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

[ForteNightshade]

The pruning regarding DPS skills on Healers is definitly not an indication of the global direction the game is taking. It is a specific exception that absolutly cannot be stretched as far as making that kind of generalization regarding the "route" the game is taking as a whole.

Besides, you compare what we have now to Heavensward -while conveniently forgetting the huge failure that was Gordias- to speak about the game's direction. But if you compare it to ARR instead, you'll see how far above we still are as long as you don't wear rose tinted glasses.

Finally, customization is not a necessity, nor is it desirable if done incorrectly (which is almost always the case). And regarding "identity", that's pretty much the reason why we didn't get a 4th healer.

Gordias continuously gets reference but without a lot of context. Why did it nearly kill the raid scene?

- The dev team openly acknowledged they did not test it properly. Instead of doing the entire fight from start to finish, they tested each individual mechanic in a vacuum. This caused it to become gear synced. Manipulator was straight up impossible to clear while Living Liquid required perfect performance to barely inch by enrage.
- No Cross-world Party Finder meant if you weren't on a dedicated raid server, your chances to clear went down dramatically.
- No CD reset.
- Due to the huge failures of LoV and Diadem, the extended length between patches left people bereft of content.
- Two of the three new jobs were borderline unplayable messes, Astro especially. Dark Knight wasn't great either but serviceable.

Pointing to Gordias and saying "See! You can't make hard content!" is incredibly disingenuous. A lot went into crippling the raid scene beyond simply Gordias—which, itself, was not balanced properly.

As for the fourth healer. It's looking more like we didn't get one because the dev team has no idea what to actually make. What we have seen from the healer rework shows almost nothing that would suggest a fourth healer were some monumental task.

A game that caters to people who only want the hardest content will be unable to thrive, because the majority of a game's full player base are casual.
Look at Wildstar.
It was centered around very hard content.
And now it's dead.

Someone with more knowledge of Wilstar will need to provide better details but if I recall, there were far more issues than difficulty. It had almost no content for lengthily periods, balance was a complete mess and PvP had a lot of problems. Again, I can't speak from experience—having never played it myself. I have, however, seen this argument a lot.

I found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/4api0a/why_did_wildstar_fail/

Basically, the devs had no idea what they were doing. It wasn't because Wildstar was hard.

[Fyce]

Gordias continuously gets reference but without a lot of context. Why did it nearly kill the raid scene?

- The dev team openly acknowledged they did not test it properly. Instead of doing the entire fight from start to finish, they tested each individual mechanic in a vacuum. This caused it to become gear synced. Manipulator was straight up impossible to clear while Living Liquid required perfect performance to barely inch by enrage.
- No Cross-world Party Finder meant if you weren't on a dedicated raid server, your chances to clear went down dramatically.
- No CD reset.
- Due to the huge failures of LoV and Diadem, the extended length between patches left people bereft of content.
- Two of the three new jobs were borderline unplayable messes, Astro especially. Dark Knight wasn't great either but serviceable.

Pointing to Gordias and saying "See! You can't make hard content!" is incredibly disingenuous. A lot went into crippling the raid scene beyond simply Gordias—which, itself, was not balanced properly.

Having all of that doesn't mean that Gordias would've been a success.
Besides, my point refered to the complexity of jobs in Heavensward, which definitly played a big role in Gordias's failure.
Also, I never said that we can't have hard content. Otherwise I'd have to say that Ultimate doesn't exist or is bad, and I'm not that dumb.

As for the fourth healer. It's looking more like we didn't get one because the dev team has no idea what to actually make. What we have seen from the healer rework shows almost nothing that would suggest a fourth healer were some monumental task.

They just got rid of one of the biggest splinter they had in the foot since ARR by killing that "identity" that everyone was trying to protect so hard. Even if you don't see what they actually did or the reason why they did it, they can now walk forward and finally start designing healing in FFXIV how it should've been. We probably won't see much happen before at least 5.2, or even 6.0 at worst. But I won't go further into that, because I'm already seeing a bunch of people starting to scream that I'm moving their precious goalpost that apparently must remain at a Lv.73 MSQ trial.

[Fellgon]

This game its not "too easy". Maybe its easy for OP cause he knows how play very well TODAY, but for new players may be not.
I remember my first day of playing ARR and others mmo the amount of hours i took to undestand interface, searching for quests, reading every skill description, learning every dungeon...all this u cant achiv in 30 minutes of play. This game its not casual at all. Casual for me, are those games that you can play in 30 minutes, 1 hour...and absorb everything.

I can undestand english, read and listen, but i have friends in real life who dont know english and still trying to learn this game.
Im sure that in 1997 theres wasnt youtube, internet as we see today, and still in those years i had a friend that was trying to play final fantasy 7 in japanese. He didnt undestand english, even harder japanese, but in those years we was enjoying the game. Try play like him: no internet, no magazine, foreign language, no cellphone.

For me, to know everything i know so far about this game, took months of play. Even today, theres some content i never finished or did. This game is great! I hope it doenst become as easy as candy crush or harder like darksouls.