Why the hate with endgame fights?

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

My point was that if you wanted to gear up your jobs, and you had more than one of them (i have every single one at 60, and all but two at 70) and you dislike pvp, its a lot more time. Its adds up fast, and most people who think its easy just play an awful lot because they like the mode. its not "oh its only 4k wolf marks" for some people, it can be 144,000 for all that they want. Then there are the minions, the orchestrion roles, etc.

There it is.

And yes. It is "only 4K Wolf Marks". 4 wins. 8 losses if you're THAT unfortunate. And it IS easy because I play a lot, but not blindly, and not treating it like a crap shoot. I pushed to get better, then I got better, then it became easier to win. You know, just like people do with endgame PvE content. Ultimate Coil took what, a little over a week? Pretty sure people weren't hitting final phase right away, no matter how good they were. And I'm sure there was frustration in doing it, but more than that, there was determination, and a will to succeed. And they did. That same mentality proves beneficial in any content in this game. This isn't me saying treat everything like Ultimate-level content, but have that same determination and willingness to learn and make effort, and you'll see the results you want to see.

Make even a little effort to learn and try and improve, and the game practically throws rewards at you.

[Sacred_Nym]

I'll agree that the difficulty jumps for savage, but let's not go crazy and pretend like it's all the same until then.

The big gap is between Normal and Extreme though. Hell, given this past tier extreme and savage may well be the same thing given how easy O1S is. But if you take a DF random from expert roulette and drop him in Laksmi or O1S he will wipe the group. Without doubt. Because he doesn't have a clue what he's doing and the difficulty of casual content has basically said that that's okay.

[KaldeaSahaline]

I want you to imagine susano ex, but with the following differences.

-everyone is forced to do him if they want to do something as simple as access tomes or the 24 man raid.
-he pops up randomly in trial roulette and gives you all of 60 tomes and no weapon for a reward.
-half the people don't watch a video, and every trial is a learning party.

What do you think would happen, given how much people complain about him when he's completely optional and doesn't gate content? Think about that when you talk about difficulty curves.

You cannot just place existing content forms in random positions in the game's progression flow and expect good results. Not a single person here is advocating that.

You need dungeons to actually force you to not watch netflix. Punish tanks for not using cooldowns or keeping threat. Punish healers for trying to afk heal. Punish DPS who cannot switch targets or press buttons on a near GCD basis or AOE. It doesn't need to be hard, but you should not be able to ignore an entire dungeons set of mechanics nor should damage be so trivial I can outheal it on my PLD and DPS irrelevant to the point where I can solo entire dungeon bosses. Dungeons should be TEACHING players how mechanics work and EX's and Savage should be making you think about how to handle multiples of them simultaneously with other complex interactions.

Reinforce these systems across all content forms, and then build on them. That's what we mean by a curve.

[Talraen]

I think there is no difficulty curve because new players don't actually play through all the content from the start to the finish at its original difficulty. If the end of ARR was difficulty 1, end of HW was 2, and end of SB was 3, then a player starting tomorrow would basically go from 0 (because everyone else is overgeared for ARR and SB) directly to 3. That's not a curve, it's a cliff. If you want the game to be friendly to new players, you really can't have a continuous curve forever.

[Sebazy]

I want you to imagine susano ex, but with the following differences.

Waaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiittttt!

Stop!

Do you actually know what a curve is?

-he pops up randomly in trial roulette and gives you all of 60 tomes and no weapon for a reward.

I guess not

I'm going to assume that you didn't play in early ARR? To put a long story short, the 'expert' dungeons of the time were a little more challenging, not in terms of mechanical complexity, but rather they punished you if you didn't respect them. You couldn't simply heal through most failures with little more than a regen like you can now. More importantly, many mechanics in the 'expert' dungeons were watered down copies (typically slower and more clearly telegraphed) of the mechanics you'd see later on in the EX primals. Antabooga taught you to hide behind pillars for Garuda HM whilst the Demon Wall taught you many of the fundamentals for Titan HM.

This resulted in a smooth and progressive difficulty curve with each tier leading nicely on to the next. Farming dungeons prepared you for Titan, farming Titan prepared you for Coil. I know you might find this hard to believe, but people managed just fine. Back in early ARR I was part of a series of linkshells that helped people with Titan HM clears for their relic, these weren't hardcore players, most of them didn't even bother with Coil. It was just a sizeable community of predominantly casual players that enjoyed the fight as well as helping others with it. Don't believe me? Here's a 13:47 Titan HM kill with them that got recorded and uploaded. Do you think 8 modern day Rabanastre randoms would manage to survive that long? Frankly, I don't.

What we have currently is absolutely indefensible. Leveling dungeons are routinely harder than 'Expert' dungeons (which are an insult to the term) whilst the gate keeper primals are significantly more complex and harder to learn than O1S (Which is doubly sad because these primals certainly aren't up there with the likes of Ramuh or Thordan, O1S is just that lame). Perhaps most importantly, both 24 man and end game dungeons 'teach' players that not paying attention and simply ignoring everything is A OK. Lo and behold, they step up into Savage or an EX primal and get completely annihilated doing the same things that served them well in everything prior. This is not a curve, this is a wall. Walls within a community are a bad thing IMHO.

Oh talking about O1S

O1s and lakshimi are too gimmick laden to be good teaching experiences.

Ok yes, I'll give you Lakshmi, that is most definitely a gimmick fight. O1S though? Are you actually being serious here? Lets see now:

1) Ice Floor.
2) Fireballs.
3) Tank buster tether.
4) Knockback.
5) 1 HP.

5 mechanics does not make a complex fight. Literally the sole factor that makes O1S even remotely challenging is the risk of sliding/getting pushed off the edge. That's it. A wall around the arena, the typical AoE+cleave telegraphs, some pacing tweaks and an appropriate adjustment to it's HP would make it one of the easier story primals.

How about you stop seeing in absolute extremes and actually think for a moment about what's being said?

Just annoying, no one ever really thinks about what changes actually mean for players in real practice.

Nonsense, you just can't see beyond your own blinkered prejudices here.

The skill gap between the raiding scene and casuals in early ARR was nothing like the massive gulf we've had pretty much since HW. Why? It wasn't because content was 'harder' because that just wasn't the case. I'm of the opinion that it was due to both content forcing you to respect it's mechanics at all stages of the end game as well as a much better sense of progressive difficulty especially when compared to the spikes and troughs we have today.

I don't know about that, that seems to be an exaggeration.

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

I think there is no difficulty curve because new players don't actually play through all the content from the start to the finish at its original difficulty. If the end of ARR was difficulty 1, end of HW was 2, and end of SB was 3

That's the wrong way to look at it. Instead think of how a new player would progress through the content they would face today.

Rather, a more logical difficulty curve should be something like this:

ARR Leveling dungeons > HW Leveling dungeons > SB Leveling dungeons > Expert Roulette + Story mode primals >> 24 man >> EX Primals >> Savage >>>> Ultimate.

Instead what we have is something like this:

ARR Leveling dungeons > Expert Roulette > Most Story mode primals + 24 man > HW Leveling dungeons + SB Leveling dungeons >>> O1S >>>>>>>>>>>>>>> EX Primals + O2S >> O3S + O4S >>>> Ultimate.

Frankly, it might as well be a bowl of pasta with some names in it with how coherent and progressive it is. Even the above is arguably giving it more credit than it deserves.

[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.

[KaivaC]

Kaiva, what do you think "raising the difficulty curve" means? If you think royal menagerie is easy, the only things harder above it are o1s and susano/lakshimi. O1s and lakshimi are too gimmick laden to be good teaching experiences. If your goal is to raise difficulty to bridge between casual and savage, that 70 trial is going to have to be like an ex trial, with shinryu hard pushed down to about 63, and probably the easier ex trials at 60 taking the place of thordan, right down to 50 ex trials ending the main scenario. You can't raise dungeon difficulty much because you'd massively slow them down, either via trash or bosses, and there's a limit to how hard they can be made when you don't have your full kit. Look at Brayflox hard final boss for an example-the bombs can be really hard for people to deal with if they don't have a point blank circle aoe.

Just annoying, no one ever really thinks about what changes actually mean for players in real practice.

You can raise the dungeon difficulty. Having a bunch of trash mobs does not equate difficulty...they are currently little more than AOE fodder. I wish to see the devs start to get away from this mindset of filling dungeons with trash mobs to add in a false sense of difficulty for dungeons. It's already too late to do anything about the dungeons we have now, but future dungeons need to start having a better difficulty curve. Realistically, now that we'll be hitting patch 4.2, even though I know the dungeons are going to essentially be the same type of content, just with different scenery and different bosses, this would ideally be the point where we start seeing the difficulty start to step up and force players to pay attention. If it's not MSQ, why can't the dungeons start having fewer mobs that start challenging each role?

Lakshmi's difficulty results from not paying attention after learning her fight and non-communication. Honestly, the hardest part of this fight falls onto the OT because they need to maintain their aggro to keep the party from being cleaved. Is the fight itself gimmicky? Absolutely. But it is definitely a good learning experience because it forces the entire party to work together. Healers stack with each other, DPS pairs off, and tanks stick together generally throughout the whole fight. Pay attention to which add has a bubble and avoid killing them if they do not have one. Always pop a Vril while Lakshmi is in Chancala mode. Even without the Vril gimmick, once you actually are in a clear party, what's so difficult about those things? And I don't mean from the perspective of a player in a trap party.

O1S is not gimmicky. You've dealt with ice floors before in a few dungeons. Again, like with the Lakshmi example above, once you learn the fight, it shouldn't be difficult to deal with practically any of the mechanics, save for the part with Alte Roite going to the edge. And even that isn't difficult to deal with - the MT just has to bait him, while the rest of the party pays attention to which way he is facing.

As for your Brayflox example, I dunno about each and every DPS job (I do know that SMN would have a little bit of a hard time with that), I believe all tank classes have an AOE attack by 50. I've done runs there on PLD where I was the only one using AOE during that boss fight, and I've been able to make a safe zone for the party. It's not that hard, players just need to stop being lazy about things like this.

[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.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

My point was that if you wanted to gear up your jobs, and you had more than one of them (i have every single one at 60, and all but two at 70) and you dislike pvp, its a lot more time. Its adds up fast, and most people who think its easy just play an awful lot because they like the mode. its not "oh its only 4k wolf marks" for some people, it can be 144,000 for all that they want. Then there are the minions, the orchestrion roles, etc.

Just based on your post history, you...

- Despise Savage and raiding in general
- Dislike EX Primals
- Dislike Tomestone gearing (Not that I entirely blame you here)
- Dislike PvP
- Dislike gear progression or its alternatives (Savage, PvP)
- Dislike 24 Mans
- Like Diadem

What do you actually enjoy about this game? Seriously. I have only ever seen you bitch and moan about everything yet you'll be among the first to jump into a parse or Savage thread and cite how toxic raiders are. You'll, of course, omit the fact you don't actually participate in that content. Your entire stance can be summarized to "I only want content I like. Everything is a waste of resources!!" And you'll promptly prattle on about concepts you have no idea about as Sebazy as so eloquently demonstrated. So instead of telling everyone else to stop complaining; to find another game. How about you take your own advice?