Don't do chaotic raid again

[AllenThyl]

However, for people who primarily play normal content, this will be far more than a challenge.

Yes, of course, for people who have spent thousands of hours in a game learning absolutely nothing along the way and making no conscious effort to improve, everything above "dodge this 3 second telegraphed AoE" will feel like an insurmountable challenge. If the only measure of "success" one had during all that time was "clearing one way or another, even if dead on the floor for 80% of the fight", that's the player's own fault. Even normal content has lots of different mechanics that can be learned if anyone actually wants to learn. However, experience tell, that just dividing up into the alliance groups and having 4 people stand on the Atomos platform is too much to ask of players with triple digit clears of this dungeon.

A significant portion of the playerbase has used the fact that the normal content is tuned to be forgiving, as an excuse to not learn any mechanics ever. Alexander raids regularly wipe groups because expecting to learn which platform to pull the adds to, or when to turn into a gorilla, or how to freeze a tornado, is toxic elitism. Aetherochemical Research Facitilty features a 2 person enumeration tower. But why learn that, when you could just let the person explode? With current gear scaling most will survive with a sliver of health, or can be rezzed otherwise. Even dead healers are no problems, tanks at that level can solo. And since "completion" is the only quality measure, there is no difference. Same for the Eden raids, just let the enumerations explode, sacrifice some dps instead of soaking their tether. Just heal and rezz through it, never learn.

Dun Scaith? Who even knows how to do the mechanics there?! I mean, why bother, someone will do them and rezz. Burst the boss' shield down so that it stops critting the tank? Actually healing the tank? Why, someone else will do it (hopefully).

That's why Bozja is no different, more on that below.

No, you're a masochist. The Baldesion Arsenal, Castrum Lacus Litore, Delubrum Reginae, and The Dalriada are medium-challenging content and actually scale down if you go with the half the max that they allow you to do. Delubrum Reginae (Savage) is a bit below Savage in terms of difficulty with escalating mechanics, but you can be carried if you aren't completely incompetent and the Zadnor lost actions make it bearable.

This is savage-tier difficulty, it has body checks and personal responsibility mechanics that hurt other players with damage downs and doom if you mess them up, something that's worse in 24-man content than 4 or 8-man.

It's not savage level, it's EX, for the very reasons I outlined earlier. Even the body checks aren't hard body checks, 1 or 2 failed towers can be survived. What they aren't though, is trivial content where a few higher skilled players can carry the majority of slackers like in normal content. And that normal content includes CLL, DR and Dalriada as well (I haven't done BA, so I cannot judge it's difficulty).

Bozja is not "midcore". A group of 4 semi competent people can clear every CE while 20 others lie dead on the floor. There is nothing "midcore" about it. The reason Red Choctober wipes so many groups so often, is because at some point, you don't even have 4 semi competent people in the whole instance anymore, or even 1. All the "midcores" repeatedly die to Red Choctober the same way all the "casuals" repeatedly die to it, by not ever having bothered to actually learn the fight. And that fight has exactly 3 mechanics. 3! Repeating! Mechanics! The same is true for the raids inside them. The bosses required "coordination" which amounts to "please split into two groups, a bit more dps and people bottom please". That's a laughable level. And even then, the main difficulty becomes "stop dpsing please". And even then, you have 3 minutes after one boss is dead to pick up the slack. 3 minutes! That's 2 whole burst windows!

You say that people can be carried in DRS. But the same is true for the Chaotic Alliance Raid. It's just that only a few people can be carried, you cannot have a majority be the one wanting to be carried all the time! As far as I am aware, that is also true for DRS.

"personal responsibility mechanics" - Yeah, good, welcome to adulthood. Stop being a slacker expecting a carriage. In Bozja, one can soak a single lane, or 3-5 (depending on class / loadout). The more each individual applies themselves to soak the damage, the less the armor is damaged, allowing for more leeway. Same is true for baiting the AoEs before going into the big line stacks, instead of mindlessly going into the AoE area potentially killing others. Or just properly equipping lost actions and using proper essences. It's personal responsibility all the way down. Always has been.

[Yodada]

It's not savage level, it's EX, for the very reasons I outlined earlier. Even the body checks aren't hard body checks, 1 or 2 failed towers can be survived. What they aren't though, is trivial content where a few higher skilled players can carry the majority of slackers like in normal content. And that normal content includes CLL, DR and Dalriada as well (I haven't done BA, so I cannot judge it's difficulty).

Go in with the intended Ilvl of 710. Then the Towers will be a problem You are comparing a 710 Ilvl Raid you are already outgearing and which you are nearly be Ilvl synched too. So of course its "just" EX cause you have wiggle room for failures. The Standard PF wont have these luxury.

[AllenThyl]

Go in with the intended Ilvl of 710. Then the Towers will be a problem You are comparing a 710 Ilvl Raid you are already outgearing and which you are nearly be Ilvl synched too. So of course its "just" EX cause you have wiggle room for failures. The Standard PF wont have these luxury.

Ahaha, yeah, you got me there! I also went in without food, had broken gear, used only AoE abilities and we didn't mitigate at all. Turns out, that made it all very hard. Who knew?!

My man, this content isn't released in a vacuum. The fact that better gear allows for more leeway is intentional by the developers. It's to reduce the necessity for proper execution and planning of mitigations. Further, it's been more than enough time for people to get the 720 sets with tomes, upgrade at least some pieces with the AR token tp 730, and to upgrade the 710 crafted set to 720. "Luxury", when the game throws gear at you left and right. But true to this topic, even the most basic of effort is too much to ask.

[Kaurhz]

Yes, of course, for people who have spent thousands of hours in a game learning absolutely nothing along the way and making no conscious effort to improve, everything above "dodge this 3 second telegraphed AoE" will feel like an insurmountable challenge. If the only measure of "success" one had during all that time was "clearing one way or another, even if dead on the floor for 80% of the fight", that's the player's own fault. Even normal content has lots of different mechanics that can be learned if anyone actually wants to learn. However, experience tell, that just dividing up into the alliance groups and having 4 people stand on the Atomos platform is too much to ask of players with triple digit clears of this dungeon.

A significant portion of the playerbase has used the fact that the normal content is tuned to be forgiving, as an excuse to not learn any mechanics ever. Alexander raids regularly wipe groups because expecting to learn which platform to pull the adds to, or when to turn into a gorilla, or how to freeze a tornado, is toxic elitism. Aetherochemical Research Facitilty features a 2 person enumeration tower. But why learn that, when you could just let the person explode? With current gear scaling most will survive with a sliver of health, or can be rezzed otherwise. Even dead healers are no problems, tanks at that level can solo. And since "completion" is the only quality measure, there is no difference. Same for the Eden raids, just let the enumerations explode, sacrifice some dps instead of soaking their tether. Just heal and rezz through it, never learn.

Whilst I can agree somewhat, I actually think the problem is more on the developers than it is on the players, if failing a mechanic is in many cases inconsequential then players simply aren't going to notice in many cases whether they are doing well or not, and there are far more instances in normal content where it is inconsequential than it is consequential, and more often than not the latter is in older, less modern content, and with the volume of instances, you're only going to encounter these mechanics a handful of times. Since playing this game I've perhaps had Fist of the Son 2-3 times, and much of the execution is only going to come with repetitive practice, something that people doing it on-content had the luxury of, and something players doing it a decade later don't really. There's a small handful of mechanics which are consistent, e.g., tethers or stack markers, but a lot of instances can also have gimmick-y mechanics which are almost always exclusive to that specific instance, e.g., A5N, or are only done a handful of times across the many many instances the game now has.

I've had plenty of casual friends that started mid-Endwalker, and didn't learn as much in those several months as to what they did when doing Dawntrail on-content for a meager 3 weeks, simply because they were only getting most of those duties a handful of times, so I think it is less about being conscious of learning and more being put in the position where it actually matters, and in duties where they can, even on an individual level, e.g., vulnerability debuff, I've seen players just laugh at it, pop a bloodbath and then plunge it into irrelevancy. If the incoming damage on the person isn't consequential then bad habits develop, and this is where the problem is on the devs because they are facilitating bad habits to occur.

Even those that are conscious of learning, most of that is only by luxury of doing it on-patch where there's gear rewards used as actual progression to incentivize them going in more than once or twice, like, most people aren't going to go "Man, perhaps I should go do that 1 Alexander turn again so I can make sure I understand that 1 mechanic which someone else did with the monkey.

[CNitsah]

I've had plenty of casual friends that started mid-Endwalker, and didn't learn as much in those several months as to what they did when doing Dawntrail on-content for a meager 3 weeks, simply because they were only getting most of those duties a handful of times, so I think it is less about being conscious of learning and more being put in the position where it actually matters, and in duties where they can, even on an individual level, e.g., vulnerability debuff, I've seen players just laugh at it, pop a bloodbath and then plunge it into irrelevancy. If the incoming damage on the person isn't consequential then bad habits develop, and this is where the problem is on the devs because they are facilitating bad habits to occur.

FFXIV dev team has a really long history with ignoring how the players interact with the game. Being the Hunts, that we don't do as it is intended, but never tried to change considering how players actually engaged with them. Or the whole deep dungeon being limited to 2 saves, strongly limiting the possibility to just pick up the content on the fly, yet still continuing with that for Eureka Orthos, which ended being dead after a couple of weeks. And those are the one that just come directly in my mind. The only time they recognize that kind of things is when they can use that to change something. Like how players used the optimal path in dungeons anyway. Instead of giving nice drop advantages in those non optimal path, they removed them entirely.

[Kaurhz]

FFXIV dev team has a really long history with ignoring how the players interact with the game. Being the Hunts, that we don't do as it is intended, but never tried to change considering how players actually engaged with them. Or the whole deep dungeon being limited to 2 saves, strongly limiting the possibility to just pick up the content on the fly, yet still continuing with that for Eureka Orthos, which ended being dead after a couple of weeks. And those are the one that just come directly in my mind. The only time they recognize that kind of things is when they can use that to simplify something. Like how players used the optimal path in dungeons anyway. Instead of giving nice drop advantages in those non optimal path, they removed them entirely.

Honestly, the sad part with it really is that they aren't actually solving anything with oversimplification.

Like for example, players could go "These raids (Eden), are really a nightmare on anyone with visual impairment like colorblindness, it's not the most friendly of content in that manner" - and it's like somewhere there is someone with cogs rattling in their brain that goes "Let's just outright make it easier, ignore the complaint entirely, and then add more visual bloat, that'll definitely resolve the issue".

The developers don't really do a good job of understanding some of the issues that people have had, and nor do they understand very well how people interact with that content... Or if they do understand, then they don't like it and simply refuse to adjust, just further letting the problem fester.

[LibitIncarne]

Or the whole deep dungeon being limited to 2 saves, strongly limiting the possibility to just pick up the content on the fly, yet still continuing with that for Eureka Orthos, which ended being dead after a couple of weeks.

EO was dead on arival because you needed to get to floor 100 to get a weapon that's on-par with the Extreme weapon.
For HoH and PotD, you only needed to clear floor 30 (50 for PotD) and it was still on-par with EX, PotD even got updated with another weapon for the next patch's EX trial's IL when you cleared floor 100 (of 200).

[Kaurhz]

In my case, it's just information overload. I try to read up on how dungeons/trials/raids work before entering them, even when I'm unsync for the express purpose of soloing it first *and then* doing it normally when it pops up in roulette later. But man, trying to keep track of EVERYTHING per expansion is daunting as I make my way through post-Stormblood (where soloing Rathalos in particular was 18 minutes of agony, and I doubt doing it with a group is any funner) especially when I still can't even 100% clear prior content without issue. I am guaranteed to die at least once per run of Shadow of Mhach (especially Dun Scaith because a lot of people just do not have Esuna on their hotbars it seems), and knowing that Return to Ivalice is HARDER with another set of bosses to figure out, or that now I have to remember Alexander mechanics on top of Omega ones means I find myself just not wanting to do Ivalice and Omega because I honestly don't think I can keep track of it all (and dungeons and trials aren't much better about trying to memorize every little thing), but since I already unlocked them, now I just don't do raid roulettes at all because I don't want to be "that guy" in the cutscene who ends up contributing nothing because I didn't read up on the fights this time, and the game isn't great about teaching you DURING a fight before snapshots or non-markers go off.

And no, I don't buy into that whole "nobody minds if you fail while learning" crap when there's countless stories of people talking about how much they hate sprouts/casuals, including THIS very topic, assuming they don't immediately treat me with disdain when they see I'm from Dynamis because it seems a lot of people from Aether/Primal/Crystal just assume we're all stupid and need to be carried or kicked. My experience with the social element of this game is that it ranges from non-existent to outright hostile, and I'm convinced after two years of playing that the whole "most friendly and welcoming community" was a complete lie and I find myself moving further and further away from group content and trying to squeeze out whatever solo bits I can find because frankly, it doesn't seem like most of the playerbase wants me here anyway to the point of being gleeful when others got skilled out of a hairstyle of all things.

For being a mode that Square-Enix allegedly wanted to bridge the gap between casual and hardcore, it's made the chasm wider than ever with just how much both types of players don't want to deal with the other one.

See a lot of this problem is caused by their yoyoing of the default difficulty. If you design fights that require these skills initially, which is fair, and then give a good decade between when those skills once more get normalized (or don't indefinitely), then it's going to trip most people up when they need to use Esuna, or silence for example on content that is well over a decade old. Every time I die to doom on Dun Scaith, I just think of monumental disappointment, that the devs have been wholly incapable of sticking to their guns. If they did, we wouldn't be having an issue where players in most cases are letting players die to something like Doom. Abilities like Esuna and Silence need to be more normalized.

I can understand somewhat people in this thread, it's 24-man content, and with more people comes a lot more possible fail states, it's fair that people want to mitigate this by ensuring people have taken an appropriate step. But yes. 24-man content is the absolute worst place humanly possible to try and bridge the gap between casual and midcore/hardcore (high-end). I don't think they actually realize but they themselves are exacerbating the issue at this point. The issue with 24-man currently is someone on the team thought it a good enough idea to lock cosmetics behind this content (exclusive to this content). Cosmetics are first and foremost for a lot of people, so many people will just jump straight in paying no heed to anything else. It's like they looked at the feedback about lack of incentive behind V&C dungeons and then someone, somewhere just went screaming at the top of their lungs "THROW THE KITCHEN SINK AT IT PLEASE"

These threads lately do make me reflect quite a bit, and it's funny to me that the game has been running for well over a decade now and they still do not understand the issues with the patch schedule, nor how to introduce that natural path of progression between story content and extreme/savage, or at the very least find that appropriate level of difficulty for normal content, to where that content alone would suffice to ensure that people are ready to step into an extreme.