Difficulty of normal content.

[Banggugyangu]

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.

This is definitely the wrong take-away from all of this. The correct take-away is that as a player, your skill grows between levels 1 and 100. For most, that skill growth is plenty to be able to adapt and learn mechanics as they're introduced. For others, it may not be enough. For ALL of them, however, there is an ability to grow even more. This is the very foundation of video games. You start at one level and improve over time. The mechanics in the raids this thread was written for are not so dramatically different than previous. What we're seeing is a paradigm shift in how they're being presented to us, but that's ok. You can either have raids that give the same mechanics every expansion using the same presentation, or you can have raids that introduce new mechanics or new presentation. If all the raids are the same, then what's the point of new raids? If you never grow as a player, then what's the point of playing the game?

The only people who have issue with the difficulty of the new content are players that want to remain stagnant in the game, and the point of the majority of posters is that stagnation WILL kill the game.

[W0rldsastag3]

Not everyone wants a constant challenge. You ex players and raiders get your own modes and challenges, some people just want to veg out and enjoy a non challenging game, which the game has been for ten years, to it's success. Stop trying to make other people play your way.

PF is getting worse with third party tool parses being demanded, and friends I do have whonhave gotten clears in savage ar getting kicked off teams constantly for the tiniest mistakes.

Giving the 'crushing difficilty' people an inch has caused the game to get less friendly, forgiving, and fun.

[jdtuggey]

Not everyone wants a constant challenge. You ex players and raiders get your own modes and challenges, some people just want to veg out and enjoy a non challenging game, which the game has been for ten years, to it's success. Stop trying to make other people play your way.

PF is getting worse with third party tool parses being demanded, and friends I do have whonhave gotten clears in savage ar getting kicked off teams constantly for the tiniest mistakes.

Giving the 'crushing difficilty' people an inch has caused the game to get less friendly, forgiving, and fun.

Like, I thought we had debunked the "Ultimate raiders demanding they make casual content harder" conspiracy theory like... 100 pages ago.
I took baby steps in ultimate, same with like, current savages, not more, yet am pretty vocal about loving dawntrail. Lots, lots of other people like me in this thread. :P
I'd wager it's the people like me that like Dawntrail the most. We can't/don't want to commit to savages/ultimates, but we still want challenge in the casual content we can do, and square enix took a (tiny) step in that direction, and it feels to me like the response is overwhelmingly positive. Qualifying Dawntrail's difficulty as "crushing" is also a gross mischaracterization or a really subjective statement that is not representative ? It's not what I would want either.
To me, it don't feel harder, it feels more dynamic and engaging, especially now that I've gotten used to the new pace.

Like, it would be really easy to turn this argument on you and say
"Giving the turbo casuals an inch has caused them to demand more and more, and now Yoshi P's lifework was making him sleepy and I didn't feel this game was for me anymore up to dawntrail, despite having played since ARR"
And again, like, yeah, am decent at the game, I think, but I'm not a raider and I don't want to be lol.

Like, the dawntrail changes to pacing aren't targeted at savage raiders at all, they deal with much, much, much worst lol.

[Alice_Rivers]

PF is getting worse with third party tool parses being demanded, and friends I do have whonhave gotten clears in savage ar getting kicked off teams constantly for the tiniest mistakes.

Giving the 'crushing difficilty' people an inch has caused the game to get less friendly, forgiving, and fun.

That is a completely different and unacceptable problem, which happens to be reportable.

[Caitamm]

Not everyone wants a constant challenge. You ex players and raiders get your own modes and challenges, some people just want to veg out and enjoy a non challenging game, which the game has been for ten years, to it's success. Stop trying to make other people play your way.

Have we been playing the same game? If you want to bring up the patterns built in the past 10 years, EW would be the dip in normal difficulty and what we are experiencing now is actually rebound towards difficulty we've had before.

[royox]

Not everyone wants a constant challenge. You ex players and raiders get your own modes and challenges, some people just want to veg out and enjoy a non challenging game, which the game has been for ten years, to it's success.

This is an absolute LIE. The game was challenging since the ARR release. Dungeons on MSQ had challenging stuff since day 1. Sastasha, the very first dungeon of the game, was a wipe horror if the tank didn't pull carefully, if the party didn't kill the clamps fast before being overruned by fireballs, if the DPS didn't know they had to block the spawn of enemies on the last boss by standing on the water holes.

Brayflox's Longstop was a guaranteed wipe if somebody pulled any extra enemy during the dungeon because they hit the tanks like trucks, and in the final boss if the tank didn't know he had to move the dragon out of the poisons. And let's talk about the literal horror movie that was Aurum Valley.

At MSQ dungeon level there were wipes, there was challenge. There was "final sting" that would oneshot tanks at 100% if the Melee didn't stun the wasp, there was "doom" that had to be cleansed by Esuna, standing on a white spot in the dungeon or being healed. There was that one with the underground worm that required one party member to venture himself to the "danger" area to trow some meat to make the worm come out...but if he catches you, bye bye. Freaking Pharos Sirus was a wipe fest on every boss and I can keep tryng to remember stuff and it keeps coming. The game had random telegraphs for the same mechanics in diferent dungeons...or didn't have telegraphs at all (hello Cyclops from Aurum Valley).

And the raids? If we don't consider Bahamut Coils as they were NOT intended for casual players. Alexander was a wipe fest on every floor, with tank swaps, wierd shenanigans, healers having to soak lasers, while healing, while DPS gets kidnaped to 1 vs 1 an enemy while the rest are dealing with aoes, laser turrets, the boss and missiles coming from all sides.

Alliance raids? OH BOY. Nobody remembers anymore how we all needed to have a macro for Behemoth to remind people to hide behind a rock? Or that before entering cerberus we all had the A: Adds, B: Boss/Belly C: Chains converstation? That the zombie dragon of Crystal Tower was an absolute drama because people had to add slow debufs to the skeletons to be able to kill them in time or they would wipe the party. Shall we speak about the WIPE CITY of MNACH and Ozma? Who had people crying on forums and reddit for "being too hard?" because people was asked to remember 3 diferent patterns of the 3 shapes it can get? Oh boy and let's talk about Ivalice, the 1st boss saying "hi!!" with falling towers that oneshots everybody, the MATHS boss, the electric grandpa with 3 swords that had people crying from week 1.

long etc.

The game was ALWAYS challenging.

[NightHour]

Not everyone wants a constant challenge. You ex players and raiders get your own modes and challenges, some people just want to veg out and enjoy a non challenging game, which the game has been for ten years, to it's success. Stop trying to make other people play your way.

PF is getting worse with third party tool parses being demanded, and friends I do have whonhave gotten clears in savage ar getting kicked off teams constantly for the tiniest mistakes.

Giving the 'crushing difficilty' people an inch has caused the game to get less friendly, forgiving, and fun.

The games success didnt come from "vegging out" content at all, it came from WoW being a shit game at the time Endwalker released.



This is an MMO, MMO's are meant to have a progression path.

That path is Dungeons > Alliance Raids > Normal Trials > Normal Raid > Extreme > Savage > Ultimate

Criterion is side content.


Normal is technically "mid tier" content, endwalker difficulty did not reflect that.

The current difficulty of Dawntrail Normals is what I'd expect mid-tier content to be tuned towards.

Not too hard but also not so easy that you can put 1 hand behind your back and still clear.

and friends I do have who have gotten clears in savage ar getting kicked off teams constantly for the tiniest mistakes.

I doubt that.

There's probably more to it, no static worth a damn kicks someone for the tiniest mistake, they'd never clear anything if they did.

PF is getting worse with third party tool parses being demanded

That's plain wrong.

In the ~ 3 years I've been playing, I have not seen a PF group put up a parse requirement to join.

Unless it was a group designed for logging, which the average PF Joe has no business joining anyway. Those groups are designed for Best in Slot players to optimize their play, not to get loot or for people to clear.



There's 3 kinds of groups in PF


Practice - People learning the fight or progressing past a pre-defined part.

Clear Group - You can hit enrage or see every mechanic consistently and are ready to clear (No, watching a guide fully does not make you clear ready)

Logging - These groups are designed for Best in Slot players and are controlled environments with specific comps and strats to optimize play on fights - These are NOT designed for 99.9% of PF users.