An offering of help for the struggling players in casual content

[Shistar]

What's worse is the direction the game is going is also making the game infinitely more frustrating due to lag.

Right on the money, there. As someone who played with up to 600ms ping and higher up until the game would crash (this was back when Thordan was the current unreal, so a while ago), the snapshots can be so mean. Before I got better internet (let's say 55ms ping, but I wouldn't be able to tell you exactly off the top of my head) I am a god. I am also infinitely more greedy, I just have no one to blame for it except myself now lol back on the topic...


I've noticed those players who have +120ms ping but are also good at the game have develop some kind of sixth sense and the subconsciously move out of the damage area earlier than what they're seeing on screen to make up for the tighter snapshots. Everyone's situation is different, but that + having a very rough idea of the fight's timeline or mechs already helps a lot. If you have high ping, you're simply not allowed to greed anything, ever. (I played with 200ms ping for my first 2-3 years in the game so I got used to it from the get-go, but I can imagine it being a pain for someone who suddenly finds themselves in a situation where their muscle memory is 1-2 seconds late to the snapshot D: )

When the fights throw literal extreme and savage mechanics from prior expansions in them, it's no longer casual. Doesn't matter how easy the classes are now, extreme mechanics are extreme mechanics. And as EX3/4 have shown, the devs are more than willing to throw ultimate-grade mechanics (just without the autodeath/autowipe to back it up) into even extremes, the definition of difficulty is blurred.

Isn't that kind of the point, though? Genuinely.
If the normal mode didn't carry easier versions of the majority of EX mechanics, then you'd feel like a fish out of water the moment you step in there. If EXs didn't have easier versions of savage mechanics, you'd be completely lost and learning everything from scratch as if it was a completely different game mode... I think the devs are trying to ease you into harder content by giving you an easier version you can practice until you get the hang of it (consider that the devs don't think about you wanting or not to do the content that would be the next step in difficulty, it is their job to design content assuming the player will eventually try everything they can get their hands on, otherwise why make that content to begin with?) so I think it is okay for them to give us a taste of what they've got in future/more difficult fights.


I was personally impressed when I was progging DT's EX4 and my buddy told me the in and out mech with the numbers 1-4 was a simpler version of something from DSR. It made me really excited to go to DSR one day, since I thought the mech was fun and satisfying when executed properly!

But that's what will ultimately get people to quit the game. The definition of difficulty has changed and the devs are literally trying to turn FFXIV into something other than what brought it to soaring heights in Stormblood and Shadowbringers. Yeah, the game carried a lot of that momentum, but it was the knee-jerk reaction to the disaster that was Heavensward that made FFXIV truly an amazing MMO. The further we get away from that, the worse the game gets.

I only started playing in late ShB, so I can't speak about how the game used to be, only of what I've heard. The game always used to be a little nasty with the players and it's been getting easier and easier up until EW. We can agree to disagree here, but if the difficulty stayed at what EW was, I think many more players would have quit than if they picked up the difficulty again. I've also heard that those who are struggling with DT are those from EW who are not used to a higher difficulty yet. I think difficulty is constantly changing expansion-to-expansion, and players are expected to rise to the challenge in response.


I seriously don't think the game will go back to HW levels of difficulty. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious about how a SB-inspired difficulty would play out today. That's the part that confuses me, even though SB was considered much more difficult than ShB and, of course, EW and DT, you say that difficulty is what made the game soar. Could you explain what you mean?

I just want to strangle anyone who thinks modern fight design is healthy for the game, when all it has done is destroy variety, entire playstyles, and made an infinitely more frustrating experience from top to bottom.

I think it's healthier than what we had in EW and that's what most people mean when they say that, but I would love to see more variety and gimmicks in mechanics. I would like to hope they're slowly heading in that direction.
It'd be nice to have a nice balance between job complexity and mechanics, I like both, but eventually something has to give for the other to rise in difficulty... we will see what happens, I guess.

[Taranok]

Isn't that kind of the point, though? Genuinely.
If the normal mode didn't carry easier versions of the majority of EX mechanics, then you'd feel like a fish out of water the moment you step in there. If EXs didn't have easier versions of savage mechanics, you'd be completely lost and learning everything from scratch as if it was a completely different game mode... I think the devs are trying to ease you into harder content by giving you an easier version you can practice until you get the hang of it (consider that the devs don't think about you wanting or not to do the content that would be the next step in difficulty, it is their job to design content assuming the player will eventually try everything they can get their hands on, otherwise why make that content to begin with?) so I think it is okay for them to give us a taste of what they've got in future/more difficult fights.

Yes and no. While yes, you want normal to have similar-ish mechanics, you don't want to take, for example, Ruby Weapon's claw mechanics with difficult telegraphs off line traces and shove that into dungeons. Doesn't matter whether it's old hat or not, that's a literal extreme mechanic shoved onto a dungeon boss because the devs have rotted out their mechanics design so badly that they have no levers to pull other than to boiling frog their own difficulty. This has the inevitable consequence of burning out players like me that want actually braindead casual content to do, while also zoning out lower-skill players who want to play FFXIV for the story. But, oops, the devs made healers a critically important role and made 'One mistake and you're dead!' mechanics the norm, meaning wipes on dungeon bosses went way, way up in EW and DT, which in turn drives players away from the content.

In extreme cases, you end up throwing mechanics so difficult, the average player for a given difficulty cannot handle it. For example, bloom 6 in EX4 is literally an ultimate mechanic. Almost no one has done it as intended, because it's way, way too hard for extreme content. The level of precision and coordination required to execute it correctly is beyond ludicrous for an extreme. But, because it doesn't one shot or wipe the party to solve it incorrectly, just overmit it and ignore the part of the mechanic that makes it absolutely insane to begin with.

A secondary consequence of this extreme is that you end up with cases like Absolute Authority or Hello World, where the 'harder' version is objectively easier than the 'normal' version. Hello World Savage required a very precise solution that was variable based on role and such. Hello World Ultimate is a dance that was choreographed by an overworked dev to be so tight that, by having LITERALLY only one solution with a variance on which side of the mechanic you directly solve it on as your only wiggle room, that it could almost be an extreme mechanic, save for basically being a giant middle finger to casters, as is SE tradition ever since EW destroyed fight design.

Absolute Authority on the other hand is such a massive amount of mechanics vomit that the best way to handle it in extreme is to simply overmit it and pretend the mechanic isn't real. Which is the same thing that happened with TOP's phase 2 triple meteors plus a whole host of other nauseating mechanics. When you push so far to the extreme, there's only so many levers you can pull, and you end up with a savage-grade normal mechanic and a normal mode extreme mechanic. To say the difficulty is a schizophrenic nightmare is a gross understatement.

I was personally impressed when I was progging DT's EX4 and my buddy told me the in and out mech with the numbers 1-4 was a simpler version of something from DSR. It made me really excited to go to DSR one day, since I thought the mech was fun and satisfying when executed properly!

It is, until you realize literally every mechanic is a 1/2/4/8 and the devs stopped making anything other than a 1/2/4/8 back in mid-ShB. DSR just has massive stress-inducing body checks, major DPS checks, and once you've done the same mechanic a thousand times, it's hard to get excited. Hell, if you've done M5S, you're already good enough to clear DSR since everything is a distinct downgrade over Arcady 1 and 2 in difficulty.

Saying X is a simpler version of Y is just code for "The devs can't actually make unique mechanics anymore."

I only started playing in late ShB, so I can't speak about how the game used to be, only of what I've heard. The game always used to be a little nasty with the players and it's been getting easier and easier up until EW. We can agree to disagree here, but if the difficulty stayed at what EW was, I think many more players would have quit than if they picked up the difficulty again. I've also heard that those who are struggling with DT are those from EW who are not used to a higher difficulty yet. I think difficulty is constantly changing expansion-to-expansion, and players are expected to rise to the challenge in response.


I seriously don't think the game will go back to HW levels of difficulty. But I would be lying if I said I wasn't curious about how a SB-inspired difficulty would play out today. That's the part that confuses me, even though SB was considered much more difficult than ShB and, of course, EW and DT, you say that difficulty is what made the game soar. Could you explain what you mean?

I have a long enough memory to remember a lot of this. The game started getting harder again in ShB. Stormblood was a distinct reaction to HW's class design breaking the game. Mechanically speaking, the only thing bad of HW fight design were things that literally broke the game, like how letting nisi expire, saccing 3 DPS to detonate 6 mines, and healer LB3ing was a bigger DPS gain than using melee LB3 and doing nisi correctly. Or things like the 90% damage into DoT server tic autodeath of pepsiman.

But the devs basically shifted difficulty from job design into fight design. And by EW, the devs were already at HW difficulty levels, it was just in the fight design. Worse still, some classes could more keenly feel it. Have a cast bar like Reaper, Samurai, or especially healers/BLM/RDM? You got to feel the full force of the difficulty. Playing Bard? What difficulty? Doubly so on classes like Monk where the giant hitboxes and no positionals meant you basically had an easier job than rphys.

The thing that made Stormblood work was it was middling difficulty encounters and variable difficulty jobs. While classes like BLM had design flaws like the entire timer system, the majority of its difficulty was to sit still and cast. Trying to find a way to do this in God Kefka was a serious challenge, especially for things like forsaken, where you had 5 guaranteed instant casts per minute (sharpcast, triplecast, swiftcast. Random procs, nothing else.) But if that was too hard for you, you could drop to SMN and have ruin 2 to carry you through movement sections. If that wasn't enough, red mage had even more. You could custom tune your difficulty by changing jobs within the role. Get bored? Play something else with a different difficulty. Jobs interfaced with fights uniquely between roles, and that kept fights fresh, especially with jobs that were slightly more involved. That's just gone now because all the difficulty is in fight design because the devs are insistent on killing their game by ruining the very thing that made it great to begin with.

You could have baby's first ultimate by playing UWU on a melee or rphys, or you could have sweaty tryhard by trying to handle UWU on BLM with stormblood BLM. Part of this was simply having mechanics that targeted individual roles and have players choose their own solutions. When mechanics are open ended, player creativity and variance in solutions adds a lot to replay and keeping things fresh, even if it means 6/8 players have nothing to do on some mechanics. Even fight pacing of having downtime to relax and uptime to panic sold stormblood a lot better than anything mid-SHB or later has created.

See, that is what ultimately made the game soar. Mechanics were varied. They still remembered rphys had unlimited movement and designed mechanics that seem obviously intended to exploit that. They had mechanics casters would be bad on, but gave the players options to choose if a caster should, or shouldn't, do it.

Then shadowbringers started to undo all the work Stormblood did at trimming superfluous buttons (For example, Foul was a hybrid ability, and served as both a single target and aoe spell. Adding xenoglossy eroded the hybrid nature and bloated bars without actually adding anything meaningful to the class that couldn't be handled with 2 charges of an instant cast foul.) They started adding DDR. Yada yada, it goes on and on as the devs death spiral their own game.

Eventually you have DT where all fights are insanity-level difficulty where the insanity is that no one bothered to test the fights above a ping of 5. Nothing is truly hard, but everything is supremely stupid as the mechanics become an absolute charicature of themselves. This is why many people who actually remember stormblood will look at fights like UWU or TEA (early ShB had a lot of SB design in it still,) and say they blow modern fights out of the water. The devs have yet to make a mechanic as satisfying as fate calibration or an intermission remotely as interesting as UWU's. Nevermind the fight actually was synced to the music far better than M5S is, especially given the aforementioned lag problems.

I digress and probably trailed off topic. Stormblood was better than what we have now, not because it was hard, but because fights were a lot easier, and players could choose how to interface with the fights by self-selecting into easier or harder jobs that changed how they handled the fights. Nevermind weird abilities like a BLM being able to throw MP at healers or the like.

I think it's healthier than what we had in EW and that's what most people mean when they say that, but I would love to see more variety and gimmicks in mechanics. I would like to hope they're slowly heading in that direction.
It'd be nice to have a nice balance between job complexity and mechanics, I like both, but eventually something has to give for the other to rise in difficulty... we will see what happens, I guess.

The sad thing is, the devs are so far into the extreme that even when they start adding gimmicks to fights again, they royally blunder it.

For example, M6S adds. The rays are a mechanic reminiscent of earthshakers from T13. A targeted puddle you have to move out of and you don't want to hit anyone else with it. Earthshakers traditionally also have cones, but let's ignore that for now. If they had just 1 ray, that's a fantastic rphys mechanic. 2 rays and, oops, guess casters need to be rphys. T13's puddles were 3-5 player hitboxes in diameter. Rays are closer to 20. Same mechanic 'Time to trot out of the void zone!' but infinitely dumber because of the sheer size of the arena and relatively larger movement that's just a giant middle finger to casters without really changing anything else.

The cat is a targeted 'This is for ranged to deal with, melee can but the chasing is weird!' thing. But throw it in a giant arena like what M6S has, and now your ranged can't hit across it. They also have to do rays so they're often in the extreme, guess they don't get to interface with the unique cat in their own way by being able to hit a dodgy little thing.

Yans are a giant game of keepaway. But the damage is so extreme that it's hair-pullingly frustrating. One mistake and, oops, all wipes! Giant arena, giant void zones for the yans to keep away from mus. And let's add stuns back in like T5 knights or whatever those adds were called. But oops, let's overtune the DPS check! They manage to copy mechanics from so many different parts of the game and still manage to royally blunder the execution.

M6S is so bizarre because the only reasonable mechanic in it is the clock spots into impromptu lite parties, which is so comically small compared to literally every other mechanic as to be a farce, despite being the most normal and even interesting mechanic without being stupid of the entire fight. It's chalk full of moderately innovative ideas and then squanders every last opportunity because of the arena size, mechanic sizes, and just asinine stupidity of the solutions required. "I could solve this in 2 seconds if the arena were half the size, but instead let's run for 5 seconds because we forgot how to make interesting and challenging mechanics, so we substitute both for absurd movement requirements and hope the players don't catch on!"

M7S is the same thing. The devs finally remembered we can go to different platforms in unique ways, reshape the arena. But they overdid it, again, and ended up making a fight that reasonably can be considered harder than DSR, save for its lack of hard body checks for most mechanics. Its DPS check also isn't that far removed, either, in how overly tight it can be. It just lacks the per-phase DPS checks of an ultimate so snowball DPS issues only become a problem at the very end.

And as if that wasn't enough, they also did it in a way that, iterating, killed caster design by making everything require too much movement at too high a pace, and broke the netcode because the devs didn't bother testing any of the fights at more than a ping of 5. Even basic testing at 100ms ping shows there's serious desync issues between the music and mechanics of M5S, which is a huge red flag for a fight clearly designed to be synced from top to bottom. Doubly so when you have mechanics like arcady that go from comfortable at 5ms ping on a healer to greedcast without slidecasting, to an absolute nightmare at a mere 100ms ping to slidecast.

If you think DT is healthier than EW, I really wish you could play Stormblood as it was at the time, including all the awful flaws like the broken Machinist design. EW and DT both are basically one long, extended Heavensward of bad combined fight-job design. It's impressive how the devs literally inverted the problem. Hard jobs became easy. Easy fights became hard. The difficulty as a whole is way too high. Also instead of turning rphys into casters, casters are being turned into rphys. The symmetry is peak comedy for the farce of EW/DT design.

Sorry for the rambling and drifting on and off topic.

[Mawlzy]

snip

I don't think you'll make progress with the general points here without recognizing something fundamental.

Because of the nature of FFXIV and the broad spectrum of players it attracts, there is a correspondingly broad range of ability when it comes to PvE. The evolution of fight design has further stretched this skill spectrum, since resolving mechanics has relied on an increasingly narrow skillset.

As a result, we have high-skill players bleating about normal content being brain-dead (see current active threads here), while the less-skilled are reaching the limit of what they can clear.

Another way of looking at this is that, in the past, essentially everyone was able to clear normal content, with EX+ providing tiers where more-skilled players could enjoy themselves, and the tiny minority of highly-skilled players being catered to with top-end PvE content.

That Overton window has moved. We are now in a situation in which a significant minority struggle to clear normal content. M1-8N are completely out of reach unless dying multiple times and being carried is the solution. And we have been told very clearly that 8.0 will make this worse.

There are several possible outcomes.

1. Normal content continues to get more difficult. ~25% of the playerbase at the low end of the skill spectrum quit before 8.0. More quit after 8.0 is released. I think this is the mostly likely scenario since it is already happening, and SE seem completely deaf to the issues of this part of the player base.

2. Normal content is made easier. Highly-skilled players claim they would quit in this event, which is incomprehensible to me given they have all the non-normal content, but I'll take this at face value and assume ~25% of the highest-skilled players quit.

Both outcomes are poor, thus:

3. Implement one of the many suggestions made on these boards to accommodate all players, from skill sliders, to NPC rezzes in normal dungeons, to increased echo... and many more.

Or better yet...

4. Revert normal content to something other than DDR rubbish that only tests a narrow sliver of gaming skill. SE is capable of this. PvP demonstrates it.

[Carin-Eri]

I don't think you'll make progress with the general points here without recognizing something fundamental.

Because of the nature of FFXIV and the broad spectrum of players it attracts, there is a correspondingly broad range of ability when it comes to PvE. The evolution of fight design has further stretched this skill spectrum, since resolving mechanics has relied on an increasingly narrow skillset.

As a result, we have high-skill players bleating about normal content being brain-dead (see current active threads here), while the less-skilled are reaching the limit of what they can clear.

Another way of looking at this is that, in the past, essentially everyone was able to clear normal content, with EX+ providing tiers where more-skilled players could enjoy themselves, and the tiny minority of highly-skilled players being catered to with top-end PvE content.

That Overton window has moved. We are now in a situation in which a significant minority struggle to clear normal content. M1-8N are completely out of reach unless dying multiple times and being carried is the solution. And we have been told very clearly that 8.0 will make this worse.

There are several possible outcomes.

1. Normal content continues to get more difficult. ~25% of the playerbase at the low end of the skill spectrum quit before 8.0. More quit after 8.0 is released. I think this is the mostly likely scenario since it is already happening, and SE seem completely deaf to the issues of this part of the player base.

2. Normal content is made easier. Highly-skilled players claim they would quit in this event, which is incomprehensible to me given they have all the non-normal content, but I'll take this at face value and assume ~25% of the highest-skilled players quit.

Both outcomes are poor, thus:

3. Implement one of the many suggestions made on these boards to accommodate all players, from skill sliders, to NPC rezzes in normal dungeons, to increased echo... and many more.

Or better yet...

4. Revert normal content to something other than DDR rubbish that only tests a narrow sliver of gaming skill. SE is capable of this. PvP demonstrates it.

Absolutely agree.

In fact, point #1 is spot on. I can't see myself persisting with the game if they continue down the current trajectory. I struggle like hell with the newer content, don't enjoy playing it, and haven't actually queued for/played 'Expert' or 'Level Cap Dungeons' roulettes since they appeared on the Duty Finder; I see little point as I'm a burden to any team I might find myself in playing that content.

But to highlight one comment I just made - I don't enjoy it. I don't pay a sub/play the game to make myself feel miserable and if they continue producing content of that difficulty level (or worse) - content I won't want to play and will actively avoid - cancelling my sub will, sadly, be the only answer I'll have to it.