the normal content is too easy

[Roflcopter]

My counterargument to the above is this: making the game infantile to play will lead to more people quitting than those who would quit due to inability to clear a slightly more difficult dungeon or trial. People should not be babied for fear of losing playerbase. SE should cater to the vast majority on the game who do believe it is too easy to clear most content, not to the loud minority who are afraid of a challenge beyond "dodge that giant telegraph thats in place for 10 seconds." The extreme and savage content is too small and far between (~15 or so fights per expansion) to justify making 95% of content a complete cakewalk. For people who game passionately and seek the thrill , who make up more of the population than SE would like to admit, the current normal content just ain't cutting it.

Most every mmo has some form of telegraph for everything including WoW. Only in that game you need to install an add on to do the exact same easy to see circles that FFXIV has by default. Every single serious raider uses DBM in WoW and it puts up the same exact telegraph markers. It has done that for ages. People in FFXIV and WoW fail all the time at avoiding the insanely obvious markers too. I’d also argue normal mode content is accessible and trivial in all MMOs. It is pretty much standard in the genre these days. Even so called heroic content in WoW was trivial from Wrath onward. Normal mode raids were accessible and trivial as well. They are designed as stepping stones for freshly leveled players to practice and gear for harder content.

Back in the days of EQ, the telegraphs weren’t necessarily obvious so you needed a raid lead to set timers and call stuff out. Trakanon for example. So many people don’t know how to get out even with someone shouting it in your ear and spamming chat in red letters.