Difficulty of normal content.

[Htakar]

for anyone complaining about normal content difficulty rising, have you considered asking for any sort of help in solving the mechanics you're unable to grasp? this is an mmo we're talking about here, there's plenty of people everywhere that would be able to offer help if you just tried asking for tips to put into practice instead of hopping on the forum to validate a skill issue which is most definitely easily fixable.

[ExiaKuromonji]

-Use and abuse of non standard telegraphs.

What does "abuse" here even mean? These telegraphs are ridiculously intuitive and easy to understand.

-Nasty mechanic overlaps, stuff you would see on extreme and harder fights.

None of these fights are remotely close to EX or harder. Like it's not even the same league. If you have done EX there is no way you found these fights as hard unless it was like unsynced Bismarck or Lakshmi.

-Mechs resolving too quickly for the mental capacity they demand to process.

According to who? These seem to give as much time as any other normal I've played.

-One too many "catch this!" mech (mechs that have you running around like headless chicken evading seemingly random patterns).

I am assuming you mean Honey B. Lovely. Which btw is the only normal boss so far that does an AoE spam like that. And listen, I get it as someone who messes this one up also. It is okay to not do it correctly the first few tries. Seriously there's no reason to stress out this hard in a game. Just try dodging the stuff, and if you die or w/e it's not a big deal.

The problem with the difficulty on normal fights as I see it is:

All this has been making fights in this expansion frustrating and exhausting.

Well these fights were about as hard on average as Omega and Eden. Granted you had some free wins like O1. But none of these fights have anything on E4, O12 or E7 in terms of causing massive amounts of player deaths.

The Honey B fight had me wishing for the healer to not raise me, I was there in the floor, dead for the Nth time, thinking that I don't really want to be on that duty.

You don't have to do the optional content.

[ExiaKuromonji]

I feel you, you have a vocal minority(?) to blame for this situation, it's the people that somehow don't play savage but complained over and over that normal content is too easy, and now here we are.

Source needed... Pandaemonium normal was far easier than Eden and some Omega bosses on normal. As far as I can tell from doing this tier twice already I'd say it's somewhere in between.

[Naleisa]

skill issue tbh

[CuteBucket]

Here's the thing. I'm in a savage raiding static. We're pretty casual all things considered. We're not trying to clear in X many weeks, we're not trying to parse big numbers, we just want to clear the content. We have several people with various types of disabilities in the group, both physical and mental. We can't raid for hours and hours on end because it's too hard on some members physically due to chronic pain issues and for others emotionally to keep playing that long at a time. We have people with autism and ADHD who have have short term memory issues and sensory processing issues. Some of us just suck at spacial reasoning; the whole "rotate an object in your head" kind of puzzles. I myself have a number processing disorder (dyscalculia), which means any mechanic that flashes numbers at me and requires me to hold that number in my mind and do something with it is going to take me a longer time to figure out and learn than someone without it. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and we all clear these fights anyway. It may take us longer than the more dedicated "hardcore" groups that raid more frequently, but we clear Savage tiers regardless.

We all had a blast running the new raids together and are excited for the Savage release. This is optional side content that no one is forcing anyone to run. Just about anyone CAN learn how to do it if they want. Look up raid guides, look up guides for your job, look up your rotation, practice on a striking dummy to create muscle memory. Many of us started out intimidated to try harder content but took the plunge and discovered we love it! It may not be for everyone, but also, please don't scapegoat any disabled people by claiming we want the game to be easier to cater to us. No one in my raid group wants that, at any rate.

[GrootAkkedis]

And furthermore, players need to understand ITS OKAY to fail. It's okay to get a vuln stack, or fall off the arena, or get KO'd and wipe. You don't lose EXP like in FFXI for dying. You just start again. This raid tier is tuned properly: there's a challenge, but that challenge is not so difficult that you can't overcome it in a few pulls or, if things go really awful, a single lockout. You're not meant to be able to queue into any duty blind and clear without a single mistake every time, unless you're some hardcore type gamer who can read ahead. Even so, those of us who do savage raids still make mistakes now and then. Mistakes are okay. It's too bad you're quitting before even trying.

I agree. No one is perfect, we all make mistakes. The point is to learn from the mistakes and improve, and not be a quitter.

[GrootAkkedis]

Keep up the good work on the difficulty and engagement, dev team. Don't listen to these kinds of outcries, these fights feel about as tuned as Omega raids and Eden raids are. This is great for the game as a whole, the ease of EW dungeons and normal raids was not.

[angienessyo]

The difficulty is just right I think. At level 100 people should be expected to be able to handle stuff that's a bit harder. I got a good laugh out of a few of the more unexpected deaths. I do savage/ultimate and I was really happy to actually be caught off guard by some things. I found every fight a joy to do the first time and I'm excited to do them again later today for fun.

I think people just need to realize that wipes and dying are fine. I don't think we should be rolling up to any content and face rolling it, or it gets too boring. I have "join party in progress" selected and my first time doing the second fight in the raids I got a 20 minutes in progress instance. The group did it on the first try after I'd joined and I guarantee most of the people that were there the whole 20 minutes were probably over the moon at finally beating it. Failing at something and then finally beating it is an amazing feeling. That's why people play Soulslikes, it just feels nice to overcome challenges. My first time ever playing a Soulslike I chose to play Bloodborne. I was really bad and it took me 2 weeks to beat Oprhan of Kos and it was one of my most memorable moments in gaming. Nowadays it's not often a Soulslike boss will take me more than 30-60 minutes because I just naturally improved. The same thing will happen for you if you do things that are harder for you, you'll just get better.

Obviously the normal raids aren't Shadow of the Erdtree difficult or anything (and I don't think they should be that level of difficulty), but the point is doing things that prove a challenge help you get better. People are likely finding the new raids hard because there hasn't been any difficulty in casual content during Shadowbringers and Endwalker. The last time I saw anyone complain about casual content being hard was Orbonne and Shinryu normal back in Stormblood, so seeing a return to more difficult normal encounters is awesome.

[Naomishtola]

Well if you have thousands of hours in a MMO (considering going through every single xpac is probably around 1k hours at this point) and you still can't do the bare minimum, that's on you. Git gud.

[BurningSoul]

But you agree that normal raids are casual, right? Because what I played today was not casual difficulty at all.

You have to consider that we're several expansions in, level 100, and optional. There has to be a point where personal responsibility and being okay with failing are acceptable in this game. The more you play that fight, or any. You'll start to respond to mechanics without as much effort. If you don't have time for all that, that's okay. It's not msq. With that said I think you and everyone else are more capable than you give yourselves credit for sometimes.

If the difficulty of the overall experience doesn't amp up in any way it's going to get stale for everyone I promise.