FFXIV too easy or too hard?

I've seen a lot of different opinions. So answer if you think each is too easy or too hard. And, if you feel like it, maybe explain what you'd change and why?

• Dungeon Content
• PVP
• Crafting
• Gathering
• Leveling
• Buying a house
• Raids
• Socializing (making friends)
• Special Events

• Dungeon Content
  Easy. What should change is not to make it hard but to make it have more unique gameplay.
  
• PVP
  Hard. The problem though is the steep learning curve. An in-game tutorial is needed.
  
• Crafting
  Too easy. Expert crafting should be significantly harder and yield much more scrips. Incorporate old skills into expert crafting. Leveling is too easy but most people want that. Side effect is botting overwhelming the markets.
  
• Gathering
  Easy. Fishing is the hardest gatherer job now because you need to care about GP management.
  
• Leveling
  Fine.
  
• Buying a house
  Fine.
  
• Raids
  Easy. 24-mans are too easy this expansion. Normal raids are fine. Extreme raids are easy but excellent due to their very well-done design (except Memoria). Savage raids are a little easy. Final floor should be harder. TEA is appropriately difficult. UCOB and UWU are too easy due to bad skill and ilvl tuning. An unreal system needs to be implemented for all ultimates so that skill tuning does not retroactively make previous expansion Ultimates trivial.
  
• Socializing (making friends)
  Easy. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
  
• Special Events
  What

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Skiros

• Buying a house
  Fine.
  
• Special Events
  What

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In terms of housing, I find it difficult. It's a pain to stand there hours on end and clicking in hopes to get it. Often with bots being the ones who win. I tried for a week and then kind of put it on the backburner for now. Definitely not easy if trying to get your first one. At least not in my opinion. But interesting to see we have someone who says it's fine. Maybe just comes down to luck or the servers we're on.

Special events, I'm thinking of things like we just had one to gather tomestones or w/e. Now we just started the Make It Rain campaign. So it was referring to things like that. https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...ign/b1nyoh167i

Dungeon Content: mostly easy, a good or bad df group can adjust this accordingly.
PVP: don't care
Crafting: fine
Gathering: fine
Leveling: its pretty easy with a nice variety of options, imo.
Buying a house: difficult.
Raids: fine, again a good or bad group impacts this.
Socializing (making friends): depends on the individual I think. but 14 gives you plenty of tools to help make buddies.
Special Events: depends on the event i guess. make it rain isn't exactly taxing. XD

Generally, the difficulty in XIV comes from a lack of tutorials and constructive learning experiences in entry level content.
The lack of difficulty comes from there being only one kind of challenge in this game, pattern memorization and execution. Once you get practiced in that one skill, the game can't really ask anything more of you.

But specifically for your questions:

• Dungeon Content

  The problem with dungeons isn't that they're easy. It's that they're all uninteresting outside of their visuals and story context. The bosses can be interesting some times, but for the most part dungeons are one of the biggest gaps in quality this game has.

• PVP

  Depends on the opponents and your team I guess. For that reason I can't really say one way or the other. I'm excited to see something other than arenas and hold-the-point style games though.

• Crafting

  Actually.. Pretty alright. I think this one suffers a LOT from the lack of a tutorial, and overmelding being the only way of optimization leaves a lot to be desired since you don't really have control over that RNG. But for the most part, it's in a good place.

• Gathering

  Same answer as crafting. Though I currently have a burning hatred for fishing since I finished the Feast of Famine quest this weekend.

• Leveling

  NUANCE!! EXP gain: Perfectly paced, wouldn't change a thing.
  Content experienced while leveling: Too easy, which makes later things appear too hard. You can just coast by without needing to learn the important tools to not only see smooth higher-level runs, but also to just have an interesting time. Though I will admit some job story quests are a bit challenging (boat samurai for example), but I wouldn't say they're "too" hard, 'cause I enjoyed having to like actually get better gear than what I was handed and stock up on potions to survive the damage. That was an actual interesting RPG experience. But for the rest of it, its easiness creates a kind of difficulty debt to be paid near endgame, which is less than ideal.

• Buying a house

  HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA LOTTERY IS GOING TO SOLVE NOTHING. It's not "hard" it's just BS. There is no agency in buying a house right now, nor after a lottery is implemented, so difficulty cannot be applied.

• Raids

  Kind of depends on the fight, but also raids are a victim of XIV's conservative approach to content and innovation, and they're starting to begin the path of growing stale like the dungeon designs are, at least for my group. Starting out raiding with no experience, it's going to be a challenge, which is great! But, since every fight in endgame is just one kind of challenging (every fight is a dance), once your team memorizes the fight, it's second nature and there's no more challenge to be had. You just kinda go on auto-pilot while you and your team are memeing in voice chat. Hell, I did an entirety living liquid phase in TEA nearly completely blind as I was having the weirdest lag where no mechanics were going off on my screen, but I could still move and attack and the game would register. Managed to dodge and bait everything I needed to just by going off of where I was in my rotation and just feeling the timing. That's a fine kind of challenge to have, but the more of it you have, the easier it's going to get the longer you play the game. A variety of mechanics checks could help a LOT here to provide a more level experience for newblood and veterans alike.

• Socializing (making friends)

  Ugh. As a social butterfly I find it just a drag to try to talk to new people in this game. I WANT to, but it's just not worth it since my only way to interface with people is through a tiny portion of the corner of my screen that people have to stop what they're doing to look at. I'm really not going to bother trying to get people's attention anymore without player speech bubbles. I'll stick to discord if this game wants me to exclusively use a scrolling chat box. That and there's like nothing I can DO for other people out in the open world outside of raising them if they went afk near a hostile monster. (rip stoneskin) There aren't really any mechanical icebreakers like popping my INT buff on people, or putting up a table as a mage in WoW, or portaling people through tough exploration content as a mesmer in GW2, which means there is really no reason to engage with people who are out doing their own business because, well, you're just interrupting their flow instead of enhancing their experience.

• Special Events

  Hit and miss. I prefer when there's some kind of minigame to play (or, more preferably, a variety) instead of a quest where you just talk to a bunch of people and then get handed a thing. Some events do it right, some events just kind of want to get themselves over with too fast. Feels less like an event and more like a limited time cutscene.

Dungeon Content - Generally far too easy now with a side order of strange inconsistency. It makes no sense that levelling dungeons are generally much harder than so called Expert level content. ARR used it's first wave of end game 4 man dungeons to ease players into hard mode primals with watered down versions of the same mechanics being seen throughout. Some bosses even had soft enrages if DPS wasn't up to snuff. That's almost comically unthinkable now. Leveling dungeons have occasional difficulty spikes primarily due to inconsistent trash gating with the occasional poorly thought out trash ability combination.

PVP - Easy and in honesty, I don't actually mind the way it is. XIV's net code and tick rate is far too slack to ever offer PvP on par with what WoW has offered in it's heyday. Not to mention that the job team is unable to keep up with the demands of existing roles in a purely PvE sense, trying to balance their full kits of PvP as well just isn't going to happen.

Crafting - Moderate, leaning towards easy. XIV's crafting is as deep as it gets, it's just gotten much easier to get into it now.

Gathering - Fine, most gathering is fairly straight forward with fishing being the true endgame.

Leveling - Pretty painless, even levelling a DPS job to cap solo really isn't that arduous anymore. Queuing for stuff whilst doing other content works well. If you really don't want to interact you've got other options too, squadrons, trusts etc even if they are a bit slow.

Buying a house - From what I hear, it's a pain. I'm glad I got mine when I did.

Raids - Soso, leaning on too easy. Casual raids are just far too easy and forgiving, sorry. I can mash one button and eventually get an even shot at loot despite being dead weight. Not acceptable. Ex primals are a good step up, whilst I'm of the opinion that they aren't as good as they used to be, not everyone could stomach Thordan EX and I appreciate that. Savage is fine but it could be tuned a little better and I wonder if the job and battle teams should perhaps communicate a little more with each other.

Socializing (making friends) - Gonna go against the grain here, it's borderline awful. Why? Go back to early 2.x, content forced you go go out into the game world, travel and socialise in the process. Now you can do everything from outside your FC house's market board and bell. I miss the days of mingling with rival progression teams at Wineport. I used to know and be on first name terms with near enough every end game healer on the server back then. Now I barely know maybe 4 or 5 people in an previous FC I raided with for over 2 years. There are few times when you actually stop, mingle and interact with people outside of your circle now compared to how things were at release. Everything else is a rushed conveyer belt of duty speed runs largely in silence in part due to the report happy nature of some aspects of the community and erratic and often overly harsh GM responses.

Special Events - Eh? Have events ever been challenging outside of maybe the sheer grind with the Yokai crossover?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

Generally, the difficulty in XIV comes from a lack of tutorials and constructive learning experiences in entry level content.
The lack of difficulty comes from there being only one kind of challenge in this game, pattern memorization and execution. Once you get practiced in that one skill, the game can't really ask anything more of you.

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I agree. First encountering and learning mechanics often makes it the biggest struggle. I will say the number of mechanics they have and how they combine do often make it interesting and hard to get to, especially if you're a person who doesn't have a fast response time. Honestly, if I wanted one where it's how quick you can aim, dodge, and whatever else I'd probably be more into FPS and all. I get into MMORPG for the strategy and exploration. In that aspect though, I wish they could let bosses be played by AI or that they'd at least randomize mechanics, so you never know what's coming. Could you imagine a machine learning thing implemented and bosses learn player mechanics, then reacts? haha. Now that would be a true extreme mode and would let it be a living dungeon, never really giving you the same experience twice.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

[*]Buying a house

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA LOTTERY IS GOING TO SOLVE NOTHING. It's not "hard" it's just BS. There is no agency in buying a house right now, nor after a lottery is implemented, so difficulty cannot be applied.

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Agreed

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

[*]Socializing (making friends)

Ugh. As a social butterfly I find it just a drag to try to talk to new people in this game. I WANT to, but it's just not worth it since my only way to interface with people is through a tiny portion of the corner of my screen that people have to stop what they're doing to look at. I'm really not going to bother trying to get people's attention anymore without player speech bubbles. I'll stick to discord if this game wants me to exclusively use a scrolling chat box.

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Haha, I'm kind of the opposite. My social skills suck and I'm usually introverted. That said, I do often talk to new players and help teach them the basics. I have found socialization in XIV to be lacking. It was awesome while I was in Novice Network, but then once you get booted from it for level and content progression, you're left with no real talk in channels except for maybe your own FC. Even then, so many people get focused on just finishing content that I don't see people actually talking and having fun. I rate this typically as too hard because they don't give a lot of ways to encourage interaction. Especially since there's no "General" or "World" chat.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

[*]Special Events

Hit and miss. I prefer when there's some kind of minigame to play (or, more preferably, a variety) instead of a quest where you just talk to a bunch of people and then get handed a thing. Some events do it right, some events just kind of want to get themselves over with too fast. Feels less like an event and more like a limited time cutscene.

[/LIST]

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Yeah, I've not really played long enough to see many. I started around like April I think. So I was here for Easter and it wasn't bad. But beyond that it's been kind of quiet. When I compare events here to what I remember back when I played FFXI like 15-17 years ago, events here are much more lackluster. They don't decorate much, have very few things to participate in, etc. Yet this is an area I can't really speak on.

Dungeon Content: Way too easy. I’m a failure of a tank and even I manage to go through literally every dungeon I’m queued into with relative ease. I’d like to be challenged just that tiny bit - because the gap between dungeon content and midcore/hardcore content is WAY too big.

PVP: Apparently easy enough to allow people to queue in and facesmash their keyboard. But I can’t say anything for myself so…

Crafting: Levelling a single crafter can take 30 minutes if you do levequests with a levekit, or about 4 hrs if youre doing Ishgard. Does that answer your question?

Gathering : I’d say this is right where it needs to be. Considering you can’t macro and sit back most of the time, you’re actively participating.

Leveling: For the first class? Way too easy. You simply blink and you’ve jumped from level 2-4. I understand theres a need for balance between too much and too little, and I luckily came into the game when there wasn’t a need for me to grind levels, but they’ve yet to strike the balance. For secondary classes, though, I feel it’s fine.

Buying a house: Way too hard, simply because there isn’t enough SUPPLY. Like, think about the current graphics card shortages - you might luck out and buy one at MSRP, but most of the time youre battling against so many people fighting for the last one in stock that’s been overinflated in price. I’d liken the current housing crisis to that. They need to up the supply, either by hiring people dedicated to reworking how their space is used so it isn’t such a chore to add housing as needed (so it doesnt take away from other aspects of the game), or by buying more server space and doubling the wards we will have after Ishgard. I know it’s not as simple as that but that’s what I think should happen - wishful thinking and all that.

Raids: Never done a single Savage mode raid. I’m too wuss for that LMAO.

Socializing (making friends): Easy! There are many avenues for you to find a group of likeminded players. Not too easy though - it’s in a sweet spot right now.

Special Events: Theyve found the goldilocks with this. Special events are just that - special events. They shouldn’t be skill gated, y’know? I find they’r perfect as is.

The game has content for all ability levels. Do what you find fun and challenging and stop crying.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Crafting - Moderate, leaning towards easy. XIV's crafting is as deep as it gets, it's just gotten much easier to get into it now.

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I hear you. Crafting always was a long grind to most in the past. FFXIV kind of started off that way as well. I think what made the biggest shift and hurt everything was Ishgard Restoration. Now crafting overall is just a joke and everyone can easily max it out at pretty low prices.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Gathering - Fine, most gathering is fairly straight forward with fishing being the true endgame.

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Yeah, I have just about gotten mining and botanist to 80, both sitting at like 76 because I had to unlock more Shadowbringers content. (and since then I've just been lazy and not using them, as no reason to have to). Fishing is something I've unlocked but haven't gotten into. I'll have to go Ocean Fishing and everything soon, get to see what you're talking about.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Socializing (making friends) - Gonna go against the grain here, it's borderline awful. Why? Go back to early 2.x, content forced you go go out into the game world, travel and socialise in the process. Now you can do everything from outside your FC house's market board and bell. I miss the days of mingling with rival progression teams at Wineport. I used to know and be on first name terms with near enough every end game healer on the server back then. Now I barely know maybe 4 or 5 people in an previous FC I raided with for over 2 years. There are few times when you actually stop, mingle and interact with people outside of your circle now compared to how things were at release. Everything else is a rushed conveyer belt of duty speed runs largely in silence in part due to the report happy nature of some aspects of the community and erratic and often overly harsh GM responses.

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Yes! You kind of have hinted on the main thing I've been saying about MMO in general over the years. In order to help people who have a limited time or lack patience, they've essentially stripped all motivation to get to know each other. And you can see with their Trust system and all, they are trying hard to be able to give people the option to solo everything without even dealing with other players. Just give it time, you'll see it happen. I mean, as annoying as some old things might have been in games, like messaging and recruiting, then running to the dungeons, and having to enter manually in regards to time and all, it also was the motivation not to suck and to talk to each other. Out of convenience you'd be friends and you'd gear each other up. From there, static groups were made and often it was the base for forming guilds/FC.

I touched on this in another thread:

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Originally Posted by Ayuhra

It seems to me like this game being very dance like causes this rift (NOTE: between "good" players and "bad"). Either you have seen the various mechanics this game throws at you and can play with your UI turned off, in which case you know the moves or...you don't know the moves. It has a higher skill floor than most other games and a lower ceiling so you end up with one crowd who feels the game is way too easy and another crowd that finds it frustrating.

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That's still how I feel.

It's very hard and frustrating if you don't know the dance and easy if you do.

....Housing system is goofy, though. I'd rather have ESO's system. It's harder to just have people walk around your house but everyone can have a house.

Dungeons: Assuming everyone is reasonably geared, pretty easy. When you get that one tank who thinks Ironworks gear is fine for Dohn Mheg, though......

PVP: Not really my thing, so I don't know too much about it. I hear the job balance is horrendous, though.

Crafting: It's more a grind than actually difficult. And Ishgard Restoration eased up on a lot of that, too.

Gathering: See previous.

Leveling: In terms of pure experience-to-level, it's almost too easy now. People frequently out-level everything.

Buying a house: Entirely luck-based at this point. Difficulty doesn't really apply.

Raids: Once you learn the patterns, normal raids are fairly easy. With alliance raids, well, the main difficulty comes from the other 23 people.

Socializing: If I wanted to socialize, I'd go out and try to meet people. (Well, not this past year I wouldn't, but you know what I mean.)

Special Events: Difficulty doesn't really apply here, since they're not meant to be a challenge.

I'd argue that leveling is more of an endurance test especially if you're not into story. That's not difficult or hard, just tedious.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dragonblanco

I've seen a lot of different opinions. So answer if you think each is too easy or too hard. And, if you feel like it, maybe explain what you'd change and why?

• Dungeon Content
• PVP
• Crafting
• Gathering
• Leveling
• Buying a house
• Raids
• Socializing (making friends)
• Special Events

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The game is extremely easy. I don't see the developers increasing the difficulty cap in the near future.

60-70 leveling I think needs something more for leveling.

I would love to see new game just give exp myself.


Other than that, I think the game has a nice balance. I want my daily content to be easy and mindless. While giving options for harder stuff if I want to do it.


Crafting, most people macro it so easy.

Gathering? Easy.


Buying a house? Would never do it with the system as it is now. I might gamble and see if I get lucky... So not hard, but annoying.



Socializing pretty easy. I guess this depends on the server. ladies and guys tend to flock to me when I do it. Makes my wife jealous, and annoyed so I just chill with her.

Dungeon Content

Too easy and unvaried. Players are very rarely challenged, and it leads to cases of 'endgame shock' that can result in people permanently being turned off of high-end content. This game has done a very nice job of smoothly building on mechanics over the years as you progress through expansions, it wouldn't hurt for them to increase the challenge a bit. Nothing too crazy, but dungeons are completely trivial and you can beat most of them essentially spamming one skill. There's almost zero risk.

PVP
PvP will forever be a cursed system until they do major maintenance on the games netcode. The tickrate just makes it feel bad, and no amount of endlessly expanding various classes melee ranges will ever make it feel any better.

Crafting / Gathering
Too easy to macro, would like to see more random mechanics introduced that require more hands-on gameplay. They should buff the amount of items certain crafts yield in hand with that, though. Crafting 100's of potions would be a nightmare if you had to actively do it.

Leveling
The leveling loop in this game is extremely boring if you try to grind it head-on. The roulette system is one of this games crowing achievements for sure, but I wish there was a way to make actual grinding a little less menial. Increasing dungeon challenge and variety would help with that.

Buying a house
lol

Raids
Savage is in a weird spot. It's basically the games new intro-difficulty, which I have mixed feelings about. I think the first two fights of a tier should be accessible, but lately the 3rd and 4th fights of each tier feels a little too easy (barring e8s).

Socializing (making friends)
Too easy. Please implement better systems to avoid stalkers SE.

Generally the game is too easy. There needs to be more mid-core content, and a bit more high end. It's not that there isn't a place for easier content, it's just that there's not enough harder content. We need more content that actually rewards the time spent grinding for better gear.

I've played numerous MMOs since the days of games like Horizons, Tabula Rasa, Auto Assault ... and I find FF14 is in a middle ground.

End game can be hard depending on what your goals are. It also feels easy to pick up and understand (though I do agree alot more could be explained as well).

As a DF/PF warrior ( no friends, no static )

Dungeon Content: It's pretty easy, except for a few pulls+paper tank. Expert are a joke, it's embarrassing. LolAkh Morn.

PVP: No idea, I only do the roulette when I need a piece of glamour.

Crafting: It used to be a long term goal, but with Ishgard resto, it's just became another faceroll activity. I won't complain though, I'm glad all my DoH are 80.

Gathering: It's fine, I really enjoy gathering, it's relaxing.

Leveling: It's ok, fairly easy if you're not in a rush. I haven't tried Bozja yet.

Buying a house: frustrating, exhausting.

Raids: normal raids have been okish to faceroll this expansion. Raid 24 were way too easy compared to Ivalice, it's really a shame. EX/Savage, well, PF being PF, it adds a layer of difficulty, but overall it was fine. Never touched Ultimate.

Socializing (making friends): Really hard. I just can't connect with the playerbase. I don't know why. It could be a matter of age, or language /cultural barrier, but I've never had this much difficulty to make friends in an MMO before FF14.

Special Events: Super hard to not ignore them when they only reward hats and you play a viera.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dragonblanco

I've seen a lot of different opinions. So answer if you think each is too easy or too hard. And, if you feel like it, maybe explain what you'd change and why?

• Dungeon Content
• PVP
• Crafting
• Gathering
• Leveling
• Buying a house
• Raids
• Socializing (making friends)
• Special Events

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Dungeon Content
Could be a little harder, but I don't really mind it the way it is for the purpose it serves. I would, however, like additional dungeons to return that were specifically tuned to be harder and/or require more investment/exploration

PVP
Don't play it, but not really because it's too easy or too hard. I'd at least give it a try if it were a faster, more punchy, casual friendly thing

Crafting
I don't craft extremely seriously, but I think it's in a pretty decent place difficulty wise. Crafting the basic stuff is doable but you need to be prepared and know what you're doing to do the harder stuff or to HQ the newer stuff

Gathering
Overall it's pretty easy, which is fine. I would like skill/knowledge to be better rewarded. Rather than waiting on timers for certain things to pop, it would be nice if you could bypass that if you were "good enough"

Levelling
Mid game levelling can still be annoying but I think it's mostly fine as is. If anything, it feels like levelling late game is almost too fast and easy.

Buying a house
Terrible and should be much more accessible to more players, but doing so in the current system isn't really realistic. A good addition would be to expand the apartment system so that people who just wanted an instanced place to decorate, plant stuff, etc. could do it without actually "needing" a house

Raids
Assuming you mean the single fights, I think they're in a pretty good place given the multiple difficulty levels. Normal mode can be tricky for a less experienced crowd and the higher difficulties are there for the hardcore. Assuming you mean the 24 mans, I think the difficulty is mostly fine. They could stand to be a little harder but, again given the audience and the purpose, I think they're good.

Special Events
Meh, I think they're too easy and too short but, at the same time, I've played other MMOs where just getting all of the "stuff" means you need to grind the event harder than the actual game so I'll take fast/easy over that given that they're just temporary fluff.

I think the problem is the lack of midcore/casual/hardcore pve content

I'm not very far into the game yet, but here's my two cents.

Dungeon Content: Seems fine so far. It's good the duty finder version isn't hard, since the msq is tied to them.

PVP: No idea, and will never know. Not my cup of tea.

Crafting: Easy. The problem is restricted inventory while handling a billion ingredients.

Gathering: Same as crafting.

Leveling: Good. Tons of options how to do it. But I really dislike how many features are locked behind the msq. If you ingore the msq while you're leveling in other ways, you could end up at very high levels without access to a lot of stuff, even low level stuff like PotD.

Buying a house: I hear it's a nightmare, so I won't bother with that.

Raids: Not my thing in any MMO. Too much drama and elitism. won't bother in this game either.

Socializing (making friends): A freaking nightmare. Mostly due to the lack of chat channels. Heck, you can't even get access to newbie help without finding a mentor who then invite you to a certain channel. Also, the game right out tells you to go outside the game, on some website, to find FCs and friends. Absolutely ridiculous. For me, this is likely to become a gamebreaker.

Special Events: N/A.

Overall a great game, but has some serious flaws.

Personally, I think it's in the “Goldilocks zone” as far as MMOs go. Not too hard, not too easy. It is just right, and it has a little something for everyone of every skill level. Obviously there are improvements that they could make to a lot of things, but I don't have much to complain about.

I started at the beginning of ShB and rushed to 80 so I could be current. In doing so I skipped a LOT of content that had mechanics that are recycled later, like 50, 60, and 70 raids and trials. This made level 80 content much more difficult than it would have been had I done the raids and trials along the way. As I back-filled the gaps over the last two years, I had a TON of "OOOOOOHHHHH, that's why everyone ran away when the boss did that" moments that I wondered about while floor-tanking ShB content.

• Dungeon Content - Very Easy
  With few exceptions, I’d categorize them into ‘Easy’.
• PVP - Average(?)
  I don’t touch any other pvp content other than frontline.
• Crafting - Easy
  Starting out is a bit harder. But later on everything becomes easier to deal with.
• Gathering - Very Easy
  What? Just get out there mine & harvest.
• Leveling - Very Easy
  Armory bonus, rested experience, roulettes. You name it. All these makes leveling super easy.
• Buying a house - “Savage”
  No comment :’)
• Raids - Easy
  Content wise, raids are not ‘incredibly hard’ as it sounds like. Dealing the randomness that is players mistakes, however, can be challenging. Especially if said mistake happens in very crucial moment (i.e. before 8-man mechanic occurs).
• Socializing (making friends) - Average
  Being highly introvert myself does not stop me from socializing (and alot!), but making friend? I’m extremely selective because of saying ”Be careful of who you’re calling ‘friend’”. So I’m just gonna leave it on average. Each of us behaves differently, after all.
• Special Events - No idea D:
• Glamour - Ultimate
  Heeyyy you forgot this aspect!! It’s the hardest, endgame content!! XD

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Originally Posted by Thangil

Raids: Not my thing in any MMO. Too much drama and elitism. won't bother in this game either.

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I'm sorry i have to tell you this, but after completing the ARR story there is a raid you have to complete to progress, namely the crystal tower. Only reason it wasn't insufferable was the high level overpowered players which made it so there was barely any vitriol since it was mostly quick regardless of a few deaths. Still a few mocking remarks hiding as quips though (not directed at me, but an a-hole is an a-hole nonetheless), but that was to be expected. At least you don't have to do it again once it's over.

Still arbitrary considering how a certain someone thanks you for the help with bahamut regardless of if you have it unlocked or not.

- Dungeon Content : quite easy when you used to doing them, but perfect state now.

- PVP : I don't think hard, but I'm doing only frontlines. With my DNS, I easily can go 100 pts without dying.

- Crafting : well, I try plenty of time to leveling a crater, but it feels so long and pretty boring.

- Gathering : same as crafting. But leveling a Fisher with sea incursions is really nice.

- Leveling : perfect ! Some solo duties were too hard for me, but fortunately SE introduced difficulty levels.

- Buying a house : my FC bought a small house years ago, but seems to be ultra difficult to get one.

- Raids : same as dungeons, perfect difficulty for me. Never tried savage or ultimate tho.

- Socializing (making friends) : I got more social interactions than other MMOs I played, which it is good.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Roda

[*]Socializing (making friends)

Ugh. As a social butterfly I find it just a drag to try to talk to new people in this game. I WANT to, but it's just not worth it since my only way to interface with people is through a tiny portion of the corner of my screen that people have to stop what they're doing to look at. I'm really not going to bother trying to get people's attention anymore without player speech bubbles. I'll stick to discord if this game wants me to exclusively use a scrolling chat box. That and there's like nothing I can DO for other people out in the open world outside of raising them if they went afk near a hostile monster. (rip stoneskin) There aren't really any mechanical icebreakers like popping my INT buff on people, or putting up a table as a mage in WoW, or portaling people through tough exploration content as a mesmer in GW2, which means there is really no reason to engage with people who are out doing their own business because, well, you're just interrupting their flow instead of enhancing their experience.

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you didnt hear this from me but there are player made plugins that enable speech bubbles

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

Socializing (making friends) - Gonna go against the grain here, it's borderline awful. Why? Go back to early 2.x, content forced you go go out into the game world, travel and socialise in the process. Now you can do everything from outside your FC house's market board and bell. I miss the days of mingling with rival progression teams at Wineport. I used to know and be on first name terms with near enough every end game healer on the server back then. Now I barely know maybe 4 or 5 people in an previous FC I raided with for over 2 years. There are few times when you actually stop, mingle and interact with people outside of your circle now compared to how things were at release. Everything else is a rushed conveyer belt of duty speed runs largely in silence in part due to the report happy nature of some aspects of the community and erratic and often overly harsh GM responses.

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i agree this is a big problem, its hardly an MMO at this point and the overzealousness of GMs make communicating in public chat very risky

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Originally Posted by TTiscancer

The game has content for all ability levels. Do what you find fun and challenging and stop crying.

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stop posting

in general the game is way too easy with a practically non-existing difficulty curve until extremes, and then you get destroyed because nothing prepared you for this. freestyle samurais exist because they can, there is no punishment for it

• Dungeon Content
  Leveling can be challenging, but all endgame dungeons (50,60,70,80) are way too easy.
  
• PVP
  Cant say anything about the difficulty, since its more luck based. If you re lucky, your team will make it an instant win. If not, you got sandwiched.
  Sometimes I feel very limited in my actions and how to defend myself. Healers are almost impossible to take down alone.
  
• Crafting and Gathering
  Got both nerfed to the ground. Make it a bit harder again, please.
  
• Leveling
  Leveling is easy. But its boring and repetitive. Especially for DoW-classes, it takes much longer than for Gatherers/Crafters. I wish there were alternative ways.
  
• Buying a house
  Its random. Not easy, not hard. If my appartement would be bigger, I wont need a house. And I cant decorate it with my other characters : /
  
• Raids
  Its a bit a shame, that old raids were nerfed to the infinite. On the other hand, some raids are still fun though. Overall, its ok.
  
• Socializing (making friends)
  Its ok. No change needed.
  
• Special Events
  There are good. No change needed.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by TTiscancer

The game has content for all ability levels. Do what you find fun and challenging and stop crying.

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What's wrong with requesting more difficult content?
I pretty much am permanently subbed to this game but even I find the majority of content is far too easy.

-Dungeon Content
Laughably easy, you can breeze through pretty much all of them without a healer and at this point they're ment to be fodder content for roulettes imo.
-PVP
It's quite hard if you're at the top because you're required to be mechanically competent while constantly thinking about what you, your team mates and opponents are doing.
-Crafting
lmao, get your gear and afk craft with macros, that's it
-Gathering
lmao, get your gear and afk gather with a flow chart, that's it
-Leveling
easy and you have many ways to do it but extremely boring.
-Buying a house
very hard because the whole system is broken.
-Raids
mmh, easy to quite hard I guess? all the 24-men and NM raids are easy content I run while laughing with friends and I think that's how you're supposed to challenge them.
Savage raids range from moderately challenging (i.e. Alte Roite) to quite hard like Brute Justice or Kefka.
Ultimate raids are hard as in they require a good time investment to be learned.
-Socializing (making friends)
depends on what kind of person you are, personally I think it's pretty easy since you're constantly interacting with other people for various reasons.
-Special Events
easy.

Mmo difficulty is kinda weird to balance, but I’d say it’s both. Scratch that, I wouldn’t say it’s too hard as you know exactly what your getting in EX, Savage and Ultimates but the rest of the content is...well too easy. Theirs only a small handful of meaty challenges in casual content getting less and less due to issues with power creep. Fights like Shinryu are now getting easier and loosing their luster faster and faster. Even this expansions raid series is on the easy side, with ivalice more thought provoking mechanics getting power creeped on and slowly turning into Crystal tower.

I’d like two things from FF14 eventually, a way to preserve old content to its former glory, and to add some servely needed spice in some content like Solo instances, and Dungeons which have gotten so easy Lv50 content outranks it like Pharos and Aurum vale

I'd love a min ilvl roulette (for dungeons) or more incentives to actually do them. Finding people in PF is nice and all but the lack of rewards is something a lot of people are turned off by.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dragonblanco

I've seen a lot of different opinions. So answer if you think each is too easy or too hard. And, if you feel like it, maybe explain what you'd change and why?

• Dungeon Content
• PVP
• Crafting
• Gathering
• Leveling
• Buying a house
• Raids
• Socializing (making friends)
• Special Events

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Extremely easy.
-Jobs are easy to play, tanking by far the easiest role then Healing.
-I can't speak about Crafting/Gathering because feels clunky because you have to click on shiny spots no matter what material you are trying to gather
-PVP its kinda ok for most people to enjoy but there is nothing else to do here, no gear, no stats, no builds, everyone plays the same.
-Leveling, wonderful the first 2-3 jobs then feels awful.
-Buying a House impossible.
-Raids are good enough to keep me interested but there is little to none incentive to do Savage ones.
-Socializing = depends I mostly play 99% solo because I'm not interested on Raiding or RP.
- Events? everyone loves them.

Dungeon Content: Far too easy, samey and uninteresting. Aside from the regular first dungeon of each expansion notifying tanks that aggro has changed a little and healers that tanks might be more squishy, every last one of them is identical and hits like foam noodles. The last actually difficult dungeon was pharos sirius unnerfed. At least that had the excuse of being optional.
Shore up the difficulty, apply variation other than one single path. Make different dungeons have different routes, replayability, more varied attack patterns.
PVP: Hard for the wrong reasons. It needs a tutorial at least and something to make hidden gorge played more. They need to do something about the win trading and botting. They also need to make wolf collars and past feast rewards available to everyone. Not everyone can do ranked and millions of players havent even started the game when some of the rewards are out and thus miss them entirely.
Crafting: Slightly too easy for progression, slightly too hard for endgame due to materia melding BS
Gathering: about right honestly
Leveling: it is hard in terms of motivation. There's huge gaps in every levelling kit because SE just takes abilities out only to readd them later with a new coat of paint than actually add new abilities.
Buying a house: Impossible. I will say no more
Alliance raids: too easy. We need more like pre nerf thundergod. Mechanics shouldn't be skipped and cheesed on day 2. But for goodness sake dont make them like delubrum where bosses have 100m hp. Savage alliance raids should stick to 24 man not 48 delubrum or baldesion arsenal and have better, replayable rewards
Normal raids: mostly too easy though there's a few that are right and 2 that are unfair. Alexander, cruise chaser, alphascape 1, eden titan, fatebreaker... all of these are good ones. The unfair ones are E9, E8, quickthinx etc, A9...ones where mechanics have are unclear and/or clunky.
Savage raids: all over the place. There's ones that have don't deserve the title savage eg o1s, e7s and ones that are blantantly bs like e8s. Overall though the worst parts of savage are getting a damn group and the weekly lockout, both time restricted and gear restricted for multiple job players. There's also a major flaw in lack of replayability for most bar the final one for mount.
Ultimates: never been able to get a group to do one sadly :(
trials: too easy by far. The end of story final bosses need to be tougher overall.
extremes: Too easy dps check wise, mechanically there needs to be less clunky ones in this expansion

overall: we're getting too much style, not enough substance and the lack of challenge coupled with the worst job designs so far made shadowbringers a poor expansion outside the main story. Lets hope SE does better for the finale but im not holding my breath

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Misplaced_Marbles

I'm sorry i have to tell you this, but after completing the ARR story there is a raid you have to complete to progress, namely the crystal tower. Only reason it wasn't insufferable was the high level overpowered players which made it so there was barely any vitriol since it was mostly quick regardless of a few deaths. Still a few mocking remarks hiding as quips though (not directed at me, but an a-hole is an a-hole nonetheless), but that was to be expected. At least you don't have to do it again once it's over.

Still arbitrary considering how a certain someone thanks you for the help with bahamut regardless of if you have it unlocked or not.

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Thanks for the info. Googled it, and you're right. Not only that, seems you have to do several raid quest lines before Endwalker too. In other words, for me the game starts great, but turns into something as far from my taste as it possibly can.

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