The difficulty of Normal Content in this game needs to increase.

[Saraide]

Yes, i do.

Do you know what the words "the game and all encounters were designed AND TESTED to be cleared without addons" mean?

Yes infact. What you need to prove for your posts to have any worth however is not only that some raiders are cheating. That's not your underlying claim. You need to proof that all raiders are cheating or failing this that every raider in this thread is cheating. Because that's your generalizing accussation in opposition to this thread.

[LevKresnik]

Normal content seems hard enough to me. I can dance circles around Lunar Bahamut because I know that fight. I've done it recently, frequently, for glam farming. Of course it feels easy to me. Then I do a regular ole DF run with strangers and watch someone eat the vuln snacks like they're starved, because it's new to them or they just haven't cleared it in a while. It's okay to be good at the video game, sure. Maybe you do all the content and know all the fights. That's just swell. Through repetition, anyone can achieve the exact same. But if that's where you're at, then this normal content isn't for you anymore. It's for those who aren't there yet. Coming to peace with that does wonders for the soul.

[Dhalya]

I'd say the mechanical difficulty is fine, the LEVEL SYNC formula however is NOT.
They should really revisit how it works, because the lower you go, the more you just faceroll everything.
This is best visible in older ultimates like ucob, where non-tank role can survive a tank buster and several mechanics are skipped due to high damage.
The way we see most duties nowadays is not how they were and how they are intended to work.

I've had a few friends try out this game and they were very bored with the leveling duties.
They didn't notice they are failing many mechanics and their rotation is completely wrong, yet they were bored.
So yeah, I don't think this is helping player retention.

[LevKresnik]

If you have a competent tank/healer combo in the party, I absolutely agree that you can sleep through lower level content. I don't think I've ever actually seen a reason to be concerned with the adds in Sastasha's final boss, for example.

[Alice9]

As others have said, I think people are automatically reaching way too far into the extreme of this idea. Someone wanting more difficult normal content does not automatically mean they wish for it to be on par with extreme, savage, or anywhere remotely close (although the difficulties within those categories also vary intensively).

I think it is perfectly understandable for someone to want more challenge from some of the normal content this game has, even if just slightly. However I think the issue lies more in the challenge being rather lopsided overall throughout the game. I feel that a great deal of normal content in this current expansion is fine in terms of difficulty, but it really doesn't feel like this difficulty is consistent. Compare the first dungeon of EW to the all the ones in the middle, and then finally the last one of the 6.0 series. Even if you find all of them easy, many can feel those spikes in difficulty that lie, for some reason, within the first dungeon and the last. And once you've reached current content, older content feels too much like a drag than it should be.

The issue I believe many people have regarding difficulty of normal content is that it causes certain pivotal moments in MSQ to fall a bit flat. When you can get hit by most of a trials attacks and survive with few issues (Thordan), or do so much damage so fast that you get to skip entire mechanics or phases without even trying to do so (think skipping aetherial tear phase in Deltascape V3.0/Halicarnassus), that big bad guy that the expansion was working towards as building up as a villain doesn't seem so threatening anymore- and thus, victory over that enemy doesn't feel as rewarding, and the mention of characters discussing how great a battle it was becomes almost laughable. I believe this to be a genuine issue and probably a tremendous challenge of normal fight design overall- making a challenging normal fight that is engaging but not to the point of frustration when failure occurs.

In general, I think older content would benefit from more stringent ilvl syncs, and difficulty, regardless of whether you want it to stay the same, be harder, or be easier- should have a consistent direction within an expansion.

[LevKresnik]

This may be stretching the ole brain muscles, but I wouldn't mind seeing mechanics evolve in content that are relevant to the skills you unlock through leveling. Rolling around ideas in mind. An example might be getting your gap closer at [insert level], then the following instance might include a moment when using specifically that may let you narrowly avoid damage. Said moment is repeated once or twice during that expansion's life cycle, keeping it relevant without overstaying its welcome. I dunno. I've been up too long. Might be going nuts.

[Payadopa]

I'd say the mechanical difficulty is fine, the LEVEL SYNC formula however is NOT.
They should really revisit how it works, because the lower you go, the more you just faceroll everything.
This is best visible in older ultimates like ucob, where non-tank role can survive a tank buster and several mechanics are skipped due to high damage.
The way we see most duties nowadays is not how they were and how they are intended to work.

I've had a few friends try out this game and they were very bored with the leveling duties.
They didn't notice they are failing many mechanics and their rotation is completely wrong, yet they were bored.
So yeah, I don't think this is helping player retention.

I agree. The ilvl is bad in execution. Maybe have a slider and the lower you go you get X% more exp and a higher drop rate. I can see people do that to level up faster.

[Payadopa]

That is objectively incorrect. Less damage going into enemies = those enemies live longer = the run takes longer.

Time is not the only metric. If an encounter is fun I don't want it to end as fast. Brutal efficiency doesn't always win. How would you categorise housing and glam then? Not everyone plays like a robot.

[Absimiliard]

Time is not the only metric. If an encounter is fun I don't want it to end as fast. Brutal efficiency doesn't always win. How would you categorise housing and glam then? Not everyone plays like a robot.

I mean, housing is just masochism at this point. Good luck even getting one. And glamour.. well, we all know that's the true endgame. I don't know that I've ever seen a glamour (or mount, for that matter) farm party interested in taking the fights slow and easy, though.

I agree that not everything needs to be subject to absolute efficiency, but the majority of people queueing for roulettes aren't there because we find the encounters fun. Most of us just want it over with. My own solution was to just always queue for them as WAR (unless a friendly healer is queueing with me, in which case I'll run DRK or GNB for the higher overall DPS), thereby removing the need for a healer almost entirely. This frees the healer up to spam their 1 key with maximum efficiency while I keep myself and all of the DPS alive. WAR's damage is a wee bit gimped, but its kit is uniquely well suited to compensating for other people's screw-ups in casual content.

[KeshLives]

I agree that not everything needs to be subject to absolute efficiency, but the majority of people queueing for roulettes aren't there because we find the encounters fun. Most of us just want it over with. My own solution was to just always queue for them as WAR (unless a friendly healer is queueing with me, in which case I'll run DRK or GNB for the higher overall DPS), thereby removing the need for a healer almost entirely. This frees the healer up to spam their 1 key with maximum efficiency while I keep myself and all of the DPS alive. WAR's damage is a wee bit gimped, but its kit is uniquely well suited to compensating for other people's screw-ups in casual content.

You can, of course, play the way you wish, but, for me, if there's a pet peeve with the MMO genre, it is the drive for efficiency in all things, *that gets pushed by people who like it, onto people who want nothing to do with it*. I HATE the whole push for speed speed speed at all times *IN NORMAL CONTENT*.

Sure, if you're doing Savage/Extreme/Ultimate content, whether raid or trial, by all means, optimise as much as needed to get the job done. I understand that completely, been there, done that, if not necessarily in FFXIV. If you're fighting a timer, ala M+, sure. But normal content has nothing of the sort.

But, the whole drive to shave 120 seconds from Sastasha or Cutter's Cry, or Holminster's Switch, or <pick some normal dungeon or trial> drives me bonkers. In the name of saving two minutes, they'll pull too much, kill the tank three times, and of course, completely lose the time they were supposedly trying to save in the first place. Makes no logical sense to me at all.