Player Drop Off and Accessibility/Diffculty

[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)

[Supersnow845]

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)

There is nothing in the job kits that allows the encounter to be anything besides “do this or die” because there is nothing meaningful utility in the kits which is exactly why the encounters are the way they are

The closest is literally shield bash being a lifesaver in deep dungeons because you can basically infinitely stun mobs when too many roamers get pulled at once, but that only works in deep dungeons