Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[Nihility]

the only terminology that has much meaning is savage and ultimate.
ultimate is brutally hard and savage is much more difficult than anything else of same range(usually)

there was a time when hard modes were legitimately harder than the standard variant but people complained so much they got nerfed so now "hard" can just be read as higher level. While "expert" is basically just highest level of normal and by level i mean literal item level, not skill level.

And just an interesting factoid imo. Since 'make it harder' was used so many times they don't actual do that. yoshi has said on many occasions that starting with normal and making it more difficult while maintaining the same feel was too big a task so they actually start with savage and take things away to create normal.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

My mistake. I do apologize for reading it incorrectly.

I've never been caught up enough to do any expert roulette dungeons while they were in that roulette. I've only done them after getting tossed into 50/60 roulette. Are they around typical HM difficulty? If so, I have always found the leveling dungeons to be more difficult since players tend to be at, or below a decent iLv to run the dungeon. What I've noticed about HM dungeons is that they do indeed toss more at you, but it doesn't matter because everyone is so over-geared. If ran at a lower iLv, the same stuff people don't bother to move out of is going to hurt.

I understand where you are coming from though. If a telegraphed attack isn't threatening, or easily mitigated with a healer regen, then there is no reason to avoid it as it disrupts positioning. Even if not using a positional job, players usually have 'comfort zones' and only move if necessary. I really like what they did with some ARR dungeons. The ones that didn't carry a HM tag and also weren't part of the MSQ. Pharos Sirius and The Lost City of Amdapor come to mind. I know these got nerfed, and it never should have happened.

I wish SE would adopt a similar mentality to these older dungeons, and create dungeons that are simply known to be more difficult than the average dungeon. Not crazy punishing, but by the Gods your attention WILL be required to get through it. We already have them, but they are few. We need more. We shouldn't have to rely on random/bad/inebriated players to make things interesting.

No worries.

To an extent, yes. Some have actually been easier. Kugane Castle is quite possibly the easiest dungeon ever released. Yojimbo's coin mechanic deals so little damage, you can outright fail and take only a quarter of your health. While ilvl does play a factor, dungeons are typically tuned significantly lower than the majority of players will be less they deliberately ignore progression avenues. Take the two most recent dungeons: Hell's Lid and Fractal Hard. Their respective ilvls are i310 despite i330 Creation gear be readily available and i350 being the new standard. Adding insult to injury, even i330 will be more than enough to steamroll through them—with only the mega pulls proving difficult at lower ilvls.

Otherwise, we agree. I certainly do not want dungeons to be tuned to an absurd level, but Expert should challenge max level players to some degree. Right now... they simply don't.

"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.

As someone who tanks, heals and DPSes dungeons day one, they are absolute face rolls at release. I recall back in 3.4 when Xelphatol released and Yoshida warned tanks about pulling too much. It was laughable. And I didn't even have Savage gear back then.

[Sebazy]

There's also a degree of consistency that's lacking as well.

Fractal is an out and out face roll, there's just nothing legitimately threatening even on large pulls. I merrily run myself completely OOM holy spamming here because I know I can heal everything between regen and my oGCDs.

Hell's lid is a little better imho, the bosses will actually kill you if you fail successive mechanics, whilst the long pull near the end is actually pretty good, combining a modest amount of sheer tank damage coupled with those two nasty cleaves that will wreck a group if people are napping. Oddly enough, I'm much more cautious with my DPSing here especially if the overall group dps is slow.

IMHO the complexity of the mechanics is fine, I see it as a case of boss damage being so low and mechanic fails not getting punished or in some cases, outright being rewarded.

[KaivaC]

snip

Yeah...it's an issue for sure. But fair enough, Hell's Lid does step in the right direction, I agree, I just hope the devs don't back away from this kind of thing. I actually appreciate sometimes having to earn a victory. Also, welcome back. Haven't seen you in a good while.

[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.

[HyoMinPark]

thus stats are useless..

again my above bard example is the same with crit.
when I was running coil with 350 crit. landing 17-18% crits.. now rocking over 2000 crit but my crit rate is still 17-18%. so I've gained 1650 points in that stat and what has changed? nothing. my crit rate is exactly the same as it was and always has been.

You can't really say stats matter when they don't actually change anything... if in 5.0 my bard is rolling 4000 crit and my crit rate is still 17-18% what exactly will those extra 1,000 points do for me?
what will I gain from the extra 2,000 points?
a higher crit rate? nope still 17-18% exactly what it is now.... thus worthless.

I'm sorry but this is blatantly untrue. I have over 2,000 Crit on my BRD and my Crit rate is always between 25-30% for any given fight; I have half of that in D.Hit and still manage 10-15% D.Hit rate.

Crit absolutely does matter to BRD, and stats are not useless. There is even a build this tier that uses an i350 pentamelded crafted bracelet over the i370 Tomestone bracelet, and an i360 Tomestone ring over the i370 Savage one for the sole purpose of giving the BRD more Crit by sacrificing DEX (this build is only effective if you have DRG/SCH for Litany/Chain though). Because it does matter that much to the job. Heck, the BRDs in the Balance Discord advise people to use the pentamelded Anemos body over the Tomestone body because the Tomestone body has the most garbage stats and you can shove 5 Crit VIs in the Anemos body; in Deltascape they advised using the i330 Rabanastre jacket over the i340 Tomestone because of the i330 having Crit.

Critical Hit rate is RNG, but it isn't t useless by any stretch. There is a noticeable difference on BRD when you play with 1,300 Crit versus 2,000+ in terms of the amount of procs you get on average. As someone who has played this job consistently for 2.5 years and optimized it since Creator, I am confident in that assertion. Good BRDs that have been playing for longer would probably agree with me as well.

Comparing now to Coil is a bit misleading; Crit scales with each expansion, but having 2,000 isn't suddenly going to give you 50% Crit rate (though that would be heavenly) versus Coil's 350 Crit at 17-18%. If 350 was the maximum you could have then given gear and melds, and the max you can have now is just shy of 2,400 I believe without food (will need to double check), it makes sense to me that they scale about the same. Why you're getting only 17-18% I don't know, unless your active uptime is low. As I said above, I have 99% active uptime in fights and average 25-30% Crit rate in a given fight. And I don't have the max Crit yet since I'm missing my Savage bow and body piece. But there would be a difference in my Crit rate if, during this current patch, I only had 1,300 Crit as opposed to 2,400.


As for your skill speed example, skill speed (and spell speed) scales in tiers. Unless your WAR friend has exactly enough to reach the next GCD tier, all points between tiers do not matter. Skill speed and spell speed function differently than critical hit rate, direct hit rate, and even determination.

Say, for example, to have a 2.40 GCD, the WAR needs 750 skill speed. And say for a 2.39 GCD, he would need 900 skill speed (these are just arbitrary numbers for the sake of this explanation). If the WAR had 899 skill speed, those 149 points are useless because they aren't enough to reach the 2.39 GCD tier. If your WAR friend is wanting to reach a particular skill speed tier for 5 Fell Cleaves, he needs to have the exact amount needed (I cannot recall what level of skill speed WAR needs for the 5-Fell Cleave IR). If he does meet those requirements and cannot manage the 5 Cleaves, then he is probably clipping GCDs, because you are supposed to weave in Upheavel and Onslaught during IR, but I do not believe you can double weave them without clipping your GCD. If he is wanting more, right now I do not think that is obtainable with current-tier gear and melds, but I would have to research to be certain (update: it is not).

Skill speed and spell speed tiers do not change between patches, if I remember correctly. It has been a while since I have looked at the specific skill speed and spell speed tier, since my main job does not value skill speed at all anymore, but Patch 4.4 isn't suddenly going to require 150 more skill speed for a 2.39 GCD or a 5-Fell Cleave IR as far as I know.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

lets say 1500 skill speed right now gave a warrior a short enough gcd to get a 5th fell cleave out in inner release for example. (I dunno what the actual number is but its just an example)
when patch 4.4 lands and that warrior upgrades a couple of pieces of gear to maybe i380. his skill speed might go up to 1530.. but now he can't do that extra fell cleave because his gcd is to long the stat weights have changed.. now he might need to get 1650 skill speed to squeeze that extra fell cleave into inner release......

so essentially he needs 150 more skill speed just to stay where he was before. he actually gains nothing from those extra 150 points..

You can get five Fell Cleaves with as little as 785 SkS.

Regardless, that is the whole purpose of Skill Speed: reaching thresholds based on the job. This will differ per individual based on ping, comfort and skill. I, for example, prefer the dead Skill Speed build on Dragoon whereas many follow the old 2.44 GCD variation. You cannot claim a stat useless when it does precisely as advised. Without Skill Speed, we are at the mercy of how the developers design specific skills to interact with one another. If they opted for a flat 2.5 GCD, this would mess with buff optimization. We aren't meant to gain power with Skill Speed but control over the GCD.

You can't really say stats matter when they don't actually change anything... if in 5.0 my bard is rolling 4000 crit and my crit rate is still 17-18% what exactly will those extra 1,000 points do for me?
what will I gain from the extra 2,000 points?
a higher crit rate? nope still 17-18% exactly what it is now.... thus worthless.

By this logic, why increase stats at all? I may deal higher damage now than in Heavensward, but the bosses have increased HP and defenses to compensate. Vertical progression is essentially about seeing higher numbers. And Crit accomplishes that, especially as it also increases your damage directly unlike Direct Hit. Secondary stats are, indeed, overrated by many but they are a factor. They simply matter significantly more to people who optimize. You getting 18% means you either aren't optimizing Bard and/or have a group who doesn't care to. One of my more recent O6S had my opening burst on Dragoon hovering at 50% Crit. Of course, it inevitably dips as RNG applies, but you are being far too dismissive of secondary stats.

[RiyahArp]

I think people don't get that 4 man parties don't allow you to have hard mechanics.

You don't have an offtank or cohealer, so you can't have any meaningful adds. DPS have zero offtank capability and are made of paper; even in normal trials single hits can be 50% of a dps health or more. The burden in 4 man is on the healer first; a bad healer will make things impossible when even a bad tank can be compensated for to some extent. And if you have group mechanics that kill, a DPS will be impacted less than a healer for the most part. They gave us bardem's second boss, which essentially made class not matter.

You have a DPS check in it that's tough, you need everyone 100%. There's no compensating for a bad dps save for kicking them. The tank needs to do every boss perfect because if they go down, chances are both DPS or worse will go down too and then its just a wipe if it reaches the healer.

8 man parties build some redundancy in, and even then hard 8 man content is a pain for most of the playerbase to do and complete. 4 man everyone will need to be perfect all the time, and one person will make it wasted time. The closest analog is the Feast, which is probably the hardest 4 man content we have in general, and people know that if one class is not on point it can easily be a lost game.

They'd probably be better off just making 8 man dungeons or something. We do have varied mechanics in experts; baeslar's wall for example actually has decently complex ones including healer gaols. But making them harder is going to really make it start and stop gameplay with a lot more player kicking.

[KisaiTenshi]

I think people don't get that 4 man parties don't allow you to have hard mechanics.

Nah, there is a simple thing that people don't want to admit. The more people there are in the party, the less hard they have to try.

Solo content - You can't be carried through it. The game honestly needs a few more of these as level/skill gate-keepers, and I'd probably advocate for at least one to be thrown in at the level 30 job quests to monkey-wrench the bots, but anything predictable is a pushover for bots. Hence any "random" elements should be in solo content designed to test your reaction time. Like a Bardams Mettle Boss II. That boss was actually a good way to see who actually is paying attention.

Duo content - I've only seen one of these in FFXIV, the Valentione event. This was actually a quite fun thing, but it's painfully obvious that this can't be done for anything short of mazes, where one person opens the door for the other. You can't balance a combat dungeon with less than 3 players.

3-player/4-player/5-player content - The One or more DPS can be carried through it, Game balance is dependent on all DPS players at least playing equally. Third party tools suggest that the Machinist is the worst DPS and the Summoner is the best DPS. Those pet's should in theory count for half the DPS of the pet owner, but doesn't.

6-player/7-player/8-player content - Now you have enough space in the party for one tank, one healer and any number of DPS to slack off.

24-player Alliances - Take the above 8-player content and multiply it by three. So other than mechanics that specifically require addressing three separate mechanics (like the "pads" mechanics) , you can have two entire parties slack off/eat dirt/goof-off and still complete the fights.

Realistically, the hardest content in the game should be the 4-player content (if not the solo combat content,) but instead it's the 8-player Savage content. Perhaps SE should consider making savage content 4-player content, and make storyline content 8-player content.

[RiyahArp]

It's not just a matter of trying. If there's only one healer, that healer has the potential to wipe the party every single time they screw up a mechanic. So if you give them very hard mechanics, the burden on them is the highest, then on the tank. It's possible to recover in hard content with your cohealer or co tank, but with no recovery those jobs need to get their roles perfect. That's not really realistic for most dungeons in the way they are played, so either the dungeons are much easier, or the difficulty isn't on the mechanics, like in POTD 100+ (most of the wipes there are rng.)

A lot of things simply wouldn't work with that kind of play. Your DPS goes down twice, he can't make the DPS check because you lose tremendous dps to raise sickness. You'd just get a lot of wipes because you'd be in unwinnable conditions very easily, just from one mistake from one job. I can't see 4 man CASUAL content working like this. You can make it savage level content, but people don't do that as it is.