Difficulty of normal content.

[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.