Anyone else concerned by the extremely low skill ceiling?

[Allooutrick]

I don't mind generally easy story content so long as there's a challenge to be found in optional stuff that doesn't require a static. So like moderate difficulty optional content that encourages and requires doing mechanics.

My concern is just the community mainly and how so many players have a speedrun mentality. I like to feel like we're a team and in it together. Not this nonsense where a first timer is watching a cutscene and the tank starts the fight anyways.

[ShadowNyx3]

I find the overall lack of interesting content to be more concerning than a shrinking skill gap. For longtime players, the content that's being delivered has repeated itself at its core since the end of Heavensward and I imagine that the desire to keep playing is becoming harder to cope with as the jobs are being made simpler to keep the healthy flow of new players coming into the game. It is a good thing to shrink the skill gap because the life of the game does depend on new people coming in and finding a foothold they might otherwise not have if the barrier to entry at the top is too strong.

I'm of the opinion that wanting to maintain a larger skill gap isn't going to create as much of a reprieve from stale content as completely overhauling how that content is delivered and I'm not just talking about more interesting mechanics in fights or more interesting scenarios for the content. What this game does so well and continues to grow on is its ability to make incredible thematic scenarios that hook us in from the start. Shadowbringers is a testament to that with how much praise this game received for its story and visuals while completely glossing over that it's still very much the same content we've been doing for years. To continue this trend, I'm sure that the YorHa raid will be one of the more visually, mechanically and thematically interesting raids we've ever had in this game, but will Yoko Taro's genius be enough to make us forget that it'll serve the same purpose as every Alliance raid before it: Glamour/catch-up gear drops, tokens for upgrade materials, and collectable items rolled on by the entire raid?

I think it would be more interesting if each expansion toned down on the risks with making so many changes to each class and instead focused on risks involving how content is treated. Alliance raid is just one example but imagine having more ways than just tomes and savage raid to gear up and more content than just savage and ultimate raids that actually made gearing your character matter. We can complain all we want about the complexity of jobs and while its unlikely we'll ever see jobs made harder again, because of the new player caveat, how long would that keep us interested in the current content cycle and how many people does that really benefit?

I certainly don't blame anyone for wanting to complain about easier jobs though. Without more interesting content to capture everyone's attention, is it any wonder people are becoming bored more quickly with each patch.

[Melichoir]

I am just thinking back to 2.x and 3.x (and to an extent 4.x) content and I am worried about this trend...not only about the design of the extreme/savage encounters but more-so the job player skill ceilings. It seems to me that the difference between a poor to average skilled player compared to a skilled player is minuscule performance wise. There is no real incentive to actually master your job, since you can be really bad and still do 99% of content. Is this the design style going forward? If so, is anyone else concerned? Higher end content should require near-mastery of your job, shouldn't it? Or am I crazy?

I always find this kinda strange to be a point. This never made sense because it assumes if youve been playing the game for a while that youll not increase in skill in any capacity, even if youve been trying out more challenging content.

You know, the plain and simple answer could easily be the player base has averagely gotten better over time while the skill ceiling hasnt been increasing as fast, and thus more people are able to get into more extreme content. Pair this with the fact that balance might not have been as good in previous xpacs as it is now. Alexander might be harder buck for buck, but it could be harder for all the wrong reasons. As a point, A3S became notorious for the dps checks. So much so it was almost required that tanks essentially strip off any stat that didtn contribute to DPS and socket for that. It ended up with tanks being slightly tankier DPS who unless they were very good with everyone else, would get killed by busters. It was a static breaker by how difficult those checks were, and it's not something fondly remembered or widely enjoyed at the time. It was plainly bad design.

DPS checks arent as bad now as then (short of enrage), but I think fights have gotten more mechanically intensive as the offset. So its a new management of doing a complex mechanic on top of keeping a decent uptime/dps, compared to earlier versions where the focus what seemed more DPS check orientated.

TLDR - Skill ceiling has gone up, but probably not at the same rate as the average player skill has increased. It makes it seem like things have gotten 'easier' when theyve actually gotten harder, but we've gotten better faster averagely.

[QooEr]

TLDR - Skill ceiling has gone up, but probably not at the same rate as the average player skill has increased. It makes it seem like things have gotten 'easier' when theyve actually gotten harder, but we've gotten better faster averagely.

i want to agree but its really not the case. Midas did the whole "harder mechanic dance with easier dps check" and yet the fights were still harder and more punishing than creator-onwards. even ex primals have gotten easier ever since sophia. thordan extreme on release was pretty challenging, sephirot and nidhogg were punishing even if the mechanics werent too hard (remember fang & claw?). fast forward to stormblood and lakshmi was absolutely brainless, byakko ex could be cleared blind on the first run, etc. over the years, mechanics HAVE been getting easier and less punishing, and dps checks more lenient.

[Melichoir]

i want to agree but its really not the case. Midas did the whole "harder mechanic dance with easier dps check" and yet the fights were still harder and more punishing than creator-onwards. even ex primals have gotten easier ever since sophia. thordan extreme on release was pretty challenging, sephirot and nidhogg were punishing even if the mechanics werent too hard (remember fang & claw?). fast forward to stormblood and lakshmi was absolutely brainless, byakko ex could be cleared blind on the first run, etc. over the years, mechanics HAVE been getting easier and less punishing, and dps checks more lenient.

I dont agree. I think true complexity has increased per xpac, and the difficulty back during midas was a mix of player inexperience and overly punishing design due to lack of dev team experience. I think it seems easier now because of a wider variety of factors - better encounter design, increased player base skills, more resources on hand to get through fights and game/class mechanics, and the skill ceiling not increasing as fast as the player base. Simply saying everything is easier now I think is a 'rose tinted glasses' effect, where people are remembering the highlights of a tier rather than the reality of it in context to the game at the time.

This all being said, If we wanted to increase the skill ceiling more to keep it at relative pace with the player base growth, we would have to address the skill floor first. Hyper disparity between the top and bottom tier players is just as bad as their being a skill ceiling to low that top and bottom players is almost indistinguishable. If we want to make Savage and EX harder, then I would propose that Regular Trials and Dungeons need to start being scaled up in difficulty. Dungeons are a joke because it is almost impossible to fail them. I love Nier but within a week itll most likely be easy mode afk farm status once people learn the single gimmick per boss fight. Hard mode dungeons are just the same dungeon at a higher level and just as easy. The issue isnt the skill ceiling IMO. It's teh skill floor. Raise the floor, youll have more room to raise the ceiling.

[TaleraRistain]

Shrinking the skill gap is exactly what they said they were going to do. They don't want the huge gap between the more casual and the more hardcore. And if EX and Savage are easier, that's entirely in SE"s lap. They looked at the numbers of people doing Savage, didn't think they were high enough, and made it more attractive to a wider audience. This made people who had just written it off as something they wouldn't mess with before willing to dip their toes into it.

[Thoosa]

It’s my understanding that the first tiers of savage, the fights are relatively easy compared to the final fights and it seems to be the case this time around.

Difficulty is reduced even further if you’re in a static group with similarly skilled players, at the end of the day it’s just a dance you have to learn and after that it’s auto pilot easy.

IMO people who cleared the whole savage tier in the first day or two in a static are pretty talented but again they are helped massively due to experience and same levels of skill in the group, but first clears are still impressive.

Try doing this in pf.

Not everyone plays savage and it doesn’t matter. If they did just cater for savage, they’d have significantly less subscribers.

I guess if you want genuinely hard gameplay throughout, play the souls games. And there’s always ultimates.

[aiqa]

With questions like this I always feel like the people asking for a higher ceiling are only looking up, while they should also be looking down.

The DPS spread as shown on fflogs suggests there already is a very significant skill ceiling.
Even on savage (which already has the best players) there is a very significant difference between a 50th percentile and a 9-th percentile player.
And that is not even counting the players that are not skilled enough to do savage content.

[Liam_Harper]

With questions like this I always feel like the people asking for a higher ceiling are only looking up, while they should also be looking down.

The DPS spread as shown on fflogs suggests there already is a very significant skill ceiling.
Even on savage (which already has the best players) there is a very significant difference between a 50th percentile and a 9-th percentile player.
And that is not even counting the players that are not skilled enough to do savage content.

That doesn't necessarily mean the ceiling is high as much as expectations and accessibility of most content is very low.

It's a side effect of the game teaching you nothing and giving very little indication of performance. Most players have no idea they're 9th percentile. They're fairly sure they're doing "fine". They've sailed through the MSQ, beaten everything on normal and even been carried through a few EX trials. In their eyes they're doing well. The concept of uptime, correct rotation, melds, food, actions-per-minute, weaving, clipping are all foreign to them. Since everything is easy they don't have to try that hard. Nothing tells them they really aren't prepared for Savage, naturally they'd expect it's the next step, so in they go.

For a good player, I imagine they hit the ceiling too easily. Once you have the fight mapped out in your head, you get to a point very fast where the content is on farm and you're just trying to squeeze 1 or 2% more on your logs. A healer for example, has their heals planned for the raidwides then the rest is 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1

Tanking too is a good example, I remember years ago when WoW was still decent, I had such a wide tank toolkit that every time I died, even in a complete messy disaster of a situation where someone accidentally pulled 2 extra trash packs or all the healers died, even when I'd done far more than the average tank already, I could look back and say "I still might have lived if I'd rotated this, this and this cd, used that self-heal there instead of there, held this for this point, remembered and used that more". And I enjoyed that, there was always room for improvement. It was so rewarding playing well, you could do amazing things.
In ff14 it's. I died, but I did use a tank cd. The healer fell asleep/someone failed a mechanic. There is nothing I could have done. Oh well.

[Wegente]

To the people who were discussing on the Savage difficulty changes over the years, you can look at the wipe count for each turn instead of the time it took to clear them, so you can compare them even after the CD resets changes.

For example, Gordias A3S and A4S and Midas A8S all took more than 1000 wipes each or very close to it to clear, while O4S, O8S, O12S and E4S didn't take more than 200-300. I think E4S might have taken less than 200 wipes even.