MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Absurdity]

They've also said they won't increase DPS options. There's no need to be at pains to respect one decision but not the other.

And personally, I'd much rather ask for something I enjoy than something I'm ambivalent about.

Because even if they say they were going to increase healing requirements it would most likely end up a joke.

Since the healer rework with ShB they have claimed to have increased healing requirements for fights multiple times. Every. Single. Time. it changed exactly nothing, you still healed the encounter the same as always.

So I'd rather take more DPS options that actually exist and make a tangible difference, instead of "more difficult" healing that only exists in the dev's heads. Which would also help with not falling asleep in low end content like dungeons or alliance raids, because they most certainly won't make healing harder in those.

[Daeriion_Aeradiir]

Because even if they say they were going to increase healing requirements it would most likely end up a joke.

Since the healer rework with ShB they have claimed to have increased healing requirements for fights multiple times. Every. Single. Time. it changed exactly nothing, you still healed the encounter the same as always.

See the thing is, they have increased healing requirements steadily. The problem is that the fight design hasn't changed, so you tackle the increased healing requirements the same way - throw however many buttons needed to survive at it, then go back to dps.

The other problem is that it's extremely skewed towards the shield healers in general, something that a phase like P7 DSR extremely showcases when you take a look at what the shield healer is doing compared to a WHM. You can easily compare a fight like uwu, ucob or TEA to DSR and you'll see major differences. Outside of Golden phase & primal roulette, even back in the day most of the general raid wides in the fight only required a 10% + shields to survive, even if it was spooky. TEA is an even bigger problem in that once you get past BJ/CC, the healing is absolutely non-existent besides a small section of J-waves.

Then you look at DSR where basically every single raidwide aoe requires 3-5x 10%s + shields or you instantly drop dead. Or take P4s week 1 for example, where you compare to week 1 E12s where every maleficium could be technically survived with shields and nothing else, Bloodrake & Decollation would sometimes just obliterate from full HP + shields if there wasn't some kind of extra 10% rolling.

Agree with that. The other thing is, if they're rolling out trusts to all trials and dungeons, could they not in principle add such a feature to those too (in the sense of easy/very easy)?

No, because roulettes exist.

For a sizeable chunk of the playerbase, roulettes are their 'endgame'. The kinds of people that don't want a challenge, want to lie back and enjoy whacking some dungeons/trials for easy tomes while they have a laugh with their buds on VC. Or the people that have limited playtime and don't want to spend half of it wiping to one trial. Roulettes in general are the lifeblood of the game for the vast majority of the playerbase, and are meant to be daily chores to skinnerbox people. Because of this, if they ever added easy/very easy options to an instance, those would be the default for any roulette by vision of the dev's game design.

Which ultimately, would make the 'hard' equivalents a waste of dev time, since you'd only ever see them by manually queueing them - and who would manually queue say, Leviathan Hard mode when it offered no rewards and would pose no challenge for anyone even remotely skilled? It'd have been a waste of dev time that some people might queue up for once for funsies, then fall into obsoletion. Why even bother when they could spend that time working on literally anything else?

The devs have made their stance on MSQ clear; it'll always be easy, no if's and or buts. Asking for changes is literally a waste of anyone's energy since any feedback regarding it will likely go straight into the bin when they have petabytes of statistics clearly stating their current direction is correct due to the changing landscape of the video game industry. In a game industry that is growing ever more predominant base of users that play video games to relax, or play them not to be challenged, and an industry where whales have infinitely more intrinsic value as customers than a normal customer does, casting the widest net in hopes of snagging a whale that will spend 50x on the mogstation than you ever will in sub costs by making the game friendly to people of any skill level is the industry meta. It's why they're pushing the 'single player MMO' idea so much and going back to re-do parts of the game to make it friendlier towards that playstyle - because its working. There's a reason Square's mobile games division is the main money maker of the company, and it ain't because of making challenging games; quite the opposite.

Your energy is better directed at asking for more optional content with modular difficulty unrelated to the MSQ in any way, like the Criterion dungeons they're working on.

[HyoMinPark]

No, because roulettes exist.

I think Lauront was proposing these difficulty options be added to the Trust versions only, since he mentions Trust dungeons. So this would have zero effect on the roulettes.

I think there would be a way to add this without having to put too much time into it. Instances can already give you Super Echo, so perhaps just apply the reverse to mobs where now they have the buff. Obviously not as ridiculous as the 200% or 300% or whatever the Super Echo buff is, but kind of like how Gloom in deep dungeons give all mobs haste, vuln downs, and damage up.

I think I would have more sympathy for healers if I wasn't seeing a large number who refuse to heal anyone for any reason and just DPS. Since moogle started it has been a positive rush of healers refusing to heal. Some even saying at the beginning "I am going to DPS so better not screw up none of you will get heals." Great fun when the tank is doing it for the first time and missing mechanics. In over 40 runs of Prae I have run into at least 9 healers like this.

My attitude is you want more to do? Show me you can do what you are expected to do now.

Are they actively refusing to heal, or are they utilizing oGCDs or HoTs to gradually get people up? I see people making comments like this, and I wonder how many times this is truly a case of a healer refusing to heal and a healer who simply does not spam their GCDs until everyone is at 100% HP and then maintain 100% Medica II uptime. There are players who are under the impression that this is how you heal in this game. I’ve met people who refuse to comm healers that don’t play like this because they’re “nervous” if they’re missing 15% of their HP when 85% is more than enough to survive in most content. It’s like the PLDs that Clemency if their HP drop below 90%. I just leave them to it, then; if they want to heal so bad.

It’s rare I run into a healer that will straight up refuse to heal and just press their nuke, and far more common to find one who does minimal damage while every other GCD is Medica II or E.Prog when literally no damage is happening and no one is in danger of dying.

I’ve been doing Orbonne Monastery since the event started and my cohealers are nearly always the type to heal when it isn’t necessary and stand around doing nothing or next to nothing. To the point I just let them solo heal since they are negating my HoTs and not letting them do their job. The irony is that, when left to do this, they aren’t even that good at it. When one was left to solo heal Cleansing Strike, they couldn’t do it. They did Ixochole > E.Prog > Physis and then just sat there as the party dropped like flies around them.
In my defense so I’m not accused of not healing/helping, I had died due to the tank running off with the tether that gives you a 20s physical vulnerability up, and subsequently bettering his relationship with the floor; and I took the tank buster because he didn’t take my raise fast enough. When I got up and Cleansing Strike was happening, I had about 2,000 mana and no Thin Air stacks. So it certainly wasn’t that I just let them die. I literally didn’t have the resources to save them since I had spent so much picking up the slack of this SGE (they didn’t want to Raise, either. I was raised by the SMN in our party).

[Lauront]

I think Lauront was proposing these difficulty options be added to the Trust versions only, since he mentions Trust dungeons. So this would have zero effect on the roulettes.

I think there would be a way to add this without having to put too much time into it. Instances can already give you Super Echo, so perhaps just apply the reverse to mobs where now they have the buff. Obviously not as ridiculous as the 200% or 300% or whatever the Super Echo buff is, but kind of like how Gloom in deep dungeons give all mobs haste, vuln downs, and damage up.

I do mean the trust system, yes, since they are retrofitting all older MSQ content to be trust-compatible and my understanding is this will also apply to future stuff given Yoshi's aspiration to allow the game's main story to be playable as a single player, as an option. Hence implementing such options within that framework. It'd provide more flexibility for how they design fights in the MSQ if they could provide an option for players who simply want to clear without much trouble an easy option that can be selected via the trust system (with reduced rewards or something after the first clear.) Similarly, as you mention, you could do harder modes too without too much hassle.

The devs have made their stance on MSQ clear; it'll always be easy, no if's and or buts. Asking for changes is literally a waste of anyone's energy since any feedback regarding it will likely go straight into the bin when they have petabytes of statistics clearly stating their current direction is correct due to the changing landscape of the video game industry.

Unfortunately those "petabytes of statistics" don't seem to stop SE from making errors - sometimes abysmal ones. But like Hyu mentioned, I am referring to the extension of the trust system to MSQ dungeons/trials.

Your energy is better directed at asking for more optional content with modular difficulty unrelated to the MSQ in any way, like the Criterion dungeons they're working on.

We'll see how those turn out in practice. I'm glad they made the step of adding them, at least.

It does seem to be limited, at least currently, to duties required to progress through the MSQ.

While I much prefer the Trust system when running dungeons, this is an MMO and completely removing the need to group up with other players would hurt the game. But I understand putting in place systems to make sure players can progress the story with as few requirements for other players as possible.

Yeah, by "future stuff" I mean future MSQ content, i.e. the dungeons and trials linked to it. I don't recall them discussing what they'll be doing with MSQ content in future patches (they'd said their aim was to retrofit older stuff by 7.0 and onwards), but given that it is an aspiration of Yoshi's to make this a feature of the game, I'd expect it will apply to future MSQ content too and will be designed to be ready for this. I agree with your sentiment, either way.

[Seera1024]

I do mean the trust system, yes, since they are retrofitting all older MSQ content to be trust-compatible and my understanding is this will also apply to future stuff given Yoshi's aspiration to allow the game to be played as a single player.

It does seem to be limited, at least currently, to duties required to progress through the MSQ.

While I much prefer the Trust system when running dungeons, this is an MMO and completely removing the need to group up with other players would hurt the game. But I understand putting in place systems to make sure players can progress the story with as few requirements for other players as possible.