Going to the same route as WoW. The game is TOO easy

[Ronduwil]

thats like your 4th strawman in the thread without actually responding. 95% of the thread is either ad hominems or strawmans, so im out
atleast thx at @Skyclaw726 and @Kalise for being ontopic

It was clearly a joke. Sarcasm is not the same as a strawman argument.

[ScarboroughFairy]

This statement right here. You can criticize anything that's always gonna be an allowed thing. However the moment you make a claim like that the content is easy without doing the harder stuff you lose all credibility.

Imagine saying DMC (capital M) is too easy...

...while having never done DMD or Hell and Hell.

Alternatively, the sentiment I've gathered can be explained in a hypothetical conversation:

"Baseline content isn't challenging. This game isn't challenging enough."
"Try the harder content!"
"...no."

Is that super reductive? Yeah, but I'm a huge fan of hyperbole.

[Sebazy]

I think the bigger issue is the lack of a decent difficulty curve ever since the days of 2.0.

The final dungeons had toned down versions of some of the Hard Mode primal's attacks to try and help people get to grips with what the game expected out of them and for the most part, it was actually pretty a good challenge to carry someone through this stuff back then.

I'd also argue that the Trials did a better job of being a good middle ground between the casual and hardcore aspects of the endgame back then. Again, carrying someone through Titan, Ifrit or Thordan EX wasn't particularly easy when they were new content. Compare that to most of the primals across SB and it rarely matters if someone simply can't pull their weight.

Lastly, this game is far too happy to reward people for completely unacceptable standards of play. It's standard fare to see several people with a sub 30% active rate in any given 24 man. I'm sorry but no, that's not even remotely ok at the end game.

The game doesn't need to be harder. Rather, the devs need to look at ways to encourage more people to play to a better standard so that they are better suited to take on the inevitable blips in content difficulty throughout the game.

[ElciaDeiLinus]

I don't think being 'too easy' is either a problem FFXIV as far as I've seen has (and, admittedly, I've very new here whereas I've played WoW since Vanilla), or is something it shares in the same way with WoW.

The difference I've seen so far is engagement. Now, first of all- every job I've tried has a complex and engaging rotation with some thought to it in this game, to the point where, even not being level 70 the most simple job here is dozens time more interesting and requires more abilities and even more thought into which to use when than the hardest to play specs in WoW. So before we've even touched the fights themselves, FFXIV has the base for more complicated play- if the games were literally beating a target dummy, this game would be considerably better.

But mechanically, there are more engaging mechanics in leveling dungeons in this game than there are in most normal level WoW endgame raids. I don't mythic raid in WoW, but I do get heroic clears in the first few weeks- and even there, at the second highest level of content- H BoD starts with a fight where the boss's mechanic is adds and an occassional directional attack. That's content most players in WoW are incapable of doing- but there are mere dungeons in FFXIV which have far more mechanically going on.

I of course have yet to do the extreme or true endgame here- but even from a casual content perspective, this game requires considerably more from players than most of what WoW does, which makes it more enjoyable.

I mean, take Dark Souls and Bloodborne. DaS 1-3 are challenging games at higher NG+, and I love it- but Bloodborne was a joke in terms of difficulty. Bloodborne also was extremely fun- less fun, but still I loved it. A game does not need to be HARD to be engaging and fun, but when it is NEITHER as almost everything in WoW is, I end up in 8.2 going back until I get through heroic Azshara and likely unsubbing once again- since the only harder content is mythic which I can't even do as my raid guild's on a different server, and I don't find WQ or speedrunning dungeons to be engaging in that game.

[ForteNightshade]

FFXIV already has a nice progression of difficulty from dungeon to normal trial/raid to alliance raid to extreme trial to savage raid to ultimate. If people want more difficult light party content, I'd rather they bring back light party trial than some kind of extreme mode for dungeon, and certainly not some kind of mythic+ style race-against-time dungeon run.

It actually doesn't. FFXIV has very noticeable difficulty spikes with little ebb and flow. Dungeons and normal modes are brain dead simple with very few exceptions while EXs have been all over the place. You have Shinryu, who could actually kick your teeth in followed by... Byakko, who is arguably one of the easiest Primals the game ever released; Lakshmi takes that title. Savage does something similar with Alte Roite having no business being labeled Savage while Halicarnassus is a massive jump over Catastrophe. Ultimate is on a whole different level that utterly dwarfs current Savage. Neo, Godka and Final are not even close to the sheer mechanical dance and demand of Bahamut, Nael and Ultima.

With that all said, I think the important factor to keep in mind is what Sebazy touched upon above. While I do think the challenge needs to go up on the casual side, it shouldn't be a quantum leap ahead. For example, Migard will not cast Tail End (his buster) until more than half way into his fight on normal. He literally does almost nothing to the tanks. I don't think it's unreasonable to say this isn't good design. You're a tank and could take every CD off your bar and live just fine in that fight. So what should change? I would like to see more tank swaps and enrages—the latter especially. It puts some actual responsibility on the DPS in lieu of having 24 mans or normal modes where you can just throw bodies at the boss until it kneels over provided a healer or RDM/SMN lives.

Put another way. I would like content to better reward effort instead of rewarding participation.

[NessaWyvern]

Yep, even with twitch perfect reactions I've been knocked off sometimes even when I appeared to be out of the area by cast end. Not having issues like this nowadays though, so either the connection improved, cast time became longer, or both.

They fixed the latency on servers end, it was a huge issue before the fix, I still have nightmares about it. I used to have to move before the abilities even appeared to dodge, which worked, unless someone ran in front of me and dropped their landslide/weights in front me, making me unable to dodge it T^T

[linay]

Put another way. I would like content to better reward effort instead of rewarding participation.

Not going to touch on the difference between Savage encounters as well as Savage and Ultimate, but I think the other contents are still within reason even with any "spikes" in difficulty. That said, I can agree with rewarding more (good) effort.

[Shurrikhan]

Why does it always seem like the ones complaining the most about "Casualbringers" and "too many casual things" are always the ones who haven't done much of/any of the difficult content in the game.

I haven't seen any clear indication of this trend, but neither would it seem that unreasonable to me.

Consider. If you only play casual content, you're in a place where you're free to optimize, but are not constrained to just the most optimal choices. You're at sort of the "sweet spot" for player flexibility and creativity. You can still experience engaging play without having to live or die by it.

But what happens when gameplay is simplified across the whole? Now you increasingly must participate in higher-stakes or high-stress content in order to reach that same level of potential engagement. For casual -- but necessarily incompetent -- player, that's sort of a worst of both worlds. You get to do things that are inherently less engaging but propelled by the exactness of the content, which is precisely what you tried to avoid in the first place. Your means are now less enjoyable and/or your ends more stressful.

Consider also the shared resource costs here. While a large part of being casual is of course choice, to avoid stressful and/or exacting content, what if they could instead receive content that is a bit more difficult without being more exacting (e.g. scheduled or scripted like Savage fights)? If you could have content that could bring in more engagement on the whole, without sacrificing the parts of gameplay you find fun through a rigorous need for optimization or memorization, would that not be preferable to, say, random "casual" side-content? What ever happened to that whole difficulty range between "casual" and Savage, where it would give casual players -- not something that can just immediately do, but rather -- to progress through without feeling pushed into a separate world of play? Why shouldn't casual players be the ones most concerned about a lack of mid-core content, or side-contents with a fair but varied degree of difficulty available to them? It's their entire sense of building up from A to B, instead of solely doing, without little real sense of achievement, casual content styles A-Z, that would be lost to them when you get features pandered to where you are now rather than where you'd want to go.

[Vercinotrix]

I'd like more small group content that's hard. Being in a discord with 5+ people is always a pain in the rear to try and do, and honestly my days of raid leading are long gone. I'd like some savage mode dungeons that I can get a weapon from and me and my 3 other friends is all thats needed as participants.

[Feidam]

I'd like more small group content that's hard. Being in a discord with 5+ people is always a pain in the rear to try and do, and honestly my days of raid leading are long gone. I'd like some savage mode dungeons that I can get a weapon from and me and my 3 other friends is all thats needed as participants.

I’m with you here. I’d love to see extreme/savage mode 4mans. As another option to partake in.