Why do casuals act as if it's the end of the world when suggesting?

[Xaruko_Nexume]

If you're not trolling, then you're missing the point of the thread.

I went back and read the OP again. I hope you will assume for a moment, that I am not trolling, because I am not. The point that I am getting, is that "many casual players complain if there is talk about adding difficult content."

And I think that statement in and of itself is not untrue. Hell, I am one of them. Hard content is not for me. I don't think the VAST majority of players are served by its addition until years later and they go back and farm it unsynced. SE obviously has data to back this up, or there would be hard content everywhere and you would need a guide to reach level 10. But we don't, so....

[GeminiReed]

- Endsinger was just bull, Endsinger EX is even worse. The meteors are finnicky as all hell, the timing is too strict and the damage is punishing. I'm sorry for not having fast reflexes to awkward "mechanics", but this thing isn't hard. It's just bull.

I used to raid at a midcore level in other games and did some casual Savage here. "It's just bull" pretty much sums up my feeling of much of the current encounter design across the difficulty spectrum in this game. Why? Because it depends on memorization, optimal skill rotations, and hyper-coordination to line up buff windows. Detailed memorization bores me. The most engaging fights I've done gave me mechanics to react to. XIV's require me to know precisely when they'll happen so I can be in position before the tells occur.

I find it really strange that so many players on this forum are so freaked out by that sentiment. I honestly believe that the vast majority of the game's players would agree with Yoshi-P as well.

You do realize that statement was aimed specifically at healers complaining about how disengaged they're feeling? It was an utterly tone-deaf response to a growing problem.

Your "vast majority" likely don't have the context to form an opinion. Healers are not in a good place. In an attempt to make them more accessible Square has continually simplified healing, increased heal potencies, and with the latest tank changes all but made them unnecessary for most content. It didn't stop there. Without explanation healers' DPS kits have been stripped down to a one button rotation with a smidge of DoT maintenance. There's not a lot of engagement for those that like the healing role.

On a personal level I don't intentionally heal content harder than the old 8-man MSQ roulette. It's not a role I'm comfortable enough with to willingly deal with anything harder. No amount of simplification is going to change that and I suspect that's true for almost everybody the balance team (wrongfully) thinks they're doing a favor.

[Allegor]

Easy, most of those "casuals" aren't genuine, they're agitators that only type what they type because they know it will upset others. Just look at any threads revolving around healears.

[kaynide]

The problem is that it all boils down to: Too Easy or Too Hard

There is no in between. Dungeons are so braindead that players don't even need to do the bare minimum to get through it, it gets boring very quickly. Suggesting they should up the difficulty just a little bit (Little Bit being the keyword) won't kill anybody, the skill ceiling is so low it is practically underground. Endwalkers Extremes weren't even that difficult and EX3 was a huge disappointment. Suggesting anything related to anything that will make people have to use their braincells even by a little bit leads to getting dogpiled and having your suggestion twisted and minced to fit their argument to the point that it feels like they are coiling in a fetal position and shouting: "Stopping making everything so difficult, you toxic elitist!".

Playing as a Tank or Healer is so ridiculously boring because everything is so easy that people actually have to come up with their own kind of challenge and you don't get rewarded for it, if people need to artificially make something challenging then there is definitely a problem.

Late to respond here, but I think that is fine, considering the dev time.

If we were still getting 2 dungeons per major patch like way back, I would certainly encourage the non MSQ ones to be harder. Even now, the 2 dungeons we have at 90 that are not the msq could have been more…medium/ex level difficulty. I’d be down!

I haven’t done the current EX content, so I can’t comment, but from what I have done on older EXs, I would agree that Stormblood was kind of the sweet spot for me so far, and Shadowbringers was pretty easy comparatively.

Full disclosure though, I don’t really touch EX stuff until it’s old old. I might try it/clear ex stuff once to see how it is, but I won’t actually spend any time trying to farm or learn it until I can decide to do it unsync’d with friends. It’s fun to try it legit, and maybe get that clear legit, but it’s just not my thing.

[Xaruko_Nexume]

I used to raid at a midcore level in other games and did some casual Savage here. "It's just bull" pretty much sums up my feeling of much of the current encounter design across the difficulty spectrum in this game. Why? Because it depends on memorization, optimal skill rotations, and hyper-coordination to line up buff windows. Detailed memorization bores me. The most engaging fights I've done gave me mechanics to react to. XIV's require me to know precisely when they'll happen so I can be in position before the tells occur.


You do realize that statement was aimed specifically at healers complaining about how disengaged they're feeling? It was an utterly tone-deaf response to a growing problem.

Your "vast majority" likely don't have the context to form an opinion. Healers are not in a good place. In an attempt to make them more accessible Square has continually simplified healing, increased heal potencies, and with the latest tank changes all but made them unnecessary for most content. It didn't stop there. Without explanation healers' DPS kits have been stripped down to a one button rotation with a smidge of DoT maintenance. There's not a lot of engagement for those that like the healing role.

On a personal level I don't intentionally heal content harder than the old 8-man MSQ roulette. It's not a role I'm comfortable enough with to willingly deal with anything harder. No amount of simplification is going to change that and I suspect that's true for almost everybody the balance team (wrongfully) thinks they're doing a favor.

I keep reading "but that statement was directed at healers!"

Uhh, okay? Doesn't make it less true for many other situations.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I would love to have some middle ground difficulty contents tbh. But no high hopes. :shrug:

How is it bait? If someone wants harder content, it exists. It is there. It is literally, there. To do. Lots of it. Go do it.

To be fair, that awfully dismissive statement was a response to a question specifically to address healer's gameplay. Which should suffice to say, they had missed the point entirely regardless whether it's intentional brushing off or pure misunderstanding (either way it was a very rude response). Content difficulty was not, or at least only partially to be blamed for their boring gameplay. If you play a boring job, it doesn't matter whether you play an easy or difficult content. Once you've learned the encounter, your boring gameplay is all you have to turn back to; that is what healer's core gameplay (80% of time spamming 1 filler button) and to some extent, tanks' feels too.

[Kazelus]

This is some "vanilla wow was hard" tier of nostalgia. Nothing in sastasha or copperbell was ever hard. It felt hard because game was new and players were bad. All ARR dungeons up to Cutter's Cry are boring tank and spank fests.

And before you go "b-but the game is easier now", just compare the difficulty between Shiva normal and Zodiark normal. And dare to tell me that shiva is harder or more complex.

Just look at the life the spriggan had when ARR was released, even when pressing your button, you would never had 0 spriggan just because they add so much life that it took a long time to clear them and by then the boss would already be here for a long time.
It wasn't harder than before 6.1 when we were able to one shot them ? Even when the game didn't gaved us the gear from it before entering, we weren't able to one shot spriggan. Only Archer/Bards, Marauder/Warrior had an AoE at this time. Most of the time the boss had between 3-5 spriggans around him and when people were bad, it could be 10 spriggans. I've wiped more time against that boss on the first week than I've ever wiped on all HS, SN, ShB and EW dungeon. And it was not the "new mechs" things, spriggan were a fucking zerg rush on that fight back in the days. And the last boss of Sastasha, if you let one adds spawn, it was possible to go wild really fast.
Back in ARR all monster in the first ARR dungeon had more life and dealt more damage. Even after you had the dungeon gear (the one the game give you before entering thoses dungeons now.)

You just can't "diagram" your way through that, you can't come up with workarounds. Either you do or you don't. That's not hard. Other fights are hard, but they're doable. That's just disheartening.

In fact, you can diagram it with markers on Intercardinals POS. The AoE will be centered on the next Intercardinals position from the slow planet strat points, and you will be safe if you are on one of the cardinals opposed to the AoE. And for the EX, the blue one, you can get pushed using the same markers. You can also avoid the next red planet by moving on the opposed side of the markers from the AoE.

Granted that this is subjective, but I think mechanics difficulty is much harder to overcome than DPS difficulty. I don't know how it was on release, but right now, you don't even have that many buttons at Satasha level. You have maybe a 2-3 button DPS combo, and a one-button AoE spam, if you're lucky enough to even have AoE at level 18. What exactly was hard about that? "Switch to your AoE button when three or more adds appear," is much easier to understand and implement than, "When the boss flies up into the air, look at the blinking lights on the side and dodge repeatedly in the order corresponding to the number of dots in each column while keeping an eye out for the circles of pain that will be spread all over the floor."

People doesn't wants more difficulty in normal content because they're bad, Copperbell had a DPS check, one of the very first dungeon of the game had a DPS check. That's what I'm saying, people HAD to play the game, they had to push button to not make things go wild. Today, people are almost able to finish the story spaming without being a healer. Isn't there a big difference on difficulty ? Making normal content asking all the player to be participative to be cleared would be a first step in the good direction, that's what I want to say. When it will be done, we should make capped dungeon on a higher difficulty. What would be nice, would a system for capped dungeon to have a "story mode" and an "expert mode", the story mode would be in the 90 roulettes and the expert... In the expert roulettes. And only the expert mode would give weekly tome outside roulettes. Then, we could have something interesting to farm.

To be fair, that awfully dismissive statement was a response to a question specifically to address healer's gameplay. Which should suffice to say, they had missed the point entirely regardless whether it's intentional brushing off or pure misunderstanding (either way it was a very rude response). Content difficulty was not, or at least only partially to be blamed for their boring gameplay. If you play a boring job, it doesn't matter whether you play an easy or difficult content. Once you've learned the encounter, your boring gameplay is all you have to turn back to; that is what healer's core gameplay (80% of time spamming 1 filler button) and to some extent, tanks' feels too.

This is exactly the problem with healer, they don't want harder content, they want to have an actual gameplay 80% of the time. (That's a low assumption, I would have said 90% cause in most content, you're supposed to cast 100% damage spell.)

[Silvarer]

Which healer only has one DPS ability?

They didn't say healers had only one DPS ability, they said they were spamming one ability. Which is pretty much true most of the time when playing healer, you get the choice of either repeatedly spamming your single target attack or your aoe attack. Not particularly the most riveting gameplay.

[Raoabolic]

Hey Peter, remember the time the devs nerfed the MSQ "into the cold" even though plenty completed it and everyone got upset when many said the instance was not hard? Tedious at parts, but not hard. I do, it was freakin' sweet.

[Cygnia]

Precisely how do those campaigning for the baseline content to improve want the challenge to be upscaled? Please less hyperbole and more specifics; hopefully there will be optional content that offers a better gradient of skill than normal/savage/ex/ultimate/unreal.

And I have to concur with my duskwight kin Illmaeran that perspective can be lost to a skilled veteran who has swung through the content countless times.
(the first and final boss in the Amarot dungeon still gives me trouble to this day with how finicky certain mechanics are regards position and timing so yes, I am probably by forum standards an awful player.)