Please do not make group quest open world areas.

[Seryl199]

That...doesn't really look fun to me. He got one-shot. I already have to wait 10 years for a tank to join my queue, I have no desire to need a squad just to walk down an area.

And again, I'll bring up that it was never stated that HW areas are intended to require a group to make it through. SE is making this change based on feedback they've received from their player base. This information is undoubtedly more than the daily whinings of the forum. Their decisions must be carefully considered from a financial standpoint, to please as large of a portion of their paying subscription members as they can. 2.0 was a fairy tale open world, and many of us weren't really impressed by it. Now, they are trying something with a bit more bite to it. If it is positively received, that doesn't mean that open world difficulty will continue to trend upwards. It means that SE listened to what the players wanted and delivered it, and will continue to do so. If not, they will do their best to adjust accordingly.

[Gunspec]

You know, I actually remember dying to stuff in the environment when I first started 2.0. Now granted, that was almost two years ago, and was due to having an ilevel that barely matched my character level, mostly NQ pieces of gear due to no crafting classes leveled, and sometimes facing off against enemies 5 levels higher than me. I would try and get kills for my hunting log, and enemies like the crocs in coethas and the garlean robots were pretty hairy encounters. I remember having trouble moving around freely in the slyphlands during 2.1 for dailies without having three or four spellcasters blasting away at me. The world HAD a sense of danger, but that was a long time ago. I've been level capped on everything for well over a year, and have trouble remembering when I was lower than ilevel 90.

"Fairy tale open world" isn't exactly how I would describe that initial 2.0 experience. Sure, I'm a destroyer of worlds today, but I think a majority of people are really overstating their power from a 2.0 perspective. So moving into 3.0, the idea of a "difficult" enemy is going to mean different things depending on what item level we consider bringing into it.

[Seryl199]

You know, I actually remember dying to stuff in the environment when I first started 2.0. Now granted, that was almost two years ago, and was due to having an ilevel that barely matched my character level, mostly NQ pieces of gear due to no crafting classes leveled, and sometimes facing off against enemies 5 levels higher than me. I would try and get kills for my hunting log, and enemies like the crocs in coethas and the garlean robots were pretty hairy encounters. I remember having trouble moving around freely in the slyphlands during 2.1 for dailies without having three or four spellcasters blasting away at me. The world HAD a sense of danger, but that was a long time ago. I've been level capped on everything for well over a year, and have trouble remembering when I was lower than ilevel 90.

"Fairy tale open world" isn't exactly how I would describe that initial 2.0 experience. Sure, I'm a destroyer of worlds today, but I think a majority of people are really overstating their power from a 2.0 perspective. So moving into 3.0, the idea of a "difficult" enemy is going to mean different things depending on what item level we consider bringing into it.

I experienced the entirety of the MSQ and almost all of my initial adventuring as a conjurer, as well as the first 30 levels of ACN, which possessed a modest physick, so I found myself pretty self sufficient. In recently beginning to level BLM, I can see where you'd say there is still some sense of danger, but I never walked out of an encounter saying "wow, that mob put up a good fight." I either had enough hp to kill it, or I didn't. The suggestion that we will need to bring our all to the battle when trying to fight multiple enemies seems to hint that enemies will be, if not substantially, at least noticeably more difficult. I'm sure that Square is aware they have a delicate line to balance, to make things challenging but not too difficult.