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

[Mature]

Can we please to avoid this "it's too easy" "it's too hard" nonsense GO BACK to what BCOB used to be? Without "savage" just a single raid? And then we can forget about complaining for whatever has been thrown to us?

I don't remember people, to say the least , people whined about coil at all.

[Ilan]

But if you are a true fan of a game, then you don't want to have changes all the time, you just play the game how it is because you like it.

[Daniolaut]

But if you are a true fan of a game, then you don't want to have changes all the time, you just play the game how it is because you like it.

Actually that would entail a lack of sense.


I also said I was a fan of Final Fantasy, neither XI nor XIV, but the series. In which case, I most likely like the series much much more than any other game or series. With that stated, I would also have favorites and least favorites within that series, but of the least favorite, I still enjoy those much more than other games.

For example, I prefer XIV over World of Warcraft, because of a myriad of reasons, which are not relevant to this post.

I also am not complaining about the game, and even in a post that could appear that way, I am mostly only suggesting how to improve the game.

No game is perfect, if there was such a game, only that game would exist because no one else would buy any other game, because said game is perfect, and a perfect game would be perfect for everyone, because it is perfect, without flaw.


Edit:

Oh, and the only reason i even made the post in the first place, is because the director was complaining that the community was complaining. That's quite a bad place to be in for a video game director and community.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I like set bonuses and the occasional gear piece with random auxiliary effects on them too. I've never understood the whole, "this would never work in FFXIV because groups won't take you if you don't have "Chestpiece of Invincibility+1 with the extra 2 seconds of Sentinel duration on it" - given how relatively faceroll it is to acquire everything but raiding gear, why WOULDN'T people be able to get those things? And I highly doubt anyone outside of world first groups would bench a PLD over those 2 extra seconds of Sentinel anyway, lol. That's not even a GCD's worth of damage reduction, it would just make timing CDs have a more forgiving window.

I think effects like that on gear or materia could work, so long as our methods of gear acquisition remain pretty consistent with what we have now. A system like Diadem's RNG drops would absolutely make it awful, though.

It isn't necessarily they won't take you but if the set bonuses are negligible-- per your example-- what's the point of acquiring it? Furthermore, bonuses like this invalid other gear. Say they added three different sets of ilvl 250 gear back in 3.4. Someone will have the stats dataminded and posted on reddit. Once people work out which is the best, you'll have no reason to bother with the others.

[Kaethra]

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.

No offense taken, I've been asking that question for about a decade now.

I enjoy all three levels of play. I like my daily beast tribe, doing my dungeons and raids. Honestly I think crossing intro all three makes a good game.

Once you box people into a stereotype you limit their gaming experience. The one thing that wow did wrong is ilevel difference in content. If you wanted to try higher level content you were held back.

I think you misunderstand what I meant.

I've got no problem with raiders doing groups. Or solo content for that matter if they want to. But what I have an issue with is when they are pretty much forced to. Try this. Make a new character. Then raid. You can't. And why not?

When you login and make a new character, or play for the first time. You've got a few levels of forced MSQ solo content before you can group. Is it really grouping though after that? The content you fight for the first 5 levels is completeable by hitting one button. Of course you've only GOT one button to press. If you're a raider, the raids don't happen until 50. And in reality they don't happen until 60 because of that being where the 'endgame'.

Its not just raiders though. Groupers get it too. You can group.. anytime you're not on a solo duty in the MSQ. But you don't see real group content until 15.

I don't know why they make these games where you have to solo, then group, then raid. And then its pyramided. Majority of the content is solo, some group, and very little raid comparatively. And this is where the rough spots happen. You get a raider, who's completed the raid content for that week (because of this dumb little thing called a weekly lockout) and they cannot raid again unless they make a new character (and slug through solo content again).

They complete their content for the week in a day. What are they supposed to do for the other 6 days? Group and Solo. Now honestly, soloing doesn't hurt anyone. You're by yourself so how fast or slow you kill things doesn't hurt anyone. But the majority of stuff they can do that is going to actually advance their character is in the group stuff, specifically the daily roulette. So you get a bored raider, in your group, outgeared, and bored, and annoyed. With 'plebeians'.

And then we end up with threads about how people are judging others and so forth. Tank moving too fast. Or whatever. That's because you forced two playstyles together. I'm going to say that you probably don't do this. You raid and happily group with no issue. I'd do the same thing. Not everyone is like us. I'll dare say we're in the minority. And even if not, there's a sizeable chunk of players who just want to play how they want to, seven days a week.

Everquest, and to a lesser extent its sequel, is the only MMO I've seen that lets you (some may say force you, but its not like that anymore) group from start to finish. You can push the envelope and hit harder areas as a group then you could as a solo player. And you can do that from level 1-110 (or whatever max level is now).

Planetside 2 is the only MMO that lets you 'raid' (join a platoon, group of squads) right after character creation.

So when I suggest these tiers of content. I'm not merely suggesting for endgame. I'm speaking of the whole game. Why not have soloable/groupable/raidable MSQ available?

How cool would that be? When you feel like moving at your own pace, taking it in, ect. You solo. Got a buddy you want to quest with. You group. Your free company feels like doing something ridiculous, you raid. Everyone gets what they want.

[loreleidiangelo]

It isn't necessarily they won't take you but if the set bonuses are negligible-- per your example-- what's the point of acquiring it? Furthermore, bonuses like this invalid other gear. Say they added three different sets of ilvl 250 gear back in 3.4. Someone will have the stats dataminded and posted on reddit. Once people work out which is the best, you'll have no reason to bother with the others.

Well, part of it would be that due to RNG or lack of skill, not everyone would be able to acquire all the gear, so the concept is that you'd cobble together something that adjusts to that using different gear pieces, meaning that effectively a lot more items in our Armory pool would have value. In truth though, the biggest reason I suspect we won't see changes like this is just because the community handles PERCEPTION of increased power very poorly, and not being able to be "the best" is met with pretty heavy outcry re: the original Soldiery gear before it was discovered that non-raiders could upgrade it too.

I prefer items like this just for the small gameplay variety they add, tbh. World of Warcraft's legendaries in Legion suck for a whole bevy of reasons, but that still doesn't mean I can't appreciate the difference in a Regen effect while standing still vs lower mp cost on a single-target heal after using an AOE heal. One of them is "objectively" better, sure, but the difference is actually pretty negligible and thus a bit more elastic in regards to desirability depending on scenario (will I be using a lot of AOE heals here? are there a lot of mechanics that target me individually as a healer? etc).

[VeliusVire]

How does one define difficult content for a playerbase of 300k people?[This number will also get higher once SB hits] While yes, Yoshi can give bosses more HP, more mechanics, tighter DPS checks, at the end of the day, content difficulty comes down to the perception of the individual, hence why there's always such a divide with fights we receive. I thought Gordias Savage was easy, do you think it was easy? I thought King Thordan was difficult at-level, do you agree? I thought A3S was not mechanically challenging because it was practically the T7 of 3.X. The answer on whether or not content is difficult will change depending on who you ask and this is where Yoshi P stems his frustration from, he thought listening to the /MAJORITY/ of people was the good idea for Gordias, but what he didn't account for was that those that said Final Coil was easy was also the people who did it in i130 20% Echo, bam Gordias. Then he listened to the majority again, we got Creator, now people are saying it's too easy, make it harder. The man is besides him as he tries to figure out ways to appeal to each and every person. If the whole playerbase was at a similar skill level, it would be easier to implement fights that would be better received as easy/average/difficult, but due to such a disparity in terms of Skillful Players Vs Experienced Players Vs Average Players, there's not a whole lot he can do right now.

[Nixxe]

Creating four difficulties did little to alleviate the top end issues Blizzard and players had, which were that people who simply weren't good enough to belong in mythic insisted on doing mythic anyway and complained to the developers rather than focused on improving when they failed. It did help out the lower end and both flex tech and normal helped revitalize pug raiding, as well as give some truly casual players something a bit more satisfying than LFR, but it did virtually nothing to solve issues pertaining to mythic. Furthermore, anyone who is sufficiently familiar with WoW and the history of its raid designs (as in the basic framework, not the artistic style) should know quite well that WoW is, if anything, a case against the ease of balancing content.

[Berethos]

I wonder if the OP realizes that such a comment (which, by the way, is clearly a tongue in cheek comment) was more aimed at how you generally can't please the MMO audience no matter what you do - someone(s) will always find it too hard or too difficult, then turn around and either complain about it or tell the developers they have all the answers and just need to listen to their idea.

[Kaethra]

Creating four difficulties did little to alleviate the top end issues Blizzard and players had, which were that people who simply weren't good enough to belong in mythic insisted on doing mythic anyway and complained to the developers rather than focused on improving when they failed. It did help out the lower end and both flex tech and normal helped revitalize pug raiding, as well as give some truly casual players something a bit more satisfying than LFR, but it did virtually nothing to solve issues pertaining to mythic. Furthermore, anyone who is sufficiently familiar with WoW and the history of its raid designs (as in the basic framework, not the artistic style) should know quite well that WoW is, if anything, a case against the ease of balancing content.

Anyone who is familiar with WoW would have also explained that the dev's came out and straight up told the players to do the content they could do. They realized it was a vocal minority trying to advance to content they were incapable of doing. The complaints came down to:

Mythical should be Heroic difficulty.
Heroic should be Normal.
Normal should be phased out.

How much sense does that make?

Especially when Mythical was actually already easily completed by the average player (they were actually far easier than BC heroics from 2006). Hence the addition of Mythic2, Mythic3, ..., and Mythic15

I wonder if the OP realizes that such a comment was more aimed at how you generally can't please the MMO audience no matter what you do - someone(s) will always find it too hard or too difficult, then turn around and either complain about it or tell the developers they have all the answers and just need to listen to their idea.

You can easily please everyone in this sense. By giving content tiers of difficulty. Then everyone does the tier they're capable of. The 'issue' and its NOT a real issue, is when you have players see others doing harder content and get jealous. Jealousy should NOT be taken into account when making decisions. That's a personal issue. It can be ignored by the devs and called out for what it is when they get too vocal.