Objectively, The Royal Managerie Will Be Nerfed

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

You're contradicting yourself a bit here. It doesn't matter why content is more difficult. You've also done virtually nothing to refute the points of myself and SuperZay.

You know what bugs me the most about people voicing mindless defences like yours? It's that we're on the same side - we want harder content in FFXIV, and we think people can handle it. Despite this, your statements paint precisely the wrong picture to SE. Rather than correctly diagnosing the problem, you act like an arrogant elitist, therefore tilting them toward a nerf rather than a wholesale reassessment of their difficulty curve, which is really what they need.

For the love of the Twelve, stop acting like there's nothing wrong with fights like Royal Menagerie or the original Steps of Faith. Any idiot could see there was something wrong, whether they were a skilled player or not. If FFXIV were a single-player game, these are fights where reviewers would criticize difficulty jumps. By acting as if nothing's wrong, you're worsening the situation. Even IF Shinryu isn't nerfed, a la Final Steps of Faith, it's still bad design. There's a legitimate reason why people are throwing a fit, as I myself did to a few friends who play. My first reaction was "Holy f*ck SE screwed up the difficulty curve." And, yes, I turned around and beat it in a couple of tries once I had a party with DD who weren't falling off the platform en masse. It felt good to conquer. But it was clearly a difficulty spike, and that's bad game design, pure and simple.

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This is a great point and expounds more upon the basic framework behind this post, which is that irregardless of your own subjective opinion, there are objective flaws exposed with the difficulty spike seen in Royal. I cleared it having to shotcall as a RDM and generally give encouragement to folks (took 3 attempts in the run). This is fine for something like an EX primal but is just a bad idea for story content because there's not nearly enough people in this game with the patience/understanding to do the kind of shotcalling to raise the level of an entire team (I'm looking at you, folks from a certain server starting with "G" and elitists generally), so there are going to be a sizable portion of people that will be gated.

Another poster mentioned an alternative is to remove the Stormblood quest as a requirement to unlock the Verity vendor. This is also a good solution and may be ideal, except SE will have take a lot of effort to re-code and overhaul the game infrastructure rather than simply reduce the stats on one instance (the nerf). From a cost perspective SE may find it cheaper/easier to simply nerf Royal rather than reformat the Verity vendor, even though reformatting may make more sense.

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Originally Posted by Tsukino

Once again, the problem with Steps of Faith was not difficulty. It was the design - having to wait for the dragon to get to the end even when defeat was long assured - that caused people to immediately drop from groups and necessitate a change.

Other difficult story fights that are straight-up full-party boss battles - The Chrysalis, Final Steps of Faith - have not been "nerfed" except by overall gear trends and maybe eventually Echo buffs.

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This is the real reason why Steps of Faith was nerfed while every other 'hard' story trial was untouched. If you wiped in the other trials, you wiped. In Steps of Faith, you're not allowed to fail and restart the fight until ~8 minutes in, even if it's already clear by minute 2 that you can't win.

There's a reason why we've never seen another trial that has worked like Steps of Faith.

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Originally Posted by Auteur

SE can't have an instance at that difficulty as a part of story mode because it's going to gate people from content (same logic behind Steps of Faith).

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Wait what? This trial is easy. All you need to do is looking at the ground and avoid aoes. SE clearly wanted to tell everyone "We made every job gameplay so that it can be played by casu easily, so now we can make normal trial instead of mannequin one", as this was their goal with the combat revamp. If casu can't do it, then play another job or learn the one you're playing 'cause nothing is wrong with the trial, the casu is wrong.

If this fight had a hard DPS check on top of all the mechanics I would believe that it needs a nerf or that they need to make the new gear buy able before that. But the only real DPS check that I noticed (add phase) is with only the meteors as mechanic and I only had one group that wiped to this check. Every other stuff is just simply moving out of attacks and DPS a bit. So if you see the phases a bit you will learn what each attack will do and can act to that.

I mean in the first phase you will always have Levi to look out for and either fire or lightning. Staying near him between that also helps with avoiding that one AOE. Then adds, some button smashing and then the difficult phase comes. But everyone can sprint now so other then some mistakes people should be able to get away from things.

So if a group that has at least decent healers and DDs, you should down him after some training. Seeing a attack and what it does once should be more then enough to avoid it the next, especially since they are attacks that are used before.

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Originally Posted by SuperZay

It's harder than Lakshmi Extreme which doesn't speak about a good balance. Story mode should remain story mode, not extreme mode.

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the problem is that Lakshmi EX is too easy, not the other way around. there's nothing EX about neither Susano nor lakshmi, it seems every new primal they add, is easier than the previous ones.
there is no lore reason whatsoever for royal menagerie fight to be nerfed. knowing what you're up against, it's like complaining about Bahamut Prime being hard.
we're at lv 70, people should honestly know how to do simple mechanics by now, and menagerie isn't anything new - do people expect to face-roll/skid through MSQ on a banana peel, until lv 100+? people should know how to play after all the other solo trials, and job fights, before they even get to menagerie.
Yes the fight is harder than anything else in MSQ before, and it's about time, and i loved every second of it; anything less would have been disappointing - the 4-man fight before, was already disappointing.

I'm sorry but despite it diffcult or not, you really should feel of an accomplishment if you defeat any boss doesn't matter if its NM.

I really hope they will not nerf it at least soon.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

You know what bugs me the most about people voicing mindless defences like yours? It's that we're on the same side - we want harder content in FFXIV, and we think people can handle it. Despite this, your statements paint precisely the wrong picture to SE. Rather than correctly diagnosing the problem, you act like an arrogant elitist, therefore tilting them toward a nerf rather than a wholesale reassessment of their difficulty curve, which is really what they need.

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Then SE should increase the difficulty of the last 2 dungeons before it.
Increase the difficulty where it is too low to make the difficulty curve less steep instead of decreasing the difficulty were the challenge just feel right.

Don't ask for nerfs were it get a bit more challenging, ask for buffs were it is just faceroll easy

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Originally Posted by MomoOG

So why not just remove the need for beating this encounter to unlock Verity vendor? Let Verity vendor just be unlocked once you hit 70.

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This is a reasonable suggestion. The fight is doable in job gear and leveling accessories but if someone joins the game late, boosts a job to 60 and doesn't already know the mechanics from earlier in the game, then they can get a little help by farming tomestone gear first.

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Originally Posted by Venjenz

Uhm...every Final Fantasy game ever has bosses/trials/encounters that people said were too hard, not fair, blah blah. Anyone who has played the games in this franchise knows there are some fights you will get slapped around until, straight up, YOU FIGURE IT OUT.

I hope they don't nerf the final MSQ trial. Make it hard. Make it FF appropriate. Players will figure it out.

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I wonder how many Japanese kids playing FFV on their Super Famicom complained about Shinryu being hard and wrote snail mail to SE asking for catridge recalls til Shinryu gets nerfed?

inb4: blah blah XIV is not a single player game, other people's skills blah blah I complain about DF but will never ever make a PF with able bodied friends.

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Originally Posted by Vhailor

...It felt good to conquer. But it was clearly a difficulty spike, and that's bad game design, pure and simple.

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the problem then is that they haven't ramped up the difficulty before now - this fight is at a good point, with what level we are, and how long the story has progressed, and who and what we're fighting. they should have raised the bar bit by bit looong ago. instead they keep nerfing already easy content, to cater to the least skilled players, and keep having to nerf content because some people can't be bothered to improve past the already abysmally low standard.