This game needs to be harder

[DiaDeem]

I think MSQ is fine being as is... but stuff like Alliance Raids and Normal Raids I feel would benefit from a higher difficulty. Something similar to CLL/DR/Dal I think would be fun.

I'll also keep yelling until someone hears me about them bringing back HM Dungeons.

[Turtledeluxe]

Everything Yoshi P touches lately assumes you're an idiot unfortunately. That seems to be his recipe for attracting a wider audience...you know in the years Elden Ring and BG3 are dominating video game discourse.

[Aldath]

Everything Yoshi P touches lately assumes you're an idiot unfortunately. That seems to be his recipe for attracting a wider audience...you know in the years Elden Ring and BG3 are dominating video game discourse.

Yoshida seriously is stuck in the 360/PS3 era of trying to appeal to a certain demographic without understanding what makes it want to play a game in the first place.
Look, I know it's a meme to say "FFXIV players suck", but I don't think so. The game has historically had balancing issues in terms of encounter design: very easy and predictable series of mechanics followed by hard hitting, cryptic ones, but this seems to be an exception and not the rule.

There are some very fun battles in this game though that can still be risky enough, so credit where it's due. Have you tried playing through the Omega raids lately? They hold up pretty nicely in terms of challenge. That said, we have an issue where difficulty feels artificially lower because of ilvl sync issues, and on the other hand, most of the older content seems to be played by Veterans that have already cleared them ad-nauseam, meaning that you are in a party where most likely only 2 people have no idea of the mechanics and it leads to a well geared group of players with experience trivializing the encounter for sprouts. BOTH sides will of course feel the game is absolutely easy.

TL;DR: Game is mostly fine, it's just crap syncing and lack of a fresh playerbase involved in more than just MSQ content that makes it seem easier than it really is. Sync stuff properly and then you'd have players actually having to pay attention.

[Sindele]

It might sound unintuitive, but making things harder at the baseline in MMOs doesn't actually get rid of people who don't know how to play their class all that well, historically. It doesn't even really gate them very much, because there's always ways to slip through the cracks and get carried or get lucky or just plain bash your head into it until it somehow works. You can go all in on systems like mythic+, but people still find ways to game scores and sneak through there too, and you get a whole heaping serving of fractal toxicity along with it.

Basic competency testing for boosters, sure, that makes sense. Beyond that? Lot of babies in that bathwater - be careful what you're throwing out.

[Renathras]

It might sound unintuitive, but making things harder at the baseline in MMOs doesn't actually get rid of people who don't know how to play their class all that well, historically. It doesn't even really gate them very much, because there's always ways to slip through the cracks and get carried or get lucky or just plain bash your head into it until it somehow works. You can go all in on systems like mythic+, but people still find ways to game scores and sneak through there too, and you get a whole heaping serving of fractal toxicity along with it.

Basic competency testing for boosters, sure, that makes sense. Beyond that? Lot of babies in that bathwater - be careful what you're throwing out.

This.

People only say they want harder content until every standard dungeon roulette takes 2 hours. Then they start only doing them with premade groups, defeating the whole point of the roulette in the first place, and leaving a lot of very disgruntled players that can't clear once all the "good" players leave the ques, leading to pushback, lots of people leaving the game, which then leads to nerfs, which then upsets the people who ARE running the premades (and enjoying the difficulty, but only in their premade groups), which leads to them leaving the game, which leads to the most hated expansions in a game's history.

Standard content that is run over and over shouldn't generally be too hard since that just leads to this chain of disaster playing out. It doesn't actually increase player skill, it just makes people have to be even more tolerant of it or makes the game collapse.

Now, when it comes to OPTIONAL content (I wouldn't consider 24 mans optional at this point since they're so needed to unlock other stuff, nor 8 man Normals since they're so essential for a lot of the story and world building), there's more leeway. The optional, non-MSQ dungeons (there used to be one (Hard) each patch, now we just get the two in X.0 and then no more...), Extremes, Savages, Ultiamtes, sure. We really need something between 24 mans/8 man Normals and Extremes as a step across that gap, though. Hard dungeons and Hard Trials could work well for that, but for whatever reason, they don't.

[Shurrikhan]

You can go all in on systems like mythic+, but people still find ways to game scores and sneak through there too, and you get a whole heaping serving of fractal toxicity along with it.

This seems a bit of an overstatement. While, yes, players will find ways not to learn to the degree others would, it's not that huge a gap, nor a particularly large reason for toxicity as long as ilvl isn't the only way people have to estimate a player's likely performance.


In systems like M+, people finding ways to "game" scores and "sneak through" there... are simply progression slower. They're padding their ilvl more relative to the content than do more skilled players.

Which, given that they're still producing the necessary throughput (even if needing 20+% more gear to meet those needs than more skilled players would, and therefore having to spend far more time at each upgrade step so they can fill out their missing slots before climbing higher)... is fine.


While others learn to jump, some may instead --in part-- paint the soles of their shoes or step in shit until its stacked thick enough to walk over the hurdles as if on stilts, but... that's kind of making a mountain out of molehill from players simply progressing at their own pace.

[Avoidy]

For me, that moment was The Burn. I wasn't playing WHM well at all and was ignoring most of my kit 'cause I'd never needed to use it. But that dungeon forced me to learn how to recognize esuna-able debuffs and forced me to use my lilies and blablabla because the last boss pushed our shit in. To this day, it's a dungeon I actually don't mind doing. It'll be a shame when they nerf it for Trusts.

[Zairava]

I do miss msq dungeons being a bit harder, and I do believe they should be. If they make it mindlessly easy due to trust AI, fine.

The real thing that inherently frustrates the hell out of me is making the optional endgame content just as easy, if not easier than leveling dungeons.

Large-scale content is my crack in MMO's. They peaked at Ridorana and Orbonne for alliance raids and it's been downhill since.

Normal raids are good on launch but the way they design fights makes them become boring after a few runs unless they have some bite to them.

[Xirean]

A big part of this could be remedied by the inclusion of features like "Hall of the Intermediate", "Hall of the [Job Name] level 70", etc.
If someone does use a skip either for story progression or class progression, then make it a requirement to complete a system like this BEFORE they are allowed to que into just about anything. Also make job stones required to be equipped unless in a full premade party for anything beyond level 35ish.

[Aravell]

I agree that the game doesn't do a very good job at teaching people how to play their job properly. They do actually have an avenue to teach people the baseline of their job though, the job quests. See how RDM, RPR, SGE and DNC all have an opening job quest instance that gives you a quick rundown on the basics of the job and how the job is meant to be played, I think every job could use something like that to teach people the baseline of how the job they just unlocked functions.