Would you like an in-game parser?

[RiyahArp]

An anecdote, I know, but I wasn’t actively raiding at the time I was farming Zurvan. I did not find his fight challenging. And I would have hardly called myself a skilled BRD at the time; even now, I’m more on the average side.

If you don't find it challenging, its either too easy, or you are too good. I don't know why the latter option isn't a factor; keep in mind, it was hard to optimize DPS jobs in HW, especially bard. If you underrate yourself, you kind of have a skewed perception of content. God I hate editing.

The current state of Savage is that it is easier than it used to be, and I think that’s probably a combination of the developers wanting to avoid a repeat of Gordias (which they openly admitted was so hard to clear due to their own poor tuning/testing of the content, not because it was overly difficult in terms of crazy mechanics, with probably the exception of Living Liquid) and because they would like to make raiding and Savage more accessible to more players—hence why Creator was easier than Midas, which a lot of raiders deem the “perfect difficulty” in terms of raiding content. But, accessibility does not always have to correlate with ease of content. Things can be accessible without being super easy.

It was difficult with crazy mechanics.

I mean, they spent some time trying to slowly adjust the jobs over the lifespan of HW, as well as the raid encounters, before more or less junking it with SB's class revisions. The thing about HW was that hard is, well hard. It was very hard to do well as a 3.0 BLM; the timers were very tight overall, and the burden on skill was just a bit too much. When you combined it with hard raids, people just noped out. It was hard to do well with many classes, especially dps, because timers and general rotations were hard for people/

The raiders...they just keep not understanding that stuff is hard. The default tends to be instead "people aren't trying enough."

No, you cannot just ignore a portion of your playerbase when trying to decide how to tune and balance content. Especially when it comes to building up to harder tiers because the casual playerbase aren’t doing those, so how can they offer insight into balancing it (other than just saying “nerf it so I can do it”)? And while the clear rate of Ultimate is very very low (0.02% as of LuckyBancho’s last census), there are still clears. I think this release of Ultimate will help developers in developing future Ultimate content (which they have already hinted that they will do), because they are getting feedback from players, even if it’s a small percentage. The casual playerbase offered nothing in terms of constructive criticism about the fight, where as some of the people who have been in there or who have cleared have.

You're kind of agreeing with me here. I meant casuals really shouldnt have input in raids, because they don't do them or care to. If you opt into a raid, you more or less accept it the way it is. The only time we should criticize is if they try and make raiding mandatory.

More and more people are getting into Extremes and Savage. And while I’m happy about the accessibility because there’s nothing wrong with people challenging themselves, when they go from Expert Roulette to Shinryu Ex, they are not prepared because this game does nothing to ease them into hard content. Even with Expert Roulette to Rabanastre, you see people complaining and struggling because they actually have to pay attention. It’s easy > easy > easy > okay, I kinda need to pay attention now > oh my god this fight hurts. And what happens when people are met with a challenge? One of two things: they seek improvement (and to direct this thread back to the original topic—parsers—a lot of people turn to parsers to try and improve, or to people they know have parsers and ask for a detailed analysis and constructive criticism) or they come here and make “Please nerf [content]” threads. The latter appears to be a far more vocal portion of the playerbase. I honestly would not be surprised if the developers listened more to the cries of nerfs than they would to more constructive feedback about changing the difficulty curve of this game. And that’s a very sad state of affairs, in my opinion.

Rab is unique because it's something designed to be done once a week. Rab becomes easier when you do it a lot, but the incentive is not to do it a lot. It also doesn't become more fun when you do it a lot (I wound up doing it a lot. Heaers don't have the luxury dps do of dying often). It's a special thing.

As for nerfing, well the issue with nerfs tends to be "reduce the difficulty so people don't vote abandon or ditch it as soon as they get it." There's a threshold for casual tome content that people don't like going beyond.

Why does everything have to be so easy? Why does every dungeon have to be so easy? Why do people have to cry about nerfing every 24-man? Or every mildly challenging Extreme primal? The Shinryu nerf thread that’s been floating around here, if I recall correctly, the OP asked for nerfs specifically so they could farm for the mount easier. If people want the shinies, they should have to put in work towards them. A reward that is just handed to you loses all sense of pride and achievement, in my opinion. A better difficulty curve would subsequently make mount farming in challenging Extremes easier because people would have built more awareness of mechanics over the course of their playtime. But, again, as it stands now, this game doesn’t have that. It doesn’t even have any guides to help you learn a proper rotation at any of the level roadblocks: 50, 60, or 70.

Because you keep assuming people will rise to the challenge, solely because you did. FFXI had a ton of the things you'd like, but all it did was winnow people out. There's no better "git gud" mechanism than deleveling if you die enough, after all. They had gatekeeper solo fights you had to pass just to get your last level tiers, and they were a huge pain. Look up the promyvions sometime; they were the first instances in one quest line, done at level 30, and were easily harder than any 24 man here.

What you are asking for winds up being "please make things hard to cause everyone who stays to be good." For some reason, the idea that people might not rise to the challenge never seems to occur to people, but it happens a lot.