People that say this game is too easy

[Kewitt]

Only content that is a challenge in EX content.
All other content you don't need to care about, but the speed at which you get over-geared for content is crazy in FFXIV.

[Tlamila]

Too many pages.
FFXIV is harder than most mmorpg, if anything because you have to actually do "significant" content to advance your MSQ. In most, you don't have to do any group content at all until endgame, and even then you can just gear up while ignoring it. And open world content is generally easy, as well as story instances, because they're meant to be the basic layer anybody can do, even with half a brain. For example, if I think of Aion, which I played for long, you could even farm the best gear set by simply doing daily and weekly quests, which were just open world kills, and only the weeklies actually required you to group. I had the best armor without ever having to do any dungeon. And even when you'd actually do dungeons, they were mostly about stats. No stuff to dodge or such things, not much mechanics to know, except things like "at this boss use this buff" (buff with 30mins cooldown so to be kept for the hardest bosses). Trash was so useless we just trained it, instead of fighting it. I played with 250 to 500 ms ping and it was still fine for PvE.
If I think of challenging MMORPGs I think of the action ones, but even then for example in Tera the huge difficulty was the ping. in BnS some classes were hard to play, some braindead, and the dungeons were such that a healer role didn't even exist and tanking was not even always necessary. I don't know about now because I haven't played either for years (same for Aion).
If I have to go to western ones, I think of Rift, which I was playing recently, where again you need 0 dungeons to progress and story is super easy. The only time I had trouble with a boss I levelled a bit more, geared up, and it became a joke. You can even get good gear by just doing IA/any reputation thing, which is really braindead, you can literally AFK it and nobody will notice, and people can just get in, get their xp and go out at any time.

These are just a few example, but really, in my experience FFXIV is the only one you have to really put some brain in. And not everybody is naturally good at dance dance revolution.

[RajNish]

It was chaotic but fun. But even then, I had no worries of ever dying. And I didn't. Not once.

It depends on what kind of content you are talking about. If you're talking about veteran flashpoints in SWTOR, yes. But if you are talking about master mode flashpoints — no. Try more complex content, HM and NiM raids in SWTOR, MM flashpoints (like Copero and Umbara) and you will see that FF 14 is much easier. This is not bad, just these games are really different. In addition, in SWTOR there is a lot of stupid grind now, I am happy that this is not in FF 14.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Lack of staple RPG tactical elements. This isn't just limited to MMOs. Things like elemental resistances and weaknesses and Physical damage type resistances and weaknesses, which could effect how you would gear for an upcoming piece of content. I mean seriously fire spells do as much damage to a magical entity of living flame as it does to a doll made of paper.

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. Most the time you don't even need to bother reading the quest dialogue. You can just open log and click button to see where the next marker is. At this point you can just disable your brain because its no longer needed.

Outside of a small handful of attacks every AoE is telegraphed long before it actually happens. Add to it content outside of savage raids and trials or ultimate with a handful of exceptions isn't really punishing to the people that get hit by it. Add to it a non existent penalty for dying and we now have little incentive for people to actually learn a fight because its not needed for progress. Additionally they nerfed content making it even easier just because people didn't want to learn how to do it right and weren't happy they couldn't just die 5 minutes into the duty and wait for the other 7 people to clear it for them.

The secondary stats for the most part have so little influence on a build that a majority of the time it has no actual effect on gameplay or performance. They could rework this to make things like skill/spell speed, tenacity, and piety be far more impactful to the actual game. Then maybe we'd see melds other than DH, crit, det on everything by people that want that extra 1% hypothetical DPS output they'll probably never achieve because they haven't developed their player skill to a level that it will actually matter.

4man duties are far too linear and basic in general. Visually they are quite well done. However from a gameplay standpoint they pretty much feel like 1 straight line with occasional doors or barriers keeping you from trying to sprint to point B while ignoring everything. IMO many of the duties in ARR are far better designed from a gameplay prospective than the ones that came out from HW and on. They need to drop the slot car race track design then throw in more instances of interesting dungeon mechanics. Add to that the only Raids that felt like actual raids to me were the ARR ones for the coils of bahamut. The ones afterwards just feel like having a second set of trials.

I'm a bit of a connesurier of MMO's Having played numerous both free and paid over the span of about 25 years. I've been gaming in general for close to 40. Games in general have been getting easier and that decline really started when companies started pandering to noisy minorities of their playerbase that wouldn't stop crying on the internet.

[DPZ2]

I've been gaming in general for close to 40. Games in general have been getting easier and that decline really started when companies started pandering to noisy minorities of their playerbase that wouldn't stop crying on the internet.

So, basically, for the past quarter century.

Your reminiscence of past MMOs may be fond, but I remember the frustration of spending two days trying to figure out where to swim to reach the half-an-amulet necessary for Druid water-form. Folks didn't read quest text back then either.

Dropping the slot car race track design of instances wouldn't result in better, more interesting instances. For an example, I refer you to the circa 2008 version of the Mauradon dungeon, including the map. It results in a long journey, frought with an almost guaranteed 30 minutes of getting lost/having to backtrack, or abandon the instance after an hour. Or the new-and-improved slot car race track design of Mauradon.

[Nedkel]

So, I fact checked you here, looked at my performance. Apparently, I pull purple pretty regularly. I am not sure if you are making a joke here! It is easy otherwise I couldn't!

Do it on ninja hehehe

[dinnertime]

Comparing the game to itself, I think the game has become...not easy, but too comfortable over the years due to the amount of streamlining that has occurred.
Almost everything within the game is pretty cookie-cutter as expansions go. In some areas the streamlining is good , some aren't, but oh well. I personally don't like the direction but I still somewhat enjoy the game nonetheless.

[Wegente]

I am an old-school MMO player (coming from Ragnarok Online, Lineage 2 and mostly FFXI) and compared to those games, FFXIV for me is easier in the sense of way more approachable and casual friendly.

On those games, trying to upgrade your gear and failing meant you could completely lose that piece of gear.
Dying meant losing experience points and even levels and moving from one city to the other meant having to physically travel between zones, or take ships which you had to wait for and that took several minutes before they reached their destination.
The open world was dangerous, and getting aggroed by a monster even 10 levels below you meant they would chase you across half the map if you were lucky enough to survive, or getting killed in a few hits depending on your class. Travelling alone in the high-level areas was never a good idea.
Obtaining the best gear available in the game was something you had to earn after putting months worth of effort, due to them having extremely low drop rates or being gated behind extremely long and hard quests.

Take relic weapons on FFXI as an example. They were hands down the hardest pieces of gear to get, and they rewarded you for your efforts by unlocking exclusive weapon skills that were most of the time extremely strong, and the weapons themselves were leagues above the others in the game in terms of raw damage output.
On the other hand, the hardest weapons to get on FFXIV are the ones you get from Ultimate raids, yet they only reward you with an extra materia slot which isn't really worth the hassle, so that casual players don't need to worry about not being able to get them.

Another example would be the Blessed Tackleking's Rod, which can be obtained after fishing 780 unique types of fish. If this was an old-school MMO, that fishing rod would undoubtedly be the best in the game, due to the effort required in order to get it.
However, on FFXIV that piece of gear is solely for glamour purposes, since the currently best fishing rod can be bought from the market board for around 300k gil, which are easily affordable by anyone.

[foussi]

Somedays ago, I talked with someone on instagram who complained about that the boss fights have mechanics and that the combat should be like in ff 11 where there are no mechanics.

.............

Ehm, no wonder the game is made easier if people like dat complain about learning mechanics.

[Genz]

Everything outside instance is dumb filler where the concept of "failing" doesn't even exist, and most instanced content are made to be accomplished with 99.99% certitude. And since it wasn't enough, updates are done so that older content get even easier.
Also, the game doesn't use many parameters to construct its difficulty. Even the "hardest" boss is just that : a boss. Do your rotation as always, follow gimmicks, and voila. Every boss since ARR are the same.

Thus, as a whole, the game is very easy.

Somedays ago, I talked with someone on instagram who complained about that the boss fights have mechanics and that the combat should be like in ff 11 where there are no mechanics.

.............

Ehm, no wonder the game is made easier if people like dat complain about learning mechanics.

That's doubly false, since, first, FFXI boss do have gimmicks, but, second, FFXI doesn't rely only on boss gimmicks to build its difficulty : as a whole, it's harder ; there are more challenges.