Why is all new content such a cakewalk?

[Ranaku]

snip

First of all yes the first boss has indeed an "enrage", he covers the floor with these squares that if you stand in them when he casts the respective attack it will automatically kill you. If the fight goes on for too long, was fairly common back then in HW, all tiles of the arena will be covered by it and that is a guaranteed wipe!

I ofc can't speak for everyone and only for myself and a couple friends what i perceive myself as way too easy. Nidhogg for example back then wasn't really forgiving at all, not like the latest trial where 3/4 of the players can die and you can still clear no problem by just brute forcing your way through it with rezz after rezz.

My biggest problem is that it seems that SE doesn't know what midcore content is. You can ask most healers and they will tell you that they fall asleep almost when healing in dungeons etc. cause ofc there is not really much to heal and their job rotation is non existent. Would be kinda nice if SE would give us something that isn't savage but also not completely braindead afk dungeon runs, trials and normal raids. (And ofc alliance raids) It can't be that hard to give us slightly more engaging content that isn't a huge time commitment but as i said SE seems to only know the extreme of both sides.

Just feeling like it is a huge loss for SE not tapping into that market and playerbase. It makes a decent chunk of the playerbase just suffer and resent certain roles like healing cause it isn't engaging at all anymore. Even in raids healers usually don't have to heal beyond raidwides and the usual tankbuster, besides that it is again just glare spam.

[IckeDerTyp]

I cant speak for you but I've been playing mmos like this for years now!

Everything is so easy due to my fantastic skill and it's prolly similar for alot of others.

I call it the dark souls 3 principle!

I mean, it's orolly also due to the content being super easy but... I like the first way more

[Alaray]

stormblood dungeons and normals were pretty much the same difficulty tbh, if anything this last normal tier had more difficult things to execute in a df environment than any of the stb ones did. i can't really think of a stb dungeon boss or hw dungeon boss i'd call harder than what's been in dungeons now.

none of the stb alliance raids were that difficult people just got cleaved by hashmal and that's all anyone remembers. anyone who played back then was worse at the game than they are now, and job changes over time affect perception of difficulty as a lot of jobs did have a lot of things removed from them they'd have to manage to some degree back then (ie: threat).

[Ranaku]

stormblood dungeons and normals were pretty much the same difficulty tbh, if anything this last normal tier had more difficult things to execute in a df environment than any of the stb ones did. i can't really think of a stb dungeon boss or hw dungeon boss i'd call harder than what's been in dungeons now.

none of the stb alliance raids were that difficult people just got cleaved by hashmal and that's all anyone remembers. anyone who played back then was worse at the game than they are now, and job changes over time affect perception of difficulty as a lot of jobs did have a lot of things removed from them they'd have to manage to some degree back then (ie: threat).

Mistdragon was a real barrier for many players, have a couple friends that even had the dungeontimer back then ran out cause people couldn't beat it. Dungeons in HW were overall more engaging cause enmity wasn't just generated by the snap of a finger and healers had to heal actually more and had to swap between damage and healing cause cleric stance was a thing.

Stormblood raids were actually pretty challenging, the first boss of ivalice and lighthouse for example. Construct beat people up who couldn't do math. The dragon people who don't understand magnetism. Hashmals cleave and the adds you had to kill otherwise they explode and deal massive amounts of damage to the whole raid. Construct back then just killed you outright even at full health when you had 2 wrong answers.

Compare that to today where you can have only 1/3 of the group stand in their area when halone does her addphase and they still can kill it and ofc if the others kill the middle spear they can also join in. Which is just sad. Completely wrong positioning but it doesn't matter at all. So i ask why have an addphase at all when you don't even have to do it right? It's like cloud of darkness nowadays you can have 3 players in one circle and they still manage to kill the add no problems, just now in the latest alliance raid which is just hilariously sad.

[Alaray]

Mistdragon was a real barrier for many players, have a couple friends that even had the dungeontimer back then ran out cause people couldn't beat it. Dungeons in HW were overall more engaging cause enmity wasn't just generated by the snap of a finger and healers had to heal actually more and had to swap between damage and healing cause cleric stance was a thing.

Stormblood raids were actually pretty challenging, the first boss of ivalice and lighthouse for example. Construct beat people up who couldn't do math. The dragon people who don't understand magnetism. Hashmals cleave and the adds you had to kill otherwise they explode and deal massive amounts of damage to the whole raid. Construct back then just killed you outright even at full health when you had 2 wrong answers.

Compare that to today where you can have only 1/3 of the group stand in their area when halone does her addphase and they still can kill it and ofc if the others kill the middle spear they can also join in. Which is just sad. Completely wrong positioning but it doesn't matter at all. So i ask why have an addphase at all when you don't even have to do it right? It's like cloud of darkness nowadays you can have 3 players in one circle and they still manage to kill the add no problems, just now in the latest alliance raid which is just hilariously sad.

Mathboss can be killed by four people who live if everyone else makes a mistake and dies to something, I know this because they refused to just wipe it and held everyone hostage for 20 minutes in a run I did back then (and a 20 minute boss encounter sticks with you). Especially since failing the add just kills the group in there, not the entire alliance. Even Rofocale adds were easy to kill, plenty of times it was me + 3 others in our place and we'd win. Just. A lot more people were a lot worse at the game, either from when they were new in that expansion, or due to not knowing a lot of the job mechanics (I mean, tank-stance only tanks were common, and that neutered your damage output. Barely any healer players touched Cleric Stance, even the StB version).

Mistdragon I purposefully got 16 vulns on for fun and... it really wasn't hard to down, even like that, with a bunch of friends while we were drinking. It's a little less clear about how to do 1 mechanic on it, I guess? But it's ultimately just a divebomb. And even if you get hit, you only really die (and, to be fair, still generally do) if you end up in a snow gaol + proximity on you. I mean, I still remember the general discussions around the game back then regarding how easy dungeons were, since the "hard" dungeons in StB were a letdown for most players looking for a challenging dungeon. I do remember people saying -this- encounter was hard, which is fair, but it was generally an exception and not the rule (I mean, Fractal Continuum Hard was... not very hard, nor were... any of the StB dungeons, even if I gave Mistdragon as 1 encounter out of... how many dungeons?)

But Alte Roite? Easier than any normal raid fight since. Chardanook? Phantom Train? normal Kefka? Normal Omega where the entire mechanic is "do you know your lefts from rights"? Chaos? None of these were ever that difficult, most of these were snooze fests while a couple were fun, or the difficulty had more to do with understanding how the game registers your position, which... I'm not going to say that's inherent difficulty. Even the math encounter... the math portion is extremely easy, most people I knew who had a hard time with it misunderstood the mechanic (not realizing you're using your HP, and not just standing in a number that corresponds to something like... "Multiple of 3").

Most of those mechanics are just as easy as what we have today, with a few that you just need to die to, or it's not clear which of the 2 possible answers is the right one off the bat (ie: the Magnetic Lysis where after he tosses you up). Pretty much all of these were pretty basic, none really stood out as "particularly difficult". They were all generally cases of "People didn't pay attention to the giant flaming hand", or misunderstanding a not so clear presentation of something. I don't think people, generally, genuinely struggle with "what's a multiple of 3" or "what's a prime number".

And... even with all of this, is wiping because one group did bad damage to their add... difficulty? It's not in your control, there's nothing you can do to change that outcome other than ditch your group to help theirs. It's not a mechanical dance, and people have always been bad at damage somewhere. Is it satisfying to fail that? Do you learn anything when you do? If its your group, do you take it as a "I should practice my rotation" or would you think it's your gear, or your teammates struggling first? Or, does failing it just make everyone annoyed? What's the benefit of failing the Halone adds and it wipes everyone? Is it really satisfying to die to that? Is it fun?

Even then, how would you balance a DPS check where every player would be taken into consideration? People in BiS? People in Crafted? People in Normal raid gear? People who are less optimal in their gameplay? People who are way *more* optimal in theirs? People who use food + pots? People who don't? Balancing variance alone would be a pain with how big that alone is in XIV.

Hardest thing on Yiazmat was just positioning the boss correctly, but that's... 1 player's responsibility, so.


I mean, I'm not against more complicated fights. But I'm not seeing how StB fights were harder, at all. Maybe slightly more punishing? But, even then, it's... so slight.

[Raisoren]

I've noticed it too. There's next to no innovation in fights anymore, before in previous expansions it would've taken a good few attempts to get through raids, now everyone can do it first try. The same stack/spread attacks over and over and over every time.

[FudoMyoo]

Hello earth to Ranaku, this is a theme park MMO. It is supposed to be easy.

Quit whining.


P.S. I love my blind runs and getting wow-ed.

[CelestiCer]

( Meanwhile me in new content at the final Dungeon boss )



Q-Q-Quality Content we been asking for!! ( obviously )

[Aelin_Ashryver]

When i think back to stormblood and bosses like the mistdragon or the ivalice raids which had some challenging bosses (especially for uncoordinated alliances lol) i really can't help to feel like the content nowadays is just is just...way too easy.

Just for context, i am by no means some elitist raider who wants every piece of content to be as hard as savage raids. But at least some midcore challenge would be really neat.

I cleared the new dungeon now multiple times with random groups and we had no wipe at all. The new trial is hilariously easy, we got in fully blind and no wipe. Same with the normal pandemonium raids. And we don't even talk about the alliance raids who are difficulty wise just a huge disappointment, especially after we had the Nier raids.

I don't really get what is going on with SE lately, feels like we have either just savage/ultimate difficulty or content that is so easy even a blind and drunk moogle could complete it.

Did you just forget that extreme's exist? Barb and the most recent ex are both great imo. Nice 'midcore' content. Normal modes should be pretty accessible since they are all story.

[Ranaku]

Did you just forget that extreme's exist? Barb and the most recent ex are both great imo. Nice 'midcore' content. Normal modes should be pretty accessible since they are all story.

Yes extremes exist and they can be really fun but it's not content you do daily or for a long time. I don't think anyone really goes into extremes beyond getting their weapon and the mount maybe? The raiding content is really nice but afterwards people go back into hibernation.

I personally would wish for more midcore content that doesn't have a shelf life of some weeks. You know maybe some hard versions of dungeons which give you more tomes, something people can do daily through roulette and don't fall asleep. I did hope criterion would fill out that role maybe but it didn't really hit the mark.