Something you may or may not have known...

[Sessurea]

I'm amazed too. How did you pull that off? Titan EX makes me wanna suck on a shotgun. That's one ludicrous fight right there. I may hold the record for most wipes...

Big thing about is: You need 8 ppl who WANT to clear it. And want to work for it.....not hoping for a carry.

Terrible thing about titan is that ppl who play only for stats or ilvl will consider it useless pointless content, I did it just coz I always wanted to kill it :< So so sooo many wipes in df *_* Got lucky and got invited to a learning party in a lavender beds LS, of all places...but since titan doesn't drop anything even near a bis item, I consider it pretty much a miracle that this party formed.

[Kiara1]

Please make more challenging content for fewer players. Like dungeons that you cant DF. Dont know what the reward should be though..

Also lke op said, dont remove the challenges. We are overgeared for titan and we stilll get echo if we wipe. Overkill to me.

Also I did leviathan ex for the first time two days ago and while I admit it only took my group of 7 new people an hour to learn the fight and beat it. Its still the hardest fight I have tried in this game and I love it(after 3 wipes at titan ex i could go through it not getting hit by anything, but after two hours of leviathan Im still finding it fun and challenging)

[Kiara1]

Iblip .

I actually think fishing works fine. There are ways to get the fish you want easier (certain baits just like in real life)
And it would be weird if we could choose the fish we wanted to catch like botany and mining works.
And this is the opinion from someone who spent three hours fishing yesterday to o ny get one HQ souvereign

Also I prefer rng to tokens. I dont care about getting good gear cause its so easy. Kill a couple of hunts a week and you will be maxed and can get the same gear as everyone else at the same timr basically.
Would be more fun to actually WORK for your gear (like dungeon drops). Something thats easier than coil so the gear shouldnt be as good as coil either

[Lemuria]

I don't honestly think anyone dislikes a challenge. However, RNG is not a challenge and that's the unfortunate method that FFXIV uses to gate a lot of content these days. Some people will overcome this hurdle immediately as they'll be the lucky ones, others will be messed over constantly. Case in point: Atma grinding.

The trick to any MMO is to have a grind, but to mask it. To hide it. There's a real art to making a grind which doesn't FEEL like a grind. Dozens of games have accomplished this before, but it's a very careful balance. I think FFXIV is still trying to find its balancing point at the moment, and is still too heavily weighted towards artificial gating mechanics rather than gameplay-enforced restrictions.

[Scootaloo]

For example. There's been some suggestions to change certain mechanics so they are STILL challenging, but not as punishing and a little more forgiving to mistakes. Right now there is a multitude of mechanics in the game that will punish 8 players for a small slip up of 1. That's not challenging, thats annoying. There's a big difference between the two.

I agree that the "one person screws up and the party wipes" mechanic is more annoying than challenging. I wholeheartedly agree with that. However I don't think the heart phase should be changed because that right there actually is something that is what is called a "DPS check" something that is a core mechanic in most boss battles in MMOs. It's a mechanic that sets apart the ones who are trying to get carried"aka leeches" and the ones who want to beat the content. Any basic zenith weapon is enough to pass this DPS check(even in titan EX)and that's fairly easy to obtain now at days.

What does need to be changed is as you said, the "one person screws up and everyone wipes" this is especially true in titan EX where if even one party member gets knocked off, it gimps the party to the point of being unable to complete the content unless 1/2 to 3/4ths of the party is wearing ilvl115 gear. A way to balance this out is if someone is knocked off, allow them to be revived with the healer LB3 or an alternate mechanic. That way if someone gets knocked off, the party has at least a glimmer of hope of being able to bring them back at some point to be able to finish the battle.

[Cinnamon]

The Burning Crusade was more challenging compared to Vanilla WoW. Your assumption that Blizzard used forum feedback to design the second WoW expansion and tone down it's difficulty isn't factual.

Sunwell was the pinnacle of difficulty in WoW. They changed their raiding concept in WotLK because less than 1% of the server population experienced Sunwell. Naxxramas (the hardest Vanilla dungeon) had more people participating even though it was a 40 man raid that needed way more organization to keep people together and on schedule compared to 25 man raids. Also less than 1% of the server population had access to the Black Temple and Mount Hyjal when it was released due to the Kael'Thas barrier.

I guess we can all agree on that using the bulk of your resources to design content for less than 1% of your customers isn't a smart move.

The Titan of WoW in Vanilla was Vaelastrasz even though he was much more forgiving compared to Titan's design. Actually the difficulty of Vaelastrasz is laughable compared to what MMOs throw at players nowadays. And yet he was like a brick wall to most players. Things evolve, players evolve, concepts evolve. That makes comparing difficulty really hard.

The big toning down of difficulty was introduced with the WotLK expansion.

Listening to feedback is always a good thing. Adjusting games solely on feedback posted on an official forum isn't; and the FFXIV-team doesn't do this; else Atma drop rate, weekly lockouts and a ton of other stuff would've been adjusted by now. So all in all your worries aren't really justified.
Being worried about content not being challenging enough is a justified concern for some people though. Tying it together with "Yoshida is listening to forum feedback and destroys our gameplay experience" isn't. Feedback here reaches from "nerf, nerf, nerf!" to "make encounters almost unbeatable" with both sides being extremely vocal about their concerns… both extreme positions whine constantly. Thinking that only the "nerf, nerf, nerf!" part of the forum population gets the producers full attention isn't rational, since there are just as many voices calling for the exact opposite thing. Catering a little bit to both sides and especially catering to the middle way the most is what makes good game design for a mainstream MMO (keyword: mainstream).

[Granyala]

WoW actually used to be challenging and enjoyable to play...then came the burning crusade.

Incorrect.
WoW is still VERY challenging, but only in high end PvP and Heroic (soon to be called Mythic) raiding.
If you dispute that, you obviosuly do not know what you are talking about and never did Brutallus/M'uru/KJ or Rag /Lei'shen at their time.

Compared to todays heroics, vanilla raiding was a joke.


Sadly all other content has been reduced to trivial difficulty.
I seriously hope that FF XIV does not make the same mistake, because I actually like playing non trivial small group content, since WoW still fulfills all my raiding needs.

[Colt47]

^ This right here. And although later on WoW did start making raids where everyone of every level could see the content and enjoy it, by that time it was to late and they had already lost half their player base. This was towards the end of Cata. I get to fed up with not being able to do the new coils and being able to see it when the content comes out. No, I get to see it when it opens up to DF and I can que solo or with a few people. I have a static right now, but they haven't even moved in to T6 yet because we've had people either not showing up at all or bailing when we have to move new people up through the old coils and none of the vet raiders want anything to do with that or to help people. So since the release of SBoC I've beaten T6, that it. I've done a bit of T7 and that as far as it goes. I do like that WoW actually had started making the raid content open to everyone through their party finder and if you wanted to do the hardcore that where you got a static or guild to do them raids. Sure the DF raids in WoW were super easy mode and the stats were dumb down on the gear that dropped, but at least I got to see the content and not have to wait 6 to 8 months to ever see it or go looking for a static that I had no time for or may not work out.

Exactly! It's not like Raid Finder killed the raiding community, it just released a ton of people that really didn't want to do raids free of the perpetual cycle of being forced into something they didn't want to commit to. And really, there were a LOT of people who got stuck into doing raids because it was the only way they could see the story. I'm certain the developers knew that there were people like that long before they even had Raid finder and simply decided to do nothing about it.

I think Yoshida realizes this audience exists and is trying to accommodate them via hunts and atma, but the part he isn't realizing is that, as a themepark title, people want to see the stories the game is trying to tell both big and small. Hunts have no story, but Coil and the primals generally do along with the dungeons. Dungeons at the moment are a different beast entirely, though. Not enough tuning to get people to use abilities like sleep and stun, and they probably need to scale statistics back to match the level of power expected in the dungeon, otherwise it turns into a myth / soldiery speed run.

[Alukah]

Honestly I think you're worrying for nothing, so far the only two nerfs that happened were the echo, that I'm pretty sure was part of their original plan to help people go through outdated content faster (and still, the echo doesn't change how mechs work) and certain dungeon nerfs, which I doubt were due to forum complaints, they have hard numbers that show them how many people try to do content, how many clear and how many fail, the nerf to those dungeons was a response to their metrics.

If they were to change something like atma the challenge would remain the same: non-existent.

Now to a semi-related topic, I'm not sure what were you trying to do here but I wouldn't suggest doing that again, you are assuming they have the same kind of discussions we do, also assuming people there don't give feedback about how to fix things instead of just complaining and I'm not sure how you planned to have a constructive discussion (as in you replying to them) when you can't understand each other.

[SevValen]

I wouldnt say most of the peple are complaining about a challenge maybe 2% of the forums are. As for t5 ha people still cant down that shmit and im one them even though there is that 20% buff we start out with