The Difficulty Has Not Increased In Casual Content.

Title.

What is becoming evident is the gear disparity between people who have been playing regularly and those who are just coming back after a break.

As a casual but regular player you will be around 368-370 ilevel. This makes the content barely a challenge outside of learning the new dances - of which there are few outside of Alphascape and Suzaku.

The Burn is 3 pulls and 3 bosses. Mist Dragon is fine if you're not 1 shot because you have sub 35k hp.

Arboretum has 6 pulls and 1 mechanic on the last boss that will kill you if you have less than 35k hp and a slow healer.

This is troubling as this is content that is supposed to last us, yet for those who do play regularly we are already done with it - the only difficulty comes from carrying under geared party members. I feel this is a huge design flaw, given that this is a complete lack of mid-core content.

Suzaku EX and the first two Alphascape raids are midcore content. The last two Alphascape raids get closer to be midcore as you obtain more gear.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

Suzaku EX and the first two Alphascape raids are midcore content.

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Organized content. The base level should be tuned to last past day one.

It lasts past day one, people run those dungeons every day for tomes, if you make all future dungeons midcore then what kind of new content would casuals get? I'm not sure what you mean by "organized content", if The Burn had mechanics with a high penalty rate then that's no different than Suzaku EX or the first savages, you don't need constant party communication to do Suzaku EX, just bare minimum such as assigning spots.

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Originally Posted by alimdia

It lasts past day one, people run those dungeons every day for tomes, if you make all future dungeons midcore then what kind of new content would casuals get? I'm not sure what you mean by "organized content", if The Burn had mechanics with a high penalty rate then that's no different than Suzaku EX or the first savages, you don't need constant party communication to do Suzaku EX, just bare minimum such as assigning spots.

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They should have tuned everything to at least min ilevel 365+ for the dungeons - they are just dead content for regular players.

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Originally Posted by Ilyrian

Title.

What is becoming evident is the gear disparity between people who have been playing regularly and those who are just coming back after a break.

As a casual but regular player you will be around 368-370 ilevel. This makes the content barely a challenge outside of learning the new dances - of which there are few outside of Alphascape and Suzaku.

The Burn is 3 pulls and 3 bosses. Mist Dragon is fine if you're not 1 shot because you have sub 35k hp.

Arboretum has 6 pulls and 1 mechanic on the last boss that will kill you if you have less than 35k hp and a slow healer.

This is troubling as this is content that is supposed to last us, yet for those who do play regularly we are already done with it - the only difficulty comes from carrying under geared party members. I feel this is a huge design flaw, given that this is a complete lack of mid-core content.

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First off, I'd like to ask for evidence of everyone who says that it's gear. Because we don't know yet.

Second, these fights are slightly more punishing and hit harder than most content prior to this in SB. I'd like to point out that from the first day to the last day with my gear at max ilvl from the previous tier, that Fractal Hard and Hell's Lid were not hard at all. These actually made me feel threatened and engaged by it, and I do raid content. I will admit I do not find Saint Mocianne's Arboretum (hard) that "hard". But The Mist Dragon is fairly testing and slightly more mechanically intense than most.

Since you don't mention whether you are talking about normal or extreme/savage for Alphascape or Suzaku, I'm going to assume you mean normal for both. And I'd have to strongly disagree. Alphascape is much more mechanically intense and throws more at the player faster than Sigmascape or Deltascape normal (especially compared to Deltascape normal). And I can't really say anything about Suzaku because I only did it once. I remember it being a fight that hurt and threw harder and more interesting mechanics than most more casual players are used to.

I don't disagree on the content supposed to lasting us. But I also believe that they are really banking on Pyros lasting us, which it most likely won't because most likely a majority of players will not have completed Pagos at the very least, Anemos if they really dislike Eureka. So, while I see your concerns, I also would like to say I don't think it's as bad as it seems, but it's definitely still concerning.

Also, like I said, I'm a regular player who completed last tier's raids and even I felt like this was a step up from the last dungeons/raids. I don't think it's just because people who are coming back have poor gear. hell, I ran the first dungeons with a group of people I knew and they felt it too, and they had as much if not more experience/skill in this game than I did.

The number of wipes I'm experiencing against Mist Dragon as opposed to every other ex dungeon boss so far in Stormblood says otherwise for me

The Burn isn't any more difficult compared to previous SB dungeons except in one way with the Mist Dragon, and thats because of one attack that does a good bit of damage AND you need to actually move out of quickly to not die to the DoT. The only other problem attack is during the mist stage, which is a bit unintuitive at first but also isn't the first time we've seen this sort of design (See the first boss of Neverreap for something similar.)

The other dungeon meanwhile is mostly only a pain because not doing the mud add correctly can kill DPS/Healers who are at the min ilvl if they aren't near full health. But this isn't a complicated mechanic either (no matter how much all of you will yell at me for accidently tab targetting it sorryreallysorry).

Gear will make up quite a bit of difference. Just the Alphascape gear is a ilvl25 difference from the min ilvl for these dungeons.

yeah, whatever. Like all the omegascapes i queue into progress don't exist either or something. No matter if they raise difficulty, there always will be people saying it's faceroll.

Gear doesn't make content look easier. Good skills do.