Feedback: Dawntrail MSQ dungeon difficulty

[Besame]

if you struggle with some mechs, then just stop attacking and focus on dodging. Its anything but too hard..

if you are really not able to do that, then you should read books, instead of "playing" video games or simply have a df group help you out.

During the MSQ only was where my handicap affects progression. I could care less if I ever set my avatar in another dungeon until the next forced msq progression. Players like you are the causal factor that I steetr cleer of dungeons now on any regular basis, I don't like to be a burden or play with rudes.

[Besame]

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.

Fanboys get their panties in a bunch when you do not agree with something they enjoy in game and you do not. They love to strike out atcha lol

[Besame]

If you're struggling then I dont suggest going with trusts since all responsibility is on you. Just queue up on DPS and get carried through, if you can handle aoeing down trash mobs then you're already doing better than like half of the players in this game.

I used Trusts a few times and they can be cool, NOW...if they could just rez me like a real healer if I goof up we'd be in biz hehe

[Shadow_Darkmoon]

Oh also, you must have forgotten it, but you, at some point, made the decision to set your achievements to public, and you have not completed a single Savage fight or Extreme fight except for significantly delayed, unsync'd ARR Primals. May I suggest you spend the time you used on writing up this fairy tale on looking at dungeon bosses instead? You will fare much better! <3

Beings they said Mythic, I am almost Certain they meant WOW, Just because they haven't done savage on FF14 doesn't mean the didn't use to do it.. Think about that before you Straight up call them a liar.

Also Believe it or not, people are allowed to feel content is too hard, and people are allowed to feel like it's just right, it doesn't make either side any less True, and people shouldn't have to Study Dungeon bosses to do Story content.

[Saya8008]

Do not listen to this Square, the new difficulty is breathing life back into the Mundane. People need to practice and practice until they get better and if they don't they won't.

[Shadow_Darkmoon]

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

[mewlynx]

Putting in my own feedback to say that I'm pretty satisfied with the difficulty overall. The first boss in the final MSQ dungeon is probably a bit too fast for the average player, but aside from that I think the bosses are well designed and engaging. Absolute Authority is pretty difficult, also, but you get a free LB3 after it resolves for a healer LB3, or a tank can just LB and cheese it, so I don't really see it as an issue. I also really enjoyed the optional dungeons incorporating raidwide damage into a couple of the trash pulls, that was pleasantly surprising to see as a healer. I think that people struggling is valid, but some element of challenge is important in making the game engaging. Endwalker dungeons were incredibly boring due to the standardization of pulls (this is still a problem) and because the dungeon bosses were extremely boring. It never felt like there was any sort of progression of difficulty, and the stagnation was a glaring issue. The relic weapon being purely tomes probably exacerbated this to some extent, but I hope the difficulty of Dawntrail MSQ stays somewhat consistent moving forward into patch quests.

[Solsbeary]

Always run with NPC's first time through for story immersion. I died once to most end bosses, and died to a couple of other bosses across all DT dungeons in my NPC group.

You just learn the signposting of the mechanics and overcome the difficulty. I think its well balanced as it stands, hard enough to need to learn the mechanics, easy enough to overcome the second time around.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

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.

It's new content it's supposed to be a little harder and once you have synced gear, materia and other players who know the dungeon it becomes very easy. Surely theres got to be a point where the game increases in difficulty even for casual players. Now I accept there could be a middle ground i.e the trusts giving echo after X fails. Also like I pointed out earlier I am a casual player. As for age being an issue i'm 43 (lol 44 in a month).

[Deccado]

I just wanted to add my experience to this, as for the first time since I started playing, I have run out the timer on a dungeon.

For me however it was not the first boss of Alexandria, I actually made it past that one on my first try, which may have just been luck, but the last... it was over 20 deaths until the timer ran out. I don't know what my previous record was, but I am sure it was not close to this.

Individually the mechanics did not seem that bad, but when they began overlapping, I just could not keep track of everything.

As with some of the other posters, I am older and much slower than I once was, and my days of enjoying difficult content in games is far behind me. Normally this is not an issue in FFXIV, if however they want to ramp up the difficulty of dungeons within the MSQ, then it may well be time to consider adding in a story mode option for those of us who either do not want, or cannot meet, the level of play required, perhaps something akin to the easy mode on solo battles, as if you are unable to progress through the MSQ, then in reality, there is little point in continuing to pay for the game.