The game is very easy

[ssunny2008]

Are you new to MMO's? Gear is supposed to give advantages and make content easier. That's the entire point of gear progression. Honestly I don't think this genre is for you Ssuny. You really should go play something else.

Having gear to kill the boss 10s faster is one thing. Having gear or multiple buffs to kill the boss 30% faster than usual and to be able to skip the real badass mechanics is somehow different isn´t it?
The whole content is forgivable and you´ve enough possibilities to clear it even before a patch with unsynced runs arrives. Stop nitpicking one fact just to ignore everything else. Srsly, what is wrong with you? If you don´t have some decent arguments you shouldn´t write stuff down.

No, normal content should not be punishing. If you make normal content punishing you create a gate for casual players which is the last thing you want to do for an MMO. Wildstar went this route with that uber hardcore "Everything is difficult" game play and guess where that game is? Oh right, its dead. The balance in difficulty in XIV is fine.

Again, Wildstar failed to other things, not being hard. It had a lot of issues and the graphics haven´t been attractive for a bigger playerbase. It was niche from begin with that decision.

Normal content in FF14 isn´t "normal", it´s braindead, laughable, the worst trash i´ve ever seen in any MMORPG. And that´s the reason why so many bad players running around, don´t know how a stackmark looks like, don´t know what abilities their class have or just stay there and spam Vita all day long. The game doesn´t force anything and the learning curve is not existent. I know a bunch of casuals or even newcomers to MMORPG´s. Once taken at hand to get into more than braindead content, they started to learn their class properly and have fun at savage raiding. But without someone else they would´ve never touched it, because the gap between "FF14 normal content" and "Savage" is way too big.

And while you claimed "gear"... it´s not even a real progression. You run old ARR dungeons via duty to get endgame gear for raiding? Is it earned, does it has any purpose? Meanwhile dungeon gear is pointless thx to tombstone stuff 10 level before? This is a joke.

Hardcore-dungeons would close this gap easily and would give us the possibility to earn our gear for raiding.