Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[hydralus]

Some people applaud the new design, others detest it. Thus the world keeps turning.

[AmiableApkallu]

I think having infinite revives would be bad, but possible one or two per boss would probably be better in Trusts.

So, the Willful buff we already get in 8-person duties/trials. (Just add it to dungeons, SE. Please and thank you?)

[Infindox]

So, the Willful buff we already get in 8-person duties/trials. (Just add it to dungeons, SE. Please and thank you?)

Imma be honest, I did I think Hydaelyn fight once and Mandy fight once with the system just to see the NPCs; I completely forgot that was in those. But yes, just add that to Trust dungeons.

[Myotis]

Harder content pretty much always have rather low clear rate because, well, they're harder and not everyone wants to bother with that. If you want content like savage/ultimate to have a high clear rate you would have to severely reduce the difficulty probably to normal raid level or, at the very most, extreme-level. But then you have to also reduce the actual normal-level difficulty otherwise it makes no sense. So you ends up with the high-end difficulty content to be easy and nothing in the game is remotely hard and challenging to do. You also alienate the majority of the players because all content are a snoozefest and nothing is remotely interesting to do. Overall, you end up with a dead game.

Hardcore raiders only gets 4 savages like every other patch and one ultimate once in a while, they've not remotely become the target audience. I would say that DT's target audience are the average casual people who don't necessarely want savage-level of difficulty but still don't want to fall asleep while doing every single piece of content.

I don't see how your personal skill could affect anything - current clear rate is a complete joke and disaster for an game like this and effects of it we can see each day seeing empty towns and waiting longer and longer in queue to get any duty done.

For the harder content you only need patience to learn certain quite boring dance where they want you to stand in certain position - your personal skill is unable to save the party from a wipe if anybody does a mistake.

I would say that normal content is made out to be too easy while it's fun to avoid the orange puddles the game does not promote anything requiring "skill" more of pattern learning i felt that a change was in valigarmanda fight and it was nice.

Extremes i find quite balanced if you are into DDR fight schemes
Savages - annoying and constant wipes during the prog are meant to exteend your grind on memorizng the patterns as the dps checks what require some better equipment later on.

as for Ultimates at first i tought they are unique but it's the same as the savage but just longer so you need quite more of the patience to learn your pixel standing spots.

Right now the clear rate for an mmogame is a pure disaster the effects of it we can see each day while we wait longer and longer in queues , while watching empty towns or quite less ammount of active PF's.

The game has massive issues with scalling, boss mechanic smoothness and there is insane visual clutter to only exteend the grind.

If this won't be fixed as you see now people won't bother - even top ultimate clear teams ain't bother at least 2 of them are being caught cheating each new ultimate is being realised.
This will only promote futher growth of black market for skips and cheating.

[CidHeiral]

Put of the problem is consistency. The game should have a hard rule for how markers appear. Not oh one you have to watch weapon and one look for the visual in the background. But oh this one you can follow the markers. Some systems can be unique. Some should not. I don't want to play any game where I have to guess how combat is going to work fight to fight.

That's nothing unusual in the realm of video games. In Souls games for example a boss could telegraph its attack by raising its arm or glowing a part of its body or leaping to a certain area of the arena. Even bosses in Nintendo platformers for children have different tells and ways you have to approach the encounter. Mixing things up keeps the encounters fresh.

FFXIV also introduces you to those concepts in normal dungeons and whatnot over time. If you're in a combat encounter at level 100 you have seen bosses telegraph attacks with various markers and body language countless times before. None of it should come as a surprise outside of whatever the unique gimmick of that particular fight is, which itself is often just a spin on an existing concept you've already seen.

[Shistar]

I don't want to play any game where I have to guess how combat is going to work fight to fight.

Understandable, that's a fair opinion. However, the game has always been like this, and it used to be much worse, so I'm wondering why it you didn't feel it was a problem before?
Bosses often had obscure mechanics unique to them that you may not see again for the rest of the expansion, take Diabolos's portal doors from Amdapor, or the boss before having the tank kill an add to be able to draw aggro in the first place. These mechanics could get quite punishing, too.

I think the added variety of having to figure out what the boss's choice of communication will be is fun, personally. I also enjoyed ARR+ mech design best (or what was left of it when I began playing in 2020, many old dungeons would consistently wipe careless groups when this doesn't happen anymore sadly) where things are overall slower, but there's more moving pieces.

I think placing the bigger part of the game's complexity on the jobs rather than on the fight design would allow both of us to have fun: You can choose to perform a simpler version of your rotation so you can deal with mechanics more effectively as needed and fall back into the normal rotation as you get more comfortable, and players who want to push the limits can try to reach for the skill ceiling of their preferred job.

This 100%. The rewards are not worth the tedious process imo; specially when they become obsolete by the next patch or two. If they were necessary for relic weapon progression, I'd be more inclined to do savage content.

I agree, but honestly I'm quite glad savage is not necessary unless you wanna see your ilvl rise. It's a time investment I wouldn't want to do without a motivating reward, and nowadays that's the glam/mount attached to the fight for me.
Relics having multiple path options (let's say in the case of DT it'd be OC, savage or fates/roulettes as a lazy example) would allow us to work towards a goal but keep things fresh. Being able to mix and match would be fun.

It's harder to do ARR dungeons as a support than in Dawntrail.

This is so true, and I find myself enjoying older content more because the combination of the lobotomized kit (not so many emergency buttons), leftover obscure mechanics from that era and potentially a sprout tank that has no idea how to split up the pulls makes for the most engaging roulettes you can get your hands on as a healer. It's that, or get thrown into a synced Shiva EX with a bunch of people who don't speak your language + don't know the first thing about the fight and figure it out from there lol mentor roulette memes are always something.

I tried using gear from one of the recent dungeons lately in a glam set but gave up because I couldn't get colors to match.

In case you or others reading this later were not aware, you can use a search function in Eorzea Collection to filter for any gear pieces you're interested in using, to easily see how others put outfits together with it. It's not a solution to the root problem, but if it at least helps you wear the piece you wanted...

[Yeonhee]

I don't see how your personal skill could affect anything - current clear rate is a complete joke and disaster for an game like this and effects of it we can see each day seeing empty towns and waiting longer and longer in queue to get any duty done.

For the harder content you only need patience to learn certain quite boring dance where they want you to stand in certain position - your personal skill is unable to save the party from a wipe if anybody does a mistake.

I would say that normal content is made out to be too easy while it's fun to avoid the orange puddles the game does not promote anything requiring "skill" more of pattern learning i felt that a change was in valigarmanda fight and it was nice.

Extremes i find quite balanced if you are into DDR fight schemes
Savages - annoying and constant wipes during the prog are meant to exteend your grind on memorizng the patterns as the dps checks what require some better equipment later on.

as for Ultimates at first i tought they are unique but it's the same as the savage but just longer so you need quite more of the patience to learn your pixel standing spots.

Right now the clear rate for an mmogame is a pure disaster the effects of it we can see each day while we wait longer and longer in queues , while watching empty towns or quite less ammount of active PF's.

The game has massive issues with scalling, boss mechanic smoothness and there is insane visual clutter to only exteend the grind.

If this won't be fixed as you see now people won't bother - even top ultimate clear teams ain't bother at least 2 of them are being caught cheating each new ultimate is being realised.
This will only promote futher growth of black market for skips and cheating.

I pretty much agreed with most of what you said. The only skill expression you have in the game is indeed pattern learning and that's a bit sad.

I don't think savage and ultimate clear rate has anything to do with the game losing players, it's mostly thanks to every other big issues the game has. Majority of the game's playerbase wouldn't be much interested in savage even if they had more skill expression or different kind of difficulty.

People using plugins in world first clears and selling clears is hardly something new. My FC was selling Titan hard clears for gils back in 2.0 and you had several website selling it and Bahamut's coil for real money. Pretty much the same for cheating plugins, the big difference now is people becoming more careless and dumb with them, streaming or screenshoting their game with visible plugins on it. Anyone seriously believing that any world first competing team doesn't use plugins is just delusionnal.

[Chajii]

Not exactly about "difficulty" but many DT dungeon mechanics are less forgiving towards players with latency issues, indirectly making the content harder for some players despite they understand how the mechanics work.

[Jeeqbit]

Not the OP. But I feel if we time DT markers to markers before this expansion they do not line up. Either the attack is going off faster or the marker is appearing later.

I don't know what markers you are referring to. You would need to be more specific. I haven't noticed a difference in any case.

They are trying to make fights "more exciting". But I guarantee it is nothing they haven't done before. There was a lot of "fast" dancing in Qitana Ravel second boss, Eden's Gate Sepulture (aka Titan) and Tower of Zot, which is going back to Shadowbringers. Don't believe me? Queue for them again and see.

I am not sure which, but the margin of error is less. That I am sure of. You have to watch visual ques more instead of reacting to markers.

As I've mentioned, there are usually clues in the environment, and that has been the case since even Heavensward and Stormblood where widescreen was the accepted norm. If you were still stuck with a square monitor you were hard-pressed to see any environmental clues at all. Sometimes you're still at a bit of a disadvantage on 1080p so you have to rotate the camera and look.

If you think that environmental clues were not relevant that far back, it's likely because the content gets melted due to excessive gear. But I guarantee there are still lots of environmental clues in old content. Take Hullbreaker Isle HM which involves looking at the treasure chests, Sophia from Heavensward which requires looking at the meteors to see how the knockback will go, or the 4th Sigmascape raid that involves looking at the environment to see what type of attack or knockback is happening. We could try an ARR example in Lost City of Amdapor that is meant to involve looking at the door symbols (but most of us just skip it with DPS).

My point is that if you think this is new, you're too used to overpowering old content and ignoring their mechanics that have always been there, and were enjoyed by older players years ago.

Except the camera is kind of unhelpful, some bosses flash text because camera can't see the visual needed. How is that good design if the camera can't show arms being raised.

The text is not necessary in the slightest. It was added to help "spell it out" to casual players that don't understand the game ie. people that don't look at the cast bar or chatbox and ignore mechanics. I don't pay attention to the flash text because there are other ways to identify the mechanics.

I feel that I haven't noticed it lately and I wonder if they silently abandoned the concept except to solve issues in older duties that involved the chatbox. Either that or I got very used to ignoring it.

Now with less time and people who need to concentrate more on rotation. The difficulty scales way harder for them. You probably don't even think of what skill to use next.

That has always been the entire challenge of the game. This is what literally made the game hard in Heavensward. The older mechanics are as simple as they are because, back then, it was hard to do those "simple" mechanics with the tunnel vision rotations we had. We had 3 seconds to continue our combo or it reset. Doing a positional wrong could wreck everything. We had to maintain a buff that expired if we didn't continue our rotation. Tunnel vision cost us a giant percentage of our damage by reducing our main stats when we died, but so did pausing our rotation.

Tunnel vision can still happen, but it's far, far less of a thing than it was in Heavensward and it's barely punishing in the slightest. So while you raise tunnel vision as a concern, you are playing a version of the game where tunnel vision is less of a problem than it has ever been in the game's history. As the game is now, you can pause a rotation for 30 seconds without consequence, pressing a button wrong is likely not going to be noticed, positionals are hardly significant now and intentionally ignorable, and rotations are simplified enough that you don't have to pay as much attention to the nuances. Buffs that are key to your whole rotation no longer expire if you stop to look at the environment for a few seconds.

It should be easy to see how DT has been difficult for some.

It's easy to see how it's been difficult, yes. It's the developer's intention for it to be a little bit difficult. The answer is simply to try it again. People who don't want to put in effort don't have to, really. They can just wait until the content is old and unsync it. It's a perfectly valid way to play the game, and there are plenty of people that just focus on old content they can unsync without thinking. Likewise, there are plenty of people who simply accept they die a lot and others who play a tank so they can eat vuln stacks and get a lot of mechanics wrong without dying.

The final issue and you might have seen a post about someone failing over and over with trusts. Trusts are bad for players that have trouble with the new markers. DPS gets one hit maybe two and then they die and they have to restart the fight from the beginning.

They should ideally make the fight not reset when the player dies with Duty Support, given how people aren't using NPCs for the challenge but rather due to a lack of confidence either in their fighting abilities or in their social abilities.

Put of the problem is consistency. The game should have a hard rule for how markers appear. Not oh one you have to watch weapon and one look for the visual in the background. But oh this one you can follow the markers. Some systems can be unique. Some should not. I don't want to play any game where I have to guess how combat is going to work fight to fight.

This game has some of the most consistent mechanics and markers. They reuse mechanics so much. In and out AoEs, tethers, tank buster indicators, stack markers, "shiva" patterns, exaflares, knockback indicators. To the point they can teach them in a recent revamp to Hall of the Novice, which teaches many of these indicators.

That said, they (obviously) got feedback that these markers are boring and repetitive, so I forget when but it was probably headed into Shadowbringers that they started making mechanics at least "look" unique instead of just being orange circles, which led us into having environmental clues as a main way to identify mechanics. Throughout Endwalker, dungeons weren't about looking for orange circles anymore; they were about looking at the environment for lasers, octopus arms and things like that.

Despite that, SE still has consistent telegraphs - for example, a boss will typically spin around in a circle or spin something they wield in a circle to indicate you need to be inside the hitbox. Or, they will push their arms out (to indicate the inside of the hitbox is safe). In reverse, they will push their arms out close to themselves or otherwise indicate a full circle somehow if you need to run out. This is consistent enough that I can actually guess it on each brand new boss that just released.

[Absurdity]

Understandable, that's a fair opinion. However, the game has always been like this, and it used to be much worse, so I'm wondering why it you didn't feel it was a problem before?
Bosses often had obscure mechanics unique to them that you may not see again for the rest of the expansion, take Diabolos's portal doors from Amdapor, or the boss before having the tank kill an add to be able to draw aggro in the first place. These mechanics could get quite punishing, too.

I think the added variety of having to figure out what the boss's choice of communication will be is fun, personally. I also enjoyed ARR+ mech design best (or what was left of it when I began playing in 2020, many old dungeons would consistently wipe careless groups when this doesn't happen anymore sadly) where things are overall slower, but there's more moving pieces.

I can't tell you definitively, but I can give you my guess.

It's a problem now because people have gotten too comfortable with bosses just doing "dodge the same 5 orange AoE patterns while it casts for 10 seconds" for 3 expansions straight.
They even went back and reworked the mandatory ARR dungeons to do exactly the same thing, or they are so powercrept that you can simply ignore the mechanic.

So most players now have never even experienced having to figure out a boss' unique mechanics from whatever obscure tells it had.
Best example is Sunken Temple of Qarn. People regularly die to doom despite there being an obvious glowing platform and nothing else in the arena, because the game no longer bothers to make them develop the skill of "look around at what is happening".