Difficulty of normal content.

[SweetestLily]

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

I only saw ONE mechanic like this in these raids, correct me if I'm wrong, but only the 2nd fight seems to have this. Besides that everything else seems to have a fairly easy dodge pattern/tell.

[execlinca]

I love the difficulty and I haven't yet seen a run fail, so I feel like the tuning is fine for normal. There's nothing wrong with being on the floor on your first time.

However, many people have echoed my sentiments already. The only new thing I would like to add is this tweet about Arcadion from @divisionten (Sara Winters) on Twitter. They are a legally blind player with partial vision, and here is what they had to say:

Arcadion accessability talk (non spoiler): I have so far only did M1 and M2. The fights are fair and for the most part clearly marked. There’s some mechanics that fully blind people cannot do (because personal responsibility) but both fights are clear and easy to read so long as you have some useable vision. Mechanics are high contrast (eg M2 is pink on blue) even if you can’t see the details. The fights are hard, especially since many are coming in just AF gear. The tier will be easier once people get raid and tome gear and start creeping up to 710-720+. We almost hit lockout on M2. I figured out the mechanics quickly and was able to sight read but I do hard content. If you can do these, you can clear P1S synched and many older EX. TLDR: tough, but very fair.

If they think it's fair as someone who is legally blind, I think that says wonders about the balance of the content and I really respect their views since accessibility is important.

[Zeya]

To all the people crying about the difficulty now being too hard. Seriously, the difficulty is absolutely perfect as it is, and don't forget that this is level 100 content where at this point you should have a pretty good understanding of the game and most of the mechanics.

What's so bad about wiping 2–3 times? After a few wipes, you've learned the basics of the fight, and you're definitely playing better than you were at the beginning. There are also countless community guides that explain everything.

I really wonder how such people go through life when they immediately give up at the smallest challenge and defeat and don't even try to learn from it, get better and overcome it.

[soliquidsnake]

Ahhh the day 1 Ozma wipes and disbands were GLORIOUS. Truly, I miss those days sometimes.

[tilznit]

As an older casual player, I went in without prior knowledge of the fights and thought the raids were fun. Will be farming for gear. Nothing needs to be changed IMO.

[KToo]

So, I absolutely think posting on the forums is probably the best way to give SqEnix feedback as a normal player.

However I couldn't disagree more with the normal content being too difficult. Dawntrail is hundreds of hours into the game; it is about time that normal content has higher intensity, there are 51 required MSQ dungeons before Dawntrail which is plenty of practice to learn the mechanics and spot the patterns between mechanics.

Dungeons don't have DPS checks, if you are struggling with a mechanic, you can run it with a trust and stop hitting your damage buttons for the duration of the mechanic you find difficult. Hell, with trusts if you're playing DPS you can just not DPS and do the mechanics. Will it take longer? For sure. But it makes the game mechanically easier. Raids have always been optional content, so if you find those too difficult you can opt not to do them, as you would with Savage or Extreme.

I really don't want SqEnix to renege on making normal content harder, so I think it's important to add another voice to the pile that I truly do love this expansions fight designs and encounters so far, and I really hope they keep it up.

[ShadHorkos]

Finally I think that people that thrive with difficulty (the ones that demand harder content) already have extremes, savages, ultimate, criterion dungeons, and more (Yoshi-p is even touting of savage alliances), this people is eating really, really good. Do they need to take normal content too? Can casual players have something easy-ish to play? Please?

People crying such don't get how ex and higher work. Were u need from few hours to hundreds to clear and get 1 times reward then. Not just 1 pull (2 if all first timers) and where u can easily be carried by rest of team. U don't punish your team with mistakes in most of cases. This mentality "Oh no, u have already your hard content, make everything braindead so I could afk" is so stupid

[SamLeens]

.. The game at level 100 should not be designed around people who effectively just started playing, they are outliers and the skip even tells them to start with the basics before jumping into content.

i know, but i also know that not everyone does what they're told. you drew the line at lvl 100, for me it's around lvl 70-80, but i can't expect that from others. i can only expect that from myself, because no one is playing to fulfil my expectations.

..But unfortunately, for a reward to mean anything it must require some effort. That is just a fact. If people want rewards with no effort beyond paying a monthly sub for the game... that sounds more like gacha than an enjoyable game.

it sounds like a different reason to play the game. my reason is as i told you the brain training and savage in pf until im fed up. for others it can be the login after a shitty day, or just to relax and thats the reward they are looking for.

I don't really know what instant death mechanic in dungeons youre referring to. .. but I cant remember anything that just outright killed me in one shot. Apart from maybe the final boss of the circus dungeon i cant remember the name of? Something dreadwalk.

the cactus boss, for example, kills you instantly if you get hit by the thorns. i, as healer, died to all the bosses in the new dungeons at least 4 times, bc i missed one mechanic (and most of the time, there's no one to rez me so its a wipe or i have to wait until the boss is dead).

The thing is about saying 'I accept this is a problem for you, but not for me' is that this person, OP, is trying to get the game changed for them.

Yoshida-san said in an interview 4 months ago that "So from now on, we’ll keep working to surprise players and go beyond what they imagine. But that reminds me of something I regret… as we’ve continued to operate FF14, we’ve made the game more comfortable, a game you can play without stress. But looking back on the last 10 years, I’m thinking we’ve overdone that a bit." https://www.ign.com/articles/final-f...-going-forward
I dont think that they will back down immediately. They knew that players will get mad.

i would tell anyone who is stressed about the new difficulty that it will get better soon and not to worry. we all had content that we had to practice and everyone is going to experience changes at some point that they're going to reject at first, so i would be patient.

As for AST... if you like, I could teach you. I havent played the class beyond 92, but not much has changed except for the cards, which I'm already familiar with. I'd be happy to keep the job alive, even if I end up straying away from it.

thanks for the offer! That would be great. wow! but how would we do that?

[LilithKha]

What a pompous arrogant elitist attitude you have putting words into others mouths.. I've never had such problems with playing this game before dawntrail normals. The game is meant to be for everyone not elitist pricks that went everything set so hard it can be used to filter out players. How greedy are you when you already have savages?

What a pompous arrogant toxic casual you are, expecting everyone else who plays this game to have a worse time because you, personally, got filtered. I have run into precisely zero players in the numerous runs of Arcadion I've done with friends who are moaning about the difficulty, everyone is having a blast even when they're hitting the floor constantly because it's fun, engaging content. Because it makes you use your braincells and hit your mitigation and heal buttons so you don't die. You know, like a video game is supposed to. I am sorry that you got filtered and have nothing better to do than complain on the forums but the rest of the community will be having fun in the new content.

[FlorineC]

except Dawntrail is seemingly even using even story dungeons to filter "bad" players judging from the first boss of Origenics being so cruel to healers, and the generally higher dungeon difficulty overall, and i find it hard th believe if the story dungeons are THIS much harder, anything harder are going to be like impossible for most players

I'm not sure I understand what you mean. The story dungeons are harder than they've been in prior expansions, but I don't think they require an unreasonable reaction time. You use the first boss of Origenics as an example, so I guess I'll talk about that.

The fight really only has two mechanics. The first is the venomspills, which give you roughly four seconds from telegraph starting to attack snapshoting where you have time to dodge, with ~two seconds from snapshot to the start of the next telegraph. You are always safe from this mechanic if you are 3/4 of the way to the edge opposite which side the boss is attacking, so this gives you four seconds to read the boss telegraph and move 1/4 of the arena over, and two seconds to reset yourself to the middle. Instances of this mechanic are also over a minute apart, so you can have Sprint available for all of them (granted, the duration only covers a part of the mechanics length). This seems like an extremely reasonable amount of time to dodge the mechanic, and also has leniency built in for getting hit, as one hit only does about 75% of a non-tank's hp.

Afterwards, you have five seconds of free time where nothing is happening, and then ten seconds of the boss telegraphicing its next attack. This gives ample time to heal the party up and raise at least one if not two players who may have died during Venomspill. The following mechanic is a simple left/right/front dodge, where you have ~2 seconds between attacks to dodge. Granted this is a relatively short period of time to dodge, but the actual movement required is minimal, and if you're not confident about dodging, there's a lot of space in the arena where you can stand still and only take one hit, which won't kill you, as again the hits only do about 3/4 of a non-tank's health pool.

You then have ~8 seconds of no damage before the next raid wide damage, which unmitigated does about 40k damage to non-tanks, 55k with one vuln. More than enough to heal everyone to full, and throw some shields and mitigation out there.

The unavoidable damage in this fight is very minor, which means the party and the healer in particular should have a lot of resources to prepare for or react to mistakes made by the party taking accidental damage. I'm genuinely unsure what part of this fight is cruel to healers, and would be curious if you had more specific issues. I'm not trying to discount any difficulty you or anyone else felt with the fight, but I believe the mechanics are far from insurmountable for anyone actively paying attention and trying to learn from their mistakes.