The new player experience and how FFXIV fails as an MMO.

[Mawlzy]

I'm not talking about optimisation. I'm talking about the basics. I don't think the game should allow people to hit level 100 as a WHM with only glare and cure 1 on their hotbars.

In what sense do you find Dawntrail dungeons harder than previous expansions? I think most of the complaints on Dt release were coming from newer players who started during Endwalker and hadn't played a dungeon without being ilvl synced before. Some of the bosses one or two overlapping mechanics but that's fairly normal. Overall I think the dungeons are the easiest they've ever been. There are no interrupts any more. No debuffs that need to be cleansed. There are a ridiculous number of forced single pulls, no big pulls bigger than 2 packs, and tanks have been massively overbuffed again.

Yeah what Valence says. It's just too fast with too much visual mess. I find it really difficult to pick off boss tells and remembering cast names is also challenging (possibly because once I've cleared a MSQ dungeon I don't touch it again). I did switch from MCH to WAR to get through the MSQ dungeons with NPCs, but I still found it difficult and frankly unpleasant.

To loop back to the issue of rotations, struggling players like me are told to not worry about doing damage, first avoid the mechanics. Very sensible, but also a massive indictment of fight design. And the less skilled you are, the more the fight reduces to DDR. Why learn what your kit does when you don't have time to use it?

The other huge issue I have is button bloat. If I wanted to use all my kit, I can't because I simply can't create that many comfortable keybinds.

I figure in terms of skill, in PvP I am top 20%, in PvE bottom 20%. A huge chunk of that is that in PvP I don't need to look at either my hotbars or keyboard. And I enjoy PvP.

[Shurrikhan]

If anything that's why the battle system has been dumbed down so much that it doesn't get in the way, and the tank literally cannot die.

I don't think the two have virtually anything to do with each other. Nor are the latest dungeons particularly "harder" than before; the "be here by X time" objectives are merely more visible. Casual content now has fewer and/or more lenient DPS checks, less need for coordination, and generally less cognitive load even before factoring in job kits.

Tanks can't die because the devs decided that people are more likely to play tanks, reducing queue quota bottlenecks, if they can be demi-gods, and healers are 20 shades of excess healing and a skill and a half of anything else because they decided that'd draw the most overall appeal to healers, not because we needed to save cognitive load for the present fights that, on average, take no more or take even less thinking ("monkey see, monkey do" included). When AST was running Sleeve Draw, Spread, and Royal Road and optimizing outcomes under varied conditions and per different compositions, we still had Mist Dragon offering far more difficulty than most Dawntrail dungeons.

[XtremePrime]

I think the new player experience is great for someone that is looking to play a Final Fantasy game, because honestly that's what it is. It's your usual Final Fantasy game but with other players populating your world and helping you on some adventures!
Endgame is not as much of a focus as in other MMOs such as WoW, instead the primary goal of FFXIV is the play and experience the stories offered through MSQ, SideQuests, Raid, A-Raid, DDs, etc as a story-driven game!

[Mawlzy]

I think the dungeons have been at their "hardest" ever. Fast paced DDR everywhere, gotcha mechanics, crapton of visuals cues to keep track of else you get your vuln stack (or potentially die), until they decided it's not working or they don't want to do it anymore somehow with The Underkeep which feels back to the usual formula.
If anything that's why the battle system has been dumbed down so much that it doesn't get in the way, and the tank literally cannot die.

The Underkeep really is a bizarre outlier and I can't imagine what happened in the design process.

I remember going through that wondering when the oh-so-funny gimmick mechanic was going to rise up and kill me, and it never did.

[Kohashi]

The issue is the implications of playing your job incorrectly being normal.

We can't have normal mode content that requires players to actively participate because the majority of the playerbase don't actually have any idea how the game works. And the majority of the playerbase have no idea how the game works because the game doesn't do anything to teach them, or even incentivise figuring it out or using external resources to learn for themselves.

No damage to heal. No mitigation required. No DPS checks. No dispellable debuffs. No interrupts. No stuns. No CC. The game never requires you to do anything except not stand in the orange. The devs have done everything they can to ensure that failure is near impossible.

The game is stuck in a vicious cycle of not being able to have engaging content because the playerbase isn't good enough at the game, and players knowing nothing about the game because the content doesn't require them to learn anything about the game. It makes it very boring for people who do know how to play the game and see all the wasted potential.

While the difference between somebody who engages with high-end content and someone who does not is like night and day, I do have to say I do appreciate, in a way, the simplistic nature of the normal content.

In my opinion, it all comes down to the person. One who seeks to improve will always actively search for information and will never need a game/somebody to babysit them. The same applies in day-to-day life.

At the end of the day is not the game that should push you to improve; you have to have the desire to push forward. That's why some people are so resistant to advice, because they don't care about playing the game optimally, and that's fine. It's completly OK to suck at the game and focus on the social aspect.

[Raikai]

I've been thinking... they mentioned offering a new starting point for new players after Endwalker's MSQ.

But would that would even see the light of day when they are actively spending their resources updating the old dungeon experience?

[BunnyBrat]

In other mmos you can play the msq together?

[XtremePrime]

I've been thinking... they mentioned offering a new starting point for new players after Endwalker's MSQ.

But would that would even see the light of day when they are actively spending their resources updating the old dungeon experience?

They mentioned it during Endwalker but quickly went back on it saying that they wish the players to experience the entire story.

[Krokov]

In other mmos you can play the msq together?

You can in the Final Fantasy XI.

[Altina_Orion]

Get real people, the story drives the game but if it was purely a story game, it would have been dead long ago. The game survives by making you stay subscribed for 4 month periods between 6 hours of story. I don't know how people can't understand this.

And yes, as a new player looking for an MMO, they almost certainly wont make it to the endgame unless they bet on a story skip unless they also like 500 long visual novels. If the story was as story driven as you people claim, a monthly sub would not be justified.