The game is very easy

[Shuuli]

I am still unsure how people play this game with some jobs on console. Like paladin has a bajillion buttons to press. They might be liking summoner a lot

[Insertusernamehere]

I am still unsure how people play this game with some jobs on console. Like paladin has a bajillion buttons to press. They might be liking summoner a lot

I think SE intentionally made some jobs very basic so people who don't have time to invest for rotation / balancing / perfection can enjoy with their friends and have a good time.

[AziraSyuren]

snip

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.

[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.

[Kolsykol]

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.

Your comment makes no real sense to me.

People who are complaining that Jobs are getting dumbed down or that content is too easy are griefers and people who don't want challenge?
When people generally talk about the game being too easy too people are not talking about Savage and Extremes ( some exceptions perhaps, I do think the second EX is perhaps too easy and the first one relies too heavily on one gimmick ).

To me it's more about fun than some obsession with difficulty.
RPR is incredibly boring to me in longer sessions because of how easy it is and how little you've got to keep track on, even tho it's not *literally* true it does feel to me like I am basically just 1 2 3.
I'd like RPR to be more difficult in the sense that I'd like it to be more challenging and force me to make more real and impactful decisions because it's enjoyable to me.
And the gap between a great and bad RPR player shouldn't be as small as it is imo, the better you are the more significant the difference in performance should be imo.
BLM is a great example of this I think that you should be rewarded the more effort you put in and the better you are.
It should be an upwards swing not just a slight upward tilt.

And when I get synced down to older content and I can literally not do a single mechanic and it poses zero challenge whatsoever it's not engaging.
It makes me feel like I want to fall asleep.

Like what challenge is there for people who actually want to be engaged?
There rly is nothing to it and it extends to too much of the content imo.
This extends to the Jobs too, not playing properly should have a real impact it shouldn't just be a minor difference.

[LeonKeyh]

Hard content you ask? They made one.. only minority liked it (I am not sure maybe they are majority?): Eureka I have some bad memories

I remember getting 2 hit and dying as tank while trying to travel penthesilea and I had all of my mitigation buffs + special buffs for the map.
I remember it took 20 mins to kill a mob because mob was close to aether teleport and I had no choice to kill it.. I remember shouting DPS for help next time It happened :3
I remember going 2 levels back because I jumped from cliff and mob instant killed me interestingly mob spared others (while trying figure out how to get in forge) :3

Is it fun no IMO.. making every single mob on the map "god tier" no fun at all.

You're conflating "difficult" with "punishing." There's nothing difficult about it taking 20 minutes to kill a normal mob or nothing difficult about dying in 2 hits. We're not even asking for content to gate bad players out, we're just asking for content that fosters player skill. That tells those players "Hey, you could be doing better."

I am still unsure how people play this game with some jobs on console. Like paladin has a bajillion buttons to press. They might be liking summoner a lot

I play on console and the only jobs where I couldn't fit everything on my visible hotbars were Paladin (which was only 1-2 abilities that I just tossed on a hotbar I could swap to if needed, which they never have been) and Samurai (again, a couple of abilities that I tossed somewhere and haven't needed). It's really not a big deal. Most jobs have a bunch of room left.

[Ransu]

When you make the punishment for failing an encounter less than it needs to be, you make it possible to amp the actual difficulty in an encounter to a point where skill is necessary to overcome it.

Look at Dark Souls. It's hard, but once you're at a point where you're butting your head against a wall trying to overcome a challenge, you've got no souls to lose, so you have no punishment for failure and only reward for success. So the game can actually take off the kid gloves and keep at it.

Old school MMOs punished you hard for death--which meant that you came in prepared to kill it in one shot or you didn't fucking go. That meant that you had to design content that could be killed in one shot. You couldn't really do complicated rotations or anything like that--you just had overgeared toons zerging a boss.

And because of this, you can have bosses do incredibly punishing things in casual content, and players can learn and push themselves and become better. The first boss in Dead Ends is far far far FAR more difficult than what most raid bosses can be in games that punish the hell out of you for failing a little. And people wipe, and because all they've lost is time... they can just run back and try again.

The worst part about this complaint is that it's not even completely valid to all content. Do you actually want content that delevels you, sets you back for failure, or makes you start all over from the start? That actually exists! Go do Baldesion Arsenal or Delubrum Reginae Savage! One mistake can mean you're kicked out and have to start from the beginning allllll over again!

Ah memories of doing AV in FFXI and people deleveling because we died a bunch of times and someone forgot to cap out their exp.

[Ransu]

-snip-

I'm going to keep posting this.....Go play something else. The direction of this game isn't going to change and its clearly not the game for you. You stick to one job and one job only and your focus is almost entirely on how "easy" end game is. It sounds like Lost Ark will be the perfect game for you.

[Ransu]

And when I get synced down to older content and I can literally not do a single mechanic and it poses zero challenge whatsoever it's not engaging.
It makes me feel like I want to fall asleep.

Old content is easy to clear? -shocking-

I really hate these kind of arguments. Its old content, of course its easy to clear because its no longer relevant.

[Insertusernamehere]

You're conflating "difficult" with "punishing." There's nothing difficult about it taking 20 minutes to kill a normal mob or nothing difficult about dying in 2 hits. We're not even asking for content to gate bad players out, we're just asking for content that fosters player skill. That tells those players "Hey, you could be doing better."

I think you should give more clear example about "difficult content".

Boss using multiple mechanics targeting different classes with different mechanics this is usually extreme trial or savage.
Perhaps a dps meter? Tells about your performance? and hints out you can do better by fixing your rotation (said service already exist but not for harassment).
Or a community interface like balance discord?

I do not believe they will make "extreme dungeons" in this game, not every one playing for challenging dungeon some people playing just for story, some people just here to have good time with their friends with easy dungeons.
For some people EW dungeons already hard enough.. some jobs unplayable or difficult for them (topics exist in forum.)