Would you like an in-game parser?

[HyoMinPark]

If the end result is to get people at 70 to be savage capable, you're going to start seeing dungeons get very hard for people at the 60s. Savage tends to be very mechanic heavy, and much less forgiving of mistakes. To make a curve that prepares people for that would end up making the same thing happen to 60+ content on a slightly smaller scale ,but even a smaller scale is a pretty big level of difficulty. I can see the end result being the final fight as something like Susano EX (which of course raiders say is so easy). I think forcing people into that would be a nightmare.

The “end result” would be to give this game a better difficulty curve so that people aren’t crying for 24-man bosses to be nerfed because they don’t bother to pay attention to a mechanic that actually hurts them. Every time a new 24-man raid is released, a thread appears asking for nerfs to at least one of the bosses, which aren’t really that much harder than dungeon bosses, just that their mechanics cannot, in most instances, be outright ignored without punishment. Something the “Expert” dungeons lack (which Expert dungeons are supposed to be designed for endgame, level-capped players, yet there are Leveling dungeons harder than the Expert dungeons). The last difficult Expert dungeons were challenging were probably some of the original ARR ones: Amdapor Keep, Pharos Sirius, and even those were nerfed because people cried about it.

Even “non-raiders” said that Susano and Lakshmi Ex were easy. It wasn’t just the raiding crowd that said that.

And this is why you ignore raiders in terms of difficulty in discussions. Thordan was designed to give players struggling with A3 a slight edge up, but that meant he was balanced in the context of people who completed the two entry fights of the hardest non-ultimate raid this game had. Shin can still be very hard despite being weaker than that, but with raiders they tend to almost always downplay how hard something is. To the high end players, everything is easy.

So, then should we ignore the casual playerbase when the raiders want something tuned to their level? Because remember what happened when Ultimate was released and all the non-raiders came forth saying that it was a waste of resources? How is it fair that raiders get ignored in terms of discussion for 90% of the content in this game, but one thing comes up for them and the non-raiders are allowed to complain about how it’s a waste of resources and how raiders don’t deserve the content?

Extremes aren’t even geared towards raiders; they are the content that is supposed to be the segue into raiding, which is largely shifting towards the more midcore content that Extremes used to be. Ultimate is becoming the new “hardcore” difficulty. Yet when there is such a discrepancy between the difficulty and design of the Extremes (again, see Lakshmi/Susano to Shinryu), there is a problem. And that probably boils down to the developers either trying to cater to both groups, or just failing to know how to properly balance and tune a fight.

I didn’t raid in Heavenward until the very end of Creator’s lifecycle. Even then I did not think that Thordan was so challenging that he demanded a nerf—I enjoyed the level of difficulty he posed even when I was outgearing his fight. Same with Sephirot. It’s not just the raiders that welcome challenges sometimes. Some people who do not raid would like for Extremes to be not-faceroll.

This would just ensure a larger amount of the playerbase would never get there.

How would making dungeons have a better difficulty curve so that Leveling dungeons or Aurum Vale aren’t harder than Skalla or Kugane Castel make it so that “a larger amount of the playerbase” would never be able to reach a raiding level? Or even a level where they can do a 24-man without asking for at least one boss to be reworked/nerfed? Or even just a level where they aren’t crying that anything that poses the slightest of challenges be nerfed?

I mean...can you imagine trying to grind tomes in expert with this kind of difficulty curve? Or how 24 mans would have to be balanced? The SB trials are annoying enough as it is to get them in roulette...imagine they all were as hard as Menagerie at min ilvl with no 70 abilties or worse. The only thing worse than a chore is a hard chore.

What’s a chore is subjective. Personally speaking, I already consider roulettes a chore because they’re so boring. The only time they get interesting is when an over-zealous tank does big pulls, or a healer lets the tank drop super low before clutch-healing them each time. I personally feel like capping tomes via roulettes would be less of a chore if they posed at least a slight challenge. As of right now, they do not. Just because you think roulettes that posed a slight challenge will be a “hard chore” does not mean that that will necessarily be the case. Not everyone shares your mindset, just like how they don’t share mine, or another poster’s mindset. However, considering the complaints I have seen about how easy content in this game is, I still feel like something should be done about it.

And as someone who has done Menagerie in the i290 gear first week of Early Access with people (tanks and healers, no less) that did not have their level 70 skills, it really was not as bad as the old doomsayers like to say it was. Just because a piece of content required you to actually pay attention for once does not mean that it was hard. It felt like an appropriate ending to an expansion, unlike Thordan’s normal mode trial at the end of Heavensward, where he just let people stomp all over him.


I do not think it’s a bad thing to fix this game’s difficulty curve so that every time a new 24-man is released or a new Extreme, people don’t immediately come here and ask for pieces to be “reworked”/“nerfed” or whatever. I do not think it’s a bad thing to help more people prepare for the raiding scene if that’s a scene they desire to enter. Creator and Deltascape 1 have tried to ease the difficulty to attract more players into raiding, but the rest of the content does nothing to really prepare them for the likes of A11S or V3S or V4S.

People want to do Extremes and Savage because they either want the challenge, the shinies, or both. Why is it so bad to shift the difficulty of content so that they have an easier time segueing into that scene if that’s what they want? And even for people who don’t want to raid, what is wrong with the game at least not being a complete snoozefast at level-cap? Why do all the dungeons have to be as easy as Kugane Castle? Why?