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

[CorbinDallas]

People are making dungeon guides?

Gotta get them clicks yo, even for the easiest of content.

[Racen]

I already dealt with enough of this type of player in wow, go play classic and have fun grinding and sleepwalking through raids that are easier than level 50 dungeons in ffxiv.

[Iscah]

People are making dungeon guides?

As a new player I would have greatly appreciated a dungeon guide. Some of the boss mechanics are quite unintuitive until the mechanism has been explained to you - especially how to respond to unique markers - and playing on a Japanese data centre, I was rarely able to communicate with my party.

[AlliciaCapulet]

Back in ARR, some dungeon where a bit more challenging (on level 50 dungeon) than what we have now where you simply grab everything, kill, boss, repeat, with no mecanics to think. Raid were more difficult too. Crafting and gathering were more difficult to HQ since you had some RNG with the good/excellent bonus where you had to adjust your rotation to when it pop, and not just run a macro like in Stormblood with 100% chance of HQ.

Globally, the game become more and more easy, and they seems to keep doing it that way. Yes the Extreme or raid can be challenging on the first week of a release when you are minimum ilvl and need to make a perfect dance, but the gear that drop in a raid have no uses except making the raid where you get it easier. They had remove everything where a player could make a mistake from the game, like the statistics, and they just make it easier to meld, you mostly have juste one build now.

I can understand that many people are just casual, but making a game too easy is a way to fall, like WoW did. We are not at WoW level yet, but, making a game where you can clear stuff easily, then have to wait for the next patch in 4 month and fill the time with repetitive boring stuff like Eureka, well that's the reason why many people take a break between patches. If the last raid could take at least 3-4 week to beat for the hardcore players, then we would have things to do until the next patch, but usually we can beat the savage within 1 or 2 weeks.

WoW was hard, at the begining. Until Wotlk. After what, the game became more and more easy, and you can see the population of the game dropping more and more since then. If you want people to keep interest in a game, it has to be hard. It doesn't matter if it's not everyone who clear a raid on the current patch, casual players can try, and if they fail, they can just try it again with better gear on the next tier. It's fun to wipe. It's fun to be challenged. I never do expert roulette here and get my weekly cap from hunt because I hate to do an easy dungeon and waste 20 minutes to be bored. So I 100% agree, this game is now too easy.

[Halivel]

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

FFXIV never was a hardcore game in the first place, at least since 2.0 release (didn't play 1.0, can't say anything about this).

It always was casual-based and also kept style "make the gameplay okay for those who can spend only one hour per day online".

For those... roughly 5% of a whole playerbase who enjoy hard content, there is hard content. Maybe with a little bit low amount, but is there sense to make more if 95% will never even touch it?

XIV does not go in WoW direction. Because it never was WoW. The quality and difficulty of the content is pretty much on the same level as it was 5 year ago. Even if there are some simplifications, there are reasons for it, and I remember Yoshida saying clearly why: community changes, too. Modern gamers in its majority can't spend 10 hours per day online trying to kill one cursed RB, a big amount of people play, like, twice time per week. And they need to agjust the game for them, too, not only for hardcore players.

[Lersayil]

I wouldn't mind having some more (optional?) midcore content, but making the base content more difficult might not be the right direction (seeing as how many people strugle with basics already in your avarage duty roulette).

As for guides, they are tools. It's as simple as not watching them if you dont want to. You can set up a staticor PF group to blind experiment if that is your thing. Without guides the first few weeks on more... obscure mechanics would be even worse, and arguably the chaos would last longer until the community consolidates on a stable clear tactic.

[CaptainLagbeard]

The regular content is quite casual generally... I can understand the MSQ and it's relevant dungeons being more casual. But raids, specifically the "hard" difficulty 8-man ones and the 24-man ones, could stand to have more difficulty than just learning the mechanics...

Some fights you could just about record yourself going through it as a macro and just let that do the fight for you next time. Worst offender of this for Stormblood being Catastrophe from Omega's Deltascape v2.0...

[NekoNova]

The game is fine as is. MSQ story content is easy, because it's MSQ Story Content.
You want a challenge, do the savage and extreme modes.
You want a real challenge, go do Ultimate and them come complain

[ScarletDawn]

Go do titan extreme sync'd to the item level it was meant to be played at which I think is 70.

The OP probably does the easy content or 70 runs old content.

[Maneesha]

Go do titan extreme sync'd to the item level it was meant to be played at which I think is 70.

Everyone i talked to who played during titan ex release told me always the same thing, the difficulty wasn't the mechanics, but rather the ping issues many players faced. Walking out of the aoe and still getting hit....

Modern gamers in its majority can't spend 10 hours per day online trying to kill one cursed RB, a big amount of people play, like, twice time per week. And they need to agjust the game for them, too, not only for hardcore players.

Yes gaming is more "mainstream" nowadays which leads to more people with less time to play, but mmorpg's were always games in which you had to invest a huge amount of time, devs trying to cater more and more to the casual 1-2h a day player base is the reason why most mmorpg's or games in general are getting more and more easy and boring. If you don't have time for time demanding games, don't play them and play single player/co-op or fps games where you can play 2-4 rounds in 2h and then log off. Instead of playing games which fit your available time, people demand everything to be changed to fit them or devs/company's try to make their games more and more appealing to "casual" players or players with very limited time so they can get more revenue...I think this is a mistake, but this is only my opinion.

I think OP does have a point, even if i don't agree with everything he wrote and you can compare FF14 to WoW, since both are theme-park mmorpg's and both use expansions to add more content to the game. Similary they both have to deal with constant "ability bloat" and they both deal in a very similar way with this issue ( remove skills to make space for new ones). Also they try to make all jobs/classes interesting,unique and balanced. While with every expansion/patch we might get more close to a balanced state, a lot of classes lose their unique game play style and feel more and more "same-ish" and a lot of players lose interest or dislike the changes made to the jobs (drk...) thanks to changes made to the way they play, be it for an overhaul or simply by losing skills they previously had.

I agree that ff14 is a very casual game, but the OP also has a point when he says the game gets easier and easier. In SB the devs did delete a lot of ability's from the classes to make them easier(thou they reasoned with "button bloat") and thus changed the way some classes were played, *cough* drk *cough*. Now with ShB again. While the dungeon/raid difficulty might not change (we haven't played the expansion yet), the game play of the different jobs can also lower/rise the difficulty of a game and affects the "fun factor" a lot.