(Spoilers) Ghimlyt difficulty was a step down from the Burn...and that needs to stop

[Sandpark]

Just to be clear I'm not asking for a sudden big spike in difficulty.
What we have now is like you're running the game on beginner mode. I'm asking to rise it to a normal difficulty.

Don't forget the echo buff which increases you HP and attack if you continue to fail. The players will not get stuck and left behind.

Is the later MSQ dungeons all really challenging? Not really. But it is far from beginner mode. Beginner Mode is A Realm Reborn Dungeons particularly the early, early ones.

HW on is more liked veteran dungeons or what you call normal difficulty. Good amount of mechanics.
Hard is normal difficulty but different locale and mechanics, but still normal difficulty.
Extreme is above normal difficulty, introduction to higher difficulty.
Savage is a step above that.
Ultimate is the highest difficulty.

Extreme onwards will come later. Final Steps/Shinryu/Burn vanilla skipped the process of having a normal mode even though they were called normal, and got ninja nerfed later. I don't want them skipping tiers of difficulty.

Are you asking for the omitting of normal mode?
If so starting in hard? Starting in extreme?

[DevilsDontFly]

When you only get DPS Players with about 2k DPS, Tanks without using CDs and only spaming Aggro-Combo and Healers just standing around, i think the difficulty is just fine o:
As a Healer i'm always Top DPS in this Dungeon, when i go with DF Players.

And i think the Burn is as easy as Ghimlyt o:
Nothing special at all in 70 Dungeons, all are the same. Mass Pulls and easy Bosses :shrug:

But don't you think the reason to why those tanks and DPS aren't pushing a bit harder is because they don't have to? What you said just proves the point that even if you stand still smashing the same key over and over, either to heal, tank or dps, you can still finish the dungeon without any issues or whatsoever.

To me the main issue is that walking around in order to get your gathering nodes is more dangerous than anything you'll ever face in a dungeon. If the game got progressively harder as levels went up, I'm pretty certain that tanks would have to put some effort into surviving and soaking damage, dps would have to pull their weight on finishing a check and healers wouldn't be able to get away with casting one spell every 8 seconds.

Content doesn't need to be extremely difficult, but when we the players have to go out of our way to make it a little bit (small, small bit) more challenging by doing big pulls (that were cut by invisible walls), I think the difficulty curve is the issue. However like other people pointed out, myself included, big difficulty should come with big rewards.

[Aomine1992]

Dungeons haven’t been hard since Pharos Sirius was current content. This one is no different from the super easy ones before it. Most dragon isn’t hard, it just has mechanics you can’t just ignore.

[Deceptus]

Dungeons haven’t been hard since Pharos Sirius was current content. This one is no different from the super easy ones before it. Most dragon isn’t hard, it just has mechanics you can’t just ignore.

And Ghimlyt is the exact same. My first group wiped on the Iron Giant due to not understanding his rotation. It's almost like mechanics matter.

[RyuDragnier]

Dungeons haven’t been hard since Pharos Sirius was current content. This one is no different from the super easy ones before it. Most dragon isn’t hard, it just has mechanics you can’t just ignore.

And PS pre-nerf wasn't even hard.

[HyoMinPark]

Ya know, I am actually not that bothered by it. After all, we are the Warrior of Light. We are the Eikon Slayer. We should be going through Garlean Troops like a hot knife through butter.

Yeah but, as a writer, I’d rather not my main character have a bunch of Mary Sue-esque qualities. We don’t have to be completely and totally infalliable. That’s why I’m hoping ShB brings a good storyline where we aren’t The Perfect Hero. The whole idea of us being so infalliable is annoying to me, personally.
Doesn’t help that my head-canon of my character directly contradicts it: she’s certainly not an infalliable person, but the game has essentially made her perfect and completely subordinate/submissive to those around her.

If I'm gonna run expert everyday for my weekly tomes, I'd rather have the dungeons be 'fun' than hard.

The issue with this statement is that “fun” changes per individual—
You want the dungeons to be “easy and fun”—because otherwise, they are just tedious to you, to give an example.
But Johnny, on the other hand, finds them so easy that they are not fun—they’re snoozefests to him, which makes them boring and tedious—and wants them to be more challenging because he likes challenging things: they are more “fun” to him.


So, whose definition of “fun” gets prioritized? Which is “more valid”? Yours? Or Johnny’s?
Inb4 “THE MAJORITY’S DEFINITION” response...

[kikix12]

But don't you think the reason to why those tanks and DPS aren't pushing a bit harder is because they don't have to?

No. The reason these tanks and DPS aren't pushing harder is because there is NOTHING in this game that forces people to learn how to push it harder on their own.

Most of those people are carried. They don't notice the drudgery that is the dungeons when they completely suck at their job because they end up partied with someone competent more often than not. Then they falsely think THEY are the good ones...because some people simply have difficulty dividing fact from fiction, to say the least.

If there were mandatory walls for solo content, the bad players would end up behind whether they wanted to or not. If you're good solo then you're also going to be good in a party. Not necessarily great, but good. The kind of good that right now you think of "Finally! A fully competent group!", which should be standard at lvl70...but is not.

So, whose definition of “fun” gets prioritized? Which is “more valid”? Yours? Or Johnny’s?
Inb4 “THE MAJORITY’S DEFINITION” response...

Sorry, but I won't bring "the majority" argument because it's stupid in this case (duh, I mean, that's what you bringing that up was all about).

However I will bring the "design" argument.

This game was made with the casual, low-skill player in mind. Simply speaking, it is an MMO that strives to bring a game with an enticing story that anyone can follow on their spare time without putting much effort. This is how it was from the beginning and changing that would be betraying their customers.

That means that, yes, the opinion of the players that want easy main story content IS more important than yours because THEY are the primary target audience. You are the secondary, the more hardcore people, for which there are the more hardcore/skilled optional things like extreme, savage and ultimate.


Now before someone says "I'm just bad and I want the content to be easy so I can snooze through it.". I'm good enough to have solo-healed Titan (Hard) when I was level 50 in Heavensward all the way from first landslide to the end, good enough to trio Ravana (Hard) on a Red Mage with a tank and another Red Mage that was constantly out of mana (probably didn't have Lucid Dreaming) from about 20% to zero, good enough to solo Chimera in Cutter's Cry from 80% to zero on slightly undergeared Bard and to heal and keep reviving healer and DPS while keeping the tank healed in Burn on the dragon throughout the fight while on Red Mage throughout second half of the fight.

I don't think I'm good enough for proper extreme content or savage so I don't do it (and my laptop and sometimes PING sucks, so there's that).

And I don't put the effort on the side to get better because in most Duty Finder parties I lose focus way too easily due to bad players and my inability to stay focused through people single-target attacking a pack of mobs, dying to simple AoE's time and again or similar. I can't get a static for various reasons either.


So no. I'd like it if the game WAS more challenging. I'd want it to have challenging solo content where I could get good with my class without having to roll the dice for the duty finder. But this game never was that and as such it should NOT become that. As much as I hate getting a person in the duty finder that still single-target-kills enemies in lvl70 dungeon, runs from a stack-up marker and such...too bad. I hope that the next Final Fantasy MMO will be geared towards the people that actually want to learn as they go. This one is lost cause in that.

[AnimaAnimus]

I see a lot of "but the game was build for casuals, not the hardcore"

But...when did being casual equate with being bad? All I hear is that casual does not equal bad in other posts but now its being used as an argument for faceroll content. Pick your poison.

We can get a tic up in the difficulty dept without alienating the casual playerbase. It takes maybe 5 minutes of research to learn your rotation, if you want to remain bad because you are casual, that's on you. You can be as casual as you want to be, they already dumbed jobs, stats and dungeons down so much that if you have not learned even the basics of your job and how the basic dungeon mechanics in ffxiv work by lvl 70 that is more willful ignorance than simply being casual.

[Slirith]

The Burn was only difficult due to it being released at the beginning of a gear cycle. Meanwhile Ghimlyt Dark was released at the end of said gear cycle.

[Sandpark]

The issue with this statement is that “fun” changes per individual—
You want the dungeons to be “easy and fun”—because otherwise, they are just tedious to you, to give an example.
But Johnny, on the other hand, finds them so easy that they are not fun—they’re snoozefests to him, which makes them boring and tedious—and wants them to be more challenging because he likes challenging things: they are more “fun” to him.

So, whose definition of “fun” gets prioritized? Which is “more valid”? Yours? Or Johnny’s?
Inb4 “THE MAJORITY’S DEFINITION” response...

Everyone has a different view on what is fun, scary, exciting, and various other feelings. The underlying truth that is not variable is that the highs or lows of any feelings are driven by the unknown and novelty. Once you do something many times regardless of how it makes you feel, the emotions, senses, and passion to do it over and over is lessened, changed, or dull. And the difficulty of what you do does not dictate your fun and enjoyment long term, it can for moments but that is fleeting.

As for what should be prioritized. When has any developer in the last 10 years prioritized one means of playing over another in an mmo?
Rare, today's market is all about giving options for players to consume content.
Go full hardcore like Wildstar? Hello cancellation.
Go extremely easy? It's a pickup and put down game.

I'll reiterate. It's not difficulty that has anyone playing a game over and over. It's either introducing novelty over and over or the carrot on the stick.

Sorry, but I won't bring "the majority" argument because it's stupid in this case (duh, I mean, that's what you bringing that up was all about).

However I will bring the "design" argument.

This game was made with the casual, low-skill player in mind. Simply speaking, it is an MMO that strives to bring a game with an enticing story that anyone can follow on their spare time without putting much effort. This is how it was from the beginning and changing that would be betraying their customers.

That means that, yes, the opinion of the players that want easy main story content IS more important than yours because THEY are the primary target audience. You are the secondary, the more hardcore people, for which there are the more hardcore/skilled optional things like extreme, savage and ultimate.


Now before someone says "I'm just bad and I want the content to be easy so I can snooze through it.". I'm good enough to have solo-healed Titan (Hard) when I was level 50 in Heavensward all the way from first landslide to the end, good enough to trio Ravana (Hard) on a Red Mage with a tank and another Red Mage that was constantly out of mana (probably didn't have Lucid Dreaming) from about 20% to zero, good enough to solo Chimera in Cutter's Cry from 80% to zero on slightly undergeared Bard and to heal and keep reviving healer and DPS while keeping the tank healed in Burn on the dragon throughout the fight while on Red Mage throughout second half of the fight.

I don't think I'm good enough for proper extreme content or savage so I don't do it (and my laptop and sometimes PING sucks, so there's that).

And I don't put the effort on the side to get better because in most Duty Finder parties I lose focus way too easily due to bad players and my inability to stay focused through people single-target attacking a pack of mobs, dying to simple AoE's time and again or similar. I can't get a static for various reasons either.


So no. I'd like it if the game WAS more challenging. I'd want it to have challenging solo content where I could get good with my class without having to roll the dice for the duty finder. But this game never was that and as such it should NOT become that. As much as I hate getting a person in the duty finder that still single-target-kills enemies in lvl70 dungeon, runs from a stack-up marker and such...too bad. I hope that the next Final Fantasy MMO will be geared towards the people that actually want to learn as they go. This one is lost cause in that.

In the first part of your post about design, you just described every Final Fantasy in existence.

I lose focus for three reasons in the battle content in this game.

1. The rotation system feels like I am playing a solo game even if I am in a group of 4-24 people because there is little synergy between me and another player and how our skills interact with each other on a moment by moment basis.
2. The enemy mechanics and environment are the novelty that drives my focus. Once the novelty runs out after doing said content multiple times, my focus goes bye bye.
3. AOE and mass pulling is one of the biggest culprits of me losing focus on the player end. To me this means the enemy mechanics are so trivial, that they can be ignored. The gameplay as a DPS feels like me mashing the same keys over and over like a hack and slash game which is the game type I abhor most. It gets even more boring the more and more enemies we fight at once.

If there ever came a point where an FF game is so difficult that I could not experience they story. I think I am done with FF at that point. Because the story, interesting open worlds, horizontal progression, and party synergy is what I enjoy most about this franchise. The latter three have already been stripped from the game. You take away my story and I am a sad panda.