When does this game become difficult

[Avenger]

It depends on what job you're playing, but several of the class/job quest battles can be challenging, particularly if you're a rather fragile caster.

I also found the next two primals you will face (Garuda, Titan) to be hard when I did them shortly after launch.

Otherwise I'd say.... high level crafting.

Which is to say... different players have different ideas of what "difficult" is:

There are a number of battles, especially after lv50, but also in some earlier dungeons and trials, where you need to pay attention to mechanics - this is probably what I would consider "difficult" and also "fun!"

There are certain beast tribe quests (item transport quests that end if you are hit) which I managed to fail multiple times, but they seem to be easier now. (lv40+)

There are also activities that somewhat challenging puzzles (at least if you solve them yourself) like triple triad, riddle quests, and high level crafting. (varying levels)

There are certain FATEs (Odin, Behemoth, Gorgimera) which can usually only be won by large forces and/or can take a while to complete.

There are other "grindier" forms of difficulty such as:

Quests that take a long time (in Earth time) to complete, such as the beast tribe quests (which I actually enjoyed.)

Quests that require you to travel to various distant parts of the world (fortunately you can teleport there usually) only to find that you need to go back to where you started. (Every story quest, and lots of others.)

Quests which depend on low item drop rates or a high failure rate, such as getting particular dungeon drops, advanced materia melding, or card collecting.

Quests which require a large number of repeated steps to complete, such as the relic weapon quests (which may also involve collecting lots of items), collecting tomestones or other tokens, or leveling crafting or gathering classes.

Quests where you may have to wait until the right Eorzean weather or time (e.g. catching certain fish, or gathering certain items) and/or for passage of Earth time (e.g. a-rank hunt timing and s-rank spawn conditions.)

Quests which depend on certain FATEs, which may take a while to spawn (and which you may miss if people finish it too quickly.)

Quests which seem to depend upon the actions of many people on the server (e.g. Doll festival quest) - this is a neat mechanic which I would like to see more of!

Quests which have too many people competing for them (e.g. hunts in patch 2.3 and 2.5) at once. (Fortunately hunts seem to have recovered as of the current patch 2.51.)

Chocobo leveling.

[Gillionaire]

If you've played other MMOs to end-game. I really don't think there's any difficulty you'll face here unless you go to the very end-game.. Even then, it's usually gear check from what I've seen.
Even Titan EX which is supposed to be this incredibly hard challenge isn't much more than just dodging telegraphs.. Looks fancy on youtube, but fighting the battle yourself is rather mundane, just gotta move around and fight.. Only difference with FF14 is the lag will make it a little more difficult than in other games, but that's not really a point in favor for SE


Hopefully coils provide to be a challenge but I've been side tracked with crafting/marketboard to tell you about those personally.


As far as the dungeons go, there really isn't any original mechanics that'll get you, can't blame SE here, it's all been done to death.. not much they can do about that.. Maybe if they introduced a more strict time limit on the runs, it would get a little more interesting.

I've personally found my niche by working the market and doing crafting. Competing with people on the marketboard is fun, figuring out who's making what and how is also fun imo..

[Dererk]

Dealing with people during end game you'll both love and hate it but it's worth it.

[repoe]

the hard part comes when you have to rely on others ppls raid awareness and knowledge of their class to handle fight mechanics. End game raids are for the most part all scripted and with experience you know what the boss. Will do before they do it. The only thing left to chance is your groups ability to prepare and react.

[KisaiTenshi]

Some later endgame content (raiding and stuff) will do this but XIV is designed to be a much more casual themepark style MMO and so its never going to be up to the difficulty of XI.

Leveling to 50 is especially intended to be easy. Titan at 34 is the first time you'll see multiple mechanics start entering fights, and then Garuda at Level 43 is the culmination of that prior to hitting level 50.

Leveling your FIRST class to 50 is easy as you get EXP from both the mainstream story and the Class/Job. Leveling additional Classes depends on how good your patience is. eg Leveling additional DPS classes is more efficient from spamming FATE's while leveling Healers and Tank's is more efficient from dungeons. Either can feel boring or unchallenging from the repetitiveness.

It's not like it was at Launch where everyone thought the Primal fights were hard and there was a lot less ragequit from failure. Right now overgeared players are invited to do the dungeon roulette, and it makes them significantly easier since the dungeons only cap the player's level (or item level) well above the point of making it easy, if it's capped at all.