The game is very easy

[ssunny2008]

Literally the best take I've ever seen in one of these threads.

The people complaining the hardest about job difficulty are always the ones who never challenge everything the game has to offer. It's always, at best, blue/low purple parsing weekly savage PF heroes. Of course the game is most boring to people who only play good enough to not grief their parties. The game is quite literally designed to be most comfortable (and therefore, most boring) to that demographic. But the game (and almost all of the jobs) is plenty challenging for everyone else, including the high-end players who try to push their performance to the limit and take on the hardest challenges in the game.

It's not casualization at all. Making the game more approachable and accessible is not the same thing, nor is it a bad thing.

"The ones who never challenge everything the game has to offer" is a clearly false statement based on your following ones. "Parsing" is not a thing the game has to offer, it´s community-based. Of course you could measure the party-output by ingame-timers aswell, but it don´t even has anything to do with "challenging" or "what the game offers". Imo playing via PF is even way more challenging than going in as static and trying to get the best out of it since you never know what ppl you get into it.
And seriously if i want to compete with others, i would either jump to a real PvP game or i would play an ARPG since it´s way more fun gameplay-wise.


But away from this, parsing means nothing and not everyone is in the mood to waste their time to be a self-named "pro". Checking out ff.logs imo and you even see a bunch of 70-90 parser without BIS gear and without melts, just because they don´t wanna waste stones / materia before the savage patch appeared. Parsing has always been and will always be nothing but the good old E-c*** comparison for ppl who either needs that for their self-confidence or just because they´ve fun to push the last out of it. But since you´re able to boost it with good groups and need a bunch of critluck, the most just don´t care.

The only thing which matters is "the boss is dead, or not". And at this point the game isn´t really challenging. It´s even the easiest MMORPG out there (my experience).
For example... I´m a mentor, who never left any EX fight in the roulette. Only 1 time the group made the vote to give up at Zurvan after 30mins, when a bunch of other mentors joined like "Go unsync, bye" or stood there for 1 try, failed miserably and left. Everything else has been succesful and i can tell you that it´s often a pain going trough some fights like Zurvan, Ramuh or even Mogry.
But it doesn´t matter. We make it happen, just because someone (me normally) knows the fight well, puts a marker above his head, writes "in / out / spread..." within the fight permanently in the chat or even use braindead-strategies to carry the whole group. This is not a challenge, this is laughable.

99% of all content in this game can be carried by one player, who just knows what to do. On the other hand, the only real challenge is that 8/8 players have to be alive when insta-death mechanics appear. If you´ve one putrid egg in your party, you gonna wipe all day long to the same mechanic. The most times ppl die are either "I never did this fight before." or "I was just too greedy." and in rare cases you´ve some mechanics like Light Rampant or Cross Lions with a very small positioning.
Tanks are broken so far, healing is in 90% of the fights 1 button spam for DPS. DPS-classes have nothing to care about but their rotation and "move from A to B, stack or spread". And while all is highly repetitive and behind strict pattern, playing "blind" is not even hard. Normal trials and raids are a joke and they already tell you what´s gonna happen in savage. Only the 4th fight each savage tier as a 2nd phase which brings new mechanics. The rest is just similar to the normal raid with advanced stuff and no castbars or telegraphs.

The only real challenge in this game might be ultimate. But 1 fight in 1-2 years? Not to mention that we already see that SE gives af about it. The priorities lie somewhere else, which is obvious, but still bs.
Now let´s check those ultimates... you´re getting scaled down if they´re not brandnew. But the scaling in this game got so fck´d, that you´re able to skip mechanics even without having a parse of 100. It´s just a matter of the next patch, just look what happens to the current content. 10 or 20 gearscore more and you skip like 20% of the fights?!
On top ultimates greatest challenge is the length. You need to remember a lot of stuff, 8 player have to remember a lot of stuff and if 1 guy fails, gogo wipe... So far it´s not a real challenge again, atleast not gameplay-wise if you´ve to rely on that egg again. It´s a challenge to your own patience in the first case.

And while the real challenge is about patience and not to get insulted for bad plays, more than enough ppl do even use BOTS. YES FCKING BOTS! And i´m more than sure that the most of the "high-end-performer" and "ultimate-carrier" use them. I sadly know more than enough ppl abusing this bs, some of them even permanently in dungeons, because ACT is running anyway. One of them has been even in my Shb static. I was like "Oh a good heal, plays well, remember the mechanics, etc..." until we did O12s to unlock the Ultimates for the last players and he knew safespots before something actually happened on the screen. To have some orange parses and to stay alive in 99% of all cases must feel really great with a bot in the bag.


Let´s move on... not casualization? What else?
As already said, downsyncs are a mess and even if you do the most content, out of savage, when it´s new, then the most ppl get used to it pretty quickly and easily. DPS checks are not existent or "forgivable".
Yes of course more poeple are able to beat the content with such designs, but isn´t it easy then? Isn´t it casualized?

Same counts for the classes... "accessibility", what a nice word. You can have this even without dumbing down everything. We´ve more than enough classes for everyone to be have class-tiers in kind of difficulty. But no, SE decided to hold everything braindead to cater ppl who run pointless dungeons all day long. Tanks and healer are laughable easy to play. DPS classes lost more and more the gap between "easy / hard to play".
On top 100 of "QoL-changes" came into the game. A word which has become a hate of my life.

- No more ressource-managements, just a personal gauge and / or Lucid Dreaming on cd.
- More than enough defs on Tanks you never use in 99,9% of all content.
- Tons of oGCD healing you only cap in dungeon bigpulls.
- Less positionals
- Smartcasts or like 0 casts on Casterclasses
- High mobility options, you don´t even need.
- Utility which got taken away, but hey we still got stun / silence and sleep, we rarely need.
- Do even half the playerbase know about Esuna?
- Removal of Dots
- Really long Dot and buff-timings
- Aligning from burstwindows on any classes
- Roleskills... like why? How about skilltrees? No... pointless role-skills to homogenize everything even more.
- List goes on....

To make a game more approachable or accessible IS casualization! The homogenization of the classes and the repetitive content with more and more telegraphs speak for themselves. A lot of ppl do even claim "every class is easy to play" and yes, they´re! The only difference lies in their fight-execution and "punishment". (Casuals seem to love the word "punish".)
There isn´t even a real punishment anymore, but losing 100-200 DPS if you missclick something. You´ve to be a fool, who´s not even reading their skills, to perform at the down end. Nothing against handicapped players, but way too many don´t even read their skills. But god bless, the game highlights everything you should press. Don´t know how such ppl play MNK with 6 buttons lightning at once, but i guess they continue playing 123.


Enough novel for today... feel free to prove me wrong. There are not many challenges left in this game and this has nothing to do with "We got used too.". Of course everyone got more experience over the years, but SE did nothing but copying the same stuff over and over again, and that not only gameplay-wise. They got ignorant and lazy, got ride of unique stuff and patched the most stuff into braindead-mode.

[Ransu]

-snip-

I'm going to keep posting this.....Go play something else. The direction of this game isn't going to change and its clearly not the game for you. You stick to one job and one job only and your focus is almost entirely on how "easy" end game is. It sounds like Lost Ark will be the perfect game for you.

[AziraSyuren]

The only real challenge in this game might be ultimate. But 1 fight in 1-2 years? Not to mention that we already see that SE gives af about it. The priorities lie somewhere else, which is obvious, but still bs.
Now let´s check those ultimates... you´re getting scaled down if they´re not brandnew. But the scaling in this game got so fck´d, that you´re able to skip mechanics even without having a parse of 100. It´s just a matter of the next patch, just look what happens to the current content. 10 or 20 gearscore more and you skip like 20% of the fights?!
On top ultimates greatest challenge is the length. You need to remember a lot of stuff, 8 player have to remember a lot of stuff and if 1 guy fails, gogo wipe... So far it´s not a real challenge again, atleast not gameplay-wise if you´ve to rely on that egg again. It´s a challenge to your own patience in the first case.

Have you ever actually cleared an ultimate, or are you just talking out of your ass? Because it sounds like the latter.

Your comment makes no real sense to me.

People who are complaining that Jobs are getting dumbed down or that content is too easy are griefers and people who don't want challenge?
When people generally talk about the game being too easy too people are not talking about Savage and Extremes ( some exceptions perhaps, I do think the second EX is perhaps too easy and the first one relies too heavily on one gimmick ).

No, I meant that the people who aren't griefers are usually the ones that end up the most bored. There's a sweetspot between not good, good, and very good at the game where the game is at its most boring. It's where you're good enough to clear Savage relatively smoothly, but lack the time, energy, patience, or people necessary to push yourself to the next level, i.e. doing ultimates, pushing your damage to its limit, etc. Almost every job in the game has dozens upon dozens of micro optimizations you can do on a fight-by-fight basis in such an environment that adds up to about as much complexity as the game has ever had in the past.

The problem that a lot of people are encountering is that the game itself never pushes you to take advantage of this complexity. You have to seek it out yourself. But the game was never particularly more challenging than it is now, jobs (as a whole) included. Jobs like Paladin (and tanking in general), Black Mage, Red Mage, and Dragoon have only gotten more mechanically involved over time. The removal of things that only existed as reasonable challenges at the baseline (enmity management, enochian, etc) doesn't actually change that. I guess another problem is that a lot of these baseline challenges were removed before people realized how meaningless they were, but I don't actually think that's a problem.

None of what I'm saying applies to healers (and ranged DPS to a much lesser extent), though. They've just gotten shafted more and more as the game has gone on.

[ssunny2008]

All you are doing is re-affirming my statement that you should play a different game. FFXIV has been continuing this design for years now and its not going to change to what you want, so why stick around? SWTOR has literally gotten worse over the past few years and guess what? I stopped playing it because the balance in pvp has become a joke and at one point they went nearly 3 years without a single new raid and next month they are nuking all the classes removing basically all of their utility....Guess what I wont be playing?

I know what happened to the game and what´s gonna happen with the new expansion. But it doesn´t change the statement, that the classes and raids have gameplay-wise way more uniqueness and variety to offer than FF14. That the game lost a lot of support has been the curse of Anthem. That they´re nuking the classes out of their existence yet, is just another move FF14 is doing with each major-patch for years now. It´s called casualization. Funny thing you mention the loss of the utility there, but don´t see the flaws and lost / missing utility in the class-design here.

And yeah, SE continues their road of dumbdowns for years now... maybe we should stop it at some point? As i´ve said, i promise that the time will come, when you sit here like me, because it has become "too much braindead, too much grind" and your favored classes got nuked out of their existence thx to some casuals who never really played them.

Have you ever actually cleared an ultimate, or are you just talking out of your ass? Because it sounds like the latter.

I´ve played them far enough, but never finished them. But i can promise it wasn´t my mistake that the permawipe, caused by the same 1-2 persons over and over again, lasted into "just timewaste".

Alex is close yeah, but the other 2 are getting outscaled already, even with the downsync. You can skip some major primal-mechanics at UwU with enough DPS. And enough DPS doesn´t even mean to run a 100 parse.
All of them has a bunch of strict pattern. So you do nothing else as you did before. You do the same stuff again and again, optimize automatically and wait until the last guy in the raid manifested the fight into his brain. Playing it completely blind might be somewhat more of a challenge, but you´ll never find a blind static unless you go for the world first. The most poeple can´t play without guides or bots in this game. The real challenge is still to remember "where to move when", and that´s a thing a lot of ppl have issues with, but definately not me.

No, I meant that the people who aren't griefers are usually the ones that end up the most bored. There's a sweetspot between not good, good, and very good at the game where the game is at its most boring. It's where you're good enough to clear Savage relatively smoothly, but lack the time, energy, patience, or people necessary to push yourself to the next level, i.e. doing ultimates, pushing your damage to its limit, etc. Almost every job in the game has dozens upon dozens of micro optimizations you can do on a fight-by-fight basis in such an environment that adds up to about as much complexity as the game has ever had in the past.

The problem that a lot of people are encountering is that the game itself never pushes you to take advantage of this complexity. You have to seek it out yourself. But the game was never particularly more challenging than it is now, jobs (as a whole) included. Jobs like Paladin (and tanking in general), Black Mage, Red Mage, and Dragoon have only gotten more mechanically involved over time. The removal of things that only existed as reasonable challenges at the baseline (enmity management, enochian, etc) doesn't actually change that. I guess another problem is that a lot of these baseline challenges were removed before people realized how meaningless they were, but I don't actually think that's a problem.

None of what I'm saying applies to healers (and ranged DPS to a much lesser extent), though. They've just gotten shafted more and more as the game has gone on.

Micro-optimization is still a self-made challenge and nothing which the game forces. You either like it or not.. for me personally it´s just timewaste to greed for 2-3 more percentiles or to waste that pot into a fight that should be a 100% clear without some. (Based on gear, knowledge etc...) If a full-equipped party isn´t able to clear XY without potions, then they seriously just don´t deserve the kill, same with the use of healer LB3, but anyway... the fights are not engaging or rewarding enough to play them multiple times unless friends need some help. The time is better used in RL or other games.

If you enjoy it "to push yourself on the next level", then its up to you, but it´s nothing complex or challenging at all. Some parses aren´t even well reasonable for that. Of course things go faster and easier if you´ve 7 top players in your party with the same attitude or skilllevel, maybe even theorycrafted the last DPS out of the fight. It´ll automatically be a higher parse than playing with the most randoms. Or you´ve RNG... i mean, i had more than enough tries back in Eden with 22k or 24k on MNK. Crit and chakraprocc luck ftw! (And yes, it has been with the same players.)

The game has been more challenging, even if a lot of poeple claim that it has been caused "by being punished". But it´s exactly that... if something is forgivable and overfilled with QoL features, it´s not a challenge. You can missplay and noone cares... but if it´s punishing?!
The game had way more stuff to take care about in the past, way more variety and uniqueness. I´ve mentioned a list earlier... but a major example would be the waste of all the debuffs / buffs the FF-series offers. We stuck on vuln-stacks now, Esuna is never used by 90% of the whole playerbase... so well... i do even wonder why caster still stuck on Mana, when it´s a braindead management unless you´ve to rezz. And what about all the re-used and clear boss-pattern with more and more telegraphs?
And talking about the MSQ... easy buttons, or even the patched coincounter in AV, like real? Aren´t that 100% proofs that the game got easier?

Poeple who´ll get used to gaming pretty fast won´t have any issues anyway. But it still matters how the classes and the content feel to play and ofcourse how hard missplays are getting punished. Call it clunky, call it meaningless, but every bit we had to care about was a bit more than we have now. It matters a lot if you´ve to press 20 or just 10 buttons, if you´ve to play 6 or 2 positionals, if you´ve to take care about 30s Dots or 45s ones. It also matters if you´ve to play your rotation well or if you´ve a braindead tankstance to keep aggro with autohits.
The list is endless and this game lost a lot of its engaging and rewarding feelings when it comes to the gameplay. More than enough classes got dumb´d down and we don´t even have possibilities to mix up our own gameplay.

[Ransu]

I know what happened to the game and what´s gonna happen with the new expansion. But it doesn´t change the statement, that the classes and raids have gameplay-wise way more uniqueness and variety to offer than FF14. That the game lost a lot of support has been the curse of Anthem. That they´re nuking the classes out of their existence yet, is just another move FF14 is doing with each major-patch for years now. It´s called casualization. Funny thing you mention the loss of the utility there, but don´t see the flaws and lost / missing utility in the class-design here.

And yeah, SE continues their road of dumbdowns for years now... maybe we should stop it at some point? As i´ve said, i promise that the time will come, when you sit here like me, because it has become "too much braindead, too much grind" and your favored classes got nuked out of their existence thx to some casuals who never really played them.

The only raid that's even half interesting in swtor is explosive conflict. The other riads have pretty meh mechanics. FFXIV trial fights and raids have more life to them than most of the tank and spank fights in swtor. And I wouldn't call the "variety" of the classes in swtor unique when they all mirror each other with 1 tree being a dot spec, 1 tree being a burst spec and a 3rd tree for pure dps being a mix between burst/sustain with the hybrids having a tank or healer tree and being thrown the "hybrid tax".

What good are 3 different specs for each class when they all take the same balancing approach which is the one thing you seem to be complaining about in FFXIV....Irony. At least in FFXIV they were smart enough to not have multiple specs and just focus on designing each job in a specific way. Meanwhile in swtor pretty much only 1 spec for each class is viable in either pve or pvp and the other specs end up being meme specs. Having multiple specs isn't real and doesn't allow for "mixing up gameplay" because cookie cutters will always be a thing leaving 1 or both of the other specs being completely worthless. Why waste time and development effort on multiple specs when you can focus on its core design? FFXIV does that right.

I´ve played them far enough, but never finished them. But i can promise it wasn´t my mistake that the permawipe, caused by the same 1-2 persons over and over again, lasted into "just timewaste".

And there it is! "It's not me, its them! I'm totally a pro!!"

[ssunny2008]

And there it is! "It's not me, its them! I'm totally a pro!!"

It´s hard to accept for you, if others are better at your beloved game hm?! Never said i´m a pro and never said i don´t do mistakes. But FF14 has more than enough players, which are not able to get more than 3 mechanics into their head. Or why do you think so many keep running around with Bots or Macros and then they´re proud on themselves and afk in Limsa with their weapon-skin?

The only raid that's even half interesting in swtor is explosive conflict. The other riads have pretty meh mechanics. FFXIV trial fights and raids have more life to them than most of the tank and spank fights in swtor. And I wouldn't call the "variety" of the classes in swtor unique when they all mirror each other with 1 tree being a dot spec, 1 tree being a burst spec and a 3rd tree for pure dps being a mix between burst/sustain with the hybrids having a tank or healer tree and being thrown the "hybrid tax".

What good are 3 different specs for each class when they all take the same balancing approach which is the one thing you seem to be complaining about in FFXIV....Irony. At least in FFXIV they were smart enough to not have multiple specs and just focus on designing each job in a specific way. Meanwhile in swtor pretty much only 1 spec for each class is viable in either pve or pvp and the other specs end up being meme specs. Having multiple specs isn't real and doesn't allow for "mixing up gameplay" because cookie cutters will always be a thing leaving 1 or both of the other specs being completely worthless. Why waste time and development effort on multiple specs when you can focus on its core design? FFXIV does that right.

Your claim let me highly doubt you´ve played further EC. Ever tried S&V or both Dread-Raids? S&V had 7 unique bosses with different mechanics / puzzles... some of them has been even doable in different ways.

What is "more life in them" in FF14? More graphical eye-catchers? Multiple bosses or adds are rarely a thing or just be there as short DPS checks. At pretty much any major mechanic, the boss jumps into the mid from by itself. If SE thinks "oh that´s too hard", they make it untargetable on top. I really don´t know what your claim "more life" should mean.

Skilltrees changed the classes somehow and all of them has been viable. They didn´t mirror each other either. Yeah the DPS speccs made up between "burst / dot / aoe", but they didn´t played too similar too each other as they do in FF14. If anything only Juggernaut and Marauder has been very similar in their execution, but Mercenary and Tech? Assassin and Sorcerer? Operative or Sniper??? Same counts for their Republic mirrors... All of them offered some unique playstyle with the possibility to adjust to your preference with the speccs.
Please don´t tell me FF14 does it better to focus on classes with a core-design, when homogenization is everything we have. Look at tanks... how long are so many DRK mains upset that it´s a 2nd WAR? What about healers... 1 attack, 1 dot, a bunch of oGCD´s? SGE is even called a barrierhealer with less barriers then standard heals and sits on the same gauge as WHM does? And DPS? What is still unique? Mudra, maybe Redmage with his swap between range / melee? That´s it?