the normal content is too easy

[Gullis]

Yea a bit. I feel this is a issue with most mmos though. you either got easy mode, or hard mode. There is little middle ground

[ASkellington]

Like I said in your other thread, they now have every opportunity to relegate their super easy mode stuff to an option for the trust modes, and leave the general DF content - trials in particular - at more decent levels of difficulty

This is what should happen and what I pray will happen.

Realistically and pessimistically I don't see it happening.

[Dzian]

IMO the issue has been long running.. ever since ARR. when something has been seen as difficult it's usually not been that it's actually difficult its usually just been a case of the game does a terrible job of explaining what you're supposed to do at the time..

The earliest examples i can remember would be way back in ARR even some of the early job quests. I wanna say 35 smn (cant rememebr exactly). had hiundreds of complaints becuase it was seen as impossibl. but it wasnt difficult at all it was just the game did a terrible job of telling you what you needed to do. Which was basicaly go allllllll the way over thereeeeeeeee and close the rifts/torsions while the npcs did all the work.. once players knew what to do it was easy..

Then you had steps of faith where the game did a terrible job of explaining about the cannons and as such people found it really hard.. but it was actually pretty simple if you used the cannons properly..

There was another quest really early in the msq for uldah at least that was the same again cant remeber the name of it but was level 15 ish if i recall.. playwers found it tough as hell simply because the game did a rubbish job at explaining it..

There's been hundreds of examples.. but the common connection between them is that rarther that fixing the quests by providing better clarity on what players are expected to do they just nerfed it to the point you didnt need to do any of it and could just zerg everything... and if that didnt work then they added a very easy mode on top...

Even endwalker. the level 90 tank quest for example just tells you to interupt an ability. so i and apparantly quite a few other players were getting frustrated because stuns are interupts and they weren't working.... and the solution to the quest was use a role skill thats basically been obselete since second coil. (minus maybe a handfull of very rare situationally niche uses) and as a result is a skill that 99% (exagerated) of tanks never even have on there hotbars...

They were never difficult. just the game does a rubbish job at telling players what they should be doing... and you can see this because when players end up going on youtube or reddit and getting just a tiny bit of information they end up sailing through the quest with ease.. If only the game gave them that tiny piece of information... instead of just nerfing everything

as it stands now. there are story quests and battles in the msq you can win even going AFK.. one of the stormlood ones where you have to take the bridge while the flag gets sorted... i was just starting that when a courier turned up at my door so had to go afk. getthe door help bring some furniture in get some old furniture out to be taken away.. and 15 maybe 20 minutes later came back to my computer and id won!!!!! WTF?!?!

[Lauront]

This is what should happen and what I pray will happen.

Realistically and pessimistically I don't see it happening.

Me neither, but at least it takes that excuse away.

[Jojoya]

MMOs that make the base content too difficult die because they can't sustain a large enough player base to cover development costs and make players feel like there's a thriving community. ("OMG this game only has 100,000 active players it must be trash I quit!")

With MSQ essentially required to progress and unlock all side content (hard or easy), the MSQ itself must remain easy.

You can't keep incrementally raising skill cap as the story progresses because not every player has the same skill potential (especially if there are physical limitations). Players tend to quit when they reach a roadblock to their skill level that prevents them from progressing farther.

There also has to be the desire to improve when those obstacles are met. Someone without that desire isn't going to rise to a challenge.

In the end, this is a game for entertainment purposes and not a self-improvement course. Look for it to be designed for those who want entertainment, not those who want self-improvement. If you're looking for a constant flow of increasingly harder challenges to overcome, this may not be the game for you.

[Lauront]

I think you could maybe make that excuse before they decided to make every trial and dungeon doable by trust. Now that that is an option, though? There's no reason not to just have an option to tune down the trust version and do that instead. Even the hardest MSQ stuff, like Castrum Fluminis or SoS (which I think is a good level to aim at for trials), is not really hard. It's just not smash the button and win type faceroll, you have to engage your brain cells a bit. And like Kizuya said, there is a point where the mechanics simply fail to convey the threat a boss is meant to possess lorewise. There is only so much you can suspend disbelief. Again, with everything doable via trust, that should take care of any concerns about being able to progress through the MSQ.

[CidHeiral]

I've been in max level groups groups with a MCH that never used Hypercharge, a DRG that only repeated True Thrust -> Wheeling Thrust, a GNB that only used Aurora, a SAM that literally just hit random buttons, etc. That is who normal content is balanced around, and to be honest that doesn't bother me at all. I'm fine with harder content being relegated to harder modes. What concerns me is watching core job design be simplified across the board to cater to those types of players.

[Jeeqbit]

Yep. I'm pretty sure I can do every mechanic wrong in norm Thordan and not die.

This is because it's tuned to item level 142 and we get synced to 270. It's a similar situation for most other story content. If you do it at the minimum item level it probably would kill you to stand in one or two things. The problem isn't necessarily whether the mechanics are capable of killing us, but how we outgear them even when they just released.

Even endwalker. the level 90 tank quest for example just tells you to interupt an ability. so i and apparantly quite a few other players were getting frustrated because stuns are interupts and they weren't working.... and the solution to the quest was use a role skill thats basically been obselete since second coil. (minus maybe a handfull of very rare situationally niche uses) and as a result is a skill that 99% (exagerated) of tanks never even have on there hotbars...

Silence was changed into Interrupt. It was made relevant at the end of Stormblood. There were interrupts in Seiryu extreme and Shadowbringers had them in extreme, savage and on a lot of the dungeon trash and hunts. If you didn't interrupt the dungeon trash, they did a lot more damage which sometimes caused big pulls to wipe.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Yep. I'm pretty sure I can do every mechanic wrong in norm Thordan and not die.

I have literally tried to die on normal-mode Thordan and couldn't pull it off. Even standing in every AoE, running face first into every mechanic, and telling the healers to not touch me for the sake of the experiment, I still couldn't manage it.

I mean, not counting running as BLU and just killing myself, but that's cheating.

[Kaurhz]

As far as normal content goes, this has been the case since (and inclusive of) Heavensward, excluding the major story trial. E.g. Shinryu, Hades, Endsinger on launch. I don't really see why they should maintain or gravitate towards incremental difficulty curves for normal mode content. From experience, at any point we've had 'difficult' normal content, people have only ever generally avoided it at all costs. See the number of people trying to avoid anything beyond Weeping City by shafting their own item level. Also referring to Shinryu here where people would go as far as either AFK on entry, or duty leave for a 30-minute penalty on release. Granted, the community has come a long way, but personally, I don't really see many people standing by this directive beyond just platitudes.