I think SE needs to focus on making players feel important again.

[Ath192]

A quick trip to the forums in its early days says otherwise. People werent peaches and cream with 2.0 nor in HW nor in SB.

Stop being in denial, its one of the biggest contributing factors in why this game refuses to evolve and be better.

People are singing praises of the game still in Endwalker. What’s your point? That you can find dissent in any period of time? Is this news to you? =S…..

But I do agree with you the game needs to evolve out of this philosophy.

As far as my takes go ARR wasn’t that good, but it was okay. heavensward got better but the game hit its stride in SB.

Honestly the only thing that should’ve been removed was the TP system and kept around that level of job complexity. This is where SHB got it wrong by beginning to homogenize jobs and simplify too much. And EW continued that trend and that’s what has now made it awful.

[PercibelTheren]

It actually feels awful to use lilybell or panhaima in a dungeon. It’s so overkill I actually feel like I wasted a hugely powerful ability…. That will never be needed for most of the game…

I know this is different in savage and ultimate, of course, but it’s getting to the point where you actually feel terrible using them elsewhere.

I can't speak to Ultimate as I've never done those, but you absolutely don't need your whole kit in Savage unless something is going HORRIBLY wrong and at that point, it's a wipe anyway because fights no longer allow you to recover. There are so many body checks that you will wipe the moment people start dropping. Raidwide attacks in Savage are timed in a way that ensures either healer can just slap down an OGCD heal and not even think about it. It's kinda sad. Between little thought required and the fact that body checks have made rezing useless outside of prog, it makes me wonder why healers are even a role at this point.

[OgruMogru]

The reason it feels like it's come to a head with Ew is because it's the expansion that has made the most obvious missteps - post 6.0 [no content longevity, poor rewards, missfires in the execution of certain content] and has also failed to correct or address longer standing issues [like loot distribution, job balance, encounter design etc] so it's sorta holding over all those issues of a much better received expac AND people are really bored so are gonna fight more.

Imo, why things felt better in past expansions compared to now, is simply because the historic response to issues from devs, especially with battle content, is to just remove remove remove - every time. Aggro management gone, timers on many jobs gone, healer dps kits gone, job synergy buffs gone, varied buff timers gone, OT responsibilities gone, TP gone, Accuracy gone - there's more I'm forgetting and I am not saying that all of these were good things! There are several listed there I'm glad to see the back of but we never got anything else in their place and it's just kinda reached a breaking point. This is what I think of when I wish for more complexity in battle content in general. It's like having phantom limb syndrome!

[Theodric]

A quick trip to the forums in its early days says otherwise. People werent peaches and cream with 2.0 nor in HW nor in SB.

Stop being in denial, its one of the biggest contributing factors in why this game refuses to evolve and be better.

Heavensward wasn't perfect but it was the game's first expansion so players were understandably willing to give the development team more room for error. That isn't the case with Endwalker as by their own admission they had material for multiple expansions but decided to squeeze them together and focus heavily on 'slice of life' and 'relaxed pace' content at the expense of content with staying power.

By this point the development team should have realised what is needed and what isn't for an expansion to have longevity. That's why Endwalker is more harshly criticised than Heavensward.

[ForteNightshade]

The difficulty curve in normal modes feels almost completely static from basically level 50 to 90 and that really shouldn't be the case especially when healers/tanks keep getting expanded kits that oft end up feeling like unneeded fluff outside of extreme and higher content.

You don't even need to burn all of your CDs to do wall to wall pulls while maintaining 100% uptime on DPS nowdays.

It isn't even the kits themselves but how comically undertone everything has become. Nothing epitomizes this more than Aetherfront where the last boss quite literally cannot kill Warrior. Despite intentionally collecting eight vuln and standing in three intersecting AoEs, I only took just slightly over 100k, which didn't proc Holmgang. What's even the point of dodging mechanics if they're so pitifully weak? Obviously, a DPS can't get away with this but it certainly highlights why healers feel so useless in a lot of content nowadays.

The dev team seems to be obsessed with making everything below EX a participation experience and nothing else. You can't fail unless you outright try, on purpose, for the most part. I certainly can't speak for everyone but it does make the content and jobs themselves much less enjoyable to play when I know nothing actually hurts.

[Jeeqbit]

Does anyone remember how hard simple trash mobs in 50-60 dungeons could hit?

They still hit that hard in leveling dungeons. It has a lot to do with the fact our gear is far better than the dungeons we are doing. Only the most casual players, who only ever equip dungeon loot, experience a high amount of damage coming in from patch dungeons. But our tools to deal with it are also better than in ARR (for example a PLD wouldn't have Holy Sheltron, a regen and constant healing from Requiescat attacks.

Do you remember stuff like the wasps in Temple of Qarn or the poison in Aurum Vale?

We did have interruptable mobs in Shadowbringers that, if not interrupted, significantly buffed their damage output or did strong raid-wide aoes that could almost wipe depending on the healer. But obviously healers and tanks have so many tools to handle even this that many of them push through it despite tanks not knowing what interrupts and stuns are.

Heavensward wasn't perfect but it was the game's first expansion so players were understandably willing to give the development team more room for error.

It was also the case that they listened more and expressed they were willing to. 1% of 300,000 players was 3,000. Now 1% is 12,000. The minorities have become louder and the division has clouded everything, so none of the minorities can be ignored. Instead they confuse everything for the developers so that they don't really know what to do or what to listen to.

Although things weren't great then, it was off the back of the failure that was 1.0, this extremely convenient version of an MMORPG (with /teleport and quests that only ask you to kill 3 enemies), the subsequent great story, a feeling that the story kept getting better and better, and that the visual and acoustic design got better with every patch with dungeons like Sohm Al and The Vault. When we got Final Steps, I was like wow! Then Xelphatol's visual detail just amazed me to look at it. Then Baelsar's Wall topped it. Then we got Stormblood's Sirensong Sea, Ala Mhigo with all the busy fighting going on in the background, The Swallow's Compass, The Burn completely topped everything for me and then we got Ghimlyt Dark which topped that.

At that point, the next dungeons like Holminster Switch were amazing, but that's really where it started to hit diminishing returns. They made dungeons as good as they could, visually and I'm sure it's not that they aren't making improvements, they just sort of reached the peak, so the "constantly impressed with how they keep making dungeons look better" became one of "this is just normal, it's always this good".

By this point the development team should have realised what is needed and what isn't for an expansion to have longevity. That's why Endwalker is more harshly criticised than Heavensward.

Yes, because staying power obviously hasn't been their goal. That was true in Shadowbringers to a degree, but WoW refugees would constantly talk highly of a quote from Yoshi-P saying he was alright with people taking breaks to play other games. With such overwhelming support for the concept of games not trying to keep you for long, is it any wonder that they double-downed on it in Endwalker?

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I've been here since 2.X and remember when people loved it when things were challenging back then. As more new players and casuals come to the game, I've felt more like I'm the outcast despite being here the whole time. Like I'm the one who doesn't fit in anymore as the game has gotten dumbed down to appease the new wave of influx gamers.

The problem with that example is there's a very easy thing that disputes it. Pharos Sirius. People would refuse to unlock it or leave on pop because it was more difficult than the other dungeons in that roulette. I remember seeing posts from people who said they felt punished by being unable to do the roulette since it required all the dungeons being unlocked.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

It actually feels like difficulty gets down once you've hit 50/60 dungeons. I wipe more often in old content than I ever would in 90 dungeons. 90 dungeons are just wall to wall pulls, where I throw my endgame rotation like a maniac at trash that has the size of an ARR boss, but still dies in 20 seconds max.

Does anyone remember how hard simple trash mobs in 50-60 dungeons could hit? Do you remember stuff like the wasps in Temple of Qarn or the poison in Aurum Vale? Hells, do you remember Diablos in Amdapor?! What happened to stuff like that???

Most groups I was in could cheese the diabolos fight.

As for leveling content in 2.0, part of the reason it was harder was because ilvl sync worked differently back then. Originally it synced you to nq gear stats, not hq gear stats. Which means you were nerfed going in over the level of the dungeon. When they changed that stuff magically got way easier.

[Ath192]

The problem with that example is there's a very easy thing that disputes it. Pharos Sirius. People would refuse to unlock it or leave on pop because it was more difficult than the other dungeons in that roulette. I remember seeing posts from people who said they felt punished by being unable to do the roulette since it required all the dungeons being unlocked.

Well; it should be mandatory to unlock in order to run roulettes TBH. Since roulettes are optional by nature. It’s not only the difficulty that people cheese. People were cheesing the hell out of the praetorian and Castrum cutscenes and what did they do? They made the players put up with them. And I would argue that it made the game better, even if I personally don’t want to sit there and watch Gaius monologue for the millionth time I recognize it makes the gaming experience better.

The same applies to challenge. IRL people will avoid challenge too, but often times having to deal with it you realize the experience made your life better.

I didn’t want to put the effort in to work out and get in shape at one point in my life, but after putting it in I am thankful I did and I am glad and healthy.

We just shouldn’t be catering to people who don’t want to play the game. We should reward those that do.

[Gemina]

Heavensward wasn't perfect but it was the game's first expansion so players were understandably willing to give the development team more room for error.

Are you sure about that? I wasn't involved with the raid scene back then, but from what has been reported, Gordias was so ridiculous groups had to prog Faust... A gate boss. Players were dropping in droves, and the FFXIV dev team nearly killed their own game right after resurrecting it in ARR.

By this point the development team should have realised what is needed and what isn't for an expansion to have longevity. That's why Endwalker is more harshly criticised than Heavensward.

Again. Are you sure? I would actually say HW is more criticized now than it's ever been due to players acknowledging what a clusterfuq it was. From my own perspective, EW is criticized for different reasons. Instead of there being essentially no rhyme or reason to how jobs and encounters were designed back in 2.x, the flak the dev team faces now is for homogenization and over simplification, which was essentially their answer to the criticism from the past.

To help put things in perspective, tanks for example spent as much time as possible out of tank stance in order to maximize their damage output. They were quite literally telling the dev team, "Eff tank stance. That crap is for saps who don't know how to play tank." Their response: Since you would rather not switch stances because you have to sacrifice damage, we will just take it away and instead make it so everything you do generates enmity as long as it is on.

Tanks didn't like that too much, did they? Now, I'm not trying to gloat or say tanks got their just desserts. The dev team could have responded one of two ways. Either eliminate stance dancing, or to punish tanks for remaining in offensive stance in a similar fashion that DPS get erased when they greed excessively. One choice brings us to current design in EW, and the other moves them in the way of Gordias. These kind of decisions were made across all roles in the game for their own respective causations. If you were calling the shots, what would you decide?