Difficulty of normal content.

[holydiver1286]

This is the "new Final Fantasy XIV". Because the reviews and the story are so bad, the only people who are buying Dawntrail are those who want to play the endgame content. FFXIV is no longer for general audiences, it's for those who've already mastered the content and want harder content. So all of the elitists have come out of the woodwork now that they finally feel it's safe to do so, and are spilling vitriol everywhere. I've even seen your post referenced in game, without anyone prompting it. They're so overjoyed that they have an expansion "just for them" and they want to make sure that no one else can ruin "their moment".

Until we get massive edits to the Dawntrail MSQ or a new starting point for new players, this is how FFXIV is going to be from now on. Odd how WoW is going to be the MMO for general audiences again for the first time in 20 years.

lol or as many people are saying over and over again, we just don't want it to be braindead easy. This has nothing to do with "hardcore players should be the only ones that matter". Nobody that raids feels like they're having "their moment". Nobody wants normal content to crushingly difficult or brutally punishing. Nobody wants to turn basic content into dark souls. We just want it to be somewhat interesting instead of feeling like youtube or netflix has to be up on a different screen so we can avoid falling asleep while essentially fighting a striking dummy of a boss. A basic example I can think of that is nowhere near crazy difficult is the hallway near the end of Puppet's Bunker. The one where the turrets are shooting down the hallways while the orbs are flying around. This is super easy, but it asks for the most minimal level of engagement where you have to pay attention and move or you get some kind of punishment like vuln stacks or death. This is all we're asking for when we say basic, but in the form of boss fights. I can literally go into almost any pandemonium normal fight, not move almost at all, not avoid any attacks, gain all the vuln stacks in the world and not die, not contribute in any way, and still come out rewarded and be on my way. That's incredibly boring, not to mention griefing the rest of the team. You are supposed to playing a game. Why would you pay a monthly subscription for something that you don't actually want to play? A boss that you can defeat by basically just repeatedly beating on it without any requirement of thought or effort is just a striking dummy.

And yet again, Dawntrail is not doing anything special in terms of increasing difficulty. All it's doing is reverting some changes that were made in endwalker. Endwalker took the pace down to like -3 compared to content before it. Dawntrail is just resetting it back to 0. I can almost guarantee that after you get used to the pace of Dawntrail content, you will very likely feel the same after ending up in something like pandemonium in a roulette.