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

[VelKallor]

And it isn't always about skill. I was a raider for years. I just won't put that time into it anymore. Not what I enjoy *anymore*. I play for the story, and I'm completely happy to learn what is needed to play 'normal' level content, and I'll do raid roulettes, too. I choose not to go into higher difficulties, because I have no patience for the kind of people that tend to cluster in those raids. Not that all are like that, but, enough.

This is where I and others stand, tbh, been there done that, I am certain a Mage of our acquaintance will say "You dont do it because you are bad, graylet" or some such nonsense.

The harder difficulties are there for people to do, sure, but that doesnt mean it APPEALS to as many as it used to.

A day or so ago, one of our more "enthusiastic" players decided to set up a PF for....Nidhogg Extreme, min ilevel no echo...later commented on his intense disappointment when no one wanted to do it.

No two guesses as to why.

Normal content is MEANT to be easily completed, it is STORY oriented, not meant to be a hard slog or a brick wall, Ill be blunt and say that what I believe I am seeing here is "make it harder so only the WORTHY get to see the content, "you should want to do savage you should want to do extreme"...this is the WOW mindset and quite frankly has no place here

I should do whatever suits ME, not you or your agenda for what you want the game to be.

t's all about "I have a life outside video games, and I refuse to schedule that life around a game, even if I do play it a lot." For me, it's that simple. I play games as my leisure time a lot, but, if family/spouse/etc want to do something out of the blue, I'm not going to tell them "Oh, sorry, can't spend time with you, I'm in a raid." YMMV.

Yup. Exactly. My schedule is varied, I play FF 14 for one reason mainly..I can log off and go do whatever whenever the hell I feel like it, I am beholden to no one's timelines or schedules, I do what I want when I want as it suits me. Forty years of dancing to others tunes, nights, weekends, holidays, mornings, afternoons, fifteen hour shifts, split shifts, broken or no sleep...been there done that.

Not anymore.

"But you can do it in PF if you want to"..again no thanks. FF 14 is marketed and RUN as casual, fun based, come and go as you please. "Make the content harder" isnt going to help anything. This is a STORY DRIVEN MMO, so making the story harder to get through isnt going to do anything but anger people and have them walk away.

I suspect we have more than few people who want this game to be more like WOW.....HARD PASS.

[VelKallor]

No one is denying that some people use cactbot or whatever.

So you agree they are cheating.

because it's possible with no evidence.

You just admitted they do cheat, so theres my evidence.

[Semirhage]

Is there any thread where you won't seethe about raiding while insisting it's not because you're *jealous* or anything? This angry fixation would suggest otherwise.

[Payadopa]

There is a lot of conflation going on here. Making something more difficult doesn't mean savage. At the moment everything bar current I guess is making me sleepy, personally. You can literally press 1 to 3 buttons and win. You can stand in most AoEs and don't even require healing.

I agree, the MSQ should stay accessable (whatever that means), but give us options. Playing HW now is mandatory. It's not hard, playing the Alex raids is not hard, there is no incentive to min ilvl and people barely do it anyway. The entire game is like that and it gets 'worse' with every expansion as new players get to wade through even more now. I've had a couple of new players in my FC ask why the game is so easy. A few left around mid ARR. I'm assuming SE gets more players that way and my experience is anecdotal at best anyway. Who knows.

Even if you are 'just' into the story it's just sad you don't even see all mechanics of a fight and the big bad dies within 30 seconds that the MSQ hyped up for 20 hours. That's pretty ridiculous if you ask me.

My solution would be more optional stuff like a min ilvl roulette or a dungeon Unreal or whatever. Put a token at the end for a shiny and people will do it. Or reuse old bosses, give them the Bozja treatment and put them in the open world. Anything, really. I think the important thing is to keep it out of the MSQ so people can trust their way through it unimpeded. Everything beyond that should be fair game to an extent.

[Carin-Eri]

This is where I and others stand, tbh, been there done that, I am certain a Mage of our acquaintance will say "You dont do it because you are bad, graylet" or some such nonsense.

The harder difficulties are there for people to do, sure, but that doesnt mean it APPEALS to as many as it used to.

A day or so ago, one of our more "enthusiastic" players decided to set up a PF for....Nidhogg Extreme, min ilevel no echo...later commented on his intense disappointment when no one wanted to do it.

No two guesses as to why.

Normal content is MEANT to be easily completed, it is STORY oriented, not meant to be a hard slog or a brick wall, Ill be blunt and say that what I believe I am seeing here is "make it harder so only the WORTHY get to see the content, "you should want to do savage you should want to do extreme"...this is the WOW mindset and quite frankly has no place here

I should do whatever suits ME, not you or your agenda for what you want the game to be.



Yup. Exactly. My schedule is varied, I play FF 14 for one reason mainly..I can log off and go do whatever whenever the hell I feel like it, I am beholden to no one's timelines or schedules, I do what I want when I want as it suits me. Forty years of dancing to others tunes, nights, weekends, holidays, mornings, afternoons, fifteen hour shifts, split shifts, broken or no sleep...been there done that.

Not anymore.

"But you can do it in PF if you want to"..again no thanks. FF 14 is marketed and RUN as casual, fun based, come and go as you please. "Make the content harder" isnt going to help anything. This is a STORY DRIVEN MMO, so making the story harder to get through isnt going to do anything but anger people and have them walk away.

I suspect we have more than few people who want this game to be more like WOW.....HARD PASS.

Totally agree and would upvote this post 100 times more if I could!

[Saraide]

So you agree they are cheating.



You just admitted they do cheat, so theres my evidence.

And you just admitted you cant read, yet here we are. Do you know what the word "some" means in this context?

[VelKallor]

Do you know what the word "some" means in this context?

Yes, i do.

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

[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.