Why do people avoid getting better at the game?

[Turnintino]

I try very hard, actually... u_u

[Kaurhz]

I would argue that it isn't that they aren't required to get better - Just that most people are simply too lazy to do such. Or because of disability or just outright hitting their peak sooner than others.

The problem with such measures is that people who don't want to learn - Will never learn regardless of what you try and propose for it, in grouped content, to a certain degree this will just inconvenience the group at large as they will be forced to then pickup the slack.

Further to this though... You need to consider that it is also done with accessibility in mind, e.g., those that may have some form of disability or just something imposed by older age, I don't think people should be relegated to a solo experience with the story just because you don't feel like the game is challenging enough. But one thing to consider though is when you do the upper end of content, e.g., extreme and savage then the remainder of the game on normal level just feels slow by comparison, but if you only do story then to a degree it does actually have progression with difficulty. That said, I do personally think the game has gotten more mechanically challenging, but stuff like gear creeping renders a lot of it moot, similarly, and by this, you just find that things don't hit maybe as hard as they ought to.

I'm not entirely against it by any stretch, but there are implications behind some of the suggestions e.g., why should people who might be bad at the game due to external factors need to be relegated to a solo experience? All this does is goes from punishing one group of players to punishing another group of players, and many of the latter may be of no fault of their own.

Similarly, the next implication is that by enforcing challenging group content that you will force everyone to get better at the game - This is not always the case. Many people hit their peak sooner than others, this is not an appropriate countermeasure for laziness, etc.,

[Rilifane]

I don't even care about "hard/ difficult", I just want things to have replay value because they're still engaging after the first few times.
And the big problem preventing that is the extreme predictability of everything and the big gaps between two big brain mechanics happening. Between them happening you have... nothing. Smileton, Eric and Tapeworm Lady are good examples of this but there's plenty more. You have long gaps of nothing happening, where you just stand still and do your thing. This is especially annoying on tank and healer as the former doesn't have anything to mitigate and the latter nothing to heal. But even on several dps it just gets so repetetive. You have long periods of dummy fight, a short big brain mechanic that makes first timers go "ooooh! aaaahhhh!" and then back to dummy fight.

Practice, getting better at your class and game and all wouldn't be so bad if the focus wasn't so heavily on having that 1-2 big brain mechanics but then nothing else because can't overload poor brains, so better not add anything else.
Instead of making it overall smoother and giving you more smaller things to react to in shorter intervals. That's what often keeps content in other games engaging even for experienced players that ran it many times.
It's a matter of balancing the impact of mechanics (how detrimental is it if you fail?) and the frequency and the predictability so you have a more consistent engagement that doesn't suddenly poof after a couple of runs. And you always have binary positioning. There's a safe spot that's always 100% safe, you either stood in it or not. And since patterns are mostly static and repeat, that leads to being able to position in a safe spot that will cover the next 2-3 mechanics and dozing off for the next 4min because you don't need to anything else.

Things like getting knocked up for a bit or a 2s stun or a short slow or a short damage down when failing something makes it low impact but still gives you a clear incentive to try to avoid it. If you fail, it's alright. Not the end of the world, it's more of a nuisance than a real danger. But you have more to react to instead of having a handful mechanics over 10min that look really complicated and like you need to study for it but ultimately come down to standing in a specific spot and you will eventually know before it happens where to stand. That is how things become stale for experienced players: it's a lot of smoke and mirrors but very little consistent substance.
You can add these mechanics and show creativity, not saying they're bad in general. But when the entire encounter is focussed around them it can get problematic; quality isn't always better than quantity and the lack of quanitity makes it stale for veteran players.

[AnotherPerson]

Dungeon difficulty has slowly gone up in terms of mechanics, but the overall difficulty has gone down based on the maximum survival threshold of our job's toolkit went up in a party setting. Look no further than how tanks improved from Stormblood's dungeons in a 4-man / Shadowbringers' dungeons during Shadowbringers expansion and Endwalker dungeons in a 4-man currently.

The dungeons in Stormblood actually required a healer to power through it because tanks didn't have natural self sustain. The amount of sustain they had was a lot lower that they can die to bosses from unavoidable damage.

In Shadowbringers expansion, tanks have gotten better mitigation. PLD and WAR in particular went crazy strong in terms of self-sustain when push comes to shove. WAR can now use Nascent Flash (HP recovery per enemies hit) over Raw Intuition (flat damage reduction). PLD being able to keep one to 2 other players alive during Malikah's Well Final Boss even if a healer is dead purely from the lowered MP cost of Clemency being able to keep up with their MP generation (4000 MP -> 2000 MP) and Atonement. That being said, tanks still mostly relied on healers. Healers were still pretty important when things go south, but the amount of healing tank can start being able to cover gave a LOT more room for error in terms of finishing a duty - thereby drastically reducing the difficulty of the dungeon.

In Endwalker, every tank has the ability to self-sustain and can do dungeons without bringing a healer (which only speaks volumes to how much extra room for error that healers -- whose entire toolkit is basically healing now-- can provide to prevent a wipe when in the past, they were a necessary component). Parties even sub in a third DPS if they are premade for that reason because the innate self sustain of a tank is enough to offset the total amount of unavoidable damage in most cases. WAR had their Raw Intuition reworked so it will now recover HP in dungeons starting from lv 56 onwards rather than wait until they get Nascent Nascent Flash at lv 76. PLD gained healing on both Sheltron (Now Holy Sheltron applying both mitigation + regen effect) and in 6.3, PLD got another rework where they have healing attached to every Divine Might combo/Requiescat usage.

A more extreme and easier to see example of Dungeon's mechanical difficulty versus overall difficulty would be the Lv 47-49 dungeon Aurum Vale. If you compare Endwalker dungeons and then you look at dungeons like Aurum Vale, you can see the difference easily. You can say Aurum Vale is much easier mechanically in terms of simplicity (especially after the telegraphs are now visible nerf), but the dungeon itself is much more difficult in relation to that level because of both a stat limitation and skill limitation required players to perform a lot better than what is demanded -- the party themselves couldn't greatly exceed the difficulty of the dungeon. There's a lot less room for error. Aurum Vale is a 4-man party where you actually needed a tank, a healer, and DPS to do the dungeon.

A more mild example would be Bardam's Mettle (Lv 65 dungeon). That dungeon's mechanics are very straightforward. However, the mobs themselves can hit very hard and wipe the party if the tank and healer are not up to par with their mitigation and healing. There's room for error and mistakes, but it's one of those dungeons that really encourage all players to use all of their toolkit or they won't have a very easy time. This was especially the case with the gear spike in the past (ILV260 Shire gear and ILV274 HQ gear had a huge gap in defensive scaling in the past, but I'm not sure if it's still there in Endwalker after stat squish).

There's a huge reason why people say healers feel very superfluous in dungeons for that reason, and would rather have more engaging DPS gameplay when they are stuck pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1 in Endwalker -- and is magnified even more than Shadowbringers now that tanks no longer require as much attention on external healing with each passing expansion. Between big differences in maximum ILVL sync through gear and lots of skills, there's so much leeway that the difficulty feels like it has gotten lower, especially with how predictable mechanics are once you seen them enough times.

[Carin-Eri]

It isn't necessarily avoidance in all cases.

I've been playing since December 2021 and whilst I'd say I've probably improved over that time, I'm still not where I feel I should be for someone who has been playing for as long as I have.

And I will say that it's NOT for want of trying. I've worked my ass off learning rotations with the jobs I've chosen and have a fairly good grasp of the ones I've learnt (still haven't really tried healing and have only dipped my toe into Tanking) but despite that I seem to have an absolutely appalling memory for mechanics. No matter how many times I've played *enter name of content here* I either forget the mechanics, make stupid mistakes or simply react to them too slowly and end up tanking the floor.

I don't know - perhaps one of these days something will click and I'll suddenly stop being so useless where those issues are concerned, and again - it isn't that I don't try - but I do still feel like my performance shouldn't really be where it is at this point and I could understand if someone were to think that I fall into the subject category of this thread.

[Rithy255]

I think Endwalker msq, trials, dungeons are actually pretty fine in terms of difficulty, I know on patch day when it was all new people seemed to have to learn somethings and the pulls were generally pretty hard as a tank/healer (if you didn't have a warrior) for a lot of the msq 6.0 dungeons, Not to say a lot of it is difficult but I don't really think it needs to be, it teaches you the basics its a decent challenge where you need to be aware, Although my main complaint is that tanks should be punished a bit more from taking a vunstack from failing a mech (increased damage on tanking classes specifically would be nice).

I wouldn't mind more midcore content though, I feel like theirs not a lot in-between dungeon level content and Savage content. It would be nice to have more things around slightly below EXT trial levels in general or a system to replay dungeons but made harder or something? like adding more damage and having less obvious mechs, I do feel like its too much of a Jump to get into EXT from normal duties I remember doing one of the SHB EXT and being told to watch a guide by a friend and all of it seemed intimidating at first.

[MistakeNot]

Jokes on you, the dungeons get significantly easier over time. They practically play themselves.

No. No, they don't get easier. On the contrary the later dungeons in the game are significantly harder than the early ones.

Nowadays there is really only one mechanic in the dungeons, and that is to avoid AOEs. In the later dungeons you have much less time to react to AOEs, and often less safe space to find.
In some cases the time to react becomes so short that unless you have already memorized where to stand there is sometimes practically no chance to avoid an AOE.
This is not the case in the early dungeons - there you usually have a chance to avoid the AOE attacks no matter where you stand when the boss starts casting.

[ronibosch]

They only nerfed the easy and very easy version, normal version was left untouched iirc.

Oh, I see. That's a relief. I'm cool with them nerfing it for the easier versions, as long as normal remains untouched. I want to try it again in the future.

It was a pleasant challenge that I wasn't expecting during the MSQ.

[Gemina]

If people actually used their buttons instead of still spamming cure 1 in lv90 content, then yes current dungeons would be a million times easier than mid ARR/HW dungeons where you are strippe off all your tools. When i get a tank that knows what to do, i never have to use half my kit cause its just that easy

What are you even talking about? This sounds like you're regurgitating the thoughts of the echo chamber, but lack of experience healing in dungeons has you making any sense of it. The more abilities all the roles get, the less a healer has to rely on GCD heals to sustain the group. Ease of trash pulls in dungeons is a team effort. Tanks using their skills mitigate damage, healers using oGCD skills to help sustain while dealing damage, and DPS figuring out ways to optimize their kits to burn the trash quickly so healers don't burn up their resources and end up having to spam GCD heals. It has always been this way, with the difference between low level and later dungeons are players have more skills to accomplish. this. In lower level dungeons, healers have no choice but to use GCD heals because they do not have enough oGCD abilities to take care of the job.

Besides, trash pulls don't have mechanics. The dungeon difficulty I'm referring to belongs to the bosses. What later dungeons have a lot more of than earlier ones are a guaranteed wipe if the healer eats dirt and there is not another job like RDM or SMN to raise them. If you're a healer in these instances, I would worry a lot less about getting a tank who knows what to do, and make sure you're staying on your own feet. If you die, the wipe is pretty much entirely on you.

[Shinkuno]

What are you even talking about? This sounds like you're regurgitating the thoughts of the echo chamber, but lack of experience healing in dungeons has you making any sense of it. The more abilities all the roles get, the less a healer has to rely on GCD heals to sustain the group. Ease of trash pulls in dungeons is a team effort. Tanks using their skills mitigate damage, healers using oGCD skills to help sustain while dealing damage, and DPS figuring out ways to optimize their kits to burn the trash quickly so healers don't burn up their resources and end up having to spam GCD heals. It has always been this way, with the difference between low level and later dungeons are players have more skills to accomplish. this. In lower level dungeons, healers have no choice but to use GCD heals because they do not have enough oGCD abilities to take care of the job.

Besides, trash pulls don't have mechanics. The dungeon difficulty I'm referring to belongs to the bosses. What later dungeons have a lot more of than earlier ones are a guaranteed wipe if the healer eats dirt and there is not another job like RDM or SMN to raise them. If you're a healer in these instances, I would worry a lot less about getting a tank who knows what to do, and make sure you're staying on your own feet. If you die, the wipe is pretty much entirely on you.

i wonder if you realize that you basically say that its easier without realizing