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

[Sylve]

when the dragon flies up there is no way to discern where his path will be that I can see)

This one is simple. Just Sprint around the edge of the arena. When you get close to where he's hovering, his trajectory appears. Usually, if you've 'found' his position, you'll be in a safe spot.

[Orbus]

hmm...
Putting aside that "savage" tier dungeons would get in the way of the dungeon roulette's which numerous main story dungeons are tie to, unless they offered substantially better rewards as well there would be little point to doing them and putting raid tier gear in them isn't going to happen.

Perhaps if they were to make a "raid dungeon" that's tied to eight man raid progression, having a dungeon where they would just put another raid boss (say for example the phantom train boss would instead be a dungeon run through the train, but with mobs and mechanics that push dungeon difficulty much higher) with raid loot distributed as usual after finishing it, and a savage tier of the dungeon doing what savage tier usually does.
It would also give them an excuse to finally make more 8 man dungeons than the MSQ roulette dungeons.

I mean it's not likely to happen, but if they were to make much harder dungeons I think it would have to be something like this since making the standard dungeons much harder isn't going to happen.

[Kazrah]

Forums: "We want more challenging savage raids"
Devs: "Here you go!" Alexander: Gordias (Savage)
Forums: "I can't raid with my job because raids are too hard!"
Devs: "Fine, we'll tune down content" gives Alexander: Midas (Savage)

Forums: "24-player raids are too easy"
Devs: Weeping City of Mhach
Forums: "NERF OZMA!!"

Forums: "Dungeons are too easy"
Devs: The Burn
Forums: "Dungeons are too hard!!"

#historyrepeatsitself

[ElciaDeiLinus]

Should they be less forgiving/harsher? I don't know, you alienate bad players if you make things unpassable for the average skill level- and honestly, I've played MMOs 15 years, I've played a dozen different ones seriously- the average player is unable or unwilling to learn, but they still have the right to play the game. If you up the challenge on everything though- well sure, that may make more hardcore players happy, but it's not like there aren't highly difficult content outside of basic dungeons/main story.

People also often equate having to group/spend time to find a group to challenge- like if you can do something solo, it's casual content but if you need 40 people it's hardcore and only hardcores should get it. This is something I've disagreed with since Vanilla WoW, and despite it taking months of 20 hour raid weeks to get through Vanilla raids, the content was actually very easy- it just required a lot of people spending a lot of time.

I do think, of course, that they should continue to include interesting mechanics in all content, it's one of the top things that is making me consider staying here rather than going back when Azshara drops, because I know in WoW that once I beat H-Azshara, everything else I can do for the next half year involves zero mechanics. Maybe that's just cuz I'm new, and admittedly haven't done any significant content yet- the hardest I've done is Extreme Ramuh. But just in ARR I've seen better 'easy' content mechanics than in 15 years of WoW outside raids, and just the ability to be interested in something other than raiding (and Legion's mage tower... gods that was fun) in a game makes the statement 'going the same route as WoW' in the title make no sense to me.

Like, think about your pre-level 30 rotation, before you get all the ninja or black mage skills added... that's still a more complex rotation than half the WoW classes. No really- I'm looking at the optimal summoner rotation guide and it's two minutes long. My BM hunter rotation is... use abilities with small CDs when they're off CD, try to sync your two big cooldowns, spam cobra shot if you have extra focus.

Just imagine that- being able to be optimal at your class with 3-5 abilities+ 1-3 CDs, where the rotation is 'use everything with a CD, then use the thing without a CD' because that is the pro guide for 90% of WoW dps specs in a nutshell. Ninjutsu alone is more complicated than entire specs in WoW, so no, no I don't think this game's at any risk of dropping to WoW's level.

[Kewitt]

Your choice to make it easy.
You don't have to do content with 50 ilevels over geared.

Also Looking at https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodes...acter/1709928/
You likely don't need to worry about content getting easier as it doesn't look like your challenging ultimate content or even very much savage.
I'm guessing this is an alt.

Unless 80% of the player base can pug a clear on current savage content it isn't to easy.

They need to clean up useless ability and streamline stuff or there would be just to many buttons to smash.

[ScorpioShirica]

Listening to forums on difficulty is how WoW turned their most successful expansion with WOTLK into their most disastrous with Cata (where they stopped publishing numbers). Unsurprisingly, a majority of people that don't have the time to spend ridiculous hours "getting good" love casual content and don't want a very difficult game.

[Reinha]

Listening to forums on difficulty is how WoW turned their most successful expansion with WOTLK into their most disastrous with Cata (where they stopped publishing numbers). Unsurprisingly, a majority of people that don't have the time to spend ridiculous hours "getting good" love casual content and don't want a very difficult game.

They didn't stop publishing numbers in Cata and when they did stop it was because 5 million people had quit in a short time span, their biggest reason being lack of content.

[Shurrikhan]

Listening to forums on difficulty is how WoW turned their most successful expansion with WOTLK into their most disastrous with Cata (where they stopped publishing numbers). Unsurprisingly, a majority of people that don't have the time to spend ridiculous hours "getting good" love casual content and don't want a very difficult game.

Yeah, no. Cata's direction was tangential to community desires at best. In some cases, it stood in direct contrast to them.

And Cata's downfall wasn't its changes, although they may have helped push certain players off certain specs (while others only became more engrossed with their favorites). Its downfall was its content and clear lack of polish.

We can find far more numerous examples of Monkey's Paw changes right here on XIV, within recent times, than we can in the move from WotLK to Cataclysm, despite how incredibly well documented and scrutinized that period of WoW has become.

[Ronduwil]

And Cata's downfall wasn't its changes, although they may have helped push certain players off certain specs (while others only became more engrossed with their favorites). Its downfall was its content and clear lack of polish.

Speaking from my own personal experience, 90% of my guild quit because Cata Heroic dungeons were harder than WotLK raids and the gear rewards for those super hard dungeons were disproportionate to the difficulty involved. On top of that, starter Cata raids were on par with WotLK hard modes. The leap in difficulty was simply insane. I stuck it out and eventually cleared all the Heroic raids in Cata, but I was completely burned out by the end of that expansion. It felt to me like the community never recovered. WoW went from being a relaxing game that I played at the end of my work day to being a second job. Successful raiding guilds became mini-corporations, complete with job interviews, performance quotas, and difficult hiring/firing decisions. That doesn't make for a compelling game. I want to have fun with my friends in a game, not raid successfully with my co-workers.

They tried to overcorrect by adding LFR "for the casuals," but 25-man content simply isn't conducive to building bonds between guild-mates. The current Mythic+ system suffers from the same problems that plagued Cata: the timer requires that you exclude under-performers. You can't play with who you want. Instead, you have to find the best co-workers available to you and work with them. Again, I want to play a game at the end of my work day, not maintain a second job.

[Shurrikhan]

Speaking from my own personal experience, 90% of my guild quit because Cata Heroic dungeons were harder than WotLK raids and the gear rewards for those super hard dungeons were disproportionate to the difficulty involved. On top of that, starter Cata raids were on par with WotLK hard modes. The leap in difficulty was simply insane. I stuck it out and eventually cleared all the Heroic raids in Cata, but I was completely burned out by the end of that expansion. It felt to me like the community never recovered. WoW went from being a relaxing game that I played at the end of my work day to being a second job. Successful raiding guilds became mini-corporations, complete with job interviews, performance quotas, and difficult hiring/firing decisions. That doesn't make for a compelling game. I want to have fun with my friends in a game, not raid successfully with my co-workers.

They tried to overcorrect by adding LFR "for the casuals," but 25-man content simply isn't conducive to building bonds between guild-mates. The current Mythic+ system suffers from the same problems that plagued Cata: the timer requires that you exclude under-performers. You can't play with who you want. Instead, you have to find the best co-workers available to you and work with them. Again, I want to play a game at the end of my work day, not maintain a second job.

Ahh, I guess my friends must have been a little more on the midcore side or above going from WotLK to Cata because they loved Cata heroics. I did as well.

Nonetheless, I don't think its difficulty came down to a sweeping HP and/or "deadliness factor" buff across all mobs so much as a failure to rein in very specific mob effects when scaling up and how those changes forced awareness and decisive counterpoint. This left a much more punctuated difficulty that then felt quite manageable to very skilled players while seeming both unintuitive and overwhelming to less skilled players. Where a skilled player might look at the damage intake and immediately takes up a kiting pattern, that degree of adaptibility just wasn't available to many an average player. And given some of the weirdness that went on there, with certain mobs scaling far more rampantly than others from Normal to Heroic by nature of their skills, I always that as a failure to polish quite enough, since difficulty as a result of damage intake or output required isn't... linearly perceived(?) (if there could even be such a thing), especially once the floor has already been raised significantly.

The last point about Mythic+, though, is one I hope XIV will learn from. I like Mythic+ as an efficiently designed reiterative system, but it is far from perfect (or all that interesting fleshed out in terms of rewards), and in this case I would the failing you describe, for instance, comes from only ever trying to suit its needs for general grinding and gear progression simultaneously.

Let me exemplify. I see no reason why I shouldn't be able to take an underperforming player to content in which they would otherwise drown without (1) risk of failure or (2) making the difficulty excessively low for myself as well if there isn't anything about the content that would specifically require, somehow, that my lowest DPS be nearish the highest in party (e.g. by split-party mechanics or whatever or tight DPS checks). Though, if it's really just about grinding, and it isn't that much less efficient to just step down a level in difficulty, it's almost a bit irrelevant; the only true solution at that point is to have dynamic mechanics also tied into the difficulty level and to target those mechanics at specific players based on their individual difficulty levels selected, so to speak.

That said, it makes no sense to then treat gear progression as if it were mere grinding. That certainly doesn't happen in raids, so why should someone who can't beat the fights in X time at Y difficulty (the equivalent of clearing any boss Y in a raid, we might say) be rewarded with that same loot? Removing the Mythic+ timer would be the equivalent of removing every enrage from raids and making the excess time purely a point of vanity. I can't take Dyslexic Joe to the Linguomancer raid fight. It may suck, but that's just the fact of it. Why would I expect any different, then, from something that provides the same quality of loot, even if based on a dungeon model?

I'd thought a lot about a reiterative system very specific to XIV that gives more control over the elements of difficulty added by dividing up the different types of difficulty that may be added to a dungeon by Element, collecting and deploying TT Cards for optional bonus fights a la Necromimicon, and using player-based difficulty levels (an idea partly borrowed from 1.x, and partly from multiplayer Rogue-likes) in the form of Blessings/Challenges, with slightly different workings between premade and matched parties -- the general idea being to give a more interesting and player-directed reward structure via Relic Armor (aka Regalia) and the gathering of Element as an analog reward structure punctuated by progressing tiers therein for interesting materia effects, preferably while allowing greater skill gaps within any given party without creating conflict for that party's workings.