The new dungeon is still ENTIRELY too easy

[Valence]

Not naming names, but I've watched some raiders get worse as expansions go by because they can't keep up with mechanics or changes in job design.

I feel attacked

[Teno]

New dungeon difficulty is fine and I personally wouldn't mind the next being harder, BUT if I have to scrape people off of the ground for a 40 minute slog of an expert roulette when trying to cap tomes before raid night/reset I'll riot.

I think the dungeons getting harder is a step in the right direction, but the devs need to give extremely casual players some time to adjust to the difficulty curve or they'll just be miserable and eventually fall behind. That, or they need to make a trust easy mode for people who only care about MSQ.

Jumping from one side to the extreme. To make having to scrape people off the ground it'd have to be savage variant, which we know it'll never be in a roulette. Don't be dramatic to make your point.

[Liyinabi]

Jumping from one side to the extreme. To make having to scrape people off the ground it'd have to be savage variant, which we know it'll never be in a roulette. Don't be dramatic to make your point.

It's not common, but I do get dungeons with groups that just can't dodge mechanics to save their lives and end up getting one-shot by the next thing that hits them after taking on too many vulns, even as it is. Sometimes it's my casual friends, and sometimes it's just randoms. I don't need to be dramatic or make things up to make my point if they're actual scenarios I end up in.

[Monolithic]

I’m pretty sure people’s issues are ‘suddenly coming out of nowhere’ because a game that they spent years on – potentially since the very beginning of ARR launch – is suddenly telling them that it’s not ‘for them’ anymore. The devs doubling down on using VFX vomit as a low-effort “difficulty modifier” (seriously the only thing lazier than attempting to obfuscate tells with visual clutter is making everything an HP sponge) is disproportionately effecting a very specific subset of people who previously had no issues with the game.

Being unceremoniously told ‘you’re not welcome here anymore’ because the VFX are suddenly giving them migraines or nausea when they never did prior to that is going to make people rather annoyed, I imagine. Not to mention the extra annoyance when they realize that the content actually isn’t that much more difficult than before, they just can’t see the mech tells, or are too physically debilitated from the side effects to do anything.

I think we'd find that if folks were given a setting similar to player effects, but for the enemy/arena effects (none/limited/full), a large portion of these ‘difficulty complaints’ would vanish overnight.

(It would also mean the devs have to do more than the equivalent of smearing vaseline on everyone’s screens to pretend everything is ‘harder’, but that's probably why they're determinedly ignoring the issue - it's easier & cheaper like this)

[jonimated]

This isn't an issue with the dungeon designs themselves, or content being "too easy". It's a problem with the FFXIV core encounter design. Fights in FFXIV are based entirely around pattern recognition. Anyone who is even half decent with recognizing patterns will understand any normal fight after experiencing it even a single time. Once you get it, that's it, you get it. You can just repeat the same thing over and over and be successful. Since the fights never change neither does the way you play them. And since nearly all job rotations are static as well this simply exacerbates the problem. You are literally just doing the exact same thing, at the exact same points in the fight, every single time.

Without some variation with how combat is designed this will always be an issue. It's not a case of making the fights "harder", it's about giving the players something to think about after the first clear.

[Volgia]

Fights in FFXIV are based entirely around pattern recognition.

I mean... every game out there and most bosses are based around pattern recognition. I think the problem is more your point on approach, as in, when you engage with a boss as a DRK it's no different than engaging with it as a WAR or PLD and this ends up going for every role and job in the game. It's what makes it feel samey.

[jonimated]

I mean... every game out there and most bosses are based around pattern recognition.

This isn't entirely true, but I see the point you're trying to make. Perhaps it would have been more accurate for me to specify the problem not simply being the pattern recognition, but the completely static scripted fights.

Everything in a FFXIV fight happens exactly the same way every time. So it's not just about recognizing individual patterns in a randomized set, which many game do. The entire fight is just one big script and once you get it there's nothing else to learn. You can switch your brain to muscle memory mode at that point.

[Volgia]

This isn't entirely true, but I see the point you're trying to make. Perhaps it would have been more accurate for me to specify the problem not simply being the pattern recognition, but the completely static scripted fights.

Everything in a FFXIV fight happens exactly the same way every time. So it's not just about recognizing individual patterns in a randomized set, which many game do. The entire fight is just one big script and once you get it there's nothing else to learn. You can switch your brain to muscle memory mode at that point.

I think the second boss of that last dungeon is a step in the right direction because while pretty simple, every role has to engage with the boss differently. I wish we had more of that, but it would be even better if your experience as a DRG was vastly different from engaging with a boss as a MNK.

[jonimated]

I think the second boss of that last dungeon is a step in the right direction because while pretty simple, every role has to engage with the boss differently. I wish we had more of that, but it would be even better if your experience as a DRG was vastly different from engaging with a boss as a MNK.

Honestly I think another really good example of this is the first boss in Strayborough Deadwalk. I know people tend to dislike this boss so this may be unpopular opinion bait, but I have always personally loved it. It's genuinely one of my favourite dungeon bosses. I think it's a really smart way of keeping players engaged in the fight using the randomized nature of the players themselves.

The Spirited Charge mechanic has the groups of dolls target different players based on positioning. They will then run in the direction of whichever player each group targeted. Sure a group of 4 completely organized players can bait the dolls to run in a very specific pattern and make it the same every time, but this just isn't going to happen. Normal duty finder just won't have that kind of organization. So what ends up happening is a mechanic that looks random on the surface, but is really that way because of the random nature of player positioning. The fight itself doesn't actually have any RNG, but due to the unorganized nature of duty finder it does.

I think it's a really smart way to cause players to have to pay attention to whats going on no matter how many times they've done the fight. It also has one of the rare examples of consequence that isn't just vuln stack. I would love to see more of this.

[Kaurhz]

I will just be blunt with this, it just means that you aren't really the target audience for the difficulty of the dungeon, as beyond a certain point you are always going to find folk that find the dungeons boring and sleep inducing, and similar conundrum with making things easier... At what point do you want to draw a line in the sand? There's always going to be people that find x difficulty too hard, just in the same vein you will always find people that think it's too easy and boring.

I will at least agree that a lot of players do want harder and more engaging content, I just don't think putting it in story dungeons is the right way to go about it, to be honest.