We need more casual PvE content.

I feel like this patch season has just not enough causal combat content. So far we got just normal versions of raids and trials (plus one alliance raid so far).

Occult crescent was supposed to be this casual combat content. But after Bozja which had some really good casual content like Castrum, Delubrum (which is still my favourite raid in the game) and Dalariada. This time for some reason we got savage only Forked Tower which provides no casual content, leaving the casuals in occult crescent only with encounters, fates and grinding regular mobs, so much less than in case of Bozja.

It’s getting kinda annoying that it seems like the part of the dev team responsible for combat content cares only about savage part of the player base.

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Originally Posted by AntoniusQuil

dev team responsible for combat content cares only about savage part of the player base.

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Good joke. I needed a laugh.

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Originally Posted by Bryson

Good joke. I needed a laugh.

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Where’s the lie tho?

- savage tier which I see majority of savage riders being really happy with

- new ultimate

- new chaotic raid - which is a completely new savage mode

- and now forked tower.

Meanwhile casual players got only standard stuff like normal tier raids and alliance raids.

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Originally Posted by AntoniusQuil

I feel like this patch season has just not enough causal combat content. So far we got just normal versions of raids and trials (plus one alliance raid so far).

Occult crescent was supposed to be this casual combat content. But after Bozja which had some really good casual content like Castrum, Delubrum (which is still my favourite raid in the game) and Dalariada. This time for some reason we got savage only Forked Tower which provides no casual content, leaving the casuals in occult crescent only with encounters, fates and grinding regular mobs, so much less than in case of Bozja.

It’s getting kinda annoying that it seems like the part of the dev team responsible for combat content cares only about savage part of the player base.

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Take it with a grain of salt, but they did mention that "cost" was a factor that led them not to have a normal version of FTB. Frankly, they should have known that this would undoubtedly alienate many players.

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Originally Posted by TeresaFortell

Take it with a grain of salt, but they did mention that "cost" was a factor that led them not to have a normal version of FTB. Frankly, they should have known that this would undoubtedly alienate many players.

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I recall them saying something like that but in such case they should have made only normal FTB, not the other way around. Seeing how they already added completely new savage content in the previous patch. Stuff like that is why casual players kinda feel like an afterthought for the part of the dev team responsible for combat content.

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Originally Posted by AntoniusQuil

Where’s the lie tho?

- savage tier which I see majority of savage riders being really happy with

- new ultimate

- new chaotic raid - which is a completely new savage mode

- and now forked tower.

Meanwhile casual players got only standard stuff like normal tier raids and alliance raids.

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1. Someone can be happy with the tier irrespective of whether they think they are "hardcore" or not.
2. Ultimate(s) have existed since SB so nothing new here.. also FRU released like 8 months ago
3. Chaotic is spammed in PF by people of varying raiding backgrounds. Chaotic = Savage is hilariously reductive.
4. My Forked Tower reclears are full of people who don't do savage or ultimates.

Casuals can do a lot of things.. whether they choose to or not is entirely up to them. Disinterest in x for reasons y isn't the same thing as "there's no content for us casuals."

It will always be the case that savage raiders will get "more" because they can do everything a casual can, but also the harder content. The vast majority of OC is casual content with only the forked tower requiring any real investment in learning or wiping.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

It will always be the case that savage raiders will get "more" because they can do everything a casual can, but also the harder content. The vast majority of OC is casual content with only the forked tower requiring any real investment in learning or wiping.

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And there is very little point in engaging with OC unless you're aiming to clear FT.

But I agree with your leading point. This is precisely why the content taken as a whole needs to be heavily weighted towards casual/non-raiding players. And in DT it's not.

The one notable exception is Cosmic Exploration which is... simply dross.

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Originally Posted by Mawlzy

And there is very little point in engaging with OC unless you're aiming to clear FT.

But I agree with your leading point. This is precisely why the content taken as a whole needs to be heavily weighted towards casual/non-raiding players. And in DT it's not.

The one notable exception is Cosmic Exploration which is... simply dross.

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I've spent about 50 hours in OC without touching FT because I've been enjoying leveling the different jobs, hunting for carrots, farming for glams, testing out dope phantom job/base job combos, and the general sense of open world community it provides. Honestly don't even care about forked tower. The mount it gives is kinda ugly and I could just trade a few carrots worth of gil for the rewards if I really cared.

I bet if they didn't release forked tower at all nobody would have anything to complain about, but now that it's there, suddenly "the only point of engaging with OC is to do forked tower". Nope, some people legitimately just enjoy playing.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

I've spent about 50 hours in OC without touching FT because I've been enjoying leveling the different jobs, hunting for carrots, farming for glams, testing out dope phantom job/base job combos, and the general sense of open world community it provides. Honestly don't even care about forked tower. The mount it gives is kinda ugly and I could just trade a few carrots worth of gil for the rewards if I really cared.

I bet if they didn't release forked tower at all nobody would have anything to complain about, but now that it's there, suddenly "the only point of engaging with OC is to do forked tower". Nope, some people legitimately just enjoy playing.

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Not really. If they released OC with no raid, it would just be an incomplete field ops. I think everyone was expecting there to be a raid at the end and there would have been an outcry if there was nothing. They know how popular CLL was, with BSF. It beggars belief they didn't repeat that.

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Originally Posted by AntoniusQuil

Stuff like that is why casual players kinda feel like an afterthought for the part of the dev team responsible for combat content.

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They just released an entire zone that is 99% casual combat content. Next patch they're adding a new alliance raid, a new dungeon, a new normal trial, and a new deep dungeon, which is to say nothing of all the non-combat casual content. Seems pretty silly to say all of that is an afterthought.

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Originally Posted by ChrysOCE

Not really. If they released OC with no raid, it would just be an incomplete field ops. I think everyone was expecting there to be a raid at the end and there would have been an outcry if there was nothing. They know how popular CLL was, with BSF. It beggars belief they didn't repeat that.

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You're probably right actually, I've got no argument against that. Still, saying there's no point without a raid at the end is pretty reductive.

If anything this game needs more hardcore PvE content. Like a hard version of the leveling dungeons and experts, a hard version of the 24 man dungeons, etcera.

Hardcore raiders share "Normal casual mode" with everything in this game except Ultimate and Chaotic, the moment they do anything that's specifically hardcore it gets them the stink eye so here we are living in our best slop era.

Variant dungeons are some of my favorite content in the game. I'm holding real hope we'll get one which would be casual fun! :) They packed 7.4 and 7.5 so much with stuff like Blue Mage, Beastmaster, and the promised Variant Dungeon though...
Meanwhile I hope they get to show us something good next week regarding the Deep Dungeon, because if it's just PotD 4 it'll be really sad :(

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Originally Posted by CidHeiral

They just released an entire zone that is 99% casual combat content. Next patch they're adding a new alliance raid, a new dungeon, a new normal trial, and a new deep dungeon, which is to say nothing of all the non-combat casual content. Seems pretty silly to say all of that is an afterthought.

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A combat zone that is utterly useless for casual players after you collected your Atmas (Phantom Jobs are absolutely useless unless you want to try FT, which is currently only organized by some Discords and mostly are only reclears).
An Alliance Raid which you only run once per week for the coin, a new dungeon only relevant once per patch, a new trial without any rewards which you run only once per patch and a new deep dungeon which (if they continue the trend from Orthos) wont't be casual content easier.

The dev team really has (for quite some time) problems designing new interesting casual content that is actually worthwhile doing.

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Originally Posted by TalithaSolarien

A combat zone that is utterly useless for casual players after you collected your Atmas (Phantom Jobs are absolutely useless unless you want to try FT, which is currently only organized by some Discords and mostly are only reclears).
An Alliance Raid which you only run once per week for the coin, a new dungeon only relevant once per patch, a new trial without any rewards which you run only once per patch and a new deep dungeon which (if they continue the trend from Orthos) wont't be casual content easier.

The dev team really has (for quite some time) problems designing new interesting casual content that is actually worthwhile doing.

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Can you give an example of an interesting piece of casual content you would like or feel like it's worthwhile doing?

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Originally Posted by Volgia

Can you give an example of an interesting piece of casual content you would like or feel like it's worthwhile doing?

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Normal Bozjan raids were exactly that for me. Fun and nice encounters, part of relic farm, some really cool glams and at the top of that they provided some really nice story content (although in that aspect I’m biased as I really liked FFXII)

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Originally Posted by UNDEAD10000

No, we don't need more casual content when like 95% of content is already for casual players.

What we really need is true middle ground content when we haven't got no middle ground content since patch 4.5 when The Orbonne Monastery alliance raid got added to the game (which was by far the best allaince raid ever made but sadly it got ruined by massive nerf that made it so easy that all fun disappeared completely from it) and all normal raids and normal allaince raids after 4.5 have being simply way too easy.

NOTE: There is point saying "just do extreme trials, savage raids, ultame raids and chaotic allaince raid" to me when i simply refuse to do them because i'm unable to do everything 100% perfectly (Job rotation, mechanics and etc.) and i got extremely bad experience back in 2.0 when i tried to do The Coils of Bahamut that i started to fear doing any of extreme trials, savage raids, ultame raids and chaotic allaince raid content.

I don't care about field operations when they requires being in party to do, which is impossible for me when no one wants me in their party and Occult Crescent is impossible to do anyway when FATE bosses dies so fast that like 99.99% of time when i get in the FATE area the boss is already dead and i don't get any rewards and Knowledge exp from it.
And only way i can increase my knowledge level in Occult Crescent currently is spend massive amount of time killing normal enemies, so my best option is simply skip Occult Crescent completely, just like i did with Eureka and Bozja.

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When it comes to leveling in Occult Crescent you don’t need to do fates, you can just do critical encounters and in their case you can either skip joining the party completely if you want to just heal yourself from aoe damage or you can join one of the parties formed at the spot simply by saying lfg at the encounter spot.

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Originally Posted by AntoniusQuil

Where’s the lie tho?

- savage tier which I see majority of savage riders being really happy with

- new ultimate

- new chaotic raid - which is a completely new savage mode

- and now forked tower.

Meanwhile casual players got only standard stuff like normal tier raids and alliance raids.

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Who's ALT are you..lol...

FATES, crafting, OC, EX, new dungeons, new alliance raid, society quests, maps, elite marks (Hunts), Pvp adjustments, class quests, Normal Raid series, Side quests, UR, sitting AFK in Limsa 99% of the time... yet you dare to talk about savage that is released once every 10 months.

The absolute audacity to even bring savage into discussion and make this a "casual" vs "hardcore" argument. God forbid you try "hardcore" content instead of spamming forums with nonsense.

Oh no, people are having fun, we cannot have that now, can we?

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Originally Posted by hydralus

I bet if they didn't release forked tower at all nobody would have anything to complain about, but now that it's there, suddenly "the only point of engaging with OC is to do forked tower". Nope, some people legitimately just enjoy playing.

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It's not like there has been countless threads about fate scaling, the fate/CE train that has no brakes, the rng atmas, the silver/gold currency imbalances, the monsters on the map that do nothing and the lack of threat, the lack of story, how phantoms compare to logograms and lost actions, etc.

I hope they inventing dungeon with 4 mob packs like mt gulg because its epic and i want to get stimulant as a healer

So,

I am sort of... inclined to agree yes, but the issue isn't that we need more content (Players need more reasons to engage with content more than once before dropping it)... The content we have already just needs to actually... Mean something, or it at the very least needs looking at in terms of rewards. It's stupid that normal raid gear for instance is equivalent to crafted., especially when it is on a weekly lockout and even more so when you factor how low the entry to crafting actually is... Just really makes it content that is dead on arrival for anyone willing to spend 45 minutes crafting their own gear. IMO, it at the very least should be equivalent to non-augmented tomestone.

Alliance raid suffers with the same thing, equivalent to augmented crafted, the former on a weekly lockout, the latter on no lockout at all, with the only requirement being tomes that are handed to you.

Like, both contents have been dead on arrival to me outside of story since 3.05. I suppose I can get a minion, but lol? when you have 400+ minions it's just a checkbox. Same thing with mounts? lol? Show it off in a dead overworld, fantastic.

What I do sort of disagree with though is that they only care about the 'savage part of the playerbase' - They are ultimately treated with the same level of contempt as what the casual playerbase is, really. Like, I don't think this needs to be an 'us vs them' thread... All players are really treated with sheer contempt.

The only real major conundrum/issue with casual content is that they've reduced it to non-substantive, under the guise that... Player A who quit 48 weeks ago, who has only just returned to the game needs to be caught up immediately, so throw aggressive catch-up mechanics (Not exclusive to casual content). Plus the fact that the way they treat casual content is really more of a side-quest rather than a substantive system to actually engage with, like, the only real 'casual' content where this still exists is fishing, everything else is beyond watered down (even on a casual level), or outright abandoned. The developers sort of treat casual players as being practically synonymous with "Doesn't want anything engaging or work towards", which is pathetically disingenuous.

I mean, it still exists there with Eureka and Bozja, but literally at that point, unironically unsubscribe from the game and just get a free trial account.

Hardcore content is sort of shafted in that, they still only get a raid tier every other patch, and ultimately they are still bound almost entirely by a weekly lockout, or content that dies within a patch cycle. Basically done because they know this game has piss poor longevity. Then there's jobs... I say this as a casual, because I know how it feels with DoH/Botanist/Miner, and Grand Companies... Classes shouldn't be designed for people that don't want to learn them or engage with their mechanics (Don't see why they all need to be so... same-y), in the same was content shouldn't be designed for people that don't actually want to interact with it (or learn it)

Between content types, and the overall game they really don't know who they are designing the game for, so what you're left with is just a lot of half-commitments to the overall design of content. This is ultimately the biggest issue and it plagues everything, and it's largely why it's difficult to see the there's anything beyond contempt or gross confusion.

Whoever thought it was a good idea to have the OC step of the relic function as a one-time step, and whoever thought it was a good idea to detach levelling from the field operation should not be allowed near design, IMO... Especially when the only rationale is "But deep dungeon"... Decision making and autonomy for players? Nah, not this game.

We need more content, period. More involvement in the world that makes the world meaningful. FF14 has the deadest world of any MMO i've played. They are focused entirely too much on the story now. We have spent way too much time in cutscenes this expansion instead of in the world doing things.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

Can you give an example of an interesting piece of casual content you would like or feel like it's worthwhile doing?

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Take for example the Variant dungeons. Add for example a challenge log requiring you to run certain paths per week. Add token rewards (like Faux Hollows) for unique rewards. You could add a similar log for Normal raids.
Because right now these are run-and-forget content.

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Originally Posted by Kohashi

Who's ALT are you..lol...

FATES, crafting, OC, EX, new dungeons, new alliance raid, society quests, maps, elite marks (Hunts), Pvp adjustments, class quests, Normal Raid series, Side quests, UR, sitting AFK in Limsa 99% of the time... yet you dare to talk about savage that is released once every 10 months.

The absolute audacity to even bring savage into discussion and make this a "casual" vs "hardcore" argument. God forbid you try "hardcore" content instead of spamming forums with nonsense.

Oh no, people are having fun, we cannot have that now, can we?

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Not that I disagree in principle with an issue of a savage raid released every 10 months, but I don't really think you should be stating that in the same sentence as arguing half of those items being content, like... literally..

PvP adjustments? Do you know *how long* it actually takes for PvP to see any worthwhile adjustments? lol, arguing this is literally the same as calling PvE adjustments content.

New alliance raids that literally don't fit anywhere in their reward structure because they are the same item level as non-augment tomestone gear, also released on an equivalent pathetically long patch cycle..

Society quests and class quests? Are you joking LOL, you do this once, and then forget they even exist, literally.

Elite Marks? 90% of that content is literally Aetheryte camping.

The absolute audacity to even bring half of these into discussion when your follow-up statement is an issue with savage (Not that I disagree), but both of these being present is beyond peak irony. God forbid people actually try to expect quality from a game that has been in service for well over a decade. So yes, people should spam forums with 'nonsense'

Oh no, people are trying to give developers feedback (even if I disagree with it), we cannot have that now, can we?

This is how I've felt, too. DT has been good if you enjoy high-end content, but for the other 80% it's been ehhhh. Base content and difficulty of DT content is perfect but everything else has missed its mark for me.

I enjoyed DT just fine the first 3 weeks but then they removed Noxious Gnash from VPR for Savage and future content (That still irritates me, honestly) and ever since I just haven't even been able to pick a main for this expansion and a lot of care and trust I had for the game went away with that, which sounds silly, but it's true. So, of course I was enjoying the other new stuff from the release of the expansion, but 2-3 months after release, there hasn't been much for me until OC came out, but a good bit of people stopped once we found out how unfriendly FT was.

So basically, yeah, we got an alliance raid in 7.1, which I did a ton, but we got Chaotic which ended up just being savage 24-man (Imagine if we actually got a fight as fun as P2, but nah, we got P3). This was 1 month after an Ultimate came out, too.

Then they released OC, but made it so casuals who don't want to do anything can just do fates, cool, but then made the "raid/dungeon" hardcore.

They keep leaving the middle class/mid-core players behind.

OC is middle class/mid-core, but then encourages people to not do it because some would rather level their jobs while doing fates. They could have done OC as a zone where you could level your jobs and play the game, but because FT exists in the same instance and requires everyone to be lvl 100, it couldn't be done that way.

Shame.

Too many L's because they're making everything that's not a dungeon or trial essentially savage content that requires studying outside of the game and 3 hours of communicating to find a group.

That's not fun.

I understand it's an MMO, but I did less communication for my Master's degree.

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Originally Posted by hydralus

I bet if they didn't release forked tower at all nobody would have anything to complain about, but now that it's there, suddenly "the only point of engaging with OC is to do forked tower". Nope, some people legitimately just enjoy playing.

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While I’ve enjoyed all the things you’ve mentioned, I’m pretty much done with all that now. I’ve gotten all the glams and rewards I wanted, leveled all my phantom jobs, got my caster gear to +1 and got a couple other sets just for the looks. I go in occasionally to gold farm and treasure hunt, but right now there’s no point in repeating the same CEs and Fates over and over again.

Everything does lead to the Tower, which makes it feel incomplete without a Normal mode. The phantom jobs, while fun to play, have skills that are only really useful in the Tower. You can’t get your gear to +2 without the Tower, because for outsiders that relies on support fates, of which I’ve only seen 2, for a whopping total of 4 pieces of sanguinite.

Bozja had 2 dungeons - CLL and Dalriada - both of which were slightly challenging at first but eased up as you leveled in the zone with mettle and actions. Plus it had DRN/DRS. Forked Tower is a descendant of Eureka’s Baldesion Arsenal, but what makes those such different experiences? One, Eureka had the big Fates for each zone that acted as kind of zone bosses. And those bosses had rare drops that were used for special items to give an in-zone advantage, and tradeable on the mb for millions to this day. Two, BA came at the end of the content so it felt like optional bonus content, as well as not having as many wipe mechs so newbies could be carried through. FT comes right in the middle, has 20-some places where a single person’s mistake can mean game over, and locks the last gear upgrade of the zone’s gear behind it, putting non-Tower clearers at a disadvantage going into the second and final zone. Third, and perhaps the most important to me, it locks rewards that should be Normal mode level, behind Hard mode content. The last FIVE field notes are in there, along with a TT card. This did not happen with either Eureka or Bozja: BA and DRS only had a mount, Bozja’s field notes were obtainable without doing DRS and their cards were sold in the cluster shop, Eureka had no field notes, but their cards were obtained from boss NMs and an NPC outside the zone.

As far as I’m concerned, current FT can keep the mount, and maybe higher drop rates for all the other stuff, but it needs a Normal mode so that everyone can go through and get the notes and have a chance in hell of getting the card (which honestly should be in the sanguinite shop anyway), as well as sanguinite for gear upgrades.

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Originally Posted by AntoniusQuil

Normal Bozjan raids were exactly that for me. Fun and nice encounters, part of relic farm, some really cool glams and at the top of that they provided some really nice story content (although in that aspect I’m biased as I really liked FFXII)

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CLL/Dalriada or normal DR? if I recall correctly, DR came almost a year after Bozja came out.

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Originally Posted by TalithaSolarien

Take for example the Variant dungeons. Add for example a challenge log requiring you to run certain paths per week. Add token rewards (like Faux Hollows) for unique rewards. You could add a similar log for Normal raids.
Because right now these are run-and-forget content.

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Well what you are describing is the carrot (rewards) to the stick (content). I don't disagree we should have more incentive to do it, but this game doesn't lack for "casual content".

Cuz TBH, we had Criterion Dungeons and the same issue happened. Great content, no reason to do it.

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Originally Posted by UNDEAD10000

No, we don't need more casual content when like 95% of content is already for casual players.

What we really need is true middle ground content when we haven't got no middle ground content since patch 4.5 when The Orbonne Monastery alliance raid got added to the game (which was by far the best allaince raid ever made but sadly it got ruined by massive nerf that made it so easy that all fun disappeared completely from it) and all normal raids and normal allaince raids after 4.5 have being simply way too easy.

NOTE: There is point saying "just do extreme trials, savage raids, ultame raids and chaotic allaince raid" to me when i simply refuse to do them because i'm unable to do everything 100% perfectly (Job rotation, mechanics and etc.) and i got extremely bad experience back in 2.0 when i tried to do The Coils of Bahamut that i started to fear doing any of extreme trials, savage raids, ultame raids and chaotic allaince raid content.

I don't care about field operations when they requires being in party to do, which is impossible for me when no one wants me in their party and Occult Crescent is impossible to do anyway when FATE bosses dies so fast that like 99.99% of time when i get in the FATE area the boss is already dead and i don't get any rewards and Knowledge exp from it.
And only way i can increase my knowledge level in Occult Crescent currently is spend massive amount of time killing normal enemies, so my best option is simply skip Occult Crescent completely, just like i did with Eureka and Bozja.

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If you're a tank or good DPS player, you can just join CE solo and get exp along with silver coins all the way to KL 20 in a week or so, which will happen since you want to farm demiatma, usually req 100 min for all of them. Honestly, there's no real reason to farm mobs since you need to chain a lot of them, which requires a gold farm party for more gold coins at once. I never did many FATEs, and I just waited by the camp for each new CE announcement. Additionally, everyone will rush to rez you since there's an achievement for it, and everyone will still have a cheap raise from the Chemist in CE.

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Originally Posted by Volgia

Well what you are describing is the carrot (rewards) to the stick (content). I don't disagree we should have more incentive to do it, but this game doesn't lack for "casual content".

Cuz TBH, we had Criterion Dungeons and the same issue happened. Great content, no reason to do it.

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The issue is the dev team has no idea how to do the carrot in any form of content.

Overworld fate farming -> how many fates do you need to farm for the end rewards? Over 2 k per. Nah, the rewards don't justify the effort. Here's an idea -> make a map equivalent as a 10% drop rate that drops the fate currency instead of gil. Now you get a fun gambling minigame dungeon for doing fates. How about a super fate in every zone, that players can actively spawn instead of waiting around on a long timer for them?

Variant dungeons -> clear all routes for a mount sounds good in concept, until you realize its each boss 4 times, and nothing to do after ( unless you want the glam ... which requires like 3 times the clears?) Why should any casual player go back? Why not make the routes vary in difficulty building up to criterion (harder routes give more currency). And allow the currency to buy other fun things, like bs powers within, or maps, or convert them into the criterion coins at an inflated rate?

And its also bad in harder content.

Criterion -> how many clears for the mount? thats it? No gear bonus for the tier, no special glam, no reason to go back unless you want to gil farm ( why? gil is beyond useless after week 1, and you get it back passively already anyways).

Even when they give "good" rewards, the timing is absolute garbage.

COD -> here, lets drop a raid on Christmas, with raid gear that is usable for 2 months?????

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Originally Posted by Alahard

The issue is the dev team has no idea how to do the carrot in any form of content.

...

COD -> here, lets drop a raid on Christmas, with raid gear that is usable for 2 months?????

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Highly agree, one thing they can do is just... let us upgrade non raid related gear so we have more of it. COD +1 gear, 760 ilvl, same substat spread. As the expansion goes on your ability to choose between different sets (be it casual or raider) doesn't increase. Just by allowing us to upgrade the previous gear would lead some people to run older content so that they can get slightly better BiS for their reclears or something. Or that players who don't raid get to choose between two or three sets at the end of the expansion (all 3 tomestone gear).

The issue is literally everyone who cares enough to use the official forum falls into the "hardcore" category, in spite of many of us not being high end raiders.

Honestly, I agree that the game seems to favor the players that want killer grinds or difficult content. We used to get a lot more side story stuff in the patches, not just Hildibrand. I wonder if maybe the time that went into minigames and side-quests is what is now put into the limited jobs.

Also, I feel the devs are forgetting that hardcore players usually do casual content, but the reverse isn't true.

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

The issue is literally everyone who cares enough to use the official forum falls into the "hardcore" category, in spite of many of us not being high end raiders.

Honestly, I agree that the game seems to favor the players that want killer grinds or difficult content. We used to get a lot more side story stuff in the patches, not just Hildibrand. I wonder if maybe the time that went into minigames and side-quests is what is now put into the limited jobs.

Also, I feel the devs are forgetting that hardcore players usually do casual content, but the reverse isn't true.

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Calling everything a "casual" player refuses to do "hardcore" is reductive. It's a race to the bottom mentality.

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Originally Posted by Bryson

Calling everything a "casual" player refuses to do "hardcore" is reductive. It's a race to the bottom mentality.

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You're right. I'm coming the argument on the perceived lack of midcore content, since it FEELS like there isn't much combat content that helps a player transition from story dungeons to proper raiding. It's either easy casual or hard core difficult, amd right now there feels like too little "easy" stuff.

IMO, anyone that can make their way through DT's story dungeons and trials is pretty primed since the devs kinda went off on those fights. It was great! But we all saw how it blindsided some people, even with NPCs to fall back on. In which case it's a labelling problem.

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Originally Posted by AntoniusQuil

I feel like this patch season has just not enough causal combat content. So far we got just normal versions of raids and trials (plus one alliance raid so far).

Occult crescent was supposed to be this casual combat content. But after Bozja which had some really good casual content like Castrum, Delubrum (which is still my favourite raid in the game) and Dalariada. This time for some reason we got savage only Forked Tower which provides no casual content, leaving the casuals in occult crescent only with encounters, fates and grinding regular mobs, so much less than in case of Bozja.

It’s getting kinda annoying that it seems like the part of the dev team responsible for combat content cares only about savage part of the player base.

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I hope you’re joking, because a lot of players actually feel pretty divided and see things quite differently from what you posted. No offense, but the way the game is right now mostly caters to casual players, and that’s become a problem for many of us. Personally, what bothers me more is the repetitive, almost drunk like predictability of the content cycles with very small innovation other than aesthetics.

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Originally Posted by DBriggs304

We need more content, period. More involvement in the world that makes the world meaningful. FF14 has the deadest world of any MMO i've played. They are focused entirely too much on the story now. We have spent way too much time in cutscenes this expansion instead of in the world doing things.

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Most rational take ever. Thank you!

i think we just need to stop with the whole "us vs them" argument an just agree that generally there is no appealing content that caters to both sides to sustain us longterm an the stuff we do get is the same spilt just with different colors of paint not very exciting when you know how everything works or functions all the time is it?
as for rewards on this point i think that rewards have heavily favored more too those on the high difficulty spectrum where as the more light-hearted less difficult stuff leaves casuals grinding for what seems hours on end for little returns to justify even going for it in the first place.
as for rewards being meaningful in some way you're kinda cutting corners here they already give us weapons to build up every expansion which sometimes includes relic/artifact gear as well, you get tokens from savage for upgraded raid gear which is also dyeable btw why they remove the dye from casuals version is beyond me an also kinda ruins the reason for casuals to even want to run the raid to begin with that coupled with the savage including a mount for the last fight but yet casuals get a stuffed toy and music sheet whoopie!! lmao when in reality the mount should be earned from a weekly token as well but yet when they do 24 man raids their is no bias at all for rewards everyone gets the same things hypocritical much dontcha think? lol
but point being they give us what people ask for for rewards but in different types of content i'd argue its the rate of which they are obtained which is the major problem an that needs to change it should not in any capacity or form take an entire month(s) just to get one drop of something that's ludicrous an insane an no it doesnt add to replay value it diminishes it an demotivates not saying at all something should be for "free" but it should not take nearly as long as it does to obtain something. an thats what i believe is the part of the arguement is that those who want challenge want alternatives to gear up their alternate jobs and casuals just want the same kind of rewards that those difficult encounters reward without feeling like they are being forced to funnel into savage, ultimate, unreal, chaotic etc.

i would also like to just say too that while the casual friendly gameplay is numerous an plenty often times the developers abandon them an don't try to polish or improve them unlike where the harder challenging stuff seems to get most of the love, care, and attention. this is why the resentment begins to appear cause the developers are really kinda creating that animosity by not showing that same level of care that they do for the hardest content to the more casual friendly content etc.