When do the training wheels come off?

[Forever_Learning]

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.

Here, you win my support.

It takes a fairly long bit of time to reach level 80 and they have made the journey somewhat painless to the extent that you don't bother to do things because there doesn't seem to be a need to do so. Even with the badly geared tank expressed by the OP, they still got through it.

The end result is that people can make it very far into the game, basically everything but savage maybe, playing their job incorrectly.

However, to what extent is that also a reflection of this game's age? Isn't it normal that when an MMO has multiple expansions, they make the previous content easier to complete in order to reach the current expansion? Nevertheless, I'm quite supportive of better progression curves and additional resources for people who want to learn how to play their job better. Like, I just realized there is NOTHING in this game that tells you to weave your spells.

Ultimately, when it comes to new players (or returning ones like me), I think it often has more to do with ignorance than attitude. You don't want to know for how long I had no idea about the saddlebag!