The general player base needs to improve

[ChaoticCrimson]

It's probably been suggested before, but I think it might be nice if there was a way to combine the concepts of Hall of the Novice, SSS, and the second boss from Bardam's Mettle. Basically do different levels and stages of training where you can solo practice various recurring mechanics at varying degrees of difficulty, practice your rotations on dummies, or a combination of all that. There could also be special drills for tanks and healers as well, i.e. holding enmity, tank swapping, balancing healing with DPSing, etc. As you progress in a class/job, different stages are unlocked as you level up, and you can have training for single mobs or multiple mobs. It's probably too involved for SE to program, though.

[KaivaC]

It's probably been suggested before, but I think it might be nice if there was a way to combine the concepts of Hall of the Novice, SSS, and the second boss from Bardam's Mettle. Basically do different levels and stages of training where you can solo practice various recurring mechanics at varying degrees of difficulty, practice your rotations on dummies, or a combination of all that. There could also be special drills for tanks and healers as well, i.e. holding enmity, tank swapping, balancing healing with DPSing, etc. As you progress in a class/job, different stages are unlocked as you level up, and you can have training for single mobs or multiple mobs. It's probably too involved for SE to program, though.

Not really...they could always set up challenge dungeons...I'm sure someone on the backup dev squad could do something like that, especially as it probably won't require a whole lot of manpower or resources.

[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.

[KisaiTenshi]

IMO,

"All content" should be available to all players regardless of skill or difficulty, solo or 24-man parties. That said,

The game really needs to change how things are gated, because I think attracting new players to the game is pretty much done. Nobody really wants to get into a MMORPG that they haven't a chance in hell of catching up on.

The squadrons and POTD are a good way for DPS to level another job, not play the game. These are actually pretty tedious and boring, if not broken ways of leveling another job. But it does bring up an interesting detail, they could be used to bypass the storyline dungeons that they can't get anyone to queue for, or are too bored of (before level 50, you will keep getting Satasha and Tam-Tara Deepcroft, over and over and over in the leveling queue, no joke.)

The "old" harder content, eg Coil, and even Alexander, should be content that players can queue for, and if there are no players available, switch to AI players and maybe beef up the AI squadron players to compensate for their inability to do the mechanics well.

In other games, typically there is no actual gate to ENTER the harder content, but you can also just pot-spam your way through a lot of content with enough money, which IMO is not fun at all, essentially funding becomes the gate instead of skill. In other (less fun) games, there is no level sync, so you can only play a dungeon until you can beat it naked (no gear equipped) and then it's pointless to ever play again.

I don't want to see "difficulty sliders" become a thing in FFXIV, because that is extreme laziness on the part of the developer to artificially inflate the difficulty, without making any actual change to the content.

But I actually want a few "long" dungeons that have puzzles to them, where you can hit a checkpoint in the dungeon and exit and come back later with help, or your squadron, rather than have to camp in the dungeon until someone comes along to help. Puzzles are unfortunately spoiled by internet guides/videos, so something would have to be clever and personalized to really do this.

[KaivaC]

snip

The idea of AI squadrons in Coils and Alex sounds good, but ...you know...mechanics. Admittedly, I haven't touched squadrons since the first couple of weeks afte rit came out so I have no idea how much the AI has improved. I imagine that T9 would be incredibly difficult to program - for one, who the meteors target is not exactly set, plus the AI would have to be able to compensate for the player's position as well as the other AI...coordinating meteor drops is already rough with just a few players if they had never done it before, and then having the golems intentionally eat a meteor...then there's the next phase with the tower...

That said, if the devs could make AIs competent enough to allow players to be able to go through old content with their squadron, I'm for it.

[Miggs]

Incompetence seems to increase exponentially with class complexity.
If you want the majority of the player base to reach a higher standard then the classes need to be simpler to play.
Until then, there will always be those that can cope with 3 or 4 bars of skills and those that can't.
Personally...I can't, so I choose simpler classes that don't have too much responsibility and will try to play mostly solo.

[KaivaC]

Incompetence seems to increase exponentially with class complexity.
If you want the majority of the player base to reach a higher standard then the classes need to be simpler to play.
Until then, there will always be those that can cope with 3 or 4 bars of skills and those that can't.
Personally...I can't, so I choose simpler classes that don't have too much responsibility and will try to play mostly solo.

Hmm....so, I'm curious about something. Is this your first class, or is this an alt that you're replying on?

[Gleipni]

Incompetence seems to increase exponentially with class complexity.
If you want the majority of the player base to reach a higher standard then the classes need to be simpler to play.
Until then, there will always be those that can cope with 3 or 4 bars of skills and those that can't.
Personally...I can't, so I choose simpler classes that don't have too much responsibility and will try to play mostly solo.

Lets just make faceroll jobs,like this everyone will be good LEL

THats the entire point,they must NOT lower job complexity,its people who HAVE TO improve,damn why everyone just want rollface thing ? if only we had battle system like xenoblade,Etriand odyssey and stuff,man that would mean something to level up thing.

[Sesera]

Lets just make faceroll jobs,like this everyone will be good LEL

THats the entire point,they must NOT lower job complexity,its people who HAVE TO improve,damn why everyone just want rollface thing ? if only we had battle system like xenoblade,Etriand odyssey and stuff,man that would mean something to level up thing.

It's simple logic here
The less you have to focus on your keybinds the more you can focus on mechanic.

[Shurrikhan]

It's simple logic here
The less you have to focus on your keybinds the more you can focus on mechanic.

The more you build a rhythm to your keybinds through a general logic and muscle memory, the less you have to focus on them, too. Heck, the mechanics can often help in that regard; after some 10 attempts at a given piece of content, I can look at the mechanics to know how many seconds remain on my abilities.