what would you consider hard content?

[Lori]

Ummm... it appears you're just using this as an opportunity to flash your e-peen. How could you possibly know how this game measures up to other games in difficulty if you haven't even played any endgame? This is a fair question.

I say this from the perspective of an old-school 8-bit gamer who has survived many a bullet hell. More currently, Demon/Dark Souls are my favorite games.

There's plenty of content in FF14 that can pose a challenge. And a hefty one that that. You'd think people were constantly entering Final Coil for the first time and one-shoting it to hear many people go on.

What poses a challenge is entirely subjective.

Less than 2 weeks for T13 world first tells us that the only real challenge is getting 8 geared people with enough time to spare memorizing a fight to sit down in a room for many consecutive hours without dying IRL.

What people are commenting on is that there's barely any adaptive play opportunities in FFXIV, which is why it is not a game about personal skill. Once you know the basics of your job and have run it for a month of two in dailies you've basically mastered performing it and the only thing left to do is find 7 other people who're willing to sit through the memorization process with you. At best the game has pseudo-random awareness checks.

The difference between say, Dark Souls and FFXIV's 'difficult' endgame, is that you can reasonably expect to complete Dark Souls without someone telling you every little thing that needs to be done against, say, Manus, or O&S, because the game allows for (and encourages) adaptive, intelligent play, whereas FFXIV's endgame has little to none - it's just time investment and memory. Sure, you can memorize those patterns, but unlike FFXIV, you can't recite nearly the exact same button combination every single fight and expect to win.

(Unless you're a pyromancer. Then log off and stop playing the game on easy mode.)

It's certainly hard to memorize Bahamut Prime's attack pattern, but to most people memorization does not equal real or organic challenge.

This person said it perfectly