The Difficulty Has Not Increased In Casual Content.

[Ameela]

As someone who was 340 for 4.2 abd 370 for 4.4 I'll tell you right now that nothing in Sigmascape or Hell's Lid/Fractal ever chunked my health to about 1/3 even with a cooldown, I actually need to plan my cooldowns for O11 on normal, people need to be coordinated in order to handle most of the mechanics in Alphascape otherwise you'll get one shot.
Arboretum also has some interesting mechanics with the sliding on the second boss and then having to protect the pooplet from AoEs otherwise you wipe.
The Mist Dragon is a fight that requires you to have enough situational awareness to avoid expanding AoEs based solely on where they'll originate from, you need to place other AoEs in a way that won't mess up your larty members and more importantly if you're hit by anything it's almost a guaranteed death, even as an i370 tank.

Compare this to Hell's Lid's bosses, which were mostly just smacking them and avoiding AoEs... same with Fractal HM and Swallow's Compass.

Is the content hard? Probably not, but it's certainly harder than what we've had before in this expansion.

[Lambdafish]

if you make all future dungeons midcore then what kind of new content would casuals get?

If "casual" players need the current dungeons to be easier, then they need to consider if battle content is for them. There is crafting/gathering/housing/gold saucer and other non battle activities for those who don't want to participate. And I guess Eureka could count as casual because its a test of willpower, not skill.

Dungeons can be challenging and still be casual content, their difficulty can last beyond patch day. I know pharos siris failed in the eyes of the devs, but I firmly believe that the problem wasn't the difficulty, but rather the disparity in difficulty compared to the other dungeons. If all dungeons were on the level of original, unnerfed pharos siris, then we would see a vast improvement in the mentality of the playerbase. That's not asking for casual content to be taken away, that's asking for said casual content to provide meaningful battle content.

[Xion136]

If "casual" players need the current dungeons to be easier, then they need to consider if battle content is for them. There is crafting/gathering/housing/gold saucer and other non battle activities for those who don't want to participate. And I guess Eureka could count as casual because its a test of willpower, not skill.

Dungeons can be challenging and still be casual content, their difficulty can last beyond patch day. I know pharos siris failed in the eyes of the devs, but I firmly believe that the problem wasn't the difficulty, but rather the disparity in difficulty compared to the other dungeons. If all dungeons were on the level of original, unnerfed pharos siris, then we would see a vast improvement in the mentality of the playerbase. That's not asking for casual content to be taken away, that's asking for said casual content to provide meaningful battle content.

"If battle content is for them."


Because you can do the entire MSQ, from which many things are gated behind, as a botanist :^)


Mist Dragon is hard due to:


1.) Never doing Neverreap and not knowing about the fog mechanic

2.) Healer not healing and leaving people at sub 50% health from attacks like Rim Wreath

3.) The amount of AoEs and DoTs that can be thrown at you at once. Most casuals who never have done harder content might never have encountered such a thing.



I'm fairly casual (I play every day but I don't do savages and all) and I honestly found Alphascape 4 easier then Mist Dragon...but hey. That's me.

[Fynlar]

I've done Neverreap and still never considered that particular fog mechanic because 1) it's been a really long time since that dungeon was current and 2) I've never seen it combined with divebombs before. Usually with (seemingly unmarked) divebombs the priority is to pan the camera around and look for a cue, which often includes standing still until you've found it.

[RuleofThree]

Gear doesn't make content look easier. Good skills do.

Disagree. It's a healthy bit of both. Pre iLevel 255 gear, I was getting shit on by the Mist Dragon, most other people here. First it was new, then after I realized it's rehashed mechanics from Neverreap (figured that out after the first use of fog), my mid-core pro skills kicked in and knowing how to dodge and clip in a few protective abilities on myself before getting caught helped, but I still died in one screw up thanks to low gear. now. iLevel 263, and I can make a mistake or two, and still in. Skill helps, but have the gear, and you are going to live past your mistakes. Harder than most casual dungeons out there? Yea. But actually hard? Nah.

[Doki]

Yup. I came into this patch as a non-raider with ilvl 369. 1 shot everything on 1st day. I spent another day capping tomes, and the rest of the week getting TT cards and minions. You can really see the difficulty ramp up the longer the week goes on. If you do everything on Tuesdays, it's all 1 shot. If you wait til the weekend, it will be nothing but wipe after wipe on the same casual content.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

2.) Healer not healing and leaving people at sub 50% health from attacks like Rim Wreath

I mean, maybe if things hit hard enough where healers didn't spend more time DPSing than healing, you'd probably see less of this.

Meanwhile, I just did a Wanderer's Palace (Hard) without a tank as they purposefully DC'd. Yes, it's an old 50 dungeon but when a Samurai, Black Mage and White Mage can mow through it with impunity, well, it doesn't exactly encourage much in the way of player progression. What's worse? I still spent more time spamming Holy/Stone II than Cure II.

[Andevom]

1. Yes, the content for this particular patch *is* harder than what we received in recent patches. Maybe you've had a stroke of good luck, but I've seen plenty players getting slammed to the stuff introduced here.

2. "Casual content" is "casual" for a reason. Do you know what would happen if they made this content harder? Go back and read some of the Weeping City threads when that was introduced to see poster after poster complain about the difficulty.

[Melichoir]

Title.

What is becoming evident is the gear disparity between people who have been playing regularly and those who are just coming back after a break.

As a casual but regular player you will be around 368-370 ilevel. This makes the content barely a challenge outside of learning the new dances - of which there are few outside of Alphascape and Suzaku.

The Burn is 3 pulls and 3 bosses. Mist Dragon is fine if you're not 1 shot because you have sub 35k hp.

Arboretum has 6 pulls and 1 mechanic on the last boss that will kill you if you have less than 35k hp and a slow healer.

This is troubling as this is content that is supposed to last us, yet for those who do play regularly we are already done with it - the only difficulty comes from carrying under geared party members. I feel this is a huge design flaw, given that this is a complete lack of mid-core content.

Casual Content is there for people who want content but isnt "raid" difficulty, so the last two dungeons are not going to be 'hardcore' for casuals. Itll be more or less the same, with slightly upticked difficulty. That difficulty isnt going to mean much to an experienced raider whos decked out in full diamond. Theyre gonna blast through it. Someone whos running around in 350ish gear is going to have a bit more trouble, but still manageable.

If its to easy for you as a casual and want more difficulty, maybe its time you put on a bigger pair of pants and go do EX and Savage mode. It doesnt make sense to up the difficulty of the casual content when there is clearly harder content for you to do if you really want that challenge. Go farm and clear SuzakuEX, or some of the other primals EX(Shinryu is or was a pretty fun EX IMO). Cause lets be real here: If you dont want to do that content because "Well you need to be super organized to do it", how else do you think theyre going to increase difficulty without needing organization?

Also, maybe Im out of the loop but Midcore, from what I understood, are people who do EX modes and some of the Savage content. Theyre 'casuals' who raid. So if youre idea of a midcore player is someone whos just sticking to hard modes and maaaaaaaaaybe touching an EX savage, you might be closer to the soft core side.

[Ilyrian]

Also, maybe Im out of the loop but Midcore, from what I understood, are people who do EX modes and some of the Savage content. Theyre 'casuals' who raid. So if youre idea of a midcore player is someone whos just sticking to hard modes and maaaaaaaaaybe touching an EX savage, you might be closer to the soft core side.

My point is that casual players - i.e not raiding Savage - finished the last patch on an ilevel that completely trivializes the new content. It just feels like a bit of a let down tbh.

My other point is they shouldn't hand out this gear if they're just planning on tuning content 20 ilevels below it. Perhaps mid-core was the wrong word... more I think the baseline content should be so under-tuned. I think the game could benefit with some challenging 4 man content - that you can just use the DF for for that 'pick-up' group situation.

But moreover, the gear disparity - i.e letting people in the dungeons at an ilevel that puts them sub 35k hp is just a cheap way to provide challenge for returning players and offers the regular players nothing else.