MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[HyoMinPark]

Hmm.

What this tells me is that you've reached your personal threshold, not that it's objectively clear that it will never happen.

That's fine.

I disagree. Participating in high-end content since Creator and watching it require less and less healing even during progression is what I’m basing my statement on. And if Savage is suffering from lower and lower healing requirements, the content below it will suffer even more. I keep hoping to be proven wrong, and sometimes there’s that one fight that makes me feel like maybe content will become challenging again (E8S, for example, was the hardest Savage fight in ShB—the rest were a bit meh, with the exception of E12S door boss. She was good, too); but I’ve been waiting for several years to see this. One fight that actually challenges you every year or two years just isn’t acceptable, in my opinion.

For healers specifically, I’m only really challenged or engaged during Ultimates when progging them. Most of the time I’m on auto-pilot pressing my one nuke and not caring about much else. I find ways to optimize by mapping my healing CDs to never have to press a GCD; but that’s also in part to mock how little I actually need to go out of my way to heal. If I want to actually heal, I spam old 24-man raids in the hopes of finding that one party that’s a clown fiesta. I don’t think it’s healthy for the role that healers need to go out of their way to find engagement.

I’m hoping Sephirot Unreal will be a real throwback to his original HW fight, which was actually really challenging and hard. He was, more or less, a Savage fight. But again: that’s one fight that will only be around for ~4 months and then go offline when the next Unreal comes out. I wish it didn’t have to be that way. I don’t think the MSQ needs to be Dark Souls levels of hard, but making Extremes and Savage feel like Extreme and Savage again would be nice. Current Extremes are nowhere near as difficult as some of the older ones.

Back in HW, Yoshida went on record telling individuals to better themselves instead of asking for nerfs (this was back when people complained the story mode trial Final Steps of Faith was too hard). Now, things have been simplified in the name of accessibility, but it has gone too far. This simplification goes beyond content design and into job design. Healers see this shift more than others since they are the ones responsible for keeping people alive.

I've been reading healing threads on the healer and general forums for almost a year now while I was on the free trial. Before I found the official forums I was searching up healer threads on the FF14 subreddit, desperately trying to confirm that I wasn't crazy and alone in finding 14's "healing" "gameplay" stultifying.

Then I’m glad you’ve seen that healer mains are dissatisfied with the state of their role. My original point still stands, though: don’t presume that people saying “the devs have said we won’t get x” mean they’re also at peace with the decision. You implied I was at peace with low healing requirements when that isn’t the case.

It would be difficult to make DPS interesting for me no matter how many buttons are added without having some clever skill interactions like friendly-targeted damage auras, pet control, punishment mechanics, spell backfires, or something more decision-heavy than 'keep these oGCDs on cooldown and never overcap your job gauge'.

Jobs used to have skill interactions that were a lot more nuanced than “fill gauge to 50 then press button for big hit”. SB BRD was the perfect example of a job whose kit interacted with heavily with critical hit. Now, there were flaws in this design due to the way critical hit scales as expansions progress, but this kit interaction was completely removed in ShB instead of tweaked to interact with either a job-exclusive mechanic or otherwise.

DoT ticks used to proc Repertoire. I don’t know how familiar you are with BRD, but Repertoire gives you things like Pitch Perfect stacks and Bloodletter procs; and this interaction could be manipulated by snapshotting critical hit enhancing buffs with Iron Jaws onto your DoTs. They also had a raid buff called Foe Requiem that drained mana for the benefit of increased damage to targets affected, and Refresh was used to manipulate and promote using this raid buff more frequently (Refresh was a party-wide mana restore cooldown). A lot of these elements were gutted in ShB, and the job is a shell of itself now. EW took care of the rest, as DoTs have no interaction with Repertoire or the toolkit anymore. Iron Jaws lost its versatility and how you could optimize it, and the concept of double snapshotting raid buffs is gone from the job. Now you snapshot once in 2-minute windows and then at ~3s or less. Foe Requiem and Refresh were outright deleted from the game. There was also synergy between BRD and DRG and SCH back then, primarily because of their crit buffs, but also because DRG offered piercing resistance down, which was a flat 5% damage increase for the entire fight. That said, piercing was flawed and not many physical ranged miss that synergy.

Now? You don’t really have job synergy. You see more anti-synergy because of things like critical hit or direct hit raid buffs not directly benefiting all these abilities they keep adding that are auto-direct hit crits. It is my understanding that they are looking into fixing this, though; but I don’t believe it will bring back synergy between jobs. Which had both its benefits and pitfalls, I will admit.

Pet control has disappeared from SMN with the advent of EW. SCH doesn’t have nearly the same interaction with the fairy that it used to have. The only downfall of pet control in this game is the pet AI being unresponsive and ghosting. I’m not sure if the developers ever attempted to fix this or just decided to axe the interactions/lessen them instead. I miss Carbuncle actually doing something and old pet interactions SCH had. Even SCH fairies having different functions I miss. Eos used to be the “heal fairy” and Selene was the “DPS fairy” because she gave a raid buff.

Mechanics should be more punishing when it comes to level capped content, I agree. Too many things now are inconsequential when it comes to failing them. I don’t believe in making everything a OHKO, but I also don’t think the way to go is to allow players to eat mechanics because they’re literally not threatening. I wish you had done Orbonne Monastery back in SB before they completely gutted the raid. Thundergod Cid actually punished you for not respecting his mechanics. Nowadays, you can disrespect the heck out of him because the developers both nerfed his fight and added the 10% Echo to the raid.

It’s unfortunate how elements of jobs have been gutted in favor of making things “streamlined” and “more accessible”. There comes a point where it’s too much.