[Personal Opinion] FFXIV is too casual friendly

[MistakeNot]

SE made FFXIV too casual friendly. I am talking about the difficulty here not the quantity.
Nothing can be said about the quantity. It is polished.

Over all we have:
- Easy Main Scenario Quests.
- Easy Job Quests.
- Easy Dungeons.

If players can pass the core of the game easily with minimum effort. How do you expect them to play at standard level later in game?

Is it really that easy? For experienced players with great gear it may well be, but for average players encountering the content for the first time with gear that is only just good enough? For them it is not all that easy.

Besides, I suspect most players are not really interested in improving their skills or facing a challenge - they play to have fun and for the story. Making the MSQ/Job quests/story dungeons much harder would just make them come to a stop at some point.

[JunseiKei]

Is it really that easy? For experienced players with great gear it may well be, but for average players encountering the content for the first time with gear that is only just good enough? For them it is not all that easy.

Besides, I suspect most players are not really interested in improving their skills or facing a challenge - they play to have fun and for the story. Making the MSQ/Job quests/story dungeons much harder would just make them come to a stop at some point.

As long as you know the basic mechanics, they were all pretty easy to figure out, even on day one in terrible gear. Also, it comes down to how much you know the class you're playing on.

We did wipe three times in Aetherochemical Research Faculity before we figured out, oh, we need to go into the thing that gave us vulnerability stacks in The Vault. We ended up laughing about how trollish it was to make that mechanic look like something that was to be avoided before.

[Synrin]

And the argument "just go with your fc then" is ridiculously invalid, because my fc members have a real live as well and will not always be online when i am and even if they are, they might not be in the mood to do it when i am. >.>

One of the issues I face - finding a place to play considering the time/capability in general.

[Rita1989]

Honestly Nidhogg normal has been the only non ex/raid fight in HW that felt right on difficulty it wasn't overly hard but required you to be able to play your class decently well to clear.

At end game that is the level of difficulty we should be aiming for casual content and hopefully in Stormblood they add some in game resource that can help people with rotations so they don't need to go look online which can be a bit confusing/ overly complicated for newer players

[Yasminou]

Honestly Nidhogg normal has been the only non ex/raid fight in HW that felt right on difficulty it wasn't overly hard but required you to be able to play your class decently well to clear.

I agree.

During 2.0, Hard mode Primals were very nice even though beating Titan as a WHM was kind of difficult for me because of the lag in Europe. However, I like to think it helped me improve.
When 2.1 was released, Good King Moggle Mog was a great fight (PLD add could be a pain if it linked with both the party healers), in between Garuda and Titan. The fact that it had i75 weapons drops was also nice as not everyone had i80 weapons for every job and it kept people queueing for it (no trial roulette yet).

However, when 2.2 came, I think it was a mistake to make Leviathan so easy with no drops at all. I think it should have had i85 weapons for glamour purpose in order to keep the trend started with other hard mode primals trials and to motivate people. And so on and so forth with Ramuh, Shiva and even maybe Ravana and Bismarck for leveling weapons.

I also think that, in 2.55, Steps of the Faith would have had a better welcome, should we have had been able to restart easily the fight after a wipe. Losing 15 minutes after a wrong start or a miss harpoon was a real problem.

[randysquirrel]

Agree. I understand here are people of different ability, and don't mind having some easier content, but until recently, savage raid was the only content that offered any sort of challenge at all. it literally was either brainAFK content or raid, with not much in between, except I guess maybe the latest ex primal. Weeping city and potd are steps in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. WC is not bleeding edge difficulty, but it does still require some sort of co-ordination

[Riardon]

I could understand the easy first lvl dungeons but the 60+??? c'mon. They are easy to the point of faceroll on keyboard and win. That if you don't fell asleep during the run. No mechanics no effort. First day of the patch I could mass pull without fearing the mobs will be powerful. This didn't happen during the 2.X series. There is no need of too complicated and too hard dungeons but what we got the last few patches is easy to the point of silliness. It's boring. The game became too easy because they want more subs fast. The overall difficulty of the 2.X series patches was more appropriate.

[JunseiKei]

But here comes the question: If Ex Primals and Savage is for people who WANT to challenge themselves, how does it come it is free to enter for everyone?! This is SO annoying... people keep entering Sophia EX farm groups even though they have no clue what to do at all. To prevent this and give above mid-core/hardcore players the chance to play the forcing way they want to, without people wiping them because of a lack of class skill, we need a new system for that. A test within the starting quest for this content for example, in which you need to beat an enemy by showing you are capable of playing your class to an certain point

At least Raid Finder is a step in the right direction, where you can only queue under duty completed if you have cleared it. The issue still comes from players that were carried, either by friends or shoving out gil to content sellers, there's no way of telling if someone has the fight done, understands it and can play competently enough with others. Unfortunately, I can't think of something to improve on what SE has.

[Chocolys]

Personal Opinion: I like FF XIV as a "Theme Park" as it is, with activities of different difficulties. If some weak players choose to enter some rides to hard to handle for them and vomit all other you, then blame them, not the ride.
Only thing I can think of that would help with your issue, is having some sort of Advanced Training Hall requirement that locks you out of some of the hard end content until you pass all its checks. But I certainly do to want the base game MSQ, simple SQ to becomes hard content.

[Squigley]

It feels to me too that we have easy content and extreme/savage content. Something in between would be nice. Not everything should be ramped up in difficulty, I sometimes like to switch my brain off and go do super duper easy stuff. It can very very relaxing. In my humble opinion it would be cool if the expert roulette would be normal difficulty instead of very easy. Nothing brutal but something along the lines of "you might actually die if you don't pay attention".

I think it was very sad that the community had to practically beg for the devs not to nerf the difficulty of Wiping City