"Raid difficulty is difficult to balance" Its not at all.

[LadyKairi]

I believe recently Yoshida had made a comment that he wants XIV to be XIV. That people are pretty much expecting XIV to be like XI, but he doesn't want that (was in one of the recent Q&A sessions. We're not EXACT words but close). It's supposed to be a different game. It's one thing for people to want ideas from it, but judging from the forums over the years, it's almost like people want XIV to be an XI clone/modernized XI. If you want to play something like XI, go play XI.

[Vanitas]

Yoshi said it himself "this is not Final Fantasy xi". X:

[Cetonis]

As best as I can tell, the thrust of your post seems to be that they should introduce upscaled content, to supplement the usual options without needing to design entirely new fights. i.e. a level 70 version of Titan EX or Coil or etc.

Sure. I think, presuming that the numbers aren't too terribly hard to figure out, they could do that if they wanted to with relatively little effort. I'd personally love to see it. Realistically however, few players would actually tackle the upscaled content, judging by the fact that there's been zero outrage over min IL sync being non-functional right now.

Incentives would need to be added to push players to do them, but now you're "forcing" people to do "old content" and they would complain. You could also be looking at dev resources for armor models and such, though there are other incentive methods.

[Kaethra]

Have you ever played WoW?
You don't know how dividing this is. Between trinkets and set bonuses, a raiding player can easily deal over double the damage of a non-raiding player.

I played WoW.. and I never understood this argument. Why is a solo or group player in the same group as a raider to begin with? That's like sticking a level 60 alongside a 45 without syncing.

I very much believe in segregating players by playstyle. You cannot put a PVEr and PVPr in the same group together. Someone is going to get bored or annoyed. Just like you can't stick a Raider with a Lonewolf or Grouper. When you complete one tier of content, you shouldn't be in lower tiers. That leads to steamrolling.

Different levels of content help spread out the player base to avoid such conflicts. Just make sure to leave everything in the higher tiers OUT of the Duty Finder. That way players have to go out of their way to be in harder content. This avoids the "I'm just queuing, why is everyone being mean to me?" WoW did this in Legion, Normal Dungeons were for leveling. Heroics were for max level players. Mythicals were for players who wanted a bit tougher stuff. Mythic+ (went from 2 to 15)

Everything but Mythicals were in the dungeon finder. Mythicals required you to form groups the old fashioned way and enter the dungeon at its location. Your 'average' player didn't even know how to get into them. Those doing Mythicals got NOTHING from doing Normal or Heroic. So if you weren't capable of doing Mythicals, you didn't see Mythical geared players in your heroic or normal dungeons.

It worked. People complained still. Because Mythicals were too hard for some of them. But it solved alot of problems. Having 15 difficulties made for a lot of content. They basically took Torment mode from Diablo 3 and applied it to dungeons. Didn't even change the mechanics much (some did change). Just uppped HP and damage of mobs, gave the dungeons random debuffs/buffs (kinda like PotD). And the players did the hardest difficulty their combined skill, gear, and party makeup could do.

They applied it to raids as well (minus the Mythic+... not sure if they added that to raids or not).

Here's how it should work:

Solo Gear advances you in Solo Content
Group Gear advances you in Group Content
Raid Gear advances you in Raid Content

There shouldn't be any reason for a Raider to do Group content or Groupers doing Solo. Those three groups of players shouldn't be together. Their playstyle is too different from one another.

[Amariel34]

Snip

The problem with this is that this game REQUIRES you to group to get through the MSQ. So solo people HAVE to become group people to experience the story. Sure you can skip some dungeons as they are optional, but some aren't. And you also need a high enough ilvl to be able to do the MSQ ones. Like Baelsar's Wall. I believe it was i230 which required the old Eso gear which is now Hunt gear. Can't solo that unless you want to go a snail's pace. *shrugs*

[Daniolaut]

I'll state it again, to attempt to make it more clear to anyone confused.


**The systems are already in place to create varying levels of difficulty for content. Alexander story mode, and alexander savage**

My suggestion, is them just adding upon this.


Why?

Because variety is always a good thing, especially in a video game that is literally called "Massively Multiplayer Online."

The two games where this game takes from the most, (FFXI, and WoW) both have 4 or more tiers of difficulty for fights.

Instead, they could create solo or light party versions of the previously introduced fights, so people can tackle them solo or in a light party, so they have a stepping stone to end game.

Getting into groups mid tier is almost impossible.

You make a valid point. Thank you.

The gist of the suggestion was a large variety of content to obtain tomes/gear, as well as varying difficulty for content.

I just added that in the very moment I couldnt foresee any real issue with giving a real incentive to raiding gear. You put light on the subject, even if someone else shined light on a correction to the issue you provided. Its a never ending cycle probably, so it just might be that set bonus' and ability bonus gear shouldnt be a thing. But again, there should be real incentive to do raiding.

As best as I can tell, the thrust of your post seems to be that they should introduce upscaled content, to supplement the usual options without needing to design entirely new fights. i.e. a level 70 version of Titan EX or Coil or etc.

Sure. I think, presuming that the numbers aren't too terribly hard to figure out, they could do that if they wanted to with relatively little effort. I'd personally love to see it. Realistically however, few players would actually tackle the upscaled content, judging by the fact that there's been zero outrage over min IL sync being non-functional right now.

Incentives would need to be added to push players to do them, but now you're "forcing" people to do "old content" and they would complain. You could also be looking at dev resources for armor models and such, though there are other incentive methods.

You get it. Thanks. The incentive would be "stepping stone gear" for returning players, or players looking to gear multiple jobs. Both tomes and raid content is locked, so unless you are in a raid group, and that raid group continues to farm the raids each week even though all 8 members have full 270 (which is extremely unlikely by the way) or you farm the 2 expert roulette dungeons over and over, youre not going to have more than 2-3 jobs tops at 260 item level or above, which is, in my opinion, unfortunate. Its like they only want people to play one job, which makes no sense to me, because being able to play more than 1 job, I feel adds value to the game.

If you want to play something like XI, go play XI.

As a matter of fact, I play both XIV and XI, so umm, thanks for the tip?

[Araxes]

Uhm.... no thanks!

[Kaethra]

The problem with this is that this game REQUIRES you to group to get through the MSQ. So solo people HAVE to become group people to experience the story. Sure you can skip some dungeons as they are optional, but some aren't. And you also need a high enough ilvl to be able to do the MSQ ones. Like Baelsar's Wall. I believe it was i230 which required the old Eso gear which is now Hunt gear. Can't solo that unless you want to go a snail's pace. *shrugs*

What I said still stands. The idea of putting Groupers and Solo'rs together to complete the MSQ was a bad idea. And then they act surprised that people aren't getting along.

I made a suggestion the other day to actually make groupable versions of MSQ duties, you know.. the ones that force you to solo. Imagine the disgruntlement of raiders who have to solo/group 1-50 (in 2.0) and 51-60 (in 3.0) just to get to their content.

[JunseiKei]

~snip~

All I get from this post is gear = the gate and balance of the raid. If that is the case, as someone who never played FFXI looking in, it just sounds like the same fight with stat tweaks to make the fight "harder" and that getting gear in the first place was the actual difficulty. That requires very little work, and that's not the case in FFXIV where the difference between "hard" and "extreme" may make one mechanic completely different and introduce completely different ones and then mix their patterns up or add entirely new phases.

The idea of putting Groupers and Solo'rs together to complete the MSQ was a bad idea.

Not to be rude, but, why are those that want to play solo play an MMO? It's like joining Facebook with no intention of interacting with someone else.

[Zumi]

I always thought set bonuses were cool. It made it so you wanted to get more pieces of gear to get bonuses that do something unique that you couldn't get anywhere else. FF11 had several set bonuses on certain sets of gear, salvage gear, AF3 from abyssea for example.