MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[vetch]

I disagree. Participating in high-end content since Creator and watching it require less and less healing even during progression is what I’m basing my statement on. And if Savage is suffering from lower and lower healing requirements, the content below it will suffer even more. I keep hoping to be proven wrong, and sometimes there’s that one fight that makes me feel like maybe content will becoming challenging again; but I’ve been waiting for several years to see this. One fight that actually challenges you every year or two years just isn’t acceptable, in my opinion.

I think if I hope for anything it should be for Square to open the purse and actually hire more staff for the game. Without dedicated healer designers who actually like healing on the job team *and* the battle design team, working together, it can't be anything but hit or miss whether a given fight has satisfying healing gameplay or just a raidwide every 30 seconds to make sure your green DPS are present and awake.

I’m hoping Sephirot Unreal will be a real throwback to his original HW fight, which was actually really challenging and hard. He was, more or less, a Savage fight. But again: that’s one fight that will only be around for ~4 months and then go offline when the next Unreal comes out. I wish it didn’t have to be that way.

It doesn't need to be that way. Guarantee you that the old Unreals are saved to a hard drive somewhere at CBU3 and could be brought back if the dev team wanted to. It boggles my mind that despite being stretched thin they go through the trouble of updating old trials for new levelcaps and then bin them after 4 months instead of sticking them in a corner of the duty list for MINE raiders to play with. Removing it after its patch cycle is up is a positive, deliberate choice, and it reeks of FOMO.

Also YoshiP's been on record in a Live Letter saying that they're deleting several mechanics from Seph Unreal. Earthshakers and something else where the tanks have to stand left & right of the boss, which I guess would be either towers or the double-stack? Either way, I was sad to hear it.

I don’t think the MSQ needs to be Dark Souls levels of hard, but making Extremes and Savage feel like Extreme and Savage again would be nice.

Yes. The MSQ is fine where it is (it could stand to be brought to a uniform, non-spiky level of difficulty, though). It's praiseworthy when a game offers multiple difficulty levels, and it's important, too -- one of the main ways to have fun is to be doing something that's not too far above or below your current skill level.

Problem being for healers that, when it comes to Extreme and Savage which should be the Medium and Hard to the MSQ's Easy, they end up being 'Easy 2' and 'Easy but you have to press W'.

Jobs used to have skill interactions that were a lot more nuanced than “fill gauge to 50 then press button for big hit”. ...

I've read about most of those, but thank you for the recap.