What are your unrealistic expectations for the upcoming Combat Live Letter?

[Lyth]

The way the 14 community defines midcore would probably lean more towards “difficult casual”, in this way the current extreme design leans too far towards savage light to be good bridging content

It's hard to compare FFXIV's encounter design to Warcraft, because they diverged ages ago.

Based off of what I remember, Warcraft tended to have stricter restrictions on battle raises, being on 10 minute cooldowns and only available on two or three classes. Contrast that with FFXIV's implementation, where Raise is ubiquitous, can be readily made instant cast, and Healer LB3 raises everyone at once. Auto damage is another influential factor as well, because a dead tank in Warcraft could lead into a string of oneshots.

When you take away these failure conditions, then fights continue until you hit a body check or enrage, so long as a couple of people know the mechanics. This means on average you will clear story mode content, irrespective of what the mechanics are, even if the player dies to the first mechanic and grabs a coffee while it plays out.

Extremes are essentially the lowest tier of content where there's any sort of failure condition present. There's no way to make the transition softer than that. If you wanted to make normal mode content more challenging, you could place variable restrictions on raises, similar to what we saw them experiment with in Criterion. But at some point in the difficulty curve you have to introduce in a mechanical pass-fail check that causes a raid wipe. If a player can't get over that fact psychologically, they're never going to put themselves in a place where they'll be challenged, regardless of how you brand the content difficulty level.

[Sjol]

If a player can't get over that fact psychologically, they're never going to put themselves in a place where they'll be challenged, regardless of how you brand the content difficulty level.

Except many of us can if the difficulty curve is smoother. It's not like the people who are failing miserably don't know they're failing miserably. There's a range between hard-fought and close but lost; and face-plant over and over with no feeling of progression. I definitely know people who aren't interested in anything remotely difficult, but there are a bunch of people who don't have the schedule for statics but are interested in pushing themselves with friends or just PF but have trouble finding stuff in the middle to get better at.

I'm also frustrated at how poor the combat log is in that it doesn't tell you what ability killed you. That's basic information that's kept from the player. The log just says, "You take [type] 4567 damage." I did raid in WoW back in the day and when I died, I would check to see what killed me so that I could focus on avoiding that. That's also not something I expect them to change. The combat log feels like an afterthought for the game.

[Lyth]

...

It's not really about personal skill. You can learn any fight that you want with enough practice in PF, regardless of time/schedule constraints. As you learn more combinations of challenging mechanics across multiple fights, you progress through newer fights faster. I think if you just go into PF with the mindset that you want to see past the next mechanic, then you'll get there eventually. Even if you wipe prior to that point, you're still building up consistency. When you're consistent enough, the stars will align with the other seven players and you'll cross to the next prog point.

That's also how you can tell how far into a fight someone is. There's a complete difference in consistency between someone who is clear ready and someone who has just seen the mechanics and understands them on a theoretical level. You'll see that very quickly if you jump back into an earlier prog point just for a bit of extra practice.

It's not about difficulty. It's just that you have to face the discomfort of wiping and disbanding in order to progress and get better. It does help to do fights as close to release as possible, just because you'll get matched up with more consistent players. This is especially true for Savage tiers, where you save progression time by investing it early rather than late. But there's no 'challenge' without a failure condition and wipes, much like there's no 'platformer' without 'pitfalls'.

As for the in-game combat log, you have four panels, so you can easily customize one of them in the game settings to only filter through the relevant information. The problem with the default battle tab is that it gives you too much information. Debuffs are a really good one to pair with damage taken, because it often tells you what debuff was responsible for the lethal damage. You'll often see a double instance of damage if you take an effect under a vulnerability. Enemy casts are also useful because they give you a framework on what mechanic is happening at the time. This could be made more intuitive, but there are ways of making it more readable. You just need to get the settings right.

[Sjol]

It's not about difficulty.

For you. Others may have limited investment time and having difficulty that can be managed in hours, days, weeks, months, etc. at different timescales allows people with limited time to tackle the level of difficulty they have time for. I don't have the time to play to master Ultimates. My life is at a different point where putting aside that many hours when people are still tackling it, it's feasible. And I'm not saying don't have Ultimates. I'm saying that a sliding scale of time investment is good for a broad-appeal game (wanting millions of players would imply FFXIV wants to be broadly appealing).

[Valence]

But at some point in the difficulty curve you have to introduce in a mechanical pass-fail check that causes a raid wipe. If a player can't get over that fact psychologically, they're never going to put themselves in a place where they'll be challenged, regardless of how you brand the content difficulty level.

That's what Dun Scaith and Ivalice did and they were not extremes either (or CLL/Dalriada). Far from it.

[Lyth]

That's what Dun Scaith and Ivalice did and they were not extremes either (or CLL/Dalriada). Far from it.

Those encounters rely on a confluence of errors from multiple players at the same time as a requirement to fail the encounter. I'm referring to personal responsibility, as in encounters where every player present has to know how to execute every mechanic. You'll never see that in 24p content. You won't even see it in BA/DRS.

Either fights have personal responsibility or they don't. There's no way to gradually ease you into content that has it. You have to dive into it, and you'll either sink or swim.