Difficulty of normal content.

[SamLeens]

Awh, is someone upset they have to actually learn how to play the game 5 expansions in? It's about time.

Also casuals have enough content? The msq, normal raids, and trials are casual content. Not to mention fates, variants, etc. Just because they're too hard for you doesnt mean they aren't meant for casuals. Like I'm sorry but... what kind of gameplay do you actually want to see? Bc it sounds to me like you just want a clear of 'casual' content to be all but handed to you. This content is not hard, I'm sorry lmao.
If you die, you get raised. If you all die, you wipe and start over. Theres no punishment for it. Idk what kind of quality of people you play with, but I have literally never taken more than 1-2 wipes to clear any msq content or normal raid this expansion. The only time we wiped multiple times was during one of the expert dungeons (I imagine people can guess which one), and even then that was more due to accidents than anything.
...
If you find DT content too hard... have you considered, idk, getting a little better and practicing instead of complaining on the forums? I was struggling a bit during the r2 bullethell part... and then I did it more, and now suddenly I'm a lot better at it. Crazy how that works! But instead you run into a bit of trouble, a piece of content you can't just mindlessly blitz through, and that's too far, huh? Like I do want to reiterate this is level 100. You have had 100 levels, and 6 expansions worth of content to use to improve. This just tells me you've gotten too used to having everything handed to you, and I'm glad DT is finally taking steps to say 'okay, show us what you've learned'.
Besides, casuals are the reason jobs are so easy to play. I thought the whole idea was 'easy job, harder fights'. Now you want 'easy jobs, easy fights'? Like these fights dont even ask you to git gud. It's more like... git gud enough.

Instead of being so arrogant and assuming that everyone can do everything, the next time you say "i can't do that" or "That's too much for me", think about your text here and answer yourself with "Awh, is someone upset they have to actually learn how to do something?"
I also need my X attempts to get everything right and train my reflexes. My brain is rotten from depression, which also means my focus and attention sometimes spontaneously drops. Yes, i did Savage. No, i was never good at it. btw, my ast is lvl 100 and I'm not able to play this class properly. what now? am i not allowed to say this class is difficult?
One of the purposes of the forum is to vent your frustration in the right place, because most people can't keep their bad mood to themselves. Let them rant!
i don't like the insta-dead mechanic of the new dungeons either. Of course i don't want them to take them out of the game, bc i don't have to like everything and i can live with that.

[Kissune]

Instead of being so arrogant and assuming that everyone can do everything, the next time you say "i can't do that" or "That's too much for me", think about your text here and answer yourself with "Awh, is someone upset they have to actually learn how to do something?"
I also need my X attempts to get everything right and train my reflexes. My brain is rotten from depression, which also means my focus and attention sometimes spontaneously drops. Yes, i did Savage. No, i was never good at it. btw, my ast is lvl 100 and I'm not able to play this class properly. what now? am i not allowed to say this class is difficult?
One of the purposes of the forum is to vent your frustration in the right place, because most people can't keep their bad mood to themselves. Let them rant!
i don't like the insta-dead mechanic of the new dungeons either. Of course i don't want them to take them out of the game, bc i don't have to like everything and i can live with that.

...Do you think I actually complain when there is something too hard for me? When I come up against something I don't understand, and it kills me or catches me off guard, my first thought isn't 'that is unfun' or 'I'm going to go complain about this on the forums' it is 'how do I not let that happen again'. I am never, ever upset that I have to learn to play the game. In fact, I'm eternally grateful when the game has new things to teach me and to get good at. Bc at the end of the day this is a game, and there is not a single game on this planet that doesn't require or benefit from putting in effort to improve.
This is level 100. We are not talking about Sastasha, we are not talking about Ifrit (Hard), we are not talking about A1N. This is level 100. There are 5 expansions and ARR that someone has to get through to get to this point. If you have not learned to play the game at a basic enough level to push through these fights, I'm sorry but... I think at that point, saying skill issue is warranted. These fights are not hard to clear. They are challenging to get through without making any mistakes and maintaining full uptime, though, and that's where the fun comes in. These fights are piss easy if you just drop all damage and run around dodging telegraphs... and yknow what? You won't be punished for it. Like all other casual content in this game, you can just shunt responsibility of a clear onto someone else. But if you want to actually contribute to a clear, it's about damn time the game asked for SOME effort.

I'm sorry to hear you're depressed and you have attention issues, but I am also depressed and have attention issues (see my last post). That is not an excuse for game designers to cater to the lowest common denominator. A game for everyone is a game for no one. If you have to take several tries to learn a mechanic, go ahead. What's the worst that happens? You die? You wipe? Someone calls you a mean word and then gets immediately reported? There are no real consequences for being unironically bad at this game. Before, all being bad meant was the healer had to work harder to keep you alive. Now, it means you die. The punishment is still on the healer (rip 2400 mana, swiftcast, and a gcd) but now you get smacked with a weakness which is a good way to say 'don't do that again'. At the end of the day these fights are quite easy after you learn the tells, but I get the sense that OP expects every tell to be a big orange circle and doesn't read castbars or like, to be a bit blunt, have a sense of pattern recognition. Ff14 fights happen in cycles, and these raids and the msq content is no exception. You get the tutorial mechanic, then you do it again, then the next tutorial mechanic, then you do it again, and then they combine them by the end of the fight. And yknow what, you should expect to die the first couple of times you do it. You should expect to wipe the first time you pull a normal raid boss. Endwalker, I want to stress, was the exception to this. DT isn't too hard, EW was too easy. And people got too used to that.

Also, if this forum is for venting....why am I not allowed to cent back? I'm frustrated with entitled casual players who do not bother to put in a modicum of effort, so I'm ranting about it. Why the double standard?

...And as a side note, im sorry, but DT AST is piss easy. If you can't figure it out, idk what to tell you. If you compare it to StB, ShB or even EW AST, it's about as simple as it gets. The healing kit is the exact same, and the card system has had all variance and complexity taken out of it for the sake of a bunch of ineffective cards with effects about as interesting as mud. You can say the class is difficult, but I can also say you're wrong. I've played AST for years, I think I'd know by now how it feels.

Ultimately, if you are caught off guard by the raise in difficulty from EW to DT and your first reaction is to go on the forums and complain about how everything is just too hard and needs to be changed... Then ultimately, yeah. I think maybe this game isn't for you. No one should be owed a clear in anything in this game just for showing up, and even then you can still get carried by people who do want to put in effort, worst case scenario. The fact that I play and have done extremes with multiple people who have attention disorders and other such disabilities (my girlfriend, who is going to be in my savage static, has dyscalcula, and has struggled with any mechanic involving a direction since the onset. She doesn't demand this game stop using them) tells me that people who weaponize disabled people as a justification for anything deemed casual is just virtue signalling. This game could always do more for accessibility, but making every fight easy when theyve already simplified and watered down the jobs you take into them is not it. This is level 100. If you've made it this far, this should not be a challenge.

[SamLeens]

..They are challenging to get through without making any mistakes and maintaining full uptime, though, and that's where the fun comes in. .. But if you want to actually contribute to a clear, it's about damn time the game asked for SOME effort.

ill stick with it. maybe the player paid for level and story skip, or (ill quote you here) "Like all other casual content in this game, you can just shunt responsibility of a clear onto someone else."
Fun is not objective. whats fun for me may be torture for you.

I'm sorry to hear you're depressed and you have attention issues, but I am also depressed and have attention issues (see my last post). That is not an excuse for game designers to cater to the lowest common denominator.

And im sorry that you are also suffering from it.
Ive never said something about the game designers. i mean my occupational therapist said that ff14 is very suitable for working on my concentration and attention deficits. Of course, "everything only to a healthy extent".
i even said that i dont like the insta death mechanic in the dungeons but i want to keep them.

Also, if this forum is for venting....why am I not allowed to cent back? I'm frustrated with entitled casual players who do not bother to put in a modicum of effort, so I'm ranting about it. Why the double standard?

Venting is one thing but you make fun of the frustrations of others. Do you think it helps if you tell someone how wrong they are and that they should just put more efford into it?
Let's say you have a problem and tell a friend about it. The friend then tells you that your problem isn't a problem at all because it's ridiculous to them.
And now imagine he thinks a bit different and says: ‘It doesn't look like a problem to me, but i accept that its a problem for you.’

... The healing kit is the exact same, and the card system has had all variance and complexity taken out of it.. You can say the class is difficult, but I can also say you're wrong. I've played AST for years, I think I'd know by now how it feels.

for you its "piss easy", but not for me. thats a fact and im okay with it.

Ultimately, if you are caught off guard by the raise in difficulty from EW to DT and your first reaction is to go on the forums and complain about how everything is just too hard and needs to be changed... Then ultimately, yeah. I think maybe this game isn't for you.. .. This is level 100. If you've made it this far, this should not be a challenge.

ive never said that the difficulty is too much for me. i dont mind it.
i just wanted to say that you can't expect others to have the same opinion as you and that i can't play the ast bc im overwhelmed with the cards, healing and dmg. my attention span is simply too short and i quickly lose track of things.

[Kissune]

cropped

As I said before, if someone bought a skip, then the expectation should come that they still need to learn the game. The game at level 100 should not be designed around people who effectively just started playing, they are outliers and the skip even tells them to start with the basics before jumping into content.

When I say that it is fun to optimize for uptime and mistake-less play, that is very much subjective. Which is why the option to not do that is there. Some people don't want to optimize, and that's fine. They don't have to, the content is just as clearable if you have 100% gcd uptime vs 20%. It just takes longer, but not as much as you think. If people find the content too difficult, I doubt they're the kind of people who enjoy optimizing anyways, as (this might be mean) an optimization mindset requires a desire to improve at the game. Some people just wanna see the cutscenes and get the pretty glam. But unfortunately, for a reward to mean anything it must require some effort. That is just a fact. If people want rewards with no effort beyond paying a monthly sub for the game... that sounds more like gacha than an enjoyable game.

(Sorry, I'm replying to your responses in order, but editing the quote reply on mobile is a pain)

I don't really know what instant death mechanic in dungeons youre referring to. Most times you get either a stun, or a vuln and some heavy damage, but I cant remember anything that just outright killed me in one shot. Apart from maybe the final boss of the circus dungeon i cant remember the name of? Something dreadwalk.

The thing is about saying 'I accept this is a problem for you, but not for me' is that this person, OP, is trying to get the game changed for them. The fights being too easy was a problem for me, because I dreaded doing them. Them being more challenging gives me something to do, but they still aren't like, overly punishing so much that I need to fixate like I do in extreme or higher content. I was so happy going through the story and I couldnt just turn my brain off for every piece of content like Endwalker, and it boggles my mind that people want it back. Because I wasn't a good player at the start of Endwalker, I was still casual. But i kept losing focus midway through and eating shit because things were just so boring. Dying because a fight is hard is one thing, but have you ever died because you started zoning out bc of lack of fun? Of course, the beauty of it was... I just got raised and got back into it. Because ultimately, I feel like people miss a big point. Dying is okay. Missing damage is okay. Wiping is okay (especially with the change to shortcuts in dungeons). This aversion to all failure points as OP seems to advocate for is part of why even the devs admitted that EW was a step too far.

As for AST... if you like, I could teach you. I havent played the class beyond 92, but not much has changed except for the cards, which I'm already familiar with. I'd be happy to keep the job alive, even if I end up straying away from it.

[Alzinor]

As for AST... if you like, I could teach you. I havent played the class beyond 92, but not much has changed except for the cards, which I'm already familiar with. I'd be happy to keep the job alive, even if I end up straying away from it.

AST is RN the best healer, dw the job will be kept alive.

[Kissune]

AST is RN the best healer, dw the job will be kept alive.

By kept alive, I mean by people who have a passion for what it is. Not meta slaves. Those people would discard astro as soon as white mage gets its inevitable buffs

[SamLeens]

.. The game at level 100 should not be designed around people who effectively just started playing, they are outliers and the skip even tells them to start with the basics before jumping into content.

i know, but i also know that not everyone does what they're told. you drew the line at lvl 100, for me it's around lvl 70-80, but i can't expect that from others. i can only expect that from myself, because no one is playing to fulfil my expectations.

..But unfortunately, for a reward to mean anything it must require some effort. That is just a fact. If people want rewards with no effort beyond paying a monthly sub for the game... that sounds more like gacha than an enjoyable game.

it sounds like a different reason to play the game. my reason is as i told you the brain training and savage in pf until im fed up. for others it can be the login after a shitty day, or just to relax and thats the reward they are looking for.

I don't really know what instant death mechanic in dungeons youre referring to. .. but I cant remember anything that just outright killed me in one shot. Apart from maybe the final boss of the circus dungeon i cant remember the name of? Something dreadwalk.

the cactus boss, for example, kills you instantly if you get hit by the thorns. i, as healer, died to all the bosses in the new dungeons at least 4 times, bc i missed one mechanic (and most of the time, there's no one to rez me so its a wipe or i have to wait until the boss is dead).

The thing is about saying 'I accept this is a problem for you, but not for me' is that this person, OP, is trying to get the game changed for them.

Yoshida-san said in an interview 4 months ago that "So from now on, we’ll keep working to surprise players and go beyond what they imagine. But that reminds me of something I regret… as we’ve continued to operate FF14, we’ve made the game more comfortable, a game you can play without stress. But looking back on the last 10 years, I’m thinking we’ve overdone that a bit." https://www.ign.com/articles/final-f...-going-forward
I dont think that they will back down immediately. They knew that players will get mad.

i would tell anyone who is stressed about the new difficulty that it will get better soon and not to worry. we all had content that we had to practice and everyone is going to experience changes at some point that they're going to reject at first, so i would be patient.

As for AST... if you like, I could teach you. I havent played the class beyond 92, but not much has changed except for the cards, which I'm already familiar with. I'd be happy to keep the job alive, even if I end up straying away from it.

thanks for the offer! That would be great. wow! but how would we do that?

[Besame]

We are not asking you fanboys to alter YOUR raid choices as they are. There are many of us with issues that can make the game we love less enjoyable and would perhaps enjoy an enhancement we can choose to make our lives a little easier. Why would you hate that so much? We leave you alone and we enjoy the game....