Quote Originally Posted by Kemiko View Post
I very much disagree that Dead Ends is pushing at all towards hardcore content difficulty. I wouldn't even put it anywhere near the difficulty of Pharos Sirius in 2.1 or Steps of Faith in 3.0 and neither of those were hardcore difficulty either.

I agree that MSQ content shouldn't be super hard but it should be challenging enough that you can't just zone out from the content and still clear. At this point, it's reliably there. It's easy enough to be cleared by the majority but hard enough that it gets significantly more difficult to clear if a quarter of party zones out for your average player.

While this may be a story driven game and we're talking about main scenario content as your character grows in abilities and equipment s9 should the content you're enjoying rise to meet your new capabilities. This is a simple and very old structure for games in general, not just RPGs. So, it's both understandable and expected that the game gets a bit more challenging as you progress. And we've been progressing in this game since 2013 and even if you hadn't been playing since then - unless you pay specifically to skip that story content - you still have to play through it. I do not believe that that any of the story content is too difficult and even solo duties have an easy mode if you can't be arsed to learn it.

Unlike your typical hardcore content, there are absolutely visual indicators for each and every mechanic performed by every single boss in dead ends. While they aren't always giant orange floor markers, casual content hasn't always used those markers for visual indicators since as far back A Realm Reborn. Expecting you to be able to pick these visual cues have long since been established.
Echoing this sentiment.

Max level dungeons have always had mechanics with some teeth to them, even if they're not overall super hard. Right off the top of my head, the final boss of Heroes' Gauntlet will 1-shot you if you don't stand in the crater, and Shinryu has been a meme for years as being a 'wall' into endgame since the end of Stormblood (putting aside that Shinryu is kind of a joke, but w/e)

Anybody who thinks that Dead Ends is an outlier in difficulty hasn't been playing FFXIV for very long. The dungeon will punish you, sure, but it's not hard. Everything is clearly broadcasted, even if it takes a time or two for people to properly internalize it.