Game too complex or easy?

[Melch]

You don't learn to play after leveling, you learn to play while leveling. If you power level your way to the top, and then try to learn your skills, you're putting the cart before the horse.

When you're leveling you understand how your skills work, but there's nothing to push you to the limits. Dungeons are pretty much faceroll (I only level in dungeons).

[Obysuca]

99% of XI's "difficulty" could be boiled down to one of three things:
- Needlessly long travel time (without the Tidal Talisman, getting to Einherjar required a 10 minute boat ride with a 10 minute wait if you missed, or using a consumable item to travel through a maze then running through aggressive territory, which also took about 10 minutes.

Just going to say. You could have always spent the few IS and took Azouph Isle staging point and ran there in like ~5 mins >_>

Imagine having to get ejected and then go build another pop set each time you failed Titan HM.

Tbh, if they had kept that and put it into XIV, I'm sure a lot of players would stop sucking and learn to dodge/listen to the strategy and not cause wipe after wipe after wipe. If you knew that a wipe meant spending a while to refarm the pop to try again, you'd sure definitely want to try your best to not wipe.
Very accessible = too many people causing too many wipes causing unneeded stress.
I've seen so many people pull miracles out of their @ss on XI to ensure a victory. While on XIV, I've seen countless number of pts just go "Just wipe" if a single mistake happens or if 1 healer or tank dies.

[Melch]

Just going to say. You could have always spent the few IS and took Azouph Isle staging point and ran there in like ~5 mins >_>




Tbh, if they had kept that and put it into XIV, I'm sure a lot of players would stop sucking and learn to dodge/listen to the strategy and not cause wipe after wipe after wipe. If you knew that a wipe meant spending a while to refarm the pop to try again, you'd sure definitely want to try your best to not wipe.
Very accessible = too many people causing too many wipes causing unneeded stress.
I've seen so many people pull miracles out of their @ss on XI to ensure a victory. While on XIV, I've seen countless number of pts just go "Just wipe" if a single mistake happens or if 1 healer or tank dies.

What you call miracles is the mastery of spellcast, but I get your idea.

[Ibi]

99% of XI's "difficulty" could be boiled down to one of three things:
- Needlessly long travel time
- Unforgiving, no do-over mechanics
- Competition between groups for scarce resources

This isn't necessarily making the game easier so much as it is removing the tedious pointless BS that is anything but actually playing the game.

An excellent summary.

What IS actually easier: XIV is considerably more forgiving about failed attempts. Imagine having to get ejected and then go build another pop set each time you failed Titan HM. That was FFXI.

True, although it was also (excepting the occasional fight like Dynamis Lord where your two hours were necessarily for mechanical reasons) much easier to stop an attempt becoming a failed attempt in FFXI.

There's no equivalent to "Okay, kite it while three-quarters of the alliance recovers from weakness" in FFXIV, because there's probably an enrage timer in your future if that many people have died.

[Kosmos992k]

When you're leveling you understand how your skills work, but there's nothing to push you to the limits. Dungeons are pretty much faceroll (I only level in dungeons).

I really, really disagree with you, however I think the problem is that once a substantial proportion of the playerbase in these dungeons is at or beyond end-game, the inherent difficulty and mechanics of the party are fundamentally altered by the overgeared players. Tanks can't learn how to tank properly if everyone and their son can rip aggro off them - for example. When The game first arrived the idea of level sync was awesome to me because it seemed to offer a way of maintaining the relevance and difficulty of the leveling dungeons. Now we know that it's not as successful as it could be in syncing high level, well geared players, which results in unbalanced runs that get things done, but teach new players very little.

I wish level sync was more effective because too many people think the content is easy, when in fact they are still effectively overgearing it compared to the first time they ran it. Try running Haukke, Brayflox and Cutters Cry in gear that is around the level of the dungeon and see how easy it is then.

[Fendred]

Rotation-based damage is usually what people refer to when I see these seemingly contradictory complaints. On one hand, rotations can be really annoying to get down, but once learned they become easy, even boring, to execute.

[T2teddy]

As other have said, I think the ex primals are a good starting spot for endgame. We just need more stuff like that. The biggest problem is right now we only have 2 ex primals

What on earth are you on about? Garuda/Ifrit/Titan/Ramuh/Leviathan/Shiva/Ravanna/Bismarck all have EX modes. That's a lot more than 2...

[Kosmos992k]

What on earth are you on about? Garuda/Ifrit/Titan/Ramuh/Leviathan/Shiva/Ravanna/Bismarck all have EX modes. That's a lot more than 2...

Currently hardcore end-game players seem to believe that pre-HW EX primals are in fact faceroll easy....I don't, but they do.

[Makeda]

Its much less complex than say, Wildstar. It SHOULD be less complex than Guild Wars 2 - except people long ago figured out how to 'gimp / cheat' that game and the devs never fixed it (Guild Wars 2's combat engine can, on all but a few select fights, be ignored by simply having a group all stack in one spot in a corner to prevent any knockbacks: once you do that, you can AOE down anything, and self heals end up outpacing damage).

However the game is more to similarly complex compared to other MMOs. I'm on the fence on this. The telegraph system here adds a lot less complexity than it should because the global cooldown is so amazingly long here, that for any event you have an absurdly long amount of time to react. You can go off, watch some Netflix, make toast and jam, and then come back and crawl your toon out of the way... Enemy mobs in this game complete their college degrees in between the long time between player attacks...

And for most fights that I have thus far seen in this game, dancing with the telegraphs and keeping off debuffs is pretty much the gimmick. That is not too different from Wildstar - but Wildstar has almost everything on a fast to no cooldown, no targeting by either players or mobs, all actions even heals are AOE... and telegraphs are short and varied in shape (in Wildstar I've had entire Tibetan Monk dioramas appear under my feet with less than a second to find the tiny gap between curves and criss-crossing lines that is the 'no insta wipe' spot).

The reals question is not is the game complex enough - but is it engaging enough to keep one entertained...

I'm finding it engaging right now.

[Catwho]

The longer telegraphs are necessary because of PS3 and severe lag. Yeah, it feels like Titan could finish his bachelor's degree in the time it takes for him to actually pop off landslide, but that's because I'm on a fast connection with great quality of service and a very good ping to Montreal - and on a gaming box that dances at jig at 60+ FPS in even the most crowded zones. I've seen new PS3 players who haven't learned the tricks necessary to dodge Titan HM fall off repeatedly with "I was out of that!" - you appeared to be, but the server didn't know it because your console had an extra second of draw time lag and you didn't change directions or use an attack to confirm the location before the attack went off.

PS4 doesn't have that second of lag, and that makes all the difference.