We covered hopes for 5.0, but what are your fears?

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Most content is tuned to be easy to moderately difficult as a design choice. If really difficult content was what the majority of people wanted, ultimate or savage would be the most populated content. They don't want to close the skill gap making everyone perform at super challenging content or the population would shrink even more.

Jobs are like real life professions in a sense. Take basketball for example. You got ten thousands of casual or serious playground/park players, thousands of college players, hundreds of g league players, and hundreds of NBA players. If every bball player in the world had the skill, physical gifts, and way to play in the nba and get paid good they would.

The skill gap that about everyone can do and agree with is there should be no content so easy that you don't have to pay attention at all or watch netflix or play another game at the same time.

Not everyone has the skill to be elite or the best at something, and that's before you even take into account if they care about that or not in a game.

Why is it every time people say dungeons, trails and etc are incredibly easy, the immediate response is to compare them with Savage and Ultimate? Asking for dungeons to require more than a pulse doesn't mean they abruptly go up to Savage levels. I'll reiterate once again, I am doing mass pulls without tank stance because the damage is completely negligible. Ten mobs all trying to eat my face do so little damage I just need CDs to live comfortably. I think we can go for a few steps above that and still be a ways off from Savage.

You are correct to assume neither everyone has the skill nor desire, but if asking people to turn their brains is too much. Let them loiter in leveling dungeons while everything else moves up for the people who want content outside Savage and EX Primals that isn't brain dead simple.

[Sandpark]

Why is it every time people say dungeons, trails and etc are incredibly easy, the immediate response is to compare them with Savage and Ultimate? Asking for dungeons to require more than a pulse doesn't mean they abruptly go up to Savage levels. I'll reiterate once again, I am doing mass pulls without tank stance because the damage is completely negligible. Ten mobs all trying to eat my face do so little damage I just need CDs to live comfortably. I think we can go for a few steps above that and still be a ways off from Savage.

You are correct to assume neither everyone has the skill nor desire, but if asking people to turn their brains is too much. Let them loiter in leveling dungeons while everything else moves up for the people who want content outside Savage and EX Primals that isn't brain dead simple.

There is something outside savage and ex primals and most people don't do them, we call them normal raids. You are mass pulling the entire zone because soft hitting monsters is the design intention. If they made them hit way harder, you would not be mass pulling anything.

I agree that combat should take thought and a degree of execution. If you can stand there and only have to dodge one move, that combat is poor. If you can defeat any enemy with the same rotation, that combat is poor. If you can dodge every single mechanic and not have to rely on resources or cooldowns, that combat is poor.

Hard or extreme is hard enough for the mass majority, there is thought, there is execution, there is required processing of resources and cooldowns. Anything beyond that is teetering on catering to the elite niche.

The biggest issue is finding content to do with other groups easily, scheduling runs, and practicing execution. So now they are adding World visit, trust, and new game plus. So I guess they think that the hardest part about developing battle content is not designing hard fights. The hardest part is getting players eager to group up and form easily.

[HyoMinPark]

There is something outside savage and ex primals and most people don't do them, we call them normal raids.

It only took them until Alphascape normal mode to actually give normal mode some teeth. Both Deltascape and Sigmascape normal mode were laughably easy.

You are mass pulling the entire zone because soft hitting monsters is the design intention. If they made them hit way harder, you would not be mass pulling anything.

And then, maybe tanks could actually feel like tanks instead of DPS with large HP pools. Maybe healers would actually have to cast GCD heals—as it stands now, I make a game of how little I have to actually heal in dungeons. I doubt that was the intention, but things simply don’t hit enough to warrant any sort of GCD healing: my HoTs, Essential, and Earthly Star take care of 99% of the damage.

I agree that combat should take thought and a degree of execution. If you can stand there and only have to dodge one move, that combat is poor. If you can defeat any enemy with the same rotation, that combat is poor. If you can dodge every single mechanic and not have to rely on resources or cooldowns, that combat is poor.

This is basically what dungeons are like, with very, very few exceptions.

Hard or extreme is hard enough for the mass majority, there is thought, there is execution, there is required processing of resources and cooldowns. Anything beyond that is teetering on catering to the elite niche.

Extremes have become decidedly easier than ever before—this was happening last expansion as well. As much as I loved Sophia, look at her compared to those that came before her: Thordan, Sephirot, even Nidhogg. Then we had the mess that was Zurvan, who showed that the majority of this playerbase cannot execute a simple opener for their job.

The only Ex primal this expansion that had actual teeth to it was Shinryu, and only during phase one because the fight kind of fell apart after that in terms of how hard it was. Don’t get me started on the faceroll fest that was Lakshmi or Byakko. Tsukuyomi and Suzaku have a medium sort of difficult to them, but they aren’t anything to Thordan or Sephirot.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

There is something outside savage and ex primals and most people don't do them, we call them normal raids. You are mass pulling the entire zone because soft hitting monsters is the design intention. If they made them hit way harder, you would not be mass pulling anything.

I agree that combat should take thought and a degree of execution. If you can stand there and only have to dodge one move, that combat is poor. If you can defeat any enemy with the same rotation, that combat is poor. If you can dodge every single mechanic and not have to rely on resources or cooldowns, that combat is poor.

Hard or extreme is hard enough for the mass majority, there is thought, there is execution, there is required processing of resources and cooldowns. Anything beyond that is teetering on catering to the elite niche.

The biggest issue is finding content to do with other groups easily, scheduling runs, and practicing execution. So now they are adding World visit, trust, and new game plus. So I guess they think that the hardest part about developing battle content is not designing hard fights. The hardest part is getting players eager to group up and form easily.

I sincerely doubt the intent was me pulling without tank stance and only turning it only for three GCDs when I open on a boss. I literally do every mass pull in both The Burn and Saint Mocianne Arboretum without every turning on tank stance. That isn't mobs getting soft, that is pathetic levels of easy I could watch Netflix on a second monitor without breaking a sweat. As for normal modes, they suffer from the same issue. I stand in multiple AoEs as a melee because why not? Nothing remotely threatens me. Kefka is about to do an AoE around him? Who cares? The vulnerability stack falls off before he even does a follow up attack. And even if he does spam something afterwards, I can heal myself up with Bloodbath.

What you just described: only having to dodge one move or defeat enemies with the same rotation, is essentially how everything functions. Normal mode raids, and especially dungeons, offer very little variance. Half the reason tanks pull the entire room is so they actually feel like tanks. When I last healed The Burn, I literally did not cast Cure II once until last boss. The damage was so slow, I spent 90% of my time casting Holy. On Scholar, virtually all my MP is saved for Miasma II. Once again, I doubt the developers intended for me to not heal but dungeons are so undertuned, you don't even need a healer to begin with.

Perhaps those players would be more eager to queue for dungeons if they were brain dead simple. I know I would be.