"I don't want to think while I play, so no one should be allowed to."

[Shougun]

There have been a lot of things done that feel maybe 'that took away from people who liked that. . . ;/" but at the same time I really don't like nor want a game that is like "you want it, you got to WORK FOR IT" particularly if it's going to involve relying on others lol. Like some of my favorite dungeon runs is when I'm stuck with not so great people (who are nice) but I am able to try hard the entire team and carry a victory. I like playing with others but I greatly dislike having the little spare time I have being committed to 100% wasted time. I do not like trying to do some regular content (everything not savage and above basically) and spending the next 90 minutes wiping because some of the players don't get it. I realize this will naturally create a space that is a bit easier.. and I am okay with that. This is definitely the game I go to relax, not to join pro E-sports. I know some people like to go to that level, but I'm not interested. 20 - 50 minutes a day, I don't need / want that.

I also greatly value content getting easier over time and will definitely argue on that hill that most (sans Ultimate) should become solo-able by the next expansion release (or at least expansion and a half). I think it's possible to have a "but I did it when it was hard so everyone else has to do it hard too" but I think it's a generally bad mindset to have and one that should be carefully broken / ignored (mind the word carefully, give someone new hard content and the very next week make it a cake walk... that'd be silly and not okay). I also like this to help support a wider range of players, which SE has done and hopefully can continue to refine (as in you can join late and still do pretty much any content you're interested in, there is no death of content and imo THAT IS GOOD, but you could / should be able to find harder content at some point).

I do believe some people are asking for something they don't want, just haven't realized it yet lol- like that classic WoW dev moment but not satirically. Like few, not many, are wanting to see casual content become much harder by force (no options in PF or whatever). It will absolutely, imo, lead to an exodus of players and probably a significant increase in time investment that they weren't prepared for. You see ideas often that are like "ZERO FORGIVENESS" and I often imagine if they got what they wanted they'd be like "oops" lol. Now of course a lot of the time it's nuanced or just a general idea of desire and not a specific requirement just "I wish it was at least a bit harder", but I have seen just the same of casual imposing on hardcore that I see hardcore attempting to do the same (two way street of "it all belongs to me").

Yet that doesn't mean throw the baby chocobo out with the gyshal water... Why not change zero forgiveness into another scary tank buster or something? Perhaps echo is activated even at release (in that failure leads to echo, so a msq boss is tuned hard but failure would help alleviate wasted time). Or I don't think all healers need to be hard-mode but it does seem like all healers have been moving towards an easier and easier route with a few variables causing this including tanks are becoming more self-sufficient (at least at particular skill points). Certainly we might think of something to help. One suggestion offered is more support skills, with the type based on healer- for example one might be an en-buff that increases a target's damage with bounded results ("next 5 attacks deal 100 more potency, 60 second buff duration") and another might be offensive and yet bounded for balance like (pulling this from a dark theme healer thread I made) hemorrhage - increases target's damage received from party by x% up to y potency (may even add flavor like boss actions also cause damage, but due to the bounded structure you wont have to worry about huge balance issues). Say one issue SE mentioned before with AST was the party wide buffs were creating balance concerns because party wide buffs could cause a difference in power from 4 to 8 (obvious math), to which I think some of these support concerns can be solved by bounding the problem.

Another was making gear progression a little bit slower, to which I called it 'horizontal-lite' so powercreep isn't as fast during live content and perhaps particularly the defensive stats (but keep echo returning power creep... thank you lol). With a potential final twist, which I think initially might sound weird but in context of difficulty settings in solo games I think it makes a lot of sense, in that perhaps the harder to get gear might have higher damage stats but lower defensive stats than the easier to get gear which has the inverse (the difference ratio not being equal either, but enough that say ultimate looks for that extra few % from each player- if casual gear was 100 defense and 94 offense the harder to get damage gear would be 100 damage and 85 defense, keeping in mind the gear stacks so % increase would be larger in a whole while at the same time gear from the previous content might have some differences but would probably have a same ilvl due to horizontal-lite). The reasoning behind this is players who are good don't need help surviving, look at games that offer challenge options - what happens when a player chooses to play the content harder? Players who want hard content in most MMOs as far as I can tell are rewarded with easier content lol (and unlike sRPGs where you just go to the next content until you win and stop playing in an MMOrpg you will repeat that content, so literally rewarded with the opposite of what you were looking for).

This in some ways might be argued as a punishment. "Good job, now get less of what you wanted". Now of course there are a series of reasons why it is the way it is... you don't want to be rewarded by nothing that'd be very lame... So in this situation you'd be rewarded by being able to complete content faster (more damage) and also perhaps access to harder content that has more strict DPS floors, but would also say "good, you now have to be even more careful with mechanics- you know that thing our not so good / new player is face tanking.. yeah you can't do that as easily, don't forget to use your mitigation tools". I think for tanks the difference might have to be a bit more nuanced though like perhaps mitigation tools have a slight buff, but otherwise you still take a bit of a defensive hit (so if you use mitigation very well you'd not notice too much of a survive-ability difference but you'd HAVE to play well for that to be true).

There would need to be careful considerations on how big the window of horizontal-ness is and such though because you could easily make it so people who are like "I already did primal 1, and the gear from primal 2 looks silly so I'm not going to bother because there is no statistical reason why I'd do it".. such a thing could negatively impact participation.. which might be a good thing for those players as they feel less 'obligated' to play content they don't want to play... but also bad for the numbers obviously (less people.. bad). One thing might be okay is if they do the powercreep in steps, like step 1 is a few patches long and the next step would be like jump 20 ilvls (substantial enough everyone will start the cycle over again), meanwhile the gear itself might now have cool effects. So you get primal 1 (Ramuh) which gives your Dragoon jumps this building charge effect giving you empowered fancy effect abilities (with obviously increased damage) meanwhile Garuda comes out and has a lot of aerial focus so like your jumps apply a max hp % shield and have half cooldown, 50% movement speed degenerating over 5 seconds after each jump and can move during jump animation, etc or something super fun like that. So during this horizontal cycle you'd be trying them out just because it's fun to see how your gameplay changes, even if statistically behind the scenes they're "vaguely" similar in output.

Then the horizontal cycle ends and the jump is large enough everyone moves forward and the investment to get into content isn't like FFXI where it was like "that thing that took 6 months to earn, you don't have that- we don't want you, also you need another item that takes 2 months to earn.. get that too". The longer the cycle the more content will be remaining fairly challenging. May also consider other things like initially everyone starts out with similar ratios of offensive and defensive but as content progresses the ratio for casual gear is fairly consistent (~92-4 damage, 100 defensive) but the harder to get gear grows slowly through an expansion such that 500 gear defense isn't a super large difference from 520 defense (so the challenge for 'hardcore' players remains fairly consistent). This also helps in other ways because if you're in a DF with new players who don't get a content they wont be killing your time because they get readily rofl stomped. Think of the sRPG again. Players who are not confident / new to a content normally get more help, but in most MMOs (and in case of FFXIV) who gets the most help? The hardcore players. Who gets the least help? New players. Seems backwards, imo.

Anyway... There are loads of angles things can be talked about, to which I'd be happy to talk about each one.. but not in one post cause.. I'm already the one of if not 'the' longest tl;dr poster here, and I do see problems here and there people mention, but I also feel the converse relationship of OP's post definitely exists where people would like to take content away or aggressively require barriers of entry to never be adjusted. Just as a casual player may want to ensure MSQ is faceroll-able at all times, hardcore might be like "THIS IS MY CONTENT, BACK OFF PEASENT" lol. My personal ideal is that content will try to mutate to each player's play style, with some exceptions (like ultimate). And there are a lot of tools to do that, including just time. Time for example makes this current tier savage solo-able in a year, to which I say is a good thing. Like how the Eureka content, generally, mutates to allow it to not die after it was popular (bots can cause an issue with echo calculations unfortunately, depending on what you're doing).