People Enjoy hard Games

[Renalt]

IMO one of my issues with these discussions is how casual and hardcore are constantly being used to describe skill levels when they originated and should still be used to indicate a person's playtime tendencies. Skill levels run a full gambit regardless of how much a person plays the game. You have casual players who spend very little time in the game but maintain a high player skill level which allows them to easily jump into any content without issue. And on the other end you also have people who spend 40+ hours a week in the game that spend most of it floor tanking and being a punching bag when they aren't an actual tank role job.

By design the game is very casual friendly when applied to the original meaning of the term. With things like Duty Finder and Party Finder it's very easy for players with limited time to hop right into content in most cases. People labeling "Casual Gamers" as the people who only have 1 braincell are likely part of the reason the content of this game has been getting systematically dumbed down every expansion following HW.

Not everyone is going to figure a new mechanic out by seeing it once. There's no issues with getting hit by it a few times. However there is a line to be drawn and it essentially separates those who learn from the experience whether it takes 1 time or 100, and those that just refuse to learn at all. And the latter TBH needs to stop being catered to as it's holding back the former. The end result being the nearly non existent learning curve to upper skill level content as they've just about turned it into a cliff face by lowering the content that should have the incline to reach that higher level.

I agree with this one. I'm on very little so I'm very casual but by no means a slouch.

Also about not getting the mechanics the first time too. You know how many times I died to sniper boys shot? Way too many times because how it's presented and said in game tells me the opposite of what I would normally do.

He says he sees your weak point and then you have a barrier around you with a little hole in it. You are suppose to maneuver the hole so he shoots through that...( what i thought was the weak point ) rather than have the entire barrier take the shot. I had to ask what I was doing till someone was like "show him your hole" and I did that and actually survived.

[Lyth]

I think it relates to the effective time investment required to clear content. You can take your time, or you could get through everything very quickly and then log after getting your raid drops for the week, it's a matter of preference.

Most 'casual-friendly' content is designed such that you don't really need to understand what's going on so long as there are others who do. There's no real time investment involved involved in clearing (although you can always improve your skill on a personal level and figure out how to do the mechanics more cleanly). In order to have a 'progression' experience, you need content that will wipe you repeatedly until you can prove that you know each mechanic consistently on an individual level. 'Midcore' is a fairly nebulous term, but I think that it does need to involve oneshots and attendance checks at minimum to test your knowledge if you want it to be a distinct entity from more casual content. If you can floor tank the encounter into a clear, then it's probably not midcore.

[Post]

It's true that some people think of content as ____core while others think of a player's general time investment as ____core.

These are not always clearly defined terms and it can help to be a little more specific when trying to compare what you're saying with someone else.

Something related to the alliance raid discussion though; I wonder if part of the reason they're as easy on release this time around is because of indirect factors. Like, rotations have become significantly easier to align in EW even when compared to ShB thanks to the Advent of the Almighty 2 Minute Meta, so in general groups probably deal higher relative damage than before. Especially with the buffs to all jobs amid 6.2x regarding guaranteed crit/dh actions and such, I think some of the effect might have been that they didn't recalibrate relative average player damage outputs to their item level.

Item level requirements have been predictible since like, patch 2.2, and the fact that they haven't changed means that they're not redoing that calculus.

I recall my first time into the 6.4 dungeon on patch day with an entirely blind team; we beat every boss before the music made it halfway into the chorus.

With the lesser requirements for relics, tome weapons and even Anabaseos' generous coffer drops and token exchange rates, I'd expect 6.5's raid to be the breeziest clear times on release ever if they keep things at Eophrosyne's level of challenge and complexity.

I'd take those streamlined classes if it means encouraging better flowing instances, since it doesn't seems they'll back down from 2 minute meta.

Trust me, unless they completely flip the script and change course, they're not doing one thing simpler to allow the other to be more complex. They have a history of overcorrecting by tackling an issue from multiple fronts. Take job ground targeted actions: basically completely fixed to be easy to use in EW finally, but the only ones that remain are Shikuchi or ridiculously huge anyways. Even DRK's got changed to self targeted in the very patch they fixed them. If something gets removed, it often gets replaced with nothing.

Just the limited amount of time they spend describing battle content every live letters speaks volumes. More time was spent on it before because it was more of a consideration before, either by the devs alone or from player feedback or both.

[ChonkGoblinSuprem]

Wait, savage is midcore?

LoL that’s how they sneak in a brag about how super good they are at bideo james.

[Ivtrix]

LoL that’s how they sneak in a brag about how super good they are at bideo james.

Everyone worse than me is a stupid noob casual and everyone who’s better than me is a tryharding gloating showboating elitist

[Post]

I didn't die to the sniper shot the first time for a few reasons:
I read the debuff
I realized that it wouldn't make much sense to make a mechanic have a 75% chance of randomly succeeding
This was reinforced when the screen get less glowy and scary when you faced the un affected side to him.
On reflection, my character doesn't normally have glowing weak spots showing, so why would glowing bits suddenly appear if I was under analysis.

I realize that sounds like 'I'm so smart', but I'm trying to say that I think it's a more fair mechanic to decipher than like, Zurvan's comets, where you have to either match the colors or balance the colors and nothing about his debuff description on theming implies which is correct in advance. Also, if you miss one you bleed a ton because fuck you (talking normal mode. There's only 3 comets in normal. By extreme you'll have been through normal and ostensibly understand the basic rules). In general they have improved communicating mechanics, especially novel ones.

Mustadio's analysis it's confusing because they try to communicate more and more visually, so reading a debuff quickly probably isn't the thing that grabs your attention first with it. It does look like it could simply be a barrier around your character with a gaping hole. I don't even know how controller players are supposed to read debuffs mid combat, do they toggle through the UI?

But like, even if nobody does anything, it is a mechanic that 25% of players will survive on average, among which in a 24 man it's likely that at least one can rez. He doesn't exactly snowball if you're short on players. And if not, it's not so far into the fight anyways.

That's not really a 'challenging' mechanic, just a surprising one. You won't die to it multiple times once you understand what's being asked of you. Compare to maths, even if you know what to do you might screw that one up because you're not great at arithmetic under pressure.

[SquishyPlushie]

People do want hard games, but only if they get properly rewarded for it.

The pre-allocated weekly timegate loot shtick isn't worth it for many people for dealing with static groups to complete raids.

[Post]

I don't look up fights in advance most of the time cuz it's fun to not know what's coming next. Not just in terms of mechanics, but moments hit harder if I haven't seen the visuals or heard the music before. I got chills the first time I heard Insatiable vs Philia, and I think the retroactive midboss theme for ShB should not have been applied to every midboss, instead just starting from ones after 5.0 like they did for later HW. Really sucked out the gravitas of hearing that theme the first time.

If I spoil myself, it's also kinda like saying I don't respect the devs to make a fight that'll be comprehensible when they throw it at me, or that they'll make a fight that deliberately wastes our time if we don't know what to do in advance.

I've been playing for years so I can usually tell what they're trying to communicate in an encounter, and I've always played this way because the community is pretty good about not spoiling things (some asshole ruined e8s for me in a random rubex group), but I get folks not having that luxury.

I also don't want any first-timers to feel like they have to look up these fights in advance because that's just perpetuates a culture more fixated on the destination than the journey, which may contribute to how we end up with more streamlined, unsurprising content over the years anyways.

I'm fortunate that I have a group of players that prefer to remain blind or allow others to for the more time consuming stuff.

[Post]

The MSQ was probably at its overall hardest in HW.

I think the MSQ required leveling dungeon bosses in that expansion had more difficulty than any other, particularly the Vault.

It's not so anymore due to general player power creep and easing of job complexity (especially at lower levels than cap), but I still kinda feel that if players could handle that level of boss design 'mechanic layering' then, they can handle it now, especially with things like duty support, easier support roles, more tools for self survival on DPS and helping your party as a tank.

It's a real shame that they don't allow you to use duty support NPCs in parties greater than 1. In general, while reworking the game to be solo friendly they should have made it small group friendly, too.

[NanaWiloh]

I have a challenge right now. What build to use in cyberpunk, but with the expansion coming next month. Its play with no build or start one and pray lol