the normal content is too easy

[Renalt]

Yes. Normal content is easy. It's a Single Player first and an MMO second. If people get roadblocked but the casual content they they can't progress period.

Harder content does exist if you want it and besides they are implementing harder modes for everything later on...so yeah.

[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.

[Packetdancer]

I could count on maybe one hand how many dungeons I’ve wiped on or died in the first time I ran them. I’m certainly not a gaming prodigy. If we’re going to compare anecdotes, mine directly contradicts yours. With the exception of a handful, they are simply facerolls. Especially the “expert” dungeons.

Being fair here, this game has a specific 'toy box' of mechanics components it tends to use; you don't need to be a gaming prodigy to recognize them and quickly put together how mechanics work, especially if you have done savage content, or any other sort of serious endgame stuff; higher-end content in this game tends to give you a lot of practice at quickly recognizing which "LEGO bricks" are being used to build a specific mechanic and reacting accordingly.

(It's one reason I love fights that bring new or different pieces into play.)

To folks who are used to watching ground AoEs, I've run into many who view a mechanic as a monolithic whole; as a result, a new dungeon is a whole set of new mechanics. Whereas for folks who are used to doing endgame content, most I know -- myself included -- think of mechanics as basically individual building blocks stuck together; that means a new dungeon is generally the same mechanics, just maybe shuffled around.

And I think the difference that mindset makes in terms of how new content lands is a bigger one than it might appear to be at first glance.

Which is why one set of folks can say "It's new content, getting the mechanics wrong a few times is what happens." and another can say "It's just the same old thing we've seen dozens of times." and both can be correct from their respective points of view.

I don't expect much from normal content but any old content should be balanced to be as similar as possible to when they launched to at least retain the normal level of difficulty. People skip and ignore so much mechanics in old fights that the supposed normal difficulty is very easy instead.

I think the power creep on older content is less by design and more a factor of the fact that this game's level syncing (and ilevel syncing) is... well, it's sure a thing we have, but I'm not sure it's a thing that entirely works. Locking content to the minimum ilevel would prevent some of that power creep, but a lot of people -- and this certainly applies to some savage raiders -- would probably balk at that, because it would make gear progression feel "meaningless".

(No lie, though, I'd love to see the functional ilevel on the Crystal Tower raids cut down significantly, so that mechanics happened again there. Not because the game needs more difficulty overall, per se, but because those ones have gotten to the point where people overpower them so absurdly that quite a few folks I know who think the MSQ difficulty for current content is their preferred level still have their own complaints about how toothless the Crystal Tower raids specifically have become.)

[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.

[Renalt]

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.

Oh no. Do those Extremes and Savages. Dungeons will always be easy till they finally pull the trigger on those variant dungeons thingies I've been hearing about.

[HyoMinPark]

Oh no. Do those Extremes and Savages. Dungeons will always be easy till they finally pull the trigger on those variant dungeons thingies I've been hearing about.

I’ve done minimum item level EX and Savage, too. Doing Savage Week 1 is doing it minimum item level, and I’ve done it week 1 since Eden’s Gate, usually clearing the last floor at the start of week 2. It’s still not as hard as you’re implying. Especially on a healer.

[Renalt]

I’ve done minimum item level EX and Savage, too. Doing Savage Week 1 is doing it minimum item level, and I’ve done it week 1 since Eden’s Gate, usually clearing the last floor at the start of week 2. It’s still not as hard as you’re implying. Especially on a healer.

I will agree on that. As a healer if the healer knows what they are doing...they can be the reason for success or failure.

The problem is everything is on a literal time and scripted. They should throw some curveballs.

[HyoMinPark]

I will agree on that. As a healer if the healer knows what they are doing...they can be the reason for success or failure.

The problem is everything is on a literal time and scripted. They should throw some curveballs.

Crit auto attacks and untelegraphed/no cast bar tankbusters were a decent way to keep healers on their toes and pay attention to tank health—versus just ignoring it for the majority of a fight. I wish they’d bring those back. I think there may still be a few busters that aren’t indicated by a cast bar, but they are few and far between. A lot of the Savage bosses only do two or three busters an entire fight, and they are all usually immuned by the tanks. Maybe upping the frequency could help that as well.

I am hoping Sephirot Unreal is as close to HW Sephirot EX as they’re able. Even with the removal of proximity damage from the earthshakers. So looking forward to that at least. He was one of my favorite fights from HW.

[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.