Endgame should be challenging - that's the point (from a casual player)

[Granyala]

Yeah the last thing I'd want is any more hard content, particularly that gates the story.

While I don't want >>hard<< content, I also don't want content that auto-completes or defeats itself just be my being there. I think there is something to be said for a "happy medium" of difficulty.

Bosses' abilities should hurt but not be instagib. So the player respects and plays around them but has a chance to learn w/o getting his butt handed to them every time he fails. What buttons I press with my job and whether my gear is up to snuff should matter somewhat.

Take Expert dungeons as an example: right now they are a complete snooze fest. I don't want criterion level dungeons but I would like ARR level dungeons back. Make bosses a bit meaner, remove the goddamn walls every 2 trashpacks so tanks can go ham and assess themselves how much trash they can manage and I as a healer can actually heal. And for crying out loud, increase the goddamn pool. Why is it only the last 2? So bloody repetitive.

I feel that the 8 man normal raids are in a relatively good spot right now. Shit you need to take somewhat serious but not overly punishing so DF groups can't complete it. Though I wish SE would loosen up on the "you have to remember/predict this attack, you do not get to react on the fly!" kind of mechanics. Especially the: "lets cleave the room in half"... seems to be their new favorite toy, lol. It's not that they are hard... they are just annoying to deal with.

Ofc keep in mind: I am biased by being an experienced ex raider. So my "happy medium" may already be too much for many folks.

Difficulty levels can help but these come with troubles of their own.
E.g.: Serious-Expert™ dungeons. A meaner version of standard experts. Put in too little and no one does it. Put in too much and folks that are not suitable feel pressured into it. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Like I said, perhaps not difficult but it demanded attention, and this is just where I am simply going to disagree with you.. The ability to craft endgame crafted gear should not just simply be a freebie for merely having a pulse and reaching the endgame level.

It is not. Don't be obtuse.
It takes a shitload of time to level all crafters to be able to craft everything yourself.

It takes time to farm materia even with the script system, it takes time to farm the materials, it takes time to familiarize yourself with the rotations and needed stats to be able to create macros and have a proper HQ success rate.

Sorry but it is nowhere near a "freebie". If it was, there would be no market for crafters at all because everyone would just "grab the freebie". You need to step out of your hardcore Omnicrafter bubble and see how this whole endeavor looks to a person just starting out.

This whole discarding of 'needing a lot of time for no reason, and being tedious content'

Yeah sorry but I refuse to call RNG based Desynthesis and CG seal grinds "systems". There really is no difference, it's the same thing just with a different coat of paint. Especially GC seals. LOL. It's literally "craft stuff to get currency". Sound familiar? Oh yeah that's script!

I do agree that crafting difficult items for Mastery books was more immersive and fun as opposed to just spamming a lowbob collectible.

No the reason for the state of gatherers is because SE sucks at node distribution. When doing all the current craft/gathering gear you need 400 items from the same node and maybe 150 from the others. Naturally such an imbalanced distribution will leave you in a spot where you have to wait for that one node. Gathering is much more fun when you need all materials and basically hop to a new location every 5 minutes, sometimes even needing Cordials for the GP to keep up.

[Valence]

So full disclaimer, it's been a while since I got to endgame myself. Last time was in the middle of Shadowbringers, so I have no reference of what current endgame looks like. What I'm criticizing is the sentiment I read on these forums. Reading that Dawntrail has some challenging content made me more interested to reach there and experience it, and I found it a pity that it's being criticized here.

This may be unpopular, but I believe the "normal mode" of endgame content should either not exist or be much harder. Content and story should be locked behind the hard content, similar to how Coil was in ARR. Being rewarded with content is more satisfying than gear, because gear is just a treadmill. Content has actual substance.

You think it may already be the case with raids unlocking as you complete them, but not really, because you already played those raids in normal mode and experienced some of their mechanics. If normal mode wasn't an option, it would motivate people to get better and push their limits.

You could find party finder groups deep into Heavensward and later for clearing Coil, and I believe mostly for story reasons. Coil brought so much value for so long because there was NO normal mode. If you wanted the story, you had to do it the hard way, or none. THAT is rewarding my friend. I get chills just thinking about it. It's a pity that doesn't exist anymore.

The MSQ can stay casual-friendly so there remains a linear accessible path. But overcoming challenge is universally satisfying. Even if some players aren't playing for that purpose, they should be satisfied with the linear MSQ while the game shifts values for other content. And they can do older challenging content when overgeared!

I do not get the logic behind this. If going back to ARR with no storymode for endgame content, do you realize that people interested in the story and people interested in raiding do not cross over that much? I don't know how big the venn diagram is between those two categories, and I'm sure a lot of raiders do enjoy the story, and I don't know about you, but when I prepare for raiding, find a static and all that jazz, the story is the least thing on my mind, and I've always been following the story and the lore with a lot of care. And most of the raiders I've played with when we did the storymode before getting into savage, guess what? They skipped everything and always had to wait for me that didn't.

It's literally the same mindset that I cannot comprehend that pushes the devs to add second phases to last bosses of each tier exclusively to savage, where in reality when you're playing savage you're not there for the story. You're there to experience the full story when playing through storymode and I always find it puzzling to see the devs literally harming their story content by cutting some of the epic climaxes of the content to keep it exclusive to savage.

The constant insistence on "people getting better and pushing their limits" also reeks to me as sports or gym talk. I remember Zepla also dropping something like this when talking about her TEA experience - and don't get me wrong, I'm glad it pushed her to improve and feel good about it - but she compared it to teaching, which I also find absolutely wild unironically. I don't think everyone play games like it's a constant sport competition (either with other people or oneself), or a matter of learning life skills. They play to have fun. Some do have fun by pushing their limits, and some find their fun in other things.

Obviously you'll find some parties trying to run savage content just to experience the story if it's gated behind the content. I'm just not sure it would lead anywhere good to force story enjoyers through a content they don't necessarily enjoy. I do feel that you're trying to push your self improvement mindset onto everybody. Just you dropping words like "universally" sounds like a lot of delusional assumptions about people. Or maybe I'm not people I don't know. It's possible.

And yeah sure, let's enjoy the story half a decade after it's released. Sure is gonna go well.

[YumieYumiki]

I dream of a world where mmo players finally understand that "time consuming" and "difficult" are orthogonal concepts

[Arkdra]

The answer is bee adds in every fight.

[Kaurhz]

While I don't want >>hard<< content, I also don't want content that auto-completes or defeats itself just be my being there. I think there is something to be said for a "happy medium" of difficulty.

Bosses' abilities should hurt but not be instagib. So the player respects and plays around them but has a chance to learn w/o getting his butt handed to them every time he fails. What buttons I press with my job and whether my gear is up to snuff should matter somewhat.

Take Expert dungeons as an example: right now they are a complete snooze fest. I don't want criterion level dungeons but I would like ARR level dungeons back. Make bosses a bit meaner, remove the goddamn walls every 2 trashpacks so tanks can go ham and assess themselves how much trash they can manage and I as a healer can actually heal. And for crying out loud, increase the goddamn pool. Why is it only the last 2? So bloody repetitive.

I feel that the 8 man normal raids are in a relatively good spot right now. Shit you need to take somewhat serious but not overly punishing so DF groups can't complete it. Though I wish SE would loosen up on the "you have to remember/predict this attack, you do not get to react on the fly!" kind of mechanics. Especially the: "lets cleave the room in half"... seems to be their new favorite toy, lol. It's not that they are hard... they are just annoying to deal with.

Ofc keep in mind: I am biased by being an experienced ex raider. So my "happy medium" may already be too much for many folks.

Difficulty levels can help but these come with troubles of their own.
E.g.: Serious-Expert™ dungeons. A meaner version of standard experts. Put in too little and no one does it. Put in too much and folks that are not suitable feel pressured into it. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

It is not. Don't be obtuse.
It takes a shitload of time to level all crafters to be able to craft everything yourself.

It takes time to farm materia even with the script system, it takes time to farm the materials, it takes time to familiarize yourself with the rotations and needed stats to be able to create macros and have a proper HQ success rate.

Sorry but it is nowhere near a "freebie". If it was, there would be no market for crafters at all because everyone would just "grab the freebie". You need to step out of your hardcore Omnicrafter bubble and see how this whole endeavor looks to a person just starting out.


Yeah sorry but I refuse to call RNG based Desynthesis and CG seal grinds "systems". There really is no difference, it's the same thing just with a different coat of paint. Especially GC seals. LOL. It's literally "craft stuff to get currency". Sound familiar? Oh yeah that's script!

I do agree that crafting difficult items for Mastery books was more immersive and fun as opposed to just spamming a lowbob collectible.

No the reason for the state of gatherers is because SE sucks at node distribution. When doing all the current craft/gathering gear you need 400 items from the same node and maybe 150 from the others. Naturally such an imbalanced distribution will leave you in a spot where you have to wait for that one node. Gathering is much more fun when you need all materials and basically hop to a new location every 5 minutes, sometimes even needing Cordials for the GP to keep up.

Your average player can do Ishgard Restoration, have everything levelled relatively quickly and even if they were buying materials they would more than likely still be recouping any losses. This is just going to be a disagreement in expectation and overall demand, for me personally something such as crafting should at the end-game should still have a respectable level of investment required. Which for me that just currently doesn't exist.

Your average crafter upon hitting level 100 can just grind scrips for 30-60 minutes, have a complete set of 720 scrip gear, spend a further 1 hour farming for materia and have more than sufficient enough stats to sit there churning out end-game gear.. This is why I call it a freebie, because it literally is, and no amount of "But, well, they did level up" is not going to change my mentality on that point. Has literally nothing to do with being hardcore. [Edit: and to be honest with the changes made to Innovation/Inner Quiet and it scaling from ability efficiency over pure control just means that in quite a few cases you aren't really gaining much anyway as the overage you get from needed HQ materials just covers that stat discrepancy.. I think there were 3-4 recipes out of everything release with Ceremonial where my stat deficit actually mattered.. and this is especially problematic when your design pretty much encourages that everything will be done with a mere macro, versus the traditional way where it encouraged manual crafting due to difficulty of guaranteeing outcome with macros]

How I engage with crafting now, versus how I engaged with it in ARR/HW-era, they could not be more different. I found myself engaging with a lot more of the game, simply because the game demanded me to do so. Some of this is down to familiarity, but much of this is simply due to the fact that they've erased some nuanced systems, e.g., WWYW, which absolutely rewarded you for the effort, and then same with encouraging me to branch out.

Takes time to familiarize with abilities etc., etc.,? - That's entirely redundant, you copy and paste a macro job done... A macro doesn't exist for your stats? Literally go on Optimo or Raphael website, problem solved, and those solvers are just as good as 99.9% of crafters out there. It's not the day of Lokyst or Beta TC solver where you would get Careful Synth 9 times, with half of them under Innovation. Literally, copy, paste, press a button and job done, and there is no incentive to learn because the self-same applies to 99% of all recipes in the game. Besides, I thought you were concluding that crafting is and always has been a braindead activity.. So surely there is not much to learn or familiarize with at all.

I also probably wouldn't be around here churning around the "Get out of your hardcore omnicrafter bubble" - When the same could just as easily be argued with respect to older crafting, where there were troves of people that struggled with it -- and understanding some of the nuance behind it -- Like recipe level versus actual crafter level. So this is really a point that ultimately goes both ways.

----
They are systems whether you want to agree with that fact or not, to be honest. You can be as reductive as you like but ultimately they had people doing a wider array of activities even if you want to boil it down to just "It's a currency bro".

Glad you can at least see some of the problems or relate to them...

This is one of the issues, yes, but the fact is still there, regardless of how that node distribution is, you still spend a significant amount of time between nodes doing absolutely nothing because 90% of the recipe structure boils down to 4 folklore and 2 tomestone items. Besides, you're still probably going to be wanting to hit those nodes anyway for spiritbonding.... and again, much of this wouldn't be an issue if it tasked you to doing other things between those nodes, as mentioned. Well, actually, I suppose you did hit your cordial every few minutes.

Fundamentally I am just going to disagree anyway. I think it's healthy that the game has time-wasting endeavors in there... Sure, some of them could have been better designed, e.g., Spiritbonding not dismantling the gear. But beyond that I don't really see why so much of the game should be a soul-less existence with the "Well they did spend all that time levelling up" token.

[Nero-Voidstails]

Second Coil was when they introduced savage as a concept, but alright.

that is true but on release coil was savage so technically of we use today terms the second coil savage are actually the ancestors of ultimate

[NanaWiloh]

I mentioned Experts simply because they cannot be crafted reliably with a macro. Everything else can, once you figure out a rotation.
To call crafting "difficult" is just dishonest.
It's as easy and braindead as games can be. It just ate a shitload of time, especially due to overmelds being mandatory in early game and grabbing materia via spirit binding yourself was a major slog.

And I did craft in ARR and Heavensward, so I know what I am talking about, even if memory is a bit hazy after all this time.

Needing a lot of time for no reason != hard content. That is tedious content. Very different thing and I am glad that SE toned down on that when it comes to crafting.

I wish they would do something with the: "stand around for half an hour to be able to hit a gathering node for 10 seconds" as well. Such asinine design.

My guess is: the same as in EW, really.
Mostly obscure one-shot mechanics, added with: "F-you player you wipe you start from scratch" sprinkled with some "no rezzes!!" on top.

The main reason why my savage raiding folks didn't want to bother with the Criterion dungeons was that the overhead was too much. We don't have a problem with wiping on mean bosses but having a game not respect our time by forcing a restart every time? No forkin' thank you. Same reason we never bothered with this deep dungeon nonsense. No permanent progress is a major turn-off once you are no longer a kiddo with infinite time.

That and the gear apparently didn't look fabulous enough. *chuckles*

Don't miss arr or hw crafting. It was nothing but 10 layers of rng waiting to screw you.