Feedback: Dawntrail MSQ dungeon difficulty

[HelSpites]

4. Tower of Zot's Sanduruva, specifically Manusya Confuse. I'm on the autism spectrum, and have some difficulty picking up body language and facial expressions. The differences in the poses are too subtle for me to pick up and process this mechanic. To me they all just look the same. I'm unable to do this mechanic on my own, and have to follow the trust NPC's or follow a player and hope they run to the right spot.

Someone's already gone ahead and given you the solution to this one, but I'm curious; not being able to read expressions is one thing, but for this mechanic, all the clones are moving and the real one is standing absolutely still. Are you saying that you can't differentiate between movement and no movement? Like, if there are two people in front of you and one is standing ramrod straight and still and the other is flapping their arms, you can't tell any difference between them? Do they both look the same to you?

[Shadow_Darkmoon]

Regret putting anything in the forums, should have known it wouldn't go well so plz forget i was ever here

[Connor]

. It takes me A very long time sometimes Months to get up enough courage to hit the Que button for the next dungeon or trial, If Dawntrail is this hard I just don't want to play.

Doesn’t Duty Support exist for every piece of story content in the game? You can do the entire thing with NPC party members now, who also usually show you the perfect way to resolve mechanics

[Shadow_Darkmoon]

Regret putting anything in the forums, should have known it wouldn't go well so plz forget i was ever here

[CatWeazle]

Why do a lot of those posts advocating for harder content need to be so rude and/or condescending? There's enough hard content in the game, it's almost as if you don't want any casual players in the game anymore, or as if those players are beneath you?

There are people in this world, believe it or not, who just want to have fun because it's just a game. Just fun. They don't want to be frustrated by a ton of wipes, don't want to invest hours to learn exactly where to stand in every dungeon at what mechanic, and they certainly don't want a game to be a second job. I for one rather invest time in getting better at my real life job than wiping in some MSQ-dungeon. Also, the amount of dungeons in the game is huge, and I cannot even remember all the mechanics - so most of them being not that hard is actually a good thing.

But the solution to the problem can be very easy, there's multiple possibilities:
- Let the MSQ-dungeons, or in general any dungeon we're forced to do, be easy, and make the optional ones hard. For me for example, the difficulty level of EW was just enough (minus a few bosses where I still struggle with some mechanics).
- Make the msq-dungeons easy and implement a "expert"-version of those dungeons. Should not be that big of a problem.

There, problem solved. You guys can have your hard content, and us casuals can have the easier stuff.

[Shadow_Darkmoon]

Regret putting anything in the forums, should have known it wouldn't go well so plz forget i was ever here

[Toutatis]

Just got to the 2nd dungeon in Dawntrail, and can't get passed the 1st boss, Died 5 times, and quit I guess FF14 just isn't for me anymore
I hope they go back and give me an easier option then one day I can come back to the game
at least I have GW2 expansion next month to look forward to.

It’s fairly easy:

Look for the frozen adds with tethers attached to them: when they are frozen they won’t cast their aoe until they melt. Instead the 2nd aoe from the other adds will go out first

[Conando]

snip

The replies are probably like that because eventually people are forced to play with others at one point and they would hope people at least picked up some of the game by then.

[Sacae]

Just got to the 2nd dungeon in Dawntrail, and can't get passed the 1st boss, Died 5 times, and quit I guess FF14 just isn't for me anymore
I hope they go back and give me an easier option then one day I can come back to the game
at least I have GW2 expansion next month to look forward to.

Have you considered that it's not that the fight is too hard, you just haven't figured out what the gimmick is? There is nothing new I'm that fight you haven't done a hundred times already, except the tether mechanic. And all that does is change the order the area go off.

Don't just try to brute force stuff running it over and over if you just don't get it. Ask your party or watch what your trust is doing. This is a cooperative game, not a solo experience.

[Mlem]

Why do a lot of those posts advocating for harder content need to be so rude and/or condescending? There's enough hard content in the game, it's almost as if you don't want any casual players in the game anymore, or as if those players are beneath you?

There are people in this world, believe it or not, who just want to have fun because it's just a game. Just fun. They don't want to be frustrated by a ton of wipes, don't want to invest hours to learn exactly where to stand in every dungeon at what mechanic, and they certainly don't want a game to be a second job. I for one rather invest time in getting better at my real life job than wiping in some MSQ-dungeon. Also, the amount of dungeons in the game is huge, and I cannot even remember all the mechanics - so most of them being not that hard is actually a good thing.

But the solution to the problem can be very easy, there's multiple possibilities:
- Let the MSQ-dungeons, or in general any dungeon we're forced to do, be easy, and make the optional ones hard. For me for example, the difficulty level of EW was just enough (minus a few bosses where I still struggle with some mechanics).
- Make the msq-dungeons easy and implement a "expert"-version of those dungeons. Should not be that big of a problem.

There, problem solved. You guys can have your hard content, and us casuals can have the easier stuff.

What amazes me is the resistance to any potential solution to the problem, up to throwing around "I bet you use Very Easy on solo duties" as an insult. (Would implementing a leaderboard on those in exchange make you all feel better?) And it's not even entire dungeons as a whole, really; it's just a handful of bosses where I've seen people get frustrated. It's also not the whole community by a long shot. I've not yet been in a party that was anything but supportive of one another or at least grimly determined in DT, so it's just this little weird slice of the forum. In actual fact, the game's taught me a bit lately, and what I've learned has not been game mechanics, but more awareness of potential accessibility issues facing other players.

Having an easy mode is not going to sully the chastity of your dungeon. Honestly, I would prefer a deeper fundamental change in design philosophy going forward, like a partial or total departure from dungeons being inserted into the story just to fill a quota. IMO you will never square the circle of i) a dungeon everyone wants to just clear once; and ii) a dungeon people love to run daily that stays spicy. It would've been great if, at regular intervals, some NPC would just say "Hey, we really should be getting on with saving the universe again, but gosh if I'm not curious about that awful looking tomb with the mist wall!" And then that could be as hard as you please and I'd be fully behind that.

But throwing on an easy and very easy mode buff and cleaning up the dummies' movements in Duty Support would be a good and easy start.