Some of my own personal feedback on the game

Hello, given that Endwalker is nearing its end, I feel like sharing my feedback on how I feel about it:

Lackluster Relics - This was just buying stuff. It was not engaging at all. I hope we get something more satisfying next time
Alliance Raids - We as players have outgrown the content in terms of our itemLevels. Certain boss mechanics of ones in Euphrosyne and especially Aglaia get skipped, which feels like a shame. I understand that being a bit stronger should make a difference, but it shouldn't be that easy to skip entire portions of the fight. Shouldn't there be a tighter ItemLevel synch or something?
Alliance Raids in Wondrous Tails - This is just a general idea that I came up with: Group Alliance Raids by expansion! I understand that there’s 15 of them currently, which is only a bit over 1 entire raid series for an expansion; however as opposed to a normal raid, Alliance Raids are always guaranteed to last a long time. Often times in a week, I run Normal Raid roulette in the hope that I might land on a Raid that’s in my Wondrous Tails, but I fear doing the same for Alliance Raids, because of how much it'll take me to complete an A-raid that's not of my interest. Given the current structure at the max level, there are 18 possible normal raid entries to get in Wondrous Tails.
Criterion Dungeons - I was looking forward to this, but the challenge was just too big, and even my more skilled friends have given up doing the content. I am even more fearful about its future post this expansion, as it seems like it is not something that we’d be able to do with an Undersized Party, meaning that I wouldn’t get a chance to cheese everything at level 90, to at least get the map exploration achievement
Eureka Orthos - This deep dungeon was a source of frustration for me for months. With Heaven-On-High as a party, I was ⅘ with the clears, with only one failed run. With Eureka Orthos, it was the opposite! I got my first clear on my 5th climb (ignoring those that ended before floor 50). In HoH, a lot of mobs simply had the challenge of including an enrage, which would be of no problem to a party, but was an intense challenge for anyone soloing. Here it feels like even a prepared run with people who know what they're doing can easily fail due to unfair bad luck.... This one I admit might be more of a personal preference, and there likely are many who don’t mind being challenged by content of this level, but to me, this crossed the line.

That would be all. Thank you very much. I understand that I might be ignored here, especially given how little time there is until Dawntrail comes out, and that many might disagree with my opinions here, but I just wanted to say what was on my mind :)

Eureka orthos was a pure dumpster fire. Deep dungeons have just become recycled content, with only the last 20 floors having anything unique to them.

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Originally Posted by Rekh

Eureka orthos was a pure dumpster fire. Deep dungeons have just become recycled content, with only the last 20 floors having anything unique to them.

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That isn't true, EO is a lot more scary with damage and mechanics from an earlier floor.

I agree with Mosha. Already 21-30 isn't something you can go through as blindly as was the case in HoH, and 40-70 already presents a challenge for an inexperienced group. I found it a bit frustrating, but I understand the approach for sure... PotD was boring until like Floor 170/180, that was extremely painful. HoH only got more intense in the second half. EO wants to be a bit of a challenge early on already. What got on my nerves was that I had several runs end in the 71-75 range, because of small mistakes, because of one person misunderstanding something or 1 guy going "Eh, I don't need voicechat. I'll be fine", which doomed all of us.

I appreciate a variety of mechanics, but it was frustrating to keep failing, and not because of my own mistakes.

I've had people be adamant about defending EO, but when I explained my reasoning, they were more willing to admit that certain aspects could have been improved.

I do not HATE the content, I just dislike how punishing things could get.

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Originally Posted by Mosha

That isn't true, EO is a lot more scary with damage and mechanics from an earlier floor.

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I'm 100% convinced that the reason Eureka Orthos was dead on arrival was because of the spike in difficulty. From my experience anyway doing it casually and really only up to what you can queue for with the Duty Finder. But I never had people rage quit and leave as much as I did doing Orthos. I also never had the amount of deaths and full party wipes since Orthos. At least to me, it makes perfect sense that it's dead. As SE didn't adjust it for the average player. Again, I have never done anything past what I can queue for, so I'm not sure how that compares to its normal difficulty range. But it seemed a lot harder than I would've expected it to be.

I remember being excited to level a lot of stuff to 90 with it, but it died. Nobody would queue for it ,or I should say I'm not waiting 30+ minutes for a run when I'm trying to spam level.

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Originally Posted by Ardeth

I'm 100% convinced that the reason Eureka Orthos was dead on arrival was because of the spike in difficulty. From my experience anyway doing it casually and really only up to what you can queue for with the Duty Finder. But I never had people rage quit and leave as much as I did doing Orthos. I also never had the amount of deaths and full party wipes since Orthos. At least to me, it makes perfect sense that it's dead. As SE didn't adjust it for the average player. Again, I have never done anything past what I can queue for, so I'm not sure how that compares to its normal difficulty range. But it seemed a lot harder than I would've expected it to be.

I remember being excited to level a lot of stuff to 90 with it, but it died. Nobody would queue for it ,or I should say I'm not waiting 30+ minutes for a run when I'm trying to spam level.

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HoH is harder than EO lol. EO was dead on arrival because it isn't fun. The mechanics aren't hard, they're just enrage, enrage, enrage on the floors. EW is obsessed with having enrages, limit cuts, ect. The rewards aren't really worth it besides the mounts, and it's just recycled rewards from other places aside the furniture.

HoH is just a funner experience overall. EO doesn't provide anything new that hasn't been seen in PotD or HoH.

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Originally Posted by Padudu

HoH is harder than EO lol. EO was dead on arrival because it isn't fun. The mechanics aren't hard, they're just enrage, enrage, enrage on the floors. EW is obsessed with having enrages, limit cuts, ect. The rewards aren't really worth it besides the mounts, and it's just recycled rewards from other places aside the furniture.

HoH is just a funner experience overall. EO doesn't provide anything new that hasn't been seen in PotD or HoH.

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I'm just telling you my experience with it. It's like any other system. Apathy is death, and Eureka Orthos is dead.

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Originally Posted by Ardeth

I'm just telling you my experience with it. It's like any other system. Apathy is death, and Eureka Orthos is dead.

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I wasn't disagreeing with you ftr, just adding onto it since I've done it as well.

It's a bummer because if they actually took feedback into consideration and changed it up instead of leaving it DOA, it could've been pretty good.

I feel like the failure was more on the strategy of trying to make mitigation matters by amping up damage and then not being fast enough on the gun to fix things as problems arise. When someone tries to introduce something as game changing as amping up special attack damage and downgrading general defense, they can't simply leave stuff on the table and wait it out until the next xpack. Even if people weather the storm the community playing isn't going to be holding up well since now they know if something is broke, they might as well walk away. From what I can tell a lot of people did walk away for literal months and only are starting to return now that Dawn Trail has been announced.

First off, the dungeon experience is pretty bad for level 80 with certain combinations of jobs (DRK + SCH being one of them), due to their "special kit" not keeping up with the other tanks. When one tank can basically self heal multiple times + mitigate at the same time, while another tank has to shield and rotate defense cooldowns like they are still at level 70, there is an issue. The other problem is that they sort of screwed up Savage and made it too heavy on body checks. With the new design they seem to lean too much on enrage and execution as the baseline for pass/fail, over just learning the mechanics, as if they forgot that people have to clear these fights multiple times to get items.

I haven't really seen a unilateral agreement that an expansion is a bad one before in the FFXIV community but I'm hoping this is as bad as it gets. I'd hate to live through a Warlords of Draenor Era situation in FFXIV because that would truly be awful.

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Originally Posted by Padudu

I wasn't disagreeing with you ftr, just adding onto it since I've done it as well.

It's a bummer because if they actually took feedback into consideration and changed it up instead of leaving it DOA, it could've been pretty good.

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To be fair, the majority of feedback sucks.

Exploratory zones were absolutely hated by players on the causal end at the time. To the point they stopped doing them. Only for those very same players to scream from the rooftops that they want them back. And I'm here shrugging thinking they sucked and I'm glad they're gone. But it looks like their back again. Maybe this time they won't be so convaluted and boring? We can only hope. Though boring is a matter of opinion. They are absolutely convaluted as hell though. Better Google your best actions because they can't make engaging content without making me level again... Seriously who likes going back to level 1 and having to catalog abilities you can only use in this zone? God I hate those things, but guess what's back!

EO was dead on arrival for several reasons.

All of which can be mostly summed up to rewards like anything else in this game.

-EO doesn't have a quick leveling method attached like the previous two did. Even if it did, the difficulty spike makes it hard to farm especially solo.
-The rewards themselves are all pretty meh in general.
-Nothing notable or worth lots of money from the highest tier of sacks.
-Lower-tier sacks are mostly all the same things that fill the sacks from the last two deep dungeons.
-Mixed opinions on the titles. Some have argued that EO has the least attractive titles of the three.

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Now that we discussed the rewards, let's discuss the tedium of the actual content.

EO is in my opinion, more difficult than the other two but for the wrong reasons. Some would say that it's easier than the other two because everything is "Just do mechanics". Whereas the other two are cherry-picking mobs while you mitigate yourself from dying to autos. The mobs in EO don't hit very hard but they do often have one-shot run ending AoEs. Some of them start as early as the first set of floors! Normally this wouldn't be a bad thing if it wasn't for the fact that everything in EO is a damaged sponge. Again starting with the first set of floors. It can take 40mins to close to the whole hour for every set of floors while playing solo. This makes the early floors even more boring than in HoH. At least you can speedrun a bit and feel like a powerhouse before things get tougher. But in EO solo, you have to go slow and steady immediately. I have had several runs end on just 21 - 30 due to a minor mistake that ended my game didn't want to go back because it takes nearly an hour just to do the first 20 floors. It's boring because it drags out. Then you start to turn your brain off and wanna netflix and chill the first 20 floors but then die again because you zoned out. Challenge is a good thing, but the first 30 floors being damaged sponges wasn't a good move. Sure the first 30 in HoH are boring too but it feels more engaging because you can speedrun. EO just feels like you're auto-attacking things for the first 20 floors. It takes too long to get interesting. Then the dread monsters were a good idea that was poorly executed. Killing them generally isn't worth your time or a promander unless it's convenient.

What Deep Dungeon needs is more variety which makes it different from the others. Have a new-looking floor layout every 10 floors that isn't just a color reskinned. Looking at caves almost every time they do caves. The boss fights were a lot more fun this time at least though. But the biggest thing is that we need different Glooms and positive effects that we aren't used to seeing. New pomanders, like a lot more. Like I should go into Deep Dungeon with an entire brand new kit of pomanders to find. Not just three of them swapped out. Deep Dungeon itself needs to have a more creative layout design too. Instead of being boxes on a grid, they should layer on top of each other once in a while connected by stairs. Or have some of the room filled with water that transitions into swimming animation to act as a sort of danger to the player since they lose the ability to do actions in the water. Maybe add a different type of chest like Bronze, Silver, Gold, and include Platinum. Even if Platinum did something basic like give you the benefits of all three in a single chest. (Potshard + Increase Aetherpool + provide a pomander).

I also think it'd be cool for solo play if bosses had two chests that spawned after a boss that dropped chests that won't turn into mimics to ready for the next set of floors. Like if we beat the level 20 boss, then two additional Gold Chests appear before leaving the duty. Something like that.

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As far as engaging though, I can't see much that can improve with DD to do that. We have several communities and streamers dedicated to Deep Dungeon. They have entire careers around it and even speed-running them. No matter what SE does, DD will always get optimized in the first two or three days as a result. We're never going to get that Necromancer moment back that we use to have in Heavensward. The community is way to good at the game now for that to ever be relived.

I think a lot of discourse comes from different groups of people.
- some people want the content to be most challenging
- casuals want things as easy as possible
- and in-between is the midcore group

We all want something specific, and in the end its not possible to please everyone. However in my opinion, the midcore base has been left in the dust in particular this expansion. EO is a few notches too challenging, and even if people disliked Eureka and Bozja, the relics were content that kept us busy for a long time. Grindy as it may have been, it was a different thing to do. Bozja felt like it did plenty of things to make it easier to deal, with certain steps having alternatives outside of the fronts, for those who really didn't want to deal with it (later they threw that out the window, but hey, they considered it at least). But I'd even take the HV/ARR rekucs over the Manderville weapons. At least it'd be a concrete goal to aim for. It was something to say "I worked to get this", and feel proud of it, as opposed to "Eh, the tomestones just came together without looking"

I have been thinking about it more and will continue to do so, but I think Deep Dungeon could benefit from difficulty filters. For example,

-Deep Dungeon
-Deep Dungeon (Savage)

Deep Dungeon is easier and savage is harder of course. Possibly locking the titles and Gold sacks in Savage with an increased rate of potshards, aetherpool, ect; whereas normal mode can be far more beneficial for generic Aetherpool and Potshard farming at a slower rate but faster to comb through floors.

This is just a general proposal and other things can be worked out around it. The main problem is that the "Savage" rewards may not be good enough. We see this problem with Varient/Critrieon already. For that reason, maybe we shouldn't do this afterall.

Endwalker was very weird as an expansion, since the way it progressed as gear level increased felt more like the extreme ends of the spectrum in difficulty just kept increasing. They had everything about right at the start of it with the first savage tier and the earlier extremes. Then they introduced the side content with variant dungeons and criterion dungeons, which ended up being the poster child of the two extreme ends of content since just about everything else followed suite. They had more ultimates released this expansion than any other, the difficulty of savage was all over the place which was kind of a weird experience to be frank. The extreme fights felt like they kept rotating between being unfair body checks and rick rolls. And then Island Sanctuary got introduced which was basically like Warlords of Draenor with the mobile phone log in and zone out thing, alongside Eureka Orthos that ended up feeling more like gambling than actually learning anything due to the enemy mechanics.

The end result was that either someone was into the savage content and smashed their face into a wall, or was part of the patch player group that clean sweeped the super easy content, unsubbed, and then played Darktide or I guess Palworld now while waiting for the next set of content to drop. Criterion didn't even have a shot at surviving as a real thing and probably will go down as being as bad as Diadem 1.0.

What it boils down to is that Square Enix cannot identify what is the difficulty most people enjoy and what the average player skill is.
This has been a glaring issue for a while now but they got away with it so far because:
A: people had a huge backlog of stuff to do from earlier expansions and fill the void when we had bad patch
B: Aside from a few occasions, things have been falling under the "too easy" category (although too easy is still better than too hard because its at least more accessible)

Endwalker was full of inconsistent difficulty from day 1.
-Infamous MSQ quest which was too hard for a lot of people.
-The lvl 85 crystalmommy trial is to this day has wipes or almost wipes more often than not.
-Extremes are all over the place, sometimes its way too hard, sometimes its just something that exists i guess.
-Island Sanctuary is full casual, its progression is timegated heavily to stretch it out as much as possible.
-Ultimates, same difficulty issues. You just cannot say with a straight face that UwU and ToP are both ultimate levels of difficulty, you just cant.
-Variant/ Criterion again, same thing. Variant is just a chore you do 12 times almost falling asleep by the end and Criterion is just way too big of a jump in difficulty and its not even rewarding in top of that.
-On Eureka Orthos i cannot really say much except you either fall asleep or you are dead because a mob turned around and cleaved.
-Alliance Raids...something is just absolutely wrecked that thing. I am not kidding, i actually have to try dying in all 3 wings of the alliance raids now, it wasnt hard to begin with and now as we got more item levels, we dont even see half of the mechanics anymore. As much as i hated how just 1 troll could cause wipes over and over with the scales in Aglaia, its just sad that we dont even see the scales anymore.

Square is either under or overestimating the playerbase and that is the sole reason why people say there is no midcore content, because there is none.
You either fall asleep or drop dead instantly.

There is no something like Bozja, that requires enough time invested and is engaging enough, it forces you to pay just enough attention while also not overly punishing and gives decent rewards.

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Originally Posted by AyumiCosplayGlam

What it boils down to is that Square Enix cannot identify what is the difficulty most people enjoy and what the average player skill is.
This has been a glaring issue for a while now but they got away with it so far because:
A: people had a huge backlog of stuff to do from earlier expansions and fill the void when we had bad patch
B: Aside from a few occasions, things have been falling under the "too easy" category (although too easy is still better than too hard because its at least more accessible)

Endwalker was full of inconsistent difficulty from day 1.
-Infamous MSQ quest which was too hard for a lot of people.
-The lvl 85 crystalmommy trial is to this day has wipes or almost wipes more often than not.
-Extremes are all over the place, sometimes its way too hard, sometimes its just something that exists i guess.
-Island Sanctuary is full casual, its progression is timegated heavily to stretch it out as much as possible.
-Ultimates, same difficulty issues. You just cannot say with a straight face that UwU and ToP are both ultimate levels of difficulty, you just cant.
-Variant/ Criterion again, same thing. Variant is just a chore you do 12 times almost falling asleep by the end and Criterion is just way too big of a jump in difficulty and its not even rewarding in top of that.
-On Eureka Orthos i cannot really say much except you either fall asleep or you are dead because a mob turned around and cleaved.
-Alliance Raids...something is just absolutely wrecked that thing. I am not kidding, i actually have to try dying in all 3 wings of the alliance raids now, it wasnt hard to begin with and now as we got more item levels, we dont even see half of the mechanics anymore. As much as i hated how just 1 troll could cause wipes over and over with the scales in Aglaia, its just sad that we dont even see the scales anymore.

Square is either under or overestimating the playerbase and that is the sole reason why people say there is no midcore content, because there is none.
You either fall asleep or drop dead instantly.

There is no something like Bozja, that requires enough time invested and is engaging enough, it forces you to pay just enough attention while also not overly punishing and gives decent rewards.

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I think you can isolate this even further down to mechanics taking a much higher priority to job complexity. I still think the sweet spot for difficulty is TEA, because you could have complex jobs dealing with a (somewhat) complex fight. Now the jobs are completely ruined, but the fights are gone on the complete other side of the scale. Things like TOP might be out of line, and I really hate saying that, but it's true. I am starting to think that fights that are like TOP are so overboard they are creating mini-Gordias situations by imploding statics left and right and are stratifying the raid scene. Like in a "If you aren't overperforming, you're absolute trash." kind of way, there's no middle ground, because that's how the late endgame fights are being designed, be perfect, or be dead. It just burns people out too fast. Maybe my experiences post-DSR have been just really bad and I'm an outlier, but I've got too many stories of people dragging themselves through the game equivalent of shattered glass just to get a clear. I don't even put up with it anymore. Think of it from a newer player who just killed Zeromus EX, and wants to get into the Savage Tier.

They walk into P9S, and while they don't have a hard DPS check, they DO get fairly strict positioning requirements, swaps, memorization, flexes, and TWO limit cuts. Assume they are playing SMN or something and everyone is just saying "Why are you struggling, your job is so easy you should have plenty of brain power for this."


Meanwhile the core game stagnates. Encounters have way too much weight on the scale of combat enjoyment now, which is why when you get something like Abyssos, the entire tier becomes a toss up, or the 24-man, people just fall asleep because they're completely unengaged, things die before what few mechanics even happen. What an embarrassment.

Jobs should be more fun to play, move some of that fight punishment to job punishment, and fights might wanna ease off on the body checks and highly rehearsed synchronized swimming. Blows my mind we have fights like P7 and P8 exist in the same tier, when we got Barb in that same patch.