Don't do chaotic raid again

[Kaurhz]

It's kinda the corner they backed themselves into though.

They started to scale back the difficulty in DF tier content with ShB and EW. Slower folks finally got to enjoy something more than just MSQ.
Now Masaki Nakagawa wants to bring stuff back to HW/StB tier for story mode and us slower folk are going "Uhhh, now what?". He and YoshiP are locked on this pattern so /shrug.

Right now I'm keeping myself occupied levelling the rest of my DoW/DoM and crafters but once that's done? It's unsub time

Honestly speaking in terms of casual content, I don't actually think the current difficulty is far off what we saw in HW/SB. Much of HW was lent to having some terrible design decisions embedded, in combination with sheer lack of QoL. Stormblood I actually found is a little easier than current. Some may agree and some may disagree with this statement, but I think current casuals are better than what casuals back then were, both naturally and because of various QoL.

Now what they need to do is find what difficulty they want to aim for and then stick to that difficulty as when they constantly yoyo around on difficulties, that is when you get issues.

Difficulty isn't as much the problem, but giving casual players very little to actively do is. I see value in raiding, don't get me wrong, so I don't want to divert this into an us vs them, but if all they release is extreme+ content after extreme+ content then this is what will put a lot of players in the position of this game not being for them, not the innate difficulty of casual content. Raids are healthy but they don't have the same sustain and replay value as what relics/ exploratory does.