Old content has become so easy that it is no longer fun

[Wyakin]

Gonna be honest, It’s always been easy during the msq. Laughably so in fact. Dungeons have been two pulls/boss and repeat for years. The “expert roulette” is poorly named, it requires zero expertise. Trials are a joke and to wipe takes real skill

[Berteaux_Braumegain]

I agree.

I always laugh when people praise this game for 'keeping its content relevant'. No, it actually hasn't, over half the game is completely trivialized to the point most of the mechanics don't even play out, especially bad in content that was already easy to begin with when it was current.

I saw a youtube video of someone comparing how things used to be to now, using Ultima Weapon as an example. That fight used to last 4 minutes in praetorium, now it lasts on average 55 seconds and you don't even get to the best part of the song.

It's embarrassing.

What video is that?

[Melorie]

At no point in this game's life did Thordan normal have any teeth lol

This isn't a discussion if something was hard or not though? The discussion is that things are becoming punching bags to a point that it's ridiculous with the power creep. It might be ridiculous back then, but now it is even more.

[technole]

OP is weird, and doesn't realize MMO content has a shelf life no matter what happens.

Even ultimates get slightly easier over time with DPS checks even if they are sync'd+ilevel locked forever. Changes to older skill potencies, new jobs like GNB and DNC added synergy and power creep that did not exist at the time.

Lastly, it's not worth their time to update old normal content when they can barely keep up with releasing new content on-time.

[ReynTime]

The reason Thordan is "easy" is because of lazy people demanding to be carried with low effort.

If things right now are easy are due the playerbase, so it sounds like they have to lie in their bed now.

No it's not.

The same "bad" players who don't want to learn mechanics and want to be carried will always play that way. But they were never going to quit the game over this.

The stupidity of making pve more and more inconsequential is effectively only making the experience less enjoyable, because as the dev team keeps their ridiculous philosophy of trying to fix what will never be fixed dungeons and combat for older content and most of what's not in high end raids becomes as increasingly shallow as an endless runner game. People who hate learning to play combat moderately decently are not playing past the MSQ for the pve so they should never have been the main audience of the design.

Regardless. That ship has sailed. I don't expect things to improve.

I've been playing this game for over 9 years and honestly I enjoyed the experience of 1.09+ a lot more than what became of this since Stormblood. It's clear I'm not their target audience as the duties have been boring me, the overworld has been unimpressive, they keep gutting my favorite jobs into their dps tunnel vision and to top it all of Endwalker's MSQ was a writing mess.

I guess I still have a few days of forum posting, but I'm pretty much done with the game. I want to play some proper Japanese rpgs and XIV isn't one of them.

[Michieltjuhh]

I may not have played the game prior to Stormblood, and I won't deny that old content is of course getting easier as jobs get more fleshed out and the stat squish certainly didn't seem to help. However, from my experience in WoW, where similar statements were being made regarding dungeons and raiding of old, it's mostly nostalgia and rose tinted goggles.

WoW classic proved and is still actively proving that there, old content isn't half as difficult as people remember it being and it was just them not being good at it. It's an educated guess to say the same applies to FF14.

[Sililos]

OP must be new to MMO's.

FFXIV at least gives you the option to do the content at its original Ilevel (Unless i misunderstood the sync feature for that) and level.
So you can just select the appropriate settings and enjoy your harder content.

No sense gating the old content through difficulty when the options already there.

[Melorie]

WoW classic proved and is still actively proving that there, old content isn't half as difficult as people remember it being and it was just them not being good at it. It's an educated guess to say the same applies to FF14.

Well, I don't believe this is a nostalgia or rose-tinted glasses thing applies to FFXIV. First because FFXIV always followed a more or less formulaic aspect, so although quite a lot of things in the combat changed, I wouldn't say that encounter design is that different (I can't speak for ARR, but at least talking about overall normal content). So there's not much to be nostalgic about, the game has not really changed. Unless you're talking about the combat of a few jobs, there's not whole lot difference between HW, SB, SHB and EW - you have the same quantity of dungeons and trials, and you'll see these expansions all speak somewhat the same language content-wise, and they all build upon each other, unlike a game such as WoW that changed a lot over the years, and it seems that every expac has a different audience. And, again, saying that things nowadays are easy to the point of being ridiculous doesn't really mean that back then it was something extremely hard. This isn't a hard vs easy debate.

Besides, a lot of content in FFXIV actually teaches mechanics that will be used in the future in other things, so having fights skipping things to the point that you see very little of it is even worse for new players. You erase the whole learning curve of the game when you do that, learning things in video games are usually an interesting aspect of them - I actually really like this particular thing in FFXIV, the game slowly teaches you things and brings them back with a different twist, and this makes the entire process of learning things about a specific fight more intuitive. You can compare fights and mechanics and use this in your favour to learn the game. This, however, will be lost if syncing is not treated with a better care.

Given that part of FFXIV content is re-doing old content, and given that a huge chunk of this content is presented in a history that builds up the climax for that specific content... To have it being simply being a faceroll fest to the point that you don't need to ever look at your screen or even consider that something is happening besides seeing things melt in your face isn't appealing. These things hurts storytelling which is a huge selling aspect of the game! Imagine playing heavensward and bracing yourself to do Nidhogg and meeting that underwhelming thing. Back when I did Nidhogg normal mode it wasn't hard, but it was engaging and, thus, at least a bit of fun. I had to keep my eyes on the screen. Things can be easy but still fun and make you pay attention to them.

Logging into the game and doing some roulettes should be something that at least is a tiny bit of interesting, it is a TREMENDOUS part of the game progression system, and it is a waste to see the biggest chunk of it (anything that's not from the current expansion, and even then, depending on the patch...) simply go to the faceroll bin. A MMO that wants to rely on old-content in the way FFXIV does have to pay a little more of attention to how syncing works and try to balance the power creep aspect of it. I don't feel like "oh that's just how MMO works" applies the same way here. In other MMOs I wasn't doing a lvl 60, 70 or whatever dungeon if I was playing casually every day, however into this one I am. If I decide to play like a casual, I barely touch Endwalker's content.

The fact that a good part of this content wasn't even hard to begin with is already a good reason to be more in touch with how your syncing works. It doesn't need to get even easier.

[Thaigare]

I disagree I think some of the older content has much more interesting mechanics, and dungeon design then most dungeons after 4.0.
The current content is very formulaic and repetitive as it caters to more casual players than the older content did. You only find the older content boring because the ilvl sync / level sync was never balanced well. When you are level 50 with all your stats capped for that level it removes any challenge the content has. So pretty much anytime you are ilvl synced, you are doing the content with the highest possible stats you can have for that ilvl, which in most cases is higher than the gear at that ilvl offered.

Erm sorry I guess I didnt do a good job on explaining what I meant, I agree with you, I just meant now that you can just blindly face roll it with 0 effort is the part that sucks(Like you mentioned with stats being capped), if they kept the content the same and scaled the difficulty a little to make things last longer then a blip I would love it.

As for the second part, I just meant they add reasons to run the old content (Relic stuff/Roulettes/Stones to upgrade gear) which would be great! except for.. the content itself doesnt shine like it used to because its become a faceroll

[IdowhatIwant]

EW was the first expansion were I felt the dungeons had 0 challenge at launch. Most other expansions typically the dungeons had a bit of difficulty on release but End Walker had such a small gap in ilvl from 80-90, you can go through the entire expansion with the tomestone gear from SHB and never upgrade until you get the 89 set. End Walker was the first expansion where people started off the expansion with wall to wall pulls with 0 issues, as well. Every other expansion I have played that did not turn out well at launch. The actual bosses did not really do anything new or exciting from what I had seen. I don't know if the devs have lost inspiration but out side of savage, most of the EW content has been pretty bad IMO. I hope they can do better in the upcoming patches but after SHB I have doubts.