Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[Kaitoo]

I disagre, with the introdcution of ultimate is perfect and there is something for everyone

[Kewitt]

I'm all for harder content if the reward is there.
I would soon hope into a dungeon and have 2 paths, easy patch with 2x trash, or boss with harder less forgiving mechanic.
Then the party could chose which way to go.

To 1st boss normal
Let's people in DF know what party can do.
Then it would be a door all 4 members interact with the door pick easy or hard path, if tie random, if wipe hard path closed.

[KisaiTenshi]

I'm all for harder content if the reward is there.
I would soon hope into a dungeon and have 2 paths, easy patch with 2x trash, or boss with harder less forgiving mechanic.
Then the party could chose which way to go.

To 1st boss normal
Let's people in DF know what party can do.
Then it would be a door all 4 members interact with the door pick easy or hard path, if tie random, if wipe hard path closed.

That was FFXIV V1.0. Parties could be up to 16 players, and each dungeon had like 4 bosses, of which you got different rewards depending on which ones you defeated, how fast you defeated them, and how fast you cleared everything in the dungeon.

What we got in V2.0 are versions of these dungeons with portions blocked off (In fact only Total-snore (Toto-rak) even has two paths still) and difficulty scaled down. Everyone's hated dungeon, Aurum Vale, also comes from V1.0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs8nEtHrCr8

[Lynde]

I'm all for harder content if the reward is there.
I would soon hope into a dungeon and have 2 paths, easy patch with 2x trash, or boss with harder less forgiving mechanic.
Then the party could chose which way to go.

To 1st boss normal
Let's people in DF know what party can do.
Then it would be a door all 4 members interact with the door pick easy or hard path, if tie random, if wipe hard path closed.

That suggestion reminds me of a similar mechanic in another game. In Elsword there were Dungeons that you ran mid to late game called Secret Dungeons. Sometimes during the run, an NPC called Luto would randomly appear on a section. Then a vote would start. If the vote was passed, the dungeon would restart from the beginning in a harder difficulty called "Luto Mode". There were perks for the added difficulty, mainly being higher drop rate and TRIPLE EXP on kills. It was a good difficulty spike, but oh man did it suck when you didn't want to do it. XD

[StarRosie]

"Luto Mode". XD

Oh heavens I remember those...they were fun but gods above one serious screw up could mess the whole thing up. Luto mode made me completely rethink my opinion on Void Princess' Aging skill. Elsword had such fun ideas and gameplay, just sucks its bogged down (Even more now) with their cash shop BS...

[Luin]

I disagre, with the introdcution of ultimate is perfect and there is something for everyone

I strongly disagree.

Ultimate is far beyond Savage, not even comparable. Most won't even enter Ultimate, much less clear it.

The primary complaint is there's nothing between standard face-roll content and Savage.

We aren't asking for ultimate to be the standard; that would be nonsense. We're asking for standard content to actually be designed properly, in a way that prepares players for the real content.

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.

First of all this is ridiculous. 4mans cant have hard mechanics? No, 4mans just can't have exact carboncopies of 8man mechanics. Exactly what would change about like, Phantom Train or Chadarnook, if we made that a 4man? Absolutely nothing. You would need to scale the Prey damage down slightly because you wouldnt have offhealer shielding or healing after Prey for the next Rain but besides that, it's exactly the same, but with mechanics targeting 1/2 of the players. Lights target 1 instead of 2, and with the 1 tether. If tank is caught in a ghost, you wipe, because you failed the mechanic and you should wipe.

As for 8man dungeons, this has been a point of contention since 2010. It was bad idea then, is bad idea now. It's not practical for 8 people to put in an hour to do a dungeon, much less the hours and hours of progression to learn it, if you actually wanted it to be meaningful content. Even organizing 8people is difficult.

It's lazy to say 4mans cant have mechanics. They can, they just need to be designed for 4 players.

And then to say "oh we cant have mechanics because players will actually need to do them"

That's the point. What in the world did you think we were talking about? You need to say NO.

No, Black Mage. You need to do your rotation. Ice will not work. Dragoon, spamming Heavy Thrust is not enough. White Mage, spamming Cure isn't enough, and tank, spamming Flash isn't enough.

Nobody is asking for ultimate to be the standard. But we're sick and tired of players that have NO idea what to do in this game. And since the game has done literally nothing to enforce some sort of standard of quality upon players and teach the players, we can't expect everybody to go out of their way to learn to play the game using 3rd parties. The blame is not 100% on the players here.

I cannot say the game has done a poor job teaching players to play the game, because that would imply that the game has even attempted to do so.

[Brill_]

To accomplish this you need to change the mentality of most of the community. Right now, people expect perfection and they expect speed runs. If that doesn't happen, they rage quit. Making content harder will result in wipes and it will result in runs taking longer. This would require the dev to dig their heels in and say "this is the bar, we're not going to lower it"

Personally, I feel the normal mode raid is what should fill the gap between faceroll and savage. At one of the sessions at fanfest in 2016 they mentioned expert dungeons would stay like they are. They are meant to be something that can get done in about 20 minutes. Using the current ilvls, they should make tome gear 350, obtained by faceroll content. Kick up the difficulty on normal mode raids a notch and have it drop 360 and then have savage at 370.

[KisaiTenshi]

As for 8man dungeons, this has been a point of contention since 2010. It was bad idea then, is bad idea now. It's not practical for 8 people to put in an hour to do a dungeon, much less the hours and hours of progression to learn it, if you actually wanted it to be meaningful content. Even organizing 8people is difficult.

It's completely practical to put in an hour+ to do a dungeon, you just have to design the dungeon so you can come-and-go, which is how dungeons work when they aren't instanced. People want to explore, not just kill things mindlessly and endlessly. Version 1.0 let you explore, but it was ham-handed by not having the ability to jump, not allowing people to fall to their death, not letting players enter "completely built dungeons", gated off by a door or NPC.

A way to do 8/16/24 player dungeons , as main story content, is to design it so that the area is not gated off (eg you seemlessly enter it from the overworld, or can pick it from a teleport list) and can thus are always entered solo, and anyone else who is on that part of the story, enters the same instance and auto-partied until the maximum number of players is hit. If you don't meet the requirements to complete the dungeon (eg under-leveled, under-geared) you get dropped into the "auto-fail" instance where you are thrown out of the dungeon early on without wasting more than 3 minutes, and given some kind of message like "Perhaps you should come back later when you're stronger/better equipped", where as if you meet the requirements, you can proceed.

Once you clear the story part, you only join other non-cleared instances as long as there are ones. If everyone has cleared it, then the game creates a default "already won" instance to bleed off players who already cleared it (to avoid the mess that MSQ roulette creates.) It automatically becomes non-story "hard" mode if there are no non-cleared players,. Hard more scales the monsters by the combat power of the collective players in it, so when the boss spawns and locks the boss room, you can't just zerg the boss, or keep throwing yourself at it. You can also force a hard mode once completed by manually creating at least a Light Party of players who have already completed it. If players leave during the boss fight, the boss will not rescale until a wipe.

If players need to go, they always come back to the same one if the instance for the dungeon hasn't been cleared yet. If players don't like the people they're paired with, they have to sit out the dungeon for a week.

And if the content becomes "stale", eg nobody joining it, both normal and hard mode can still be completed solo, just it will take 8 times longer. During solo runs at the boss, if you're the only one in the instance, the boss will be scaled directly to what job you're playing so there are no "easy solo" jobs. Unlike "undersized party" options, the dungeon is always level synced regardless of the number of players, as the combat scaling considers the collective number of players and their jobs.

Of course SE wouldn't do that because that would require more server resources to keep instances open all week instead of open for the 10-15 minutes most duties can be completed in.

[MoroMurasaki]

To accomplish this you need to change the mentality of most of the community. Right now, people expect perfection and they expect speed runs.

Based on what I've seen from pugs and PF I walk into everything expecting to wipe until we disband because people are bad and lazy. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment. The idea that people expect perfection in a game where 0 dps healers are clearing endgame/tanks who don't leave tank stance are common is laughable.

[RiyahArp]

Exactly what would change about like, Phantom Train or Chadarnook, if we made that a 4man...If tank is caught in a ghost, you wipe, because you failed the mechanic and you should wipe

You wouldn't be allowed to make any mistakes, mostly. You answered yourself. The healer gets caught by a ghost, you wipe because he can't kill it fast enough before people die. The healer makes any mistake at all, and you are all dead. Essentially we are talking landsides and being knocked off arenas, but one person getting such would just make it a fast wipe instead of a slow limp to the finish. If you get nailed once, game over.

I don't think a lot of people would be into that kind of content. If its decently hard, combined with no real redundancy, its going to be worse than ex trials. I mean, at least in them you can recover from a mistake either with your cohealer or cotank, or 3 dps can cover for a fourth. It's not easy, and may not always be possible, but you can. In 4-man, healer missed the mechanic? wipe. Healer dies to a specific mechanic but gets the rest? Wipe, instead of being able to finish.

I mean, everyone here talks a lot of junk about wanting hard content, but noone here is going to love 45 min dungeons or 20 min vote disbands because no one can drop the meteors correctly.

Based on what I've seen from pugs and PF I walk into everything expecting to wipe until we disband because people are bad and lazy. I don't think I'm alone in this sentiment. The idea that people expect perfection in a game where 0 dps healers are clearing endgame/tanks who don't leave tank stance are common is laughable.

Yeah you probably suck, with that attitude. And you like to berate non raiders about being elitist.