How do people calling themselves casual feel about the difficulty level?

[Judge_Xero]

Casual player. (3 nights a week @ 3 hours) Legacy with most lvl 50 classes though. T4 on Farm. Yet to beat T5. Only on my 4th EX weapon. Just having fun trying the fights with different classes.
I wouldn't consider the content too casual. I see people who are way over geared for most stuff get creamed on fights. If it was to the point where you could easily win by over gearing content then it would be way too casual.

[Hulan]

You're going to get some pretty bad confirmation bias when you ask questions like these. It's particularly bad because you asked on a forum for an MMO. Being a forum browser myself, I can't speak from personal experience, but I find that virtually anyone I talk to who plays less than a few hours a day does not read or post on the forums. Your experience is dictated by your environment. I almost never spend time in Mor Dhona, and I am constantly seeing people in pre-endgame gear, or linkshell mates who are having trouble beating Garuda EX, or even Titan HM. On the other hand, the few times I do visit the popular hang-outs, it's like a completely different experience.

As someone who plays probably more often that you do, but the sounds of it, I can't speak to how people who play less time feel about the difficulty. But I can say that by asking the question the way you did, you're just asking to have your own perspective reflected back to you and reinforced.

[Noahlimits]

I'm a pretty hard-coreish player. I play around 2-3 hours a day after work on weekdays and generally don't play on weekends unless I stay in. However, I really wish they'd tweak how combat is. I wish there were more grind-it-out boss battles. Where you can't just get out of the red and dodge everything, and you had to just absorb punishment and heal / deal with it correctly with cool downs. More fights like CAD (with higher difficulty) would be my preference.

[Jadi]

Heres the thing with the games difficultly. It's not really too hard or easy that is the major problem it's the mechanics that SE have available to them within the game's structure that is the problem.

== Dodging crap.
This is WAY over used by SE and they really need to cut this out. It causes extreme hell and frustration to players who are not able to meet the minimum network requirements to play the game and I'm sure SE has a lot of problems here to figure out exactly what players reaction time should be. So players in say Europe or the Middle East may have extreme problems with content where as players in Japan or Toronto would find it cake easy. It's unfair to people and it just causes unhappiness and frustration in the player base because almost all endgame progression content is subject to it.

(post 1 of 3)

[Jadi]

== Scripted battles.
Every single fight in the game is scripted and this is probably the only way SE can do the fights at all with the game engine. This is why fights appear to be hard when you first fight them and then become easy afterwords. It comes down to a memory test and I don't think this is something that makes a fight difficult. It plagues the game by making content extremely hard by people who first undertake it and boring dull easy to veterans. They REALLY need to change this.

== Gear requirements.
Anyone in the game with half a brain can obtain ilv 80 gear. If you haven't seen clueless players in CT then you haven't run CT. I would think that they would need to have some kind of proficiency with the game in order to obtain such strong items but the way it's designed it's very easy for a full group to carry a few bads in there, and due to that the "DPS Race" difficultly mechanic of endgame is of little practical importance.

(post 2 of 3)

[Jadi]

These are the problems that make the game unfun for hardcore and for casual's alike and SE would do well to attempt to fix these things in following expansions.. I consider FFXIV 1.21 to be a superior game to FFXIV 2.0 because the games mechanics allowing the creation of difficult content was better implemented there was a lot more diversity in the content itself (same for XI by design). I can understand why due to the uncertainty and trouble SE had rebuilding this game that they did what they did and I know why it is we got to this state but they need to go back now and repair some of this. We know they have the money from their successful launch. We have an impressive and wonderful game world.. lets fix these problems please SE?

Due to this it's not too hard or too easy its that the mechanics for creating difficult content that are poorly implemented.

(post 3 of 3)

[Chasely]

== Dodging crap.

I absolutely hate this. Failing to dodge due to latency issues should not mean instant death and ridicule from my peers.

[Xayoc]

I absolutely hate this. Failing to dodge due to latency issues should not mean instant death and ridicule from my peers.

The problem is that people with 'latency' issues use this as an excuse/crutch to not improve. I know someone with very high latency (Japan on a NA server) who has very little issues with Titan EX. If you anticipate the upcoming move you can dodge it, there really is no excuse except being bad to not dodge mechanics.

[Naberrie]

I call myself casual, and I consider the difficulty level decent. What annoys me is the refusal of other players to let it be challenging. By that I mean you're expected to be perfect in a fight or you get kicked, or the PT abandons, or someone drops, etc. Other players don't actually want a challenge. They want to face-roll the content.

When I play a game I like it when a fight kicks my butt a couple times and I have to learn how to progress. (If I go into a boss fight and kill it on the first try, honestly, I'm disappointed.) But in this game that's not allowed by the other players. I understand that they simply want to get through the content as quickly as possible to get their tomes, or their gear, or their relic, etc., but personally I would like it if there was some allowance for learning and adaptation.

For instance, first time I did AK on BRD I had watched a video, but had no practical experience. On demon wall I needed to learn the footwork of where to stand when. First time I was doing good damage and well on the way to victory, but realized at a certain point that I lost track of where to stand next, so I followed the healer, who was a veteran of the fight. As it happened, they lost track, too, and we both got knocked off. Okay, no problem, I thought, next time I'll just pay more attention to my footwork and try to get that down. So the next time that was what I focused on, just trying to learn the pattern. I needed to learn where to stand so that it was second nature, like muscle memory, so I didn't have to think about it. Problem was, my rotation suffered because I was so concerned with my footwork, so I wasn't doing my best damage. Still, I felt I had my footwork down and could get it easy on the next try. But I wasn't given the chance. The healer and the tank left (this was before kick or abandon), and that was that.

I wish there was more patience from other players, a better sense of community. Everyone wants you to know the fight, but they don't want to help you learn. Let it be someone else's problem.

[Jadi]

@Naberrie

It's due to the scripted nature of things. The players that know it well find it extremely easy, since you don't know it they label you as bad. The problem isn't the players it's the fact that it's scripted. Poor design causing more unfunness. (hea new word. lol)

Player nature won't change.. but the game sets low expectations by veterans due to its scripted nature.