Difficulty of normal content.

[Kesmar]

I'm posting here for the first time to offer this counterpoint: the difficulty on this content has been EXCELLENT.

I'm not an extreme or savage raider FWIW; in fact I've never cleared a savage fight and have only ever unsync'd extremes. But this was the first time since Shadowbringers that I felt like the game was using actively engaging fight mechanics again. I loved it.

Even the expert dungeons and stuff have felt so much more interesting and engaging compared to the boredom of Endwalker fights.

It's very possible to learn these and play these without being an extreme/savage player. They aren't overly difficult-- you just have to take some time to learn them and accept that failure is okay. Practice makes perfect as they say.

More of this please!

This. New dungeon aren't hard once you understand them, no dungeon is, but they are FUN. I actually want to play expert roulette unlike Dead Ends or that void dungeon with the trash pack "boss." New mechanics finally are good. New normal tier is very fun with some fun ideas going on. We literally just had "#healerstrike" over dungeon content not being engaging, we get the tiniest amount of spice, a couple new mechanics, and people start complaining the other way. Maybe instead of complaining you learn how to play the game. Learn how to look at the screen, see what's happening, and think to piece it together. Don't get mad if you die, use it to learn and improve. It's end game content in a video game, it's not supposed to be playable asleep.

[TeoMoonstrider]

The bar for difficulty HAD to be raised. Similar to how there is a small amount of the playerbase that clears ultimates, on the opposite end of the scale there is a small amount of the playerbase that can struggle with raids like these

There is such a vast majority of casual+ players who seem to enjoy this newer difficulty. People who clear savage and ultimates and such are expected to go to party finder to get their clears in, why can't the same apply on the opposite scale? If someone really is unable to clear this or struggle too hard through duty finder you can absolutely list a group on party finder and find plenty of people who would be more than happy to go through and learn with you.

The game won't be balanced around the best 5% of the playerbase, and it can't be balanced around the worst 5% either. The fights can get hectic, but there really is no tight DPS check you have to meet or such, if you have played the hundreds of hours it takes to reach these raids there needs to be a basic expectation of skill to have the content be interesting for the majority of the playerbase

[GuildDrama]

If you spent as much effort as you do crying and writing out paragraphs of complaints into using applied knowledge from previous content and adaptive understanding you would see that Dawntrail content is simply a babystep forward in terms of "Difficulty".

For example: everyone knows what a directional arena attack looks like. Don't stand in front of the directional arrow that says HEY IM GONNA BLAST HERE. Seen it plenty of times in previous content.

In Dawntrail: So you remember that directional arena attack? Ok so we're gonna freeze 2 of them so that it delays that one. It doesn't take rocket science to understand the non-frozen ones go 1st.

This is a classic case of "Git Gud". All of the mechanics get spoonfed to you on Youtube anyway if you don't wanna prog blind.

[Kissune]

This. New dungeon aren't hard once you understand them, no dungeon is, but they are FUN. I actually want to play expert roulette unlike Dead Ends or that void dungeon with the trash pack "boss." New mechanics finally are good. New normal tier is very fun with some fun ideas going on. We literally just had "#healerstrike" over dungeon content not being engaging, we get the tiniest amount of spice, a couple new mechanics, and people start complaining the other way. Maybe instead of complaining you learn how to play the game. Learn how to look at the screen, see what's happening, and think to piece it together. Don't get mad if you die, use it to learn and improve. It's end game content in a video game, it's not supposed to be playable asleep.

I'm gonna be real, the people who did the healer strike arent the same people complaining about dungeon difficulty. I would know, I'm one of the people who joined the healerstrike. Then I did the msq... and started reconsidering after seeing how much damage was going out and how the emphasis on vuln stacks was lowered. I have no faith in Square Enix after years of being let down, but this is one of those cases where I feel like they actually nailed the difficulty. I'm still kinda struggling with myself, but I am strongly considering actually picking up healer again. I know I'm just one person, but it does go to show that if you make the content more engaging and challenging, it does actually benefit people more than it harms. Depends on how bad the 7.05 changes fuck up Viper ;P

[Post]

Let's not disregard the lingering issue of nearly every dungeon/trial/raid/alliance raid prior to Shadowbringers being an undertuned and/or oversynced snoozefest. Guildhests too, which are somehow still in the game and were never expanded on and have a roulette that gives 10k EXP, fell victim to this and are utterly ignored mechanically. Most of the 8-man content could be cleared comfortably with one tank and healer.

Other posters alluded to this, but I think this point is incredibly important.

Old normal raids caused wipes and deaths, too. Even the normal dungeons content. Often, perspectives are skewed because we compare a current new fight THAT IS TUNED PROPERLY to an old fight that is horribly, horribly tuned.

A1n, the Fist of the Father, is a duty that players will complete in under 2 minutes today, where it used to be a fight that could conceivably hit an enrage timer. If you're a new player from 2019 or beyond, did you know that the twin Oppressors will launch into the air and land somewhere in the room? Let alone having to care about the core mechanic of shrinking the 3000 tonze missiles with the add corpses.

Basically, the result of this is that the difficulty curve is a flat line until you reach current expansion content for many players when it really wasn't back in the day and really shouldn't be today. But, effects of things like boosting job potencies while making rotations simpler at low levels every expansion and no ilvls syncs for 'max level' content results in players not having any hint they aren't learning their job or understanding a boss' telegraphs until suddenly they're faced with a properly tuned boss and they die.

I haven't done the new raids yet, but I'm sure that they're on par with the rest of DT. They may have some new ideas, as they should, as the population of the game that enjoys battle content deserves to be surprised. They may throw mechanics at you more often, as they should, ShB and EW were often far too slow to tutorialize and left many bosses feeling like HP sponge slogs with a lot of dead time. But, most importantly, I hope that the new normal raids are harder than the MSQ dungeons, because a curve, or ramp, of difficulty should exist for the 'non organized' players, too. How else do you expect people to get better?

Super Mario doesn't go from 1-1 to 8-1, and neither should FFXIV duties.

[TheTreblesomeBard]

A lot of people wouldn't have survived 2.x. LMAO.

[Huskie]

Were the normals harder than usual lol? I didn't notice. The same slog we always get, one-shotted with no trouble. I'm not surprised someone is complaining about this, and frankly it's a personal problem. Be better.

[HemlockEvergreen]

And how many hours do you have to play FFXIV before you get to that point? Because most of the posts in this thread celebrate walling off current content and requiring hundreds of hours and ten years of experience before playing. "You're level 100, everything should be easy!" The issue at this point isn't Square Enix, it's the Final Fantasy XIV community which wants something far more restrictive than any other MMO. We have approached the "final boss" territory of FFXIV. And that's FINE! That's great news! Because it means that Final Fantasy XIV is finally approaching its end of life and the company can finally move on to a new MMO.

Nah dude, no comparison. You have no idea of what you're talking about. WoW story was so bad that it made you feel bad for caring about it. The way XIV approaches it at least doesn't completely retcon everything every expansion. Shadowlands was so bad that they managed to retroactively ruin Warcraft III.

And the grind is different as well. You don't understand how good it is over here. Universal tokens for all the gear? Bad luck protection books? Catch-up gear that's easy to get if you miss a tier? WoW had none of that. Not to mention the abomination that was the weekly vault.

Let me explain how it worked: You had a vault that you could open once a week, that contained up to 9 pieces of loot. To unlock all of those 9 pieces of loot, you had to complete certain goals on raiding, PVP, and mythic plus dungeon runs. So you had homework to do every week. These were not things that you could do quickly in one day either, they were time consuming.

The vault pieces were random pieces that your class could wear. There was no guarantee that they'd be good for your spec. There was no guarantee that they would be something you don't have already. You could very well get the same pair of boots that are shit for your spec three weeks in a row and there was no fallback system for that. And your BiS depended on the vault. You could not acquire certain optimal pieces without them being from the vault, because some of them were higher item level than what you could get from other sources. So you had no way to plan to get BiS, you depended solely on luck.

All that I mentioned too is max level, endgame content. It's not comparable to the leveling process, which is what you mentioned. But even in that we can mention that if you wanna play another job in XIV, you don't have to level another character from scratch. You can just level and gear the job. If you want to play another class in WoW, you need a different character, in which not only you gonna need to level up through story quests again, but if you wanted to mantain both of your classes geared, you needed to do the loot vault weekly grind twice. The amount of time wasting is not comparable at all.

[Jinglypockets]

We need another tier of difficulty between Normal and Extreme/Savage that's aimed at midcore players and people who enjoy being challenged but don't have the time and/or skill for Extreme/Savage.

When I did the new raids yesterday, I was disappointed by how easy they were. Savage raids, meanwhile, are *extremely* difficult, and they require a massive time/energy investment just to *start* working on them. Going from Normal to Extreme/Savage feels like jumping straight from LFR to Mythic.

You're either casual and get trivial content, or you're hardcore and get insanely difficult content. Nothing in between.

Meanwhile, I think this game has set a standard for a very long time of Normal content being extremely accessible. I feel for the people who've spent years playing this game at one difficulty level just to have it suddenly cranked up beyond what they can handle. By making Normal content dramatically more difficult, SE is altering the deal for those players. If they suddenly cranked the difficulty of Normal dungeons up to Dark Souls levels, I'd be in the same boat they're in now. Difficulty is relative and we need to all take a step back and recognize that people who are less skilled than us have a valid claim on enjoying this game too.

A more granular range of content difficulty (and investment) would go a really long way in solving everybody's problems.

[Amenara]

The raids are extremely fun and have a bit of difficulty involved, I hope they keep up this creativity with mechanics and encourage everyone to learn and get better at playing their classes and the slightly harder fights with experts and normal raids. I also hope this design continues into the alliance raid series.