Difficulty of normal content.

[Alice_Rivers]

You'll be just fine, so long as you're willing to learn from mistakes, the game really isn't as hard as the OP makes out. Yes there are a few nasty mechanics here and there but they're still doable with practice. If you're really as concerned as you appear about being dead weight then I advise doing your first run of each duty with a physical ranged job you really can't go wrong there. As for the community being unfriendly? Game fora always attract the worst elements of the community, peeps in game are equally as they appear (even if contractually obliged by ToS), if you ask for help I'd suggest at least 80% will happily walk you through stuff.

[Linnaete]

1. I'm eventually going to hit a wall in normal content because the hardcore crowd needs *everything* to be a ball-buster even though they already have their own exclusive modes.

Nothing in normal content is a genuine "ball-buster". Of course if you're unfamiliar with a fight then new mechanics will catch you off-guard, but that's remedied with practice (and gear). These are content designed for any randomers in Duty Finder; they're nothing comparable to Extremes and above because players don't need to coordinate strategy just to clear. Some people really need to stop seeing any degree of additional friction intended by game designers as insurmountable content made just to punish casual players.

2. The playerbase is not in fact as "friendly and welcoming" as they claim when a significantly large portion of if it so willfully, and happily even, tells people to "GTFO then" when some players run into difficulty.

Oh, for crying out loud. You're on the FFXIV forums. This place is not representative of the game's wider community and playerbase, much less the minority of posters here hurling the most vitriol.

By and large the wider FFXIV community is accepting of mistakes and/or when a player is new to content. Unless you've done something to actually warrant it (like griefing a party on purpose), other players will generally not kick you from the group or hurl barrages of insults at you simply for making mistakes. Even veterans with more than a decade of FFXIV play will make mistakes here and there. No one is going to have photographic memories of every instanced duty in the game, and some mechanics can be genuinely annoying to handle.

What matters is that you at least make an honest attempt to pick yourself up, learn from mistakes and strive to improve for next time. What people will not have time for are people who are at the lowest possible skill floor because either they're deliberately playing poorly for kicks, or they simply refuse to improve in any way, shape or form. As the majority of this long thread attests, how about the game designers not cater to this latter group?

As someone who only recently touched down in Stormblood, this is the first time I've had to stop and think about how I'm going to do the blue quests because doing so would be adding things to the duty finder where I'll just end up dead weight it seems

How do you know you will? You haven't set foot into any of these later expansion content yet, so how have you already resigned to the belief that you will never be able to contribute? If you do make mistakes, so long as you have the capacity to learn and improve in general, I'm sure you have the capacity to apply this to the game. A solo run with Duty Support can be an excellent way to gain initial familiarity with the mechanics, then once you've accrued enough confidence you can take the next step and try it via Duty Finder.

[jdtuggey]

Um... wow. What I've learned from this discussion is that:

1. I'm eventually going to hit a wall in normal content because the hardcore crowd needs *everything* to be a ball-buster even though they already have their own exclusive modes.
2. The playerbase is not in fact as "friendly and welcoming" as they claim when a significantly large portion of if it so willfully, and happily even, tells people to "GTFO then" when some players run into difficulty.

As someone who only recently touched down in Stormblood, this is the first time I've had to stop and think about how I'm going to do the blue quests because doing so would be adding things to the duty finder where I'll just end up dead weight it seems, or I'll be forced to 100% rely on Trusts for the MSQ the whole way because I would be better off avoiding the majority of the playerbase who clearly doesn't want me in their runs anyway. Is this really what I was subbing for this whole time? To go pure solo because I have neither the confidence to do the upcoming harder content, and because the community wasn't anything like I had been lead to believe?

This has definitely been an eye-opener compared to when I first started playing during Endwalker, and I probably should start treating it more like a single player game to prevent future issues.

You should probably take a deep breath, get there, and experience the content with no pre-made expectations built on an argument on the internet.
You don't know at this point if you're gonna hit a wall. You might not even feel it. Who knows ? I haven't really noticed until I got to the later Dawntrail dungeons myself.
Players are actually quite welcoming and kind. Veterans don't feel welcomed by struggling players that demand they nerf the content they love as is, you know ? It kinda goes both ways.
They also want to defend their interests here. You're more than welcome to struggle in an encounter and ask for help, and we will help, at least I know I would, all that's expressed here is
"we don't want square enix to nerf the content after they've made it so interesting after years of lull".

ᵏᶦⁿᵈᵒᶠ ᵒᵛᵉʳʳᵉᵃᶜᵗᶦⁿᵍ ᵃ ᵇᶦᵗ ʰᵉʳᵉ, ⁿᵒ ?

[Jaxtaro]

Um... wow. What I've learned from this discussion is that:

1. I'm eventually going to hit a wall in normal content because the hardcore crowd needs *everything* to be a ball-buster even though they already have their own exclusive modes.
2. The playerbase is not in fact as "friendly and welcoming" as they claim when a significantly large portion of if it so willfully, and happily even, tells people to "GTFO then" when some players run into difficulty.

As someone who only recently touched down in Stormblood, this is the first time I've had to stop and think about how I'm going to do the blue quests because doing so would be adding things to the duty finder where I'll just end up dead weight it seems, or I'll be forced to 100% rely on Trusts for the MSQ the whole way because I would be better off avoiding the majority of the playerbase who clearly doesn't want me in their runs anyway. Is this really what I was subbing for this whole time? To go pure solo because I have neither the confidence to do the upcoming harder content, and because the community wasn't anything like I had been lead to believe?

This has definitely been an eye-opener compared to when I first started playing during Endwalker, and I probably should start treating it more like a single player game to prevent future issues.

I've got some good news for you. There isn't much that you'll experience at the point you're at in the game that will represent the toxicity you're seeing here. It exists at the leading edge, but don't let what you see here obscure your sense of wonder and optimism at your level of play. Almost no one is toxic at someone struggling in older content at all.

[Sida]

The old story comes to mind. A radio broadcasts a warning that there's one car driving to opposite direction on the highway. One driver hears it and harrumphs "What do they mean one car, *everyone else* is driving to the opposite direction." If you see toxic everywhere around you, are you quite sure you're not the source yourself?

[Oku-1]

Um... wow. What I've learned from this discussion is that:

1. I'm eventually going to hit a wall in normal content because the hardcore crowd needs *everything* to be a ball-buster even though they already have their own exclusive modes.
2. The playerbase is not in fact as "friendly and welcoming" as they claim when a significantly large portion of if it so willfully, and happily even, tells people to "GTFO then" when some players run into difficulty.

As someone who only recently touched down in Stormblood, this is the first time I've had to stop and think about how I'm going to do the blue quests because doing so would be adding things to the duty finder where I'll just end up dead weight it seems, or I'll be forced to 100% rely on Trusts for the MSQ the whole way because I would be better off avoiding the majority of the playerbase who clearly doesn't want me in their runs anyway. Is this really what I was subbing for this whole time? To go pure solo because I have neither the confidence to do the upcoming harder content, and because the community wasn't anything like I had been lead to believe?

This has definitely been an eye-opener compared to when I first started playing during Endwalker, and I probably should start treating it more like a single player game to prevent future issues.

Literally nothing in normal content is hard. All that's happened is the game expects you to understand how to do basic highly-forgiving mechanics after 90+ levels of showing you the exact same mechanics and so it's giving you slightly more complex versions of those mechanics. In all of Dawntrail I died exactly once and it was because I didn't expect an ability to do a knock back and it threw me off the platform, and then I immediately went "oh I see!" and cleared the boss without a single vuln stack after that. If you go in to harder difficulty optional content, which Raids are, then that's your choice.

The playerbase is great if you aren't a condescending weirdo, which is why it's all the more ridiculous to complain about the difficulty of normal content: literally all you have to say is "hey I'm struggling a bit with this expansion's content sorry in advance if I screw up" and everybody will be understanding and will probably /cheer at you and give you the entire party's commendations when you eventually clear, or you can just say nothing if you clip a mechanic and die because people don't actually care.

In over 4000 hours in this game I can count on one hand the number of times I've encountered a toxic player in a duty. The community is great. A lot of y'all just come in to heated discussions outside the game and then throw your hands up and harumph at everybody, which of course is going to invite a little snark.

[Conando]

Um... wow. What I've learned from this discussion is that:

1. I'm eventually going to hit a wall in normal content because the hardcore crowd needs *everything* to be a ball-buster even though they already have their own exclusive modes.
2. The playerbase is not in fact as "friendly and welcoming" as they claim when a significantly large portion of if it so willfully, and happily even, tells people to "GTFO then" when some players run into difficulty.

As someone who only recently touched down in Stormblood, this is the first time I've had to stop and think about how I'm going to do the blue quests because doing so would be adding things to the duty finder where I'll just end up dead weight it seems, or I'll be forced to 100% rely on Trusts for the MSQ the whole way because I would be better off avoiding the majority of the playerbase who clearly doesn't want me in their runs anyway. Is this really what I was subbing for this whole time? To go pure solo because I have neither the confidence to do the upcoming harder content, and because the community wasn't anything like I had been lead to believe?

This has definitely been an eye-opener compared to when I first started playing during Endwalker, and I probably should start treating it more like a single player game to prevent future issues.

There is nothing in DT that is harder than Heavensward or Stormblood. Endwalker was an outlier and even Yoshida acknowledged it by saying it was making him fall asleep.

[JokoCGN]

....
the only peeps who might tell, some NORMAL duties are difficult or too hard, are the ones with some kind of disability - I'd understand that tbh.

all others mimiming, telling like "I want to relax, it's a game", are just lazy or unwilling to learn.
U're like 4-8 peeps in a duty, just ASK If U didn't get any mechs or something.
Social anxiety .. it's a MMORPG, so I won't let that count tbh.

and like some others said already, them duties are optional. so skip them or play them duties with Ur NPC friends.

[JoshuaEN]

I don't think mechanics in normal content need to be deadly to be interesting; giving a damage down is (to someone who is interested in being challenged) a fate near enough to dying, while not causing actual deaths.

Mixing this in would allow for a higher mechanical difficultly (like we're seeing in DT) while providing a lower-stakes environment to learn, and without being overly punishing to causal players who may not even be interested in engaging with harder mechanics.


I also think normal content should have something like variant actions to make healers not the single point of failure when there's not a res caster around.


That said, I am personally happy with the increase in difficulty (in terms of it being harder to correctly resolve a mechanic), especially having less of slowly showing a very easy to resolve version of each mechanic once, which ends up being the majority of the fight once IL creep hits. For any replayable content (which all duty finder content I would argue is), having some challenge even after you know all of the mechanics is a welcome relief from EW where Expert roulette in particular became extremely boring after a while (p.s. can we please keep more than two dungeons in expert, even if that's just going back one more patch's dungeon).

[yoshinoharu]

I don't think mechanics in normal content need to be deadly to be interesting; giving a damage down is (to someone who is interested in being challenged) a fate near enough to dying, while not causing actual deaths.

Mixing this in would allow for a higher mechanical difficultly (like we're seeing in DT) while providing a lower-stakes environment to learn, and without being overly punishing to causal players who may not even be interested in engaging with harder mechanics.


I also think normal content should have something like variant actions to make healers not the single point of failure when there's not a res caster around.


That said, I am personally happy with the increase in difficulty (in terms of it being harder to correctly resolve a mechanic), especially having less of slowly showing a very easy to resolve version of each mechanic once, which ends up being the majority of the fight once IL creep hits. For any replayable content (which all duty finder content I would argue is), having some challenge even after you know all of the mechanics is a welcome relief from EW where Expert roulette in particular became extremely boring after a while (p.s. can we please keep more than two dungeons in expert, even if that's just going back one more patch's dungeon).

Damage downs work in Savage and EX because there's an enrage, an actual time limit that means if you aren't putting out enough damage, you will not clear. I agree that it's a great tool to use in such fights where DPS is important, but normal content has no time limit or DPS requirement. It goes on infinitely until you die or you clear it, so death and vulns that threaten death are the only real consequences that have any meaningful weight. It's moreso that there's this weird concept that it's not okay to wipe. It's okay to wipe and fail as long as you're learning from the experience.

Edit: Wholly agree with adding variant raise though. Healers being the lynchpin is kind of annoying. Even letting us use a quick-cast Phoenix Down would be a great option.