New 4.X open field monsters will be a shorter fight.

[alimdia]

I remember these forums were very vocal about how increasing monster HP does not equal to danger and how HW monsters were annoying rather than challenging, so what difference does it make?

[Shurrikhan]

I remember these forums were very vocal about how increasing monster HP does not equal to danger and how HW monsters were annoying rather than challenging, so what difference does it make?

Because once again rather than aiming to increase difficulty and engagement, SE has sided with only the reduction of inconvenience. Granted, they've got more than enough of that to go around as an MMO, due to various areas of backwards or antiquated design, but more than that there's a failure to flesh things out, and this has just gone further in that direction.

[Atoli]

I'm glad about that. From the get-go, a world isn't dangerous just because the opponent has a big health pool.
When I talk about how I want the overworld to be more dangerous, I think of roaming lvl 100 bosses that pop up out of nowhere,
area effects, many aggroing enemies that rush you if you aren't careful, have mechanics that are hard to do without triggering others, etc.

Not "fight one monster on your level but hit on it twice as long as before".

[Shougun]

I don't care to much about this. Once we "completed" a zone in HW there was no fighting anymore anyway because we could just fly to avoid anything.

Wouldn't that strengthen the argument to make the moments spent more memorable then? Like are you going to remember one hitting all monsters on the way to the center of an extremely dangerous beast tribe, or seeing their fortress and planning your infiltration trying to avoid certain monsters/combinations - perhaps even having a reason to pull that chocobo out.

Not that I think every monster should take 20 minutes or some exaggeration, personal just think less is more sometimes. Rather than a quest to kill 10 wolves get me 3 wolves with mini-boss mechanics.

I wasn't really excited to read that question/answer either. I feel similar about dungeon trash though, unless the explicit feeling required was zerg swarm (which usually is not, and when zerg is not the desired feeling it shouldn't be the feeling at all.. imo :P).

[alimdia]

Because once again rather than aiming to increase difficulty and engagement, SE has sided with only the reduction of inconvenience. Granted, they've got more than enough of that to go around as an MMO, due to various areas of backwards or antiquated design, but more than that there's a failure to flesh things out, and this has just gone further in that direction.

My point is they didn't go "further in that direction", we're exactly at the same point we have been all this time, this change isn't really changing the status quo with open world difficulty.

[Shurrikhan]

My point is they didn't go "further in that direction", we're exactly at the same point we have been all this time, this change isn't really changing the status quo with open world difficulty.

Any time they admit that a problem isn't a problem to them, or that they'd rather circumvent it than fix it, we move "further in that direction".

[alimdia]

Get ready to remain disappointed until this game closes then, it's pretty obvious for anyone not blinded by wishful thinking that what you propose is not how they envision the game, it has been many years already and more to come with SB and they still don't want to take that direction, they want open world to remain accessible for casuals and keep hard content in instances.

But hey, Yoshida himself recommended people to play other games when they feel burned out, and there are many MMOs out there with the goal of providing an old school feel, perhaps you should try those when you feel like taking a break from this one.

We're also getting gordias savage type of content after you clear omega savage, so that's even more challenging content available.

[Nalfein]

I think it is about FATEs. In 3.0 the FATE enemies were not really harder, just longer to kill.
I'm more for shorter fights, where in 10 sec the enemy or the player is dead. Better than a 1 minute fight with a 100% win for the player.

Finger crossed, hope they were talking about FATE too.

[Shurrikhan]

Get ready to remain disappointed until this game closes then, it's pretty obvious for anyone not blinded by wishful thinking that what you propose is not how they envision the game, it has been many years already and more to come with SB and they still don't want to take that direction, they want open world to remain accessible for casuals and keep hard content in instances.

But hey, Yoshida himself recommended people to play other games when they feel burned out, and there are many MMOs out there with the goal of providing an old school feel, perhaps you should try those when you feel like taking a break from this one.

We're also getting gordias savage type of content after you clear omega savage, so that's even more challenging content available.

Being accessible to casuals does not mean that the world needs to be devoid of difficulty or any rewards other than overlying gimmicks (e.g. exp-grindable or relic FATEs).
Why would there only be one level of difficulty in a given experience?

Moving in a direction that treats the open world as having potential to be a real point of content, newly allowing for difficulty, just means that it wouldn't necessarily be fated to planned obsoletion. Why spend so much time developing a piece of content, if it's going to be ultimately meaningless (not even remotely the content we call "content")?

[Laerune]

Maybe they could make fights shorter and make enemies hit harder? If enemies have low HP, but do alot of damage, this might bring some challenge to the fights and force players to use more of their abilities. As it is right now, unless you do dungeons, you dont need to use offensive or defensive skills, most players just use their regular combo attack or if you are a WHM Stone 3 XD