The Difficulty Schism (And Why The Real Enemy is Scaling & Max iL Sync)

[Aldath]

I agree. I started at SHB, and I had interest in FFXIV boss design since ARR launch because of how fun it loked and how cool the music was. Lo and behold, since the Ifrit fight and until I reached Endwalker, the instanced content was one of the biggest dissapointments I've ever had. Very good game design, having the player lose about an hour and a half doing a banquet so a group of douchebags tell you that the weak point of the boss is the obvious unprotected shiny spot on its chest, and then have this battle that was hyped some hours before that take at most 2 minutes, and that was with Duty Support.

I don't know why on earth they gave Ultima and Castrum a pass to make it less anti-climatic. Ultima is still a fun and challenging battle for complete sprouts, and it isn't an absolute snoozefest compared to Shiva, Leviathan, and everything else after it and until Endwalker. Heck, they bothered fixing the ilvl sync of Endsinger to make her less pathetic, yet Shinryu and Hades are still an absolute joke of a fight.

And seriously, I don't understand why some old bosses still take longer to kill than others. Lakshmi for some reason still takes a decent time and requires more attention span than other bosses after her. Ryne/Shiva gets literaly melted by damage compared to the bosses before her. Carbuncle in the Pandaemonium raids is pathetic compared to what comes before him, but suddenly everything after him is still enjoyable. And the Myths of the Realms ARs aren't fun anymore, everything gets killed before it has a chance to do anything; Dun Scaith is somehow still harder than Myths, heck, Nier has pretty much remained consistantly challenging through patches.

And it's getting worse. I recently got with my sprout friend into Eden raids and he was dissapointed at how things die too fast. I played them for fun a week before Dawntrail launch and they still took a decent amount of time to clear (except the aftermentioned Ryne); we are still in phase 1 of Dawntrail endgame and the raid already feels like it was released and powercrept 3 expansions ago.

[CrazyDude]

I completely agree. This game needs more care put into preserving the experience of older content. I still do not understand why the devs seem adamant on only putting ilvl syncs on 4 player content. And even with those, a lot of them - especially pre-Shadowbringers - are too lenient. I was so disgusted getting Aglaia the other day and seeing how Nald'thal had been butchered that I'm not sure I'm ever going to do AR roulette again.

Heck, they bothered fixing the ilvl sync of Endsinger to make her less pathetic, yet Shinryu and Hades are still an absolute joke of a fight.

And seriously, I don't understand why some old bosses still take longer to kill than others. Lakshmi for some reason still takes a decent time and requires more attention span than other bosses after her. Ryne/Shiva gets literaly melted by damage compared to the bosses before her. Carbuncle in the Pandaemonium raids is pathetic compared to what comes before him, but suddenly everything after him is still enjoyable. And the Myths of the Realms ARs aren't fun anymore, everything gets killed before it has a chance to do anything; Dun Scaith is somehow still harder than Myths, heck, Nier has pretty much remained consistantly challenging through patches.

Lakshmi is a leveling trial, so her fight is properly synced at level 68 and relatively immune to ilvl creep. Proto-Carbuncle is supposed to be fairly easy. There is supposed to be a difficulty curve for each Normal Raid tier, where fight 1 is easiest and fight 4 is the hardest. Imo the devs have been failing to accomplish that since Eden's Gate, and likely putting all their balancing focus on Savage.


Ryne and Hades are just simply horrible design. Even when they were each current groups only ever saw all the mechanics if dps was really low. If your fight is going to be heavily scripted you have to make sure the fight lasts long enough to exhaust all the unique mechanics.


Shinryu would be a pretty challenging fight for a normal mode that would give new players a taste of later game difficulty if it were properly synced.


Myths of the Realm were genuinely awful mechanically, the only reason people gave them a pass was "pretty". It's no wonder Dun Scaithe is harder. It's actually challenging to begin with, and because the min ilvl is 235, the effective ilvl sync is only 40 higher at 275 (level 60 max). Contrast that to Aglaia, which was braindead easy when it was current, and with a min ilvl of 565 and an effective max of 665, it's getting absolutely melted.


The Nier raids - and ShB content as a whole - are in a bit of a weird place. ShB benefited the most from the 6.0 stat squish, so there actually is not that much of a difference between, say, ilvl 435 and 535. It does matter, and there are a few mechanics that are always skipped on Copied Factory, but it's a far cry from the situation of most other Alliance Raid series.