Why do casuals act as if it's the end of the world when suggesting?

[Rilifane]

I mean, you did say, quote:



...all of that requesting a harder game, and implying people who don't play at that level lack "a functioning brain" or need to be "spoonfed" or need to fail in some way and then learn they need to go into the settings and decrease difficulty (which good luck on getting Grandma to understand how to do that).

Do you know the difference between "hard" and "slightly increased"? Where have I mentioned that people need to fail?
And kindly remind me again where exactly I said that:
1) I want the game to be hard
2) FFXIV is supposed to be/ advterised as hard?
You have yet to do that.

I mean, you even highlighted "slightly increased" and yet you are talking as if I want to turn the game into a full-blown hardcore game while highlighting proof that it wasn't my intention at all.
Or why do you think I advocate for choices for easier modes (Duty Support/ difficulty settings for duties) to exist? Or specifically for midcore content?
Oh and I specifically said Duty Support is the default story mode unless you change settings - so it's easy unless you set it to harder. Please just read properly. Please.

If you want to have a sensible discussion I'm all ears. But as long as you're deliberately misinterpreting what others say just so you can paint them in the evil super duper hardcore elitist light that won't be possible.

[Kazelus]

Personally, i like the Music in normal and EX(i found "with hearts alligned" to be the worse of the two, it was a good hype music, but thats it, it was a good music for a "victory round" not for an actual fight)
I find it PERSONALLY fitting that the Final boss of the 10 year saga
it is quite litteraly a medley of each expansions final boss, Shinryu, the FF Overture in general, Ultima Weapon, Thordan, hades. There is not really a more fitting piece of music for this boss, Especially as its creation lead to basicaly everything we fought against even if indirectly. And honestly only ultima was "overused" prior to this fight from what i can remember

"With hearts aligned" was a fucking second wind and hope out of despair because after the first minutes of P1 musics I lost hope in Soken and Yoshida to bring that musics for the final fight... The first minutes in the arena is an old music already used too much times and that is not what I expected from them... So yeah, it was maybe the most fitting piece for this since in put into despair but... That killed the hype of the expansion & the emotions of the moments until "with hearts aligned" started playing. I had high hope for the EX version to be incredible, I was disappointed to a point... I literally stoped playing after having killed it, I don't want to farm for the mount because the music just makes me want to do something else... Just like Zodiark EX annoys me with his easyness, this fight just kills me with this musics...
And by the way, I'm really bad at recognizing music at first, so if I recognize a music somewhere I enter for the first time in less than 10 seconds in this game, I'm already out in my heads... (Yeah, this raid tier was not good for me either on that point but at least I wasn't expecting much on this side for this content...)

[Caitlyn]

I still need to do Aglaia this week. I will record a video tonight and post to youtube so you can see just how much you "dont need to heal for the most part." Im probably not allowed to link to the video here, but it will be findable

Well, I did Aglaia with 23 random ppl and recorded it. Based on the recordings, I counted the healings and raises I did. Shields and Pneuma are counted as heals as well. It may not be 100% correct though.

To make things more interesting, I asked the random WHM not to heal (excluding Assize, which is part of his damage rotation). As far as I can tell, he barely healed, with the exception of Assize, a few raises and maybe the one or other Afflatus Solace (because it was a bit messy at the end).


Aglaia, 03.06.2022 22:41 - 33 mins total

Byregot: 9 heals
Rhalgrs Pet: 4 heals
Rhalgr: 16 heals and 2 raises (2 deaths)
Lions: 3 heals because DNC got aggro
Azeyma: 30 heals and 3 raises (5 deaths)
Naldthal: 31 heals and 2 raises (4 deaths)

Total: 93 heals and 7 raises (of 11 deaths) from my side. If some video evidence is needed, I can provide a link here or via discord. Someone even uploaded the logs lol.

93 heals may look like a lot, but its not. Split that number in half because you have 2 healers. And I m just a casual with standard gear. Real raiders may heal the entire group with even lesser heals.


In conclusion: No, you dont really need to heal in Aglaia.

[Payotz]

I'm personally okay with most MSQ stuff(this includes the leveling dungeons) to be straight forward and easy. There's a lot of people that play the game just for the story (I was one before I raided) and has no interest in hard content at all, so it wouldn't make sense for it to be hard. MSQ is pretty much the lowest of the lowest floors because you have to do it to unlock the features of the expansion for so it makes sense for it to be really accessible. It's the bare minimum filter essentially.

I'm also okay with the 24 mans as it is. It's supposed to be LFR, raids for the casual playerbase. A place for a dude to just go in with a couple of friends and just have a good time. Kinda like the arcade, but in the MMO. Sure they can be as hard as pre-nerfed Orbonne (and I personally would love that type of difficulty back), it doesn't really have to be. 24 mans have its place, as a way for casuals to have a taste of raiding, with no pressure. Like a taste test of some sort.

Normals are the same thing. They're meant to be a taste of 8 man raiding. They have actual mechanics to make it more difficult than the MSQ trials, and are just there to put just a little bit of personal responsibility on the people in there. Go in, have some fun, farm the last turn weekly for the tome weapon token, blah blah blah, you know the drill.

Now I'm okay with the above three being accessible. They shouldn't really be much harder than what they are right now. They're just there for the people who can't handle raiding, and honestly that's completely fair. Make content for the peeps who just wanna vibe and chill without thinking about buttons. That's fine. They're all pretty much beatable by literally doing your 123s and that's perfect. Let people have that.

What I kinda have a problem with right now, is that they're slowly making the High End duties(aside from Ultimates) a lot easier.

Extremes have an enrage, but no dps check. Sure they should be easier than Savage, since it's technically the first fights a budding raider would do, but I don't think making the enrage not matter is a good path forward. I think they should still have a relatively tighter enrage, but have easy mechanics to compensate, since they should be the "do you know the basics of your job" check. If you can do your rotation while handling very straightforward mechanics, then you can clear the fight. As it is right now, it has easy and straightforward mechanics, but its dps check needs to be tightened a lot more. 5-8 deaths with damage downs should be the maximum leeway. Right now, you can clear EX 1, EX 2 and EX 3, with more than 10 deaths.

P3S and P4S are exactly where they should be. I have no problems with these floors. The only problem is that P1S is essentially has the ideal Extreme dps check. I don't think any of the floors for Savage should have an Extreme level dps check. I get that the tier gets "harder" as you prog through the tier, but P1S (and to an extent P2S) feels like they're made to be Extreme fights. I don't like the idea of Savage getting nerfed for the sake of "Ah yes more people into Savage!", because it's meant as a wall you have to overcome. Savage shouldn't have a welcome in mat. The welcome mat are meant to be the Extreme fights. Make the first and second Savage floors harder and make it appeal to the target audience of Savage, the people who like being tested and improving to overcome that test.

High End duties are meant to be a test of a player's endurance and consistency. Don't make them easier to try and shovel people in.

There's also no point to making the jobs easier to play when casual content demands 0 effort to clear (as it should be). The jobs should remain complex. BLM should be the baseline of complexity for the jobs in the game as it has a very low skill floor, but a very high skill ceiling. People who have no interest in tackling harder content will play the job as usual whether or not it's complex or the state it is now. The people who just do 1 2 3s or spam Cure 1s in Dungeons will still keep doing that whether or not the WHM has 3 more dps buttons and or the Monk has its positionals back.

Making the jobs easier and the high end content easier will just disgruntle high end players while barely affecting the casual players. Making the game accessible doesn't mean lowering the skill ceiling Yoshida. You can both lower the floor and raise the ceiling at the same time. It's just harder to do so, but hey, that's your job isn't it?

There needs to be room for skill expression in this game, and right now, there barely isn't.

[EgilTheStressedMage]

Lol we just wiped in LOTA because people didn't know not to stand in KB's hitbox during meteors...after someone explained it. People don't care, that's all it is. They just want the easy carry to the reward.

[TaleraRistain]

If the "In From the Cold" nerfs taught us anything, it's that the vast majority of the player base seems incapable of understanding context clues and is completely helpless without something akin to a bright neon arrow pointing them to exactly where they need to go.

It is my fervent hope that SE understands that said casual players will simply abandon the game when it becomes too boring for them, which it will in record time due to how absolutely braindead most content has become. SE will also lose the more dedicated fan base that was the source of this games revival and success in the process. SE will once again make the corporate mistake of prioritizing short-term profits over long-term sustained growth. I'm reminded of a line from the intro cutscene in Secret of Mana; time flows like a river, and history repeats. It seems as if the hubris of SE may once again be on the rise, with dedicated fans and new players alike, who both enjoy a challenge, being left behind in favor of the FotM fly-by-night casual crowd who will largely tap out after a handful of months.

There were legitimate complaints about the In from the Cold scenario, though. I can see it being very jarring for someone not used to that type of gameplay. Before it's brought up, no I'm not one of them. That was one of my favorite parts of Endwalker and I would be thrilled to see more like it, but I'm also a fiend for stealth games. And I know that can sometimes be an acquired taste in gameplay.

[Cygnia]

For me 'In from the Cold' the goal was reasonably clear; it was the clustered mobs that spawned without the whistles and bells stealth games normally offer to help sneaky-sneak past foes that hurt a lot. Being mediocre in Tenchu translated to eating dirt hard on multiple tries. So many times I'd wind up trapped between a gaggle of foes guaranteed to aggro and a fast approaching gang ready to split my helmeted head open like a melon.

[RitsukoSonoda]

For me 'In from the Cold' the goal was reasonably clear; it was the clustered mobs that spawned without the whistles and bells stealth games normally offer to help sneaky-sneak past foes that hurt a lot. Being mediocre in Tenchu translated to eating dirt hard on multiple tries. So many times I'd wind up trapped between a gaggle of foes guaranteed to aggro and a fast approaching gang ready to split my helmeted head open like a melon.

A majority of the complaints I recall seeing from ppl about "In from the Cold" were either ppl unhappy the quest had you play a different person who was unable to just walk thru the quest area killing everything while sipping a cup of tea or spent too much time finding the quest objectives in the magitek salvage because it wasn't auto marked on their map for them with big glowing markers on the main screen to make them go "ooh a piece of candy" repeatedly until they finished the quest.

As for the other person saying the quest indicated a vast majority of the player base being incapable of understanding context clues. Nah I'd like to think a majority cleared that quest like I did with 0 issue and it was just a noisy minority that didn't even read said clues making most of the noise as they were clueless on the quest due to doing the equivalent of buying assemble yourself furniture but throwing the assembly instructions in the garbage without even looking at them the moment you open the box.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

[...]In conclusion: No, you dont really need to heal in Aglaia.

Aglaia as a whole has a very pushover healing requirement. As far as unavoidable damage, either from raidwide or tankbusters, they all come out at very low frequency:

• Byregot
  
  00:10 - Ordeal of Thunder (Basic Raidwide)
  00:36 - Byregot's Ward (Basic Tankbuster cleave)
  03:13 - Ordeal of Thunder
  03:48 - Byregot's Ward
  ...With most auto attacks happening when the arena is transformed.
• Rhalgr
  
  00:12 - Lightning Reign (Basic Raidwide)
  01:07 - Broken World (Proximity)
  02:06 - Destructive Bolt (Basic Tankbuster)
  02:27 - Broken World + either real or fake proximities.
  03:52 - Destructive Bolt
  04:19 - Broken World
  04:26 - Lightning Storm (random, personal circle AoE)
  05:26 - Broken World
  All of these has very long cast time in which period Rhalgr stops auto attacking. He does not cast another Lightning Reign until about 6 minutes or longer into encounter, which is quite a rarity nowadays for his fight to last that long outside clownfiesta groups. Failing to do the knockback attacks properly results in instant deaths most of times (Yes, you can get get punched by Hand of Destroyer and somehow not falling off the arena).
• Azeyma
  
  00:12 - Warden's Prominence (Basic Raidwide)
  00:51 - Warden's Warmth (Basic Tankbuster AoE)
  02:07 - Warden's Warmth
  03:05 - Warden's Prominence
  03:32 - 1st Triangle knockback, minor damage
  03:36 - 2nd Triangle knockback, minor damage
  03:40 - 3rd Triangle knockback, minor damage
  04:21 - Sublime Sunset (Proximity)
  05:50 - Warden's Warmth
• Nald'Thal
  
  00:12 - As Above, So Below (Raidwide + Blue/Red Flame mechanic)
  00:35 - As Above, So Below
  01:01 - Heaven's Trial (Stack up) + Smelting (random personal cone)
  01:09 - Golden Tenet (Stack Up Tankbusters)
  01:20 - As Above, So Below
  01:47 - As Above, So Below
  04:03 - Fortune's Flux (Boss jumping around for pointblank or knockbacks with minor damage)
  04:46 - Fortune's Flux
  05:42 - Magmatic Spell (Add's stack up marker)
  06:48 - Tipped Scales (Ultimate Raidwide)
  07:07 - As Above, So Below
  07:33 - Stygian Tenet (Personal Tankbusters)
  07:43 - As Above, So Below
  08:08 - Hell's Trial (Basic Raidwide)
  If you're (un)lucky, Red "As Above, So Below" usually comes with additional damage from a line up marker.

Nald'Thal is a bit of an outlier amongst the 4, but nothing like pressing 1 or 2 more buttons from a healer's arsenal & it would be enough to go back to 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 again. This is one of the reason why day 1-3 of Alliance Raids are the most fun period for green icons.

[hynaku]

Quest In from the Cold wasn't even a challenge. Finished it on the first try.