the normal content is too easy

[ThaCa]

I'm bit torn on the difficulty of Normal content, while I personally would love to see it being bit harder, I can see a lot of other players already struggling with some of it. For example: last boss of 81 dungeon, EW trials, 90 dungeon and most of the Pandemonium Raid - I've seen decent amount of people dying over and over, though they often end up getting dragged through them unless too many of them got to same group by chance. There's already quite a lot of internal dissonance with the difficulty in how the 81 last boss is tougher than basically any of the later dungeon bosses (aside from like two from 90 dungeon), where too many of them have like 3 abilities that repeat over and over. It would benefit them to have more clear progress in difficulty, though they do build up well based on earlier seen mechanics.
Then again you sometimes get level 80+ player who runs away from people with Stack marker. Maybe some advanced or updated version of Hall of Novice would be in place?

At least with the addition of difficulty selection for solo duties they have bit more freedom to make them tougher.

I think some of the main problems currently comes from the newer skill adjustments (massive potency creep over the years) and lenience of the ilvl sync. This leads to most of the older content becoming completely unchallenging and often uninteresting as people can ignore and skip mechanics and are barely punished at all for failing, along with having very few skills to use which are very back loaded on some Jobs and doesn't really teach much about playing it. How can people learn to play or keep their interest up if everything is a breeze? You miss some fancy attacks and the base level challenge as things are now.
Most of the stuff wasn't impossible hurdle to players back in day, so could they at least make the optional Trials, Alliance and Normal raids closer to what they were during their launch? Even better if the mandatory ones would be too so experiencing those fights would be exciting instead of just pretty much ignoring everything.
If rebalancing or tightening the ilvl seems too time consuming, then just give us options to run roulettes and stuff on minimum ilvl and give greater rewards or ensure some of the rarer drops.

Then again a lot of people would probably be upset if their fast and easy roulettes were slower and slightly challenging.

Overall I'm fine with the current level as long as there's enough of Ex and up stuff to play through, but would like to see the older content given some love.

[StriderShinryu]

I'm bit torn on the difficulty of Normal content, while I personally would love to see it being bit harder, I can see a lot of other players already struggling with some of it.

This is a major point that needs to be considered. We literally had a thread complaining about how bad DF is that it got closed for running so long it was lagging the forums. We have posts all the time about how players have no idea what they're doing and how better players are forced to carry the whole team.
While I still maintain that the vast majority of that complaining is based on overdramatized rare experiences and not the actual frequent occurrences that some people claim, what is the logical result of making the basic story mode content harder? Yep, the better players being asked to and/or outright expected to carry even harder.

I wouldn't really have any issue with the story mode content being harder you're dreaming if you think that just making the game harder will all of a sudden make the average (and worse than average) players better. And it's also not really that easy to just "make the game harder" while still keeping it fun and enjoyable.

[Bad_Luck]

This is an MMO not Elden Ring.

[linayar]

IMO the issue has been long running.. ever since ARR. when something has been seen as difficult it's usually not been that it's actually difficult its usually just been a case of the game does a terrible job of explaining what you're supposed to do at the time..

Many of these are explained via NPC chats. I'm not sure what else you want them to do other than pausing the game every time to pop up those active help windows.

There's been hundreds of examples.. but the common connection between them is that rarther that fixing the quests by providing better clarity on what players are expected to do they just nerfed it to the point you didnt need to do any of it and could just zerg everything... and if that didnt work then they added a very easy mode on top...

Yeah, that's unfortunate, but when people in multiplayer contents would rather leave at the start of a duty rather than take the time to explain to their fellow players, it kind of shows the solo mentality of the community, so I can see why easier content is better for most people.

Even endwalker. the level 90 tank quest for example just tells you to interupt an ability. so i and apparantly quite a few other players were getting frustrated because stuns are interupts and they weren't working.... and the solution to the quest was use a role skill thats basically been obselete since second coil. (minus maybe a handfull of very rare situationally niche uses) and as a result is a skill that 99% (exagerated) of tanks never even have on there hotbars...

That was the first role quest I did and I don't remember having difficulty with an "obsolete" role action. What was it?

I have literally tried to die on normal-mode Thordan and couldn't pull it off. Even standing in every AoE, running face first into every mechanic, and telling the healers to not touch me for the sake of the experiment, I still couldn't manage it.

I mean, not counting running as BLU and just killing myself, but that's cheating.

Out of curiosity, did you do it at the ilvl that was available when Thordan was first released or just rely on the sync that probably will put you at max level 60 ilvl?

[AziraSyuren]

Out of curiosity, did you do it at the ilvl that was available when Thordan was first released or just rely on the sync that probably will put you at max level 60 ilvl?

I did. It was even more egregiously easy than Hades and Endsinger, given you spent the last 50% of the fight with the boss impotently swinging at you instead of the last 20-15% (given your damage doubles in the last phases of both Hades and Endsinger).

[linayar]

I did. It was even more egregiously easy than Hades and Endsinger, given you spent the last 50% of the fight with the boss impotently swinging at you instead of the last 20-15% (given your damage doubles in the last phases of both Hades and Endsinger).

That is interesting. Maybe our jobs are just more powerful than they were relatively at similar ilvl, or it was a choice given how much harder Extreme would be, especially as that was also the era of Gordias.

[AziraSyuren]

That is interesting. Maybe our jobs are just more powerful than they were relatively at similar ilvl, or it was a choice given how much harder Extreme would be, especially as that was also the era of Gordias.

Yes, they're actually a lot more powerful. Potencies are higher across the board, partly because more potency was consolidated into fewer buttons given at lower levels on average.

[KizuyaKatogami]

This is an MMO not Elden Ring.

You said that before, and you’re logic is still as flawed as it was before.

[SamsaraTrickstar]

Well ff14 is affectively a dress up game that got some rpg element to it. By the point I get to where I can do the harder content I lose interest from the brain dead things. But it what "people want". Not lot of people do the harder things . But not because they don't want but because the it's go from 1 to 10 no in between.

[Silver-Strider]

I remember when I 1st started FFXIV. It was my 1st MMO and I was obviously a noob to the genre. I started off as a CNJ and was a nervous wreck for every instance that I got put in. At some point, I was told to go unlock Swiftcast on BLM so I could quick rez people.

The level 15 THM quest bodied me. The mobs just spawned quicker than I could kill them and would ultimately overwhelm and kill me, which was frustrating to say the least. I thought it was weird that I was struggling so much since I was more than properly geared for the role, having saved up plenty of caster gear leveling up my WHM and had been doing relatively fine on THM thus far, or so I though. I was wrong. I was switching between Fire/Ice after 1 cast each thinking that was how you were supposed to play the job but this quest showed me how wrong I was. I failed the quest twice before I decided to learn what I was doing wrong and decided to read my tooltips more thoroughly. It didn't help because back then, tooltips had a ton of unusual phrasing and made it seem much more confusing than it actually was so I decided to try attacking some of the target dummies and figure out if there was a way I could do more damage that way. Turns out, staying in Fire boosted my damage and once I figured that out, I cleared the quest on my next attempt and that feeling of relief was euphoric.

I was a new player that had never played an MMO a day in his life. I got stonewalled by a quest and instead of asking for nerfs, I improved so I could continue on with the game. You don't see that nowadays because I know I wouldn't be seeing level 90 Ice Mages in Expert roulette if that was still the case. I'm all for adding back that level of difficulty if it improved the quality of players from being whiny children that ask for a nerf to solve their problems rather than, you know, get good.