MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[VerdeLuck]

Yes. the tuning is so fine that an entire role has been rendered obsolete in Endwalker MSQ. There is not a single dungeon throughout this entire expansion three of the four tanks cannot heal themselves through with very little difficulty. While we all like to meme on the absurdity of Bloodwhetting in a dungeon, Paladin and Gunbreaker are just as capable of solo-ing everything. Even Dark Knight can solo dungeons. They just need a good DPS group for pulls and some spot heals from a Red Mage. The fact tanks can accomplish this means healers are literal gimped DPS. If you're not spamming your AoE, you're actually less useful than Alphinaud or Urianger who will DPS. The latter, surprisingly, does more damage in some of the leveling dungeons than geared players.

Regardless of how you feel about the MSQ combat as a whole. I don't know how anyone can justify the tuning of Endwalker when it reduces an entire role to their secondary utility. Nevermind the fact prior dungeons have suffered so much power creep, they barely even tickle. I've gone through old Heavensward dungeons using less than five heals on new tank players. Bosses many dungeons can't even get through their scripted mechanics because they explode so fast. Once again, nobody is asking for the MSQ to be immensely hard or anything remotely equivalent. Many of us want our respective roles to feel like they have a purpose. Healers right now have almost zero relevancy.

You're talking about going into casual content completely overgeared and thinking it's too easy. No one runs the MSQ at max ilvl for dungeons. If you think it's boring you can just not run those roulettes and dungeons.

[ForteNightshade]

You're talking about going into casual content completely overgeared and thinking it's too easy. No one runs the MSQ at max ilvl for dungeons. If you think it's boring you can just not run those roulettes and dungeons.

... you can't overgear leveling dungeons, my dude. At least not the Endwalker ones where we're synced pretty much on par with what's expected and don't have the benefit of power creep. Which is another issue with older content. Ilvl doesn't mean much when the jobs simply aren't balanced whatsoever. Even at ilvl, Endwalker don't require the slightest bit of healing outside of Tower of Zot's massive pull. The tanks simply have too much sustain. When I mention tanks solo-ing bosses, they were doing that at level, on release. I should know. I was one of them. I solo'd Hermes in a hodgepodge of 80-85 gear. He never once got me below 15k.

There were even threads complaining about how insanely strong tanks are when Endwalker released. This isn't simply an ilvl problem, though I'll admit ilvl sync is a problem. Frankly, I think content should be synced closer to its relevant ilvl so things like Weeping City and Rabanastre aren't a shell of themselves. Hashmal used to actually have several mechanics we almost never see even in particularly bad parties.

[Rilifane]

... you can't overgear leveling dungeons, my dude. At least not the Endwalker ones where we're synced pretty much on par with what's expected and don't have the benefit of power creep. Which is another issue with older content. Ilvl doesn't mean much when the jobs simply aren't balanced whatsoever. Even at ilvl, Endwalker don't require the slightest bit of healing outside of Tower of Zot's massive pull. The tanks simply have too much sustain. When I mention tanks solo-ing bosses, they were doing that at level, on release. I should know. I was one of them. I solo'd Hermes in a hodgepodge of 80-85 gear. He never once got me below 15k.

There were even threads complaining about how insanely strong tanks are when Endwalker released. This isn't simply an ilvl problem, though I'll admit ilvl sync is a problem. Frankly, I think content should be synced closer to its relevant ilvl so things like Weeping City and Rabanastre aren't a shell of themselves. Hashmal used to actually have several mechanics we almost never see even in particularly bad parties.

Can confirm.
I've solo'd Hermes two times while leveling GNB shortly after EW release and had more runs where one or two dps were still alive and I healed them as well. Same for Vanaspati last boss, same for pretty much every boss in Babil. In ShB tome gear, so that argument "You just overgeared it" is moot. And I had a lot more tanks that did the same while I was leveling dps. Saw healer DC right after EW release a few times and we just finished the dungeon without a healer because they couldn't get back in. Single pulls are easily possible on every tank, WAR can just meme the way through wall to walls and PLD and GNB as well if they play decently well.

[DPZ2]

Can confirm.
I've solo'd Hermes two times while leveling GNB shortly after EW release and had more runs where one or two dps were still alive and I healed them as well. Same for Vanaspati last boss, same for pretty much every boss in Babil. In ShB tome gear, so that argument "You just overgeared it" is moot. And I had a lot more tanks that did the same while I was leveling dps. Saw healer DC right after EW release a few times and we just finished the dungeon without a healer because they couldn't get back in. Single pulls are easily possible on every tank, WAR can just meme the way through wall to walls and PLD and GNB as well if they play decently well.

Sounds like a reason to nerf Tank damage and mitigation, not to make dungeon instances harder.

< yes, I know. Tank damage and mitigation are so high-end instances don't wipe. Just don't use them as examples of the need for 'harder' MSQ content then >

[Semirhage]

Sounds like a reason to nerf Tank damage and mitigation, not to make dungeon instances harder.

< yes, I know. Tank damage and mitigation are so high-end instances don't wipe. Just don't use them as examples of the need for 'harder' MSQ content then >

Yay, once tank sustain and mitigation is nerfed the healer role will be saved. Then they can go back to oGCD healing once a minute and spamming Glare for the entire instance. So engaging, I don't know why anyone asks for dungeons in this very difficult impossible to complete MSQ to have anything more to them.

[ForteNightshade]

Sounds like a reason to nerf Tank damage and mitigation, not to make dungeon instances harder.

< yes, I know. Tank damage and mitigation are so high-end instances don't wipe. Just don't use them as examples of the need for 'harder' MSQ content then >

So your solution is to neuter another role or intentionally not play it properly than to actually ask for content being tuned around the trinity this game prompts? Great idea. How about instead we nerf all the tank, DPS included. After all, if mobs live longer that will also fix the problem.

I'll never understand this averse to wipes people seem to have. Who cares if you die? You don't lose EXP, gil or literally anything. That all being said, I do actually think tanks need their mitigation scaled back. Healers also need less healing abilities and the content as a whole should be tuned to where every job serves a purpose.

[Packetdancer]

I hit my post limit earlier and got put in the forum's "Talky Timeout" for a bit, sooooo let's just dump all the stuff I couldn't post...

Limit Cut and Kampos Harma [my static before we had to break because our raid leader is currently on night shifts were progging P2S] are the two mechanics I'm having issues with. Kampos because of the random nature with which he chooses who to hit first, Limit Cut because I can't see the damn marker if I'm in a crowd.

I mean, I know plenty of people who had trouble with the chaotic nature of Kampeos Harma without any other factors in play. Especially since, unlike most other things that get referenced as "Limit Cut" in this game, you don't have different colors for odd vs. even numbers.

(Whether or not it is a limit cut is a matter of debate; my ultimate static actually has a "Limit Cut Alignment Chart" a'la D&D alignments, based around what you consider to be a limit cut.)

Contrast that with P3S Darkened Fire, or the Flood Ray mechanic in Diamond Weapon EX, or most other limit-cut-like mechanics where you have the odd numbers in blue and even in red, meaning you have an additional visual cue to sort of 'speed up' recognition of the count over your head; if you think at first glance the number over your head is "six" but the pips are blue, time to double-check.

That said, even with Kampeos Harma, the mechanic can be broken down into only a couple of possibilities -- albeit by doing so in several steps.

1. Do you have a tether? Two possibilities: yes/no.
2. If no tether, just read the number and head to where that number is stuck on the map. (Four possibilities.)
3. If you have a tether, without thinking too hard about the number over your head, just notice if it's odd or even. If it's odd, go opposite the boss. (O = Odd = Opposite.) If even, huddle under the boss. (Two possibilities.)
4. If the other person at your square has fewer pips over their head than you, you ought to be further back than them for the first hit. If you have fewer pips, get up front. (Two possibilities.)

I have a friend who has memory issues, and who raids savage, and I like to come up with bite-sized approaches like that to mechanics to help her. Plus, little bite-size approaches do tend to make a mechanic easier to teach in learning parties, which I also enjoy periodically running.

Mind you, Kampeos Harma is also a perfect example of what I mean when I say I wish that marks like those also appeared as a debuff on the status bar; for folks who are visually impaired, they can put the status bar somewhere clearly visible and blow it up to like 180% of the default size -- for mechanics that do give you a debuff, that tends to make it much easier for them to resolve than relying on a visual cue that may be harder to make out, especially in a crowd.

Because frequently it's not that mechanics need to be easier, they just need to be communicated in a way that is accessible to more people.

And I suspect if the game was better about that, a large number -- not all, but many -- of the folks who feel they have issues with higher-end content would find at least some of their struggle went away.

I play with a keyboard and mouse. My shaking, when it gets really bad, makes it so that pressing the proper key or mouse button becomes enormously difficult ( I either miss, press a nearby wrong key by mistake, or press the key/mouse button multiple times).

As I sort of expected, this maps 100% to the issue Bryan had: he'd jitter and hit a key multiple times, or he'd hit a nearby key by mistake.

The software I was writing for him basically solved those two problems by 1. letting him hit any key near the key he wanted, and have it process as the key in question, by mapping sections of the keyboard to stuff (and sometimes even to a series of things, where it advanced one each time you hit something in that area), and 2. repeated taps of a key within a certain window of time were 'eaten'; e.g., if he tapped '2' three times in 400ms, it would read that as likely a mistake and swallow two of them before passing the input on to the game.

I'm now tempted to go dig up that old codebase and see whether finishing it out might not be beneficial in situations like yours.

If you haven't tried a controller yet, it might be worth a shot, I think with the ergonomics and how spread apart the buttons tend to be, it might be easier.

Obviously I can't speak for Eraden, but I know the issue my friend faced was that with the tremors, he'd jerk the joystick around -- moving his character or shifting the camera unintentionally -- and it made movement more difficult for him, rather than less; not twitching the mouse a huge distance was easier for him than not having a thumb twitch on the controller joystick, especially since you can adjust mouse DPI.

I mean, it never hurts to try, though!