Don't do chaotic raid again

[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.