People that say this game is too easy

[Silverquick]

Honestly, the game becomes too easy with one word: overgear.

If you overgear the content, any content is easy. There is a big difference on how much mobs a tank can pull at Akadaemia Anyder with gear synched down to i470 and i410. You can safely pull wall to wall with i470 without problems. Want to do the same with i410? Good luck.

Want to do it the hard way? Do it at min ilvl.

Yeah seriously,

Its "easy" when you're doing it with Max gear that's way over the content level. Hmm Imagine that. Try doing it at the iLvls it was originally and its a whole different story.

Another one... especially older and higher geared players... (yes I realize I am included in this) but newer players have never had to go though the content the older players have. So some of the people saying it, went through all the stages of slowly ramped up difficulty in raids and dungeons alll the way up through each expansion as they came out. Try completing the Omega Raids which are just last expansions raids... you'd never complete them because no one plays them anymore so you queue for hours and no one joins them.

All these mechanics that older players did over and over again with each expansion that got increased in difficulty slowly and over time... they were there for the changes. Most newbie players will NEVER get the chance to get the slow increasing difficulty of stepped up mechanics through the expansions the older players did.

So of course the new mechanics are "easy" to them because they've been there from the beginning while the mechanics slowly ramped up in difficulty... while a New player gets thrown in the deep end right off the bat without any of the previous lessons learned.

[Packetdancer]

Wildstar's about the hardest I can recall in recent memory but that was only when you did the hard dungeons and raid.

I loved WildStar with all my heart; I very nearly moved to California to take a job at Carbine. So I say this with deep and abiding affection for the game...

...but WildStar's content difficulty wasn't a hill so much as a wall.

People sometimes say that FFXIV's jump in difficulty between Expert content and Savage is too much (or between normal and Expert), but honestly it's just a little hop over a puddle compared to the yawning chasm that WildStar's difficulty jump could be. The normal content (at least up to a certain point) was reasonably easy to play, and then you had better bring your A game for any content beyond that; there was no gradual ramp up to get players going on progressively harder difficulty, and for many people it was just rounding a corner and slamming face-first into a brick wall like Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon. (Meepmeep. Pthb.)

To put it in context, for many of them it was like if ARR had gone up to Aurum Vale and then jumped straight to T9S without passing through any other content between the two points.

I know people who relished that, but I also know people—a lot of people—who slammed into that wall and moved on to other games. And the second group was too large to be healthy for WildStar's survival.

That said, I just started savage stuff in FFXIV and I'm still not great at it. Nor do I think I'm anywhere near ready for Ultimate. Is this because savage is harder than WildStar was? I honestly can't answer that objectively, because 'difficult' is relative; I'm not even sure if it's subjectively more difficult for me so much as still unfamiliar. But it's definitely different in what's difficult about it.

FFXIV has a much higher predictability of mechanics in fights—after the boss casts this, they will cast this, etc.—but what also feels like a much greater variety of mechanics than I've encountered in other games recently.

In some games, difficulty is about reaction time; the boss might only have four or five real mechanics, but they could come in any order at unexpected times. In FFXIV, it feels more like difficulty is about precision and choreography; it's not that you have four or five different things to react to on-the-fly, but that you have 3 variations of 5 different potentially-complicated mechanics—some of which which folks who are newer to the game may be learning for the first time if they didn't go through previous expansions' savage content.

I tend to think of FFXIV battles as timed collaborative puzzle games, baked to a golden brown and seasoned with just a pinch of periodic semi-random obstacles to resolve for spice. ("Okay, so, the main tank just took a third vuln stack and the other healer was trying to slow-rez the RDM and just ate a mechanic to the face and there's about to be a mechanic that requires all 8 of us to be up... #thisisfine") They can be challenging, but they also have a solution you can find like any puzzle.

When everybody plays their part perfectly and has all mechanics for all the fights memorized? When, as it were, the dancers have the choreography perfected? Yeah, it's probably easier than WildStar was. Heck, it's probably easier than The Secret World's 'Nightmare' mode content was, though to be fair half of that difficulty was less by design and more because TSW's combat system was objectively godawful.

But getting to the point where everyone has all those memorized? For some folks that may be far harder than reacting on the fly to a smaller number of less convoluted mechanics.

[Packetdancer]

Double-posting, because I'm a Wordy McWorderson.

The game literally tells you exactly where to go for every quest objective outside of a handful of quests they intentionally designed to not fully track in the quest tracker.

To counter-argue, I will point to investigation missions in The Secret World.

Now, I loved those. When you figured out the answer to a riddle and translated it into Latin to be able to unlock a passage? Or you successfully figured out a chemistry-based cipher and turned molecular formulas back into readable text that told you where to find the thing you were looking for? Or you went onto a real website for a fake in-game company, downloaded the service manual for the particular model of radio receiver you were trying to use that was broken, read the section on improvised repairs, went to collect materials, and then repaired the radio just to be able to hear a Morse Code transmission you then had to translate to be able to know where to go next?

When you figured one out, the rush of "I solved the damn thing!" was incredible. Every time I saw the investigation icon for an available mission, I had both a sense of dread—how much time was I going to lose to solving it this time?—and excitement, because YAY PUZZLE TIME! And oh, that heady rush of victory.

But a huge number of players hated them. Quests that just said something like "Decipher the code and retrieve the artifact." as the 'goal' text from the moment you accepted the mission until the moment you concluded it drove many people batty, and no few of them said those quests were "too time-consuming to solve" and would just go read solutions out on the web.

What I take from that is that many players want to 'optimize' the time it takes to do content, and prefer things to be ones where you don't have to spend 45 minutes to do something (solve a cipher and then interpret the resulting deciphered clue, go to a place, and fight your way through monsters to get a thing) when it could be just 5 minutes (go to a place and fight your way through monsters to get a thing).

[hydralus]

It's kinda hard to decipher whether the games got easier or the players got better. I know I sucked at MMOs back in 2003 when I first started playing them. They still didn't seem that bad. Wildstar's about the hardest I can recall in recent memory but that was only when you did the hard dungeons and raid.

[Liam_Harper]

It's kinda hard to decipher whether the games got easier or the players got better. I know I sucked at MMOs back in 2003 when I first started playing them. They still didn't seem that bad. Wildstar's about the hardest I can recall in recent memory but that was only when you did the hard dungeons and raid.

It's not just that players got better, it's that we have vast amounts more information on literally anything accessible to us. There are guides, websites, discords, simulators, ect. We can analyse and figure out anything nowadays. WoW Classic experienced this recently, people remembered it as punishing and tough, but it was figured out in days and apparently felt quite simple.

Raid encounters have had to evolve to compensate. In 2003 you could get away with giving a boss 2-3 mechanics and it would feel difficult. You wouldn't have a well researched rotation and your gear would be random stuff you picked up along the way.
Nowadays on week 1 you have videos with every mechanic explained in detail, the optimal tricks and strats figured out. The optimal rotations are all figured out too, mathematically calculated and tested. Guides are abundant and any random person in your FC, linkshell or forum can tell you the indepth workings of your class, stats and tips.
This is why boss mechanics look like a small novel in modern MMO's, where you literally had 3 basic attacks 15 years ago. The only way they can really challenge us now is sensory overload.

[BluexBird]

I've played World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, SWTOR, and Blade and Soul. At least these are the only ones I'm able to draw comparisons with FFXIV.

While this game is indeed easy to the rest in a lot of aspects, there is still a certain level of challenge to it depending on how you choose to do certain content. I'll admit the combat is probably the simplest of them all, due to the high GCD giving you a lot of time to think about your next move. Plus the lack of builds makes it so that there is really only one optimal playing style for any given class, which kinda sucks unless you're a Bard.

[Granyala]

So, I'm just curious. Unless you've exclusively played Eastern MMOs, which do seem more challenging, what makes you think this game is too easy?

The game isn'T too easy, most of the content is.
Savage has a decent difficulty attached to it and I am sure Ultimate can see to some grey hair.

Problem is: they account for a tiny minority of the content. The rest is: are you breathin? You win.

WoW, Tera and SWToR, Aion all felt similar in that regard. Only difficult in raid content, rest easily manageable.

Eh, that says more about how good your healer is, more than anything. When a tank is under-geared, it falls to the healer to pick up the slack.

Pretty much. Though there is a limit. If chain casting with CDs is insufficient, you die. No matter how skilled your healer. Same if the mob group globals you or if the tank runs out of CDs because DPS is crap.

That being said: dungeon mobs hit like wet noodles.

[MoonPhaseAlpha]

what makes you think this game is too easy?

FFXIV is a lot of rinse and repeat. Once you memorize the mechanics, you can go into a dungeon, raid or trial blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back. This game is a choreographed dance. Learn the steps and practice. Rinse and repeat.

Now, I played XI for 9 years so I'm used to it's endgame functionality which is very different from XIV's. Each boss fight is essentially the same, but the abilities can be very random on when/if they happen. The chat log was your indicator for everything: what ability was being used by each mob/player or what defuff landed or wore on a mob/player. You have to constantly be watching the chat log for a debuff and there were no icon indicators (back in the day) as to what was inflicted on that player like silence or paralyze. It was all in the chat log. My main was WHM. Plus, XI has so many more spells at one's disposal to use. There are no such things as rotations in XI. AOE ground notifications do not exist. The chat log was your best friend. If I missed removing a debuff (which lasts much longer than in XIV), the player would have to type in the log what debuff they had on so I could remove it.

[MistakeNot]

FFXIV is a lot of rinse and repeat. Once you memorize the mechanics, you can go into a dungeon, raid or trial blindfolded with one hand tied behind your back. This game is a choreographed dance. Learn the steps and practice. Rinse and repeat.

For those of us who only run a given dungeon once per month - at most - there is no chance of being able to memorize all the mechanics, let alone the timing. Then it is not so easy when you have to react on the fly and figure out what to do. Or rather where to go, since what to do is 90% of the time to avoid an AOE.

[shao32]

As a tank main i can say the game has become to easy, the skill ceiling on the role has been pulled down to much this expansion making tank mechanics and complexity literally non existent, both WAR and DRK how use to be the most complex tanks now are the most brain dead ones surpased by PLD on complexity wich idk if i should laugh or cry, agro means nothing now, defensive kits has been cloned and most of the tanks have the same mechanics rotations with little variance. tanks has become boring in so many levels, the role is basically brain dead now and i no longer use my tank outside of savage bcs of all this, it's not rewarding to play and if you want a challenge and love high/medium skill ceiling jobs you won't find it on the tank role anymore, and i don't wanna start talking about healers.

if we talk about content, considering combat conten has been reduced more and more and most of then don't ask you to have even basic knowledge about you job to complete the duty it's easy to see why some call this expansion casualbringers.