"Taking a stand" quest

[Minali]

It's odd some people in these comments act like making "very easy" actually easy enough for the story to remain accessible for disabled people would require them to give something up.

The "very easy" mode in solo duties is by definition to be made incredibly easy for people who can't or don't want to bother with a harder challenge. Nothing about the other modes has to change, so if you have never used "very easy" to begin with, a change of this mode toward more accessiblity will not affect you. Meanwhile other players wouldn't be blocked from continuing with MSQ. There is really no downside with adjusting this difficulty level to live up to its name.

[Jojoya]

SE does monitor player progress on these special duties and will make adjustments when they find too many players are struggling to complete them. It could be Warpsberger was on the right track and SE missed something when creating the easier difficulties.

It's hard to say when/if they will make such adjustments for this duty.

Until such time, I think it's best to try to focus on sharing advice that may help others get the duty completed now instead of forcing them to wait. I have a family member with a physical disability that will probably be reaching this duty later today and I know it's going to frustrate them. Perhaps in helping them, we can come up with more tips to help others struggling with it.

[Menolie]

Same here - I'm stuck on the fight and "Very Easy" ends for me with me never having full health other than when the fight first starts. I definitely agree that there needs to be an option to either skip a "play as" msq fight or to watch as just an observer/story-mode, especially if a fight like this one can't be passed after multiple attempts.

[PercibelTheren]

I will admit I failed on my first try (had trouble estimating how far I would be knocked back) and ended up just going for Very Easy in order to get through it faster, as I've never enjoyed the "play as someone else" duties. I was surprised at how tight the timing is on the boss jumping the three towers. I could be wrong but I don't think it's different on different difficulty settings. Surely, the easier ones could give you just a tiny bit more time if that's what people need. That and honestly, just let people select the difficulty without having to fail first. I remember feeling incredibly humiliated by the system when doing my DRG job quests in HW as a wee sprout. Giving a selection from the start would change the vibe from "you suck lol, want to try easy mode" to "select what level of challenge you feel like facing".

[Fae_Valwynd]

I'm also one of the disabled users as I have rheumatoid arthritis in my hands. And I find that needlessly smashing buttons to find out what they do is not great for the body.

My main complaint about these instances is that they are hard simply because they ask people to play jobs they do not normally play, and the game rarely explains what the buttons do.

Every time someone says "Read the tool tips" ... I get enormously frustrated and mad, as a console player, I cannot find where such a thing is actually explained and those shouting from the rooftops, stop being lazy and read the tooltips, might actually be a bit more helpful and tell the rest of us where they are.

I've hovered over buttons, held down, and pressed buttons to see if they said anything, I've even tried to look up the player's actions and roles when I'm playing as that person and found out that we are not allowed to do that.

So yeah, I figured I'd put in my two cents this time since every voice is important, and say that these instances should be skippable if a person fails them more than three times, or at least, put them in but not as part of the msq.

[Jojoya]

I was surprised at how tight the timing is on the boss jumping the three towers. I could be wrong but I don't think it's different on different difficulty settings. Surely, the easier ones could give you just a tiny bit more time if that's what people need.

This is the type of observation that will be helpful to SE when it comes to possible adjustments that need to be made.

Every time someone says " read the tool tips" ... I get enormously frustrated and mad, as a console player, I cannot find where such a thing is actually explained and those shouting from the rooftops, stop being lazy and read the tool tips, might actually be a bit more helpful and tell the rest of us where they are.

Any controller users out there that can explain how to get the tooltips? I'm a keyboard/mouse user so I can't help with this one.

[Rylanda]

Same here - I'm stuck on the fight and "Very Easy" ends for me with me never having full health other than when the fight first starts. I definitely agree that there needs to be an option to either skip a "play as" msq fight or to watch as just an observer/story-mode, especially if a fight like this one can't be passed after multiple attempts.

I agree with you 100% on this. I understand giving us a challenge however, those of us who may disabled or just more of a casual player - this "very easy" mode doesn't seem to actually be "very easy". I'd be willing to even give up any XP that's gained from this if they converted it to just skip it, do story/observer mode etc. Personally, I have put my attempts on hold as I don't play to get upset, frustrated or to feel humiliated over and over again (aka bashing my head into a wall). I wish there were other options as you said or even permitting 2 folks to do this jointly. Right now, as it is.. I personally can't get past this.

[Minali]

Regarding the tooltips, I don't know the specific settings for controller, but I do know many of the main combos are very non-telling.
They just say

1. - Random skill name
2. - Random skill name
3. - Random skill name

to tell you that button rotates between the three of them, but it doesn't always tell you what these three random skills actually do. If you know the original job, some might seem familiar, but that's rarely always the case. So "read your tooltips" might be a good idea for the usual jobs, but not so much for solo duties where the tooltips say fairly little to begin with. And knowing what the skills do is no help if your disability limits your reaction time or movement under pressure etc.

[Post]

Every time one of these threads about solo duties barring progression comes up, I'm always humbled by how different my experience with the game is than with those who struggle with them.

I wish to echo Jojoya's request that someone with experience playing on controller explain how to 'read the tooltips' would comment in detail. I might try later, but only having the game on PC I wouldn't be able to confirm if it functions the same on console.

The problem sounds like 'easy' and 'very easy' don't really tackle what makes a duty difficult, and instead just apply some sort of blanket 'damage taken down' and 'damage dealt increased' (or enemy HP reduced) parameters, like the kind you'd see in extremely low effort game modes throughout video games as a whole. For example, does anyone think that 'easy mode' offers a well tuned challenge that likewise thinks 'normal is too hard' and 'very easy is too easy'? I'm assuming most people just jump to very easy unless they don't want to engage with the option at all.

This thread presents a valid criticism, and the developers shouldn't be content with how these solo duties currently function. The very easy option was implemented in, I want to say, Heavensward, and likely hasn't even really been looked at closely since then (this time period also having been before duties where you play as another character, the first of which was in post MSQ in StB).

Since the whole point of these solo duties are for storytelling, as an example solution, I don't think it would be unreasonable to make very easy mode just make you invincible or get downed for a few seconds if you fail to dodge enough and your HP is reduced to 0, that all of the 4 or 5 buttons you have just cycle automatically so you're not missing out on important cooldowns, and any pass/fail mechanics like DPS checks or having to save an ally likewise don't fail you if you mess them up.

I would personally prefer if they carefully tuned the modes to present an appropriate challenge because I think that would help players that struggle and still want to improve our be challenge get what they want from the game, but I'm not the one struggling so I think it's fair to say my opinion on that shouldn't matter.

[Post]

Regarding the tooltips, I don't know the specific settings for controller, but I do know many of the main combos are very non-telling.
They just say

1. - Random skill name
2. - Random skill name
3. - Random skill name

to tell you that button rotates between the three of them, but it doesn't always tell you what these three random skills actually do. If you know the original job, some might seem familiar, but that's rarely always the case. So "read your tooltips" might be a good idea for the usual jobs, but not so much for solo duties where the tooltips say fairly little to begin with. And knowing what the skills do is no help if your disability limits your reaction time or movement under pressure etc.

This is another example of them maybe assuming how players will interpret what they're given, but those main auto rotating combos almost invariably just 'deal damage', the same way many job 123 combos work (casters/healers often have 1 repeating). You can see this mirrored in PvP jobs, where they often have basic combos that auto rotate, but we can only assign the combo button to our hotbar with its unhelpful tooltip and must look further into the PvP profile menu itself if we want a more accurate description of each action.

The assumption that I think developers are making is that players will hammer away at this button when the other buttons are on cooldown, as a cooldown itself existing implies the action would be too powerful if you could always use it without having to wait.

Speaking of, however, do those other buttons have descriptions? Or are their tooltips likewise useless?