Why is FFXIV considered to be so hard/hardcore?

[Eclipsed]

Just a question I have been struggling to understand since launch...

So many people consider Coil to be impossible to get a group for and incredibly difficult. People struggle on extreme primals for months... Etc.. Etc..

Personally I have never understood it, nor have I seen an MMO community with this kind of fear of the content.

I have played virtually ever major MMO, and most minors of note. I have seen a lot of communities and a lot of different kinds of content/dungeons/raiding. But never until this game have I seen the difficulty of the raids being discussed so often in guild or on the forums. People I came here from Rift with, people who beat pre-nerf Akilyos and Hamerknell (which were on a magnitude of difficulty a thousand times harder than anything in FFXIV. Think 10 times the mechanics and fail conditions, you even had to do platforming jumps and dodging without telegraphs in the fight!) tremble in fear of FFXIV.

Personally I don't understand... I look at this in comparison to that, and this content is a cakewalk. Even WoW LFR raids have content that I would consider more difficult than FFXIV. So what is it? What makes these raids so much more intimidating and hard than any other MMO that has been on the market? Why are so many people here unable to clear content, when they have always done so in the past?

[Sygmaelle]

I honestly never found WoW to be any hard on the raiding content, on the other hand I find this game to be more challenging on a pure timing point of view. Its still nowhere close to the game I beloved when content wasn't nerfed, aka Age of Conan (had the hardest PvE I've personnally experienced, very subjective statement here, don't throw rocks tyvm ;D ) that had incredibly complex mechanics in raid on top of an already pretty deep combat / game system.

But still i'm slightly off topic : this game is really exigeant on a pure "timing" point of view and even if you dont have a lot of actions, its executin it all within limited timeframes (before the next pattern come up) that is pretty interesting and definitely enjoyable in FF XIV.

I'd say that people are simply not beein "taught" in the good way. If you look at it, all these video guides and whatnot can be pretty intimidating for anyone that would want to give a shot to the endgame experience, because even if its recommandable enough to have guides, its still not the good way to teach people and make them confident enough in order to simply go for it.

[Moheeheeko]

Its not difficult, this is just a massive case of the "first MMO syndrome"

I laugh at every thread talking about how unforgiving crafting is when I still have nightmares about crafting in other MMO's

[Eclipsed]

ahh Aoc. I love that game, some of the best encounter design ever in an MMO (at least on the Khitai stuff). Those fights were so incredibly mechanic heavy and unforgiving (heck some fights you had to coordinate an action along with an appropriate emote in a group, but people even manage to pug that). In that game, everything was a fail condition! Miss a single minor mechanic? Bam, group is dead. Makes me sad that Khitai was not the game at release, it would have been so much more accepted.

I have to agree on the guides. The people writing them atm have no talent. A certain unnamed person just makes 25 minute videos that don't teach at all and are far too long with too much e-peening that you can't even maintain proper concentration throughout them. And another website that makes guides that are missing crucial pieces of information and don't provide good training either and are extremely poorly formatted. I can figure out fights based on them but it is true that the popular guides out there atm are some of the worst I have ever seen.

[Jubez187]

I find the difficulty lying in the fact that every piece of raid content is balanced around 8 people being alive. The tank/s need both healers up at all time. You need all 4 or 5 DPS up for DPS checks. So combine that with 1 shot mechanics and it gets annoying. Oh you got hit by a Divebomb? Well raid over. Oh you got knocked out of Titan arena. You're just an idiot and died? Game over.

[Raminax]

I laugh at every thread talking about how unforgiving crafting is when I still have nightmares about crafting in other MMO's

This line reminds me of the Hot Heart of Magic/Shining Statue of Siel in Aion. *sniff* Oh, the pain.

And well, I suppose it's a combination of the average skill level of players and that personal failures usually lead to dangerous amounts of collateral damage in the tougher encounters. Unless you're in a static or befriend skilled people that caught your interest while PUGing, it's more than likely that your progress is essentially reset every single time you join a new group. At this point, I'd imagine apathy/fear sets in and people just stop caring/trying, because they believe they'll never get anywhere. :P Kind of apparent with the amount of groups that want experienced players (experienced in eating Landslides, maybe), I guess!

[Clicked]

Meh. FF games have never been particularly difficult if you grind enough.

[Eclipsed]

I find the difficulty lying in the fact that every piece of raid content is balanced around 8 people being alive. The tank/s need both healers up at all time. You need all 4 or 5 DPS up for DPS checks. So combine that with 1 shot mechanics and it gets annoying. Oh you got hit by a Divebomb? Well raid over. Oh you got knocked out of Titan arena. You're just an idiot and died? Game over.

For sure this has truth in it.

But why is divebomb so hard? It is so easy to dodge it's pitiful. I haven't even been hit once since I figured out that I had to run on my own when the green circle shows up, instead of running with the group. You have so much time to react to this. They could cut the timer in half and I would still consider that a cake easy mechanic. What makes it impossible to "see green > run" here when players have been doing this forever in other MMO's?


Knocked off at Titan? If you can't move a quarter of an inch in the insanely long cast time that landslide gives you then well... I have seen pugs deal with far worse dodges a million times. What is it about this game that suddenly they can't? Other MMO's would have adds, fire walls, bombs, etc at the same time as landslide and the MMO community beat those fights just fine!

[Warlyx]

in other mmos u usually didnt die to everything that is tossed around , for example : fire on the ground usually ticked for 25% of the player HP

there are lot of games with 1 shot mechanics? yeah but in FFXIV is nearly everything , even if u dont die, the mistake will cause a wipe later on , or u will kill another member...ect

the amount of times we called a wipe ...because is unrecoverable

[SwashBuccaneer]

Wouldn't be as bad if you sometimes didn't get hit despite being out of telegraphs.