MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Rilifane]

Heaven forbid I be responsible for turning into a giant gorilla and punching high explosives across the room. That's so unfair. I'd much rather press the same 25 buttons I've pressed for the last 100 hours to shave off 2% of the boss's health.

The calcifying effects of the design decision to never require any decisions of the players lest endgame raiders indicate a preference for certain classes (which they were going to do anyway) are even crippling DPS gameplay now. Every job gets uptime-friendly 'stand here, then here' mechanics. Every job bursts at 2 minutes. Every job wants the same substats. It's so tedious.

Ironically, A5 gorilla would be a perfect mechanic for modern FF14 healers. They do the least DPS, their burst doesn't suffer from not building up resources if they disengage, you have to bring two of them, and there's never so much outgoing damage that the tanks can't get along fine without them for 15 seconds.

What is more ironical is that the endgame raiders didn't even ask for it for the most part. Having some burst at 90s, some at 120s and some even during other windows was completely fine for most of them. I can't remember a single "please streamline everything and give me full uptime on every boss, everything else makes me feel uncomfortable" threads and only very, very few posts with most of them coming from people aren't really into it but rather do it for glam and want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

On the contrary, I've seen a lot more people disliking the perfectly scripted and aligned down to the second burst from everyone, feeling like it cripples design, takes away decision making and optimization options and find easy uptime fights boring for the same reasons. Especially the physical ranged role has been up in arms over this for years now because the unique advantage their role had is completely irrelevant now since everyone can keep uptime just like that in most fights while they still suffer from their ranged tax.
So, who were these changes for? Because they sure weren't for people that genuinely enjoy endgame raiding.

[vetch]

players complaining about MNK for 6+ years the overhaul in EW

I desired increased healing. I still do; but after asking for 4+ years, it’s clear we won’t get it.

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.

Reading threads on the healer forums would show you I’m not alone in this opinion.

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.

Now I desire more damage options since, if I’m going to be spending 80% or more of the fight pressing damage buttons, at least make it interesting and not 111111111111111 until my controller button wears out.

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'.

[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.

[Raoabolic]

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.

And by the looks of the game, a lot of the modern playerbase's personal threshold was "In from the Cold" and the Dead Ends dungeon. Too bad the game doesn't have a difficulty curve that would teach the newer players concepts like mitigation and mechanics. Eh, not that I have a horse in the race. I enjoy a little spice in my games but who am I to stand in the way of the dev's steamrolling that difficulty curve with the steamroller called "accessibility". lol

[HyoMinPark]

And by the looks of the game, a lot of the modern playerbase's personal threshold was "In from the Cold" and the Dead Ends dungeon. Too bad the game doesn't have a difficulty curve that would teach the newer players concepts like mitigation and mechanics. Eh, not that I have a horse in the race. I enjoy a little spice in my games but who am I to stand in the way of the dev's steamrolling that difficulty curve with the steamroller called "accessibility". lol

Before “In From the Cold”, it was “Will of the Moon”. Tbh, people are still complaining about that instance and they’ve added Very Easy mode…

[vetch]

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 becoming challenging again; 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.

I think if I hope for anything it should be for Square to open the purse and actually hire more staff for the game. Without dedicated healer designers who actually like healing on the job team *and* the battle design team, working together, it can't be anything but hit or miss whether a given fight has satisfying healing gameplay or just a raidwide every 30 seconds to make sure your green DPS are present and awake.

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.

It doesn't need to be that way. Guarantee you that the old Unreals are saved to a hard drive somewhere at CBU3 and could be brought back if the dev team wanted to. It boggles my mind that despite being stretched thin they go through the trouble of updating old trials for new levelcaps and then bin them after 4 months instead of sticking them in a corner of the duty list for MINE raiders to play with. Removing it after its patch cycle is up is a positive, deliberate choice, and it reeks of FOMO.

Also YoshiP's been on record in a Live Letter saying that they're deleting several mechanics from Seph Unreal. Earthshakers and something else where the tanks have to stand left & right of the boss, which I guess would be either towers or the double-stack? Either way, I was sad to hear it.

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.

Yes. The MSQ is fine where it is (it could stand to be brought to a uniform, non-spiky level of difficulty, though). It's praiseworthy when a game offers multiple difficulty levels, and it's important, too -- one of the main ways to have fun is to be doing something that's not too far above or below your current skill level.

Problem being for healers that, when it comes to Extreme and Savage which should be the Medium and Hard to the MSQ's Easy, they end up being 'Easy 2' and 'Easy but you have to press W'.

Jobs used to have skill interactions that were a lot more nuanced than “fill gauge to 50 then press button for big hit”. ...

I've read about most of those, but thank you for the recap.

[HyoMinPark]

I think if I hope for anything it should be for Square to open the purse and actually hire more staff for the game. Without dedicated healer designers who actually like healing on the job team *and* the battle design team, working together, it can't be anything but hit or miss whether a given fight has satisfying healing gameplay or just a raidwide every 30 seconds to make sure your green DPS are present and awake.

I can agree that they need dedicated healer mains on the development team. Having devs that actually play the role regularly in all forms of content could help improve the state of them. That said, listening to feedback is also important; and I hope they can also take some of the reasonable suggestions people have made and consider incorporating them as well. Having real healer devs might help facilitate this.

It doesn't need to be that way. Guarantee you that the old Unreals are saved to a hard drive somewhere at CBU3 and could be brought back if the dev team wanted to. It boggles my mind that despite being stretched thin they go through the trouble of updating old trials for new levelcaps and then bin them after 4 months instead of sticking them in a corner of the duty list for MINE raiders to play with. Removing it after its patch cycle is up is a positive, deliberate choice, and it reeks of FOMO.

I agree. It doesn’t. I wish they could figure out a way to maybe rotate them in and out. Kind of the way PvP rotates things like Frontlines, Rival Wings, etc. to incentivize and pull people into each mode. I don’t know how successful an Unreal Roulette would be, but maybe picking one each week that gives you an extra replay on the Fox board or something to keep the older ones alive. I think this could be down without having to upscale the old 80 ones to 90—or the 80 and 90 ones to 100, assuming that’s where we’ll be in 7.0.

Also YoshiP's been on record in a Live Letter saying that they're deleting several mechanics from Seph Unreal. Earthshakers and something else where the tanks have to stand left & right of the boss, which I guess would be either towers or the double-stack? Either way, I was sad to hear it.

He said they were removing the proximity damage from the earthshakers. I have heard nothing about the removal of the tower mechanic, which is not an exclusive tank mechanic. When the orange and green vulnerabilities are out, it becomes a responsibility of anyone with an orange debuff. When they aren’t, then it’s a tank mechanic. I think the promixity removal is fine. You’ll still need to do earthshakers properly to ensure there’s no overlap that will lead to people dying. I can’t imagine it being the double stack since you technically only need three people to live that (if you’re talking about the two jumps he does during Phase 1). The MT never stacked in that when it was relevant—it was DPS in one and healers/OT the other.

Yes. The MSQ is fine where it is (it could stand to be brought to a uniform, non-spiky level of difficulty, though). It's praiseworthy when a game offers multiple difficulty levels, and it's important, too -- one of the main ways to have fun is to be doing something that's not too far above or below your current skill level.

I kind of wish solo instances could have the opposite options of Very Easy—maybe add a “Hard” option to them so if people find they want a challenge, they can take it. And then leave the “Normal”, “Easy”, and “Very Easy” for those who don’t want it. More options would be good; and I don’t think it would hurt. Especially if you were given the option to choose without having to wipe first.

[vetch]

That said, listening to feedback is also important; and I hope they can also take some of the reasonable suggestions people have made and consider incorporating them as well. Having real healer devs might help facilitate this.

I would go so far as to say that it's required. Without someone who plays healers regularly to parse the feedback, it falls to the current team of DPS mains to do it. Accordingly (if they even take any feedback) they will pick the suggestions that seem feasible to DPS mains.

Crucially, DPS and healer mains often differ on their idea of fun. For example, as a healer main I like to feel like my party is in actual, real danger of dying to damage in difficult content and it's my skillful play preventing it long enough to win the fight... whereas DPS mains probably prefer it when they don't remain at low health, barely alive, one mistake away from death because I'm too busy doing triage healing on people who've been chosen for unavoidable damage.

You really need some healer mains on the design team to reconcile this.

I wish they could figure out a way to maybe rotate them in and out ... to incentivize and pull people into each mode.

Doesn't even need its own roulette entry. I'm in several large discord servers dedicated to re-running old extremes and savages that would jump all over the ShB Unreals.

He said they were removing the proximity damage from the earthshakers. I have heard nothing about the removal of the tower mechanic, which is not an exclusive tank mechanic.

I re-checked what I read and you're right about the proximity damage.

"Earthshakers, where two people get targeted for cones, used to have proximity damage, but it was too mean and so they removed it."
"Also there was a mechanic where Tanks had to position left or right, but they kept getting confused. "Our right? Sephirot's right?""

I don't know what the left-right mechanic they're referring to is.

[Absurdity]

They've also said they won't increase DPS options. There's no need to be at pains to respect one decision but not the other.

And personally, I'd much rather ask for something I enjoy than something I'm ambivalent about.

Because even if they say they were going to increase healing requirements it would most likely end up a joke.

Since the healer rework with ShB they have claimed to have increased healing requirements for fights multiple times. Every. Single. Time. it changed exactly nothing, you still healed the encounter the same as always.

So I'd rather take more DPS options that actually exist and make a tangible difference, instead of "more difficult" healing that only exists in the dev's heads. Which would also help with not falling asleep in low end content like dungeons or alliance raids, because they most certainly won't make healing harder in those.

[ForteNightshade]

What is more ironical is that the endgame raiders didn't even ask for it for the most part. Having some burst at 90s, some at 120s and some even during other windows was completely fine for most of them. I can't remember a single "please streamline everything and give me full uptime on every boss, everything else makes me feel uncomfortable" threads and only very, very few posts with most of them coming from people aren't really into it but rather do it for glam and want to get it over with as quickly as possible.

On the contrary, I've seen a lot more people disliking the perfectly scripted and aligned down to the second burst from everyone, feeling like it cripples design, takes away decision making and optimization options and find easy uptime fights boring for the same reasons. Especially the physical ranged role has been up in arms over this for years now because the unique advantage their role had is completely irrelevant now since everyone can keep uptime just like that in most fights while they still suffer from their ranged tax.
So, who were these changes for? Because they sure weren't for people that genuinely enjoy endgame raiding.

The whole direction of Endwalker seems like the dev team once again overcorrecting based on criticism to specific things. Uptime complaints were abundant mostly throughout Verse because E6 and E8 were notoriously bad for losing downtime with no means of adjusting strats to accommodate for it. Granted, NA did opt for the worst possible strat to exasperate the issue but the point still stands. Instead of addressing those specific cases by focusing on fights where downtime could be mitigated with creative solutions, they scrapped it altogether. Now you have boring strike dummy fights that only showcase why Prange movement tax is laughable. Then again, the sheer number of Prange players who can't figure out how to flex for P1S remains staggering.

Burst phases are similar, though more a product of the devs insistence on dumbing everything down to be near fail-proof. The hilarious irony is several jobs have become so incredibly rigid due to this change, they suffer more now than ever before. Bard, Dragoon and Summoner are notorious for having their damage completely crater if forced off the boss or said boss jumps away. Meanwhile, Gunbreaker has been made worse with the addition of Hypervelocity making it even harder to weave or re-position bosses and even the newly released Reaper doesn't help well with forced downtime. Something which Dragonsong has highlighted immense as it went from being the most popular job in Savage to the second least played after the seemingly forgotten Machinist.

A lot of their changes since Shadowbringers have been... questionable to say the least in who they're actually appealing towards.