Difficulty of normal content.

[jdtuggey]

Look 'ma, it's the thread that's on tv!

Just want to throw my opinion here, am a casual, have been since ARR, I don't want to commit and maintain a schedule, I don't want the game to be difficult to the point of being frustrating, I also don't want to feel like I have to commit like I used to on wow. Am mostly on the game because I enjoy leveling, running dungeons and making my friends smile, yet, since shadowbringers on a lesser level and then endwalker, I've felt I've been left behind. None of the content that I reasonably want to engage in challenges me anymore. Dawntrail feels like a step in the right direction to restore what was lost to me in that transition to accomodate more players.

Like, people that are struggling with dawntrail and expressing it in this thread feel like they're missing context, that the only FFXIV they've ever known is SHB and beyond, so they feel slighted, but to a player like me, they took the bar too low for low commitment content, and they are readjusting it. They aren't making a new move out of nowhere here from my perspective, they're fixing mistakes they made in the past. There's also another dimension to understand in this, they can't cater to everyone reasonably, there's a range of players that any given game will cater to, and when they made changes to difficulty in SHB, they did not widen that range, they dragged it to another place in the spectrum, and that left a wide gap between experts/normal raids and savage. Like, to think that they could cater to every player is kinda utopian ? Holding CBU3 to that standard is pretty unreasonable to me. Alternatively, you have the ultimate choice, you can choose not to engage in content that is too hard for you up to yeah, not engaging with the game anymore.

Unexpected difficulty is always jarring at first in a video game, but as you try and try, your standards readjust, you become better, and that's a reward in and of itself. Personally, am pleased by the slight increase in difficulty and how much more dynamic fights are, keeps me attentive and on my feet. And well, I'm a parent-aged gamer well past my prime.

One last thing, let's not forget to put the "dawntrail too hard" criticisms against "endwalker braindead" criticism, just to show the reality that no matter what CBU3 will do, people will complain. It's their game, not mine, so I prefer to defer to them and when the game goes south for me, I speak with my money. I'm willing to bet that this thread made it so many people who wouldn't throw their voice in the mix do so in the end, and from what I can tell, this ultimately worked against the opinion that dawntrail is too hard, which I would describe as "counter-productive". :P

[Theswweet]

for p8s before patch fix? maybe, almost definitely yes.
for p8s after and especially p10?! no lol

If we're directly comparing P8S to the Ultimate raid it unlocked, no, even before the nerf I wouldn't say it was anywhere near the same level as TOP.

[Sqwall]

If we're directly comparing P8S to the Ultimate raid it unlocked, no, even before the nerf I wouldn't say it was anywhere near the same level as TOP.

I said near ultimate....not that it is. I was pretty damn hard. Even the raid designer said it was overtuned and was as difficult as a ultimate.

[TakeshiNakazato]

because it HAS. since 2.0 the adding of normal made it so much easier. I wish they just kept the savage or regular difficulty to be able to see the story etc, and gate people from doing it. Then add a savage which would be ultimate now. For so called normal just make normal modes of other bosses or make casual world bosses that give mats etc. Instead they made it so much easier in 4.0 and have went easier every patch since, other then ultimate and some savages were really fun. I just mean regular normal modes dungeons casual content. This Finally made a tiny jump up in difficulty and people are complaining they cant just press one button anymore and play other games while you play. I can tell these people never played 2.0 when titan story was harder then these normal modes. Honestly If these people hate any challenge and just want the story etc and want to feel like they are playing GRAB a controller that is NOT PLUGGED IN watch a streamer play from the start and there you go. Just pretend its you , you can experience everything !!!!! problem solved.

Nyehhh, I think BCoB served it's purpose, but I think it's difficulty as it's own raid series is better kept in 2.0. For story goers, Bahamut is a pretty critical piece of lore that was gated by the hardest content in the game at the time. Stuff like that doesn't need to be gated by hard content, what we have now is fine enough. Wish we got more dynamic fights like turn 2 though...

The game hasn't gotten any easier, hasn't gotten any harder. Dungeons were never really all that difficult. The only thing that's easier is the job design, but that's a whole other conversation aside from the content itself. Hell, even this new normal tier isn't hard. The funny knockback mechanic and the heart bullet hell mechanic will trip you up like once or twice, then never again. Normal mode is and always has been fun little gimmicks leading into savage. Nothing's changed.

[Pepitoow]

For those who are complaining about the difficulty in an MAX LVL CURRENT CONTENT OPTIONAL RAID , just take your time to learn or like yoshi p said just take a break come back whenever you want, no one is forcing you to do or learn this OPTIONAL RAID , you can save up some sub money and come back later whenever you can unsync it solo without any "sudden non telegraphed aoe that one shots you" (oh look an activated bomb in the ground, surely its not gonna explode and dmg anyone around it right? why would i move away from it )" or try other games , i heard Hello kitty island adventure is coming up next year , you can try that one which is more in the casual and less difficult side and let us know how it goes

[Capstone]

This comment in Arthars's video raises a great point.

See, people is dismissing this issue thinking they are not affected are wrong. You are in the same boat with people like me whether you like it or not.

And I already made the decision of not even trying M3 or M4, but the alternative, the malicious compliance way, would be to just to go to the raids and just stand there doing some semblance of a rotation, zero effort of doing mechanics, and when I die and get raised I do it again. "Sorry guys, I'm still learning the fight. Tee hee! ^_^" (might even turn off skip of watched cutscenes to sell the illusion). And when the healers get tired or expending MP on my sorry butt, I just gonna lie down in the floor, watching something on the other monitor. But I will sure fit and perky for the moment of rolling the loot. Or maybe I'll just finish whatever I was watching before I roll, that would be fun for M4 that I'm pretty sure must have a minion.

But you see I already decided that I gonna protest (and yes, I think deserves to be protested) by just not doing it (already said it in the OP) and not go with the second option because a) I'm not an as$hole, and b) as I said I don't believe the people in this forum represent the community at large and I would be griefing the wrong people.


On a completely unrelated note, I love all the people saying that criterion weren't played because of the rewards, Xeno already covered that on a video. You all love so much the challenge for the sake of a challenge that you kick the content under the rug the second it doesn't reward you with something to showoff how much of a Big Boy Gamer you are!
If that's is the rule, let me tell that undyable gear and some ts are not reward enough for the difficulty of these normal raids.

So long as you are aware that you are absolutely going to get reported. Please don't grief people just because you are mad.

[caffe_macchiato]

Are the forums being raided? Why are there so many brand new accounts posting vitriol that violates the TOS? Just because someone has a different opinion doesn't mean you should call them "dogsh-t" and tell them to uninstall the game. What's going on?

[Glassem]

I wanted to wait to see the raid tier before I say anything. There are already post about dungeon and trial difficulty, and now normal raids should be thrown into the discussion too, and I might repeat points already said but I think we should really make a point of this, we (the people not ok with this difficulty) need for the devs to hear it to hopefully make a course correction.

The problem with the difficulty on normal fights as I see it is:
-Use and abuse of non standard telegraphs.
-Nasty mechanic overlaps, stuff you would see on extreme and harder fights.
-Mechs resolving too quickly for the mental capacity they demand to process.
-One too many "catch this!" mech (mechs that have you running around like headless chicken evading seemingly random patterns).

All this has been making fights in this expansion frustrating and exhausting.

The Honey B fight had me wishing for the healer to not raise me, I was there in the floor, dead for the Nth time, thinking that I don't really want to be on that duty.

And it's not an issue of learning the fight, because that I can do, but we don't do this content alone, you know? I think it was the 4th time I was doing Valigarmanda when I finally managed to finish without dying myself, but that's a moot point when half the party was dead half of the time, even knowing the fight doesn't make it any less of a disheartening experience.

And yes, this concerns normal raids too even if they are optional content. In fact I gonna take the skip option for this raid tier, something I haven't done since I started playing in SB. And that's the point really, for the most part in the past 3 expansions difficulty for normal content was fair outside of some hiccup here and there.

I firmly believe that content meant to be done via the duty finder (where you don't choose who you playing with) shouldn't be this level of punishing. And I know that JP people do savage in the duty finder but we don't do that in NA or EU, for better or worse western players doesn't behave like JP players.

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?

skill issue

[reflettage]

Context: I'm a veteran player who has been raiding Savage/Ultimate for years and have leveled several alts by hand.

One of the greatest failings of FFXIV in its current state is that it doen't teach you how to play. Sure, when you start the game it teaches you how to move your character, the myriad steps involved in doing a basic fetch quest, how to use aetherytes, and more through never-ending "Active Help" text dumps that look like ads just begging for you to close them. But while the game has evolved significantly since its release nearly 11 years ago, most of the early game has not.

Power creep reigns supreme through entire expansions, and is especially apparent in those ancient solo duties whose only requirement for success nowadays is "have a consciousness". Players never learn how to fail until they're eating dirt over and over to newer content and they understandably get frustrated.

Watching the boss's castbar is integral to modern FFXIV fight design, and yet its default position is this tiny little toothpick-sized speck tucked away in the upper-right corner of the target bar. THAT'S why we have people say mechanics are "seemingly random" or "come out of nowhere" -- because they have no idea they should be looking at the cast bar for information, they might not even know it's there. Think the final boss of the lv89 dungeon -- he can cast half-room cleaves called Left Firaga and Right Firaga, where Left and Right indicate what hand he's gonna cast the cleave from. The cast bar is the only indication this attack is coming until it's too late to dodge it intentionally. It's an incredibly basic mechanic, but if you didn't know to look at the cast bar, you'd be thinking "Wtf? How was I supposed to know?"

The game makes almost no effort to teach you how to play your job beyond the most basic of basics. I've been in duties with 0 DPS healers, tanks who don't mitigate, Black Mages who spam Blizzard -- hell, I was in the lv95 dungeon around a week ago and the Red Mage with us didn't press a single AOE attack the entire 23-minute dungeon, dualcasted Jolt more often than not, and never touched half of their oGCDs. Their search info informed me they had somehow gotten all the way to level 98. Likewise, a few years back I watched a friend attempt Pagl'than (level 80) with Duty Support. On the first boss, he didn't seem to realize that standing in the lightning pulses gave him vuln stacks, and due to tank privilege he wasn't in any immediate danger of dying so he didn't move out of them (maybe didn't even realize he was getting hit by an avoidable environment hazard?). He accumulated 8 vulns. When the tankbuster hit him shortly thereafter, he went down like a sack of potatoes, and had no idea why.

The game seriously needs to start expecting more than the barest of bare minimums from players way, WAY earlier, so they can learn iteratively throughout the entire 1-100 leveling experience.

[caffe_macchiato]

Oh, the thread got posted on 4chan. No wonder.