The general player base needs to improve

[KaivaC]

Before I get to responses...which is going to take me a while because I have quite a few posts to digest, I do want to say this one this: I think it would be helpful to have a perspective from someone experienced with an outside MMO. I've never played WoW, or SWToR, or BDO, or Everquest, or Lineage...I have no idea how content and mechanics run in those from their casual stuff up to their raid-level/difficult-level instances. Would love to hear thoughts from those Eorzeans who migrated from one of those games.

[Teiren]

Before I get to responses...which is going to take me a while because I have quite a few posts to digest, I do want to say this one this: I think it would be helpful to have a perspective from someone experienced with an outside MMO. I've never played WoW, or SWToR, or BDO, or Everquest, or Lineage...I have no idea how content and mechanics run in those from their casual stuff up to their raid-level/difficult-level instances. Would love to hear thoughts from those Eorzeans who migrated from one of those games.

Long story put extremely short with several short notes: The MMORPG community has changed. Mobile devices did a lot of damage in that regard. People are also stupid everywhere. FFXIV is the "Easy WoW," but I like that because I like WoW. If you want to focus super seriously on gameplay as your primary objective, WoW is clearly the better game. For storytelling and awesome gameplay presentation, FFXIV is your game. I have a ton I could say, but it would be an obscenely long post to detail the progression of dungeons & raiding in WoW. I actually did briefly put everything in this post, and I saw it was just going to be a disservice to the thread to make people scroll that much.

To be more specific, from someone that played WoW from nearly the beginning through all of Mists of Pandaria (2014):
WoW has 3 difficulties: Normal, Heroic, Mythic. Normal is something like all three Binding Coils in ARR. Heroic is roughly like Savage raids. Mythic is like Ultimate. Although the raid is the same in each difficulty, the difficulties surely change how it feels. Normal/Heroic are usually the same fight roughly, just different amounts of damage taken. Mythic difficulty, like Savage, completely changes the fight while retaining something of the original. Also, at least when I played, a couple things were exclusive to Mythic difficulty, similar to god Kefka being exclusive to Savage.
I would say WoW's LFR (Looking for Raid) difficulty is like FFXIV's 24-players', but LFR is so much ridiculously easier that that's not fair to say, though both are designed very similarly.

Oh, and I did play Legion, WoW's current era, for a few months when it launched. One really interesting thing they implemented was a Mythic difficulty for dungeons complete with a system where you can challenge a random dungeon on a Mythic+ difficulty that goes up one stage of difficulty for every Mythic+ dungeon you clear, rewarding better gear the higher the stage. The idea was to make somewhat parallel or alternative gameplay to raiding. While I think that'd be cool to see in FFXIV, I don't believe that fits the devs' vision.

[Shurrikhan]

Before I get to responses...which is going to take me a while because I have quite a few posts to digest, I do want to say this one this: I think it would be helpful to have a perspective from someone experienced with an outside MMO. I've never played WoW, or SWToR, or BDO, or Everquest, or Lineage...I have no idea how content and mechanics run in those from their casual stuff up to their raid-level/difficult-level instances. Would love to hear thoughts from those Eorzeans who migrated from one of those games.

WoW is my other major MMO. I've also played things like BDO, GW2, B&S, Rift, WO, NWO, and a bit of ESO, etc., but WoW is the only of those one similar enough to really make meaningful comparisons, imo.

WoW felt more lore-filled and certainly produced content at a significantly higher rate, but until this most recent BFA revision to leveling, everything short of the latest expansion was treated as disposable in terms of difficulty curve or gameplay-integrity, non-game before the real game so to speak, and could frequently leave a foul taste in the player's mouth that removed most semblances of it being a role-playing game with any real story. If you leveled all your alts up within a given expansion, so you only had the next to go, it felt great. But if you had something to level up from scratch several expansion in, you could scarcely even understand why people would pick up the game anymore outside of boosted characters.

Combat-wise though, I loved that CC and target-swapping beyond just target focusing or add-burns were real mechanics there, though. Utility was meaningful. Though you ultimately needed a healer and tank for maximum efficiency, your toolkits were strong enough to allow for a great deal of creative play, especially pre-streamlining (WoD-Legion). Though the game's obviously had more chances just due to sheer duration, super-speed Monk and maybe HW DRK are the only instances of gameplay that I'd call incredibly strong -- by my own tastes -- whereas WoW has had 10+ specs over time that were similarly brilliant, without even touching on the nostalgia of where they were used and what all they could pull off outside of normal play or as just a numeric thrill (e.g. 5-Hunter dungeoning, trio-plate DPS as swap-tanks, tank-dps WotLK Feral, or the ridiculousness of the most powerful form of Combustion or pre-nerf raid Sub Rogue).

[KaivaC]

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This could be a situation of what I'm suggesting not entirely matching up to the devs' vision. Either that, or they may feel the player base on a larger scale wouldn't be ready for the type of difficulty they had originally planned. But in their pursuit to keep as many combat-related things as casual as possible, it's created a situation where dungeons don't feel like they have that 'umph' any more. I kinda hoped that the progression we felt going through the dungeons from Satasha to Wanderer's Palace hard would apply to Heavensward and then to Stormblood. I am partial to the idea of having something similar to Mythic dungeons (sounds like Mythic+ would be raid-killers with the way GCDs work here, if their version of normal was equivalent of the Binding Coils).

It might be too late to implement CCs or 5-mans with the current engine. But surely there are other things that could be done in the future. It feels like the full impact of a class' utility is truly only felt in Savage. But messing with that would probably require a rework of the engine, I'm sure.

[Shurrikhan]

This could be a situation of what I'm suggesting not entirely matching up to the devs' vision. Either that, or they may feel the player base on a larger scale wouldn't be ready for the type of difficulty they had originally planned. But in their pursuit to keep as many combat-related things as casual as possible, it's created a situation where dungeons don't feel like they have that 'umph' any more. I kinda hoped that the progression we felt going through the dungeons from Satasha to Wanderer's Palace hard would apply to Heavensward and then to Stormblood. I am partial to the idea of having something similar to Mythic dungeons (sounds like Mythic+ would be raid-killers with the way GCDs work here, if their version of normal was equivalent of the Binding Coils).

It might be too late to implement CCs or 5-mans with the current engine. But surely there are other things that could be done in the future. It feels like the full impact of a class' utility is truly only felt in Savage. But messing with that would probably require a rework of the engine, I'm sure.

Yes, generally you can consider "Normal" as being roughly aligned with original Coil, "LFR" with having more mechanics but being just as generally lenient as our normal mode, "Heroic" as the roughly around the easier half of our Savage fights, and "Mythic" as a little under our Ultimate to even above it.

Personally, I'm all for pushing back content, in some cases, to allow for more a responsive and undermechanics-capable engine, especially if they double down on that time to create whatever systems they need to produce the content itself more quickly without limiting what all can go into it (e.g. building such systems only around today's XIV dungeon conventions, which I'd argue are lacking).

I would absolutely love some form of reiterative challenge mode content similar to Mythic +. In fact I'll try to present such an idea, framed within a larger expansion idea, sometime this weekend.