the normal content is too easy

[Stanazolol]

The truth is that no matter how hard a dungeon is, if you do it every single night, it's going to seem easy. Normal content is not intended to be consumed time and again for hours on end. It's one and done for most casuals. Endgame players mostly do them for the ludicrous rewards that facilitate their endgame content (Savage/Ultimate trials and raids). Those rewards don't exist to reward effort; they exist to entice hardcore players into running casual content with casuals. Unlike Blizzard, the SE team understands the difference between a social game and a meritocracy. I have yet to run a dungeon in this game that I didn't die on my first run through. Maybe you're a gaming prodigy who instinctively understands and responds to every mechanic before you're even aware that it exists, but as far as I'm concerned, the difficulty for dungeons and normal raids seems about right. I die a lot at first, and then I gradually get to a point where everything is second nature, and then I can queue in a healing role and laugh at the new players as I bring them back up. The fact that the content is easy enough to be cleared despite a few deaths in the group is what enables me to laugh through that experience. If you want to see the toxicity that's bred when content is designed to be as difficult as possible for as long as possible, go try out M+ in WoW. They've even built functionality into the game that facilitates gatekeeping so that you can keep out the "braindeads, lazies, and carpal tunnels," ensuring that they have as miserable an experience as possible.

Normal content is intended to be consumed hours on end. Well, I guess depending on your definition of hours on end, but the daily roullettes are intended to be done daily, by casuals or otherwise. If you play for any significant period of time, you will have multiple run throughs of every dungeon and should know most of them very well.

But even that doesnt account for most of thw dungeons being ridiculous easy even the first time. I mean, they are four man dungeons but you dont need four people to clear them. You dont even need four people for most wall pulls. And if you play warrior, you dont even need a healer, and barely need a dps. The dungeons are so easy, one semi decent player can carry a squad full of braindeads, and I think its working as intended.

[Ronduwil]

Normal content is intended to be consumed hours on end. Well, I guess depending on your definition of hours on end, but the daily roullettes are intended to be done daily, by casuals or otherwise. If you play for any significant period of time, you will have multiple run throughs of every dungeon and should know most of them very well.

If they're designed to be done for hours on end, why are they 20-45 minutes apiece and only give significant rewards once a day? If you're spending hours a day wiping on a normal dungeon run, then you're either a horrible player or you're playing a very poorly designed game. It's a daily roulette, not an hourly one. You're basically being rewarded for doing daily community service and helping a new player progress through MSQ/questing. It's not like Bozja or Ultimates where you're expected to invest hours trying to progress through the content. Normal content was clearly designed as a casual experience. The reason you don't approve of normal difficulty is that you would rather design the entire game as a meritocracy. I've done my time in WoW, and I've seen how toxic and unfun games that are designed as meritocracies can become. I'm not saying that meritocracies don't have their time and place, but that time and place is in Ultimates and in try-hard modes like Bozja and solo PotD/HoH. There's no shortage of difficult content in this game.

[HyoMinPark]

If they're designed to be done for hours on end, why are they 20-45 minutes apiece and only give significant rewards once a day? If you're spending hours a day wiping on a normal dungeon run, then you're either a horrible player or you're playing a very poorly designed game. It's a daily roulette, not an hourly one. You're basically being rewarded for doing daily community service and helping a new player progress through MSQ/questing. It's not like Bozja or Ultimates where you're expected to invest hours trying to progress through the content.

This almost seems like a shift in the argument. Casual content does end up being done for hours on end when you think about how much the developers try to incentivize players into going back to the older content. Not just through roulettes but through things like the ARR and HW relics (and likely soon to be the EW ones) and Moogle Tomestone events. Normal mode raids and Alliance raids—which are still considered “causal content”—rely on RNG for players to keep running them and re-running them for their weekly tokens/gear drop. If not that, then minions or housing items or the beloved Nier gear coffers and hairstyles until they made them drop every single run.

There's no shortage of difficult content in this game.

Ah, yes. The 12 Savage raids and 1—maybe 2 if we’re lucky—Ultimates that grace an expansion. And even some of the 12 Savage fights certainly don’t deserve the moniker of Savage (P1S is literally normal mode but with a slightly modified Intemperance). Extremes are hardly “extreme” anymore. They can be done with one or no healers on content, as Hydaelyn and Zodiark proved. ShB didn’t even have a solo Deep Dungeon, but at least we’re maybe getting on with the EW Deep Dungeon.

[Renalt]

Run that content with minimum Ilvl. You'll get spanked...I promise.

[HyoMinPark]

Run that content with minimum Ilvl. You'll get spanked...I promise.

Yeah I’ve done minimum item level stuff, casual and high-end. I’ve even done dungeons with 4 DPS or 3 DPS and 1 tank. Still not getting “spanked”. In dungeons especially. Friends and I have done dungeon roulettes where we pick one, pick the jobs for each other, and pick conditions like “do in first person” and still weren’t getting knocked around the way you’re implying. All synced down. We even did one run of one of the HW dungeons with level 1 weapons and no accessories.

[Stanazolol]

If they're designed to be done for hours on end, why are they 20-45 minutes apiece and only give significant rewards once a day? If you're spending hours a day wiping on a normal dungeon run, then you're either a horrible player or you're playing a very poorly designed game. It's a daily roulette, not an hourly one. You're basically being rewarded for doing daily community service and helping a new player progress through MSQ/questing. It's not like Bozja or Ultimates where you're expected to invest hours trying to progress through the content. Normal content was clearly designed as a casual experience. The reason you don't approve of normal difficulty is that you would rather design the entire game as a meritocracy. I've done my time in WoW, and I've seen how toxic and unfun games that are designed as meritocracies can become. I'm not saying that meritocracies don't have their time and place, but that time and place is in Ultimates and in try-hard modes like Bozja and solo PotD/HoH. There's no shortage of difficult content in this game.

The point was, responding to the person pretending like normal content is only easy because we've run it countless times, that for one, its designed to be run countless times, and two its moot because they're super easy even the first time.

[Ronduwil]

The point was, responding to the person pretending like normal content is only easy because we've run it countless times, that for one, its designed to be run countless times, and two its moot because they're super easy even the first time.

My point is that it's not designed to be run countless times. It's designed to be run one time. They provide overinflated incentives to get you to do them repeatedly despite the fact they they were only designed to be challenging the first time around. The content itself is designed to be compelling for new players. The rewards are designed to be compelling for the older players. Asking SE to make normal content more difficult is effectively asking for the content to suck for new players. SE understands that old players wouldn't normally want to run this stuff, so they offer high end rewards for it.

Blizzard takes the opposite approach. Their content is designed to be overly challenging for everyone, so they effectively stripped all rewards from their normal modes and locked them exclusively behind their hard modes. The reward system is designed to make the content compelling to people who normally wouldn't be bothered to do it. In my case, it worked for a time. In Cataclysm I went from being a dungeoneer who occasionally dabbled in raids to being a crucial member of a Heroic raiding guild who got the first Heroic Deathwing clear for the Alliance on my server. At the end of that, though, I was burned out and tired of feeling conflicted every time I had to choose between letting my raid down and letting one of my kids down when their extracurricular activities conflicted with raid nights. To be clear, even though my kids always won out, I still felt bad for the rest of my guild. That's why I'm now playing this game and not WoW. I would rather be rewarded for helping out newer players than rewarded for gatekeeping and try-harding.

Even now that my kids are grown, I have no desire whatsoever to pore over raid logs and practice on target dummies for hours on end. In fact, I'm glad SE bans DPS meters because it's all the more reason for me to not even install them. You can call me lazy if you want, and that's fine by me. I'm playing a video game here, not curing cancer. If I wanted to be productive in my downtime, I wouldn't be playing FFXIV.

[Gember]

Normal content is catered to those playing for the story, not those seeking challenge. The new trust dungeons, the YouTube beginner's series.. all are catering to the brand spanking new. There is already statistics that people are STAYING after attempting ARR because of the trust dungeons. The anxiety performance is a real thing that can gate players from actually going all the way through. Even I was scared of my first dungeon when I was a clueless sprout years ago. I am not saying that content should get easier; but there should be space for players to jump in the puddle and have fun without random pugs yelling at them to "git gud". After such phases; then they might stay and start learning to be better. I believe that is what SE is aiming for. How a new player approaches harder content is completely on their own, and its up to the community to help them out.

[Asako]

Normal fights are fine difficulty wise, not everyone is as good as the combat as we might be so just let them get through the story and be on your way.

My only gripe with the difficulty however is the item level sync on the last bosses of each expansion. These should be heavily restricted in order to give the true experience of the fight. A lot of new people don't have the luxury of playing with 8 premade and ilvl sync on and it's always a shame as when as a mentor I'm going into these fights that were so good when I done them back in the day just to see them melt and ruin the entire buildup of the story.

The last boss of HW and SB are especially bad as they were both huge spectacles that just come off as boring when you beat them in less than 2mins.

Most people beating the last boss of HW are capped at 270ilvl when storywise you would only be 150 after main scenario. That's 120ilvl extra per player. Far too much.

[Supersnow845]

Normal fights are fine difficulty wise, not everyone is as good as the combat as we might be so just let them get through the story and be on your way.

My only gripe with the difficulty however is the item level sync on the last bosses of each expansion. These should be heavily restricted in order to give the true experience of the fight. A lot of new people don't have the luxury of playing with 8 premade and ilvl sync on and it's always a shame as when as a mentor I'm going into these fights that were so good when I done them back in the day just to see them melt and ruin the entire buildup of the story.

The last boss of HW and SB are especially bad as they were both huge spectacles that just come off as boring when you beat them in less than 2mins.

Most people beating the last boss of HW are capped at 270ilvl when storywise you would only be 150 after main scenario. That's 120ilvl extra per player. Far too much.

Do thordran at MINE, he is still a complete joke