FF14 needs more difficulty levels

[Garnix]

More difficulty options would not do anything. People would only play the harder difficulty after a few days anyways.
The only thing I absolutely think would be good is a hard mode for the dungeons, with a difficulty level a bit lower than EX fights and higher than story mode dungeons.
I don't see the point of having something between savage and ultimate. If you find Savage not challenging enough, there is a high chance nothing other than Ultimate will be fulfilling.
That's why Ultimates are such stupidly long multi-phases fights, because the endurance check is basically the challenge on top of the challenge. Without that, it would just be "one more fight" in the raid tier really...
Of course people always want more, so no matter how much they add, people will not have enough.
But I think overall, they should rather invest more time in side content that everybody will participate in, even though some will hate it (like Bozja for example).

[Anhra]

Squeenix was always known for insulting their Playerbases intelligence. It wouldnt suprise me at all, if Criterion Dungeons will just turn out to be some halfassed solo Dungeon that has the Difficulty of early HoH Floors (1-30).

And whats the point of adding more combat related content anyway, if the very Jobs, that are suppoest to enter them, are blandly designed, overtuned and lack any identity?

[Kaurhz]

Not that I can say a grand deal as more of an observer, outside of a few far-and-between experiences, but I'd much rather they just rethink their design strategy going forward. They shouldn't need to resolve such issues by incorporating another difficulty (Which depending on expectation can just be a needless resource sinkhole). They just need to be more open to taking some risks until they find a healthy balance between difficulty and accessibility, and how well they prepare for subsequent content. As it stands with many avenues in the game they always manage to be excessive in their adjustments by overextending how accommodating they are to certain crowds, or by over-streamlining. This IMO has remained a prominent issue across a few avenues of content and is not really exclusive to one particular area. Outside of a few nuances, they struck a healthy balance in Stormblood.

Learning cannot be forced, which is something they've yet to really ingrain in their design strategy. Oversimplification is not going to resolve that indifference to adequately learning the game.

[Skiros]

More difficulty options would not do anything. People would only play the harder difficulty after a few days anyways.
The only thing I absolutely think would be good is a hard mode for the dungeons, with a difficulty level a bit lower than EX fights and higher than story mode dungeons.
I don't see the point of having something between savage and ultimate. If you find Savage not challenging enough, there is a high chance nothing other than Ultimate will be fulfilling.
That's why Ultimates are such stupidly long multi-phases fights, because the endurance check is basically the challenge on top of the challenge. Without that, it would just be "one more fight" in the raid tier really...
Of course people always want more, so no matter how much they add, people will not have enough.
But I think overall, they should rather invest more time in side content that everybody will participate in, even though some will hate it (like Bozja for example).

The amount of statics who are imploding because of DSR but have formerly memed that P4S is ridiculously easy says otherwise.

I must admit I have a bit of schadenfreude seeing these hotshots get brought low, but every serious raider right now are on the same page - that on-patch Ultimates are actually a very steep difficulty spike from Savage, both because Savages get easier and also because Ultimates actually get harder.

I'm only on Eyes enrage so far but from talking to my FC and other high-end raiders a lot of them think that this is probably harder than on-patch UCoB, which was regarded as the hardest ultimate on release. I have to agree - Nidhogg is harder than Nael, while Sanctity makes Twintania look like an absolute joke.

Meanwhile Savage difficulty resets every expansion while jobs are only getting easier and easier. The combined effect is that Savage overall has gotten easier and easier and the clear rates reflect that.

JP Savage clear rates are above 40% at the very LEAST, on patch.

This Ultimate will 100% have a clear rate below 1%. Probably even 0.1%.

You seriously don't see the gap? There are a lot of players who find Savage too easy while finding Ultimate too hard.

[Garnix]

I am not saying there is no gap. I am saying the gap doesn't matter at all and that no matter how much is added to fill in the gap people would still not be happy about it.
Also, people say savage is too easy but how many of those players you mention are capable of clearing fights without following guides and using min iLvl?...

[Skiros]

Imo the game needs more challenging solo content.

Casuals are far more likely to try out gradual difficulty solo content than bother to meet and talk with people to get into a static to do raids, that takes times, mental effort and also requires specific times for raid and organize that many do not like being limited to.

Now they could also make a solo savage raid option where the npcs behave very average or slightly below average so victory COMPLETELY depends on your own PERSONAL performance but that is probably a lot of work instead of some solo designed deep dungeon.

It already exists in the form of solo deep dungeon and Bozja duels. But there are two significant problems:

Solo deep dungeon is way too hardcore for the majority of players. HoH solo took me around 40 hours which is the same amount of time you'd dedicate to an entire Savage tier. There is no incentive for players to solo deep dungeons up to any point other than the top floor, which IMO is an extremely bad implementation.

Solution:

The new deep dungeon should remain extremely tough for those who want to solo up to the max floor. However, there needs to be significant rewards every 10 levels beyond a certain "hard" floor so that players can actually feel good about soloing them without feeling like it's a drag.

I think the new deep dungeon needs to have 150 floors. It should start getting as hard as HoH floors 50-60 at floor 80. Then allow people to choose between three starting points: 1, 41, and 81.

IMO, for rewards:

Reaching floor 90: a title and an exclusive minion (one-time). Difficulty: HoH 61-70, PotD 151-170.

Reaching floor 100: 360 weekly tomes (weekly reset) Difficulty: Hoh 71-80, PotD 171-189.

Reaching floor 110: an exclusive mount and glamour (one-time) Difficulty: HoH 71-80, PotD 171-189.

Reaching floor 120: a title and a one-time significant boost to relic weapon completion of your choice (e.g. skip the Harrowing Memory step) Difficulty: HoH 81-100, PotD 190-200.

Reaching floor 130: 20M gil (one-time) and 24 Savage books of your choice (one-time). One relic step completion of your choice (weekly reset). HoH 81-100, PotD 190-200.

Reaching floor 140: An exclusive mount and glamour (one-time). 3M gil (weekly reset). Harder than HoH/PotD.

Reaching floor 150: An exclusive title and two relic weapon step completions of your choice (one-time). One relic weapon step completion of your choice (weekly reset). Harder than HoH/Potad.

---------

Party mode rewards:

Floor 120: Title and one-time relic step completion.

Floor 150: Mount, 20M gil, glamours, and one-time relic step completion.

They do different things:

Floor 1 is for everyone to experience the new deep dungeon for the first time at a casual pace.

Floor 41 is for people who want to grind levels or other stuff.

Floor 81 is for the challenge mode and I hope that they enable achievements even if you start from Floor 81. At the moment HoH solo is a drag all the way until Floor 61, which is just a huge waste of time. I didn't even bother with PotD solo because I had to grind so many potions and grind through 150 floors of boring snoozefests. This needs to change. Make all floors starting from 81 challenging and engaging. This way you have 70 floors of challenging content.

This is the reward structure that I think should be used.

Also please make it a non-reskin deep dungeon. I don't think I will even touch it if it's just PotD reskin 3.0

[Liam_Harper]

Solo deep dungeon is way too hardcore for the majority of players.

I personally don't find it too hardcore, I just find its not worth my time investment. It's strange that the devs ramble about how they can't make Mythic dungeons because it'll be stressful and punishing, yet they made a dungeon that literally erases hours of progress over a single wipe.

I'm just not motivated to run something that I could spend hours on and lose everything because I dc'd or had a string of really bad RNG on floor 199. Nor can I be bothered to run 150 floors of boredom just to reach the challenging part. It's like having an end tier Savage boss that requires you to beat 20 normal mode bosses, 10 EX bosses and the first few Savage bosses in a row without a wipe and then you finally get your challenging boss.
The save system is also rubbish. Imagine being bound to a static that you can never sub a player or pull someone in from PF without redoing the entire tier. Starting from Normal mode.

[Kuroka]

I personally don't find it too hardcore, I just find its not worth my time investment. It's strange that the devs ramble about how they can't make Mythic dungeons because it'll be stressful and punishing, yet they made a dungeon that literally erases hours of progress over a single wipe.

I'm just not motivated to run something that I could spend hours on and lose everything because I dc'd or had a string of really bad RNG on floor 199. Nor can I be bothered to run 150 floors of boredom just to reach the challenging part. It's like having an end tier Savage boss that requires you to beat 20 normal mode bosses, 10 EX bosses and the first few Savage bosses in a row without a wipe and then you finally get your challenging boss.
The save system is also rubbish. Imagine being bound to a static that you can never sub a player or pull someone in from PF without redoing the entire tier. Starting from Normal mode.

Excatly that... let us have saves and restart from them... id love to try, but the time... and as soon as im gettin tired in the evenings i dont even dare to try it, if something is up that needs me to leave i can trash my whole progress... If i could try 10 floors a time, id have cleared it years ago...

[Ralphe2449]

The new deep dungeon should remain extremely tough for those who want to solo up to the max floor. However, there needs to be significant rewards every 10 levels beyond a certain "hard" floor so that players can actually feel good about soloing them without feeling like it's a drag.

I think the new deep dungeon needs to have 150 floors. It should start getting as hard as HoH floors 50-60 at floor 80. Then allow people to choose between three starting points: 1, 41, and 81.

IMO, for rewards:

Reaching floor 90: a title and an exclusive minion (one-time). Difficulty: HoH 61-70, PotD 151-170.

Reaching floor 100: 360 weekly tomes (weekly reset) Difficulty: Hoh 71-80, PotD 171-189.

Reaching floor 110: an exclusive mount and glamour (one-time) Difficulty: HoH 71-80, PotD 171-189.

Reaching floor 120: a title and a one-time significant boost to relic weapon completion of your choice (e.g. skip the Harrowing Memory step) Difficulty: HoH 81-100, PotD 190-200.

Reaching floor 130: 20M gil (one-time) and 24 Savage books of your choice (one-time). One relic step completion of your choice (weekly reset). HoH 81-100, PotD 190-200.

Reaching floor 140: An exclusive mount and glamour (one-time). 3M gil (weekly reset). Harder than HoH/PotD.

Reaching floor 150: An exclusive title and two relic weapon step completions of your choice (one-time). One relic weapon step completion of your choice (weekly reset). Harder than HoH/Potad.

That is absolutely something I would love to see. Especially since that gradual design allows you to ramp up difficulty in a good manner.

I have honestly not bothered with potd/hoh much due to lack of rewards like those and the fact that I was told that getting to max floor as certain melee classes is not possible unless you use the "spinning" around mob circle to cancel their auto attack which honestly sounds like bad design, that is not kiting, it is not positioning, it is doing something incredibly specific to bug out a mob so it stops auto attacking.
Instead auto attack damage should be survivable(as long as you dont take too long) for dps assuming good use of your personal health/leech skills and obviously not getting hit by mechanics and dealing with adds appropriately.

Also the fact that Potd is stuck at lvl 50 is another issue since classes feel very boring and simple at that level

[Skiros]

I am not saying there is no gap. I am saying the gap doesn't matter at all and that no matter how much is added to fill in the gap people would still not be happy about it.
Also, people say savage is too easy but how many of those players you mention are capable of clearing fights without following guides and using min iLvl?...

So many baseless assumptions.

How will people not be happy about it? Have you asked all of them?

Also yes a lot of raiders are capable of clearing all Savages at min ilvl without looking at guides because they are genuinely not that hard and at this point people have already seen those mechanics used over and over again so much it's hardly blind.

Not that I can say a grand deal as more of an observer, outside of a few far-and-between experiences, but I'd much rather they just rethink their design strategy going forward. They shouldn't need to resolve such issues by incorporating another difficulty (Which depending on expectation can just be a needless resource sinkhole). They just need to be more open to taking some risks until they find a healthy balance between difficulty and accessibility, and how well they prepare for subsequent content. As it stands with many avenues in the game they always manage to be excessive in their adjustments by overextending how accommodating they are to certain crowds, or by over-streamlining. This IMO has remained a prominent issue across a few avenues of content and is not really exclusive to one particular area. Outside of a few nuances, they struck a healthy balance in Stormblood.

Learning cannot be forced, which is something they've yet to really ingrain in their design strategy. Oversimplification is not going to resolve that indifference to adequately learning the game.

I think that makes sense but everyone is at a different stage of learning the game. Stormblood worked fine because outside of Ultimate, the difficulty gap was more narrow. Endwalker's difficulty gap is at the game's most extreme (for combat content) since its inception. On the one hand you have what is pretty much a visual novel. A very good one, but still a visual novel experience. On the other you have what is probably one of the hardest raid mechanically across all MMOs, period. This gap is too insane and like you said comes from trying to cater to people of all types.

But I think at this point the players themselves have a wide divide between them. While it would be nice in theory to strike a good balance, I think there needs to be at least one more difficulty level. Otherwise you'd have to narrow the gap to strike that balance. I am personally against narrowing the gap if it means lowering the difficulty of Ultimates. But I can also understand why some players wouldn't want to narrow the gap by increasing the difficulty of the MSQ.

Striking the balance would be great for midcore content like alliance raids, Bozja, EX and even Savage. But it doesn't really bridge the gap between the two extremes IMO: what you'll have left would be a big, packed island in the middle of an ocean (the midcore content) with MSQ lying all the way to the west by itself and Ultimate an entire ocean away.

The gap has to be filled somehow and adjusting the extremes would be something I'm against. But there isn't enough difficulty levels in the game so that they can fill in the gap without having a spike somewhere.

What you're suggesting could work if there was enough creativity and genius for them to design content that can bridge the gap while being repeatable so you can keep training to get better. For example, a Bozja duel that keeps getting harder and harder with more mechanics thrown at you over time, so that it acts like a difficulty slider in one single piece of encounter. But for the most part no such content exists in the game currently.