More Difficult Single Player Content Please

[MasamuneBranford]

In my opinion - the difficulty of the single player activities is this game's biggest flaw. The endgame is gated by well over 100+ hours of single player activity. Beautiful story, fantastic music, great graphics but horrible, horrible single player gameplay (a flaw of many MMOs).

Go to spot X, pop a mob, kill the mob. The issue is that you do this gameplay for a good 150 hours - yet the difficulty remains the same the entire game. It never changes. That might have been acceptable a dozen years ago when WoW was released but gamers now expect heightened difficulty / innovation.

100 hours into a game - the player shouldn't be able to take on every challenge in their sleep. The player has been trained to master their job. Make them use those skills. The crazy dungeon boss dodging mechanics and stiff penalties for missing a dodge should be present during regular encounters. I'm ashamed to admit this - but this is something Destiny does well. You simply can't snooze through a single player quest or you'll find yourself killed. As you progress through the story - the enemies take on different personalities and become more challenging. This is how a game should progress.

Enemies don't need to have more HP. They just need more types of attacks and larger penalties for failing to dodge such attacks. The game doesn't need to be difficult that only few can overcome its challenges - but NEVER should a player feel like he / she would literally need to walk away from the computer mid fight for 5 minutes in order for there to be a chance of failure. Many of the solo main scenario quests are near impossible to die if you have a healing chocobo out. How is that fun?

[Eul]

How about trying to do Dragonskin Map solo?

[Selli]

Undersizing the level 50 dungeons and doing them solo is pretty fun. I farmed Brayflox HM for weeks to get the minion. I'm sure there are other dungeons that are much more challenging and fun, but I've only ever attempted Bray. XD And to be fair, I did get my butt handed to me at i170 more often than I'd like to admit.

[EDIT] It's not quite the same as having harder mobs in the MSQ and it is something you have to go out of your way to do. But it is quite challenging and the rewards are all yours.

[pushin_tin]

Job quests were a missed opportunity to do this. Level 60 job quests should push the player to 80-85% of his class's potential. If anyone happens to be familiar with the legendary Rogue quest in WoW back in Cataclysm, that was a fine example of great challenging single player content. The initial part of the quest basically took advantage of all of the Rogue class's stealth mechanics, and it culminated in a 1v1 boss fight that demanded you use all your tools to balance damage output, interrupts, and self-healing.

I get goosebumps just imagining something like that for every Job in FFXIV, but the devs are probably too scared to do it because most of the playerbase couldn't be bothered to do more than a 1-2-3 rotation.

[FoxyAreku]

Because everyone plays an MMO for a difficult single player experience, right?

I think you're in the wrong genre.

[Zer0]

As much as I like challenging solo content, please for the love of twelve don't make it mandatory. Don't make job quests, or main story quests super super challenging. You forget not all players here are capable of it, some physically. Some players may have poor reaction time or other issues preventing them from playing at a high capacity. It's unfair to make it so they can't do the last job quest because of it. I'm all for adding in other side quests that solve this. Personally as a solo player myself, I'd rather not see hard content but just in depth content. Long chains to work towards that culminate in something awesome. Something I can do a few steps at a time when I have the time to log in.

[zandervont]

Job quests were a missed ...

Or, the Warlock greenfire-quest, that was pretty good on difficulty and knowledge of the job.

[Rynia]

The player has been trained to master their job.

No. No they haven't. You only need to run things in the DF to see that the game does a terrible job of teaching people their class beyond the absolute basics.

I agree with others, you're in the wrong genre if you want difficult solo play. It's an MMORPG after all, and one that is determined to cater to as many people as possible, no matter skill level. Which is great! Not all games need to be difficult to be fun =/

[Nadirah]

I got a rl friend that quit playing ESO because of forced single player, challenging content.

He couldn't get the Lyris doppelganger fight(YouTube it, I have an annotated instructional video up on it). He'd quit FFXIV outright and has ragequit for days at a time over some of the job and MSQ lines that he couldn't get help with(instanced duties).

Meanwhile I solod lv 43 guild quests in ESO at 31(also on video). Everyone has a different skill cap.so no, not if it'll be mandatory solo.

[MicahZerrshia]

If they made job quests, msq or anything in anyway difficult or challenging or made a small percentage of it difficult the poo storm that would rain down from the extremely loud, casual elite that wants everything now would be real.

In beta the msq were actually somewhat hard. You would wipe multiple times, same with job quests and it was nothing but poo poo on the forums, of course there were ppl who loved it. But man the butthurt was real.

That's why we have no real endgame raids in 3.0. All we got was a rehash of existing content with loot that is marginally better but looks the same, but dyeable. The people who do not like challenge and want everything handed to them are extremely loud and spend more time complaining on forums than tackling content. And since they are so loud, companies listen to them.

The people who want challenge need to get louder. Time to take back gaming. This is Final Fantasy not candy crush for cryin out loud.