The game is very easy

[ssunny2008]

Literally the best take I've ever seen in one of these threads.

The people complaining the hardest about job difficulty are always the ones who never challenge everything the game has to offer. It's always, at best, blue/low purple parsing weekly savage PF heroes. Of course the game is most boring to people who only play good enough to not grief their parties. The game is quite literally designed to be most comfortable (and therefore, most boring) to that demographic. But the game (and almost all of the jobs) is plenty challenging for everyone else, including the high-end players who try to push their performance to the limit and take on the hardest challenges in the game.

It's not casualization at all. Making the game more approachable and accessible is not the same thing, nor is it a bad thing.

"The ones who never challenge everything the game has to offer" is a clearly false statement based on your following ones. "Parsing" is not a thing the game has to offer, it´s community-based. Of course you could measure the party-output by ingame-timers aswell, but it don´t even has anything to do with "challenging" or "what the game offers". Imo playing via PF is even way more challenging than going in as static and trying to get the best out of it since you never know what ppl you get into it.
And seriously if i want to compete with others, i would either jump to a real PvP game or i would play an ARPG since it´s way more fun gameplay-wise.


But away from this, parsing means nothing and not everyone is in the mood to waste their time to be a self-named "pro". Checking out ff.logs imo and you even see a bunch of 70-90 parser without BIS gear and without melts, just because they don´t wanna waste stones / materia before the savage patch appeared. Parsing has always been and will always be nothing but the good old E-c*** comparison for ppl who either needs that for their self-confidence or just because they´ve fun to push the last out of it. But since you´re able to boost it with good groups and need a bunch of critluck, the most just don´t care.

The only thing which matters is "the boss is dead, or not". And at this point the game isn´t really challenging. It´s even the easiest MMORPG out there (my experience).
For example... I´m a mentor, who never left any EX fight in the roulette. Only 1 time the group made the vote to give up at Zurvan after 30mins, when a bunch of other mentors joined like "Go unsync, bye" or stood there for 1 try, failed miserably and left. Everything else has been succesful and i can tell you that it´s often a pain going trough some fights like Zurvan, Ramuh or even Mogry.
But it doesn´t matter. We make it happen, just because someone (me normally) knows the fight well, puts a marker above his head, writes "in / out / spread..." within the fight permanently in the chat or even use braindead-strategies to carry the whole group. This is not a challenge, this is laughable.

99% of all content in this game can be carried by one player, who just knows what to do. On the other hand, the only real challenge is that 8/8 players have to be alive when insta-death mechanics appear. If you´ve one putrid egg in your party, you gonna wipe all day long to the same mechanic. The most times ppl die are either "I never did this fight before." or "I was just too greedy." and in rare cases you´ve some mechanics like Light Rampant or Cross Lions with a very small positioning.
Tanks are broken so far, healing is in 90% of the fights 1 button spam for DPS. DPS-classes have nothing to care about but their rotation and "move from A to B, stack or spread". And while all is highly repetitive and behind strict pattern, playing "blind" is not even hard. Normal trials and raids are a joke and they already tell you what´s gonna happen in savage. Only the 4th fight each savage tier as a 2nd phase which brings new mechanics. The rest is just similar to the normal raid with advanced stuff and no castbars or telegraphs.

The only real challenge in this game might be ultimate. But 1 fight in 1-2 years? Not to mention that we already see that SE gives af about it. The priorities lie somewhere else, which is obvious, but still bs.
Now let´s check those ultimates... you´re getting scaled down if they´re not brandnew. But the scaling in this game got so fck´d, that you´re able to skip mechanics even without having a parse of 100. It´s just a matter of the next patch, just look what happens to the current content. 10 or 20 gearscore more and you skip like 20% of the fights?!
On top ultimates greatest challenge is the length. You need to remember a lot of stuff, 8 player have to remember a lot of stuff and if 1 guy fails, gogo wipe... So far it´s not a real challenge again, atleast not gameplay-wise if you´ve to rely on that egg again. It´s a challenge to your own patience in the first case.

And while the real challenge is about patience and not to get insulted for bad plays, more than enough ppl do even use BOTS. YES FCKING BOTS! And i´m more than sure that the most of the "high-end-performer" and "ultimate-carrier" use them. I sadly know more than enough ppl abusing this bs, some of them even permanently in dungeons, because ACT is running anyway. One of them has been even in my Shb static. I was like "Oh a good heal, plays well, remember the mechanics, etc..." until we did O12s to unlock the Ultimates for the last players and he knew safespots before something actually happened on the screen. To have some orange parses and to stay alive in 99% of all cases must feel really great with a bot in the bag.


Let´s move on... not casualization? What else?
As already said, downsyncs are a mess and even if you do the most content, out of savage, when it´s new, then the most ppl get used to it pretty quickly and easily. DPS checks are not existent or "forgivable".
Yes of course more poeple are able to beat the content with such designs, but isn´t it easy then? Isn´t it casualized?

Same counts for the classes... "accessibility", what a nice word. You can have this even without dumbing down everything. We´ve more than enough classes for everyone to be have class-tiers in kind of difficulty. But no, SE decided to hold everything braindead to cater ppl who run pointless dungeons all day long. Tanks and healer are laughable easy to play. DPS classes lost more and more the gap between "easy / hard to play".
On top 100 of "QoL-changes" came into the game. A word which has become a hate of my life.

- No more ressource-managements, just a personal gauge and / or Lucid Dreaming on cd.
- More than enough defs on Tanks you never use in 99,9% of all content.
- Tons of oGCD healing you only cap in dungeon bigpulls.
- Less positionals
- Smartcasts or like 0 casts on Casterclasses
- High mobility options, you don´t even need.
- Utility which got taken away, but hey we still got stun / silence and sleep, we rarely need.
- Do even half the playerbase know about Esuna?
- Removal of Dots
- Really long Dot and buff-timings
- Aligning from burstwindows on any classes
- Roleskills... like why? How about skilltrees? No... pointless role-skills to homogenize everything even more.
- List goes on....

To make a game more approachable or accessible IS casualization! The homogenization of the classes and the repetitive content with more and more telegraphs speak for themselves. A lot of ppl do even claim "every class is easy to play" and yes, they´re! The only difference lies in their fight-execution and "punishment". (Casuals seem to love the word "punish".)
There isn´t even a real punishment anymore, but losing 100-200 DPS if you missclick something. You´ve to be a fool, who´s not even reading their skills, to perform at the down end. Nothing against handicapped players, but way too many don´t even read their skills. But god bless, the game highlights everything you should press. Don´t know how such ppl play MNK with 6 buttons lightning at once, but i guess they continue playing 123.


Enough novel for today... feel free to prove me wrong. There are not many challenges left in this game and this has nothing to do with "We got used too.". Of course everyone got more experience over the years, but SE did nothing but copying the same stuff over and over again, and that not only gameplay-wise. They got ignorant and lazy, got ride of unique stuff and patched the most stuff into braindead-mode.