Could we get some "Mainstream" content?

[Felis]

but Levi and Ramuh HM are pretty casual and calling them "Hard" is a bit of a misnomer.

Just call them "story mode", because they are inside of the mainstory.

[Moqi]

I think Primal Ex fit the bill, although Titan is not forgiving AT ALL. Way too much.

Levi EX is the best example of mainstream for me. It's hard, but it's also not as unforgiving as Titan. Coil 1 as well (now that it has echo).

[Iriadysa]

I would agree that Ex primals are "mainstream".

I wouldn't categorize content according to their difficulty directly, however. Instead, I'd consider more the time investment required for such content; specifically the amount of structured time you must dedicate to a specific content.

People tend to categorize casual - hardcore and the gradient between them based on difficulty as if, for some reason, casual players were bad players and hardcores were specially good at playing. This is by no means truth and I'd bet my hide that you find the same proportionally good and bad players in both groups. The difference is one of them is bigger than the other, thus bad players seem more prolific (and in raw numbers are of course more).

On the other hand, structured time is usually the mark of a hardcore player. These are players that are able and willing to commit their game time for a specific goal with specific organization. Note that this doesn't refer to the amount of time invested, as there's certainly casuals that invest copious amounts of time into the game and hardcores that don't play as much.

The thing is, to dedicate your time to a goal you must commit with other like minded people who are willing to commit the same amount of time and, what's more prohibitive, the same time frames. Perhaps the younger people reading this won't understand it but as a more adult gamer the problem isn't necessarily not having time for your hobby but actually having a steady schedule for it.

So if you rate content in terms of structured time requirements, only Coil 2 fits the bill. The rest of the content starts at the mid range part of the gradient with Extreme primals (yes, all of them, even Titan) down to the absolute casual content.

I would agree that there's mostly casual content and that perhaps the worst part of 2.2 and onwards is the elimination of actually relevant mid range content. While Ex primals are mid range in my mind, they are also pointless in terms of actual progression... even Ramuh.

[Gardes]

I am referring to EXs, anything besides that are very casual in terms of difficulty.

I mostly agree with this but it's really really too bad the rewards really does not fit its level. Anymore, that is. I really don't understand why they're...what's the word, trivializing the ex primals? The first thing people compare when it comes to gear reward is item level before calculating their secondary stats and majority of the 2.2 primal rewards and beyond are generally inferior to 'casual' soldiery at first glance.

[Themis]

I mostly agree with this but it's really really too bad the rewards really does not fit its level. Anymore, that is. I really don't understand why they're...what's the word, trivializing the ex primals? The first thing people compare when it comes to gear reward is item level before calculating their secondary stats and majority of the 2.2 primal rewards and beyond are generally inferior to 'casual' soldiery at first glance.

This is one of the biggest cons of vertical progression: equipment of a certain level will, at some point, be rendered useless to the general player base (that being players who are moving forward and want to become stronger). In the case of XIV, this point comes every 6 months (or every 2 patches).

The other problem that XIV has is that new content that is added requires a higher item level for participation. Whilst content is generally added for all levels and play styles (i.e. story related content is of a lower level than the 3 new dungeons, which are in turn lower level than the current top tier content), in comparison to the previous content addition, the shift progressively increases. This wouldn't normally be an issue, I don't think, but the ease of access to the "baseline" equipment is too much that it renders even the recently added content practically obsolete to most players, especially those in the "I want to get stronger" camp. You don't find very many players who are gearing up using dungeons like the latest expert dungeons, or last patch's expert dungeons. It's just unnecessary to do that (outside of collecting gear for some alt classes).

That's really the main thing that needs to be "fixed". I'm all for trying to let players play catch up but it's a little ridiculous at how easy and fast that can be. For me, personally, I get more satisfaction out of earning my gear and my strength. But with the current ease of access to top tier gear, I don't feel that at all. I've kept away from the Hunts because I feel it cheapens the whole game, but as we're (the people I play with) are doing these and pushing ahead, I'm starting to feel like I'll have to in order to keep up.

tl;dr I'd rather see meaningful content, regardless of what level/tier of -core it sits at, than simply adding in more of the content that people won't want to do because there's an easier path somewhere else. (But trying to change human nature isn't something a game is going to do, without punishing the more casual players at the same time).

[Odett]

I would argue that EX Primals are often too easy to be considered "mainstream" content minus Ramuh, which requires some coordination, but you could still learn all these fights in a day. You can actually queue up in DF now and have a good chance of beating Levi EX. I wouldn't call SCoB hardcore. People have mentioned the time needed to do SCoB, but that's up to you and your group, really. You could just dedicate an hour or an hour and a half two days out of the week if you want to. You're the one that sets the pace.

[Colt47]

The primary hurdle for doing content in this game is actually setting up the time to build the party to do the content. Plenty of people don't want to commit to statics, but still want to get together and do the content that makes up the current end game. DF helps a ton with this and I wish they would allow people to just queue individually for the latest content instead of holding it off. I mean, if someone wants to learn ramuh EX it's going to be faster to just throw oneself together with a bunch of other people via a Duty Finder queue than to have to build a learning group that is going to achieve the same results. Once people have progressed far enough to get the idea of the fight Party Finder starts making more sense.

[Dyvid]

I would classify content as this:

Casual - Dungeons, Story Elements
Mainstream - CT/ST, Primals HM
Hardcore - Coil, Primal EX

[Tupsi]

With the amount of time commitment needed for coil I don't think it's aimed for a 40%, savage coil was created for a special part of the <10% that wanted more, a really small part that doesn't care much about rewards and more about challenges, call it high-end hardcore or the real hardcore (since most of the 10% just blow through guides to get there).

Savage Coil, per Yoshida, was designed as an experiment if people would want harder content - The problem, however, is it shares lockout with the current progression content (Coil 2) so more are less inclined to even play around with it.

[Khaoticsuccubus]

With the amount of time commitment needed for coil I don't think it's aimed for a 40%, savage coil was created for a special part of the <10% that wanted more, a really small part that doesn't care much about rewards and more about challenges, call it high-end hardcore or the real hardcore (since most of the 10% just blow through guides to get there).

If someone doesn't have the time or commitment needed for coil then that means they fall into the 60%, casual playerbase. This isn't really about what one person or the other defines as being mainstream or not. It's what SE divides them into. Coil was not put in there to cater to 10% of the playerbase. Savage coil was however.