Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[Azurarok]

My take's been that MSQ dungeons shouldn't have been made faster or had telegraphs hidden until last minute, or at least not have been so strict on their enforcement. The last boss of the Cenote dungeon's got some strangely strict positioning with the knockback mechanics, and the second boss of the latest one catches quite a few players with the one move where a bunch of aoes go off one after another. The phoenix down change did help counterbalance it a little, but it should've happened much earlier.

Also you know what isn't as strictly enforced in normal content? DPS checks.
Playing a job well, while encouraged, is a lot more optional in comparison and job complexity allowed players to adjust the challenge for themselves but we don't even have that now. They went a route where the game caters to a much more specific crowd than it used to.

[Jeeqbit]

My take's been that MSQ dungeons shouldn't have been made faster or had telegraphs hidden until last minute

If telegraphs are hidden until the last second, then there was another telegraph in the environment that was not noticed. They wouldn't just give you a second to dodge. It's much more like 3-10 seconds but you're meant to observe the environment or "learn the fight" which mostly happens the same way every time.

The last boss of the Cenote dungeon's got some strangely strict positioning with the knockback mechanics

You need to be knocked back diagonally to have enough ground to remain on the platform. This is pretty obvious. It's why the blue circle is at a corner. Do not be inside the circle or it'll kill.

the second boss of the latest one catches quite a few players with the one move where a bunch of aoes go off one after another.

All telegraphed like 10 seconds before. Need to read the environmental clues so you can pre-position.

If you can't dodge fast, I suggest playing a tank because they can survive hits.

[Mecia]

Put the ''difficulty'' back into jobs.

[Yeonhee]

There is a player base in this game that likes to do stuff at max level and ins't doing the latest difficulty dungeon ... they enjoy housing, glam and a myriad of other things, which has been the attraction of ffxiv in the first place ... and this for a long time has been the draw of the game for many players, including older players, disabled players, those who may play for themselves, with their children, or even grandchildren in some cases. They happily made their way through the MSQ, making mistakes and learning, not burdening other players with their lack of speed and reactions, and making their way via duty support to end game.

However, come DT and things changed.. The speed with which aoe's are chucked out is ridiculous for some players except almost professional players. Yes, we can work out our mistakes, yes, we can move when need, but not at that speed. Not as an older/disabled player.

I think that it's not only the lack of content, diffuculty of content or whatever ... I think alot of older and/or disabled players that enjoyed the game and invested a lot of money through subs and/or online store purchases, have now decided it all too much and cancelled their subs. They cannnot progress any further, especially if, as Yoshi has said, it will get even more difficult.

I know my post is coming from only one part of the fandom, but I also know that many other parts are unhappy, so what should they do ... or will they go down the Blizz route and not listen to anyone?

I'm all for some accessibility settings like disabling some of the bosses VFX of making clearer colors. But reducing the already quite easy difficulty even more and making the majority of the content boring for everyone just so a small minority can clear it easier isn't an healthy way forward.

Sure, DT is harder than EW which was a huge snoozefest but it's ridiculous to say that it's for "almost professional players". The normal's content difficulty is still quite easy. I know that's a quite unpopular opinion here but not all games has to be for everybody nor should they. If one finds DT's dungeon to be so hard that they can't manage to clear them, maybe it's time for that person to reconsider playing the game.

And telling people who don't want to fall asleep while playing to "just do savage/ultimate" is pretty ridiculous. Some people still want a baseline difficulty without having to throw themselves into the game high-end difficulty. Having only "inexistant" and "high-end" choices with nothing in-between isn't exactly a good way for combats.

Put the ''difficulty'' back into jobs.

That would be great but then you would have people still complaining that they now need to decently press buttons to clear content and that's still too hard for them because of age and/or disabilities.

[Mesarthim]

"The speed with which aoe's are chucked out is ridiculous for some players except almost professional players"

So the boss actually doing something other than standing around doing nothing but 3 autos in a row and saying hurr durr is for professionals now? Can't wait for 7.4's inevitable "this dungeon is too hard!" thread. You know it's coming and the cycle repeats.

[Jaltaer]

"The speed with which aoe's are chucked out is ridiculous for some players except almost professional players"

So the boss actually doing something other than standing around doing nothing but 3 autos in a row and saying hurr durr is for professionals now? Can't wait for 7.4's inevitable "this dungeon is too hard!" thread. You know it's coming and the cycle repeats.

Adding to this - in later/newer content, a lot of the time, if you can see the orange AOE marker, you're already too late to dodge. Most bosses and enemies have other tells and cues before their AOE goes off (using M7 as an example - Brute Abominator has an attack that can either be a point-blank or donut AOE. It's telegraphed beforehand by both the name on the castbar, as well as which of his weapons is glowing), the orange is pretty much there to let you know how far in/out you should be dodging, it's there as something you can remember for the next time the mechanic happens or you're in the fight. While I don't doubt that yes, there are people lazy enough to use plugins to solve mechanics for them, it's far more likely these hypothetical people being accused of cheating are simply paying attention and have learned the fight and its tells. Add that to the fact that pretty much every new fight is on a script these days, and it's not hard to preposition yourself for a good 80-90% of mechanics.

[Valence]

Adding to this - in later/newer content, a lot of the time, if you can see the orange AOE marker, you're already too late to dodge. Most bosses and enemies have other tells and cues before their AOE goes off (using M7 as an example - Brute Abominator has an attack that can either be a point-blank or donut AOE. It's telegraphed beforehand by both the name on the castbar, as well as which of his weapons is glowing), the orange is pretty much there to let you know how far in/out you should be dodging, it's there as something you can remember for the next time the mechanic happens or you're in the fight. While I don't doubt that yes, there are people lazy enough to use plugins to solve mechanics for them, it's far more likely these hypothetical people being accused of cheating are simply paying attention and have learned the fight and its tells. Add that to the fact that pretty much every new fight is on a script these days, and it's not hard to preposition yourself for a good 80-90% of mechanics.

Those cues are garbage. I'm not playing Seikiro, I'm playing a MMORPG.

What the fuck has happened to this game in pve over the years I don't even

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Put the ''difficulty'' back into jobs.

Pretty much (mostly).

Are people surprised though? When you take out the difficulties from playing the job then dumps them into solely encounter difficulty, what else can they make other than increasing the amount of "stand here or die idc" and its severity?

Maybe it's cheaper for devs to do this (not enough cost lmao) because they only need to design mechanics for main tank and non-tank instead of trying to design for diff subroles but look what that has done to the rest of the game lol.

[Crafoutis]

Put the ''difficulty'' back into jobs.

From someone for who things come easily: doing the thing isn't the hard part.

I shouldn't find it difficult to make my Warrior combo correctly, that should be instinct.

The difficulty should come in the decision-making from the outside (the encounter), not from the execution (the player's kit)

[Amarande]

I feel like people are over-dismissive of the disabled here. Disabilities come in a number of types.

Neurodivergent spectrum (an issue which A LOT of older generation gamers especially grapple with) people for instance frequently struggle intensely with sensory overload, which has been one of the latest gimmicks heavily used as "difficulty" these days.

People with vision issues genuinely ran into issues with EX4 to the point SE had to adjust color tones somewhat as a result.

Hand issues are becoming an increasingly severe problem if you have them (this started to really be noticeable with the mandatory full party QTE in the 5.3 trial; I remember a friend telling me it almost stopped her from continuing MSQ, and this was a person who was skilled enough to deal with the then-current Eden Savage tier!).

Age becomes an issue as well because reaction time slows down with age and we're being given less and less reaction time to register what's often less and less clear clues. Even skilled players cannot but switch to a "die and learn" methodology as the brain often simply does not operate fast enough to be able to deal with certain mechanics outside of pre-knowledge and reflex grooving (even the reaction times associated with DANGEROUS DRIVING - and we know how dangerous that is IRL - are slower than the ones asked from FFXIV raiding).

And essentially the game has frog boiled its way from being a more cognitive challenge (which older and less abled could handle better and gave older FFXIV so much of its enjoyment) to almost entirely an athletic one (which favors the young and abled and is apt to leave a lot of older people to the kind of embarrassing career end Brett Favre experienced, for instance lol).

It is true that WoW is even more fast paced in ways (1.5s GCD) but at the same time: it usually is structured to allow much more meaningful reactive play, and it's also slower in some ways.

Keep in mind that ranged attacks have a significantly longer range in WoW, also that the arenas are MUCH BIGGER which lends itself more to mechanics of the "you need someone out here to handle xyz that will happen there" type vs. the "stack on his butt" chestnut of FFXIV, and to rather less frantic avoidance of huge no-zones (especially when you also consider that in-combat speed boosts are much less uniform across WoW classes, and have been heavily muted in most of the post-WoD era due to "well, you see, agile movement is Demon Hunter's class fantasy!" leading to a round of heavy mobility nerfs back in Legion).

Also, while the WoW GCD is faster, the game is far lighter on oGCDs: you don't tend to have a lot of them in your damage rotation as you do here; they are almost exclusively for utility actions such as interrupts (and sometimes - keeping in mind that unlike SE, Blizz often change things up so much in a new xpac that it often almost might as well be a new game altogether - they try playing around with putting even those on the GCD, although this was vocally not well received by the players).

The big problem is we're likely hitting the limits of FFXIV's design: Job homogenization is all but forced by the fact that every slot in an 8 player raid is so severely oversubscribed (even WoW runs into issues with that for small group content on the reg such as high end Mythic+ teams being extremely homogenous and this meta often trickling down to the minds of group leads at much lower levels) and a lot of more varied mechanics have been tried and didn't work well within the system (Coils were a big graveyard of this), which leaves "push people to play big-league perfectly" as about the only thing they have left. I hope the new Myth Arc if we get one isn't too long, because I see maintenance mode in the nearer rather than further future for FFXIV as a result (and I sometimes wonder if this is why they compressed Endwalker which was IIRC originally meant to be a pair of expansions).

(And then there's the fact that Western feedback is stunted by 3000-char limits - Japanese being a LOT more space efficient generally - and janky editing requirements, dangit. LOL)