Quote Originally Posted by TheMightyMollusk View Post
I feel like there has to be a distinction made between "challenging" and "hard". But it's been a long week and I'm not sure I'm up to the eloquence required to get the point across right now. I'll try to remember to come back to it later.
As threatened, I want to come back to this idea a bit. Lots of opinions incoming. I'm mostly going to be sticking to current endgame for this ramble, because by all things holy I'm tired of thinking about the Crystal Tower.

Most people aren't looking for something super-difficult, just something more engaging. And a lot of level cap content doesn't deliver on it after the first week or two. Part of it, I believe, is that item level increases without real synching defangs a lot of encounters. Compare Endsinger at launch to her state today; you can power straight through most of the first phase, without even seeing repeat mechanics beyond maybe the second set of planet collisions. You won't see the part where she resets the collisions to replay twice in a row, or the diving attack where she's also dropping AoEs on people. (The final phase is also over in half the time, but that part was basically a victory lap in the first place; now you just miss part of her monologue.) Now that most of us massively out-gear the fight, it's lost the threat and become almost a formality. Similar fates befell Shinryu and Hades. (Thordan on Normal mode was never a challenge in the first place, sadly.) Compare to, say, Hydaelyn, who syncs the party, and thus can still put the hurt on if you don't follow the mechanics, and it's night and day.

Now, part of the challenge is, naturally, going to be lost in repetition, as we simply learn the dance steps and remember how to do things. But power creep is undeniably a factor, too. The same also applies to other endgame content. Compare Aglaia or the first four floors of Pandaemonium at launch to now.

I also honestly feel that a lot of our jobs are simply far too powerful now. Tanks, in particular, being able to solo current dungeon bosses is absolutely absurd. The idea that healers can be left out of current content is also disheartening, to say the least. I'm not gonna go deep into healer game play, because I don't play them enough myself to feel qualified to do so, but I can see why most of them are less than happy right now. Tanks have lost all sense of challenge, which in turns means healers have less to do as well. Tanks could stand to be toned down some, to give the rest of us more to do.

That segues into another point. Are jobs hard to play? Well, no. Some are a little harder to get down than others (I struggle a bit with remembering Ninja's mudra combinations, for example), but none of them are especially difficult to figure out. But were they harder in the past?

For the most part, no. Not really.

I'm sure someone's already preparing an angry and probably insulting reply, but read on first.

Jobs have never been hard to play, at least not for the right reasons. Tanks used to struggle with aggro, because the game was designed around damage races and aggro stance reduced damage, so nobody wanted to use it. That's not really hard, that's just a weird design choice. Party buffs and AoE heals had smaller ranges, but that just meant people had to group up closer to the caster; it's not a challenge for the caster so much as a fail state for the other players. Machinists in Stormblood had a clunky and excessively ping-dependent Heat gauge; yes, you could learn to play around it and get decent results, but that's still more bad design than genuine difficulty. Summoners had to press a lot more buttons, but that's complexity, not difficulty. (Mind you, I'd agree that summoner went a bit too far in the other direction now, but it still wasn't that bad before.)

If anything, I'd argue that a lot of jobs just feel cluttered and overly busy, without actually being meaningfully more challenging to play well. More buttons doesn't equal depth when you're hitting them all in mostly the same order all the time anyway. Once muscle memory takes over, you barely think about it anymore anyway. (There's also my issues with attack and spell animations being obnoxiously overdone, to the point where it's sometimes hard to even see the target under everything happening, but that's a whole other thing.)

This kind of comes to my thoughts on the overall issue. I feel like the challenge should come from what the game is doing. Enemies need to hit harder and faster, and players need less ways to invalidate it all. I also feel that we should be worried more about watching the play field, rather than keeping up with a fifteen-button rotation and positional combos and other controller gymnastics. The basic building blocks are in the game, they're just not used as effectively as they could be. In short, I want it to be more challenging, but for the right reasons.