What would casual gamers like to see with regard to 'battle' content?

[Gurgeh]

Well, for starters, remove the 2 minute meta lol. Secondly, bring back some RNG into the game. Everything being so static and same-y is what's killing the combat. They need to make each tank/healer to be different, each with different difficulty to master (WHM/WAR being the easiest for example, while GNB/AST could be on the hardest). It doesn't have to be extreme difficulty, but there needs to be something different than same attacks with different effects.

This is all just to pander to high end again. And they are going to get their way again and wreck Picto. You know it's coming. Just let then do ultimate with four pictos, or fight among themselves for who is Picto, or bitch that they cleared ultimate in two weeks.
Honestly, your logged the hell out of your rotation, logged the hell out of your fight, min maxed the life out of it, and metad your party comp... and the ultimate challenge got too unchallenging?
Talk about stupid games and stupid prizes.

Stop ruining 16 jobs , when no matter what you do there will always be a top 8, and people will only use those.

Let ultimate be unclearable with the wrong party. Your not good enough to do ultimate with your backup main? Boo hoo get gud, it's ultimate. Savage to easy with meta? Fine. People can do ultimate after. Just make sure savage fights are tuned to the worst party comp, pf market forces will have to do the rest.

Some people will put up unrestricted PFs. If DRK is underpowered, but they force the other 7 players to be meta don't be surprised if it doesn't fill to carry you.
They are letting logging ruin this game. This is all about how the player base behaves because 'Nin' or whatever is meta, and people whine at the Devs *All because of fflogs*.

[AntoniusQuil]

I mean, I would like to see some rewards giving some purpose to grind normal content.

Currently due to the one item weekly cap, you can’t even grind the newest alliance raid for glams, so there’s no real reason to do it more often than once a week. And there’s currently no other reason for doing normal content in game other than glams (if you aren’t leveling) and that doesn’t even include normal raids, considering how undyeable glams are pretty much useless.

I think variant dungeons were a move in the right direction where both normal and hardcore versions had a mount reward, but imo the normal mount achievement should be a bit more grindy

Generally adding nice rewards like mounts or cosmetics locked behind grinding normal duties would be imo the best solution to make them more engaging and give some purpose to grind them. Kinda like what they do with pvp but maybe bound to particular duties instead of a missable all content “battle pass”.

[Hasrat]

You'll never get a straight answer, because they'll be divided between "something to grind" and "something we don't have to grind."

Nobody wants more ARR Zodiac books or Atma farming. Nobody wants another Manderville tomestone-to-relic exchange.

Ultimately, what the complainers want is just not this game. They ain't gonna Ship of Theseus this thing and rebuild a new game out of it.

[AntoniusQuil]

You can balance grinding somewhere in the middle, some relic farms were definitely too long for average casual player, but you don’t see too much complaints about PvP series grind being too long or too shorts (most complaints about it come from people who just hate pvp)

[Mawlzy]

You'll never get a straight answer, because they'll be divided between "something to grind" and "something we don't have to grind."

Nobody wants more ARR Zodiac books or Atma farming. Nobody wants another Manderville tomestone-to-relic exchange.

Ultimately, what the complainers want is just not this game. They ain't gonna Ship of Theseus this thing and rebuild a new game out of it.

There are 431 answers provided on this Reddit post from 11 hours ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme..._what_content/

The "complainers" want a better version of this game, not a different one.

[YumieYumiki]

Good casual content would be content where you don't need to learn and prepare tactics in advance to succeed. So it would need to be combat content designed around rewarding successful improvisation, rather than requiring to learn the specific patterns of a particular fight.

An example of something that it kinda like that is the second Vanguard boss. It uses only familiar mechanics, but overlaps them in a way that requires you to think on your feet. As such it doesn't require you to plan with other players in advance of the fight (a la "group X should go to this place during phase Y"), and it doesn't even need you to have done the fight before to have a chance to succeed.

(casual doesn't have to mean "easy" by the way, it should just mean "doesn't require significant preparation, coordination and a premade group")

[Gwenkatsu]

Good casual content ... would need to be combat content designed around rewarding successful improvisation, rather than requiring to learn the specific patterns of a particular fight.

This.
I still remember the Ivalice Raids. The robot that targets you with a sniper rifle while you get a shield that covers 70% of your body. Surely this shield will protect you from the sniper, right? RIGHT?
Or this Thundergod Whatsoever guy, where you need to look at the ground to see what's happening at your feet, and at the same time look high up into the sky to see how he's waving his swords around in the air. First, I have no idea how to look in two different directions at the same time. Second, even if I could, I had no idea what his sword gestures mean.
And then... prime numbers, anyone? Of course I can do the calculations... but when I have read the tooltip and found out what the heck I'm even supposed to do, I'm already dead.

This was one of the first times in FF14 where I thought to myself "this content is just not made for me". Of course you can watch guides, memorize 5 dozen spell names, gestures, AE colors and whatnot - but this is not fun gameplay to me. Casual raid content should be about combat, not about hours of memorizing arbitrary stuff for every single boss in the place.

So what was fun battle content to me? The latest dungeon "Cowabanga field station" comes to mind. I went in blind, and the mechanics turned out to be challenging - but not obscure. Same with the variant dungeons that I did just recently. Went in blind (used a guide only to find the 12 different pathes), and managed to finish them all. So this is the kind of content I'ld like to see more of.

[Gurgeh]

This.
I still remember the Ivalice Raids. The robot that targets you with a sniper rifle while you get a shield that covers 70% of your body. Surely this shield will protect you from the sniper, right? RIGHT?
Or this Thundergod Whatsoever guy, where you need to look at the ground to see what's happening at your feet, and at the same time look high up into the sky to see how he's waving his swords around in the air. First, I have no idea how to look in two different directions at the same time. Second, even if I could, I had no idea what his sword gestures mean.
And then... prime numbers, anyone? Of course I can do the calculations... but when I have read the tooltip and found out what the heck I'm even supposed to do, I'm already dead.

This was one of the first times in FF14 where I thought to myself "this content is just not made for me". Of course you can watch guides, memorize 5 dozen spell names, gestures, AE colors and whatnot - but this is not fun gameplay to me. Casual raid content should be about combat, not about hours of memorizing arbitrary stuff for every single boss in the place.

So what was fun battle content to me? The latest dungeon "Cowabanga field station" comes to mind. I went in blind, and the mechanics turned out to be challenging - but not obscure. Same with the variant dungeons that I did just recently. Went in blind (used a guide only to find the 12 different pathes), and managed to finish them all. So this is the kind of content I'ld like to see more of.

Agreed with much. The sniper mech is great except it makes no sense. But it would have been more fun if theyd made it a small shield, that you had less time to position.

Agreed on the gestures. Make easy to learn but punishing.
Show the mech three times or more.
First time you pause (sniper style) and force them to look. 2nd time you pause and show the second gesture.
Then you repeat the mechanic later without forcing them to look. Just think very carefully before you add a four part memory game and distract the hell out of people.
Why is it always all or nothing. Braindead or savage, little in-between.
Alpha 3 is perfect this way. It's punishing, fast you have to look at the biss, but you HAVE TO LOOK AT THE BOSS, they are not tricking you, causing you to not look, and have no idea what's killing you again and an again.
Less mechs combinations. Faster mechs. Harder hitting mechs, Less ground aoe telegraphs, be very careful that combining mechs doesn't make hard to see what's killing you, or leaves you looking up guides to learn the position solutions.

[Loggos]

(Edit: I know lots of people brought up randomness before me so I'm not making any novel point here. I'm just frustrated with the game's current state so you'll have to endure my long-winded rant.)

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(casual doesn't have to mean "easy" by the way, it should just mean "doesn't require significant preparation, coordination and a premade group")

So much this! This really is the key for me.

I want something that is mentally engaging but that I can engage with without much of an entry barrier. I want to do the thinking inside the content, the thinking and problem solving should be part of the fun gameplay.
Preparation for hardcore content makes sense and is an integral part obviously but I don't always want to do (relatively extensive depending on the content) dry homework before playing just to be able to have any fun.

Right now this game only offers two extremes:
* completely stale and easy content you run almost mindlessly (esp. the more often you repeat it)
* Hardcore content that requires a lot of preparation

The middle ground is entirely lacking in PvE.
I want something I can jump into and that I can complete in a reasonable amount of time but that still keeps me on my toes.

And imo there is a factor that could greatly help with that (and that would ensure that it keeps more of its difficult over time because currently even hard content turns into DDR autopilot at some point). The problem is that it would require SE to fundamentally depart from their formula:

(Pseudo) Randomness.

Regarding both the order of attacks in a fight as well as randomness in a fight itself.
(Compare it to the design of a Soulsborne fight (minus the difficulty) where you have to read and react to your enemy's random attacks and even then the attacks themselves don't always play out the same way. Though I'd like it if FF14 added even more randomness to the attacks themselves.)

Making the order of boss attacks random would already help but I don't think it would solve everything.
If you run trial roulettes most won't have memorised the order of every fight either but can still easily clear them because of a general familiarility and the simplicity of many mechanics.

But I think if you combine a random attack order with (more) RNG-based attacks you'd have a nice level of adequate challenge that forces you to think in the moment.

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Adding randomness to dungeons would help a lot as well. I don't know how much effort it would amount to but if the dungeon path(s) were generated randomly (plus monsters/bosses with random attack patterns) then this would already add a lot of value even if the fights themselves aren't hard. You'd have an exploration element that keeps you engaged and that makes you feel like you are actually in a dungeon again.

I can somewhat understand why they wouldn't do this for story dungeons even though I think it is a shame and they should expect at least a little more competence at higher levels.

People like to complain how badly many casuals play (DF hell yadda yadda) but the thing is: Right now non-raider casuals have no incentive or content to grow.
Adding "mid-core" content with a low entry barrier and more in-fight thinking and problem solving could teach people to be better over the course of 100 levels.

(At the very least it could inform the design of the optional capstone level dungeons.
Or bring back optional "hard-mode" dungeons and implement a randomness-based design there if you want to keep it out of normal dungeons.)

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That's why I play PvP almost entirely now because every game is different. I always have to think inside of a match, assess the situation an react accordingly even in casual matches.
PvP I can legitimately play for hours because it's intrinsically fun to me. I can absolutely not say the same about PvE, even though I'd really like to do that because in theory I love PvE boss fights and dungeons.

At the same time you can transition smoothly into hardcore PvP (discords, advanced guides etc.) if you want to. Jumping back and forth between both modes/"worlds" is very easy.

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Also, ilvl trivialising a lot of content doesn't help. I understand it's useful for farming older EX fights and making daily roulettes even easier/faster to farm and so on but it also makes them very bland and boring. If older fights retained their risk to a player's health this would also contribute to having to think more.

[Kaurhz]

You'll never get a straight answer, because they'll be divided between "something to grind" and "something we don't have to grind."

Nobody wants more ARR Zodiac books or Atma farming. Nobody wants another Manderville tomestone-to-relic exchange.

Ultimately, what the complainers want is just not this game. They ain't gonna Ship of Theseus this thing and rebuild a new game out of it.

No what people wants is for the developers to have some more self-respect in the substance of content they produce. The fact your perception is that they would need to "Ship of Theseus" this game and rebuild an entirely new game tells me that you don't actually understand many of the complaints levied against the game.