Would you like an in-game parser?

[Tridus]

My point was that people already do the mechanics in dungeon fine. Making them more punishing for mistakes wouldn't matter, unless you made the actual mechanics a lot more difficult. And if you did, you'd just suck the fun out of the game, for what? We already clear casual content fine already. People don't do raids because they don't like the way hard content in this game plays; trying to push that mode of content down the chain isn't going to magically make them like it or decide to try raiding.

But people don't "do the mechanics in dungeons fine". They're often terrible at it. It just looks fine because there's no consequence for failure in pretty much any dungeon in Stormblood. Risk of wiping is nonexistant outside of pulling more trash packs at once than your group can handle. That wasn't true in the past, and it creates a very steep difficulty jump when you get to stuff where the consequence is "you wipe".

[HyoMinPark]

My point was that people already do the mechanics in dungeon fine. Making them more punishing for mistakes wouldn't matter, unless you made the actual mechanics a lot more difficult. And if you did, you'd just suck the fun out of the game, for what? We already clear casual content fine already. People don't do raids because they don't like the way hard content in this game plays; trying to push that mode of content down the chain isn't going to magically make them like it or decide to try raiding.

People don't do the mechanics in dungeons just fine. How many times do you see people running away with a stack marker? They just don't learn because the mechanics don't punish them enough for failing. The minute anything is added that is remotely challenging (take Hashmal from Rabanastre), a thread is made asking to nerf the fight because failing the mechanics actually does more than gives you a vulnerability stack. Like his fire dash gives you a DoT that will kill you if you fail it, unless you’re a tank and have tank health/defense privileges. Very simple mechanic, very obvious mechanic on how to avoid failing it, yet people were asking for it to be nerfed about a week after the content was released.

Adding on to this: take Weeping City. Probably the best example of a challenging 24-man in this game at release. And the 24-mans got easier after it. Dun Scaith was good; I loved it. But it didn’t have that same difficulty curve as Weeping City did. And Rabanastre, the first two bosses are fun, but after that, the last two are a snooze fest unless people ignore the Shades during the last one and 3 or more explode so that everyone gets turned into a chicken. And even that won’t really wipe you the same way as screwing up Ozma’s meteors or Forgal’s puddle mechanics or spinning Calofesteri around would.

Yojimbo in Kugane Castle, if you ignore the gold, his attack does 16,000 damage. People had more health than that in Heavensward, so it won’t come anywhere close to killing you now. So it doesn’t really teach players anything other than “I can ignore this and be fine”, which then filters over into other content if they decide to poke around in Extreme or Savage—you can’t ignore mechanics in those fights (usually). Then they come to the forum or go to reddit or wherever and start crying that content is “too hard” and needs to be “nerfed”.

And making a better difficulty curve isn't about trying to get people to raid. It's about not making 99% of the content in this game mind-numbing boring/easy and giving it at least some form of challenge. I don't think dungeons should be so easy I could do them while making myself a sandwich, sorry.

[Sebazy]

it wouldn't matter, because people do the mechanics in them fine already.

Do they though? I'll usually see people with 3 or 4 vuln stacks on the Skalla pony (Primarily because people don't drop the puddles out of the way) and at least 1 or 2 stacks on the last boss. Not to mention the hilarious mess that typically ensues in Ala Mhigo's last boss if the group is slow enough to get the double tether + pushback, people who know how to get pushed back into position so that the tether is pointing outwards are absolutely in the minority from my experience. Heck, a good portion still struggle with Pushback + storm on the swords phase.

If you want a real laugh, go run the 59 dungeon, the amount of people who have no idea how to deal with the elemental circle boss is cringe inducing.

A good portion of the player base will merrily ignore mechanics and rightfully so because most of it just doesn't matter.

My point was that people already do the mechanics in dungeon fine. Making them more punishing for mistakes wouldn't matter, unless you made the actual mechanics a lot more difficult.

As already stated, Kugane is a bit of a snooze fest but Skalla's mechanics are actually pretty decent, if that dungeon killed you instead of placing a minor vulnerability stack I suspect a lot of people would be whining about it right now.

[Deithwen]

The idea behind this is not to make dungeons as hard as savage or extremes, but to make them progressively harder, or punishing for failing mecanics in order to smooth the difficulty curve which is, as Dzian perfectly painted, way too steep as it is now.

If they can make that happen, and with the right difficulty progression (ie make Dung 2 a bit harder than Dung 1 and so on), the overall player base would, in my opinion, be a lot better than it is now, and the average player wouldn't feel it a lot. Solo games do that a lot already. In fact, the vast majority do that.

We had that during Arr launch, and as far as I remember, a lot more people were interested into raiding, and the difficulty felt right compared to the rest of the content.

On a more personal note, I feel the current dungeons are way too easy, and become really dull quickly due to the lack of challenge. Take the last boss of Kugane Castle for instance. You might think you can wipe if you don't take the gold on the floor. Wrong. You can't even wipe to this, even if you let Yojimbo charge his attack to the fullest, you won't wipe. That means you can totally ignore this mecanic and you will still be fine.

[Tridus]

On a more personal note, I feel the current dungeons are way too easy, and become really dull quickly due to the lack of challenge. Take the last boss of Kugane Castle for instance. You might think you can wipe if you don't take the gold on the floor. Wrong. You can't even wipe to this, even if you let Yojimbo charge his attack to the fullest, you won't wipe. That means you can totally ignore this mecanic and you will still be fine.

That's a perfect example of the problem. It's conceptually a cool fight and I love the guy in the background scrambling to find more gold. Then it turns out it doesn't matter because it's no threat no matter what you do. It's not like its a terribly hard mechanic to begin with, but making it completely impossible to fail just means that you can doze off during the fight and it hardly matters.

[KaldeaSahaline]

100% difficulty curve issue I agree. It also plagues their raids as well. You end up with free bosses early, then a decent challenge and then an unnecessarily large jump. They really need to get more battle content planners hired and trained so they can boost the raid size to maybe 6 or so, so there is room to really smooth the curve out.

[Magic_Fork]

I would only say yes to a parser if it was fair and dosnt impose on people trying to enjoy the game. Perhaps a system where you can choose to have it on or off. Also maybe an option as to who can see your DMG output. That way people who dont want it and arnt intrested arnt going to be as pestered if there DPS is a little too low/high. I get that this whould be a handy tool for alot or pro/semi-pro players but its important to understand that some people take it too far. So basicly if it goes in it needs to be managed and used properly and not a tool to agro other players with.

[Selova]

snip.

While my own experience doesn't represent the majority, if I combine my personal experience un groups on a daily basis and compare it to the hundreds upon hundreds of nightmarish group stories in the tales of the duty finder thread, I'm pretty sure it's not as rare as you think it is.

[RiyahArp]

That's "mean world syndrome," in which media tends to amplify the negative and make it more commonplace. I don't see complaining, I don't see mass bad play, and the only time I had to abandon a casual duty was rab and royal menagerie when they were brand new. Dungeons I never see issues, trials i never see issues. Casual play is fine; the real griping tends to be in 8 man ex pugs and up, and people wanting as quick and as easy clears as casual play.