle and translated it into Latin to be able to unlock a passage? Or you successfully figured out a chemistry-based cipher and turned molecular formulas back into readable text that told you where to find the thing you were looking for? Or you went onto a real website for a fake in-game company, downloaded the service manual for the particular model of radio receiver you were trying to use that was broken, read the section on improvised repairs, went to collect materials, and then repaired the radio just to be able to hear a Morse Code transmission you then had to translate to be able to know where to go next?

When you figured one out, the rush of "I solved the damn thing!" was incredible. Every time I saw the investigation icon for an available mission, I had both a sense of dread—how much time was I going to lose to solving it this time?—and excitement, because YAY PUZZLE TIME! And oh, that heady rush of victory.

But a huge number of players hated them. Quests that just said something like "Decipher the code and retrieve the artifact." as the 'goal' text from the moment you accepted the mission until the moment you concluded it drove many people batty, and no few of them said those quests were "too time-consuming to solve" and would just go read solutions out on the web.

What I take from that is that many players want to 'optimize' the time it takes to do content, and prefer things to be ones where you don't have to spend 45 minutes to do something (solve a cipher and then interpret the resulting deciphered clue, go to a place, and fight your way through monsters to get a thing) when it could be just 5 minutes (go to a place and fight your way through monsters to get a thing).

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Reap00

All these tough guy responses are so giggle worthy. Thanks. I guarantee you all the tough guys die quite often and then talk about how easy the game is.

---

I am thinking the same thing. For me, FFXIV has the perfect level of difficulty. It is challenging but not overwhelmingly so.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Darsien

It's exceptionally easy to hit purple/orange in this game, especially on casual content because so few players care about their performance. All it takes is a small drive to improve and a willingness to put in the minimum to research this game's fundamentals.

---

Lol no its not. Not at the original gear levels it was intended at.

Go put on your old Weathered Gear from the ending of the Shadowbringers campaign... then run Copied Factory which is how you would have originally played it and see if you can parce Orange. Hell even in Ronkan Gear.
Pfft good luck with that.

When I started a new character (this one) on a new server I did just that while working it up from scratch.

When you play the game at the original gear levels this stuff came out at, its not so easy.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Silverquick

Go put on your old Weathered Gear from the ending of the Shadowbringers campaign... then run Copied Factory which is how you would have originally played it and see if you can parce Orange.

---

If you've been playing the game and are caught up with gearing, you should not be on Weathered gear by the time Copied Factory was released, at least not on your main. But the fact there are people who are late at gearing (or are playing alt job) might increase your chance at getting higher parse at the beginning, assuming you are caught up with the game.

But yes, everything is harder at min ilvl.