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

[Sessurea]

Yoshida wants a casual game, not a game where no life rules. But I think its slightly pushed to the extremes...9 Haukke HMs per week to cap off myth.......

He said he wants these lockouts so that no lifers do not get benefits for no lifing, which is revolutionary and very positive imo. But I think 3-4 hrours being sufficient to cap myth tomes is just a step beyond casual....Hope new dungeon takes an hour to clear. 9 hours of dungeon running per week seems a lot better for hardcore players, but I think even most casuals would prefer this also.

As to difficulty, I think the game is hard enough....granted, much of the challenge lies in actually finding parties, especially when one hits that brick wall known as titanEX, but I'm playing a month and still not bored.

[necrosis]

My gf who only plays on weekend and has only one job lv 50 cleared twintania before me, a multi lv 50 playing almost everyday.... casuals can clear everything in the game.

Anyone could. I have 3 50's and have yet to set foot in, or even unlock, T1. If I didn't level other jobs I am sure I could be in a group with T5 on farm mode at best, killed at least once at worst.

All depends on where you focus the time you have.

[TrystWildkey]

Casual player here.

Casual with regard to intent, not time spent in game. When I was happy with the game, I logged in almost every night after work, and at least one full day on the weekends. But, I don't go all out to get through every piece of content as quickly as possible. I took a slow pace with everything, trying to enjoy the game.

Here is where I answer your question about difficulty.

The 'difficulty' was done the wrong way for my tastes.

The difficulty for this game has to do with memorizing patterns and motor memory.
Step One: Get your fight patterns in your motor memory.
Step Two: See the pattern for each fight.
Step Three: Memorize the pattern.
Step Four: Follow your rotation and anticipate the pattern.

In my opinion, that's a crap way to add 'difficulty.' Instead of fights and abilities that reward thinking and strategy, you have one-shot kill and placement mechanics. Instead of being able to creatively use abilities and cross-class skills, being able to creatively use your party makeup to work together, you're all individually following your own rotation. One person misses their placement, or fumbles their rotation, and on the 'hard' content, it's a wipe.

Yes, that makes it difficult but my problem with those kind of mechanics is that it's not challenging. And boredom comes into play, even for casuals, when you realize that once you have the pattern and rotation, it's completely mindless combat. It's artificial difficulty. Since I took things very slowly, it was a few months before I realized exactly what this game is. It's a giant lobby, with progression and gear locked behind instanced, mindless dungeon runs with punishing positioning mechanics.

tl:dr - It's only hard until you memorize the pattern, then it can be ridiculously easy. If you suck at memorizing patterns, have really bad lag, or aren't 100% perfect on your placement and rotations, it's never going to get any easier. (which is why they're adding the echo buff, they know it won't get any easier for certain groups of players)

[ExKage]

I started last day of November 2013 and as of today I only have 2 jobs at 50 (BLM and PLD). i84 BLM with a i69 PLD. I haven't found a group so that I can learn Garuda Ex as BLM and I have yet to clear T4.

[Bigpurpleharness]

As someone who is a medic working 72 hours per week and is also going through pre-med courses currently... The difficulty is fine for me personally, but finding a group for it is nigh-impossible. Which, whatever, my schedule sucks, if I stop getting things done because they're not PUGable with some effort, then I just won't play. No biggie.

[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.

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[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.

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