Unbalanced Instances and Mechanics

Me and my wife, both playing mmo's for 15 years, played in the betas and got upto brayflox. From what we saw till then everything was sort of balanced, difficulty scaled up nicely, brayflox was abit harder but farmable using the duty finder.

Now at launch we are currently level 46 WAR/WHM and tried all the instance content upto that level including Qarn,Cutters,Stone Vigil and Dzemael. From what i can tell difficulty bounces upwars to sky limits from Stone Vigil and Dzemael making it almost impossible to do a proper run using the Duty Finder.

These higher level instances require a coordination and experience that is just too much for random people you pug with. If you are lucky and have experienced players join you it might be a good run but 95% of the times its a disaster.

In the end its not even worth it, the equipment you get there(which is also scarce) will get replaced in a matter of hours with the practically free lvl 50 gear you get from quests and the exp sucks! 1 hour of Dzemael run maybe 30% exp while 1 hour spam fating coerthas nets you 1 and a half levels. Its actually funny making literally 10k exp in 5 seconds fating while to make the same ammount in a dungeon you need to break your fingers.

Now i get the whole hard content is good mentallity but for something like this to work properly you need to reward the "hard" and not making it obsolete. As it stands now pre-50 instances are a total joke, they offer nothing worthwile and they are NOT fun because of that.

Making matters worse the duty finder is lacking serious features, for example lets say i win the lottery and get a decent group to farm an instance with, i cant even keep in touch or re-run the same instance together, of course not. I will end up with another newbie group wiping my @ss on the floor till they all know the mechanics of the dungeon.

For me the golden solution to this problem would be to "ALLOW" cross server grouping/ friendlisting or at least the option to re-run the same content with the same group when you finish the instance. Moreover the low level loot needs to get buffed, noone will farm a level 40 instance 50 times to get geared up. 10 stone vigil runs and i still got a white weapon from a trash quest which i changed for a higher level trash quest weapon.

I would love to level up all my jobs using instances cause they are cool and i like a good challenge, but please S/E make it worthwile, give us the proper tools to do so. Nerfing the difficulty is a bad solution instead reward us with better exp/items/gil.

Maybe you just had bad groups? Explaining mechanics to new people usually gives them the heads up, and if they genuinely want to be better at playing the game then they will take advice on board. There are however people who do not listen and don't care to do mechanics properly. They are the minority imo.

I think there was no problem with the difficulty of the dungeons, I think you just got bad groups.

Come on man, 15 years you said? It is called leadership. Seriously, dust off your keyboard and explain stuff to people. I have led my pick up groups through each of these dungeons. Try using your words. A little kindness and patience combined with some sense of leadership will work wonders. Type less book rants on lodestone and save the energy for your groups.

Once a strategy becomes established and knowledge spreads people will be saying they are too easy. I think they are at a good level, definitely not too hard.

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Originally Posted by Zehl

Come on man, 15 years you said? It is called leadership. Seriously, dust off your keyboard and explain stuff to people. I have led my pick up groups through each of these dungeons. Try using your words. A little kindness and patience combined with some sense of leadership will work wonders. Type less book rants on lodestone and save the energy for your groups.

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I agree and that is not the main issue here, the main issue is that the ammount of time you devote does not get properly compensated, free 50 gear and grindin fates breaks any pre-50 instanced content, noone will use the hard earned equip from dzemael's at level 50, why should you farm it under the above circumstance( low exp,almost no gil and scarce items).

Then don't farm it. Skip to 50 and don't waste your time. You will get to use the dungeons for company hunting logs anyway. Why would anyone do totorak in 1.0 once 50? To turn in that garbage gear you mention for seals. Come on man. I feel like you are better than this post. I think you are just frustrated.

I haven't done dzemael but I did vigil with 3/4 people running for the first time. We wiped on boss 1 and 2 but not the final one. I don't think it was unreasonable.

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Originally Posted by DukeGr

From what i can tell difficulty bounces upwars to sky limits from Stone Vigil and Dzemael making it almost impossible to do a proper run using the Duty Finder.

These higher level instances require a coordination and experience that is just too much for random people you pug with. If you are lucky and have experienced players join you it might be a good run but 95% of the times its a disaster.

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I've done Wander's Palace, Amdapor keep and Ifrit Hardmode with duty finder groups and none of them were a group where everyone had done it before. people explains things and we worked out mechanics for the new bosses in trial and error. the dungeon difficulty is spot on it should not be a cake walk.
Either you and your wife are bad or the dps you've been getting from DF are(or both).

The lack of exp stops people grinding duty finder from inside town i guess though both it and item drops could do with being higher

When I run a dungeon for the first time I'll ask on what's the plan before entering boss fights and if someone has made the run before they will in most cases explain what to do. This is how you coordinate a bunch of random people and frankly even if you are in a known party this still helps to refresh it.

Soo... You want lower level instances to give gear that's better than level 50 gear? Yeah let's throw the concept of progression out the window. I honestly think the problems you are having with duty finder are problems on your own part. I've ran dungeons all the way up to darkhold, and I haven't had a group that couldn't be talked through the fight. Some players were mediocre, but with a good calm explanation, they could succeed. The fact that you came on the forums to whine makes you look like an elitist jerk. No matter how much final fantasy changes, it will always be a game of patience. I suggest you learn to deal with that. All that aside, I will agree that instances could use an experience boost. As it stands right now, fate spam far outperforms any other form of leveling methods.

Yah I'll echo what most people have already said:

It's a new game with new dungeons that people haven't farmed for months. There are no abundance of strategies online, a handful of people are aware of the mechanics on boss fights, and most people are stepping in there the first time.

I expect fuck ups on a dungeon that I've never stepped in before, even after explaining it because some people learn by making mistakes and some learn from reading strategies.

It gets better.

If it all follows typical dungeon patterns I've experienced in most other MMO's, its difficult the first few weeks as everyone adjusts to it, but then it normalizes when people know what to do. People will then look back and say "Those dungeons were so easy. We need harder dungeons!"

Everyone bitched the game was too easy now you bitch the game is to hard, lol, ridiculous!