Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[KisaiTenshi]

Didn't I just say something similar to this a couple comments above yours?

There was more to the post, but it got eaten.

[KaldeaSahaline]

I think there is definitely a happy medium hidden in here somewhere and I think something that could be done to gently increase dungeon difficulty (in optional content only of course) is to just increase the damage enemies do considerably and perhaps add some extra effects to those attacks to make them less ignorable.

How about bosses. Make Mothorbit less predictable and cause every hit not on the tank to give the player damage down. For every stack of damage down the boss gets a stack of damage up. Now if your BLM eats the obviously telegraphed AoE it's more than "eh, I'll Tetra it" and if the puddle gets dropped in a bad place the healer can't just run in and eat it then Esuna the heavy off/heal up.

Here is a post I made a while back about Motherbit:

A good example could have been like the first boss in Fractal HM. Instead of all her bits being active from the get go, they could be frequent periodic spawns. The first one spawns, tank grabs it (and boss obv) and then the DPS/tank/healer kill it. When the boss casts his wall laser move, it revives the current number of bits dead. If any are alive - they also maybe shoot a laser across the direction they're facing (making the follow up mechanic harder). Then this layers on with more bits each time, thus more lasers and more tank damage. Eventually getting overwhelmed.

The point I wanted to draw attention to is that encounter design can dictate a healthy balance of difficulty and engagement without being overbearing. This teaches you that doing mechanics matters, because if you fail, you have direct consequences that are likely to snowball more failures, before eventually overwhelming you. Gear helps assuage these concerns, but if ignored can and will still prove deadly, unlike their current philosophy.

Stats basically just don't matter. the only one you ever need to look at is Item level. every other stat in the game could be totally removed. even the primary's. because there all dictated and hard capped by item level anyway... just equipped the highest ilevel piece you have for the slot and go. you don't even need to look at the other stats. they are meaningless

This is why it's such a big complaint that gear is just boring because none of the stats actually matter. and thus gear is all dull boring and trash

I've echoed this before as well. With how much Yoshi complains about the amount of data stored in gear, I'm nearly 100% confident they could remove everything from gear and make it strictly cosmetic (a la BNS) and tie "stats" to some other easily tuneable knob, thus freeing up a ton of balancing time and improving the database weight. However, it would require some creativity...

I disagree, some jobs playability is influenced by how much you have of a determined stats, like SAM and their 1-3 Sen openers, not to mention BLM and their 2 actual builds in terms of stats.
True WD and main stat will always triumph, but I don't really think you want something like wow were a 30 ilvl difference might mean that the higher ilvl item is worse than the one currently equipped for stats alone and frankly they are moving away from that apparently

There weren't a ton of cases where 30 ilvl was worse based on secondaries in Legion short of a handful of fringe cases. Not counting set bonuses, but that's it's own barrel of issues.

While it's true a few jobs have some pretty key breakpoints, I'm fairly confident they could easily be tuned via another knob should gear ever go strictly cosmetic.

[Remedi]

Even one case is problematic, we have the same problem with tanks here, in a vertical progression setting you want to get stronger and stronger, since that's the fantasy they are after.

[F_Maximillian]

The main problem with most content outside of savage in this game is that it isn't punishing enough (despite the fact that some people don't want punishing content which I understand). For example, in most games if there's a wide but slow casting aoe you can be sure that with how much time you have to get out of the way it's going to hurt like unholy hell if you get nailed by it, whereas quicker aoes that you need to have solid reflexes to reliably dodge aren't as painful. If there's a mechanic with alot of tells and time to react to it and you fail it you generally die or it will make things noticably harder for you in some capacity (perhaps the boss heals or gets a shield or whatnot). In this game though.. bosses cast long-casting wide aoe attacks with plenty of time to get out of but they're akin to threatening someone with a chuck-e-cheese mallet. It may look intimidating to your 5 year old self but even if they do smack you with it I'd wager said mallet probably would inflict more damage than most of these types of casts in the game. I don't think the reaction time or the tells or anything like that should change in the more casual content at all. I just think that with all the time you're given and the hints you get to handle mechanics they should definitely make you respect them or pay the price which is something this game sorely lacks at the moment.

On the rare occasion I run expert roulettes I can stand in just about everything without any downsides for the most part, no interrupted casts no deaths no meaningful debuffs (vuln stacks do not count when all they do is make the next feather tickle slightly more) or anything but a potentially annoyed healer (who is probably spamming cure on me anyway..) to worry about for straight up ignoring the warnings and standing in bad. That isn't to say I make a habit of it but you can see why people tend to do just that since there's no downsides for them to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of why people struggle so hard to adapt to tougher content because the whole game basically teaches you that dodging and respecting mechanics is optional until you get to where it isn't. Not only do they have to cope with more things not having tells and more stringent damage/healing/tank checks but they also have to work around their bad habits that the game itself teaches them by not punishing failure.

[KisaiTenshi]

I've echoed this before as well. With how much Yoshi complains about the amount of data stored in gear, I'm nearly 100% confident they could remove everything from gear and make it strictly cosmetic (a la BNS) and tie "stats" to some other easily tuneable knob, thus freeing up a ton of balancing time and improving the database weight. However, it would require some creativity...
.

That's what F2P games have been doing. Make players pay for the costumes, make upgrades within the game affect the "class" armor that is permanently glued to you anyway.

[KaivaC]

Good points made

Those are fair points. Play anything long enough and yeah, it will grow stale. But I'm not necessarily suggesting that the proven formula should be totally, completely changed. I am saying, however, that continuing to do the same thing over and over again isn't helpful. Now, I don't know about things over on the JP side of the playerbase, but the stale formula in addition to everything else that occurred in the current patch series as a whole is already beginning to alienate players. Granted, the forums and reddit are only just a slice of the base and we won't really know if this is indicative of anything, subscription wise, until something official comes out.

Should 4-mans start aiming towards the kind of difficulty that Mateus and Hashmal provide? Yes. Only in Expert, though, and only with justifiable rewards. No point in increasing the difficulty if you can't provide the playerbase with rewards for taking on higher difficulty. Menacity isn't worth it anymore, since all you have to do is spend a couple hours with the train in Eureka and you'll cap out on those tomes. I don't want things hard for the sake of being hard - but put some kind of challenge to them, yes. And again, I don't really suggest that the devs should go with this right out of the gate. With Hell's Lid, I do kinda hope that the devs continue the trend of having a little bit of challenge associated with future Expert dungeons.

[Remedi]

Problem is that expert dunegons are not really expert dungeons, they are just the newest dungeons avaible, they just used a fancy name, but since they end up in the normal dungeon que, they hardly fall off the normal difficulty curve.
Now if we had truly expert dungeons as a category that would be fine

Personally I wouldn't mind if they ever added Battle square boss rush extreme, where you face increasingly difficulty bosses with some random affixes but one can only dream I suppose

[thegreatonemal]

There can't be a middle ground in this game with out nerfing healing and tanking into the ground. This game comes in two flavors

A. The aoe does some damage and adds a vunln stack or whatever else
B. The aoe kills you/almost kills you/wipes the entire raid.

The problem being when a player moves from content A (anything that's not savage or extreme) into B (savage and extreme) that jump scares people. The other problem being that content in A is trying to prepare you for content B in teaching you how mechanics work. People simply ignore them since content A doesn't do anything to not make you clear the content therefore why bother learning how a prey marker works or any other mechanics. Then they show up in content B and you die and wanna whine that its too hard. Game has been trying to teach people the entire time hardly anyone is listening

[KisaiTenshi]

Problem is that expert dunegons are not really expert dungeons, they are just the newest dungeons avaible, they just used a fancy name, but since they end up in the normal dungeon que, they hardly fall off the normal difficulty curve.

"Expert roulette" is simply the newest dungeons that players need the tomes gear or better for entry. When the content is new, and you don't have the lock-out tomes gear yet, yes, there is a fair bit of challenge to be had. But it's not like an Extreme Primal, where you're going to be one-hit-ko'd.

I'd like to see some kind of boss-rush/FF6-style colosseum. The actual location exists in the game (The Dragons Neck), that's the trial with Ultros and Typhon.

eg, "wager" a good item, get a certain boss. Defeat the boss, get a different item.

For most "trash" style bosses, wagering trash, just gets you HQ trash. Wagering blue gear from Alliance raids, gets you other blue gear from the set, etc.

Ignore all gear stats, level sync to the boss level, no items allowed. Create a leaderboard for time taken to defeat per job.

The obvious problem is that the difficulty scale is different depending on the job. Going by POTD standards, where all combat power is the same, would just turn it into something only the red mage can do.

[KaivaC]

Expert dungeons

I agree. Expert dungeons are really no different from what's in the level 70 roulettes - there's hardly any challenging 4-mans that earn the title of Expert, save for Aurum and Pharos from ARR. There's been no real actual challenge since then, in the content of actually having to pay attention (save for the typical wall-to-wall pulls). I actually miss enemies that you have to put a focus on, like every bee in the game.

The battle square idea sounds good..there are plenty of early bosses in the game that could be fun to fight as a boss rush mode with level 70-appropriate mechanics.

snip

True, currently, there is no middle ground. Is it possible to make a middle ground without nerfing heals and tanking? I don't know. Honestly, I don't have enough experience with other MMOs to really say for sure. That would have to come in the form of specific debuffs - maybe like a dungeon where, enemies are weaker than usual level 70 enemies, but tanks have a vuln stack or two for the entire time they are in the dungeon and everybody is suffering from infirmary. Just as a thought.

But yes, you have a good point - the game has been teaching folks how to play - but a lot of folks simply don't listen. If one makes it to Doma Castle still not knowing how stack markers work, that's just plain bad, considering how much Susano and Lakshmi both use it.