Why the hate with endgame fights?

[Squintina]

I can confirm that it's not, try it for yourself.

I did. I wouldn't have said it if I hadn't.

Once again I'm not disagreeing with the general statement that the difficulty jumps up way too much and doesn't allow a good learning curve to difficult content,just the ridiculous notion that it's all the same difficulty at all times until you get to extremes/savage. If that were the case, people wouldn't still be dreading anything less than extreme/savage (synced), yet there are still people who have issues with AV and Vault and the last MSQ dungeon in SB.

Heck I'm not even saying it always goes up. I actually thought the last few dungeons of ARR (not counting the last 2 from MSQ roulette) had more difficulty than the beginning dungeons of HW, but SB dungeons were definitely more difficult than the beginning ARR and all of the HW ones, and some of the trials are more difficult than others (sync'ed, at least).

Admittedly it can be difficult to separate out "dungeon difficulty" with "Player induced difficulties". Maybe you are right and it's all the same difficulty but it might have felt differently for me because of "player induced difficulties" like people repeatedly not bothering to dodge telegraphed attacks and not bothering to take on mechanics-related adds unless someone marks and spams party chat to focus on the mark. Who knows. There are some really bad players out there. I just know that I definitely felt a variety of difference in difficulty and not just a jump from "this is easy" to "this is Extreme".

If I did make a picture of the difficulty it would be a whole bunch of small-medium ups and downs and ups and downs along the way, and then the big gigantic jump at the end.

[Sebazy]

Heck I'm not even saying it always goes up. I actually thought the last few dungeons of ARR (not counting the last 2 from MSQ roulette) had more difficulty than the beginning dungeons of HW, but SB dungeons were definitely more difficult than the beginning ARR and all of the HW ones, and some of the trials are more difficult than others (sync'ed, at least).

That's a fair comment, there are certainly a few dungeons in all tiers that are outliers and that's always going to be a thing with the way SE seem to divvy around the responsibility for designing these dungeons. All 3 expansions have levelling dungeons that will wipe groups if enough people are napping, the problem here isn't so much the difficulty between each expansion's leveling content, it's more that most levelling dungeons are typically more punishing than pretty much any Expert Roulette dungeon after Haukke Manor Hard.

If I did make a picture of the difficulty it would be a whole bunch of small-medium ups and downs and ups and downs along the way, and then the big gigantic jump at the end.

IMHO there's a great big 24 man and expert roulette shaped trough between the little ups and downs and the gigantic jump at the end. This content should be preparing people for EX primals, instead it's just suggesting that they might as well watch Netflix. That's the thing that needs to be addressed imho.

[Zojha]

You couldn't simply heal through most failures with little more than a regen like you can now.

In fairness: Add a Cure II and you probably already got someone from 1 to 100, erasing any non-lethal punishment for failure.

Which, IMO, is a pretty big issue. Non-lethal damage is so easily erased that it's not a very good punishment for mechanical failure and prone to be ignored if used. As the healer saying goes: The only HP that matters is the last. Healer resources aren't exactly scarce either - All that time and Mana spent DPSing could just as well be used for fixing mechanical mistakes and that's a _lot_ of leeway a group potentially has.

Making a proper difficulty curve under such circumstances is probably not easy, because whether a mechanic can be ignored or not is largely binary and that leaves you with much less tools to scale difficulty. I'd not go as far as to say this is the only reason difficulty spikes, but I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a connection.

[Brill_]

I agree in regards to the lack of learning curve. In 2.0, there were a few dungeons that posed some problems. Now, with overgearing, even thats gone. Had Sastasha for leveling roulette last week, had a brand new tank, first dungeon run. ME and the other dps were helping him out. Healer didn't want to wait and ran ahead pulling things. Since you don't really need a tank in that dungeon, the tank learned very little.

While I'd like to see some content that ramps up the challenge towards savage, would it work? The community is all about rush rush rush. Harder content means things will take longer and some groups might wipe. Seeing as the community is intolerant of such things, people would leave. People instant leave aurum vale. They left Pharo Sirius before that got nerfed.

One thing I'd like to see is a rework of normal mode raids. For this raid tier we had:
omega normal - 320 gear
tomes - 330 gear
savage - 340 gear.

If they want to keep 4 man dungeons as easy as they are now, then swap the tome and normal raids so tomes give 320 gear, then kick up difficulty on normal mode raids a notch and have it drop 330 gear.

[jameseoakes]

If they want to keep 4 man dungeons as easy as they are now, then swap the tome and normal raids so tomes give 320 gear, then kick up difficulty on normal mode raids a notch and have it drop 330 gear.

Wouldn't that defeat the idea of having the normal difficulty raids so people can enjoy the story?

[HyoMinPark]

Wouldn't that defeat the idea of having the normal difficulty raids so people can enjoy the story?

Well, since the entirety of the 8-man normal story occurs outside of the actual duty, I don’t see that being a problem. The 8-mans aren’t like Coil anymore; all story occurs before the instance, or after. There are no lengthy cutscenes during them. So them dropping higher ilvl gear from the tomestones won’t affect those who want to view the story.

[KaivaC]

I want the sense of danger in dungeons, so I have been thinking about one mechanic to make a hard move dungeon feel truly hard. You know, since I haven't really posted specifics. Anybody remember in most ff games, there are enemies capable of stealing from you?

See where I'm going with this?

[SenorPatty]

I want the sense of danger in dungeons, so I have been thinking about one mechanic to make a hard move dungeon feel truly hard. You know, since I haven't really posted specifics. Anybody remember in most ff games, there are enemies capable of stealing from you?

See where I'm going with this?

I do but iirc, the items were insignificant consumables like potions. But that's only from what I remember.

If you want some real danger though, you could always frog-lock yourself in FF7. Good times lol.

[KaivaC]

I do but iirc, the items were insignificant consumables like potions. But that's only from what I remember.

If you want some real danger though, you could always frog-lock yourself in FF7. Good times lol.

If this were reddit, I'd probably get downvoted to hell, but I've actually never played FF7. Of all the main titles, I completely missed out on all Final Fantasy titles before FF8 - that was my first FF.

[SenorPatty]

If this were reddit, I'd probably get downvoted to hell, but I've actually never played FF7. Of all the main titles, I completely missed out on all Final Fantasy titles before FF8 - that was my first FF.

That's fine. I actually have not played FF 1-3 and 5 and while I'm aware FF7 is an incredibly popular FF game amongst them all, I barely bat an eye when I hear someone hasn't played it.

If anything, today the only reason I would recommend anyone to play FF7 is just so I can shamelessly promote one of its compilation game: Crisis Core. Imo, its the best FF7 game out of them all.


But look at me ramble on. Here's an idea of what it looks like. (You can watch the whole thing if you want but if you want to avoid any form of spoilers, stop at 1:21)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8EfMTiOtb0