Overtuned MSQ 4-mans and subpar story ends 12-year journey

[Valence]

what

I can't take your post seriously if you're actually comparing ARR/HW dungeon mechanics with the current twitchy DRR with visual saturation we have today. That both may trip people in different ways is one thing, but what we're seeing here is the result of people being alienated by the current model at work.

[Powercow]

Yuweyawata Field Station Boss 2: "Lost Hope"
Four random players need to rely on their ping and spatial relationship ability to line up the spinning hand in multiple directions to navigate through zig zag paths to the outside of the room or they are 1-shot.

If you're a Ninja, Reaper, Dancer, Pictomancer or White Mage you have 0 reason to ever die to this mechanic. Those jobs all have "hey I need to get to the safe spot" buttons that completely ignore the spinning hand. Anyone else, also 0 reason because you can literally hit Sprint, press W, and no matter where you were in the field beforehand you'll make it to the wall before the explosion hits. Sure you'll take a little bleed and a damage down, but the bleed is easily healed through with self-defensives (or just heals), and let's face it you getting a damage down isn't going to affect anything.

[Exmo]

There's no network latency in the spinning hand mechanic. That's calculated client side. The only latency is what happens between your brain and your computer.

[Novarius]

Please you've got to be kidding me, another one of these threads? They're cropping up like weeds I swear, although they make for a pretty entertaining read admittedly... If you think the DT dungeons are shallow and have no substance in terms of theming then you must have been asleep playing the Meso Terminal one in 7.3, the theming is really on point with the mechanics employed by the first and second boss in terms of making sense in the context of what the boss is and the third boss takes the theming up another level attacking you with attacks that killed people during The Storm Surge drawing inspiration from their last moments to devise mechanics to kill you is pretty rad imo... Admittedly the MSQ story wasn't great in 7.0 and 7.1 but I feel that 7.2 and 7.3 whilst not absolving all the sins of the DT MSQ have been a good course correction to get the story back on track so it can move forwards in a more interesting direction...

[Mana_Azir]

Also to people saying that encounters were harder before EW, go play through them right now and we'll talk again. You're just remembering them within their own expansion with their own job mechanics that we have lost or have been watered down over time.

well yeah excluding the balancing changes after their own expansions, stuff got nerfed and reworked post 5.1-5.3 whenever complaints got bad and even more so to accommodate for the system updates to Trust/Duty support. The watering down was bound to happen at point if people kept making a fuss about it. If you go play them right now in their current state post EW then its all different enough.

[Mana_Azir]

EW was also not objectively easier than past expansions. This may be your personal opinion but it is not a popular one.

It legit was a popular opinion?? People were dooming the game cos it was baby levels of easy in some places. Heck it was easier to level up my Trusts in EW cos of how easy the encounters were compared to ShB and DT due to how things were when things were at their respective current balancing.
And looking at Arm gestures as a mechanic has been a thing since as back Stormblood even if i recall Swallow's Compass or maybe even further back

[Mana_Azir]

They even upped the difficulty of map dungeons. They were fine before. The same people here love to sing the song of upping the difficulty and excluding casual content where it was a staple before it fine.

Casuals are going to leave and they've for the most part have been paying the bills.

akshully treasure map dungeon "difficulty" for lack of a better term, went down around ShB then folks complained about it enough and things got reverted back to a degree to handle the kits we got given at lv100

[Foraet]

I also think the MSQ dungeons are overtuned for casual players, but that's just me. Too many moments in the learning process that felt more tedious than fun through most of DT. Clearly someone has Yoshida's ear. I've been farming the latest dungeon for glams and I personally love the 2nd boss, but the number of times I've been yanked by 2-3 of the bosses to finish them off myself is kinda laughable at this point. I always feel sorry for the people who keep failing mechanics and constantly apologize profusely (like I care if you're failing, you don't need to apologize to me). Sure the dungeon seems super easy to me but I've run it like 40 times already because it was entertaining and it's not like there's a ton of other new things to do for midcore players like me. Just keep wondering how many people who are here for the visual novel aspect of game SE has manage to bleed off at this point. Not like they're going to post anywhere about it that they're no longer spending their money on the game.

[Jeeqbit]

I can't take your post seriously if you're actually comparing ARR/HW dungeon mechanics with the current twitchy DRR with visual saturation we have today. That both may trip people in different ways is one thing, but what we're seeing here is the result of people being alienated by the current model at work.

They do make the new ones faster paced and as I've said, I don't particularly care for or need it to be fast, personally.

I'm not comparing mechanics, but rather how "obvious" mechanics were or were not. My point was that in ARR/HW their design was to not really explain the mechanics, and much more value was placed on YouTube dungeon guides due to this, which became pointless in future expansions both due to how over-telegraphed it was and Duty Support showing you where to go.

One of the main things they have been trying to do in Dawntrail is to return to that. Regardless of how fast or slow it is, if you do it enough, it's a lot less stresful and hits you a lot less due to the increased amount of understanding and knowing the script.

This has been so very clear to me in Occult Crescent and some dungeon fights. At first I've just been baffled about what's going on, and got slapped around by things gathering vuln stacks, but as I've done it more I've figured the mechanics out and can do them flawlessly, because I'm familiar with the timing and I know to expect them. The first boss in Skydeep is so easy to tunnel and then every single bubble mechanic just hits and racks up vulns, until you learn to focus on its mechanics. The last boss of Vanguard catches a lot of people out, but once you learn to read cast names, moving appropriately to front or back is easy and then the entire fight is nothing. Oh, that last boss in the capstone 7.0 dungeon beat me up a number of times at first because I tunneled hard on Viper, but now I can do it flawlessly.

And when someone else can't do it yet, we've still cleared the dungeon. We just pull through it, rez them if we can, or clear anyways.

[CaptainLagbeard]

The only things in normal difficulty content I might consider anything close to being overtuned in DT is the Second boss in Vanguard, specifically it's Search and Destroy attack as that's a lot of AoEs, Also the HP of Zelenia in Recollection.