6:04 Cae’s really calling me out. I do my EX1 farms while watching Game Changer because I’m so used to the fight now. And It’s fine. Doing this as a healer is so funny though. Imagine your doctor gets bored and starts watching Jeopardy during the surgery.
Something I'm noticing is that "content being difficult" and "content being engaging" seem to overlap a bit too much....at least from a metal perspective. You mentioned the Ivalice raids as an example earlier and those fights are only difficult if you DON'T learn the mechanics. After that point, they are quite chill, but you're still ENGAGED with the content. A game that asks nothing of you will lose its appeal quickly so dumbing down of mechanics or being able to completely faceroll content is long-term detrimental to the game.
EX really helps fill that gap. most of the EX are not that hard, but its not so easy you can just face tank everything. you will have to learn some mechanics.
To be honest, I think Ivalice and Nier raids are skipped not because they are hard but because they are long. The Nier ones are at least a half-hour commitment.
that not the same the casual content is made for casual ppl who do not wish to suffer from unclear mechanics that cant be learn by simple watch and not needing ot look up guides or videos to do .
@anteprs7908 Most mechanics in the game are very clear. You might get hit the first or second time you see a mechanic in Ivalice or Neir, but if you're paying attention, it should be very clear every other time you run it. It's OK to wipe to a fight the first time you see it.
I have a feeling that a lot of the difficulty complaints come from the culture shock of playing through the entire game with power-crept gear (which isn't the player's fault) and then suddenly experiencing current-level content with current, at-level gear. I started playing in shadowbringers and after being able to largely faceroll everything, Holminster Switch hit like a brick in the face. Some of the Dawntrail dungeon bosses are a bit harder than Endwalker and honestly that's good, I've enjoyed it, but now we're into post-game gear we're already skipping mechanics because people know the fights and are at endgame gear ilevels. Of course to those that just quit out of a roulette in a Dawntrail dungeon they'll always be hard because they've never tried. I think keeping story mode content easy would be fine if we had something in the gigantic gulf between normal and extreme fights. I thought Criterion Dungeons might solve this but they're at the Extreme/Savage level and the upcoming Chaotic 24 man raids also look like they're going to be very hard too.
thats honestly, why I think for most content, the sync level needs to go down, or for stuff like mount drops, they cant drop if done unsycned is a valid solution.
Yeah a lot of it is this. And just the tiny (seemingly) difference between 690 and 710 is enough to turn the 100 dungeons from near-run things to trivial encounters.
The upcoming field op will likely be a difficulty that fills that gap between casual and hardcore nicely if it's balanced anything like bozja. Which is funny because I actually think many bozja critical engagements are harder than some ex trials, but it's a lot easier for players to just drop into those and learn by failing because of the structure. I think casual/midcore players tend to vastly overestimate the difficulty of EX trials because of PF culture rather than anything intrinsic to the difficulty of the fights. PF strats tend to create an expectation of competence that just scares casual players out of trying even though most of them are wholly capable of learning and completing the fights.
I made this comment about tanks in WoW, but I think it applies here as well: giving tanks self-healing instead of mitigation is generally bad. Because eventually the healing outscales the damage and you become immortal. Give me a short 90% damage mit on a short CD. Let me stun the group to drop incoming damage. A mit that gets stronger every time I'm hit until it expires. Anything but complete self-sufficiency.
My hot take is that Dark Knight isn't undertuned as a tank at all, and is completely viable. I've used it to w2w dungeons like Mt. Gulg, even when I didn't perfectly cycle my mits. It's just that every other tank is overtuned because they have self-healing on short cooldowns, which means that people are used to having immortal tanks in their party by now. Dark Knight doesn't offer enough immortality to render healers useless, which leads people to decry it.
Cries in Dark Knight, rolls face over multiple mits. But no huge heal other then our Invulnerable. I will say i do with the other classes had abilities similar TDN where you get massive mit but not heal through everything@CaetsuChaijiCh
If my group wipes and I'm still alive on tank, I always ask if they want me to solo it. If even just one player wants me to wipe so we can try again as a group, I'll stop soloing and reset the fight but if everyone wants to cheer me on, I'll do it. (well, as long as the boss is on a reasonable amount of health)
30% or less I always finish. It's more time efficient than running back and soloing the boss DPS-wise anyways because both DPS are doing less damage than you and one of them is doing less than the healer.
One tricky part is that the focus is on duty roulettes. Player A queues up for his dailies and expects a simple easy run, but gets thrown into a complex fight, player B wants an engaging run and gets Satasha. Those players shouldn't be in the same queue.
This was the point that stuck for me. You have people who are going in for different things so ideally they should be in different queues. I suppose the concern is diluting the player base too much so that new players can't get a group. But with Duty Support being fleshed out more (I think they said the non-story dungeons were going to start getting it) maybe this will be less of a concern?
@Wolfgang9Hype Might as well make it a single player game till current content then if you're just gonna segregate high and low level stuff like that with the excuse duty support exists.
It also doesn't help that doing an expert roulette a day is 1 of the better ways to capping your weekly tomes, it's either just do a hunt train which is equally boring, or do an expert a day with brain dead mechanics and just switch your brain off. I honestly think the whole "this is too difficult" argument is overblown, it simply isn't anymore, you got 1 dungeon with 1 boss that is slightly challenging and not even for the good reasons. (strayborough orsomething, the 1st boss) which is just atrocious hitboxes with exaflares and constantly running around enemies. But everything else? it's not hard. (to be fair, I raid savage and ultimates, but if I can turn my brain off and still do it stress free, I can't imagine the dungeons being legit hard, especially when the punishment is "we go again") You had people complain it's too difficult, oh no, you gotta pay 1% more attention, what do you mean that you still don't know what a stack marker is at lvl 100. (had an healer be in M4S with 3% enrage experience who didn't know what rez immunity was, bad players are everywhere, even at the last fight of a tier)
The only Dawntrail fight I despise is the first boss of Strayborough. The combination of chaotic movement, hidden effect radius and removal of player agency borders on insufferable. I've never bailed over it, but watching it pop in the roulette is an instant wet blanket on my mood.
I agree with this completely. I get it in DREX (or even mentor) and I go "oh ffs not this again". Also I am not a fan of the dungeons overall aesthetic, but that's a me thing not a game thing so I just bear with it.
@@EventimeDash I don't even eat enough damage to die on that fight unless the healer is deadass asleep. I'm just so damn sick of having my ability to interact with the game stripped away, simply because it's virtually impossible to tell when you've been boxed in until it's too late to escape. I'll take Honey B's chaos phases over that any day.
Given the fact that I thoroughly enjoy Touhou, the dodging of unkillable adds isn't what's hard, it's the game's tickrate that completely destroy the enjoyability in Strayborough or Honey B. Lovely. There's no consistency to dodging. You can sometimes have a projectile graze right past your hitbox, and you're fine. Other times, the projectile is *actually* like two seconds ahead, so you'll move when there's like 15 feet between you and the projectile, and it still has already registered that you were hit in the server.
Came here to say a similar comment. I thought DT content was highly enjoyable. Engaging enough to have fun, but simple enough I can brain off when tired. But heck that first ghost boss. The other fights are fun, but them mascots cheat so dang hard
Well, at least I can counter the player agency problem! There's a very easy bait pattern you can do, as the mechanic is very predictable: adds spawn between the cardinals and will always run to the furthest player first, then the closest. In addition, the adds on the east side will move first, then the west side. As a result, if you have someone standing directly on E/W near the wall, then all the adds from the opposite side will path to 'em, which leaves some rather large safespots for the melees to dodge through. Afterwards the baiter can just take a few steps north/south and the whole clumped up add group will charge at 'em and off the arena. This should also work with 3 melees in the party, though you might want to disengage for the bait to make it easier. Max melee range is possible, but leaves the adds a bit too spread for the return bait to work easily.
One of the things I’ve heard people talk about is how a lot of duties in DT no longer apply a vuln, instead placing a heavy DoT and how that’s been more punishing without being more challenging. As a healer it’s true that those dots need to be topped off or the one mistake will be fatal, as opposed to a vuln that might not even matter anyways
That is an interesting point! And yeah with vuln stacks, it is such a feast or famine thing where either it makes you die from a later mechanic, or nothing at all to worry about
With regards to learning mechanics, I'd love to see a system similar to WoW's adventure guide in XIV. It is an in game journal that has a short and simple breakdown of the mechanics of each dungeon/raid boss that you can read on your own time or even mid run after a wipe.
One issue I have with 4 man content specifically is that it feels like the healer isn't allowed to make mistakes. A dps goes down? They get rezzed and the fight takes a little longer. The tank eats a mechanic? They just laugh it off and add another vuln stack to their collection. But if the healer messes up and dies you'd better hope you brought a caster with raise or they're going to be out the rest of the fight. And that often means either the tank soloing or the party wiping. If there were more ways to come back from a healer mistake then you could have dungeons that are mechanically challenging and engaging while still being somewhat accessible. I think something like a "Phoenix Down" duty action to revive a player would go a long way here. It would just need to have some penalty that prevents it from being abused like a long recast timer shared by the whole party, a limit gauge cost, limiting it to one use per fight, or similar.
the criterion dungeons have this feature! everybody in the group gets one rez to use on another person. after you've used yours, it doesn't get replenished until the fight is over (either through victory or wipe). I never considered having that for story dungeons, but it's an interesting thought for sure. I can think of a few Skydeep Cenote runs where people just...weren't grasping the mechanics of the final boss, lots of deaths, lots of wipes. and all my reaper ass could do was pop bloodbath and hope everybody else got their act together...
The same people crying about the casual dungeons being too hard, are the same ones queued up undergeared and joins farm parties and expects to be carried.
Expecting people to pay attention instead of watching something on their 2nd monitor absolutely is not a problem. We're talking about battle content FFXIV, not leveling woodcutting in Runescape. If you want to watch something on your other monitor, do some crafting/gathering. If the content is so boring that people feel the need to watch something on their other monitor, that's a problem that needs to be addressed.
those ppl arne the target audience and let not pretend you could do any dung without watching what you do , what pp lwant it CLEAR CUT MECHANICS NOT CHAOTIC BS liek the last 2 dungs of the game (msq)
So, after listening to this video, I think it's a mix of everything. As a primarily tank and healer player, I've seen it and done the whole solo tank of fights for years now. I'm noticing that as we level, DPS and healers are taking more damage from everything despite having higher defenses. Add a vuln stack, and it's practically a death sentence if not 80-95% health. We can address some of the issues, however. The knowing what markers do (Tankbuster, stack, separate, Conal AoEs) should be addressed via a function already in the game: *Hall of the Novice.* Adding these mechanics into the tutorial and making HotN *mandatory and part of the MSQ before entering the first dungeon* would better equip players especially new sprouts with the knowledge of what to do and give context of what to expect to help ease clears. Could also force this on players who do the adventure packages, new or returning. That way, they are at least aware of how things work, and for returning vets, a good refresher after taking a break, you know? But maybe I'm being a bit short-sighted?
@@HakureiIllusion Yes but they're not mandatory and are only available after lv 50, granted you don't really see this mechanics before lv 50 but its fully optional.
While it would be nice, there are problems with making HotN mandatory. Perhaps the biggest one is player retention. Imagine you're about to go into a dungeon for the very first time. You're super excited and you reach the point in the quest line where the next step is to raid the pirate's den in Sastasha. Suddenly, you are stop signed by 20 minutes of homework on mechanics, many of which don't even appear in the dungeon. You would feel duped. This would be the same for returning players. Imagine that if you hadn't played for long enough that you got the flower and the game made you do that 20 minutes of homework again the first time you tried to sign up for roulettes. It's just a bad player experience.
@@bishiknight it would be better overal though and they could keep it short, make 1 or 2 duties each being 5 minutes showing the mechanic, let you execute the mechanic and move on to the next. We don't need 20 minutes to show and let you do it once of a stack marker, tank buster, tank share, spreads etc. that can be shown and executed once in 5-10 minutes, which isn't bad, sure it might suck a bit, but it's crucial since you got people even today who don't know what a stack marker is at lvl 100.
This whole conversation is insane to me because I remember everybody in endwalker complaining that the game was too easy and you could fall asleep in dungeons. Now that the dungeons have *SLIGHTLY* more intricate mechanics, we're having a discussion on the game being too hard??????? I don't buy it. If we keep talking in circles like this, the devs should stop listening to us altogether.
What's insane is the people who talk like this. People who make this argument are forgetting the fact that they're dealing with group of people rather than a homogeneous blob. OF COURSE there are contradictory opinions to changes. Any time you make any change you're going to have people on both sides of the spectrum- those who like it and those who don't. Those who don't just tend to usually be louder.
IMO there's no dungeon that's even remotely difficult in an interesting way. What there is, is Strayborough Deadwalk. Which is slightly more difficult because it's complete mental overload and/or because the hitboxes are atrocious. Which feels less like it's meant to be that difficult and more feels just unpolished.
WHO IS EVERBODY nobody but the worthless midcore and hardcore palyer complain BUT IT NOT EVER THEIR CONTENT they went out to ruin casual content for casuals who didnt ask for ANY OF THIS CHANGES . content that not made for you aka casual content it not made for midcore and hardcore isnt something yo uhave right ot demand change on same way casual have ZERO RIGHTS to demand savage raids ot be easy becuase it not content MADE FOR THEM .
Half of all players in instances, outside of PF/friends meming around, are DPS. The other half are tanks and healers. For tanks, you're given survival, which directly impacts your survival, and the party's if you give them mits like Reprisal, Shake it Off, or Heart of Corundum. For healers, you're given recovery, which directly impacts *everyone's* survival, and as a shield healer you also get enough mits to sometimes survive tank attacks directed towards yourself. As a DPS, you're given Feint or Addle, if you're lucky. One action most players never think about, once every couple minutes. You don't, for the most part, meaningfully interact with your own survivability or others'. There is little interaction, and unless you're playing content not specifically intended to be casual, like EX or Savages, you could not have those buttons, or even raid buffs on your bar, and nothing would truly change. I think the issue stems from people not needing to interact with each other, and not being properly incentivized to do it. You just do *your job*, very literally, and things will get done. Do your job enough, it gets repetitive, and so mechanics need to keep you awake, but they can only do that by being harder than you're used to, which might be too hard for your first time though. Do the dungeon enough, though, and even that stops working. But with all the different combinations of classes, surely there's *some* variance that can be introduced without falling into that trap. I don't know how you could redesign job balance to make that true, though. Mechanical difficulty doesn't need to be hard for it to be engaging. Bozja has a perfect example, to me, of party synergy being incredibly fun in and of itself: in Delubrum Reginae, a Ranged DPS with Pure Essence of the Fiendhunter can use Cure II to give someone else Lucid Dreaming, or rather, a comparable mana regen effect. If you give it to a Dark Knight, they get to pop the fuck off and become your best DPS by miles. But that's one effect, between one job and one role. Interactions like that are great. Mechanics aren't good enough, because there always ends up being a widely-accepted Correct Solution, and "interactions" within those correct solutions aren't properly interacting with your party at all. In the end, it's just that there aren't any interactions, usually, outside of "someone heals you so you don't die". And trying to plan ways for those interactions to happen between *all* of the classes the game has to offer sounds like a design nightmare.
It is my opinion that we should have substantially more Susano Sword Mechanics. Holding the tank in place as a form of combination DPS check and tank check while ALSO doing something that looks cool is great. Standardizing that as part of the formula going forward would help prevent hostage scenarios. The DPS check doesn't have to be hard, but making it a forced clash that causes a need for a second player would be excellent. "Wait, but that just ruins soloing!" Well OK, IF WE WANT TANKS TO BE ABLE TO SOLO, give tanks a ground DoT AoE then, or some way to weaponize something like Vengeance going forward. Make it so that they can set up something to passively deal damage/break something that is considered as both attacking them and in their current location. Could even give them a sort of self-Wildfire that builds potency for every hit they take before detonating on the enemy to trigger its final count - it wouldn't be gamebreakingly powerful, but it would work well for a forced clash situation where they're taking sustained heavy damage. The fundamental heart of the issue is that a tank can solo, but it takes the tank forever to do so. The easiest solution is to change the design philosophy so that a tank isn't just soloing by virtue of Live Mechanic, Do Damage, Self-Heal. It'd be even better if the tank (in that state) would retain the ability to use any defensive cooldowns, but can't use targeted abilities or AOE damage (since those aren't targeted per se). Then they still are actively playing the game in an intense "live this constant tankbuster with your cooldowns" pop quiz while everyone tries to help. I don't think we need a vote to force-kill the tank button, but we definitely need a new mechanic to restrict tanks' options pending assistance. Make the group actually feel necessary, or make it feel a lot harder to solo tank without your group.
Another issue about tanks soloing a boss that might get ignored is the effect it would have on the people doing the dungeon for the first time depending on the MSQ point of the dungeon, the last thing people would want while being hyped up for the final boss is to lay dead for 5 minutes doing nothing on the duty before it.
One thing that I think constantly gets overlooked in these discussions is also accessibility issues - which are mediocre at best in FFXIV. So it's one thing to say "well, they should have gotten good by now", but there are also people who know what to do but their body might not let them easily. There are days when the arthritis in my hands mean I can't play FFXIV at all, and days when I can play but can't move fast enough for super hard content due to the pain in my hands. And I say that's ok, I just don't do extremes and harder that I can't solo unsynced. Between that, and my thinking of "something hard is fun the first couple times you do it and sucks the 1,000th time it pops up on daily roulette" and I'm wary of making story based content too much harder. That being said, there is room for people to have challenges for when they want them without forcing the challenges on people who either can't or don't want to do it - another tier of difficulty slotted between standard and extreme with it's own roulette or something. Because the people who want that additional challenge should have that - I just would prefer to be able to finish the story of a game that I have enjoyed up until this point.
Absolutely agree. Making content harder would indeed cause problems for accessibility as you say, and in extension of that, I'm sure ultimately only another difficulty stage is what would satisfy those that want something more 😅😊
And should the accessability of an mmo require that the entire playerbase has to be bored of the game so that less than 1% of the playerbase can be included? If people cant do basic dungeon mechanics, its not accessability, its an understanding that mmos are not for them. The story exists for everyone, thats all the inclusivity that the game needs, the rest of the game should not be designed for the 1%
@@NuchiAsaki No I haven't, I'll have to do some research. The big issue will be I have to play on console as my PC can't handle games in general. And it wasn't worth spedning a ton of money on a fancy controller when I don't need it consistently yet.
When it comes to the soloing tank thing, I go back to one of your older comments... "Use your Human Words" if a group asks me to wipe, I will stand in the wall. If they say nothing, it's all up to me, or he'll, some encourage me to solo the first boss in Strayburough so we don't have to do it again
Absolutely fair! I imagine in MOST cases people aren't just quietly grumbling when they actually want wipe and try again, or I would at least hope so! I've had similar experiences myself 😊
As someone who has played 14 casually for a few years, but WoW for far longer and usually quite hardcore for competitive server rankings, one of the issues with 14 is the combat log when compared to WoW. It provides barely any information for review. All you see is "You took 50,000 damage. You died". Ok, so I can't review the name of the ability that killed me if I missed it ingame, which can be compounded by multiple mechanics going off at the same time so I can't be certain which one(s) hit me. I also can't even tell which enemy hit me, which isn't usually a problem, but it's a trend of denying the player information. It's that lack of clarity, no effective death log, and if you died to a mechanic, there's a good chance you fundamentally misunderstood what you were supposed to do, and are not given an answer on what you did wrong. I honestly wouldn't be opposed to a system where The Echo or something gives you advice after a wipe clarifying what killed you, or mistakes you made, to keep it lore-friendly.
this was the biggest issue ever with E8S (Shiva Savage) Light Rampant starts, 1 guy fucks up and everyone dies, you check the logs to see what killed you and ... it's all the same ability at the same time ... nice. (not really) atleast there's Death Recap (plugin) that does this, but it should be in the game period, but SE is so afraid of introducing anything like this because "what if the playerbase uses them not the way we intended" which is just a dogshit approach, we can't get individual DPS meters because "people would feel like they don't belong" or others can harass you, meanwhile FF14 has DPS checks without knowing who is the issue for not reaching the dps check. (plenty of times i've had people not die once, but their dps being so abysmally bad that every other player had to parse top 70% to reach the dps check)
@@DarkDyllon Hilariously 14 is in a prison of it's own making. In my over a decade of playing wow, I VERY RARELY get called out for damage even when I know I'm doing poorly and that's for 2 reasons: A. Wow has FAR less hard DPS checks then 14, espically in pre mythic content B. People care MORE about mechanics then they ever have about damage. People are more likely to flame you for missing a stop interrupt or any other mechanic before they will ever care about your dps. In fact, the only time I give a single shit about what a dps is doing numerically is if I see them not even trying and literally below the healer.
I do think this would be a great addition but I also think they would have to make Crystal Tower not a requirement for MSQ to make this viable. Imagine going through the MSQ and you get to the part where you HAVE to do Crystal Tower, only to have to wait HOURS on end just to get a queue to pop because everyone blocked Crystal Tower from their alliance raid roulette?
whenever i die at the last boss in a dungeon as a healer and the tank just beats the boss anyways, i just think "what was the point of me being there if the tank could've soloed" like i know it would've been easier if i didn't die but especially when im in a story dungeon, i just kinda feel a bit left out and useless when i have to sit there knowing that i could've just gone and had a drink instead of playing. i've probably formated my thoughts poorly but i hope my message goes through. its like if the tank can solo whithout a healer, whats the point in playing healer?
I’ve leaned more on the lines of “you should know how to dodge/read mechanics at this level” when this argument comes up. One of my mates recently did the final MSQ dungeon in roulettes and rezzed a couple dozen times on the first boss before dying from a lack of mana specifically on the + and o mechanic. Alternatively one of my friends is one of those “can’t dodge” people. She stresses out way too easily (which she very much needs to deal with) and cannot remember mechanics very well. This leads to many instances of us just repeatedly saying what to do as mechanics happen to help her dodge them. While I do have this insight that some people just have a harder time with this kind of stuff. I still feel like you should have some understanding of how a fight operates at higher levels either after a death or two or just from your past shortened.
I think people kind of need to get over their own anxiety about failing sometimes in dungeons, you don't need to win every time, losing is part of learning how to be consistent and part of what makes winning so fun. There is absolutely a point where some people can't figure out the boss of a dungeon and it will brick them, and dawntrail probably isnt as relaxing, but I didnt feel like it was impossible at any point.
The extra layer here though is "failing in front of others" (which 90% of people on planet Earth are not comfortable with), and "how your failure affects the other players" (which everyone takes differently; some people decide to commit seppuku out of shame, others blame everyone else but themselves and say screw you).
buddy we arent sad or scared we lost we are pissed that the MECHANICS ARENT CLEAR THE FIRST TIME and we wiped and have NO CLUE ON WHAT it frustraining and a WASTE OF TIME . .. causal content is MEAN TO BE RELAXING AND ENJOYABLE FOR CAUSAL THAT THE POINT IT EXIST . yo ucan lear the fight after 3 to 5 tries sure but the 3 to 5 tries are pain and arent fun to do beucase we went from fully clear cut mechanics ot total chaotic and that something that not fun or relaxing but annjoying make the content you do simple missreable .
@@garitobee7541 Yes failing in front of others can be rough. I personally handle my failures in another way entirely. I usually take responsibility for whatever I did wrong and I ask for possible clarification of what I did wrong if Im unsure of that. I'm in the camp that I'd rather have some failed runs even in casual content to have the feeling of success when handling the mechanics well.
@@anteprs7908 I understand your perspective I think, you'd rather the game be easy even at the later levels and that's a fine opinion. In my opinion the content should be a bit of a challenge and take a bit of time to wrap your head around to be fun long term even if people have a harder time with it. I feel like the mechanics in DT have gotten harder, and instead of mechanics being a bit optional it became required to at least somewhat understand what to do. I do disagree that they are chaotic however because it is possible to predict mechanics if you understand the fight, the fights usually start at a low level of complexity and become more and more complex as time goes on.
absolutely. and imo learning that it's okay to make mistakes, it's okay to fail sometimes, is good for the soul as well. makes you a happier person and prepares you better for whatever struggles might come your way. teaches you how to adapt and keep moving forward.
So hearing this stuff since launch of dawntrail I find it interesting when I noticed the differences between groups I end up in or watch For me, I find them harder but still rather manageable. In my eyes, I do think the game should slowly get harder and harder the higher levels you go because it just makes sense? I'm someone that LOVEs learning (depending on the subject) so seeing new stuff pop up that isn't rinse and repeat or instantly told to me is great. I dont want all of my "casual" content the longer I play the game to only be "brain off go brrrrrrr" However there are a lot more players out there that don't really learn the mechanics be it because they just didn't understand what went wrong (or refuse to in rare cases), or the mechanics didn't happen/didn't matter because there was no punishment due to power creep.. I don't think there really is perfect solution but I think dawntrail is close to what I think is as just right as it can be for "casual" content. Its not so bad that 25% of the community is being gated from finishing story content. People shouldn't be gated from main story content in an MMO like this one because its so hard that no one can clear it. Its not what FF14 is for (in my eyes). But it should get a little harder and creative with its designs the later it goes. That just makes sense to me, let devs have some freedom from the ire eventually Words are hard, have a good one to any that took a gander
but the mechanics arne the same we went from formulaic dungs i new to chaotic in dt (the last 2 msq dungs) this ruins the first dung clear a lot when you wipe and it UNCLEAR TF HAPPENED unliek before where it clear .
I have been going through the older expansions again with a new group of friends who have recently gone into the game. I am under the firm belief that if people can get past ShadowBringers dungeons, they can handle DawnTrail dungeons. I mean there are really hard mechanics back in ShadowBringers too, and they aren't exactly slow, and also Amaurot has a genuine soft enrage on the last boss, on top of that, Seat of Sacrifice trial, that's like the hardest normal mode content in the game until DawnTrail where Interphos blows that out of the water with Absolute Authority. (Even then, Absolute Authority gives a free LB3 for healer panic)
6:31 "and also crystal tower for whatever reason." Crystal Tower is the poster child for content that is way too easy. Labyrinth and Syrcus Tower are so braindead that people have fallen asleep during it, myself included. To put into context how boring simple they are, I once put a pf together where we only pressed our basic level 1 starting skill and we still killed most of the bosses without seeing a mechanic you'd normally skip in roulette. The couple of "new" mechanics we did see we were able to ignore because of the power of gear. I will absolutely leave if I get either of them, because I'd rather spend that 30 minute debuff doing something productive that doesn't put me to sleep.
@@psoffxifan4904 that beucase they made crstal tower not optional so causal are FORCED TO DO IT . that why you rarely see any other ally raid casual dont do anything (battle content) beside msq dung and variant and expert dung(before dt those are pain) the rest arent fun and are challanging content and casual a (most ) dont dable in difficult content it not FUN FOR THEM .
I'm perfectly happy with the difficulty of Normal mode content in DT. I like that it's not necessarily HARD but is tough enough that you do need to actually pay attention because if you don't you will dye. The only thing I wish was tightened up was the first boss in Strayborough as it really does feel like the little guys can grab me from way too far away, and getting grabbed even once as a DPS means there's a good chance you're dead given how the mechanics overlap. Maybe that's just lag or ping but I have no connection issues anywhere else in the game. They need to either tighten that up or, at the very least, put some sort of visible aura around the little guys so you can more accurately see how far away they can potentially grab you from. As for the Tank Soloing question, though, I do think that probably should be addressed. I don't have any real concrete solution in mind but I find it really hard to say it's intended to work where a tank can literally solo an on level dungon synced. I mean, clearly it IS technically intended since it's been the case for years and they still haven't changed it, but it just feels wrong. The only thing I can think of is to either nerf tanks (which no one, including SE likes doing) or to maybe make tank specific mechanics (and mob pulls) just hit a lot harder and/or come more often. Putting timers or enrages in does feel like it could unfairly punish less experienced players as outlined in the video. But if tanks really got crunched to the point where either needed to play perfectly or have at least some level of support to stay alive feels better to me. Fewer tanks would be willing to do the *I'll just solo from 40% now" dance if they knew there was a good chance they wouldn't be able to do it, and it would encourage group play which I think it important in group content regardless of the skill level of the players involved.
As a healer and caster/ranged main I deffly think they should slowly ramp up the differculty of casual content, and thus have taken a step in the right diretion. If you wanted content you could stop and dance along you might as well just grab gathering or crafting. But I believe there should also be some sort of step between dungeons and extremes, their far too different to easily slip into (Party Finder hell being party finder hell) and I'm certain the skill floor of extremes are miles above a skill middle of a dungeon run. I don't normally touch extremes(I progged Golbes extreme ONCE and we never got past the first body check because someone always died before it, it was only sometimes me) because I'm unsure I'd reach the miniumn expected result to not encounter issues and casual dunegon don't prep you for it at all so there's nothing aside from yeeting yourself into the deep end and hoping you don't belly floap in the pool. Expert dungeons aren't it either(fucking tea cup ghost I hate you), maybe they need to bring back hard trails? something that will help adjust you into eight man combat easier, not as hard as extreme but not as brain dead as normal and not expected to be completed for the story.
thsi come at the cost of many causal players WHO DIDNT ASK FOR THIS AKA THE VAST MAYORITY OF THE PLAYERBASE. ppl want ot do the msq as it causla content made for causal if you dont like that causal content cater ot casual you arent casual and should speak on it same way casuals shouldnt speak on about savage raid or extremes. if this trend continiue and the msq story doesnt get better ffxiv wil l face it wow shadowlands expantion where all they do is listen to irellavant midcore and hardcore over the 80% casual player (in wow it less casuals but still mayority)
i'm not really sure if DT stuff is harder but i can definitely say i've been more engaged. though part of me wonders if a lot of the people seeing it as too hard started playing in late Endwalker so this is their first time doing something on content so the mechanics might be more punishing because of that.
The first week or two of Dawntrail was great fun, but it has crept back to being very easy in my view and healer is the first role to become irrelevant. I don’t have any new answers to suggest that we haven’t discussed, I just don’t play this content regularly anymore. So I guess my answer to the game being incredibly easy in casual content is to just to do other things. Casual non-battle combat, high end trials and such.
In the pugs I run with, healer is certainly still not irrelevant in DT content. If I was not there dragging them kicking and screaming through the dungeon they would all die, including the paper tanks that have no idea what mit is. Normal content is going to seem trivial when you only play with your friends or other players who know how to play but it is not trivial once you start playing with the general playerbase of this game.
I think the main problem with this and a lot of games with multiplayer is that because casuals self-identify as casual they have a huge mental roadblock to getting better because then they can't be smug about how casual they are. Before gaming got mainstream, we just referred to casuals as "new", which is something you can grow out of. But today casuals have such an ego about being casual, and get so offended if you say anything about them, that they can't let themselves become better at the game, or they will lose their identity.
sorry like you hardcore is dont have ego . we seek to have fun to be challanged it what make a causal a causal . we are good enough for the content we do and dotn seek ot imporve BECUASE THAT CONTENT THE ONLY THING WE CARE FOR most causals care for raiding savage we dont hate our life enough for that.
I’m going to resonate what some other people have said: mechanic difficulty and survivability difficulty are different. You can have hard, weak mechanics that slap you on your wrist with a vuln until it eventually kills you. Or you can have easy highly punishing mechanics that one shot you. DT has a little more difficult mechanics but ALSO a little more punishing. So it makes sense that people feel it’s more difficult overall. DPS have no way to make up for their own mistakes. Healers and tanks I imagine, ESPECIALLY tanks, don’t feel as strongly like DT is too hard. They ONLY feel the mechanical difficulty and not the survivability difficulty. Inversely I have been loving playing DRK this expansion because spot mitigating people’s mistakes has saved the party from wipes many times, and it feels great even if it’s a DPS whose death wouldn’t have mattered. I will say that the back-to-back punishment of mechs does emphasize this feeling for me since a tiny bit of mit each time more easily builds up to having saved them, as opposed to in the past where there is 1000 years between party-wide damage and it’s impossible for a healer to be late on a party heal.
The true problem with 14 is dps not having good defensives, or any at all, which imo is straight bad game design and completely unacceptable. All dps jobs should have defensives and those that currently have them should have them buffed.
Lol, yeah, with your first spread marker example, that was basically my experience with the first chain I saw in the Vault. Was on WHM, it chained me both times, so I assumed it was just a "damages healer and a DPS, it's a heal check" mechhanic and then promptly got obliterated by the chain in ARF.
I think there's a design approach that could make both the high skill and entirely casual players generally happy -> give both a high skill and a casual victory condition to the fights. Example: Picture a boss with a Savage-level DPS check, he's also throwing out AoEs and stacks which require the usual mad positioning and coordination skills to avoid. If you're a high skill player you can handle the coordination and DPS and pass the boss in one go. The key is to make failing the initial test something other than a wipe and lose state. Say if you fail the DPS check, the boss blows you off the platform, onto a set of lower platforms where you need to fight some much easier adds. Make those simple enough for casual players to beat and then make the DPS check on next round against the boss easier, repeat that pattern a time or two, maybe toning down the Boss's damage on each round, until you do a round with no DPS check at all, it's simply "kill the boss" and he's doing his lowest level of damage. This gives the veteran players a tangible reward - they can speed through the dungeon, while not smashing the casual players into an unbreakable wall. They can beat the dungeon they just have to work longer at it.
That's actually quite a good idea. So the penalty for failing would mainly be duration of the fight, not outright resetting the fight. The problem I see with this is just making the "penalty" also engaging. Just having additional braindead mobs to defeat would be rather boring, they should be capable of at least inflicing SOME kind of damage / require SOME kind of attention (i.e. something like the Ancients of the normal Hades fight.)
Then you run into the problem of vet people being matched with casual people, expecting to beat said DPS check first time, and when they don't get that they get pissy. But then again this is coming from the guy who fully believes 14 is FARR too damage focused to the point where damage is more or less the only thing that matters in this game outside of "can you dodge?"
I've theorized about ways of designing fights so that increased dps increases healing needs without increasing fight complexity which is arguably the inverse of your idea. One of my best ideas is a 10 minute long boss fight that has the boss applying a different 60s DoT every 10% of hp lost. If killed in 10 minutes the DoTs do not really overlap, but as player damage output increase the DoTs start overlapping more and more increasing the amount that needs to be healed in a shorter period of time.
@ultimatecalibur then we run into the problem of feeling like you're activity punishing good dps, which is something wow did in shadowlands. I think you should add more utility based mechanics like interrupts, the need for stuns, hell maybe even make aoe have an actual use outside of dungeons! That's just boss design I'm firmly against because it sucked ass on Sire Dentharius and it'll suck here
@@scorpiowarrior7841 That is kind of the point. Most fights do not give a reason for tanks and healers to get better at tanking or healing which is part of what leads to Tenacity and Piety being bad secondary stats in FFXIV. A quick kill should just as reliant on Tanks and Healers doing their job well as it is on dps doing their job well. It is tragic when the tanking and healing requirements in a fight drop low enough that a fight can be solo tanked/solo healed. The tricky part here is balancing things so that healing and tanking needs increases at rate consistent with the dps increases. You don't want pushing dps to cause an instant wipe as what used to happened with Ifrit Ex. As for mechanical things like stunable/interruptable attacks, esunaed debuffs and add swarms; they should be included in fights on the regular anyways.
It seems the issue with being held hostage is as much an issue of a lack of a way to get back into the fight when all the rez players go down as it is not having a way to prevent the tank from continuing to solo. I wonder if when resetting to the start, instead of locking you out of the arena until all players die/reset, it instead gives you a cooldown of say a minute or 2 that prevents you from re-entering. After the lockout time is up, if the fight is still ongoing, you can re-enter the arena and continue as before. And to prevent possible cheese of re-entering the fight without a healer, particularly for harder/optional content it should only be applicable in dungeons (and maybe MSQ trials). It feels to me like that would not punish lower skilled players as much by giving them a way back into the fight (as well as unlucky situations where the healer dies early one) without fundamentally making the casual content any easier than it already is, or punishing good tanks by atrificially forcing them to stop them fight.
Or thinking more thematically, perhaps some sort of LB type guage that fills up while players are dead, filling faster the more players are simultaneously dead, e.g if 3 players dead it will top off 1 minute, 2 minute for 2 dead players and 3 minutes for 1 dead player. Once full it automatically has a healer LB3 effect and rezzes all dead players (possibly with the brink of death debuff). And it will always reset when all players are alive whether thats from the LB rez going off, or a rez player managing to get everyone back up. I wouldn't even say the guage needs to be visible, can be a hidden thing that will just go off when needed and again only applicable in casual content e.g dungeons and some MSQ trials.
Specifically I think tanks (except for DRK but ESPECIALLY Warrior) Have too much self sustain. Simply put, there should be no content where a level synced tank should be able to 1v1 a boss under ANY circumstances. I know people find it lots of fun to just pop Bloodwhetting and be able solo entire groups of enemies or bosses, but trust me when I say that it's not healthy for the game, not does it feel great for the entire team to die and the tank to be able to 1v1 the boss, even though it would legitimately be FASTER to wipe and beat the boss from full with a full team, then for the tank to 1v1 a 50% HP boss.
i think dawntrail combat is just right. Normal difficulty is not savage or extreme but still engaging to not fall asleep. I do believe the arr dungeons are way too easy that mechanics get skipped and never learned. To an extent this is true up to the level 65 dungeon. After regetting mentor status, I've been replaying the story on a second character for a few reasons. There are so many veterans who forget how boring copperbell mines is or what esuna is used for until cutter's cry. Sprouts miss a chance to learn mechanics when a fight is done too quickly. Hopefully the hall of intermediate will help. This should not be required for msq but does a a good incentive reward to complete for sprouts.
SO YOU WANT CAUSAL CONTENT CLEAR NTO MADE FOR YOU TO CARE OT YOU AT THE COST OF THE JOY OF CAUSAL PLAYER. to you it borring to causal it fun enough or engaging and most importantly RELAXING AS ALL CAUSAL CONTENT SHOULD BE .
I would love to see a return to Criterion dungeons where those of us who WANT the challenge of harder content and don't have 8-man statics can go in and do something harder than normal mode dungeons. I enjoyed the step up in DT! They're far more interesting dungeons than getting copperbell mines yet again
Criterions were way overtuned though. Basically Savage level content you had to prog and learn over several attempts until you got the clear. Which is fine, but the game is lacking in content that is sort of between normal content and savage tier content, and what we got was more Savage tier content.
My solution would be, making boss arenas enterable again, but with a cooldown. So for exemple, if a healer dies in the beggining of a fight, they would get a debuff once they returned to the beginning of the dungeon that doesnt let them enter the boss arena for around 1:30min. So if the party wipes under that duration they still get punished but if they succed dps can be raised or healed back up before only the tank survives. It would keep the content difficulty, but not punish everyone for only one person mistake. They could even make some bosses harder because of this
Despite playing a lot, I’m just not very good at videogames. I have poor coordination and response time, and memory difficulties that make it hard to keep track of every mechanic in every dungeon. I’ve only done two Dawntrail dungeons so far but I found them challenging in a fun way. I guess one possibility for players that want to get through the story but aren’t very good could be implementing an “Easy” mode in Duty Support. I’m not sure how difficult this would be to implement, but I imagine it playing similarly to the Easy mode that’s available for some instanced events such as job quests. I don’t like the idea of dumbing down existing mechanics though, just maybe adjusting health bars or something like that. I’m hoping that the new training materials FFXIV mentioned in future updates will actually do a good job of explaining mechanics, because you basically have to rely on third party websites to figure some out if no one in your group knows. I think highly skilled players need to accept that duty roulette means you’re getting a random mix of people with varying skill levels. Better to explain than get angry. Personally, I’m fine with wiping to help learn when I’m playing by myself, but feel bad in multiplayer content that I’m holding people back. That’s why I really appreciate Duty Support/Trusts so I can learn on my own first.
I felt like Dawntrail duties were pretty much the perfect difficultly at launch, then when they added the post-700 ilevel gear that difficulty was nuked back down, the only exception being trial 3. I feel that that is ideal difficulty for normie content.
You know thinking about this there is a really easy solution. The problem is not that tanks are too strong, not that healers are too weak, it's that healers have no safety net to catch them in case of failure. There is plenty of places where you just don't need a healer, good use of personal defensives, mitigations and whatever party heals jobs happen to have is enough to kill most dungeon bosses with healer on the floor and all the dps surviving till the end. The solution to that problem is so simple, give tanks an rezz action that can be used only in normal content and only targeting healers so in case healer falls, a tank can bring them back into the play, kind of like duty action in Criterion. It'd not ruin integrity of the game as harder content would have the action disabled and it's not like casuals would be mad that instead of wiping or watching from the beyond they could jump back in to the fight.
I don't think tanks being able to hold out is an issue. If you're dead, take the time to watch the alive player(s) and how they survive the mechanics. Generally, I think difficulty could even go a little further than they have with dawntrail. Normalise dying in casual content so that people don't get a sudden wake-up call when the extreme makes them pay attention to what is going on.
causals dont do extreme most dont and arent instreads in hard or challanging content and no CAUSAL CONTENT EXIST TO BE THEIR FOR CAUSAL NOT TEACH THEM TO BECOME MIDCORE TO HARDCORE that what normal raids and optional dungs are for .
Personally I'm more excited to get the challenging ones than not during roulettes - I don't have that much time after work and doing some of the roulettes are the most I can do before sleep, so if it's too easy then it's kinda boring. I'd rather have some adrenaline pumping action (well as much as FF14 can give me anyways) before ending the day.
The make everyone happy solution: roll job design back to stormblood and then IMPROVE upon it instead of lobotomising it. This is a direct consequence of the ShB design they're IMO quadrupling down on: with 0 depth in the jobs themselves, all of the depth and complexity has to come from the encounters instead. Without people self-selecting a comfortable level of complexity between content and their preferred job, you get the current situation where they are both overwhelmed (lol) and bored out of their minds.
something that truly frustrated me was levelling roulette as a melee DPS. i found myself in Skydeep Cenote, level 95. the run went absolutely fine until the final boss, Maulskull. the few hits we took on the first two bosses were fine, we could just heal it off. suddenly the healer is launched clean off the platform, and we cant heal it off anymore. the tank was not good enough to keep himself up, and the two DPS couldnt finish the job. and theres nothing we can do about it. we told the healer how to dodge the fists, but they couldnt dodge all of them. we told the healer to use surecast to stop the big blue circle knockback, but that wont save them if they stand in it and take a million damage. even if that worked once, it happens too often, they cant stop all of them, they need to know how to angle themselves to survive it! which we can explain that as well, but they couldnt do it, and away they went. the only options left after the 4th or 5th wipe were to votekick the healer, which failed, and vote abandon, which also failed. so i chose to leave. is it too hard? i dont think so. i enjoy savage and ultimate raids. i think DT dungeons are fantastic! is it too easy? i also dont think so! i genuinely think theyve nailed it. i dont know how they could make dungeons easier so literally anybody can clear them while also keeping them engaging enough that people enjoy doing them. i guess they could make less unavoidable damage attacks like tankbusters and stacks, remove them entirely, and make more dungeons use knockbacks, death-walls, and Twice Come Ruin debuffs. even a DPS could solo a dungeon if they simply had to avoid *all* of the damage. they could make more bosses like the Magus Sisters in Tower of Zot, with orange AOEs in various shapes and sizes all over the everywhere! ...but you can just dodge it. all of it. and if the healer goes down... who cares? just dodge it.
Solution: give Paladin a revive. ...Only half-joking about that; it wouldn't outright fix the problem but it would give an extra bit of contingency in the case that a newbie healer keeps dying early, and plays more into the magical subtheme of Paladins and makes them less boring in my opinion. Warrior is definitely an outlier of a job in how much it can solo, and I can see both positives and negatives of this. The obvious negatives being, it invalidates healers even more than other tanks do, it can make people who rely on it less ready to try other, more balanced jobs, and it leads to those "everyone died early but let's watch the Warrior solo the boss for the next 10 minutes" situation (this happened to me on my first run of Origenics during the first boss, which is on an elevator; the three of us were unable to even see what was going on in the fight because it takes place in a separate room behind the elevator door, just watching the tank's HP bar go up and down throughout the fight until the door opened again). On the other hand, there's something positive to be said about a job like this existing as a crutch for a player/party who really can't handle the normal content as it is, and it's my go-to for soloing treasure map dungeons while my friends are busy. With that "having a crutch job could be a good thing" point in mind, there are negatives that come with it as well. As it's been this way for so long, I don't think they would even be allowed to nerf Warrior at this point. If people genuinely couldn't clear content without it and fought their way through the MSQ with it, taking that crutch away and stranding them would probably feel even worse than if they'd never gotten that far to begin with. And like I mentioned before, there's certainly the possibility of having people who start tanking as Warrior, get used to the self-healing, then try out another tank later and aren't prepared to mitigate normally without having Raw Intuition to fall back on, give up, and never try the other tanks again. But really, there's no easy answer here. The fact that some people have trouble with normal content and some people can do it with the game volume muted while watching a video on a second monitor to me says, at least, it's as balanced as it needs to be. Any required content needs to be clearable, not just by any player, but by any combination of jobs. If a trial is so hard that two Sages can't deal with the damage output and four Bards can't beat a DPS check, that's going to cause a problem when those individuals get put together in a roulette. Honestly, there's something to be said for bringing back "Hard" variants of dungeons. And like, actually making them harder, rather than just scaling them up to the level cap. Something to bridge the gap between normal content and Extremes. Optional post-game level cap dungeons like Tender Valley and Strayborough Deadwalk are good candidates for this, though for those two in particular, their difficulty isn't quite what I have in mind. Tender Valley's difficulty comes from the first boss being chock full of "unfair" mechanics that are likely to kill you before you have the chance to learn the gimmick, but super easy once you have learned it. And Strayborough Deadwalk's difficulty comes solely from the fact that I'm sure the first boss's Team Spirit mechanic was tested in-house with 0 ping and latency, plus whatever sadistic lunatic on the dev team decided to stack some chaser AOEs on top of that. So they're on the right track for having harder mechanics, but still are missing the point a bit. Though to me, the first and most basic step that needs to be taken is that players need to be taught things earlier and more explicitly. The upcoming Hall of the Novice update is supposed to address this from what I've heard, but nearly everything in this game needs to be explained better. Not just "you should stack up when you see these arrows", but WHY you do it, what happens if you don't, etc. Explain that it splits the damage between players who get hit by it and that it's too strong for one or two players to take alone, and most players will naturally understand that they want everyone to get in there. Teach a man to fish, so to speak, rather than giving them the fish. Jobs also need to be addressed in the same way. Basic concepts like defensive cooldown cycling are completely untouched by the game, and even some quintessential job-specific mechanics get little to no explanation. Why wouldn't I just use all my strong cooldowns at the start of a fight? Why would I cast Fire when Blizzard has the same potency and doesn't drain my MP? Why do these damage-over-time potencies seem so low, and how much damage do they actually do? Why shouldn't I save my cooldowns for when they'll be most needed, like during a boss fight? It seems like Square is more or less *relying* on the players to look up secondary tutorials, which should not be the responsibility of the players or the people making these tutorials.
When bringing up the point of if dg bosses should be having a enrage, I'm reminded of the time I got put into Dohn Mheg (tank GnB), and got to the 2nd boss of the dungeon. By the time of getting to it I had already fully realized that our healer was most likely learning the class as I couldn't at all manage wall pulls (or pulling more than 1 pack at a time) due to just not getting healed enough, but I was finally made aware of the fact that this boss HAS an enrage if enough orbs are not soaked. (I was amazed by this because I don't know of any other dg boss having one and I'd never ran into the issue of people not soaking the orbs and I'd ran this dungeon a lot due to wanting glam from it) I have never left a dungeon due to not being able to do it, but this was one that I came close to leaving because I was almost certain we were not going to clear it before timing it out, due to the fact that the healer would not soak his orbs at all even with being told what they needed to do after 2 wipes, and finally after 11 wipes they finally soaked their orbs. We finished the dg in the end with about 10 mins left before it timing out. with how they were playing I was honestly questioning if they were trolling or not, because of their unwillingness to do the mechanics. I think having enrages on dg bosses is just a horrible idea as I know this sort of thing would happen a lot more.
The video is basically "WAR is the dev bias job". Which has been the case for like three years now in excessive amounts, and longer in less excessive amounts. I do love the video though. Great job!
Yeah ngl, when I get A4 I think it is, the one where the boss fight is just fighting a bunch of adds. I will leave as soon as I load it. I'd rather take the 30 minute penalty than deal with the tedium that is that fight. As for DT content. I honestly like that they made the fights a little bit more challenging. "Casual" or not, you shouldn't be able to just face roll the entire thing. Some attention should be paid. Though the 1st boss in Dreamborough is BS with the grabs. Also, there is no solution that is going to make everyone happy. The problem is being able to solo a boss when the rest of the group wipes is one of the few times tanks get to feel like they got an epic moment. So taking that away from tanks is just going to make tanking feel a little worse overall. Also not everyone has an issue with it. I've gotten people praise me for soloing a boss from 70% as a tank. I've also gotten people annoyed at it. Not to mention that PLD and WAR can both heal other party members pretty efficiently if they know how. So a good tank may end up just healing 1 dps through a fight rather than wiping and resetting.
I’ve actually had a dungeon idea I’ve wanted to see happen! It basically like T2, there you can choose to fight certain mid-bosses to make the last boss weaker, or you go straight to the last boss who has all these buffs which makes it extremely harder (if not impossible).
There's a philosophy surrounding difficulty in gaming that mainly targets the Dark Souls/Fromsoft games and why there is no built-in difficulty slider. The devs have a certain gameplay experience that they want players to go through, and rising to the challenge and conquering it is part of that intended experience. The unfortunate reality is that not everyone is going to be able to get through that challenge for one reason or another, which is where the coined terms "git gud" or "skill issue" come in more often than not. If it's a skill issue and *not* and accessibility issue, then player growth is something that needs to happen in order to beat harder content, and players who aren't willing to learn, grow, and "git gud", are never going to beat said harder content.
I think many people are too used to bring carried at the lower levels, they level up too quickly and don't learn the mechanics. Then you have boosted accounts. Had a scholar for Atheiascope who ran away with the stack marker on the first boss and didn't shield us, claimed it was the first time they had seen that mechanic... 🙃
ffxiv has a thing that i say a lot about but many people seem to not pay attention to at all. the game focuses a lot on learned ease rather than actual difficult stuff (outside of savage and ultimates) doing a duty for the first time might catch you off guard here and there or contain a mechanic that once you learn how to handle it becomes trivially easy, it's only easy because you learned how to deal with it, if you've ever met one of those people who after a grueling and difficult fight in any video game just turns around and goes "easy peasy didn't even break a sweat" (unironically) that's what you're doing if you call ffxiv easy. this phenomenon is most clear and easy to spot on fromsoft players who die a million times to a boss, and after they learn all the patterns and know the fight inside and out they say the game is easy.
This is flat out incorrect. Most of the mechanics in these dungeons are taught to you in other dungeons and can be solved on the first try with common sense. We aren't talking about a souls like where you need to learn attack patterns. We are talking about "oh a bomb fell into a circle shaped hole, I should probably stay away from the circle shaped holes in the wall" or "oh the ground is red here, that's probably bad " What you are describing is savage or ex, where you are expected to fail, learn from the failures, and do better until you get the kill and maybe eventually perfect it.
@@AltinaXIV nope you are incorrect your description of the tender valley bomb mechanic is a GROSS simplification of the mechanic itself where it throws a bunch of shit at you at the same time and expects you to figure out where to stand and not get hit while already loading up the next set of the same mechanic completely overloading a normal person's brain. first time i went there i was overwhelmed, but i did figure out the mechanic because it's INTUITIVE. some mechanics are simple and can be solved with "common sense" but not every mechanic is like that even in normal content.
That is why more difficulties need to exist of the same dungeons., like in wow. This will weed out the people who are less skilled and keep them in less harder content where they can't breach the ceiling, allowing others to break the ceiling and find others who are equally skilled.
I'd be curious about your opinion on the impact of making the Hall of the Novice mandatory before players can progress though MSQ, especially with the updates coming in patch 7.1. I've seen a number of players in Dawntrail dungeons not know what a stack marker is and run away from the rest of the party when they had it. I'm assuming players like that had used a story skip and have just never encountered the mechanic before. Typically they're really nice and appreciate being told how it works after the fact. I'd except that forcing players through a tutorial would help them be more familiar with the common mechanics, but also potentially making new players quit the game because they don't want to go through boring tutorials. Though it is funny to watch a tank with a stack marker run from the party, even after I used Rescue to bring them to the rest of the party.
Bad Idea. Warcraft did it with proving ground during the mist of pandaria. It was a disaster. So many people can't even pass bronze challenge. The heroic dungeon participation rate dropped So low, The dev team received ultimatum from the upper management, And that feature never returned
People need to learn to play the game better. The tools in game do a bad job at actually teaching people rotations and it requires people to sit down for a period of time to read their skills and string something together, or look up a guide. Most players won't do that, so it's on Square to provide a system to teach people. I'm hoping the new Hall of the Novice can actually do that, because I recently started teaching my friends and FC members how to actually play DPS and none of them knew what a burst phase was. When I asked people how they try to determine what mechanics do, they stated they try to figure it out through visuals the boss gives or like you mentioned, they just try to run away. These are fantastic points brought up in the video and i agree they've basically taught most people that ignoring mechanics is okay. I think tanks and healers are fine as they are tbh. They're both just DPS 90% of the time and have to do their jobs the last 10%, which made them really appealing to me as someone who was a DPS main coming from WoW. In fact, I actually like tanking and healing more in ff14 because i can carry a lot easier. I've noticed in roughly 40% of the roulettes I join, the healer actually out damages at least one of the DPS. From a sample size of roughly 400 dungeons I've done since the start of the expansion, DPS have by far, been the most likely to be the ones struggling and dying repeatedly. Part of this could be the perception that healers are harder, so people who aren't as confident shy away from the role, but I find healers to be easier than DPS for casual content. I've hard carried entire groups as a tank or healer through dungeons they would not have been able to do regularly and I actually think it's not a bad thing for the game, but it also encourages bad play. Story skipping also contributes to these complaints. It's kind of weird having them in a game that focuses so hard on their MSQ, but I think it's for people who are just interested in doing Savage and Ultimates right away. Which is part of the problem because I've seen fresh sprouts boost to 90 and MSQ skip to DT, then get absolutely destroyed and have a bad time. The difficulty spike is way too big for people who have no idea how to play the game and freshly queue into content that's supposed to be moderately challenging for a casual player with hundreds of hours of exp. Mechanics that rely on the entire party to do their job will act as a gate for people who do this. Overall I don't think diminishing a tanks ability to solo will solve any of this, because as you said, some groups absolutely need a hard carry. However, this isn't always good in the long term because it doesn't actually teach people to do the next dungeon or trial. I really think the game design itself needs to just do a better job at handling and teaching mechanics in casual content.
ppl who are causal want ot play on causal lv not to be better but to be good enough for the content aka most CAUSAL ARE USED OT EW DIFFICULT nobody told us we will get huge spike and change in the way mechanics are done and that simpel a spit i nthe face to casuals.
@@anteprs7908 So the casual skill average was too low. I played as a casual until DT and still one shotted everything up until trial 2 without dying once. This expansion was actually quite easy because they improved telegraphs to abilities a lot, you just didn't pay attention. Every mechanic had better tells this time around and you could see everything that happened by looking around the battle area.
@@Ignition1640 that bs the lv 97 and 9 dung aren anything but easy the first time they are chaotic and a annjoying mess . with unclear mehcanics that run the relaxing part of casual content aka the KEY PART.
@@anteprs7908 the level 97 dungeon was a spike in difficulty true, but you just have to pay attention to the surrounding area and the boss. the motorcycle attack is VERY telegraphed and all the AOEs can be seen by looking at the outer rings of the room. The second boss has a lot more movement and is a lot faster, I will say it's harder to read but you can get through it by staying calm and getting your timings correctly. The third boss is the same, read the bosses casted attacks "fore" and "rear" are obvious tells to where he will hit. It is more chaotic yes, but if you don't panic you'll be fine. I oneshotted all of these using duty support, so with NPCs. the level 99 dungeon, just look at the bosses arms and move the opposite side, not hard. It's more difficult because mechanics are faster, which is a problem a lot of people are having now, which is fair. The increased speed in mechanics in casual content has been a struggle for people. I think this is the main issue most people really have even if they know the mechanic.
i feel like something that always gets overlooked in conversations about casual content difficulty is ilvl sync. in the video you mention power creep, where older content gets easier and easier over time to the point where mechanics can be completely ignored without punishment. but the thing is they already have an answer to that, they just dont utilize it nearly as much as they should. because theyve shown theyre capable of keeping old content from being outpaced with the rework of arr's main scenario dungeons, or even when they enforced it on endsinger after people complained it being facerolled ruined the msq experience. so i dont think they need to make things harder, they need to make things that /last/ longer than a patch cycle
I remember a tank in a neir raid when ALL of us died but him he started to attempting to solo the Boss everyone was BEGGING him to wipe but he didn’t the one thing that killed him was the chain mechanic that he had sprint on so he was pulled into the death wall. no I don’t think the duties are too hard that should be good for how long people have played to get to dawntrail unless they level skipped everything.
Look, I understand that many people are "hyper casuals" and are hitting their skill cap with these dungeons and everyone knows they WON'T EVER try getting better, but devs nonetheless made a step in the right direction. MMORPGs (or in this case RPGMMO) are designed to be played with other people, hence the MMO tag. Dungeons/raids are too hard for you? Ask someone to carry you through, people will be very happy to do so even if you keep dying every 2 minutes, that's just how the community is, warming and welcoming. FFXIV already has the massive problem of not just having an extremely boring start gameplay-wise, but also boring normal content and simply not enough end game content, and exactly that causes the vast majority of new players to try it once and never pick it up again, while making veterans jump back and forth to WoW and other games between patches. Like, why should most people suffer in that snoozefest called roulettes just because a handful of very vocal people couldn't be bothered to learn what markers mean through 100 whole lvls of gameplay.
Something I keep pointing at is, how much time do you think it takes to reach Dawntrail dungeons? It's not 100hrs, specially if you play casually. That's plenty of time to practice. I don't want my content to be suppressed and boring because someone else wants to be mediocre in his one trick job over 600hrs in the game or god knows how many years of paying.
@@kfk4441 exactly that, if you can't be decent at performing your role, maybe MMOs are not for you. Plenty of youtubers upload the MSQ on their channels, there is really 0 urge to drag the rest of us to that lvl.
it not hyper but true causal ppl who play to relax and have fun with causal mindset not midcore not hardcore who are NOT CASUALS. we aint hiting our skill cap we simpel HATE UNCLEAR MECHANICS AND CHAOTIC GAME PLAY IN THE MSQ we play for the msq not to suffer or learn a stupdi mechanic that NOT CLEAR. if causal are minority tell me why most pp ldont bother doing any extreme or normal raids they arent done by most player at tops 30% so a vocal minority is the idiots who try to ruin casual content that NOT MADE FOR THEM.
The only solution for this problem I see is make optional content with a medium difficulty. Leave leveling/story content as is and make for example dungeons that are slightly harder, but put them in a separate roulette. This roulette could then be exclusively for slightly challenging content and anyone who only wants to watch shiny effects with the ability to slightly effect when and where these effects appear can then just stay away from that content. You can never satisfy both kinds of players, so the only real option i can see is to find a way to split them
They could add a difficulty setting to dungeons which would allow you to adjust it to your preference and have it match make with others in duty finder that have selected the same difficulty as you. That way the game caters to every person's abilities/capabilities. But that is too much work for SE , or that's what their excuse would be anyways. The game has to be able to cater to the people that have disabilities and want to play as well.
It seems to me that you are assuming that people leaving dungeons are only because its too difficult, which seems impossible to know unless you are a mindreader.
I'm not assuming that's the only reason. However I have actual people telling me precisely that reason on my previous video on the subject of people leaving content, so I know for a fact it is ONE OF the reasons. Don't need to be a mind reader when people sometimes just tell me 😁
I really enjoyed soloing M1N, it'd make me sad to see them give a bunch of bosses enrages or damage increases specifically to prevent soloing. Personally I'd prefer they add a comeback mechanic where if you're dead for over two minutes but the fight is still going on, you auto resurrect. This delayed auto-rez should only be in dungeons I think. It solves the problem of people being bored watching a tank solo the boss for 10+ minutes. It doesn't punish the surviving players who can now effectively save others. You have to sit out for 2 minutes so it does give you time to reflect on your mistake or possibly notice how the surviving players handle mechanics correctly. I don't think it would honestly make dungeons much easier. And it would take some pressure off of healers whose deaths sometimes signal the end of a fight.
The problem with this auto-rez concept (even if it is dungeon exclusive) is that it makes it so that healers are even LESS necessary for casual content than they already are. I like the idea of it though… if it is healer exclusive (in dungeons). IMO, it would accomplish largely the same goal of putting less pressure on the healer because as you say, sometimes the death of a healer spells an end to a fight. It remains on the other players to hold out/stay alive/finish the fight within that timeframe, but at least there’s the possibility that a healer death doesn’t cause dominos to fall. I imagine this would make it easier on new or inexperienced healers (whether in general or just to the dungeon) because it can really suck to be a sprout healer to just struggle with learning the mechanics of a fight while Feeling Bad™️ about struggling. They’ll still have the chance to watch and learn and it will also give them the opportunity to “redeem themselves” once they get back up by raising/healing the other downed players (if there are any) Edit: typos
As a person who went throigh dawn trail first deliberately as black mage only, the dungeons were so difficult for me to consistently clear without several wipes, it was also simply not possible with trusts on black mage cause tho double trash pack pulls were easy, some of the boss mechanics would quickly become a mess of movement disrupting my rotations, forcing me to drop fire early to spin in umbra ice... So I could avoid dying and resetting the fight. Some dungeons I had to get carried cause once I ran out of instant cast abilities id just sort of fall off on damage frkm movement mechanics... It made the story much slower to get through. But when I went in on scholar for my main characters playthrough it was so easy I just felt annoyed that I'd even bothered... Like I've cleared Savage content and Extremes on tank and melee dps, but playing dungeons as blackmage in dawn trail almost made me hate the expansion.. Idk what that says about the dungeon difficulty...or me for that matter but I love black mage, and still have a chip on my shoulder about the experience... X. X the normal raids didn't give me as much trouble thankfully.
Hmm, as a BLM main I think you may be moving too much, if you end up running out of instant casts. Especially since ice paradox is back, it's fairly easy to line up one of the instant casts for when you need to move. That said, when you go in blind you will end up running around more than you have to, so it might just be a knowledge check. Best tip I can give you is that it's much easier to pre-position than react when stuff happens. Can use your instants to already creep towards the position you need to be in to dodge the mechanic before it happens, and then use a triple or swift to make that final distance, instead of having to use everything to get there. Hope it helps!
They turned the difficulty up a slight amount. I mean *slight*. People who think it’s too hard are either soft or shitters. There’s nothing in these dungeons that are any harder than the dungeons in Stormblood, and we get through those just fine.
To be honest, I feel like the only reason the game feels easy to me is because: 1. I have XIV brainrot and slowly remember content as I do it 2. Item level sync is not the best. Remember Cape Westwind? The duty people remembered for lasting all of 10 seconds if people screwed around? That fight was originally designed for i60 because that was about where most people were with their old relic armor. We were synced to 120 for that, and that gear is so much better (Unaugmented Ironworks) that people never experienced a lot of mechanics in that fight. My whole issue with item level sync is that it isnt done well for powercrept content. For the most part, we hit so hard and have such high numbers compared to when content was current, that you stomp older content by virtue of potency increases not seeming to scale down with your gear. Fights that would teach mechanics just die because we still hit like trains even sync'd in comparison to when the content was current (pretty sure there are people who remember Xenoglossy getting over a 200 potency increase in Endwalker). The only way I can think of to make dungeons even remotely challenging without being super overbearing is to reduce potencies for content to match what it was in that content while it was current while also making gear scale in the same way. For people that think the content is too hard, now...that's more complicated. We would need to know if they are struggling due to a lack of knowledge, a bad PC (like mine when I started back in '13) or something else. I feel like it also hurts the situation by learning many mentors have just played a lot, but they arent very good. They can't really teach because they unsynced a lot of content and never saw a 5th of an EX and they might not remember older dungeons (which, many people don't. I only remember things because of brainrot :D). I feel like we need something we can access on the fly that gives a short video demonstration of how a basic version of a mechanic works, like in, I think it was DFO, where you see a short video clip that shows what a skill does in combat before you decide to invest in it (I hope that was DFO, it was something I've played)...that way people don't need to remember fights they did over 5+ years ago. You could even make it so that if, after a single wipe or multiple hits of the same mechanic, something pops up that you can click on and a small video plays showing how that mechanic works. Honestly, I really don't think we can fix dungeon difficulty without brand new solutions that XIV might not be capable of.
omg yeah, I've been complaining about that for a while now. I wish SE would adjust it, tbh. teach the sprouts that they'll die if they're caught in the middle of the venn diagram...so they don't go on to wipe everybody in my Eden raid roulettes.
I have two comments/ideas The first is kind of beating a dead horse but, more interesting job optimization would really fix a lot of issues here. Giving good players something to actually do for (largely pointless) opti is a good way to keep people who want to be engaged, engaged! Even if it doesnt matter really. Outside of sweeping job changes, the buff orbs in Worqor are a good example of this. Does it matter if i get full melee/caster uptime while collecting as many as possible? No. Will i do it anyways because its fun? Yes! More interactive things like this that allow people to approach differently depending on the encounter rather than just smacking 3 dummies would be wonderful. My second preposition would be, as long as they are putting development effort into trusts, why not make this version an easier and equally lucrative 'story mode', that is perhaps just a bit slower. Then they can amp up the 'expert dungeons' to be actually expert while providing a cinematic experience to those who don't want a challenge!
I feel like rather than a button to vote for a wipe, do the opposite - add in a button that allows you to vote to empower the last remaining character. That way if it's a skill problem and you get stuck, and one of the players is willing and able to "hero" it solo, you can buff them to just get it done faster. It feels like that way you can maintain the difficulty, but then give options for people who struggle/want a break/are chilling to just have a "get me out of this dungeon faster" button without leaving. People could end up relying on it, but I feel like theyd also be the ones relying on strong healers/tanks/dps anyway
As a warrior, some of the most fun I've had in the game was, for example, when I was able to solo the second boss of Dead Ends down from something like 40%. I had friends in the group outside the arena cheering me on and I felt like such a badass. I try to be mindful of not wasting other players' time just because I like feeling badass, but sometimes I literally CAN'T die because the arena doesn't have death walls or whatever. (Worth mentioning, as well, that the first boss of that dungeon is much harder to solo because of the doom and needing to stack, and I have had lots of frustration because the rest of the group not being able to grok the safe spots). I do think that adding more frequent DPS checks to fights is a way to keep things going and make both the dps and healers more essential because if I can just sit there and smack the boss for ten minutes with no consequences (outside of my consideration for other players) there's nothing stopping me from doing so, and dps can feel like their contributions are unnecessary. They don't have to be intense DPS checks, just something above the level wherein a few cooldowns of fell cleave won't cut it, where having any dps alive and hitting buttons mean you can meet the check. Then it incentivises the healers to keep the dps alive instead of just focusing on the tank or glare spamming or whatever too.
I had one of these last night in mentor roulette. I got a 4 man that was 50 minutes in. It ended up being the level 95 dungeon with a dps that ALWAYS got knocked off the edge. I ressed them probably 10 times hoping that they would eventually figure it out, but they never did. It was especially annoying because of the multi-hit stack marker in that fight. We finally won in 1 pull with me carrying with heals, but at the end I wished that I had stopped ressing the dps and used that time to do more dps myself.
3:40 I think the difficulty is about right. Tanks need to be able to take punishment because the run literally falls apart if they die. I would say DT just upped the personal responsibility and now people can't be carried as easily as they were before. That said, as much as I love it, blood whetting should probably be nerfed to bring WAR back in line with the other tanks. Make it function the same as PLD's magic heals and only count the first hit.
@@Scerttle imagine nerfing a move over casual content. I was with you till you suggested that. If it was broken in extremes and above, I'd agree but it's no where near so just no. It's only broken in wall to wall pulls. So against trash mobs. Literally makes no sense for anyone to complain about (except for DRK maybe lol)
I think a more interesting change would be to make Bloodwhetting and Nascent Flash heal based on damage dealt, which would naturally make it weaker per hit in AoE / the same for ST while also introducing rotational considerations.
@@audrey_in_black it was already like this before EW and was still "OP" for trash packs. So highly doubtful it'll go back. BW is perfectly fine as it is. If you don't think so, take WAR into high end content and see how broken it simply isn't.
i dont think dawntrail dungeons are that hard, but they tend to be extremely punishing if you dont do something right, sometimes even being a OHKO or at least a very quick setup to death. But I could not say where the balancing factor would be. Also on this subject, blue mage comes to mind. A lot of players feel it was setup as a casual diversion and now its upper tiers of its soloplay(carnivale) is called too hard to clear by some. IMO every fight in the game up to extremes is doable by any skill level player that is actually willing to pay attention to learn mechanics (though I guess they are arguably not in the lower skill tiers if they can do that?).
How about a "story mode" for MSQ dungeons and trials? Enemies have lower health, you can't go below 1 HP, there are no wipe mechanics, and you get the same rewards as doing it unsynced. Make it a toggle that doesn't get reset when you log off so hyper-casuals can turn it on once and never worry about it again. Story mode and normal mode would have separate queues and optional content would not be available in story mode. Squeenix can then continue their current Dawntrail design and no one gets locked out of story because there will be no fail state. Guild Wars 2 kind of does this. NPCs will always revive you if you're downed/dead and if your DPS is low, they will carry you through most story instances. As a result, even the worst players are able to finish the story and "participate" in end-game content.
I'm a pretty new player (started playing around December of 2023) and there were absolutely many times where the party ignored or skipped mechanics because our gear or even the players in the party were too good. When I reached Endwalker (when it was still current, albeit very late in the patch cycle) it was a bit of a wake-up call, as the gear syncing was much less forgiving. I will say that I do enjoy the added challenge of the Dawntrail dungeons and trials though. Tender Valley is my favorite. The tank bit seems like a complicated issue, as my understanding is that they balance classes around current Savage content. It seems like there will always be some classes that are overtuned in casual content, even if they perform reasonably in Savage. (Pictomancer seems like one non-tank example; that dungeon DPS is insane with all the downtime you get.) I agree that the "vote reset" is probably the best option, and they should limit it to one vote every several minutes and/or limit it to just a couple uses per instance.
Casual content is for one thing and one thing only. Leveling, they are supposed to be fast and fun, so that the leveling processes is not a pain in the A
Honest question. Is there actually anyone that complains about DT content being to hard (besides a few players on the forums)? As of now every single player I know whether they are hardcore casuals or hardcore raiders praises DT for its content in regards to difficultly and engagement. So either i live in a bubble or the vast majority likes the slightly harder difficulty in casual content.
I have had several accounts specifically state on my previous video "why are you leaving?!" that they leave if they get dt dungeons because they are too hard / various other reasons related to difficulty. That's not a lot, but it is a few more to add to the pile 😅 It is pretty common we all may have seen different things depending on who we play with as well!
yes a huge chunk of casual and not that it hard but the mechanics are to chaotic for content that made ot be realxing aka causal content . in ew the mehcanics are forumlaic you can understand what the boss will do but in dt (well the last 2 ) you pray you doing it right (this is mean for the first clear aka blind run) and when you wipe and have no clue on what then you arent not only not relaxing you are annjoyed and that the problem the pp lwho cried for harder dungs where midcore and hardcore ppl for who this content isnt made and their opinion dont matter o nit same way casual opinion shouldnt matter on savage raiding since it not content MADE FOR THEM. if this continues in 2 expantion ffxiv will have it shadowlands phase . ppl need to understand ew was pefrect for causal player and going for ew to dt that openly spit i nthe face of casuals is insult first we wont get any content beyond beastmaster and ally raids(if they dont buff the idfficult and it becomes midcore ) but then go out and RUIN CAUSAL CONTENT AND THE MOST IMORTANT CASUAL CONTENT THE MSQ (with shitty writting and chatoic msq dungs ). i am all for harder content for pp lwho want it BUT IT MUST STAY AWAYS FROM MSQ AND BE OPTIONAL.
For me at least, Dawntrail's content is so hard that there is only one, maybe two dungeons that I feel confident doing without feeling like dead weight. And that is Vanguard, and maybe the first dungeon. (I can't spell the first dungeon) Anything else, dungeon or trial, and I just don't feel like I could do them without dragging the party down.
9:55 I had this problem with the Lahabrea and Igeyorhm dungeon boss fight. The Healer did not understand the mechanic of "move in when it's a frost orb, move away when it's a fire orb" and we were stuck there fighting the boss for about 40 or so minutes. Our tank left and got replaced with someone else later, but it was still a struggle because of the Healer who also barely spoke in chat and just never understood the mechanic or just wasn't paying attention maybe???
I have been thinking that they should bring back Hard dungeons. The ones in ARR to seperate those who are looking for a casual vs. engaging experience.
I had a situation with Zodiark where everyone but one tank wiped due to half of us getting swept off the arena including both healers, and the tank just won the fight like a giga-chad. I feel like I don't deserve to even know who Wuk Lamat is because Zodiark was killed by someone other than my Lalafell. XD
Im not typically smart enough to come up with a solution to these sorts of problems; typically if I "fail" content in ffxiv, I always assume its a "me issue" and that I can improve somewhere. Unless its blatantly obvious someone else is dragging down the team, Im more than willing to engage with more difficult content for the sole purpose of bettering myself
I wish there was a setting or something to mark my queues as something along the lines of: I prefer players that wall to wall pull, I'd like higher level/harder dungeons if possible. It could be a single button that's usually off, like the "Join party in progress" one. I'd even say that we'd have to unlock it by archiving something relatively hard (dungeon oriented) I say this as a *preferred* queue, if there's no players like you then you go back to good old regular queue. Maybe give us 30s-60s at most then we go back to regular queue. Another thing I'd like is a..harder dungeon setting? Maybe we could get more exp from that as an incentive but we get more attacks more often with more damage or a dps check (it could be a easy one, but AT LEAST HAVE IT). It could be a pre-made party, the thing is to have the option to choose.
Oh, and It'd be good if we could have a single use of a phoenix down in a boss. That'd help with the "Healer died, we're dead" problem we have a little bit
I think Dawntrail dungeons are *WAY* more engaging for an experienced player than Endwalker dungeons for example. As someone seeking challenge I am just left desiring more healer and dps specific things to do... Especially as a healer it's just tank healing during W2W and then snoozing on the boss if everyone understands what's going on, or getting an exciting boss pull where people keep messing up and you end up having to actually utilize your kit. What "more engaging dps encounters" would entail is hard to say. WoW has a lot more add/priority spawns which definitely could spice things up in FFXIV as well, it's just hard to imagine it feeling rewarding.
then clear you not causal most causal loved ew dung but the sec you wrote seeking challange it was clear you midcore player and while it nice you enjoy this difficult it not your content it causal content and it comes with the price of causal not enjoying the casual content anymore.
I think the regular duties are fine, but the expert ones have a lot of mechanics that can ohko non tanks if you mess them up. Even AAC normal is more forgiving to mistakes. The number of times I've had to finish a boss solo in expert roulette is very high compared to Endwalker.
I always ask if a party wants me to solo or if i should wipe it. Since, im happy to let people take the time to learn, but also sometimes people just want the clear. Idk what the solution is but i think it should be a party decision not a single players either way
Going through Dawntrail content for the first time, I felt AMAZING! I felt strong, like I had learned the game and so had my guild mates! Now that I keep running roulettes, I have a harder challenge than any ultimate: playing with other players! Sort of kidding, but I do believe that running content with an underprepared group IS the challenge others are looking for but not taking advantage of. I make it a rule that if the boss is over 50% and I'm the last one up as any job who can't rez, I wipe, I state a suggestion, encourage the group, and try again. I have never gotten into a group that has wiped so many times we've disbanded since Dawntrail's release (as of posting this), but who knows? Maybe I'm just incredibly lucky and optimistic, but I would encourage others to approach "easy content" differently.
vvv 5 paragraphs I did not mean to write vvv While I think it's fair to say high-end stuff is a big step harder than casual-that's the whole point-it's also very different, both in its design and how the way players approach it affects everyone's experience. If Strayborough boss 1's mechanics were part of an EX or Savage I think people would hate it a lot more because you'd have to experience it so many more times as you wipe and retry. Casually, you might hate it, but at least it's much less likely to punish you to the point of multiple pulls and will just be a short, annoying thing to muddle through for the sake of daily roulette. Because EX/Savage requires so many repetitions, people develop and spread strats that make the mechs much simpler, and this goes backwards too. There's no modern mechanics (barring basic swap TBs or whatever) where only half the party needs to participate because people going in with community knowledge or at least pre-pull coordination of who's going to stand where is a standard the devs understand and build around. In this Leonogg EX scenario, people would eventually figure out what makes the mechs tick and develop standardized strats (think M2S Mario Kart, if that happens to work for you like it does my group). But as a casual fight, most people don't bother. You COULD, which would help you to some extent, but you still couldn't ever expect that whoever you got in DF did the same. Setting aside raw difficulty, I think the closest the game comes to high-end design in casual content is P10N, where there are 6 towers to stand in. Compared to Savage, there's wiggle room for two people to be asleep at the wheel, there's time to adjust since it's uncoordinated, and missing two towers isn't a wipe (or a probably-wipe if you miss one). Expecting 3/4 of the party to be on the ball with direct raidwide consequences is kind of high for casual, but those three concessions make all the difference: Nobody coordinates tower spots prepull in P10N because winging it just doesn't cause multiple wipes that often. Anyway my point with all that is that while the gulf between them seems like empty design space, introducing a middle ground between casual and EX might cause as many problems as it solves. Mixing different design philosophies means people go in with mixed expectations, which causes the kind of player-player friction nobody likes. I'm already foreseeing a bit of a community learning curve with Chaotic ARs as people come to understand either "This ain't CT, watch that guide or 23 people will have your ass" or maybe "We have a vet who will explain everything and we'll nail it in 10-20 pulls" depending on how that type of fight turns out. That said, if you wanted to try and fix the Tank solo problem for its own sake, I'd probably just start giving boss autos a little bite. Makes the healer wake up and feel needed and still gives Jimmy Bloodwhetting a chance to have their moment, but puts a more reasonable timer on the hostage situation.
The only thing in dawntrail dungeons that i find hard is the ghost cat thing and his adds, they always grab me from 2-3 metres, as a tank i survive it easily but when playing dps im scared of the cat. But tbh its because the weird hitbox or lag of the adds, the rest of the dungeon i love it. I like the design of the buff cactuar a lot, it can kill you easily the first time but once learned you can position yourself well. That said this expansion i have found myself alive or even without vulnerabilities while the party dies to a single mechanic fail, so maybe the problem its that previous dungeons are too easy and the new ones kill non tanks too easy. Usually i let myself get killed unless the boss is low on hp to not held people hostage while i play. I have no solution as im not a game designer but i would like something that makes optional dungeons punish more but taking less time per try and mandatory ones to remain easy for anyone to be able to advance the msq but with lots of mechanics so people at least remember they exist
I think the current conundrum is actually a combination of problems that all need to be solved separately. The biggest one is that the harder content *exists* but isn't easily accessible the way that MSQ dungeon roulettes are. If, for example, we had separate roulettes for "challenge dungeons", "challenge trials", etc., then the game designers would be free to make harder content catered to that audience (and people who want to cruise can reliably get easier content). Ideally we'd also have a limit for how many roulette rewards you can get per day, so you aren't pressured to do 10+ roulettes every day. The second and third problems are that the game is too easy for tanks, and too hard for healers. As a tank main I can safely say that tanking is easy mode, and as you say, that skews the experience for everyone else. Their survivability needs to be directly nerfed instead of increasing the overall difficulty of content. On the flip side, playing healer can be very punishing, mainly because a healer death often wipes the whole party (or at least the dps). Personally I'd like to see healers' effective HP increased, either by passive damage reduction like tanks have or just by increased max HP. Something to allow healers to survive more mistakes than dps classes can. As a bonus, that might even make the role appealing to more people and improve queue times.
