Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[dejiko_san]

Alright…let’s talk about it. Been wanting to discuss this for some time, but of course, I had to go Kanye and run on tangents about other things – but here I am now. As the title suggests, I don’t feel that increasing difficulty in casual content equates to having Savage-level difficulty. I’ve made this point before, I’ll make it again – you can increase difficulty without touching Savage levels. But, naturally, some may disagree, so I wanted to start a discussion for the sole question of: why?

People don't want hard dungeons. Look what happened with Pharos Sirius or the Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep. It started as tough, lots of people complained, it got simpler.

I won't even get into people quitting as soon as Steps of Faith loaded up..

[jameseoakes]

People don't want hard dungeons. Look what happened with Pharos Sirius or the Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep. It started as tough, lots of people complained, it got simpler.

I won't even get into people quitting as soon as Steps of Faith loaded up..

The main issue with Pharos was that it was a lot harder than the other two dungeons that came out with it. Amdapor keep nerf are a bit special as they rescaled it to be inline with Wanderers place and dropped the ilevel of the drops

[KaivaC]

People don't want hard dungeons. Look what happened with Pharos Sirius or the Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep. It started as tough, lots of people complained, it got simpler.

I won't even get into people quitting as soon as Steps of Faith loaded up..

Steps of Faith was just bad design in my opinion. Even with a nerf, when you have to wait until the dragon reaches the end to reset the fight (which can be minutes at that), it's bad.

Pharos Sirius had the misfortune of being synced down to lvl 49. It also did not have a min ilvl. Both of those things probably could've helped. Aurum is not that tough, provided you are wearing at least lvl 47 gear and have players who have a basic idea of what their doing, and a tank who can control their pulls. I've never fought the original Demon Wall in the instance, so I'll have to concede that point to you.

I think the problem here is that this is treated as a dichotomy. You're either Savage content or you're casual content, but it's like. Why call things "Hard mode" if it's going to be just another variation of the dungeon that isn't actually more difficult? And if Hard Mode is too difficult for you, then it's because it should be midcore difficulty, not proper casual.
To be clearer, I agree there's room for more difficulty in the game, but not necessarily harder casual content. We need more difficulty tiers in between.

Good point. Maybe less focus on difficulty like harder hits, and more focus on stuff like smarter enemies and mechanics, perhaps? Imagine having the healer silenced from an enemy whose hate cannot be taken by the tank.

[Remedi]

Aurum Vale had the misfortune of being synced down to lvl 49. It also did not have a min ilvl. Both of those things probably could've helped. Aurum is not that tough, provided you are wearing at least lvl 47 gear and have players who have a basic idea of what their doing, and a tank who can control their pulls. I've never fought the original Demon Wall in the instance, so I'll have to concede that point to you.
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You may want to change the bolded part in your post since you wrote Pharos sirius and the phrase is about Aurum vale

[Luin]

People don't want hard dungeons. Look what happened with Pharos Sirius or the Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep. It started as tough, lots of people complained, it got simpler.

I won't even get into people quitting as soon as Steps of Faith loaded up..

Yes, we do want hard dungeons.

We just dont want hard dungeons we have to run with a variety of skill levels apart of a daily roulette and the other dungeon in that roulette was arguably the easiest cap dungeon in the game.

There's no reason we can't have an Extreme dungeon on its own, outside of a roulette. Unlike trials, Praetorium, any of that stuff, it's easy to find 3 other players to party with, and as levelcap content, it wouldn't be needed for leveling, and in the next xpac when everyone outgears it significantly, you can throw it in a 50/60/70 roulette. If people have trouble with it in the roulette, put Echo on it.


More importantly, nobody is asking for Nael in the very next dungeon. Most are asking for gradually more difficult dungeons, since dungeons are SUPPOSED to be designed to teach players the mechanics that will be used in end-game content.

The current problem now is that dungeons have no mechanics. They have aoes and nothing else. Players go into savage with zero experience.

We have twisters, conflags, deathknights, ferrofluid, double drill, nisi, landslides, gaols, suparna/chirada/caduceus tethers, golems meteors, heavensfalls, garrotes... We can even have Allagan Rot. And yet, dungeons. Have. Nothing. 9/10 dungeons use ZERO mechanics. Even The Vault had no mechanics. Just aoes and forced damage. Stormblood dungeons are an absolute joke.

Dungeons as they are now, as casual catchup content, should exist to teach advanced mechanics in low-stress environments.

The problem is we get shit like Pharos dumped on us and we're told to run that every single day with who the hell else knows, and the first boss is a massive roadblock with literally only 1 mechanic, and it's ass-backwards, in that you just need to do bad dps. So yeah you can wipe on the first boss of Pharos, or you can just do the other dungeon.

Dungeons as they are now, are worthless content, and an insult to the players that run them.

Simply increasing auto attack damage the tank receives and littering the arena with more aoes is not good design, and that has been the only trend HW and SB have taken postHW release.

[Shurrikhan]

People don't want hard dungeons. Look what happened with Pharos Sirius or the Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep. It started as tough, lots of people complained, it got simpler.

I won't even get into people quitting as soon as Steps of Faith loaded up..

I'm not remotely surprised that everyone I knew who complained about either of those first two initially, but eventually got past them, ended up far more skilled players and faster learners than my friends/acquaintances who did not. Personally, their pre-nerf forms remain two of my favorite dungeons of all times.

My only issue was the effort-to-reward imbalance. As it wasn't originally even required for Expert Roulette (and remained optional until the next dungeon's release), it ended up at the time far superior not to unlock Pharos Sirius so that one could get consistently fast (well, standard speed) daily bonus runs.

[akaneakki]

People don't want hard dungeons. Look what happened with Pharos Sirius or the Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep. It started as tough, lots of people complained, it got simpler.
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Took me 2 tries for steps of faith I think, when it was all new. But I guess it's hard to use canons and kill adds etc.