Quote Originally Posted by Forever_Learning View Post
Yup, I recognize everything you are discussing, and I’ll add the doom floor in Qarn, which made us go up the hill on the side of the floor to just avoid it. I can also agree with argument that it was more difficult in ARR, but you also acknowledge that the difficult wasn’t exactly cuphead or dark souls difficulty. There were bad players back then too, and people didn’t exactly spend hours getting through these dungeons like a savage raid.
I don't think anyone looking for more difficulty is looking for it to go to the Cuphead or Dark Souls levels outside of savage/ultimate content. As much as I hate FPS games, they make the best examples for difficulty curves, they have the easy, normal, hard, you gonna die, etc difficulty modes you set at the start akin to normal, extreme, savage, ultimate content in XIV, but as you progress through their stages things gradually get harder too. In theory, if you enjoyed the game enough to beat it, then replay it, if the devs did the difficulty well you could often bump it up one setting and get a ways before ran into issues.

If was to liken XIV to a Mario game, ARR felt more like an 8 world mario game progressively getting slightly harder. And the hard mode primals and post MSQ dungeons felt like the start of world 1 hard compared to the MSQ Praetoriun clearly being 8-4. The expansions have all felt like still stuck in world 2 or 3 for the difficulty progression, and then jumping to extreme, savage, and ultimate with the lack of 5 worlds worth of gradual difficulty and complexity to create a smoother transition.