Former WoW player: Suggested changes to FFXIV Raiding end-game

[Controller]

Except you're relying on conflation. The problems most people have with M+, for instance, are rarely anything core to M+. It's keys. It's the vault. It's the drop rates. It's the reward scaling. All things exterior to the gameplay itself.

And it's not that no one ever talks about the idea of progressive or player-chosen or scaling difficult in dungeons. I have. Forte has. More than a dozen threads by now have. The problem is that the conversation is so frequently derailed by those who go out of their way to ignore the contexts of the requests and harp on already-known problems external to other iterations of the system in question. At this point, a quarter of all avenues likely ever to be available to an MMORPG can be condemned merely by half-understood association to WoW. It's stupidly reductionist.

I don't want to give off the wrong idea, I myself liked it when the game was harder. I LOVED ninja and monk when they had openers that took and made me want to train like I was training for Evo for a Street Fighter. But I've watched countless things get nerfed so bad it's not even depressing anymore. I dunno if I want even the idea of Mplus if I'm honest. I'd rather have just a true expert. Like a 5 man dungeon or something that's got an extreme setting. No sliding scale. Just a new context where we do 5 man or 7 man content that's ONLY extreme setting for dungeons. I don't want dungeons to have easy,hard settings... I think it'll be better if we just had a new mode for it and ONLY it.

That way the people who can't beat story bosses can keep their stuff and we can get something for us. like how Ultimate , savage, extremes are already are.

[Cebo]

I don't want to give off the wrong idea, I myself liked it when the game was harder. I LOVED ninja and monk when they had openers that took and made me want to train like I was training for Evo for a Street Fighter. But I've watched countless things get nerfed so bad it's not even depressing anymore.

TBH, I was in the same boat as you. These were changes I was hoping for even back when I was playing Heavensward in 2015/16. But after not seeing any improvements or advancements to endgame dungeons/raiding for 6 yrs, and jobs getting further simplified and homogenized in SB and ShB, I basically resigned myself to play this game solely for the story and the world only, even though I really enjoyed the difficulty and gameplay of Savage raids/Extreme trials. So I'd come back each expansion, immerse myself in the story, enjoy the first tier of Savage, max out a few of my favorite jobs...and then trail off as I pick up other games.

This post may not have been timely considering the boom FFXIV is experiencing with all the WoW refugees. And for relatively new players, there is a TON of content the game still offers, especially with min-iLvl syncing. But for players like me who've been playing since ARR, and enjoy the dungeons/raiding the most, the endgame content drought is real.

[Shurrikhan]

I don't want to give off the wrong idea, I myself liked it when the game was harder. I LOVED ninja and monk when they had openers that took and made me want to train like I was training for Evo for a Street Fighter. But I've watched countless things get nerfed so bad it's not even depressing anymore. I dunno if I want even the idea of Mplus if I'm honest. I'd rather have just a true expert. Like a 5 man dungeon or something that's got an extreme setting. No sliding scale. Just a new context where we do 5 man or 7 man content that's ONLY extreme setting for dungeons. I don't want dungeons to have easy,hard settings... I think it'll be better if we just had a new mode for it and ONLY it.

That way the people who can't beat story bosses can keep their stuff and we can get something for us. like how Ultimate , savage, extremes are already are.

I feel we're actually in a very similar boat on this. 5.0 NIN (apart from some tuning issues, and wanting the later TCJ change and ONLY that change) and 4.3 Monk (and 3.x high-SkS Monk just behind that) were some of the best combat experiences I've had in a tab-target MMORPG, and I loved that even if not everyone felt up to optimizing them, that depth was there and available to all. Content, unfortunately, cannot be quite so accommodating, as by the time it allows for those who are only looking for minimal engagement their clears, it makes higher ends of engagement seem far less pertinent (not that a speedrun can't be fun in and of itself, as wonderfully useless as it is for anything but saving time).

And I completely understand that preference towards a single, higher difficulty. While I have to very much appreciate the sheer development time granular difficulty settings save for hours of fun at one's preferred levels of challenge (as happens to be seen, despite some less than ideal trappings, in WoW's M+), I'd be okay with just having some real stand-out, optional dungeons at one, higher difficulty level each. Heck, there are some challenge concepts you can only work with basically from scratch, or with them being intended from the start. Imagine, for instance, the old "Hmm, is that a boulder coming down this way?" concept. Apart from some very handy coincidences in design, environmental mechanics like that aren't something you can just add in later, and it'd often be hard to quite fit them along cohesively along other scalars.

My point was merely that it's really bad practice to talk through concepts only by association with some past trappings they may have carried. It reduces our criteria, priorities, value sets, etc., down to something only seen by reflection from something else -- "Not WoW" or "Not XI".

Removed from those trappings, the question of "To M+ or not to M+?" instead becomes simply: "How many difficulties do we want available to our dungeons?" and "To what extent do we want to allow meaningful gear progress via light-party play?"

Therein, we may note a couple things:

• the more difficulty settings you have, the more people can play at a level neither dull nor oppressive to them.

  An Extreme-only dungeon, for instance, will feeling nicely iconic to those able to do it, but to those who cannot, it will feel like content from which one is excluded, more so than any Extreme trial or Savage raid. Similarly, basic-difficulty-only dungeons will rarely feel like more than a grind to a large portion of players. Meanwhile, if you design a dungeon around the Extreme experience first and carry just a clever selection of those challenges over to a Normal mode, you've wasted almost zero development time while increasing the pool of content for all players. That leaves us with a further decision: Do we want to isolate the dungeon to a specific difficulty, to give it a more iconic feeling, or do we want to be more efficient with our development time?

• As we open up more gearing paths, we broaden the sense of who all or what interests are considered as an intended or central part of the game.

  That, in turn comes back to that same question of how much we wish to accommodate/isolate. If we want the only way to fully progress gear to be through raids, then that's that. But if we want, instead, for it to be progressible through anything of similar (or higher) difficulty, then now we're accommodating more areas of player interests, but we might have sacrificed some part of something iconic, depending on how much the game's identity hinges on some common experience.

[Controller]

I feel we're actually in a very similar boat on this. 5.0 NIN (apart from some tuning issues, and wanting the later TCJ change and ONLY that change) and 4.3 Monk (and 3.x high-SkS Monk just behind that) were some of the best combat experiences I've had in a tab-target MMORPG, and I loved that even if not everyone felt up to optimizing them, that depth was there and available to all. Content, unfortunately, cannot be quite so accommodating, as by the time it allows for those who are only looking for minimal engagement their clears, it makes higher ends of engagement seem far less pertinent (not that a speedrun can't be fun in and of itself, as wonderfully useless as it is for anything but saving time).

And I completely understand that preference towards a single, higher difficulty. While I have to very much appreciate the sheer development time granular difficulty settings save for hours of fun at one's preferred levels of challenge (as happens to be seen, despite some less than ideal trappings, in WoW's M+), I'd be okay with just having some real stand-out, optional dungeons at one, higher difficulty level each. Heck, there are some challenge concepts you can only work with basically from scratch, or with them being intended from the start. Imagine, for instance, the old "Hmm, is that a boulder coming down this way?" concept. Apart from some very handy coincidences in design, environmental mechanics like that aren't something you can just add in later, and it'd often be hard to quite fit them along cohesively along other scalars.

My point was merely that it's really bad practice to talk through concepts only by association with some past trappings they may have carried. It reduces our criteria, priorities, value sets, etc., down to something only seen by reflection from something else -- "Not WoW" or "Not XI".

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Actually reading this post and rereading it and letting the idea sink in.. I think you might have a better system then the one I purposed. If I'm being honest my only worry with a sliding scale is that the few we have has been towards the easy side. I know that's not what you're proposing.. it's just a fear I have based on what has happened in game already. And it's why I would rather have a mode that's only set to one setting. But I'd be lying if I said I don't see where you're coming from so I guess I can say I do agree... I'm just scared of how it can be mishandled. Tho like I said rereading what you just posted I am abit more warm to it then I was before.