Are the raid tiers "too hard?"

[Hyrist]

There are a number of critical flaws within the Raiding system, and I do not speak just mechanicly or the reward system - but how we as a community have been discussing raids to begin with. This stems both from the raiding and non-raiding perspective.

Taking a singular item such as 'difficulty' without really even analyzing what 'difficult' really means in this context isn't making a constructive discussion on the matter. It's not if the Raids are difficult enough or too difficult, but the manner of 'how' these raids are difficult, that needs be discussed.

It's not whether or not there should be valuable rewards in raiding or valuable gear for raiders, but what is considered 'valuable' in and of itself and why.

It is clear by the metrics that Raiding is a niche affair, and by many that Niche is too narrow to justify itself at this point. We needs re-analyze this from the ground up rather than pick at the shallow-level issues that fail to address core problems.

[seekified]

I think they should go back to the SCoB model, but add more assistive tools ingame for people to join the raiding community.

[Ceasaria]

For me, here my comparison between Bahamut and Alexander :

As a whole :
- T1-T5 (I did it after the nerf) > A1S-A4S
- A5S-A8S > T6-T9 (I did T6S and T8S at 2.5)

Separetely :
- A3S > the other
- T9 > the other

And please, stop to bring T10-T13 when Alexander has not yet A9-A12 to compare with that.

[Velhart]

I think they should go back to the SCoB model, but add more assistive tools ingame for people to join the raiding community.

They just need to balance the learning curve. Just one EX primal is not the solution to it. They need an entire raid tier at a midcore level that can help work you into Savage.

[Stanelis]

these people however, are also a bigger voice stating that the raids are too hard. and because the % of the raid clears being relatively low (which i get from a business POV. this is bad because less clears = wasted content.) but i feel like we're heading backwards within how raids work, coil was good because difficulty increased relatively, however its as if we're going backwards with alexander, this is obviously too late for change, however im more interested in other peoples opinions on what they feel about how the raid scene seems to be going. so lets discuss

People really need to understand that content shouldn't only be hard to be interesting. If the content is so hard it isn't entertaining (like typically A3S or A4S) then people will not take part in it (what typically happened with alexander savage). Only a very small subset of the community actually have the patience to spend their evening wiping hundredth of times to complete one encounter of a raid.

Also, there is the issue with FFXIV's battle system game design and how its lack of depth force the developers to implement artificial difficulty, with little to no gameplay value.

[Lambdafish]

OH and another stupid thing: % fights. Bosses pahsing too fast / skipping and messing fight just because you were too good. But this was a case also in T7...

Not as bad as ifrit and levi EX which just wipe you for being too good.

[Duelle]

Taking a singular item such as 'difficulty' without really even analyzing what 'difficult' really means in this context isn't making a constructive discussion on the matter. It's not if the Raids are difficult enough or too difficult, but the manner of 'how' these raids are difficult, that needs be discussed.

The problem with that is that approaches to difficulty vary from person to person.

For example, memory game stuff is not fun nor approachable to me. I look at fights like Ravana EX that requires you to memorize a John-fucking-Madden style football play diagram for Final Liberation and nope right out of there. Largely because I'm not fond of memory games and prefer gameplay where I can react to stuff as it happens (the same reason why I disliked how Titan HM and EX were designed). Ergo, when you make something a memory game, you basically make it unapproachable to me because I hate memory games. This is obviously a metric that does not apply to everyone, and to make all content reaction based just for my sake would be unfair.

They just need to balance the learning curve. Just one EX primal is not the solution to it. They need an entire raid tier at a midcore level that can help work you into Savage.

I'd rather see, say, Wicce's Citadel (a raid centered on the magus sisters set in a big castle that becomes accessible over time) Story Mode, Hard Mode, and Savage Mode, than to see them add something entirely unrelated with a midcore difficulty level. For one because you're otherwise wasting assets and potential settings in content that will become irrelevant too quickly.

[CrimsonThunder]

Gating is also a huge problem...or the lack of, rather.

Quite frankly, I feel you shouldn't be allowed to touch Savage unless you've beaten the current Extreme trial....maybe even something like 5 or so times incase your clear was a fluke.

There is no learning curve to hop into this content and what we end up with a cesspool of people who can and people who can't all ending up in the same parties which just results in throwing lambs to the slaughter.

[Brannigan]

Well, it used to be that you had to clear the previous tier in order to enter the current one iirc. They could bring that back, but only like 8 groups per server would be able to enter Final Coil of Alexander, so I don't know if that's a good idea.

[Velhart]

Also, there is the issue with FFXIV's battle system game design and how its lack of depth force the developers to implement artificial difficulty, with little to no gameplay value.

If you decide to make the battle system more complex, in turn you have to tune the fights to make it easier to compensate the level of complexity of the battle system. Basically the more complex you make what happens on your bar, the easier boss fights have to be. Yoshi-P just commented recently that they think one of the issues with Savage is that the lv.60 rotations are much harder than the lv.50 rotations and lower end groups can't balance that with the difficult content in place.

I would pretty much expect in 4.0 for rotations to be easier, likely easing up on DoT and buff management and they will increase difficulty of raids from doing that.