Would you like an in-game parser?

[HyoMinPark]

@Dzian -- The 10 million comes from active subscribers throughout the game's lifetime (so 4 years). Of course not all will stay, but there is a lot of truth in what you said: a lot of people are fed up will how "easy" a lot of the content in this game is. I get really annoyed by it, and how the game just continues to stay easy until there's just one massive spike in difficulty. It's exactly why when something like ShinEx pops up that people cry for nerfs. There's no adequate difficulty curve. It's "easy > easy > easy > slightly hard 24-man boss > holy hell ShinEx".

[Sebazy]

Snip

Absolutely agreed, early ARR did a great job of using the end game dungeons to introduce players to key mechanics they would need to understand to beat HM primals, The demon wall taught Titan HM, The dragon thinger and mindflayer demonstrated Garyda HM mechanics. If you couldn’t handle these, you couldn’t do the dungeon either. SE absolutely lost their nerve after Pharos =\

[Tridus]

SE absolutely lost their nerve after Pharos =\

Yep. It's telling that the hardest content in levelling and expert roulettes combined is Auran Vale.

[Sebazy]

It’d be interesting to see how different things would be if the current crop of Dungeon bosses punished players for mistakes in the same manner as the early ARR stuff. Mechanically they are more complex, much more so, it just doesn’t matter if you ignore/fail most of it.

[Deithwen]

snip

Those paint skills are wonderful !

I totally agree with what you explained here (in a beautiful way).
When ARR first released, I indeed remember dungeons were a lot more punishing, maybe this smoothed my transition to HM primals and Coil after (actually, this is probably the case) and that's a thing newer players lack now.

Also, I started to parse myself at this precise moment too, when I was running Amdapor Keep at the time, because the DPS checks made me want to improve and check if my rotation was correct, what I could optimize etc.

Maybe that's what the game really needs now : a smoother difficulty curve and the addition of a tool to improve on this content.

[RiyahArp]

It’d be interesting to see how different things would be if the current crop of Dungeon bosses punished players for mistakes in the same manner as the early ARR stuff. Mechanically they are more complex, much more so, it just doesn’t matter if you ignore/fail most of it.

it wouldn't matter, because people do the mechanics in them fine already. The whole skill debate tends to center around being able to do pain in the butt content that has a huge list of mechanics that will one shot you or the raid if someone fails them. Unless you made the dungeons like that, you wouldn't get what you wanted. The greater issue is that a lot of people simply don't care for that kind of content.

[AmeliaVerves]

truth has been painted

Maybe that's what the game really needs now : a smoother difficulty curve and the addition of a tool to improve on this content.

Because simply pressing "Like" is not enough.

This. Is. What. We. Need.

It does not always have to be super hard endgame content (tho this is nice for many raiders including myself ), but just a bit tougher bosses and a rewarding learning curve that teaches you how to beat the ---- out of those.

[Deithwen]

it wouldn't matter, because people do the mechanics in them fine already. The whole skill debate tends to center around being able to do pain in the butt content that has a huge list of mechanics that will one shot you or the raid if someone fails them. Unless you made the dungeons like that, you wouldn't get what you wanted. The greater issue is that a lot of people simply don't care for that kind of content.

This is exactly what Sebazy said : " if the current crop of Dungeon bosses punished players for mistakes in the same manner as the early ARR stuff"
And people don't really do mecanics fine, they're just non existant or barely noticeable. In Amdapor Keep (before it got nerfed to the ground) you actually had to do mecanics properly while dealing at least decent DPS to clear.

[RiyahArp]

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.

[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.