New Unreal is a an all around miserable experience.

[Ath192]

How? All the things the poster listed are either solo content that doesn't require any kind of mechanical precision or in the case of normal Trials/Dungeons can be done with a party of NPCs. We are talking about variable difficulty in group based content. There is very little to do between faceroll "for everyone" group content and meat-grinder challenging content in this game, UW Unreal was an exception. There is nothing equivalent to LFR/Norm/Hero/Mythic raid tiers in WoW for example. It's just the equivalent of LFR and Mythic level difficulty. And the people who would normally engage with the Normal and then Heroic level in WoW and then maybe step up into Mythic near the end of the tier essentially have no way to advance except throwing themselves at the massive difficulty spike between normal and Savage/Ex.

Its okay you feel like that, but unreal isn't the category for you to take it out on. In fact, you probably would've already cleared if you spent the amount of time you've spent complaining about it in this forum on practicing and studying the fight, perhaps making raiding friends.

But no, instead arguing with people who like the content, and the devs already released, is the method of choice here. For one I hope it stays as is and I'm happy there's challenging things to do in this game. There was midcore content, but it was people whining about how hard it was that got it nerfed. Orbonne, CLL, AV etc....

Everytime SE releases anything midcore people like you flock to the forums to nerf it to the ground. It almost seems as nothing will satisfy people unless its handed to them in a silver platter and SE actually pays them money instead for the priviledge of having these folks play their game.

[Kyu-Momo]

I did seph ex 70+ times when it was current for the birb mount.

Never. Again.
I'll wait until they do another ex for unreal, I'm skipping this one.

[Menriq]

How? All the things the poster listed are either solo content that doesn't require any kind of mechanical precision or in the case of normal Trials/Dungeons can be done with a party of NPCs. We are talking about variable difficulty in group based content. There is very little to do between faceroll "for everyone" group content and meat-grinder challenging content in this game, UW Unreal was an exception. There is nothing equivalent to LFR/Norm/Hero/Mythic raid tiers in WoW for example. It's just the equivalent of LFR and Mythic level difficulty. And the people who would normally engage with the Normal and then Heroic level in WoW and then maybe step up into Mythic near the end of the tier essentially have no way to advance except throwing themselves at the massive difficulty spike between normal and Savage/Ex.

Each person's experience is different, but I would imagine there is not a lot of people who weren't doing Savage or EX now suddenly starting to do the harder stuff because of UW Unreal. If anything (even by your OP), the UW Unreal was "faceroll for everyone" in my experience. Based on the previous Unreal fights, they've been consistent in doing their best to not change anything mechanically from when they were originally released, so I'm unsure why there is a need for this one to suddenly be an outlier.

[Issaella]

And what do you tell the players who wanted to experience Seph Ex as it was when it launched to the best the game can do? Which is where it's at now.

Why does your preference supersede their preference?

They can do what everyone has been telling me to do - go play it synced, min ilvl. To your second point, because they get Sav/Ex literally every patch that is at that difficulty level and people who don't have the skill/time/patience to do that have gotten nothing since DR/Dal (before the action stacking trivialized it) except UW Unreal.

[Saraide]

How? All the things the poster listed are either solo content that doesn't require any kind of mechanical precision or in the case of normal Trials/Dungeons can be done with a party of NPCs. We are talking about variable difficulty in group based content. There is very little to do between faceroll "for everyone" group content and meat-grinder challenging content in this game, UW Unreal was an exception. There is nothing equivalent to LFR/Norm/Hero/Mythic raid tiers in WoW for example. It's just the equivalent of LFR and Mythic level difficulty. And the people who would normally engage with the Normal and then Heroic level in WoW and then maybe step up into Mythic near the end of the tier essentially have no way to advance except throwing themselves at the massive difficulty spike between normal and Savage/Ex.

Please explain to us why unreal should be that midcore content.

[Issaella]

Please explain to us why unreal should be that midcore content.

Because it was in the last patch cycle.

[Angellos]

You have Sav, Ultimate, and Ex. Why can't we have 1 piece of content that people can do without hours upon hours of misery?

We have normal dungeons and normal raids for that. That is your easy content.

Matter of fact you have dozens of dungeons and raids to go do. You also have Island Ultimate, just trying to zone into your island. (but seriously. We have enough easy content. Not everything is supposed to be handed to you on a silver platter.)

[Menriq]

Because it was in the last patch cycle.

This is very subjective. You might have felt it was midcore, others might have felt it was too hard, whereas others might have felt it was extremely easy. From my perspective, any EX done on tier could be considered midcore, but others might have a different opinion.

[Saraide]

Because it was in the last patch cycle.

Then you have misunderstood the point of unreal. Unreal is supposed to provide the difficulty very similar to the original release. Ultima extreme was much easier on launch than sephirot extreme. Therefore the same has to be true for ultima unreal and sephirot unreal.

They can do what everyone has been telling me to do - go play it synced, min ilvl. To your second point, because they get Sav/Ex literally every patch that is at that difficulty level and people who don't have the skill/time/patience to do that have gotten nothing since DR/Dal (before the action stacking trivialized it) except UW Unreal.

I told you to check out min ilvl no echo (MINE for short) because to me it seems that's the level of challenge you are looking for. This fundamentally does not work for people wanting to experience sephirot extreme like it was back when it released because since HW we have seen massive job changes, massive potency creep and new jobs that are simply not balanced for low level content.

[Gemina]

Was a lot harder. A heavy pull in a dungeon required everybody in the party to be good (and for your connection to be stable as a tank/healer) because you needed to rotate cooldowns as a tank or you'd die quickly. The healer needed to be on the ball with healing or the tank would die quickly. DPS would need to burn the mobs down quickly or the tank would die quickly. Keep in mind that it was easy to run out of MP and TP back in those days too, so deaths were painful, and it was very common to wipe to heavy pulls (Neverreap was pure evil for this).

There are only two things that made large pulls more difficult back then. Neither of which you have listed here. The first is Cleric Stance when it swapped a healers MND and INT stats. The second is tanks lost enmity far easier than today, and this is related to a stance dance as well.

These two aspects to FFXIV early on made things more difficult in the same way that rocks were more difficult to transport before the invention of the wheel barrel.

Other than that, large pulls in dungeons are as dangerous now as they were then. A slip up from anyone tends to lead to a wipe.