Heaven on High: That's it?

[RiyahArp]

All you’re doing right now is saying that Yoshida is lying. If you think he’s lying, then jus stay so straight-up. I doubt he has reason to lie about people liking the challenge floors as opposed to spamming PotD 51-60 all the time.

I'm saying he misinterpreted the data, along the lines what I said earlier. The casuals did the easier floors, the hardcore potders did the challenge floors to completion. So he would think that the casuals didn't care for lots of floors or difficult story ones, when it was more the incentives for casuals (leveling aetherpool weapons, tome farming, jobs) favored easier floors. The hard story ones weren't disliked because they were hard, but because they gave the same rewards as the easier ones.

Do you have proof to back up your claim? You don’t even need a “static” to do the challenge floors for PotD; I did my first run where we wiped on 197 with a random PF of people that were just advertising wanting to do it. My clear was done with my friends. Same with my HoH clear—done with 2 friends and another person that was a friend of one of mine. You don’t need a static, nor do you need to put in “tons of time” equivalent to the time you would put into clearing Savage or Ultimate.

And it took you how long?

You needed a static so you didn't have to do all the floors in one go, for 3+ hours a run. That's why the limitations were so bad, most NA players really aren't doing content for that long of a sustained period. Factoring in breaks or wipes and you can sink some really serious time into a single day's attempt. But if you hav a static, its easier to break off in the middle of floors.

Again, your proof? Have you actually cleared PotD 200 or HoH 100, or are you just making assumptions about content you don’t actually do again? When mobs hit hard enough to force me to actually have to heal outside of regens or a faerie, or where one actually spams AOE damage after a cleave and a large circle AOE and requires me to actively AOE heal to keep people up (this is in HoH), that’s already a myriad above what most dungeon trash pack pulls do. Part of the challenge is also the RNG and having to be responsible with your pomanders. It requires judgment calls as opposed to just using them willy-nilly as you would during story floors.

I got up to 170 before my static stopped. The person I play with simply doesn't have the time to spend 3+ hours on a single instance repeatedly. Its bone easy to heal it. Just because we don't do savage doesn't mean we haven't healed in other games or not know how to do mob triage or be aware of roaming mobs. POTD doesn't have any of the things that make this game specifically difficult, i.e. the precisely choreographed boss dances that demand very fast reaction times or holding multiple elements in your head. If you played ffxi, you played harder than the hardest potd floors anyways just by leveling.

Because the Ixali beast tribe quests were difficult for fisher? No, they just took longer. Beast tribes have always been easy; Namazu quests being easy shouldn’t be a surprise at this point.

Look at the moogle crafter quests and compare them to the namazu ones. No contest. Look at leves and compare them to namazu. No contest. The namazu are streamlined far too much; they don't even use spearfishing, and its like crafting a level 20 item when you are level 70. They nerfed them for some odd reason when no one complained about them being too long or involved.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I didn't say that. The issue is that the quote you used indicated that the only challenge people wanted out of that were floors like 180-200, and I'm saying no, that can't be true. Not true enough to nerf the story portion to 1-30 and in the end, give us literally one floor to easily grind casually, 21-30. Very few peopls relative out of the population would have done 180-200, not because of challenge, but because you needed a static and often as many hours as you would put in raiding to seriously do the challenge floors due to the limitations. The challenge floors were boring, and not even challenging; you died mostly due to rng of wandering mobs or people getting bored and rushing in to trigger a trap; the problem was that one wipe just meant you had to start the whole thing over, so you were incredibly punished for a mistake or for rng.

I think people were expecting them to keep the challenge, but get rid of the silly limitations. They didn't. and they didn't even keep the challenge; only three sets of floors apparently are difficult at all. They actually overall nerfed the experience when no one really complained; I shouldn't be able to duo 1-40 with a friend with no wipes and not even breaking a sweat ever. This is what befuddles me.

Its the same as the stupid namazu quests. You know what you do with them as a fisher? You go to the mark, they tell you where to fish, and the very first fish you get is it. Fishing one time. There's no real reason to nerf them like that; as fishers, we really don't mind fishing for a bit. They keep doing these weird little gameplayless decisions, like doma rebuilding and fashion report.

You're literally calling Yoshida a liar. Does he embellish things? Absolutely. But an embellishment in this scenario would be 120/150+ to 200 or that people enjoyed the challenge despite not actually clearing, not the entire thing. If only very few people attempted it, why did he specifically mention floors 180-200 in his interview with MrHappy? Keep in mind, Happy didn't even mention the challenge. Now you're claiming he misinterpreted the data. Alright, suppose I make the same argument regarding Savage, thus they should bring back Midas' difficulty. If we're going purely on anecdotal evidence, I am no less accurate than you are now. At this point, it comes across you simply cannot fathom the idea not everyone wants the game to be brain dead easy.

And no, you do not need a static. I cleared with a group I barely knew. And just late last night I saw a couple groups looking for people to attempt a full run. All you need is some measure of communication.

Claiming they nerfed it demonstrates you, once again, have no idea what you're speaking about. PotD floors were easy all the way until 150. That's why the common strategy was to chain pull everything to the exit and just aoe them down until floor 101, then you took a pack or two at a time until 140-150 before you finally had to slow down. Of course you can blitz the early tiers with the pomenders and magicates now. They aren't intended for those floors, but strictly for the higher ones. Basically, HoH isn't balanced around casual players who only wished to grind levels. If that is all you want from the content, it will disappoint. Fortunately, that doesn't seem to be the case, at least where most people are concerned.

Look at the moogle crafter quests and compare them to the namazu ones. No contest. Look at leves and compare them to namazu. No contest. The namazu are streamlined far too much; they don't even use spearfishing, and its like crafting a level 20 item when you are level 70. They nerfed them for some odd reason when no one complained about them being too long or involved.

Please tell me you aren't insinuating the Moogle quests were remotely difficult. They were just as easy as the Namazu ones.

[Ryaz]

Dang that's crazy, I've been to 63 and among the sacks I got two susano minions, two shieva minions, levi barding, Sophia barding, ravanna barding, two lvl 70 craft alc flower glam stuff I sold, and some sparrow minion I already had. Those are only the things I remember getting, there indeed was material and sparklers though.

Definitely better luck than me. Even platinum sacks have been giving rank 5 materia to me. :/

[Tint]

the reduction to only 30 floors wich you can queue for and then that you actually only queue for 21-30 because there is simply no point for 1-20 when you can skip that floors... makes this content really boring on day one.

i now did 1-30 one time and 21-30 two times and i am already bored to death. but well... i want that weapon, emote, pet, hairstyle... and after i have the weapon i need to grind to 99 again for the 30+ floors...

oh yeah, the 30+ floors... yes they exist. yes i ignore them. i am just giving feedback to the 1-30 floors, wich are the floors i can queue for and therefore are the floors wich i have to do to get all that stuff.

1-50 and later 51-100 in PotD was so much more fun and really felt like exploring a huge dungeon and like a rogue-like. maybe the 30+ floors will have the same feeling. but the accessible floors are just a disappointment.

[Remedi]

you know what exist too? PF and crosserver too, ppl need to stop saiying that there's this huge barrier of entry because there isn't anymore

[Felis]

Look at the moogle crafter quests and compare them to the namazu ones. No contest. Look at leves and compare them to namazu. No contest. The namazu are streamlined far too much; they don't even use spearfishing, and its like crafting a level 20 item when you are level 70. They nerfed them for some odd reason when no one complained about them being too long or involved.

Moogle quests and difficult? I think you mean the Ixal quests.
Without level down synch, cross-class skills turned off and reduced CP the moogle quests where like a walk in the park.

[Alleo]

But that statement also doesn't prove he asked anyone outside of those who had been to 200. The entire playerbase is everyone - those who do potd, those who don't do it, those who only do the leveling part, those who do the challenge floors. That's why I would want to see which were part of the sample size. Did he even look at people who hadn't been to 200 and ask why? Or why people didn't do potd at all? You can't just ask people who do the content and assume that's indicative of the entire population.

Its the same with his Eureka statement, and how more people have done it for fun than rewards..And I am sitting here wondering, where he got that information, since there are no ff14 specific surveys, the forums and reddit were quite negative about Eureka and a lot of people even stated that they are only running it for the rewards..so yeah not really sure how they sometimes get their interpretations.

Doing PotD Floor 200 or HoH Floor 100 with randoms? No. Then the challenge of the content doesn’t even match the challenge you’d face with matched parties charging into rooms and popping pomanders the second you find them. I understand completely why they don’t allow matched to do the harder floors.

Harder PotD floors started at 151+, only truly getting their punches in at 181+. HoH starts at 50, where you have to start being cautious, and then at 71+, you can no longer pull several mobs at once. And if you end up with 2 or 3 on you, you have to actually strategize depending on which ones they are. Got a mob that enrages and one-shots? Prioritize him. Another mob that has an attack/self-buff that needs to be stunned? Make sure to watch for that and stun it.

You’ve only been to HoH Floor 40; I don’t think you can really speak about what the higher floors are like without at least having some knowledge or experience of them. Duoing to Floor 40 is just about the same as how I duo’d to Floor 175 in PotD. I know two other friends that duo’d to the 190s.

I have done PotD until 150 solo and seemingly it only get harder after that. And I have done HoH with complete randoms until 81 where we died to those nice chimeras..We were not optimal, like not using the best pomanders, got unlucky with drops, lots of exploding traps and one healer that liked to run to chests while we still fought. And yet it was only a challenge 70+. Yes the ones after 65+ hit harder too but we still had no tank and I was the only one with full aether set at the end, the rest was like 20 points under me. If we had good pomanders we would surely have reached even higher. And again that was with total strangers. (And we were quite disappointed with a lot of bosses. Honestly the PotD <100 ones felt harder than anything including 80 and now you can even get Odin which one shots them..)So in PotD only the last 40 floors are a challenge and in HoH the last 20. Not really that great and I still dont understand why it was necessary to cut the casual part down that much. They still could have made more floors for casuals and just implement it that you can start at 101 or the challenge floors as soon as everyone cleared the floors before that once..so anyone that gets a challenge dont need the casual floors more than once and the rest of us that dont have the big amount of time to run this with a static or a unlucky to find randoms that stay with them that long can still have a big playground too.

(I am looking it at this with the whole group there. Which is exactly the amount of people that they created the challenge with. Everything else, like only duoing it, is your own challenge and I am not sure if that should be counted in the talk about the level of it)

[Reinha]

you know what exist too? PF and crosserver too, ppl need to stop saiying that there's this huge barrier of entry because there isn't anymore

The barriers to complete HoH are 1) needing to do it with the same people from start to finish and 2) the total time it takes. If you have a constantly changing work schedule (can't have a regular HoH day) and you can't play more than 2 hours in one sitting (can't complete it in one go with strangers), you are in the same situation as with PotD. The inability to just pick up random people and continue where you left off makes this very inaccessible to casuals, which cannot even be said about savage anymore.

[HyoMinPark]

I have done PotD until 150 solo and seemingly it only get harder after that. And I have done HoH with complete randoms until 81 where we died to those nice chimeras..We were not optimal, like not using the best pomanders, got unlucky with drops, lots of exploding traps and one healer that liked to run to chests while we still fought. And yet it was only a challenge 70+. Yes the ones after 65+ hit harder too but we still had no tank and I was the only one with full aether set at the end, the rest was like 20 points under me. If we had good pomanders we would surely have reached even higher. And again that was with total strangers. (And we were quite disappointed with a lot of bosses. Honestly the PotD <100 ones felt harder than anything including 80 and now you can even get Odin which one shots them..)So in PotD only the last 40 floors are a challenge and in HoH the last 20. Not really that great and I still dont understand why it was necessary to cut the casual part down that much. They still could have made more floors for casuals and just implement it that you can start at 101 or the challenge floors as soon as everyone cleared the floors before that once..so anyone that gets a challenge dont need the casual floors more than once and the rest of us that dont have the big amount of time to run this with a static or a unlucky to find randoms that stay with them that long can still have a big playground too.

(I am looking it at this with the whole group there. Which is exactly the amount of people that they created the challenge with. Everything else, like only duoing it, is your own challenge and I am not sure if that should be counted in the talk about the level of it)

The “story mode” portion was likely trimmed down because people that did the story floors of PotD tended to do it once for completion/story, or for more opportunities for aetherpool/weapons (since PotD 51-60 was very “speedrun/experience only, no silvers just gogogo). The most popular floors were PotD Floor 51-60, because they gave the best return in terms of time spent and experience. HoH 21-30 is the equivalent of PotD 51-60. If the developers see data that insinuates players ignore 90 out of the 100 story floors of PotD, why should they implement another 100 story floors that will likely also be ignored in HoH? At most, they could have done a flat 50 story floors to maybe flesh out the story a bit more, but they probably would have still started the challenge floors at Floor 41, and 41-50 would have been the new “spam for experience” set; there isn’t a need for 100 more story floors.

Re: Odin Magicite—it’s my belief that these exist for solo runs, and that they are for use on bosses only. Floor magicite are Garuda, Titan, and Ifrit, and really they should be planned around/used in an emergency (i.e., everyone but 1 player is killed by a series of unfortunate events on a higher floor, and the last person standing turns to a Magicite as one of their emergency pomanders if things like petrification are unavailable). Those pomanders aren’t intended to be used on story floors, but in later ones to either make quick use of a floor (like the big room ones) or to save from a stick situation. So of course they seem OP in floors where they are only challenging for solo runners with low, low aetherpool.

Bosses are not hard, though, so for full light-parties, Odin doesn’t even need to be used for them (probably not even for duos either, though I haven’t done any of HoH as a two-man party, so I cannot say for certain). I have to disagree with your assessment that HoH Floors 71-80 aren’t challenging; perhaps you got lucky with your Floor spawns, but each time I’ve hit those floors, it has been full of combined floor debuffs (had 5 in a row that were auto-heal disable + another debuff), treasure rooms with 10+ mobs, and danger mobs like the Griffins or Mammoths crowding the floors, especially around the exit. They aren’t as hard as the floors above them, but I wouldn’t say they are a cake-walk either.

The trimming down was also probably due to feedback about how irritating it was to do PotD Floor 51 to 100 for Floor 200 runs, and from how Floors 101 to 150 were also mostly fluff save for a few tricky mobs that could screw you over if you were unprepared for them. 100 fluff floors were not well received, from what I gather; hence why they trimmed it down.

The barriers to complete HoH are 1) needing to do it with the same people from start to finish and 2) the total time it takes. If you have a constantly changing work schedule (can't have a regular HoH day) and you can't play more than 2 hours in one sitting (can't complete it in one go with strangers), you are in the same situation as with PotD. The inability to just pick up random people and continue where you left off makes this very inaccessible to casuals, which cannot even be said about savage anymore.

Even with those above-listed situations, is it really hard to find friends or FC mates to try and work something out with? I have a limited amount of in-game friends (and a very small number of them even like PotD and HoH), but I still managed to clear Floor 200 and Floor 100 with just friends. PotD 200 took longer because I was working full-time, as was another person in our group, so we would set aside time at night (around 10pm EST, when we knew we were off) to do a few floor sets, and then continue the next day; the run where I finally cleared was spread over 3 to 4 days back-to-back at a couple hours apiece. HoH Floor 100 only took 4-5 hours to clear, and that was with us breaking after every set to check our loot sacks (and complain about the crap prizes we got).

You also only have to start at Floor 21; you don’t have to start at Floor 1 unless you are going for solo achievements.

[RiyahArp]

If only very few people attempted it, why did he specifically mention floors 180-200 in his interview with MrHappy?

I'm not saying anything about it being brain dead easy, if anything the opposite. I'm saying there's no reason for them to gut casual content because apparently he thinks people only enjoyed 180-200 being a challenge. There was no call to reduce the casual floors so much, and it suffers in every way, especially since up to 70 is a casual floor anyways! He just gated floors off that he could have kept, 1-50 casual, 51-100 challenge. 40 is just as casual as 21-30.

The namazu...at least the moogle had separate steps and dialogue. Half the quests you go directly from catching the fish back home, and even the multistep ones only require 2 interactions. It's stripped down too much, and its hard to care about them at all because of it.

The most popular floors were PotD Floor 51-60, because they gave the best return in terms of time spent and experience. HoH 21-30 is the equivalent of PotD 51-60. If the developers see data that insinuates players ignore 90 out of the 100 story floors of PotD, why should they implement another 100 story floors that will likely also be ignored in HoH?

The problem is that they didn't give any rewards to do them in sequence as opposed to single floors. Tomes and exp are a flat rate with very little bonus for completing the whole set, aetherpool is not particularly more efficient past 60 than at 51. For some reason they simply don't get the fact that players will do whatever is efficient and are very good at finding that; they just put out systems and get shocked when spamming 51-60 or FATE trains exist, and then they made these dumb decisions to curtail them, like HW scaling fates.

Either they are rushed, or give content to junior people, or what, but they should have known how only 30 floors limits the story, or that casual floors have zero difficulty period because of decisions made for upper floors or soloing.