Quote Originally Posted by AyumiCosplayGlam View Post
What it boils down to is that Square Enix cannot identify what is the difficulty most people enjoy and what the average player skill is.
This has been a glaring issue for a while now but they got away with it so far because:
A: people had a huge backlog of stuff to do from earlier expansions and fill the void when we had bad patch
B: Aside from a few occasions, things have been falling under the "too easy" category (although too easy is still better than too hard because its at least more accessible)

Endwalker was full of inconsistent difficulty from day 1.
-Infamous MSQ quest which was too hard for a lot of people.
-The lvl 85 crystalmommy trial is to this day has wipes or almost wipes more often than not.
-Extremes are all over the place, sometimes its way too hard, sometimes its just something that exists i guess.
-Island Sanctuary is full casual, its progression is timegated heavily to stretch it out as much as possible.
-Ultimates, same difficulty issues. You just cannot say with a straight face that UwU and ToP are both ultimate levels of difficulty, you just cant.
-Variant/ Criterion again, same thing. Variant is just a chore you do 12 times almost falling asleep by the end and Criterion is just way too big of a jump in difficulty and its not even rewarding in top of that.
-On Eureka Orthos i cannot really say much except you either fall asleep or you are dead because a mob turned around and cleaved.
-Alliance Raids...something is just absolutely wrecked that thing. I am not kidding, i actually have to try dying in all 3 wings of the alliance raids now, it wasnt hard to begin with and now as we got more item levels, we dont even see half of the mechanics anymore. As much as i hated how just 1 troll could cause wipes over and over with the scales in Aglaia, its just sad that we dont even see the scales anymore.

Square is either under or overestimating the playerbase and that is the sole reason why people say there is no midcore content, because there is none.
You either fall asleep or drop dead instantly.

There is no something like Bozja, that requires enough time invested and is engaging enough, it forces you to pay just enough attention while also not overly punishing and gives decent rewards.
I think you can isolate this even further down to mechanics taking a much higher priority to job complexity. I still think the sweet spot for difficulty is TEA, because you could have complex jobs dealing with a (somewhat) complex fight. Now the jobs are completely ruined, but the fights are gone on the complete other side of the scale. Things like TOP might be out of line, and I really hate saying that, but it's true. I am starting to think that fights that are like TOP are so overboard they are creating mini-Gordias situations by imploding statics left and right and are stratifying the raid scene. Like in a "If you aren't overperforming, you're absolute trash." kind of way, there's no middle ground, because that's how the late endgame fights are being designed, be perfect, or be dead. It just burns people out too fast. Maybe my experiences post-DSR have been just really bad and I'm an outlier, but I've got too many stories of people dragging themselves through the game equivalent of shattered glass just to get a clear. I don't even put up with it anymore. Think of it from a newer player who just killed Zeromus EX, and wants to get into the Savage Tier.

They walk into P9S, and while they don't have a hard DPS check, they DO get fairly strict positioning requirements, swaps, memorization, flexes, and TWO limit cuts. Assume they are playing SMN or something and everyone is just saying "Why are you struggling, your job is so easy you should have plenty of brain power for this."


Meanwhile the core game stagnates. Encounters have way too much weight on the scale of combat enjoyment now, which is why when you get something like Abyssos, the entire tier becomes a toss up, or the 24-man, people just fall asleep because they're completely unengaged, things die before what few mechanics even happen. What an embarrassment.

Jobs should be more fun to play, move some of that fight punishment to job punishment, and fights might wanna ease off on the body checks and highly rehearsed synchronized swimming. Blows my mind we have fights like P7 and P8 exist in the same tier, when we got Barb in that same patch.