New Unreal is a an all around miserable experience.

[ForteNightshade]

I don't recall the devs stating any of this. From what I recall, the problems began with Gordias, continued into Midas, and started getting better with Creator. There was a lot of trial and error back then, and current content, even Ultimate will never have the kind of difficulty associated with the inexperience between dev and playerbase that AS had. Regardless with how you feel about savage, the majority of the playerbase is incapable of clearing that content. If you disagree, start up a PUG in PF and see for yourself.

None of this is accurate. Yoshida specifically mentions the reason for Creator being toned down is due to player feedback citing the previous two tiers were too difficult. It had nothing whatsoever to do with inexperience from the dev team. In fact, Living Liquid and Brute Justice are widely regarded as two of the best designed fights in the game amongst the raid community. There's a reason for everyone's excitement when TEA was announced. Furthermore, Ultimate was a response to the playerbase whose skill had improved yet were losing content with the reduction in Savage difficulty. My own conjuncture is the other reason—one Yoshida would never say publicly—is they wanted a way to keep the raid community from unsubbing. Ultimate accomplishes this endeavour.

Also I honestly think the issue wasn't how hard gordias and midas were, it was that Coil at the time had a much smaller but in my opinion skilled playerbase did it.

The playerbase was significantly worse in ARR than HW. What caused the massive spike in difficulty is, ironically, the midcore players complaining because Coil took less than a week to clear whereas WoW raids took several. Gordias' difficulty was in direct response to the devs listening to the wrong players.

To go with your statement, theres nothing wrong with that, getting gear is part of the process, you are trying to assert current design to before, theres nothing wrong with tuning a fight to have a certain gear level, but that was not a mistake lets be honest.

I have to disagree here. Gear gating content is terrible design. It has nothing to do with player skill. Manipulator was simply unkillable for several weeks regardless of how flawless you played. This alone is a massive demotivator for most players, even incredibly skilled ones, because there's nothing to overcome. You literally cannot win because the fight has arbitrarily said, "come back in five weeks." Several World Prog caliber players have long criticised that design philosophy. Ultimate, for example, is not gear gated yet it remains incredibly challenging upon release. Dragonsong is by and far the hardest fight the game has ever made. You don't need artificial gating to make challenging content.

[Rueby]

Doing Sephirot unreal in PF gave me PTSD, I need ice cream and a hug cause I'm about to ugly sob after I cleared this on two chars.

[Deveryn]

People get clears on this? Wind / adds is usually where things end.

[einschwartz]

People get clears on this? Wind / adds is usually where things end.

Sounds about right. Wind adds is when things can start get chaotic if people aren't paying attention. I'm doing through PF with my limited playtime and have seen enrage three times!! It's always on the last pull so I have no luck getting clear. *Sigh*

It's likely that most of the better players are progging savage. That's why PF for this can be cursed at the moment.

[hagare]

you mean people don't clear unreal in DF? *shrug*

[Gemina]

None of this is accurate. Yoshida specifically mentions the reason for Creator being toned down is due to player feedback citing the previous two tiers were too difficult. It had nothing whatsoever to do with inexperience from the dev team.

I'm not exactly sure what you're arguing about. You are taking what I stated, and just rewording it.

Gordias' difficulty was in direct response to the devs listening to the wrong players.

Would you not agree that this is a result of inexperience? When I say inexperience, I'm not talking about inexperience with gaming development; I am talking about the inexperience with the playerbase. The dev team was not as aware of the players playing their game back then as they are now. Also the WoW type style and format of combat was new to this team as well, so there is inexperience in more ways than just one.

My own conjuncture is the other reason—one Yoshida would never say publicly—is they wanted a way to keep the raid community from unsubbing. Ultimate accomplishes this endeavour.

There is nothing wrong with observational awareness when making and stating a case. If I or someone else mentions that they don't recall the dev's mentioning something that confirms a statement from a player, that doesn't necessarily invalidate the claim. All I said was that I don't recall them ever stating that releasing Ultimate was to 'give back' the difficulty they took away from Savage encounters. I also think that is really lame and weak motivation behind content creation. If they haven't mentioned anything like that, then it remains a fact that they have not. Furthermore, if you 'feel' that Ultimate gives back that element of difficulty to players, that is much different than that actually being the intent for its inception. For someone like me who does not participate in current Savage or Ultimates, Ultimate content is just seen as a way to challenge players further, and the current Ultimate requiring completion of P4S confirms that.

[Gemina]

People get clears on this? Wind / adds is usually where things end.

I still haven't cleared this fight. Many, many attempts. I wouldn't say this is where things usually end, but rather this is the bar groups can't get past, IF they get there. A group that gets to enrage is capable of clearing this fight if they just clean up their errors. A group who can't even handle the purple/green spread mechanic in P1 isn't going anywhere, but will hopefully take valuable experience with them.

[Jirah]

i'm not saying it should be easy, i'm saying it should be possible. Like perfectly timed potions & burst phases, etc.

spare the hyperbole, your acting like its Sephorit Ultimate

[Packetdancer]

So it's fine to take Unreal away from me by massively increasing the difficulty, because I'm a filthy scrub who doesn't want to feel like they are taking a 3h organic chemistry final just to complete it?

I think the key issue here is that you're treating "Unreal" as though it is meant to be a difficulty level, akin to Extreme or Savage. It is not.

(Not, of course, that the game is always entirely consistent from fight to fight within a difficulty level even if it were, but I digress.)

I know this has been repeated multiple times already in this thread, but I'm going to come at the explanation from a slightly different angle.

Think instead of the "Unreal" duty as being like a movie theater; one month they might be running a noir thriller, another they might have a romantic comedy, and another time they might have a horror movie, or some classic science fiction. Most movie theaters are not dedicated to running a single genre forever -- much less the same single specific movie.

But having the theater say one movie's run has come to an end and start showing a different movie does not mean they are "taking the movie theater away" from someone who enjoyed the last movie they showed. It is, in fact, what the movie theater exists to do.

As does Unreal. It is, functionally, a theater that's like "Hey, remember this film? Some of you loved it back when we showed it for the first time. Some of you weren't in the neighborhood and so never got to see it properly. We've got a new restored high-quality print, and we're gonna show it again for a while!"

It's just that the movies are previous fights. And just like different movies can be from different genres yet still be shown in the same theater, different past fights revisited in Unreal can be of widely varied difficulty levels because... well, they're "high-quality restored prints" of fights that already exist.

Saying that because the previous 'currently playing attraction' in Unreal was easier, all others should be -- and that otherwise it was "taken away" from you -- is kind of akin to going to the movie theater and saying that because the last movie that was shown was a science fiction movie, all the movies shown there should be, and demanding that if the next movie is Casablanca, instead of just restoring the print they should remake it to be Star Wars, otherwise they've taken the movie theater away from you.

That's not how movie theaters work... and it's not how the Unreal system works. Or is meant to work.

I agree there's certainly space in this game for more midcore content, though I'd say the devs seem to be shifting focus a bit already with extreme trials to try to make them fill that gap; the Endwalker extremes have all been extremely approachable.

But Unreal is not meant to be that content; it is not even meant to be a particular classification of difficulty at all.

[Imora]

Living liquid was a great fight, just the tuning was rough for a lot of groups, mine included. Still traumatized by hand of pain.