Does 14 Promote a Culture of Mediocrity?

[Caurcas]

Disagree. As a DPS it is not enjoyable or engaging to have aggro management take up hotbar space instead of a more complex base rotation with more buttons. DPS still have plenty of damage mitigation abilities that are basically useless outside of high-end content and that's fine. We don't need every aspect of tanking to be a team effort. Especially not when the aggro management system also made it a fucking nightmare to play with strangers who refused to use their tools effectively or disagreed on who's responsibility it was to manage aggro. I don't need tanks refusing to take a damage hit and letting the DPS die, and I don't need healers greeding damage with cleric stance and letting the tank die.

SB also still had TP, which was also a pretty terrible system held over from an earlier design philosophy where complexity was put into the player toolkits rather than the encounters themselves, and it also restricts the design space for hard encounters because those tools are either essential (which means old encounters become broken and incomplete when job skills change, like in WoW) or non-essential which then makes them rather useless as skills unless they do more damage and kill the boss quicker.

In order to keep the game fresh with each new expansion and content release stuff has to change. Jobs have to change, but old encounters still need to work and provide some level of challenge at the appropriate level. If you design the encounter challenge around frankly niche skills the challenge doesn't last more than one expansion, as those niche skills get old the fastest, are removed and the encounters are rebalanced to allow brute-forcing mechanics. On the other hand, if you just shuffle around the ways Jobs do and mitigate damage they can still feel fresh each new expansion without breaking all the old fights.

In short, it's not about how easy or hard it was. SE isn't designing the game the way they do in order to make it easier for players. The difficulty is just shifted to the encounters themselves, because they're going to stay the same even when the next expansion comes out, while the Jobs will inevitably continue changing.

I mean it was pretty easy to manage aggro. Using DPS as a cooldown taught them to hit their 1 or 2 buttons every minute or so to drop aggro. Encounter difficulty hasn't really changed either. O12s was no easier than E12S.

[SenorPatty]

I mean it was pretty easy to manage aggro. Using DPS as a cooldown taught them to hit their 1 or 2 buttons every minute or so to drop aggro. Encounter difficulty hasn't really changed either. O12s was no easier than E12S.

Gotta agree with Caurcas here. Wasn't it like, two buttons, one to lower your enmity and the other one to prevent it from rising for a time(I don't remember the names for them)? SB will probably the only expansion I've played where people would get so riled up at the thought of hitting any of these two things in their rotation and as much as I hate to say it because I'm not a fan of unsubstantiated generalization, but it seemed to me like the type of players who would use those things regularly in their rotation were savage/ex raiders. Time after time, in any role I was, someone refused to pitch in for aggro management or mindlessly not use it, it was usually a casual.

Unfortunate, because it was one of the last semblance of "busywork" and usually, if both dps (and even healer to some extent) used them, things went as smooth as butter and even allowed tanks to have a bit more fun off-stancing.

[Garnix]

In my opinion, in this game, difficulty should come from the encounters, not from the abilities which just add a layer of "busy work".
If controls are too complex, it is often bad game design.
That said, I think content (especially new dungeons) should be harder by now...

[Kolaina]

Go play Dark Souls or Lost Ark if you want a difficult game. Have fun. The devs have stated they made this game so people can have fun not so tryhards can gloat about a bunch of pixels.

The devs also gave you buttons to use. Not just to fill your hot bars with

[IdowhatIwant]

Go play Dark Souls or Lost Ark if you want a difficult game. Have fun. The devs have stated they made this game so people can have fun not so tryhards can gloat about a bunch of pixels.

Sadly I probably will because this game has gone to shit and it is suffering at keeping my attention. Hopefully the next live letter gives me some hope, and the devs get back some sort of passion for the game back. Copy pasted content got old last expansion, and I am sick of running 1 dungeon for my expert roulette. Which how do you call something a roulette when your option is 1 dungeon (not this patch but the next patch). If you are not going to put more interesting side content that retains value then just give us more dungeons again and make them better then 2 pulls and a boss x3.

[Snorky]

Sadly I probably will because this game has gone to shit and it is suffering at keeping my attention. Hopefully the next live letter gives me some hope, and the devs get back some sort of passion for the game back. Copy pasted content got old last expansion, and I am sick of running 1 dungeon for my expert roulette. Which how do you call something a roulette when your option is 1 dungeon (not this patch but the next patch). If you are not going to put more interesting side content that retains value then just give us more dungeons again and make them better then 2 pulls and a boss x3.

Maybe the answer is a new deep dungeon, since we can travel back in time and through the aether current they don't lack a concept for one.

[Beytran70]

Maybe if you want more of a challenge you guys can try to group with your friends and put limitations on yourselves like speedrunners and Dark Souls players have been doing for decades now. Force yourselves to minimum item level, don't use certain damage mitigations, take off your helmets, I don't know. The point is fun, and as many of the posters on here have already explained, the devs aren't too keen on making things any more difficult in a broad sense, but they also don't really have to in order to have more challenging content for those who want it. There are always options, so if the challenge is really something you care about, make the challenge yourself and don't force others to suffer just because of your own views on how the game should be designed. Not every MMO is one size fits all, as much as devs would love it to be.

[drtasteyummy]

FFXIV hardcore raiders are like wrestlers intentionally going into a kindergarten to beat up some kids then complain to the teachers why everybody here is such a loser

[Absimiliard]

The endgame content provided by FFXIV is at least more difficult than anything WoW has to offer. Anything below that endgame content, however, has to be accessible to the masses. That isn't encouraging a culture of mediocrity; it's making a game lucrative. Ramping up the difficulty of non-hardcore content will serve only to alienate a portion of the playerbase, thus bringing in less money and ultimately resulting in less interesting content for everyone.

[Asmodai]

The game is meant to largely appeal to casual audiences, which is where most of the games financial success originates. Many of the old HW / SB era systems that were streamlined were pointlessly punishing to casual players, but had very little real impact on high-level gameplay. They've made a few missteps, but seemed to have fairly solid reasoning behind most of their decisions. Rather than stripping away 'complexity', it's more replacing convoluted design with overly simple design. 'Complexity' just gives a little too much credit to some of the bad systems in SB/HW.

This game has a lot of bad players and weird white-knighting no doubt, but I feel like a lot of people just defend "bad" players because they find it more satisfying and entertaining to get under the skin of people who whine about performance in casual content.

Ive always assumed they were the bad players.