The constant disbanding of Steps of Faith

[Alistaire]

Better comparison to WoW encounters i've seen would be the Oculus. Something that's completely outside the norm for encounters up to that point that everyone avoids because it's completely outside the norm for encounters up to that point.

You guys make it sound like this "out of the norm" is hard or something. Tanks and healers on cannon duty before? Stone Vigil HM. DPS should avoid fighting adds? Tamtara HM. Fights where someone needs to run from the boss, click an object to do some mechanic? Copperbell HM.

I'd be really annoyed at running into players in any of these that couldn't grasp those mechanics. Yet somehow this happens quite a bit in Steps. I honestly don't get why people derp so hard on this fight.

[Seiryuukishi]

If something that would be considered a joke of a fight on other MMOs is considered hard here, just how low does SE need to set the bar to not "compromise" the game experience?

That's just it, there's no way of knowing what standard to set because the player base are human beings. What you and I and probably most of us have encountered in our various MMO history gave us the tools to adapt to things like this. After learning it, it actually appears easy to those with a trained set of eyes and have a concept of how these things play out. Newer gamers to MMOs maybe not so much. Some may view it as a challenge while others may see it to be hard.

With people always using the "time" excuse, it sort of forces Yoshida and Co.'s hand. Why that argument even exists in a form of entertainment designed to waste time is beyond me. I think people want to make time=difficulty and it won't happen. So when we get something with flavor that takes five minutes longer to do than Howling Eye Hard, people cry foul. On the other hand you have people with huge learning curves so it takes them longer to complete content with some degree of difficulty then they typically would. It's not entirely their fault; it could be they have trouble grasping simple instructions or maybe they were unable to retain information gathered via video or written guide. This mostly in turn causes them to give up or be more prone to do so.

It's all mentality, really. But as far as SE setting a standard it's difficult to say. I think they're giving us a taste of some things to come in Heavensward but if people can't get up to speed or just won't "try" it'll be for naught.

[Starcade]

That scares me though. Steps of Faith is an incredibly basic fight. If you want to compare it to anything, it could easily be compared to the airship battle in ICC, which was known as the "lootship" because of how easy it was. If something that would be considered a joke of a fight on other MMOs is considered hard here, just how low does SE need to set the bar to not "compromise" the game experience?

It's a basic fight, with the understanding that it actually requires actual gameplay rather than rote facerolling.

You actually take many of the players who are set in roles, disrupt those roles, and make them do something else.

And many of these people cannot do that -- and that's why I fear for the availability of decent 3.0 players when we get that far.

[Gardes]

To everyone complaining about the incoming nerf to Steps of Faith:

They gave plenty of time for people to try and clear this. Now it's time for everyone else to play catch-up. Besides, there are a lot of scrubs holding back some of the better potential players out there, who are just struggling to get this done so they can move on to progress. So just be happy you were able to fucking beat it, will you? The moment you beat it is the moment you lost your bitching privileges.

Of all the things SE has done for me, this is probably the most impressive one. Turning an innocent word into a disgusting and vile one for me.

[Tsukino]

I don't know why everyone keeps debating the difficulty and ability of players to play the game properly when it has absolutely nothing to do with why people are exiting upon entering. They're exiting immediately because every other trial in the roulette takes about five minutes, while this one takes a minimum of 15.

Though they do (or the first person does at least) incur a 30-minute penalty for leaving, that's 30 minutes they can go do something else, even not play FFXIV, so they take it. They were looking for something quick, they didn't get it, so they leave.

[VTanner]

I don't know why everyone keeps debating the difficulty and ability of players to play the game properly when it has absolutely nothing to do with why people are exiting upon entering. They're exiting immediately because every other trial in the roulette takes about five minutes, while this one takes a minimum of 15.

Though they do (or the first person does at least) incur a 30-minute penalty for leaving, that's 30 minutes they can go do something else, even not play FFXIV, so they take it. They were looking for something quick, they didn't get it, so they leave.

So say for instance if T9/T13 was thrown into Trial roulette with all the singing and dancing mechanics they have would you stay? Okay it's no where near that difficulty but the difficulty of SoF comes from it's deviation of the normal Tank & Spank zerg fest many have become accustomed to and as such you can eat a 30min timer or spend at least 15mins failing then arguing then leaving and doing it all again...or just leave on entering which is what is happening. Sometimes you just know when a group will not pass a fight and sadly SoF contains more of them and it's much much harder to just carry the dead weight. Fire up Garu HM and some fresh lvl50's in i40>i50 will probably die quickly but the rest are so overgeared that they'll just blast through it with ease. In SoF if you're not doing at least moderately well it's a fail with a really really long reset.

I think the problem is too many players now are being carried through once difficult fights by overgeared players (willingly or not) and are missing all the learning of those battles. Most of the primal fights now can be simply DPS at lightning speed with complete disregard for any of the original mechanic's so a new player will never know those or learn them. In turn they'll get to newer content and have missed all that previous experience that many of us who have played before the nerfs had to learn.

[DragonSlayer45]

I have a simple fix: Don't do trial roulette. Stay away from it, pretend it doesn't exist if you hate Steps that much. There is nothing wrong with the Steps of Faith fight, the problem is the community that is prone to ragequitting and extreme lack of teamwork in duty finder scenarios. This exact same scenario happened in 2.1 with the King Moogle fight and I'm honestly disappointed that the Steps fight is more than likely to get the nerf stick as well.

It makes me worry about the future of fights in this game. Does every fight besides the weekly raid and Extreme primals need to be tank and spank? If we put in a fight that requires a minimal amount of effort from players other than just pushing buttons and watching numbers pop up, is it going to be met with the same reception as Steps/Chrysalis/pre-nerf King Mog? Because heaven forbid we have to work as a team in an MMO.

[Neuflune]

For everyone who's stuck, please do try Party Finder. Isn't it better to sit on PF waiting for people who are actually willing to help, instead of taking your chances on a long queue on Duty Finder only for people to leave right away?

Why do people leave? Personally I am willing to tank, heal or DPS Steps, but the amount of newbies who "go in blind" is too high. They go in blind and expect everyone else in the duty to teach them what to do. There are guides out there, the duty isn't new already. I'm up for helping people, but help yourself too!

And as for the turtle that was mentioned, for the Twelve's sake do not spam stun on it! Only the massive AOE should be stunned, otherwise the turtle will resist if you don't kill it fast enough!

[Govalon]

It took me few days to find a group which could beat this. I have done all roles as DPS. Cannons, tower, keeping on boss and stunning tortoise because cannon people suck. It is a hard fight and anyone saying otherwise is full of himself. If this was a easy fight, I would not had to spend 3 days in this single fight now would I? I didn't have to try Castrum multiple days to get it done, I didn't have to try Snowcloak or Keeper of the Lake multiple days to get it done. Those are easy dungeons. They can be done in ANY DF group. Steps of faith is not easy because most DF groups fail at it. Simple as that.

I am glad they are making this easier since this is a story fight that needs to be beaten to progress in to heavensward. People should not get stuck in the story dungeon for days. It is ok to make fights like these optional but not story dungeons. Last night, time was like 2 am and I was heading to bed but decided to do trial roulette for fast tomes before sleep. Well, I got into Steps group and I knew that it was not going to be fast. It never is so I left and wen't to sleep. If rewards would have been better, I might have stayed to see if the group can make it but with so little rewards I was not going to stay for half of hour wiping with a really small chance to get few tomes.

[Gardes]

II am glad they are making this easier since this is a story fight that needs to be beaten to progress in to heavensward. People should not get stuck in the story dungeon for days.

Yeah, they should be able to steam roll every main story content. Then we would never have anything to fight that feels 'worthy' for a big bad boss. They're all just as easy as the little bosses in the 4 man dungeons. Then people would start thinking that the game has only teased them a little bit and have more 'challenging' content for them to tackle. Then they walk up to a raid boss and get slapped and then spin a thousand times when they're already dead on the 1st spin. Then they would get confused and think there must be something wrong with the game balance and demand nerfs.

Large leap of thinking? Feels like it already happened.