Forced to Raid?

[nebby00]

Thank you all for your replies. I really appreciate it. I realize that not everyone feels the same way about raiding and it helps to hear that these older content raids can be run at the lowest difficulty via duty finder. I have a mood disorder so sometimes I ruminate on things and end up turning molehills into mountains. I think I will check out the unlocking for some of these and see how it goes from there.

It's all good, hopefully you'll have a good time completing some of them. And remember, there's no harm in announcing in the alliance/party chat that it's your first time, people will be more than happy to explain mechanics most of the time. After a few runs you'll get a hang of it and it'll be easy for you then. Not to mention the stories behind the raids are pretty neat too; so if you do like story and lore you might enjoy them.

Have a nice day; best of luck to you!

[Rowde]

There are some suggestions for story, and some suggestions for content.

Storywise... we kinda don't know what's going to be made important until it becomes important. What might start as a side story in an older expansion might suddenly become hard canon to the MSQ in later expansions. Sometimes the older content isn't effected, you go back and do it at your leisure and the story happens "out of the timeline" for whenever you decided to complete it. Other times side content later becomes mandatory to access other content, or becomes mandatory for the MSQ.

Examples:
"Side Content" that is still optional that you can complete whenever you want out of the timeline
ARR DRG story (meet Estenien and introduction of the Eyes of Nidhogg), Estenien then became super important to HW MSQ, and now Estenien is graduating to a Trust in EW. However, players are not required to ever level DRG to progress MSQ.

ARR Crystal Tower series (meet Graha T'ia and introduction of the Crystal Tower), was completely optional in ARR, HW, SB, and the beginning of ShB. Was changed to a mandatory duty to progress the MSQ in 5.3... furthermore, new players are also now required to complete CT as part of the MSQ in ARR.

SB Return to Ivalice series is still completely optional side content, but it's required to access other optional side content in ShB, Save the Queen story.


Content-wise... there's a lot of "theory crafting" about what content may or may not be more difficult after the stat squish. The dev team is not infallible... although they are being very vocal about the process and are generally confident, mistakes are definitely possible. However, even if something is broken, it won't remain broken forever... but when it will be fixed then becomes an issue. It could be a hotfix, or they might wait for one of the regular patch intervals to address... in a perfect world there won't be any problems and everything will "just work", we'll find out in a couple months.

That being said, a lot of ppl are recommending the completion of older Savage content now if that's something your interested in seeing for the story alterations, or farming for glam. The dev team acknowledged that some things might actually be harder unsync'd after the squish, which is why they're adding an extra echo... but that's also going to be variable in strength depending on the content.

Another big one is the BLU achievements, if you're interested in the Malboro mount... since the echo has to be turned off for those achievements to even proc. If that's unintentionally made more difficult by the squish... then it's gonna require additional rebalancing to the fights or to BLU... which is not going to be a major priority after the launch. If it's broken, I'm confident that eventually they will fix it, but it's definitely something that would probably be rolled into a patch and not addressed with a hotfix.

[Dreamsoap]

OP if you're in an FC, you can also ask them for help running these. This is what FCs exist for!

[TaleraRistain]

I've played WoW in the past (WotLK through Cata) and did not care for raiding there. I've also played a lot of other MMOs over the years as well including GW1 and GW2, Rift, Aion, ESO, The Secret World, EverQuest and probably a bunch more I've forgotten.

Raiding just stresses me out because it's so time consuming and there are a lot of people involved.

I totally get you there. I didn't want to dip my feet in here either after being a hardcore back in EQ. But you can't even really call raids here raids like other MMOs. The 24 mans are the closest we come to those 72 people 10+ hour sessions and they're quick, easy, and have good stories. They have you progress through an instance like a dungeon with a handful of bosses so that's more like old school. The normal raids are only 8 mans and they're just a fight in an arena. The difficulty is scaled intended for people to be able to experience the story.

So if you like trials and dungeons, it's really just more of the same. You can easily PUG and the only time anyone really worries about someone being new is closer to launch. But then we're all new and dying all over the place anyway, though some people get butthurt when others don't catch on as quickly. So if you stick to sometime like now where we're waiting for the next expansion, you should get some pretty chill folks just filing in the time or getting their tomestones.

[Jeeqbit]

Alliance Raids are casual content with 24 people. You can die 20 times and nobody will mind. You will get resurrected and keep going.

Normal Raids are casual content with 8 people. They are designed to be easy. People make mistakes in them all the time and it's fine because they are designed to be easy.

The only raids with any sort of challenge are extreme and savage which are optional. You really should not worry about the story versions. There is no pressure in those and nobody will care if you make mistakes.

The only raids that are required are Crystal Tower, but like a lot of sidequests, the others give additional context to the story you already did.

[Erakir]

I've played WoW in the past (WotLK through Cata) and did not care for raiding there. I've also played a lot of other MMOs over the years as well including GW1 and GW2, Rift, Aion, ESO, The Secret World, EverQuest and probably a bunch more I've forgotten.

Raiding just stresses me out because it's so time consuming and there are a lot of people involved.

Alongside everyone else, I want to mention that the 8-man raids are also split up per-boss so far as the duty finder is concerned.
It's not like crystal tower or a dungeon where you clear boss 1-4 in the same sitting/same group. You'll queue for boss 1, kill it, leave instance - queue for boss 2, kill it, leave instance, etc.

You can think of them like 4 individual trial fights with story cutscenes between them. There's no similar time commitment like we had in EQ/earlier WoW. If you've got 10-15 minutes, you can do one and hop back into the next boss three days later, and they are not intended to be difficult "know it all or wipe/get kicked" content.

Not to try and force you to do them - but I'd hate for people to miss out because of the term 'raid' from other MMOs and the connotation it generally carries. Binding Coil in ARR is the only one that doesn't follow this formula with easily accessible/low time commitment story versions.

[KitKatnip]

Alongside everyone else, I want to mention that the 8-man raids are also split up per-boss so far as the duty finder is concerned.
It's not like crystal tower or a dungeon where you clear boss 1-4 in the same sitting/same group. You'll queue for boss 1, kill it, leave instance - queue for boss 2, kill it, leave instance, etc.

You can think of them like 4 individual trial fights with story cutscenes between them. There's no similar time commitment like we had in EQ/earlier WoW. If you've got 10-15 minutes, you can do one and hop back into the next boss three days later, and they are not intended to be difficult "know it all or wipe/get kicked" content.

Not to try and force you to do them - but I'd hate for people to miss out because of the term 'raid' from other MMOs and the connotation it generally carries. Binding Coil in ARR is the only one that doesn't follow this formula with easily accessible/low time commitment story versions.

Thank you for this detailed explanation. I have enjoyed some of the trials. My favorite was the one with the sea serpent (Leviathan?) and the boat. Getting tossed about at sea was a unique experience for me.

[Caurcas]

More should be locked behind completing raids. Make people work for something for once.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

I was close to dropping the game when I learned I had to complete CT to progress with the MSQ. I then decided to go through with it, and I hated every minute of it. If they ever do this to me again, I'll definitely not go along with it anymore.

[FoxyAreku]

There's already so little to do in this game I don't know why you would limit your content intake even further, but no you don't have to do anything.