Would you like an in-game parser?

[HyoMinPark]

The raiding crowd said Zurvan EX was easy to skip soar so long as you knew a basic opener. They tend to be weirdly two faced-apparently raids are easy yet no one can do them.

Skilled people underrate their talent's factor in doing something.

An anecdote, I know, but I wasn’t actively raiding at the time I was farming Zurvan. I did not find his fight challenging. And I would have hardly called myself a skilled BRD at the time; even now, I’m more on the average side.

In terms of raids, the difficulty has gotten easier; I’ve never said that they are “easy” the way I say dungeons are easy (well, except for maybe Alte Roite...he’s debatable, in my personal opinion). And while I did not raid until the very end of Creator (after the weekly lockouts had been removed, and I never did clear A12S until after SB came out, and that was an unsynced clear), the shift can be seen in clear rates. Gordias was impossible to clear without gear, it took 5 weeks for a clear (of course, it was poorly tested and tuned). Midas took 2 weeks. Creator took ~34 hours. Neo was downed in ~20.

The current state of Savage is that it is easier than it used to be, and I think that’s probably a combination of the developers wanting to avoid a repeat of Gordias (which they openly admitted was so hard to clear due to their own poor tuning/testing of the content, not because it was overly difficult in terms of crazy mechanics, with probably the exception of Living Liquid) and because they would like to make raiding and Savage more accessible to more players—hence why Creator was easier than Midas, which a lot of raiders deem the “perfect difficulty” in terms of raiding content. But, accessibility does not always have to correlate with ease of content. Things can be accessible without being super easy.

Yes, you can ignore them. The issue with ultimate is not the casuals, but that virtually none of the raiders will clear it themselves. It also was just bad timing in that it was the only thing released in a patch during a content drought. The same "it's a waste" applied to bard songs, too.

No, you cannot just ignore a portion of your playerbase when trying to decide how to tune and balance content. Especially when it comes to building up to harder tiers because the casual playerbase aren’t doing those, so how can they offer insight into balancing it (other than just saying “nerf it so I can do it”)? And while the clear rate of Ultimate is very very low (0.02% as of LuckyBancho’s last census), there are still clears. I think this release of Ultimate will help developers in developing future Ultimate content (which they have already hinted that they will do), because they are getting feedback from players, even if it’s a small percentage. The casual playerbase offered nothing in terms of constructive criticism about the fight, where as some of the people who have been in there or who have cleared have.

More and more people are getting into Extremes and Savage. And while I’m happy about the accessibility because there’s nothing wrong with people challenging themselves, when they go from Expert Roulette to Shinryu Ex, they are not prepared because this game does nothing to ease them into hard content. Even with Expert Roulette to Rabanastre, you see people complaining and struggling because they actually have to pay attention. It’s easy > easy > easy > okay, I kinda need to pay attention now > oh my god this fight hurts. And what happens when people are met with a challenge? One of two things: they seek improvement (and to direct this thread back to the original topic—parsers—a lot of people turn to parsers to try and improve, or to people they know have parsers and ask for a detailed analysis and constructive criticism) or they come here and make “Please nerf [content]” threads. The latter appears to be a far more vocal portion of the playerbase. I honestly would not be surprised if the developers listened more to the cries of nerfs than they would to more constructive feedback about changing the difficulty curve of this game. And that’s a very sad state of affairs, in my opinion.

Why does everything have to be so easy? Why does every dungeon have to be so easy? Why do people have to cry about nerfing every 24-man? Or every mildly challenging Extreme primal? The Shinryu nerf thread that’s been floating around here, if I recall correctly, the OP asked for nerfs specifically so they could farm for the mount easier. If people want the shinies, they should have to put in work towards them. A reward that is just handed to you loses all sense of pride and achievement, in my opinion. A better difficulty curve would subsequently make mount farming in challenging Extremes easier because people would have built more awareness of mechanics over the course of their playtime. But, again, as it stands now, this game doesn’t have that. It doesn’t even have any guides to help you learn a proper rotation at any of the level roadblocks: 50, 60, or 70.

If content continues to remain so easy that, as Dzian put it, a chore becomes nothing more than a meaningless chore, then this game will fail to retain players.



But none of this really has anything to do with parsers or having a built-in parser. Unless you want to correlate it back to the fact that a lot of people are never properly prepared for harder content, and when they go into said harder content completely unprepared, and someone mentions how they aren’t doing as well as they should, they take it immediately as a personal attack. But I’ve digressed into probably just rambling at this point....

So, I just happen to read a lot of your comments when I'm researching stuff here and EVERY TIME I see you say something, it's constructive and detailed. Keep being awesome! (I hope you see this cause I don't know if forums notify people of replies haha)

Awh, thank you. <3 I try to be as objective as possible in my posts, though it can prove difficult sometimes when I try to separate my own experiences from those of others—I still try though, because I do remember what it was like when I first started playing and everything was new and different and I was a really, really god-awful bard who didn’t know what they were doing. XD I try to see all sides of an argument, and formulate my own responses in a way so as to not be overtly condescending or rude, because I really do enjoy constructive discussions, and by being rude or abrasive, you lose points in your argument that way.

But I’m glad that you find what I have to say constructive. Hopefully some of the posts I have read have helped you out in some way! :3