Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[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.