Why is FFXIV considered to be so hard/hardcore?

[Fendred]

You know, that is a hard question to answer. From my perspective, it might be a negative thing. The end game has proven that mixing new and old players in hard content is a serious issue that creates a sort of negative feedback loop where one group becomes increasingly insensitive to the other while the other becomes afraid to even attempt content. People want a supportive environment to get better in while also not being held back by a conveyor belt of new players who are behind the curve.

I really liked suggestions on these forums for a practice mode and added my own two cents to that by bringing up the idea of Maat from FFXI being brought into FFXIV as a story driven tutorial for the harder bosses in game. It would inject some light hearted humor into the situation and also help by giving new players a place where being new is always guaranteed to be okay.

[Dwill]

You havnt played crystal cronicles multiplayer or any other multiplayer FF game?
Because what you say makes no sence to me, in FFXIV there is no time to recover, if timing is off you will wipe!
It is the mecanics and Chrono Trigger, Grandia2, Star Ocean or any other games would be much more fun in multiplayer than current FFXIV...

Complains timing is off you wipe yet brings Star Ocean where for example, if you don't cancel Freya's Ether Strike in 4D it's an insta wipe

[Yukiko]

Complains timing is off you wipe yet brings Star Ocean where for example, if you don't cancel Freya's Ether Strike in 4D it's an insta wipe

Well... Star Ocean... the problem here is we have many versions

[Sapphic]

Actually, has anyone cleared savage 2nd coil? Gee maybe if it dropped something nice, more people would try. I don't think there is any other mmo that would throw *no drops at all* behind their most difficult encounter.

*sigh* why do people keep bringing that up? Savage coil was put in as a test, there was no real development time spent on it, was put in as a test to see if it is worth continuing to add that kind of content, if it had failed it would have been a waste of time designing and adding new gear for it. They stated that if it was succesful they would look to add new gear sets to savage versions in the future.

[Sapphic]

Some people have fun wiping for months to figure out fight mechanics in order to beat "the hardest content". I'm not one of those people personally, but I can see the attraction. It's the "Look, I'm so LEET" club.

Not everyone who raids cares about their ego, so nice generalization there. I like to raid to beat content with friends. I dont care about posing like an AFK attention deficit turnip in a public place posing with said gear. Neither do I think that im better than anyone else just because of playing a game.

For me the drops are just to help us get through said content.

Anyways back on topic

One thing I've noticed in many years of playing MMOs to various levels (raid member, guild leader, world firsts etc) that many players stuck at content have an ego problem, they find it impossible to admit to their own mistakes, even to themselves. But find it easier to blame others thus the potential for self improvement is lost. You can't improve until you self admit that you need to improve, which doesn't just apply to games but to everything.

[Seif]

The only diffyculty really is what kind of party you happen to fall into.
If you could trigger all of the mechanics yourself this would be a cakewalk.

[Jon_00]

Problem with Coil is it's purely single tiered content, tuned at one specific difficulty which by default is 'hard'. (Ignoring Savage Mode)

WoW's raids are three tiered in content with Raid Finder difficulty, normal difficulty and heroic difficulty.

In my opinion, the difficulty of the content can be organised like this

Least Difficult
Raid Finder WoW,
Normal Mode WoW,
Coil,
Heroic WoW,
Savage Coil.
Most Difficult

Hence why FFXIV is hard by nature, there's no 'easy' setting.

[Kosmos992k]

An open question to all the hardcore - or whatever you want to be called - players out there who have turns of Coil 2 on farm already and are so dead set against easing turn 5 in any way; why would it mater to you in the slightest if the difficulty of turn 5 was eased considerably to allow more players to at least see the story elements of it? Several people have suggested a easy mode that gives no reward but eases the difficulty a lot. Why would having a mode like that impact you in any way? Why are you so against it?

To answer the OP, the reason it's so hardcore is that to participate in the raid content you have to be in a static group and learn to team jump rope, and face the wrath of moron when you don't achieve perfection ever single run. The end-game in FFXIV is a total turn off for many players who simply do not want or need that crap.

[Odett]

It's because of the game's lack of challenging content. There is challenging content, but very little of it. Most stuff in this game is a cakewalk that requires less than minimum effort to clear. The game coddles poor players too much, and more often than not, if you try to give someone that's doing the bare minimum advice, they don't care and the group beats the fight anyway, which just goes to reinforce that kind of behavior. This is the drawback in having an MMO that tries to appeal to everyone. You get many players that differ in the way that they play, and stick them in the same dungeon.

Because of this, you get DPS who don't use cooldowns as well as have bad rotations, full-spam on healers, healers who just stand there, and tanks who either cannot keep agro, cannot cycle between their 8+ defensive cooldowns (which breeds full-on spam healers because healing a MRD who doesn't mitigate makes you do this, and when you as a new tank, see a healer full spamming you, why bother with defensive cooldowns? It's a vicious circle.), or both. Doing these things is not min-maxing, it is using your class skills that the game gives you, and you should do so. But because the majority of content let's you get by without doing any of this, players who either don't know any better or are just plain lazy keep doing what they're doing. This is also a result of too many fights with negligible mechanics that players ignore, and a small handful with mechanics that will kill you if you don't handle them properly (as they should).

On the other hand, you also have players that are playing their classes well, and have huge egos because they're performing...as they should perform. So you get self-proclaimed hardcore players who don't want to play with new people, a handful of new people that are willing to take advise and improve, a ton that do not and throw the word "elitism" around like hotcakes, as well as good players who like to help, but have become jaded with the "don't tell me how to play my class" responses as well as "I've never even seen a 5 minute video, but I expect you to tell me about the fight and wipe tons of times" who have experienced this scenario too many times and groan when they have to do it again, and are also just tired of seeing new people unwilling to listen, as well as people that call themselves "pro" blaming others. It's all a big headache, really.

[ToffeeCoffee]

The only hardcore component that applies to 2nd Coil is the artificial restrictions SE put on it through the turn/weekly lockout system.
One week you might 1-shot T6, 7 or 8 and the next week spend 4 or 5 hours stuck on one turn because 2 or more members of your static couldn't make it to the raid.

2nd Coil in and of itself isn't actually hard, what's hardcore is getting a competent (hopefully pleasant to deal with) group together every week (preferably the same 8 people so you can allocate loot, previously Sands and Oil before they became household items). Having to PUG for anything in FFXIV is the worst, I'm sick of dealing with people who pay more attention to their parsing program than what's actually happening on the screen. I'm also sick of having to party with people who rage and point the finger when things go wrong. Give me 2nd Coil, unrestricted, in solo queue Duty Finder, every day of the week so I can click J and be happy. I'm more than competent with Turn 6-8 but I just refuse to bother revolving my life around a dysfunctional static in the middle of the night, or joining a PUG group where my DPS and skill rotations get critiqued by a bunch of elitists. I'd rather join a practice group and help players who actually appreciate it.