FFXIV: The State Of Raiding

[Kerrigen]

Personally, I don't think difficulty is the problem. Granted, I've only got to A6S Swindler with my static (we are wiping lots, but only raid 5 hours / week). The issue I've had with HW raiding is that it is just less fun. The fights are challenging, but not fun. The two aren't necessarily the same. I want challenging AND fun content for raids. A5S was a decent example of something that is quite fun. As you said though, it was fairly easy. The last time I had a fun fight that was also challenging would be T11. Conversely, I am pretty sure A6S is the least fun I've ever had in a raid and it is draining my enjoyment of the game trying to progress on it every week.

I don't know, fun is a personal metric? I think A5s is extremely fun (but very easy, I would have loved a bit more resistance) and I also find A6s to be extremely fun (a bit less so post-nerf as they considerably de-fanged Brawler and healing through this mess was epic and felt rewarding). Different strokes, etc. I know a lot of people loved T6 and T8 back in the day and I hated these fights, while I loved T7 pre-nerf and everyone seemed to dislike it. I'm no stranger to having unpopular opinions.

I think all 4 of the Midas fights manage to be fun (low point for me would be A7 but it's not a very low point), although I get that a lot of people don't like the theme and tone compared to Coil, and this is absolutely valid criticism. Gordias in comparison was terrible, with the only somewhat fun fight being A3s, and A4s being an all-time low.

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The incentive for me is the challenge as I frankly don't care about the gear unless it helps me reach a VIT or DPS threshold. I find it genuinely sad that a lot of players aren't looking forward to the challenge as a form of reward. As you put it yourself, there is no real point in getting the gear, but this stems from an another issue: nothing in the game apart from Savage content is even remotely challenging. Okay, currently Sephirot Ex and potentially Final Steps Ex might be slightly challenging but if you raid Savage content there's no point repeating these. I haven't set foot in Sephirot Extreme once in the last 3 months. One of the largest problems this game has is that content is developped with absolutely no longevity in mind.