Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Absurdity]

Understandable, that's a fair opinion. However, the game has always been like this, and it used to be much worse, so I'm wondering why it you didn't feel it was a problem before?
Bosses often had obscure mechanics unique to them that you may not see again for the rest of the expansion, take Diabolos's portal doors from Amdapor, or the boss before having the tank kill an add to be able to draw aggro in the first place. These mechanics could get quite punishing, too.

I think the added variety of having to figure out what the boss's choice of communication will be is fun, personally. I also enjoyed ARR+ mech design best (or what was left of it when I began playing in 2020, many old dungeons would consistently wipe careless groups when this doesn't happen anymore sadly) where things are overall slower, but there's more moving pieces.

I can't tell you definitively, but I can give you my guess.

It's a problem now because people have gotten too comfortable with bosses just doing "dodge the same 5 orange AoE patterns while it casts for 10 seconds" for 3 expansions straight.
They even went back and reworked the mandatory ARR dungeons to do exactly the same thing, or they are so powercrept that you can simply ignore the mechanic.

So most players now have never even experienced having to figure out a boss' unique mechanics from whatever obscure tells it had.
Best example is Sunken Temple of Qarn. People regularly die to doom despite there being an obvious glowing platform and nothing else in the arena, because the game no longer bothers to make them develop the skill of "look around at what is happening".

[Kohashi]

However, come DT and things changed.. The speed with which aoe's are chucked out is ridiculous for some players except almost professional players. Yes, we can work out our mistakes, yes, we can move when need, but not at that speed. Not as an older/disabled player.

The main thing that I can say about that is that the game now forces you to know when snapshots happen. In your defense, it is probably the most unintuitive system in FF14 that the game never even remotely mentions.

In FF14, there are 2 types of snapshots based on the target Info (progress Bar):

1. That happens around 80% of the castbar
2. That happens at the end of the castbar

Most snapshots in casual content and a great portion of savage are done at the end of the castbar, so you can guide yourself based on that.

The solution to your predicament is to go to HUD-> split Boss information into 3 elements-> Drag the target Info (progress Bar) in the middle of the screen or where it is easy for you to see and make it 200%.

[CuteBucket]

My problem with savage isn't the "difficulty", it's just a memory game at the end of the day, my issue is that it's just a memory game - there is no skill expression, the mandatory damage is carefully calibrated to not kill you as long as the right buttons are pressed and the fail damage causes a wipe then and there, no room for healers to save the run, no room for tanks to do anything to save the run, no room for good dps players to beat the dps check anyway just "you slipped up, back to the start." From what I'm told Ultimate is the same but longer.

Punishing vs challenging. This is the issue I'm having right now as a person who does the savage raids. I don't mind that part of the fights is like learning a choreographed dance, I can find fun in that aspect, but when that's ALL there is, it gets grating. Hell I don't even mind a couple of body checks during a hard fight, but M8S in particular is just Netcode Bodycheck Savage. It's not a fun fight when there's little to no chance of saving a run, just hours of "nope, wipe and start over." Like sure, I can use Cover as a Paladin on a healer while the LB3, but it doesn't even feel that cool because it doesn't matter, the fact that we had to do that at all means it's most likely a lost cause because the DPS were down for 5 GCDs so we might as well give up now and wipe because we won't hit the DPS check. Savage has always been difficult, that's the point, I know, but something feels different now. I actually really enjoyed M6S because I felt like I really got to shine as a tank and manage aggro and keep enemies apart and manage my shields well, but that fight stands out as unusual in that regard.

[FuturePastNow]

I mostly just do normal content, and a few extremes, and I don't think normal content has gotten too hard. What's happened mostly is that a lot of the fights now assume that you know (as you should after 100 levels) to pay attention to the boss's cast bar and actually look at the boss to see for example if he's going to hit left or right. A lot of players have gotten through a lot of fights without learning to watch those things, but it's truly not too difficult for anyone.

[AyumiCosplayGlam]

Harder content pretty much always have rather low clear rate because, well, they're harder and not everyone wants to bother with that. If you want content like savage/ultimate to have a high clear rate you would have to severely reduce the difficulty probably to normal raid level or, at the very most, extreme-level. But then you have to also reduce the actual normal-level difficulty otherwise it makes no sense. So you ends up with the high-end difficulty content to be easy and nothing in the game is remotely hard and challenging to do. You also alienate the majority of the players because all content are a snoozefest and nothing is remotely interesting to do. Overall, you end up with a dead game.

Hardcore raiders only gets 4 savages like every other patch and one ultimate once in a while, they've not remotely become the target audience. I would say that DT's target audience are the average casual people who don't necessarely want savage-level of difficulty but still don't want to fall asleep while doing every single piece of content.



And most MMORPGs have visual/audio cues for mechanics and not just a orange danger puddle on the ground for 30 seconds. And with most jobs now being braindead to play, you should be able to focus on something else than your rotation anyway.

Sorry but the 4 savage and 1 ultimate excuse dosn't fly anymore when hadcore raiders have been eating exceptionally good in dawntrail while everyone else had borderline 0 content until Occult Crescent.

They currently have 8 savage raid, 1 ultimate, 1 chaotic, 1 alliance raid (Forked Tower) and for some reason now we also have the Deep dungeon boss accessible by que with the difficulty cranked up to 11.
Meanwhile Casual players have: 8 normal raids, 2 alliance raids, Occult Crescent without an ending because of forked tower, ill be generous and say that the new deep dungeon is casual but its actually debateable due to requirement for entry aaaaaand thats it i guess.

I always laugh when YoshiP says in an interview that they want to make content for everyone from now on and thats why we have the new deep dungeon stuff shoehorned in, while forked tower and chaotic is still unplayable pieces of...content. Somehow the content for everyone means we also get a hard version of things, but for some reason i highly doubt the next ultimate will have a normal mode when you actually survive stuff and normal raids with the savage exclusive boss forms.

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

[Shistar]

[...] ill be generous and say that the new deep dungeon is casual but its actually debateable due to requirement for entry [...]

You just have to finish the "tutorial floors" so to speak and beat one boss with a grand total of two mechanics which boil down to run away, come close, run away. You can literally get it done in one evening and do it fully blind. It truly doesn't get any easier than this...

[Valence]

Punishing vs challenging. This is the issue I'm having right now as a person who does the savage raids. I don't mind that part of the fights is like learning a choreographed dance, I can find fun in that aspect, but when that's ALL there is, it gets grating. Hell I don't even mind a couple of body checks during a hard fight, but M8S in particular is just Netcode Bodycheck Savage. It's not a fun fight when there's little to no chance of saving a run, just hours of "nope, wipe and start over." Like sure, I can use Cover as a Paladin on a healer while the LB3, but it doesn't even feel that cool because it doesn't matter, the fact that we had to do that at all means it's most likely a lost cause because the DPS were down for 5 GCDs so we might as well give up now and wipe because we won't hit the DPS check. Savage has always been difficult, that's the point, I know, but something feels different now. I actually really enjoyed M6S because I felt like I really got to shine as a tank and manage aggro and keep enemies apart and manage my shields well, but that fight stands out as unusual in that regard.

M6S is the oddity that shows that we're not playing for the same kind of game and enjoyment than what's being served sadly.
I'm actually glad M6S saw the light of day for this specific reason alone, it puts this wedge issue under the spotlight.

[Voidmage]

I always laugh when YoshiP says in an interview that they want to make content for everyone from now on and thats why we have the new deep dungeon stuff shoehorned in, while forked tower and chaotic is still unplayable pieces of...content. Somehow the content for everyone means we also get a hard version of things, but for some reason i highly doubt the next ultimate will have a normal mode when you actually survive stuff and normal raids with the savage exclusive boss forms.

All in all lets just stop the copium, its obvious that square wants to cater to the hardcore raiders and it is objectively, actively reducing the playerbase in dawntrail and overall interest in the game.

I would wait for now given they have just introduced quantum and seem to genuinely want feedback on it.

If for example the next variant has no criterion but scalable difficulty or the next chaotic is more accessible for nonraiders then they are on the right track.
If the whole thing boils down to hardcore raiders getting content in patches that are usually more casual and the nonraiders are being left out with either nothing or a barely existing reward structure, then yeah they deserve every criticism and hate they can get.

That's actually my greatest fear with quantum. That they only take feedback from the raiding content creators and all we are left will be mini ultimates as the only noteworthy content out of it.

I agree with your points in that raiders definitely have no reason to complain in DT (since EW to be frank).
Not necessarily because of quantity but quality.
The raid series is considered as great, chaotic was in itself a fun fight and Forked tower at least had much love put into its design at least.
Non hard content like OC has been underwhelming so far with CE even seemingly being the same thing for 4 zones.
FT's "cost" argument especially was a slap in the face.

They have to step up their game and stop regarding non raiding content as a thing "they have to do" and I think that's the actual answer to this thread.
Normal content feels like an obligation from their part while they would love it more to work on hard raiding content.
The amount of effort and love put between these two is stunningly different.

[aiqa]

What I've come to dislike about FF difficulty in recent alliance raids, is how many fights have a tricky part near the end. Often balanced in a such a way that you can completely skip it with enough dps. That means with a better team, that could handle the trickier parts perfectly well, never gets to see it. And a team that is already struggling, then gets hit with some even more tricky mechanics.

Giving better players the easy mode fight is not how content should be designed.

[0blivion]

i had a one-handed player in my party actively playing better than the able-bodied ones. a couple days after, i had a vision impaired party member who, again, did much better than some of the well-sighted people. this is a skill issue on OP's part, stop using disabled people to pretend it isn't just you underperforming.