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

[Volgia]

This issue with the game is not difficulty imo, it's the texture (things are too smooth). Even competitors are roughly similar (I don't die in regular wow dungeons either).

Adding challenges won't make the regular MMO player better, you'll only get a better pool by narrowing it. Many players don't want to sit down and fail for the hour they have to give the game.

I don't think generally making the game harder solves anything for anyone long term. As it isn't the core of the issue.

Healers can be valuable without a substantive increase in difficulty (meaning they feel important in regular content), content can gain variability without a large increase in difficulty, etc, etc.

I see this sentiment and I don't think they are hitting the nail on the head with difficulty. They want to feel alive again because each expansion their content loses flavors and ingredients, left with a basic oatmeal. They say if I had more ghost peppers I'd feel alive again, and maybe partially true- but they're making a terrible oatmeal doing that. Just add the actual dang ingredients back (and improve them).

It's not the difficulty but the texture of the game. Some texture may add minor challenges, but it wasn't the challenge that was making it more fun.

In the vast majority of games I almost never ever die, except for perhaps FromSoft's stuff. I don't only enjoy FromSoft's games. Death is not the key to happiness. Perhaps you weren't saying that, but honestly bad players biff it all the time in normal FFXIV content. You can almost always win without them. So really the only challenge to add then is failing the dungeon, and I think that would be bad to touch on very much if at all.

Anyway game can be slightly harder and benefit but it will be through adding texture (depth) and not specifically just challenge (like harder hitting fight isn't the solution).

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I think it's hard because they have to rehaul their whole CORE system of things. To my mind and as an example:

Healers don't get challenged in healing. I barely use my kit during dungeons, there's no damage triage for me to make decisions on who to heal during pulls, even in savage it's very situational when I have to focus my healing on a particular person (P8S purple circle thing comes to mind).

Tanks don't get challenged in tanking, there's no aggro management in any of the normal content, and extreme and savage content have resorted to just tank swaps.

There's no gameplay difference between casters, melees and ranged. Something like a Ninja should be able to do things like SCOUTING, Ranged should be able to trap (MCH/BRD) or Charm (DNC) CC things, Casters should be able to nuke things (BLM, PCT, SMN), other than their rotations/buffs their role in any given content remains the same.