Anyone else concerned by the extremely low skill ceiling?

[Dadbod]

Yeah? So it's a problem we can start the fight again after failing? What do you propose, a lock out if you die? That's pretty absurd.

I’m not proposing anything... you all are saying how the savage fights are too easy... I’m pointing out that even the best players still wipe and lose on the savage fights all the time during “clear” parties.

The lack of difficulty just Seems like a perception issue that failing doesn’t matter at all.. not that good players don’t “lose” these fights regularly

[Rilifane]

Many good players intentionally wipe if a try is botched for one or multiple players because of logs or simply because they don't consider the resulting kill smooth enough, even if they could still clear it. That's a matter of choice, not difficulty.
Also, mistakes happen because humans are.. well.. human. Even if you know a fight really well, a momentary zone out is all it takes to fail a mechanic you would usually easily play correctly without anyone reminding you to and that, in turn, often snowballs into more mistakes or deaths because of how the fights are designed.
Many mechanics aren't particulary difficult. You have patterns to follow, fixed positions you get assigned etc., it's mostly just a matter of memorizing and the boss is the vocabulary test. There is little "winging" involved outside of first week when nobody knows what they're doing yet.

[Kobalos]

How would you 'punish' players for dying in raids anyway? Loose gil? Exp loss? The FFXIV police comming round yah house and smashing up your pc/ps4? XD

[Dadbod]

The penalty for wiping a fight is wasted resources and time. Lots of lots of time that adds up as a whole especially if your team really starts failing at about 7 min in or so.

It sounds like you want to do content like Baldesion Arsenal where the penalties for dying are far more strict due to the unconventional ways to raise and the threat of being kicked out by certain mobs.

The time spent playing the game during a wipe isn’t really a penalty... that’s just not being successful.. not being successful at what you were trying to do being the largest penalty for failing means there isn’t a penalty... I’m not suggesting this is right/wrong for majority of players or the health of the game or any debate like that.. I’m simply saying a byproduct of no failure penalty is a perception that content is easier.

[HyoMinPark]

How would you 'punish' players for dying in raids anyway? Loose gil? Exp loss? The FFXIV police comming round yah house and smashing up your pc/ps4? XD

Personally, I miss the old perma-death some fights had if you fell off the arena.

Notice the words "pretty much" and "for the most part". Bard is just 1 job.

There are more jobs than just BRD that were simplified to the point of being braindead. DRK and WAR also come to mind here. Upkeep of GL on MNK is a joke now. Positionals on the job are a joke now. ShB made just about every job overly simplistic, and we have people making threads still to advocate for making things even MORE simple (see the recent thread about how DNC’s Flourish is apparently difficult to use).

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

Personally, I miss the old perma-death some fights had if you fell off the arena.



There are more jobs than just BRD that were simplified to the point of being braindead. DRK and WAR also come to mind here. Upkeep of GL on MNK is a joke now. Positionals on the job are a joke now. ShB made just about every job overly simplistic, and we have people making threads still to advocate for making things even MORE simple (see the recent thread about how DNC’s Flourish is apparently difficult to use).

Simplistic or just QoL? There was a lot of just bad design in some of the jobs. Not sure how war got more simplistic tho, it was pretty straightforward even in 3.0. It just seemed more complex to pld, and it's 123 rotation (or 145, 146. Even now pld is still the most simplistic rotation-wise)

[Payotz]

Now all the tanks feel the same with the exception of GNB, and even that isn't as complex as 4.x DRK.

God I miss 4.X DRK. TBN felt so much better. Now it's just a "Edge of Darkness, but mitigation!"
People felt that the DA spam was too much but it was amazing busy work to balance DA usage and TBN mana costs with Blood gauge gain.

[Arthrun]

Skill ceilings used to be higher because the number of people playing were much lower, but now due to console players and more people getting into PC gaming... there is no longer the 'elitist majority' in MMOs anymore. If MMOs want to make money today, and they are a BUSINESS after all, they have to cater to the majority of players- which today, are casual players who just want to jump on after work and run a few dungeons and log off. They don't want to turn the MMO into their 'other job' where they have to spend hours studying and trying to build the perfect rotation to meet the newest meta or grind for days to acquire the current BIS gear. Interesting how we still have people bemoaning their bygone days of early WOW... they still cannot accept that MMOs have changed, and what 'used to be' for MMOs is no longer the case.

Quoted for it mirrors my feelings on this exactly.

[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.