New Tier

[DivineP]

Whilst I do agree with you.

I do think a ladder of difficulty is needed.. I mean 50 - 100 you see alot of mechanics. (As a healer I know in new content a raid wides going out)

I think the think is.. with these 'road to, FC exp and food buffs' people are missing these because everything's so plowed through with I'll (CT is an example)

I do like the turn in DT - as a healer it gives me thing to watch out for instead of spamming glare.

[DivineP]

The bleed in M8N been one. I have yet to let anyone die from that. Ppl are so conditioned to just DPS they don't realise a DPS with respect does less damage.

I like it. Makes healers think after 10 years xx

[DivineP]

I meant the new trial, but you get the jist.

[Taranok]

Whilst I do agree with you.

I do think a ladder of difficulty is needed.. I mean 50 - 100 you see alot of mechanics. (As a healer I know in new content a raid wides going out)

I think the think is.. with these 'road to, FC exp and food buffs' people are missing these because everything's so plowed through with I'll (CT is an example)

I do like the turn in DT - as a healer it gives me thing to watch out for instead of spamming glare.

Personally, I'd prefer that casual content be kept casual, and the devs actually fix the core problem of healers and tanks. The problem? Simple.

Medica 1 was overpowered in ARR, it continued to be overpowered. It's still overpowered. How do you threaten a healer that can heal 30-40% of their entire party in 1 GCD? Tanks have the same problem with mits. How do you threaten a paladin who can pop 5 oGCDs and have over 450% effective HP? How does a self sustain tank fit in a world with a boss that has a tank buster that defaults to at least 150% EHP in damage? How does a healer with smart heals fit into a world where every healer has free, instant cast medica 1s on extremely short cooldowns?

The answer is simple. Add more mits, make tank busters even more insane. Add more damage, make it faster. Kill people off of singular mistakes and give healers less time to react.

This is what the devs have been doing since ARR for tank and healer design. I recognized this problem by late HW, and Stormblood solidified it. I wish I actually talked about it back then, because now the devs have killed caster gameplay because they basically did to casters what they tried to do to rphys back in heavensward -- force them into gameplay that is woefully disconnected from how the role both wants to play and has played up to that point.

The solution is to completely redesign how tanks tank, and how healers heal. In order to let a WoW-style discipline priest with strong single target barriers and smart heals that bounce around the group, medica 1 must die. WoW learned this lesson in Wrath of the Lich King when they realized healers would just spam holy over and over because aoe healing was too easy and efficient. And, as one might expect, it's also insanely boring.

Nothing the devs have done in DT has been truly beneficial to healers, because there is nothing engaging about pressing 1 or 2 buttons and winning. Healers are, simply put, overpowered. They need to be nerfed into the ground, and how they engage with encounters needs to be completely rethought. Just as how the devs need to realize that core caster gameplay is a major draw of why players have loved this game in the past, and forcing casters into rphys gameplay is only going to drive people who love core caster gameplay away. Just as how tanks likely want more than just binary pass/fail checks attached to a bad DPS rotation.

This has always been what the problem is. Since ARR.

[Valence]

The problem with faster everything is that it reduces reaction time more and more and we end up in those binary situations where if you're fast enough you're alright and will find it easy, and if you're not, you're dead, your tank is dead, or you wipe the party depending on the content, and you'll just feel frustrated. Healing is no different, if one can heal anybody to full under a GCD, and then the mechanics can drop someone so fast in counter reaction to even prove remotely threatening, especially since MP management is a shadow of its former self, then you end up exactly in that kind of situations, and it starts even in casual. It's also similar with uptime and casting, and now you exactly have this displayed into full reality by BLM main vets that tell us that BLM was already very mobile and had all the tools to deal with uptime (which I don't doubt) confronted by everybody else telling them that it was unsustainable. More and more DDR mechanics where it's all about standing in the right spot or die/wipe, etc.

The whole game's essence has become very binary and it drives wedges into the community, while pushing into unsustainable design where the smallest deviation can snowball into a myriad of issues (as seen in the DPS class balance around a singular damage metric).

[JadeCurtiss]

People should be allowed to select a difficulty that fits the content they wish to play.

Remember, on JP, these fights typically have closer to a 40-60% clear rate across all players (someone correct me on actual numbers.) It's intended to be decently accessible, not strictly hardcore.

They can. It's called AAC Cruiserweight. And hard is AAC Cruiserweight (Savage). You don't make Normal and Hard difficulties then make Hard the same Normal difficulty.

JP clears more because they are generally better at the game and have more unified community consensus on strategies. Also they generally try not to burden others by prog-lying like people do in NA.

[Valence]

JP clears more because they're better? Where does this meme even comes from? They clear more because more of them raid, that's all.
Unless you have actual stats on the numbers of pulls-to-clear ratios in NA/EU vs JP?

[JadeCurtiss]

JP clears more because they're better? Where does this meme even comes from? They clear more because more of them raid, that's all.
Unless you have actual stats on the numbers of pulls-to-clear ratios in NA/EU vs JP?

If more of them raid, does that not mean those people would be better at raiding overall than regions that do not raid as much? Also keep in mind that saying they're better at the game doesn't mean a great deal given how incredibly low the bar is for PF in NA.

[Taranok]

The problem with faster everything is that it reduces reaction time more and more and we end up in those binary situations where if you're fast enough you're alright and will find it easy, and if you're not, you're dead, your tank is dead, or you wipe the party depending on the content, and you'll just feel frustrated. Healing is no different, if one can heal anybody to full under a GCD, and then the mechanics can drop someone so fast in counter reaction to even prove remotely threatening, especially since MP management is a shadow of its former self, then you end up exactly in that kind of situations, and it starts even in casual. It's also similar with uptime and casting, and now you exactly have this displayed into full reality by BLM main vets that tell us that BLM was already very mobile and had all the tools to deal with uptime (which I don't doubt) confronted by everybody else telling them that it was unsustainable. More and more DDR mechanics where it's all about standing in the right spot or die/wipe, etc.

The whole game's essence has become very binary and it drives wedges into the community, while pushing into unsustainable design where the smallest deviation can snowball into a myriad of issues (as seen in the DPS class balance around a singular damage metric).

BLM's problem is it relied on bad class design to enable mobility. But the issue is it never should have been mobile to begin with. When you force everyone to solve every mechanic equally, no one can be different with E.G. self roots such as cast bars. You can't have boss outs that only affect melee, you can't have a cyclops roaming the arena that only rphys can reasonably do. Or forsaken challenging the hell out of casters.

So as you say, everything gets faster. But with garbage netcode, faster means people who have higher ping have less time to react. Less time to react means you're more likely to get hit. More likely to get hit means damage downs and deaths. Tight DPS checks means you can't clear and toxicity. Toxicity means PF kicks and disbands like mad, as well as saying some classes cannot join.

Another way to think of it is: If Bloom 6's holy cleaves actually one shot players, that mechanic would be 100% at home in TEA, UCOB, even DSR and its fast paced high movement garbage design. It's precise, gives little time to solve, and is highly punishing of mistakes, save for the ability to mit through the cleaves and just not care. That is the only thing preventing it from being ultimate-grade.

The difficulty creep and mechanical homogenization is killing the game.