Is the new Ultimate too hard?

[Somnolence]

IMO the difficulty of ultimate should be such that midcore static should have reasonable shot to clear it within a patch. Because the purpose of ultimate's is to bridge the gap for savage raiders between savage patches.

Kindred spent thousand pulls to reach final phase. This seems excessive.

This one likely will cause more of static collapses than DSR

[Amarande]

Or just... Don't engage in the content if it's too difficult?

Being that the comparison to Dark Souls was made, it seemed to me the point being brought up wasn't so much a matter of "not enough skill" for it, but the team logistics and culture matter.

You could be the most absolutely perfect player on the planet, and it won't do you any good unless you can assemble seven other players that cut the mustard. The toxicity gets in this way (especially when many people have such an obsession with clearing it first - I expect that groups going back to do older Ultimates to pass lull time are likely a lot more chill), especially when you also add in not only needing to have the potential, but needing to PROVE you have the potential (how much MMO forum conflict erupts over disagreeing over community standards of proof?).

A lot of people who might clear Ultimate sooner or later doubtless nope out of even trying it exactly because they don't have the patience for player pettiness, to put it bluntly. Some have probably even given up on bothering with Savage for the same reason - dealing with the politics of player culture just isn't fun. I went to high school over half a life ago. I have no desire to repeat it.

Ultimate is literally the biggest draw FFXIV gets on twitch. Even the MSQ doesn't bring in the numbers Ultimate and Savage World Prog do. It's undeniable Ultimate drew in people from the WoW exodus given that community's penchant for raiding. The engagement also comes from its longevity.

Which is another issue as well: the business realities of running a major MMO tend to require every means necessary to keep the customers rolling in, which means maintaining continuous attention (to often obviously aging titles, which need to compete for that attention with the plethora of brand new things, at that).

And it's surely pretty dang hard from a business conscience standpoint to pass up that much hype and marketing that the community does for you, even though it's clear that focusing on these raiders has negative knock on effects

IMO the difficulty of ultimate should be such that midcore static should have reasonable shot to clear it within a patch. Because the purpose of ultimate's is to bridge the gap for savage raiders between savage patches.

Kindred spent thousand pulls to reach final phase. This seems excessive.

Yep. Trying to curry the best of the best's favor definitely throws other, and likely far larger, segments of the player population under the chocobo.

I guess they could if they felt like nerf it later, as many developers do after the spectacle is over, though this is likely to receive no small amount of negative feedback also. (On the other hand, what you can't do is release it easier and then buff it later. See what happened to LOTRO raiding.) We cannot always be happy, apparently.

[angienessyo]

My group is in P2 of the ultimate so I can't give my view of the whole fight, but I've been watching what's ahead in the world race. And honestly it's hard to say. People thought DSR was too hard and people eventually figured out strats that made it more manageable. I imagine this fight will eventually have some concrete strats that take some of the bite out of it. When I look ahead of what's in the fight my thought is "this will probably take a bit for me to get through" and not "there's no way I can ever do this", so I don't think it's too hard.

[Jeeqbit]

Personally, my preferred difficulty level is all the way down at EX1 and EX2.

But people keep asking for harder content and saying everything is easy. For years, people have claimed savage is easy. So what is the point of saying content is too hard the moment it challenges you?

[Nihility]

I'm not actually sure "too hard" is the right wording.

What's happening is the field is getting so overwhelmed with so much stuff happening simultaneously that it's basically blinding everyone from seeing where to go even if they know how to do it.

I guess you could call it difficult in the same way driving fast on a winding road in thick fog would be difficult.

[Rolder50]

I'm not actually sure "too hard" is the right wording.

What's happening is the field is getting so overwhelmed with so much stuff happening simultaneously that it's basically blinding everyone from seeing where to go even if they know how to do it.

I guess you could call it difficult in the same way driving fast on a winding road in thick fog would be difficult.

So basically the end result of having fight design that is so rigid and scripted. There's only so many ways to combine the same mechanics before it gets to be too much.

[Tatiana]

It's supposed to be hard. There are a lot of players who want harder content that takes time to clear due to difficulty, I don't want SE to stop making really challenging content due to people using 3rd party programs. Not every form of content is going to be for every player out there, and I think it's really good for the game to have content like this in the same way it's been good for WoW for all of these years.

[Asari5]

several streamer said its a really fun fight to prog

[hagare]

supposedly not harder than DSR.

[RitsukoSonoda]

Again I feel like it's not really that it's too hard, and more of an issue of the people using 3rd party software saying their tools make the game too easy. And when said people are asked why they don't just stop using the tools their response is the content is supposedly unplayable.