Thread: The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

Originally Posted by Kaurie

Honestly, I think this is the issue. They want to classify people in to these big groups, but there isn't really a large category that people belong to. It's much more of a scale. Not every non-raider is on equal footing, not every raider is on equal-footing. They need content to match this scaling mentality, where things naturally progress.

Most definitely. I will agree that they've probably gotten too caught up in the numbers without necessarily taking the right lessons from them. With regard to the original EX Primals for instance, fewer people cleared Titan than they expected. But I do wonder how many players that did clear Titan went on to also clear Binding Coil and if that's something they had a way to track back then. The original three primals, both in their HM and EX incarnations, had a wonderful sense of "progression" to them that we've never really had anything comparable to since.

Ifrit HM had a relatively simple "follow the numbers" pattern with a basic DPS check, which prepared you for a slightly more involved pattern in Garuda HM (that also introduced tanks to kiting mechanics, since you had to drag her around originally), which in turn prepared you for the mechanics of Titan HM. At that point, the more hardcore players were probably comfortable enough to start doing Coil. It was the same with the EXes. Garuda EX was the first major "tank split" fight, which is a useful thing for healers to become comfortable with, and Titan EX made tank swapping front and center (with add phases that were reminiscent of T4 in terms of incoming tank damage), while Ifrit put an emphasis on focused DPS targeting and situational awareness with Searing Wind.

A "mid-core" player could reasonably progress through the six original Primal fights at level 50 and suddenly find that raiding wasn't as daunting as it once was in the past, both because of additionally acquired gear and just from progressing through the fights themselves. And they served as a pretty good "endgame substitute" for the non-raiders, too. I knew numerous players for whom clearing Titan EX was the pinnacle of achievement. These players often didn't really raid, but they still had a sort of similar content they wanted to do and clear.

But ever since that point, HM/EX primals haven't really served as any sort of stepping stone, and I think that's a bloody shame. EX primals are all sort of in between the HM/EXes of 2.0/2.1 now, and the "story" mode fights don't honestly serve much of a purpose outside of narrative, since they stopped putting rewards on them. I really do wish they'd go back to putting meaningful rewards on the Primals and making them more "progression" oriented as they were originally. I still feel like 2.1 was this game's peak in terms of the range of available content (even CT, while "easy" didn't really coddle the player the way the later 24-man raids have, potentially preparing them for more difficult content both in terms of drops and in terms of mechanics).