So... Who said NM's were too easy?

[Kazimir]

Open world NMs are always going to require little skill because open world fights are limited in what can be done and anyone can go zerg, die, zerg, die until the mob dies. You can't do that in a timed instance because if you suck you won't even make it through to the mobs that drop the good loot or have the time to kill it if you do get through. You can also have more dynamic effects in your instance that just wouldn't work in open world.

How so? If they make NM's a challenge for a full group they would need plenty of skill. You can't zerg in this game either, once a mob is claimed there's no inviting outside people and with a proper weakness / raise timer you're not going to be able to just zombie it to death.

No matter what any dev does, short of making them unbeatable there will always be someone complaining that enemies or NMs or bosses are "too easy." Hell, even with that Pandemonium Warden fiasco in FFXI a few years back I saw people blaming the players, rather than the devs, for the fight taking 18 hours. It's good game design to make fights that are challenging for most players, but also feasible for most players to beat. This maximizes the content that's doable for the playerbase for the amount of manhours that go into making these NMs, which is something the dev team is in very short supply of right now.

tl:dr Dev team can't waste time making content for 5% of the playerbase like a lot of FFXI's endgame content, it needs to be accessible to more people. If they can make a hard mode or something for more drops in instanced content, then that'd work fine for everyone I think.

A lot more than 5% of the player base can beat most of FFXI's endgame content. It really is not that hard. It takes cooperation, strategy, and timing, something none of the current NM's really need to beat, and something all NM's should require. Of course, there are harder HNM/NM that takes such a cooperation that not everyone can beat, but that's needed for the more skilled players to not get bored.

They can't make all NM's easy enough that everyone can do them. When you do that you get what we have now. A bunch of bored players and only a few that are okay with it. Minus the pop times and camping, FFXI actually did a really good job with its NM difficulty. I'm fine with some instanced content but I don't feel they should go the WoW route of having a normal and hard mode where the only big difference is drop rates. Perhaps if the hard-mode fight had it's own unique twists and the gear dropped was also unique with superior stats it would be fine with me. Just my opinion though, of course.