please stop make the game easier.

[Tridus]

Lack of difficulty for whom? Keep whom interested?

Seeing folks complain about the ease of endgame content that can, and does, stymie 90% of the playerbase, is as common as breathing on these forums. Choose any Ex or Savage fight - ANY, old or new - and I guarantee there were plenty of folks to consider it difficult, often insurmountably so, at the time it was released. I remember folks in a thread being incredulous to hear that there were STILL folks who could not skip Soar on Zurvan toward the end of Heavensward - but it was even worse that that; not just some folks, but MOST folks couldn't do so, even in farm parties. Skilled endgame players have VERY poor conception of the actual skill levels of the majority of players in this game, and tend to assume that most are at least near their level. This is absolutely not the case.

^ This. Players are terrible at judging the skill level of the playerbase. We don't have the data necessary to do it well (because we don't have attempt vs clear rates across the entire playerbase), but we try and do it anyway and the result tends to be not pretty. You see the same thing in the other direction with high end players that insist they're average. No, no you're not. Not even close. It's a skewed definition of "average" that uses the forums and the savage data on FFLogs, ignoring that most of the playerbase doesn't exist in either of those things.

The other difference is that we want content that's fun and challenging for us. That's going to vary from person to person, but we're very good judges of what is fun and challenging for us individually. SE has to cater to as many people as realistic to make money. It's a very different thing than a savage raider saying "stuff is too easy."

[Narcotics]

^ This. Players are terrible at judging the skill level of the playerbase. We don't have the data necessary to do it well (because we don't have attempt vs clear rates across the entire playerbase), but we try and do it anyway and the result tends to be not pretty. You see the same thing in the other direction with high end players that insist they're average. No, no you're not. Not even close. It's a skewed definition of "average" that uses the forums and...

The definition of "too easy" is when you would literally have to not try in order to fail. When you can ignore mechanics and clear, the content is a joke. As a casual player of this game, I still want to play well...a game. It's not much of a game when it's been designed to baby you through content. Like what's the point? Really? What are we playing for in the end if we're just having everything given to us unless we're doing savage content which makes up for about .1% of the game?

[KisaiTenshi]

The definition of "too easy" is when you would literally have to not try in order to fail. When you can ignore mechanics and clear, the content is a joke. As a casual player of this game, I still want to play well...a game. It's not much of a game when it's been designed to baby you through content. Like what's the point? Really? What are we playing for in the end if we're just having everything given to us unless we're doing savage content which makes up for about .1% of the game?

The problem here is that MMORPG, at least the Japanese and Korean variety rely on a gear grind. When the content is new, you need the best available gear to play it, or you can't get through it. Hence minimum ilevel is a thing. No more complaining about gear. If you can enter the dungeon, you can complete the dungeon. If people vote abandon, it's because whoa, there's a challenge involved, it's not a faceroll.

Yet that creates this environment where people who have the best gear, go back to old content and breeze through it, ignoring the mechanics, thus creating carry situations for too much of the content. This is the problem with the MSQ. Only when the content is new, does it offer any challenge. Once you're overgeared for it, you too will wonder why it was hard at all. Arguments back at 2.0 release often had people unwilling to run content at all through the duty finder because people were woefully undergeared for it, yet you don't get the gear you need unless you play the content. Do people not remember any of the content ever having challenge? Have all new players to the game after 2.1 been carried through all content?

That's the funny thing about Eureka, in a way it's shoving actual difficulty in peoples faces, because everyone started from the same place. After one or two patches it will likely be just as much of a faceroll as all other content becomes.

Like perhaps what Square-Enix should be doing is creating it's own leaderboard system for clear times of each content at each patch (eg like this https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...lo_party=party ), and creating way to playback the top-10 or so clears in-game through the duty recorder.

[MistakeNot]

The definition of "too easy" is when you would literally have to not try in order to fail.

Good thing there isn't any content like that in the game then.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Good thing there isn't any content like that in the game then.

A good number of dungeons fit that description. Even the story mode trials give echo upon failure, thereby adding less incentive to improve. Why care if you wipe when the game will gift you permanent Trick Attack?

[MistakeNot]

A good number of dungeons fit that description.

Perhaps the first two - but those are supposed to be fairly easy.
In the rest it is quite easy to wipe if you don't know what you are doing. (Assuming you don't grossly outgear or outlevel the dungeon of course - but in that case it is not the dungeon which is easy, but the character who is too powerful for the dungeon.)

[DreadRabbit]

Perhaps the first two - but those are supposed to be fairly easy.
In the rest it is quite easy to wipe if you don't know what you are doing. (Assuming you don't grossly outgear or outlevel the dungeon of course - but in that case it is not the dungeon which is easy, but the character who is too powerful for the dungeon.)

Agreed. I really wish people would understand the "to YOU" part of this argument. I feel like a lot of folks who keep saying "too easy" or that content is "braindead" have not partied with legit sprouts/new players in a long time. Sunken Temple of Qarn and the Stone Vigil (normal mode mind you) both come to mind. Both are ARR dungeons and the mechanics really aren't difficult to navigate around if you know them and know how.

In Qarn just a few days ago I was in a party with someone who had never done the dungeon before and another who had never tanked it before. Guess what? We wiped twice, once on each of the first two bosses. When it finally clicked what was going on I asked if anyone knew how to fight the final boss, and the sprout spoke up that they didn't. Spent a few minutes typing out what to look out for and how to handle it. We had a close call after the fight was explained, but we managed to squeak out the clear. There was no way I could have "face-rolled" that run because I had to pay attention to what my team was doing and pick up where they couldn't.

Stone Vigil was a similar story. The first boss there is one of the first few in the game that doesn't telegraph its room-wide AoE. So if you don't watch a guide and know to get behind him, you don't think you're going to eat damage. I know because we wiped to that guy because the tank and the other dps didn't know this.

Hell, level 70 fully geared players still eat Titan normal's landslides. I know because I watched two of them when I did it for my MSQ clear on my current character.

So no...content isn't braindead, you've just graduated beyond it and need a new challenge. That's a different fight altogether.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

snip.

Coincidentally, when people ask for reference points as to what the difficulty should be, Stone Vigil, Qarn and Titan are all mentioned as highlights. They posed legitimate challenges—something virtually no supposed Expert dungeon does. People cite many dungeons "braindead" because they offer little challenge even at level. Look at Kugane Castle, Ala Mhigo and Temple of the Fist. Tanks were doing mega pulls in i290 job gear. An even better example is Yojimbo's coin mechanics. If you ignore them, he deals approximately 15-20k. There is no job that is remotely threatened by that. It doesn't help we out-gear a good portion of the content before it even releases. Hell's Lid is a better dungeon than many of its predecessors but it's still only i310. You know, the highest ilvl we could obtain nine months ago.

Leveling dungeons generally aren't the issue. It's everything that comes after them where the difficulty simply does not scale.