Quote Originally Posted by Valence View Post
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I mostly agree about introducing more failure and raising the skill ceiling of the game overall, but I wanna point out that casuals didn't "went by just fine" during HW. HW was the period where, to my experience, the playerbase was at its most toxic because of the job design. Job design was convoluted, complex and satisfying to optimize maybe, but also unintuitive for most jobs, and a time where balance was at its most out of wack. It made it so casual players were scorned by midcore/regular players and some hardcore players for not mastering what they thought should be the baseline of job usage. It's one of the many reasons for the simplification that started in Stormblood (notably the cross-class skills system, remember that casuals were supposed to "know" they had to level up Thaumaturge for Swiftcast or Lancer for Invigorate).

And yes the game didn't exactly crater, but it was also maybe it's most dire moment since 1.0 too at the beginning of the expansion. Gordias remains the most ill-received raid tier in the game's history and almost killed its raiding scene, Diadem which was supposed to be the expansion's major feature failed catastrophically 3 times in a row. The game took a better turn in 3.2 but raiding remained unappealing not only because of the sheer difficulty of Midas, but also how gatekeepy the difficulty of both job design and encounter design made this side of the game (both in terms of investment required and community behavior towards "less skilled" players). Even the first release of Deep Dungeon 1-50 was poorly received. That's why we got the new raid design we still have now starting from 3.4.

So yes, I do agree about introducing more failure and raising the skill ceiling. I'd add also skills that are more interactive than "fancy animation + x potency". But HW was way dire for casuals than people seem to remember, if the main story didn't hit as much as it did, it would be treated worse than Dawntrail currently is.