please stop make the game easier.

[Tridus]

When one to two GCDs of healing top everyone up, yeah it's relatively unscathing.

Which is a problem with the healing design, rather than encounter design. Healing is far, far too powerful.

[Tridus]

It's a bit annoying that someone tells me to listen to actual arguments while not even understanding mine.

Or maybe you're just wrong?

1. Its hard to make yojimbo's coins harder because of the mechanic of picking things up.

I'm pretty sure it's possible to make something harder than "ignore it entirely and still pass." There's a wide gap between requiring 100% coin pickup or wiping a party, and the current version where you can ignore it entirely, pick up no coins, and still not have a single person die even when you don't outgear it.

I have no understanding of how you can't tell the difference. It's impossible to fail this mechanic. Why even bother with it except as window dressing?

2. I think they made duty action to remedy this, because you dont need to click on things, just hit the action over the object.

They added duty actions because of stuff like Vrill and the levitation thing that don't have anything to click on. It certainly helps with the brush because clicking on something with 8 other people on top of it is pretty hard, but that doesn't apply to the coins as you're spread out and they're huge, easy targets. Making you walk up to it and press the duty action button would change very little about the difficulty.

3. Yes, rab has the mechanic too, but even easier; there is nothing to interrupt it.

There's a reason why Rab is considered to have front loaded difficulty, after all.

4. People already do the mechanic perfectly, not missing any coins in most of the instances I've seen; if they miss it, its one or two.

I was in one the other day that missed half of them. It makes no difference. That's the whole problem: there's no real reason to care a lot about it because failing it doesn't matter in the slightest.

[Derio]

I think healing was made that way in this game for a reason, to lower the skill cap, not raise it. Its clear that SE wants tanks and healers to be the easiest jobs to play.

[Ilyrian]

I think healing was made that way in this game for a reason, to lower the skill cap, not raise it. Its clear that SE wants tanks and healers to be the easiest jobs to play.

I don't think that necessarily true – the pay off for the 'flashiness' of the game, the animation locks and the general cinematic nature of the encounters don't really gel with a twitchy healing style. It does open up the gulf between healers that DPS and those that stand there though - but that is down to player choice how much they want to engage with an encounter. Like DPS, healers and tanks can be played optimally or sub optimally within each encounter.

[RiyahArp]

Or maybe you're just wrong?.

No, it's not easy to do it. It's because you cannot move while activating and being attacked breaks it. That changes encounter design radically. and virtually every instance you see that happen its easy. Leviathan's "activating the elemental converter" is the same way. Or 07's activate the gob medicine; only one person needs to, and then you just run under it. Activating icons makes the player a lot more vulnerable than normal gameplay, and restricts what they can do more. When you have four players, you also cap how many things they can grab at a time. It's the same thing like the gameplay where you need to use a key item on something to weaken it. If you make it too hard, the player often can't use the item in between attacks, which is why they do the reverse more now; you use the key item at the end, not the beginning, and the mobs tend to have long periods of inactivity when you spawn them if they still do it.

As for doing it, they like players to have different mechanics during down time. There's no point to QTE's either; none are particularly hard, but they serve as rest mechanics as well as breaking up the stale dodge-based gameplay. Yojimbo's mechanic is also one of the few mechanics where we have actual story and dialogue in it. Not everything is a challenge or designed to be.

In most MMO's, every patch cycle obsoletes the previous skill set. FFXIV basically acknowledged this is what normally happens and instead "stacked" the skills that are basically the same, and scales them by level/level-sync. But other MMO's also tend to lock you to one class/job, so if you pick healer in another game, you are basically picking the hard/hardest class to level because you do so much less damage and have much less of DPS toolkit, if any. Where as if you pick a DPS class in other MMO's, you usually end up with no self-healing toolkit at all and have to rely on expensive pots. So if you are really good at getting money in the game, it's easy. If you're not, then it's a grind either way.

Like for all the flack FFXIV gets for being easy, it doesn't let you faceroll all the content by acquiring the best gear and no skill, which is what many other MMO's do. "Here's new gear, it makes (easy content) so easy that you 1-hit-ko everything, including the boss."

If they tightened up the ilevel sync to the original release values, it would be more fun when replayed, but it would make gear pointless.

Yeah, other MMOs generally have a much different style of difficulty and progression. Stuff like making the challenge gear acquisition just to get into the instance then huge RNG to get the next set of gear is the norm, not so much the actual mechanics. If they tightened up level sync, they might as well just make this an action game, since that is what it would be.

The reason they don't make anything strong is because players like you begged for something like SOA in FFXI and SE came out and said it wasn't made for casuals, it was strictly for the elite players.

You can go further back than that. They tried the whole "make low level content difficult" thing with Chains of Promathia. It failed pretty badly imo, with Sea being the least occupied endgame area because it simply was too hard for most players to get the story done. People got stuck at many points and never finished it because the bosses were nightmares. So TOAU was the beginning of them moving away from hardcore stuff, and trying to soften difficulty a little. COP was a really divisive expansion when it came out, and TOAU had to fix a lot of what it did; it wound up being too hard and a lot of people never bothered finishing it.

[MilanFrozen]

Well...the skills being chopped mostly were dead weight. You don't need to have two dots on a mob per class unless the class is made around dots, but every job had that in HW. It wound up being a mechanic that people failed more than one they found fun. Some stuff made little sense; why need multiple buffs taking up slots when all they do is increase percentage of damage? Just combine them, or fold the damage into the ability.

I think you are missing the point of my contempt. An ability animation/effect/icon are all gone when removed. This is more of an artistic complaint than a game play one. Though it could be argued as game play since the enjoyment of the animation could be perceived in a game play light. Also I'd like to point out that baking one skill into another changes them both. It's entirely possible to lose two skills in the process of trying preserve one. Either way it would be a net loss. And if we're going to remove skills then take the game a step further and allow us to adjust skill animations for skills and readd them as optional animations/effects for some abilities.

Surely this would be a lot of work and probably not worth it, but I'm free to be upset about the loss of anything. I also don't like it when you get 'ability gaps'. What I mean is like there is a miasma one and I think a miasma two and I think there is a four, but I believe three is gone. So you get miasma one, it changes to miasma two(?) and then you get aoe miasma. I can't remember exactly what the abilities are off the top of my head, I just know that it skips a number in the chain and that's lame. Nit picking for sure, but I just wanted to point it out.

-snip-

Can you link the source for this loss? I'm under the impression guild wars 2 is not a subscription based MMO and that sales would be loss relative to the previous expansion, not due to the expansion content (one could not experience without owning the game).

[Camiie]

What difficulty do people actually want? Long, complex rotations that will invariably and constantly be interrupted by mechanics? What good is a rotation that one can never completed? Should each class have a similar button count to your average passenger jet? Perhaps they should be akin to playing 6 games of Simon simultaneously? I sure wouldn't play a game like that. Maybe that's the point? Not sure.

[HoodRat]

It's amazing how many people only jump to extremes and just completely ignore all the middle ground.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

You may see 15-20k in damage and think "no one's threatened by that," but to someone who doesn't know the game as well there's a big chance they're going to either overcompensate (believing something even bigger is coming) or panic. Either one will affect the entire run. If people that have supposedly beaten what's available in this game are still making mistakes in ARR level dungeons, primals, and other content, then no it isn't braindead content that anyone and everyone can faceroll.

Yes, however if mechanics continuously do paltry damage, it will inevitably encourage bad habits. When you constantly get away with standing in aoes, you won't see them as inherent risks. Why do you think Black Mages and melee stand in so much? Many of them know it won't kill them, so why bother moving? These poor habits that have been cultivated are then taken into your Shinryus, Nidhoggs, Weeping City and Dun Scaiths.

And so begins the cries for nerfs because suddenly, everything they did previously, no longer works.

You know why Temple of Quan is a good dungeon? It made you respect the mechanics. Those bees were going to murder your tank if they weren't stunned or killed. Doom made you pay attention. You rarely see those nowadays hence why dungeons are widely perceived as boring.

As for people making mistakes. That has no bearing on whether the content isn't braindead easy or not. Half the time those mistakes occur because people don't care since dungeons just aren't threatening.

snip

I would also fancy a source. In the quick google search I did, all I found were complaints specifically towards forcing more group oriented content on a playerbase accustomed to solo play, far more linear progression paths and large tedious time sinks (hero points). Complaints of difficulty were certainly not hard to find, but this paints an entirely different paint than the one you have where difficulty was the sole contributing factor.

Admittedly, I do not play GW2. So I may have only scratched the surface here. So do correct me if I'm mistaken.

What difficulty do people actually want? Long, complex rotations that will invariably and constantly be interrupted by mechanics? What good is a rotation that one can never completed? Should each class have a similar button count to your average passenger jet? Perhaps they should be akin to playing 6 games of Simon simultaneously? I sure wouldn't play a game like that. Maybe that's the point? Not sure.

People advocating for more challenging content what some risk of failure. Examples of that would be Shinryu Normal or The Vault. Both have fairly reasonable challenges when initially released; never demanding too much for story based content but equally not allowing you to mindlessly zone out either. Palace of the Dead's higher floors offer a perfect example of a proper difficulty curve without being too overwhelming, Chimera notwithstanding. You have priority mobs, traps and more branching pathways that all serve to break up the monotony of linear dungeon progression. Mobs on floors 110+ actually hurt too. I can't chain pull them near as easily, if at all, and actually have to rotate CDs on just a single pack. Dungeons? If I'm not blindly pulling everything in sight, I may as well not have CDs because they're utterly useless.

In fact, a friend and I got Kugane Castle a while back. She was on Bard; I on White Mage. Our tank decided to troll at Yojimbo and attempted to get himself locked out. When we caught him, he immediately left. Not wanting to wait, said friend tanked Yojimbo on Bard and you know what, it was probably the most fun I've ever had in Kugane. Why? I actually had to pay attention to her HP. So instead of tossing Regen and forgetting the tank existed while I DPS, I had to weave in both heals and DPS; stopping the latter entirely at some points. Imagine if that were standard boss mechanics. Healers might actually have to heal without mostly Regen.

That's what I want. Not Savage level dungeons or some cutting edge super hard trial. Stuff like the aforementioned, EXs more in the vines of Sephirot and Nidhogg compared to Byakko and Lakshmi and dungeons similar to The Vault and Amdapor Keep.

[Zeonx]

You can go further back than that. They tried the whole "make low level content difficult" thing with Chains of Promathia. It failed pretty badly imo

Oh yeah I completely forgot that, I beat it when they made it easy, though my cousin went at it in hard mode and won he said it was a nightmare on airship battles and tenzen with the taru's in background also walking through the mazes.

But others had problems doing it and were left behind cousin tried to help people they didn't want help after a while just waited for the nerf.

He basically said COP was best expansion made for FFXI.