How Do You Feel When Old Content Is Made Easier?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

the player has to have good spacial awareness and resolve the mechanics in series.

This would be true on the initial few pulls, which is perfectly reasonable. After several attempts, if someone is still failing the same few mechanics, blaming it on anything but lack of effort often times comes across as excuses. Even at an increased speed, they remain the same mechanics people have already seen. And one person out of place will not kill you unless that single person is targeted.

Not everyone who does poorly is an idiot.

And nowhere did I say they were. You're putting words in my mouth. I cited a particular incident where someone failed the very first mechanic repeatedly despite being told how it work. He, instead, rushed in and pulled without listening. That isn't someone doing poorly because they're new. That is an impatience fool who couldn't be bothered to listen and wasted people's time. You'd see less of that if content actually forced you to pay attention far earlier. Leveling dungeons do a decent job of this. At least until the gear out-scales them, though the big pulls still hurt.

And they nerfed heavy thrust because they nerfed timers in general; timers dropping off were the biggest lost of dps for any dps class in this game, and drg in particular is very rigid in timing, even still in SB. And yeah, in HW dps classes sucked, managing 3 or more separate timers for dots and buff abilities sucked hard. if we had HW system with these fights it would be hilarious, people would lose so much dps simply because they couldn't refresh their timers that they'd complain.

First, they only reduced the damage bonus it provides not the timer itself. Secondly, they outright acknowledged the nerf was due to people forgetting to re-apply it. Keeping Heavy Thrust up should never have been an issue if you bothered to learn Dragoon's rotation. I was a novice back in Heavensward and learned the rotation through youtube and google doc guides. If I could figure it out and not have this issue, why can't someone else do precisely the same thing? Or do you actually believe I was born better somehow? No one is asking for Savage level dungeons or expecting top tier raid parses. They're asking for something with some teeth to it and a little competency.

[MoroMurasaki]

I think fewer people enjoy hard content than you think.

No one is asking for Savage level dungeons or expecting top tier raid parses. They're asking for something with some teeth to it and a little competency.

Is anyone else just so done with having this same conversation over and over again? I sure am.

Riyah - you're making a positive claim here, saying that less people enjoy more difficult content. Back that up with evidence or for the love of god open your mind to the idea you might be wrong.

Increasing clear rates right now for EX and Savage stand against you, come up with something compelling to put up against them or drop this.

[RiyahArp]

Riyah - you're making a positive claim here, saying that less people enjoy more difficult content. Back that up with evidence or for the love of god open your mind to the idea you might be wrong.

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage. On primal Pug PFs for all savage tend to cap out at 4-5 instances per fight, with the majority of them being farm parties. This is per data center; seeing all of 20 pfs for savafge per data center is not a sign of a healthy game. The amount of people doing savage or ex learning parties drops tremendously after the first two weeks the content is live, often without a single learning party in pf at a random time. SE released minimum ilvl for people who wanted to do old content somewhat close to the original ilvl it was released at; it was barely used, even when they gave increased drop rates to the crafted coil gear they introduced. I had a linkshell mate who was obsessed with using min ilvl to do all the old content, it would take him weeks to find the people to finish one fight. The hard 4 man content in POTD is also barely used, the big way you can tell is that crafted coil gear of the two higher tiers drops there like candy, but never hits the auction board.

The playerbase can and will leave instances they find are too hard in significant amounts. Trials of Faith, Pharos, Shinryu, launch 24 mans, Tsuku, etc. They sometimes leave preemptively, or will leave after the first wipe. There's plenty of evidence to show that people aren't particularly keen on content actually being hard, in practice. Heck, even reddit now is mostly about fan art and fluff pieces, and less about git gud or complaining the game is too easy.

I don't see why content has to be considered less important solely because of its age. If I go out and buy a ten-year-old single-player game and clear it, is the experience somehow lesser than an equally challenging game that was released last week?

You don't need to convince seven other people to play that game with you. People generally do the roullettes because they aren't hard, and you get a bonus to help out. We have had discussions about mentor roullette and coming into synced ex primal trials which show the difficulties of hard older content staying relatively hard; many mentors dislike it because you can spend the lockout just wiping, removing the reward for them being there.

They end up nerfing through echo and sync so players aren't just facing that. Other MMOs generally don;t even have that; they just make old content trivial and you get your overleveled buddy to facetank an entire instance for you

[KisaiTenshi]

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage. On primal Pug PFs for all savage tend to cap out at 4-5 instances per fight, with the majority of them being farm parties.

On Primal, there are no newbies that aren't alts or rmt bots it seems. It's so incredibly rare to actually get newbies. When I do roulettes, I almost never get anyone from my server, it's always Lamia and Exodus. (Note those are preferred worlds.) It feels like nobody on Excalibur does anything but the hardest content, and I don't blame em.

But that also means that "oh just start a PF" means you are in for a wait worse than death. s/

I was playing on an alt as scholar, and I left the fairy behind after first boss fight in an ARR dungeon, and I was still able to keep up with a tank that was pulling too much and dps sprouts. I specifically created a Scholar because I didn't want to waste an hour waiting in a DPS queue, and my main character is WHM anyway. Anyway, this was with all grey gear for the previous dungeon. With blue gear this would have been even easier. There really does need to be a ilevel sync on all old content to retain some level of challenge. It doesn't need to be 2.0 launch level of challenge, but the current level of difficulty literately in a lot of content is tuned to a level where the healer doesn't even need to be present.

Encountering actual new players, let alone a group of them, is just not something you will run into often enough to care about about the difficulty of the old content. But I feel that the other players that are overgeared for content setup the expectation to newer/returning players that the content is always supposed to be a push-over, and thus when they get to the end-game content, suddenly the difficulty spikes up, because relative to all the content they played up to that point, it was all a push over.

POTD on the other hand offers a more linear difficulty as you progress through it, but it's not designed to be hard, as the monsters are tuned in a way that once you get 99/99 gear, floors 1-99 are a push over, and only floor 100 offers anything difficult depending on your party configuration and pomanders collected. After 100, I assume the difficulty just curves up less steeply since no additional gear is available, and your success hinges on not stepping on traps.


Other MMO's, don't even try to make their content challenging. You can overlevel everything on day 1, and then the entire content can be cleared with a sneeze.

What I hope happens, at some point is that Square-Enix puts ilevel locks on all older content so that it retains some level of challenge, especially the 24-player content. Because as it stands right now, when you do the alliance raids, you keep getting LotA, and the reason for that is people don't want to play the SB 24-player content because it takes too long just to get the roulette reward. Elsewhere on the forum, people say they specifically remove gear so they won't get it when queuing for it. Please don't reward this kind of behavior. If the system knows they won't be eligible for the lighthouse, remove the tomes of creation from the reward.

[MoroMurasaki]

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage. On primal Pug PFs for all savage tend to cap out at 4-5 instances per fight, with the majority of them being farm parties. This is per data center; seeing all of 20 pfs for savafge per data center is not a sign of a healthy game. The amount of people doing savage or ex learning parties drops tremendously after the first two weeks the content is live, often without a single learning party in pf at a random time.

This isn't comprehensive and don't try to play dumb like you think it is. This is like looking out at the ocean and seeing one fin break the surface only to think "Well I guess that means there is only one shark!"

It's an easy way to lose a foot.

The problem is you have no actual evidence to back up your claim since it would require access to information we just don't have. The truth is that the only evidence that leans one way or another here is the circumstantial - SE keeps making Savage so they have to be seeing enough people do it to justify the investment.

[Ameela]

There are more people in a single eureka instance than there are making pug pfs for all of savage.

This makes absolutely no sense.

1 - One PF is comprised of multiple people so the number of PFs up isn't a good way of showing how many people want to do the content.
2 - You're completely disregarding parties that have already filled and are doing the content when you look.
3 - You're also not taking into account the fact that most people who do Savage have a static so they're not using PF in the first place.

And most people in Eureka are just tabbed out anyway until a NM spawns, I bet they're really enjoying themselves.