This expansion is dealing with growing pains that it should have addressed waaaaaaaay long ago. Upping the difficulty was good but they need to really help players grasps their jobs as a whole. Edit: A good example of this would be how they introduced viper and pictomancer, they explain the class and have you practice it before giving you a basic challenge. It gives you time think about the skills and how you want to set up your hotbar. I want that applied to all classes. Make Hall of Novice mandatory and show example of how to use less used skills like arm"s length, rampart, interject, reprisal and so on.
@@anteprs7908 shit take, casual content (especially combat content) doesn't need to be literally brain dead like it was in EW. people are just mad that they finally have to learn the game after just holding W and pressing 1-2-3 in dungeons for 2 expansions. even a game like super mario bros has an overarching risk of death. "casual" MMOs like guild wars 2 could get you killed in the open world. if they don't want to actually interact with the game they might as well go watch a movie or something
@@anteprs7908I couldn't imagine playing an mmo for hundreds of hours and not want to learn how to play it. It does not take much effort to perform decently in the average DF content, and I'm tired of people complaining that it does. And before you assume: No, I'm not some hardcore raider, I just prefer to learn and perform well in a *party-oriented game*
@@anteprs7908 You say that like they're making dungeon bosses like they do savage bosses. We're seven expansions in. Shit should be harder the further you get into it. Instead we get the majority of EW bosses being the equivalent to something found in early level dungeons. At that point its just bad design.
Personally I believe challenge should come from the content and not from job design. Especially in a game where they expect you to be playing multiple jobs in endgame content. Some of the best designed jobs in this game are some of the simplest. WAR, PLD, and VPR come to mind. Jobs should be able to be played almost instinctively. Fight the boss, not your hotbar.
Sorry ahead of time if this is going to sound like whining, but the worst part of it for me is the sense of entitlement XIV players seem to have? So for reference, I started playing in Shadowbringers after things were already very streamlined to be new-player accessible and relatively intuitive. But seeing this same playerbase go into endwalker was insane. People act as if it's expected for you to just carry them through any sort of obstacle whatsoever, without ever having to use an inkling of their brain or thought, and act pissy when you want them to do their job and play the game in GROUP CONTENT that requires group input. It's borderline griefing. Joining a level 100 expert roulette dungeon standing in aoes and them complaining that they died, not using aoe, not using mitigation, not using 90% of your kit and playing like you're still level 30, that shouldn't be allowed. It's frankly ridiculous that 10 years into the game 100 levels later, we're STILL dealing with people who do (and these are real examples I have witnessed myself) ZERO damage scholar, no dot, no broil, just sitting there and spamming succor. samurai who do not use iaijutsu (no midare, no higanbana) just 1-2-3, NO SONG, NO DOT BARDS. it's absolutely ridiculous! And sure, some of them might not know. Some of them might have job skipped or story skipped. but why is that OUR problem to deal with? It's like if you joined an intramural sports team for soccer (or football for non americans), and you join as a goalie. Why then, are you complaining that you have to block the ball from entering the goal? Why are you playing a DPS if you aren't going to do damage??? Why am I as a healer doing 3-5 times more damage than a samurai? And people can talk about toxic dps meters and fflogs and whatnot but I don't NEED those to tell when someone is playing god-awful and completely useless to a party. If a black mage does nothing but spam blizzard 3, I can see that with my own eyes, I don't need ACT to tell me that. If I see that the bard does not play any songs and the samurai does not use any iaijutsu, I can *see* that. Why are you playing a tank if you don't want to tank? Why are you playing a healer if you don't want to heal? It's actually insane the people that have the audacity to join content of their own free will and choose to play this game and then complain that they dont get to sit and do nothing and get carried through content. It's my biggest pet peeve with this playerbase. And also the reason I say I joined in ShB is because I *WAS* a new player. And you know what? I LEARNED. I learned how to play the game, and be a DECENT OKAY AVERAGE PLAYER. If I, someone who had no experience with this game whatsoever can do it, it's not unreasonable to expect other people to reach a mediocre level of mastery, which is really more than enough for anything this game requires. People really act like it's unreasonable or ableist to expect healers to press ONE BUTTON, to do a filler spell when nothing is happening and there is no damage coming out, or to press ONE BUTTON to do a damage over time spell twice a minute. Or press ONE BUTTON to do aoe when there are 3 or more enemies. It's absolutely ridiculous! I've literally never seen any other game community be so resistant to playing their own game than xiv players are, it's insane.
Thats exactly one of the issues that comes from the flat difficulty curve. What happens if you never challenge players? Their expectation becomes to mindlessly AFK through things, because "thats how it has been so far". And if that expectation is suddenly challenged - boom, you get people crying about it. And as I said, its understandable they complain, but its also unreasonable.
@@mouuuuuu9000 it's not even about research necessarily either. cuz like i'm sure some amount of casual players will just play through the game and call it a day and not think about it too hard. but what i really don't get is getting to level 100, in the triple digit levels, 100+ hours into the game, and then not pressing 80% of the new fancy buttons you get? Like I don't get why you play at that point, what is the purpose of getting and unlocking all these new job actions and skills and spells that you just don't use? Because it feels *good* to use them, that's where the fun of playing the game is. Unlocking fancy new weaponskills and cool big magic explosions and flashy attacks is literally half the sellling point of mmo expansions. I just don't get it. it's just this fundamental lack of desire to engage with the game at its core that completely baffles me.
@@metaknightmare1234 right and im 100% with you 100+hrs in a game at this point you love this game and to me loving a game = wanting to be better at it or at least trying to be better at it and since ffxiv lowkey dont teach you shit unless you’re in a helpful FC you would want to start googling stuff up lol
The sounds of cure 1 and physic are ingrained in my brain and everytime I'm tanking expert roulette I take a time to reflect on my life when I hear them.
If you hear it once during the whole dungeon, it's usually a simple misclick as I'm a main healer and SOMETIMES brain just goes brrrr and I press cure 1 instead of cure 2. Other times I just like using it for the heck of it in isolated situations because why not
I think a good middle ground was joining an “oops all healers” jueno run for me. No pressure, negligible consequences, we had one newbie to the raid. It took a while and mechs definitely started looping, but boy was it fun figuring out how to get past the stuff we couldn’t interrupt. By the time we got to the last boss our “tanks” were consistently surviving the TB’s. Super fun and a great note to end the year on :)
1:22 I still stand by the idea that Cure II should be an upgrade and not a separate ability, and Freecure should be removed. I will DIE on this hill. Also, after watching the whole video, holy shit, YES. PLEASE. Players need to be challenged. They need to be taught. There are too many people who grow complacent playing their job wrong that when they're faced with a modicum of challenge they cry and bitch and moan that the game is being unfair to them when the reality is that they just haven't properly developed their skills.
It would solve the issue, not in an elegant way, but honestly, its a design mistake right now, because it just so clearly baits players into the wrong behavior. WoW tried to add triage healing in WoD(?) but FFXIV never had that in that form. So the whole idea to spam a low-cost low-impact healing spell is so out of place.
It is rough because many MMO developers have metrics, numerous WoW devs, Yoshi P himself, GW2 devs, Everquest, etc. all have stated that the vast majority of people who play their games want to turn their brain off and would rather quit the game than improve. For every person who says "dang that was a bit difficult, let's go again" you have five who go "I'm done, it is too hard." Although all of the developers would rather try a more proper difficulty curve the fact that people take breaks, lapse in their subscription, life hits them, is a live service, etc makes it almost impossible to do so without the executives coming in and being extremely mad. Back when WoW introduced mandatory tutorials, they found that 25% of players didn't or couldn't complete the tutorials and the forums were filled with people saying that mandatory tutorials were a terrible idea. It proper spooked the MMO industry and as such outside of some tutorials, they no longer made tutorials mandatory. The improvements to the Hall of the Novice are welcome and they do teach more standard universal mechanics to new players but they are not mandatory at all and a new player can completely miss them. Another example that might have spooked the FFXIV developers in their design philosophy was in Korea and China people were surprised that they actually had to play the game and said that ARR dungeons were too hard, along with too much reading (ironic since their games and media require a shit ton of reading and idioms) that it almost caused FFXIV to fail in China and Korea. It was only really a change in strategy, marketing, and new team handling those versions that FFXIV was saved and is thriving in those countries. FFXIV when too far in the easy route (for normal content, savage and ultimate got harder and harder and followed closer to the proper difficulty curve) to the point that even casual players were a bit bored of the encounter, hence the slight course correction in DT.
@@Blahblah-oo7lk about the tutorials on FFXIV is why FFXIV devs do rewards players for doing the tutorials, to give a incentive for them to bother to do them, nice threads and accesories what boost exp, so people has a reason to bother to learn(if not just become somewhat familiar) mechanics, two of the bad points of tutorials is what they are boring and unrewarding, and FFXIV ones are boring, but they reward you for bothering to do them
FFXIV will never be anything other than a furry ERP simulator ever again because the devs want the money that catering to people using the game as a glorified sequel to Second Life ie the lowest common denominator produces and the braindead Redditor playerbase defends the decisions and therefore the profit margins of a corporation over their own player satisfaction and game enjoyability by claiming this just makes good business sense and it's better to have a shit, adulterated, degenerate ERP game with barely anything at its core to bite into or engage with than to not have the game at all. Worse, influential micro e-celebs within the FFXIV community will make this argument as well despite knowing better and talking at length in their own rants and videos about yearning for the Heavensward era and wishing challenge would come back to the game.
For me the big spike is the lv 60 lab dungeon. This one is DESTROYING sprouts. New players are never told they can move inside an orange aoe after it disappears instead of waiting for the actual attack animation to be done so they get rolled over by that in and out mech with the fire and ice balls.
@@magamisic5924 Not at all. The mech is simple but the timing is stricter than most things in msq. It is also unforgivable and will kill if missed. Any time rollos drag me there and there's a sprout in the team, he inspect the floor like never before. I've had runs with all sprouts parties and these always results in MANY wipes because of that single mech. I tell them to follow me closely, I put the dorito on my character. It does not matter, they get nuked a whole bunch of times before it finally clicks. Nothing else in the msq does that.
@@benjimaxbobjohn slidecasting is not beginner thing. At that point of the game most of new players have not figured out that aoe can be dodged without having to wait for its animation to finish.
As a relatively new player in between ARR and Heavensward content right now, I think my biggest gripe with the game is that the main story thus far hasn't taught me how to actually play my class at all- it took doing a bunch of palace of the dead to get a better grasp, though I still have much to learn. If I were relying on the story to teach me how to play I would be screwed if I attempted harder content.
its usually not too hard to pick up arr classes since youll get abilities slowly but once you get classes past HW they get increasingly annoying to learn sage was notably a pain to learn since it has no true combos so you just gotta read *everything* what classes are you struggling with?
@@Luxia-f1e I wouldn't say I'm struggling, but as someone who's liking tanking classes the game has done an awful job of teaching me when the best time to pop times like Mitigations is, I've had to look elsewhere for that.
Yeah, this: People don't get how little the game teaches. It teaches some EXTREMELY basic stuff like 1-2-3 combos and BLM Astral/Umbral, but that's it. It doesn't even teach what an oGCD or weaving are, fundamental skills to know to be good at the game. People are asking for harder content not realizing the game teaches very little AND the content we have is mechanically far more complex than anything we've had to date. Compare any DT boss to any ARR boss and tell me that the ARR ones aren't mechanically simpler. "Circle aoe, maybe a cone, the rare line...that's it" is not more complex than even the simplest EW bosses - the "easy" expansion is more mechanically complex than that.
@SubduedRadical the sad part is many of the old ARR dungeon bosses have been updated with modern mechanics to kinda help but combined with being older content and the mechs being slow people may easily not remember or feel its no biggie since it doesn't hurt that much
The sad thing is that the game *did* challenge players in the MSQ outside of dungeons with some of the Stormblood solo duties, but when some people were unable to bypass the basic skill checks presented in them, they whined until they added easy mode so they could brute force it and bypass it without actually improving.
Heck in the MMO genre which spooked many developers was the reveal that many WoW players couldn't complete the mandatory tutorial, which sent reverberations throughout the industry.
@@Blahblah-oo7lk Do you talk about a tutorial in FF XIV or the time in WoW where they tried to implement a mandatory scenario required for unlocking to automatic dungeonfinder? Because in WoW with Mists of Pandaria they implemented the Proving Grounds, which should be a Solo Scenario that teaches you in a Tutorial everything you need to know for your role. In Warlords of Draenor they thought that they should make it mandatory for the groupfinder for heroic dungeons so that every player goes in there with the basic skills needed and so from gearing there goes into higher content. The problem whas that it whas not only so badly patched but also that so many players where so bad and could not complete it, that after WoD they stopped it because it whas one of the reasons why WoD whas the WoW expansions that failed so hard that it halved the player numbers. So with Legion ongoing they instead continued to make the game even easier and easier except for the Raid difficulties above normal and whenever they tried to decide to up the difficulty for everyone, they instead got a crashing downfall in player activity. So with the newest update they kind of gave up and just give second best loot in an easy solo mode while the group players have to through hard modes.
My problem here is you either “don’t step on the orange puddle” or “memorize 34 attack patterns with assigned light party, counterclockwise while keeping uptime, while you also run southeast with your assigned party member”. There is just no in between. I love Bozja/Eureka, the issue is we get one exploration zone every 86 years and it’s normally introduced later on the expansion, if anything. My solution would be introducing an exploration zone at the beginning of an expansion and build on it throughout the whole cycle, that way midcore players have something to do and grind all the time.
Massively agree there needs to be more "midcore" content. This is fun for casual players who want a bit more of a challenge AND more hardcore players that want a break from the rigidity of hard 8 man content. Bozja was a blast just hopping in with a few friends and trying to navigate the chaos of groups with varied skill levels.
@@NabsterHax Early extremes are midcore content. Its just there is a huge jump to requiring coordination in that 8 man content and can clear while being dead the whole time in story content. Other games would push people to this content overtime....either with exclusive rewards or gating more of the game behind it. However, there is a large number of players who do not want to be pushed even to extreme level of content which requires coordination and they can get through any content by getting into queue with someone who carries them through all the story content. They are never given a fail state that stops them from progressing the story or content.
@@zekego people don’t need to be pushed to do content they don’t wanna do. I don’t have the patience or the time to do savage, current extremes or ultimates, I also like doing Eureka/Bozja type content, which is a huge grind at your own pace. There should be content for everyone, not only hardcore or super casual.
@@PapiKamikaze Sure, except the vast majority of content in the game is casual. There are people doing expert runs that have no idea on how to play their class and only hit a couple of buttons. They expect to be able to clear while doing this because the game does a really poor job giving negative feedback about their performance. Other genres have a greater expectation from the player as more hours are invested. And this is even true in most MMOs. FF14 on the other hand has people complaining about the difficulty of normal dungeons because they wipe and refuse to learn a mechanic.
@@zekegoeh, I'm not sure I agree with that necessarily. Casual combat content includes: dungeons, trials, normal raids, alliance raids, variant dungeons, exploration zones, uh... maybe hunts, the story floors of deep dungeons? Sounds like a lot but a lot of that is one time only. Content introduced in 7.1 was one dungeon and one alliance raid you'd ideally do weekly. A casual player starting from 2.0 will have a lot of content to go through, a casual player who's caught up and beaten the old expansion's content will find themselves doing one alliance raid clear a week very quickly. Meanwhile, hardcores will always have a new tier of savage, Ultimates, Criterion and Criterion Savage, Chaotic A. raids, extremes, all of which are repeatable. Technically roulettes are repeatable, but as soon as you're capped on 450 there's virtually no point to doing roulettes for that week.
This was the first savage tier I completed. This is also the first expansion where some of the dungeon and trial bosses have made me want to jump off a cliff. And that Alliance raid... holy crap.
Something I dont think a lot of people take into account when making retrospectives like this is the fact that FFXIV is an ongoing game that has changed it design philosophies over its lifetime. In ARR and Heavensward, the game was upside down compared to now. Fights were always easy, even back then, but especially in HW, your class mechanics balanced on a razor's edge, you had several spinning plates you had to juggle, and if you dropped any of them, your DPS soured into nothing for the next minute. You couldnt have complicated fight designs, no one would be able to maintain their class. In Stormblood, the designers realized this made for boring gameplay in the long term, and so made the journey to flip the script. Classes would no longer be difficult to maintain, they'd largely maintain themselves as long as you were pushing buttons. Instead, the difficulty would come from the fights, leading to the designs we saw in Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and now Dawntrail. Unfortunately, this means that all the fights in ARR, HW, and even some of StB are now hilariously braindead, because you have easy fights with the now-easy classes. The only way they can fix this is by going back and redoing all the content from two and half expansions with modern fight sensibilities, and like... They're just not gonna do that, lets be real. I'm glad to the see the new Hall of the Novice, it will help. But this game really needs an in-depth Hall of the Novice for each individual class that teaches you have to play it, tips to keep in mind, and some rules of thumb.
First time i ever died in a dungeon in FFXIV when i started out was in The Sunken Temple of Qarn. The reason was stat i was standing in the AOE punch zone of the Temple Guardian and chose to not move because up to that point no AOE in the entire game has dealt high enough damage to make moving matter. If i didn't do extreme trials or savage raids for fun in the free trial i imagine id never learn how to do proper rotations. I think just upping the damage for making mistakes in dungeons in early content would give players more reasons to improve.
I feel the difficulty of dawntrail dungeons have been increased significantly compared to what we used to have pre-dawntrail. This is a good change in the right direction because you can make the encounters engaging while punishing players moderately for their mistakes. In endwalker, people could go afk and clear a dungeon, that is how easy it was. Regarding extremes, I think they have done an outstanding job, especially with Zoraal Ja and Queen Eternal, both of these fights have phases that are VERY punishing if a player dies; therefore, it gives the non-savage players a taste of what savage is supposed to be. Also Valigarmanda is an amazingly designed fight. Nevertheless, if difficulty keeps increasing steadily, it will be so long before the CORE audience complains and Square send us back to E.W standards. After all, these people are the very same reason of why they simplify/nerf classes so it can appeal to the hyper casuals who can't press more than 3 buttons in rapid succession.
You do realize that there is a variation in people's ability. I am old if I practice 24 hrs a day I will never be as proficient as someone 20 years younger. FFxiv doesn't seem to be catering to this variable ability any more. Not everyone can be a gun player.
@@anteprs7908 I honestly don't know what you think casual players are but i know a bunch of casual players who like the new dungeons, since even tho they don't wanna raid or do hard content they still want to be challenged for the content they do, they dont want the game to play itself which was literally how EW was, you could stand in EVERYTHING and still most probably survive, and if you think the game is dying because casuals are leaving then youre just wrong, its actually the opposite, the veterans and midcore/hardcore players are leaving, why? because we are done with the boring job designs, the boring fight designs and broken promises. honestly, i have not seen game go as hard casual mode as this and you say they are killing it for the casuals? XIV is struggling as MMO because it tries to cater for everyone, that is why there is actually really little hardcore content or content that lasts for long, meanwhile there is actually a LOT of casual content
@@anteprs7908 did you actually just say that expert dungeons are midcore content? those are literally normal dungeons, and you know why casual players are leaving? because that is what they do, they play the game for X amount of time, they don't get attached to games, meanwhile people who matter, the midcore/hardcore players who get attached to games and are willing to support the devs, those matter, the moment a new game the casuals want to play arrives, they will just quit, that is how it is, appealing to casuals means getting a quick buck for it, appealing to loyal but "minority" players means slow but steady money and loyal player base. most of your "midcore" content isnt actually midcore content, like eureka or bozja for example, what makes those midcore content? you lose EXP when you die? like oh no, dying is bad, who coudlve thought? dying SHOULD be bad, you should be punsihed for dying, but that does not make it hard content, if you honestly think that game is "too hard" when you cant just hard smash your head to a wall and expect it to fall before you do, i cannot understand how you can get on with life
@anteprs7908 No. The dawntrail dungeons are not midcore level content. If we want a good level of midcore content we can talk about stuff like the field operations in bozja or a fair few extremes like zodiark
Free cure is an old mechanic leftover from a time when players had to actively regulate their main stats and mp levels. There was no default 10000mp for all jobs. Your mp was directly linked to your stats and its was up to you how much you had. Some players chose to have massive mp pools with much smaller heal and damage numbers while others chose to have much smaller mp pools that they would have to maintain with ethers and juice (ether still has the same function of providing a quick hit of mp but juice used to give an mp or hp regen feature depending on the type of juice). If you went with the low mp but massive output build that was huffing ether drinking juices and spamming shroud a cure 1 was effective enough to be usable in content. I remember cure 2 being worth 75% of your tanks health while cure 1 was worth 50% if your build was right. They just did a bad job of optimization if they wanted this mechanic to remain viable.
I'm 95% sure the only reason Cure 1 still exists is because it has a legitimate use-case in the hardest level 50 content. Stuff like Coils still has a lot of random, continuous but inconsistent damage that needs to be healed actively, but if you try to do that only with cure 2 you can run out of mana fast. It's just from a completely different era of encounter design, and short of redesigning those encounters to have the same consistent and predictable damage profiles as modern raids there's not a lot to be done.
I completely disagree @4:40. The game has tooltips. You legitimately have a video just before this of a White Mage, with Swiftcast off cooldown in The Burn GCD'ing whilst someone is dead on the ground. Is this the game failing to teach the player Swiftcast allows a player to instantly cast a spell? Or a failing of the game and others teaching the player Raise can be used to revive a fallen player? No, they're making a choice not to raise. (Also, this is going to sound dumb but I actually DID need to look up something in Portal, because the game never taught you that you could open doors in the game by interacting with it so after clearing the first pit on the final test chamber, I was stuck. Funnily enough, puzzles didn't stop me, a door did.) The claim of XIV not letting players practice is also insane. FFXIV doesn't FORCE people to get better, yes, but at the same time, it doesn't FORCE people to do the bare minimum. Every time a player is entering ANY piece of content they can be pushing themselves to be better but many don't. In line with this you state "People have to go out of their way to look up guides", but they also don't need to at the base level. There's the Novice Network where you could ask "/n Hey, so I'm struggling on White Mage, does anyone have any advice?" Realistically, the problem is mentality of players. I still remember a decade ago asking a tank in my FC how to tank, I have taught a bunch of people how to play jobs in the game. You can read tooltips, ask for help in Novice Network or Free Companies, and hell, I've risked ToS violations and given legitimate advice in dungeons. What's insane is when you talk about things being so easy most of the time then the spikes... even the difficulty you claim is not real. You rate Holminster, and Zot as non-existent difficulty? The amount of wipes and deaths on those two dungeons are much more than I've ever seen in Amaurot or Dead End even back when they were poorly geared at the start of an expansion. Where's Endsinger? Warrior of Light? Shinryu? None of them exist on your spreadsheet cause you're looking at dungeons only and even then, only mandatory ones so Aurum Vale which new players DREAD isn't on there. Even your example solution doesn't even work as all you did is took your fake chart and went "The solution is we STRETCH this and make players HAVE to be better" but it doesn't work that way unless you force players to get better, which in this game is to put individual roadblocks in the way or to increase the risk of wasting time for others. Guess what... we had the first, and people complained, and then SE introduced difficulty options for solo content to make it easier. We had the second and SE implemented forced cutscenes in MSQ dungeons because people were kicking new players to be more efficient, resulting in a bad situation for all. Simply put I believe you're wrong at the core of your argument. The game allows players to improve, every single dungeon is an opportunity for players to choose to do better. When the devs have had instances, or even job design that force players to be better they have complained until it was changed. SB, ShB, and EW design was a result of these requests and was a steady difficulty decrease when it came to jobs, yet players don't know what they want and some of their requests if performed would actually break the game's design. We cannot somehow force players to get better without rolling back many of the changes to design philosophy of late HW, SB, ShB, and EW and spending pointless amounts of dev time, especially with how their reworks to make XIV more single player friendly have also reduced difficulty.
I'm sorry but your entire argumentation is unreasonable and devoid of logic. Double standard: You struggled with interacting in portal, but say tooltips should teach in FFXIV when tooltips (like freecure, cure 2 vs cure 1) are literally teaching the wrong lessons - and you can argue that you should have looked up keybinds in portal where you would have seen an interact key. You cannot base your entire argument on me not mention every single point a person MIGHT struggle with and then claiming I rate them as trivial just because I left them out. Thats just maliciously interpreting things to fuel a fake argument. And yes, players failing to improve is exactly the problem - but the designers can majorly fix this. They can't make everyone be decent, but they can do a miles better job than this. You mention they should ask in NN? NN is full of toxicity and misinformation, add to that that ASKING PEOPLE is a 50x bigger wall for people than looking up a guide and you see how thats not an argument in your favor. It feels like you just filled in the gaps as poorly as you could to make an argument that has no meaning.
@@menardyxiv I'm sorry this is so long, but me simply saying "You're wrong" without providing the reasons would be pointless. As for my pointing out Portal, I didn't know I could open a door in Portal because nothing in the game prior to that point had said that I could so I assumed it wasn't possible. To expand; The testing was mostly done with Valve employees, people who had played Half-Life 1 or 2 who knew the doors of the game from Half-Life and that in that game they could be opened. Not once was it actually taught in Portal itself. The issue was the information wasn't even made available to the player in game. This was a literal example of the game assuming outside knowledge that it itself did not provide. Yes it had an interact button, yes there was doors in the environment, but no they hadn't been something you did interact with or could interact with until this point, as only buttons and objects you could hold were. Tooltips are the opposite, they ARE in the play environment (some of them are a bit vague though especially in relation to tick speed which isn't in the tooltips and I'll give you that, but generally yeah, info is right there) and all players have access to that information. But lets move onto your actual points; You want to bring up Freecure teaching the wrong lesson and it kind of does. It's from A Realm Reborn and is based on how people healed back then. In part because of the different mana economy and in part because healers didn't DPS and generally weren't expected to. Now the question is "why remove an Out of Mana tool?" which is all it is nowdays. I'll shift to another example with how you're claiming it's 'bad teaching' first and then come back to Freecure. The same could be said about Physick and Adloquium. Some new players will see Physick heals more than Adloquium and spam it to try to catch up once a person's HP is low and then put Adloquium on the target only when HP is full. Freecure could be removed so people don't get the wrong idea but then what about Physick? At higher level play it's niche, but still has rare use cases, e.g. catchup in double shield comps or OoM situations in things like Alliance Raid. That second example is also a place where Freecure matters because even a little bit of extra healing there helps, but SE could simply rebalance MP costs to remove Cure and Benefic entirely thus solving any confusion yet then OoM situations feel like they have less pressure since you can still spam a decent sized heal on demand and entirely remove hero moments that come from it, and it still doesn't really solve the poor learning entirely cause it doesn't help Scholar. Even beyond there on the same line of thinking and one I see more often than cure spammers especially at higher levels; How do we solve all the players who don't use their group abilities in trash pulls? For WHM, this would obviously include Temperance, Asylum, and even Medica III. How should the game teach players that these abilities that help in AOE situations should also be used in solo cases if you'd be losing usages by holding, or even to replace less powerful single target options (Medica III is 1000MP for 1175p over 15s vs Cure II being 1000MP for 800p)? Simply telling people would work since if you don't it's a difficult thing to teach with gameplay? But that itself has a problem since if it directly explains how to play, any/all updates that may impact this in the future would need to be reflected in said content (we actually had this happen with Hall of the Novice when an update made one of the fights temporarily impossible due to Holmgang). These problems don't really have solutions that are as easy as "don't teach people the wrong way to play" since the base way people play is often the wrong way. As for you stating I'm claiming you rate pieces of content not mentioned as easy I did this because of your "example graph" which doesn't really have spikes or even increases for said pieces of content, same reason I called it fake, it's made to prove a point, not to show what you claim it shows. To claim I'm taking your graph in bad faith is blatantly false, and in all honesty I could flip your argument back at you, since if what you're stating NOW is true you ignored points where average players regularly find difficulty and where the game asks them to be better, and then stated that the occurrence was rarer than it actually is, when it often happens a few times an expansion on the MSQ side of things. Side content even more-so. Like, if we just look at MSQ, we get, per expansion, between 15 and 18 pieces of required content. Generally per expansion you'll find 2-3 dungeons and 1-2 trials that people struggle with at an increased rate on MSQ, so somewhere in the range of 15-30%. As an example, lets go with ShB. People struggled on launch with Holminster and especially its pulls, supposedly (according to you) Amaurot, and Warrior of Light. We had 6 launch dungeons, 5 post launch dungeons, 3 launch trials and only 1 trial post launch since rest were sidequest. So a total of 15. That's 1 out of every 5, or 20% of the MSQ group content, and that's without any real nitpicking about "oh people found this fight KINDA hard" or "I've seen a decent amount of wipes or near wipes on _____" to which we'd probably see 1 or 2 other trials added and Heroes Gauntlet and possibly even Anamnesis Anyder could be included. The pieces of content I counted in that 1 out of 5 people were actually seeing common wipes on this content for a decent time after launch (much more so than surrounding content) or you claimed it as difficult, and the others listed below that have difficulties that are uncommon but I've definitely seen more than enough wipes, solo tank finishes, or DPS raise required to state people have had some level of difficulty on them. We have more harder pieces of content on the MSQ path than most acknowledge. It's simply that people can get dragged through every piece of harder light or full party content, and the stuff they can't be dragged through they have complained about until it was made more accessible. I even gave you the example of the solo content which players complained about until SE allowed for different difficulties of which we got "easy" and "very easy". So lets say they do increase difficulty in light/full party Duty Roulette content to force people to get better. Well if people are straight up making content take too long because they're struggling it will result in people being kicked as most people want to avoid stepping even close to the ToS and often that can lead to players who are underperforming abandoning the game, same as if we were to remove Easy and Very Easy as these players wouldn't be able to pass the content at all. I would refer you to "Tales from the Duty Finder", it has some pretty good evidence of players who are entitled whilst others simply don't want to put in any effort at all. And yeah, the reason I bring up NN is because it was a tool added by SE with the intent to allow experienced players to help new players. I never said it wasn't full of toxicity, or there are no players who are full of misinformation, but you acted like the only way people have to learn is to leave the game which is false. In ARR and some of HW we didn't even really have that Novice Network, or even FFlogs to review, let alone we had only a couple people making guides for jobs, mostly on UA-cam. If you wanted to get better, you simply COMMUNICATED and asked people who were more experienced than you, you READ the tooltips and pieced things together yourself, and hell, here's another for you; the guides don't pop out of nowhere. People have to make them or they wouldn't exist, so they take the information from the game (not from other non-existent guides) test theories often via spreadsheet math and disseminate that to the public in guides. This all came from people getting better themselves and learning from what they could take from the game and making tools to help them and others get better. Guides just help people skip most of the steps people have had to go through over a decade of this game and its updates to make things MORE accessible. SE themselves have over and over tried to make getting into the game and through the content easier for players because time and time again players have asked for it, and simply put, you haven't even made an argument against it being PLAYERS CHOICE to not improve only stated "Square-Enix could make it better" when you've ignored all the reasons it is like this in the first place. What's insane is I'm defending SE here when I'm someone who frequently wants the opposite of what they've done. I want choice for more OPTIONAL challenges in the story, like for hard, and very hard in solo instances instead of having to click off the Warrior of Light buff only to find out it is mitigating SIXTY PERCENT PLUS of the incoming damage (rendering some things actually impossible), but I don't just want the game to be harder for people who just want to enjoy the story or hang out with friends. This is an MMO, and that ease of access and the social aspects help keep the game alive.
@@lilithalicedark The problem is you only look at dungeons. I mean the MSQ as a whole. For 90% of the time you are not in a dungeon or trial. You are in cutscenes, reading text or doing the most barebones fetch-quests. If I made an accurate graph, not only would that have taken hours, but it would be completely unreadable. Sure you can argue its inaccurate and are right, but you know you're watching a YT video, not reading a 150 page university paper on difficulty. Its the same misunderstanding you seem to have with players. They don't want to put in the effort. And they don't need to. The designer (and here, the person making the video) can do it by simplifying things and making them approachable. A simplified graph does a billion times better job illustrating the issue than an accurate one, while also being easier to make.
@@menardyxiv How are you supposed to get better at the gameplay aspects during non-gameplay parts? That kind of makes cutscenes and reading text redundant areas in which you can't really improve player skill, and generally they're not able to just be replaced with combat to the same effect or would be extremely cost limiting to do. But lets say we increase field instance difficulty for the "fetch" quests. You'll likely see a repeat of the Red Chocobo situation we saw in SB. Where large groups of players were getting wiped by story mobs and people were healing others to get those players through their quests. In fact, in 5.21 SE eventually even nerfed the Red Chocobo's of Uninvited to allow easier access to Save The Queen content, and this was side content, MSQ it'd be the same if not with more outcry, but if we make them instances, well the Easy/Very Easy difficulties being added at player request nips that. You have stated I have a misunderstanding with how players "don't want to put in the effort... they don't need to". Simplifying anything doesn't change that. You can simplify all you want but you need to change one part of that earlier problem. Either they must be made to want to put in the effort, or they must be made to need to put in the effort. Your graph is a good representation of this. You COULD have put in more effort, but you didn't NEED to. So the question becomes was the problem that making the graph more accurate was too complicated or was if not worth the effort for something unnecessary even though you know you could have? In the end I am simply trying to point out, the developers cannot fix both it being too easy and too hard, because it's not too easy because the effort you want to or need to put in is up to the player. Cause yes MSQ is very easy, but alongside this we have optional content going up to needing really high level play for 18+ minutes to clear, or even endurance gauntlets of up to 10+ hours if you want to take on a solo Deep Dungeon. Best SE could do is add hard options for MSQ for people who'd like more of a challenge there too, but that'd be optional. It's also not too hard as there is only pain points in group content where people can be carried and the reason for the state we're in in regards to MSQ is because of SE doing what the community has requested. These are the same people who say "______ is too hard", so it's redundant at this point because they never were willing to put in the effort to the game even when it was actually required, instead the effort went to complaining.
@@lilithalicedark The problem is, you imply that anyone BUT the devs can change player behavior on a large scale, but that never works and never has and never will. Only the game's design can fundamentally alter the dynamics (=how players interact with the mechanics. Take the bonus you get for having someone in the party that hasn't completed the duty. That fundamentally made everyone much more accepting and happy about newcomers. And similarly the game can be designed to MAKE players want to improve and make them improve without them even realizing it (or consciously wanting to). It's simply a design problem. E.g. the game gives 0 feedback how you were doing in a duty. If after an extreme or savage fight you would get a window (that you can disable too), that simply showed you your gcd uptime % with nice color-coded numbers and maybe small hints how to improve, that would go a long way to making players improve and want to improve.
I remember starting in 2.3 and my onboarding friend talking about Brayflox being a healing check since a bad healer couldn't get you through the final boss, or Sunken Temple of Quarn being a dps check because if your dps couldn't do basic mechanics or target prioritize it would be a painful experience. It's hard to tell now if patches to the game made those challenges ultra trivial or it was just improving past the need for other players, but at the time I genuinely felt those little spikes in difficulty and the need to do your job right for the sake of everyone else.
I've enjoyed the video as a balanced discussion. However, there are a couple of things I would like to add. I know adding every single point would make this at least an half an hour video but I feel like these are important: 1) how you experience the difficulty curve and difficulty spikes in FFXIV is massively affected by when you started playing. For myself for example, the difficulty graph has A Realm Reborn (ARR) and Heavensward (HW) in a higher difficulty and it goes down over time. For me the examples given as massive difficulty spikes weren't that big of a difficulty spike. It's one of the criticism I have of the devs. I believe the stuff they pulled in ARR and HW would've been better off being introduced around now-ish. However, if you start ARR now, it's pretty easy due to how sync down works. You can brute force pretty much everything (ice dragon is no longer wiping everyone left right and center). The age of the game has flattened previous difficulty and difficulty spikes. They've also reworked a lot of the ARR fights which leads into my second point; 2) There are 2 different types of difficulty. One related to jobs and one related to fight mechanics. MSQ focuses on teaching the players what mechanics markers mean and how to handle them. In fact, the current trend of the game seems to be making the jobs mind-numbingly easy whilst going all out on mechanics. I believe this is one of the growing pain points between devs and the community. Funny you picked Conjurer as an example because the job quests (which I think is what the devs originally wanted use to teach you how to play your job) is all about how just healing is not good enough. You need to do damage. However because it's not outright stated and simply implied it goes over a lot people's heads. Hall of Novice actually tells healers to dps but that's optional. /shrug Those are my 2 gil.
This is the first time I've watched any of your videos. I was expecting a bunch of whining and not much value. I was pleasantly surprised that this was a very thoughtful critique. As an ARR player, it's always nice to have constructive criticism of the game.
Thank you. Thats what I am going for, looking at things from multiple angles, analyse, maybe make a suggestion if it makes sense, but I try not to judge, even in my prog liars video.
I just want a mechanic in a casual dungeon to surprise me the first time I see it in a new dungeon in the 5th expansion of a videogame. Mechanics don't need to be hard, they should just require you to respect them i.e. you should definitely die if you overlap two aoes or stand in the boss' gigantic murder attack that he spent 8 seconds charging. There is a very severe problem with mmos that's very obvious in WoW which is the coddling of the playerbase until the point their brains rot and they don't learn anything. If you've ever stepped into an LFR fight or a normal fight, you'll know exactly what I mean. Bosses targeting a gigantic laser directly at a player and literally 10 people standing in it only to get hit for like 30% of their life bar. If a mechanic isn't punishing, why should anyone ever learn how to deal with it? This lead to the average skill level of the WoW community in the casual playerbase to atrophy at an unbelievable rate. It still shocks me in a full 24 player alliance raid to see all 24 players perfectly resolving a dance mechanic that doesn't have an "obvious" hitbox (i.e. literally drawing on the floor where you shouldn't be). That is a MAGICAL feeling and it never fails to make me gasp as a former high level raider in WoW who has had the misfortune of winding up in groups with people like the former. This is why I severely disagreed with Square massively revamping all of the old dungeons to trivialize them in order to accomodate the duty support and trust system. I actually got depressed when I hit The Keeper of the Lake in a leveling roulette because I remember first hitting that fight in the MSQ and requiring a good 4~ pulls from my group to clear it. It taught mechanics and ideas that I hadn't yet seen in the game before. Additionally, fights feel half as long as they used to be, especially in trials which would sometimes wipe a new group a few times. When you make these fights totally braindead, it amplifies the coddling problem so much. Players will reach lvl 80~ before they even really need to consider the enemy boss they're fighting to be a threat. Thus completing the same paradox that modern WoW suffers through; casual content is too easy, and hard content is too hard.
On the positive side, I feel like the MSQ roulette dungeons (prae, castrum, ultima) are much more interesting to practice in now. Not "enough" - main issue I have is that nothing really kills you, like trying to die is real effort. Same as WoW dungeons on normal/heroic, or even M0 or M+ 1-5. Players learn to disrespect mechanics there...
@@anteprs7908 I've seen people survive a boss clear getting up to 6 vuln stacks. Dungeons don't do enough damage to punish players who ignore mechanics. Healing dungeons below 80 can cause me to doze off from how little I have to do, honestly
@@Cobra0798 Some Bosses have just these kind of "Afk-Check" like the first one in Qarn and the First and Last boss of Dead Ends. If you dont pay attention, you'll die of doom. And these are pretty much the only Dungeon Bosses in which i remember fatal Mechanics (Beside Ascian Prime, but that Guy is just a Raidboss that got lost and ended up as a Dungeon Boss. His in-Out mechanic is a Sproutkiller)
I have some new friends who started playing high end content with me and its crazy how there is literally no single content that would teach them how to do their lore in high end. I heal but i never tank so helping my tank friend on higher difficulty content is hard and even in prog parties the expectation is that you only come once you know how to play... but you wont know how to play unless you watch a video. Its crazy that we have to learn to play a game from a video and not from the game.... I now started doing the unreal trials with them which is kind of a good middle ground but it was not out until months into the expansion... and so we went into extreme trails then savage raid, both where they were shittalked from time to time for not dealing enough dmg or not tanking/ healing well, without exception none of the times people offered explanation what to do. Now they have done M1s and we tried to do the new extreme trial, they said after going through m1s it was much easier to catch up for mechanics, as half the mechanics are similar. Once it becomes easier to learn mechs, they finally could start working on their rotations... People tend to forget that if you want to play an mmo you WANT to have new players get into its content. If you shittalk everyone left right and center, and the game is not accomodoting appropriate learning ground, all you will get is an elitist community with no growth and a decreasing player base... cause what can you do between patches when you did everything else if you aint doing the harder content? We even did Eureka on the downtime, fully cleared with BA and weapons creation.
Sorry you had poor experiences. If I speak up, which is only rarely (thanks to their policies) I always offer to teach, even if it takes me an hour or more. And I agree, just shittalking people does not help things, especially for more casual players. Now, please don't understand this the wrong way, but I think that in WoW, which I consider inferior in many regards especially community-wise, the open toxicity does at least provide feedback to players that they are doing badly. In FFXIV, if the boss dies, players tend to think they did their part in accomplishing it, even if they underperformed HORRIBLY - sometimes so bad that being 7 players instead of 8 would have been easier. But this is just a 1/10 in feedback vs. a 3/10. Neither is desirable. The game should give you non-biased, nice and reliable feedback that doesn't make you feel bad, but allows you to feel good about making progress on your personal skills. And if the game did that, I would much rather people not be toxic/shittalk - so FFXIV is a step closer to the goal.
Oh my god I hate cure 1 so much. A few days ago I was tanking in Dohn Mheg and we kept wiping to the trash mobs because the white mage wouldn't holy and would instead just spam cure 1. I told them not to do that and the 2 DPS players who were in the same FC as them straight up told me "it's just a game" and "you were rude". Unsurprisingly the dragoon player also didn't do any positionals whatsoever and all the bosses took forever. I bet the black mage was pressing random buttons too but I couldn't tell because I have others' attack effects turned off. 3 years ago if you were in a Shadowbringers dungeon and you didn't know how to play the game you'd be actively griefing, but with every new expansion it seems the bar of expectations get lower and lower.
Another funny thing about those 3 is that I was looking at their plates in the dungeon to see how new they were (the WHM had literally only that job unlocked and the other 2 had multiple level 90 jobs) and saw the DPS players were e-dating. When I finally got out of the dungeon I tried to check their plates again and they were now privated 🤭
BRUH I JUST CHECKED THEIR LODESTONE PROFILE RIGHT NOW TO CONFIRM AND THEY'RE ALL PRIVATED EDIT: OH WAIT I OPENED IT IN AN INCOGNITO TAB AND I'M JUST BLOCKED LOOOOOOOOOL
I personally hate holy spam because it stun locks enemies before they cast anything and then they cast everything all at once after being stun locked. You should stun when they're casting, not before.
@@tc-tm1my you're meant to holy spam because it's like 7 entire seconds of invincibility for the tank every pull, so they can save their defense buttons once the enemies can move again. also, yknow, its your only AOE attack besides glare IV and assize, so what else are you gonna press during groups.
Great video on a topic I think about a lot! I think they’ve done a decent job with the new Hall of Novice stuff in 7.1 teaching a lot of the common markers so that new players camore aware of that stuff going in. And in terms of not dying, the game does an okay job of generally being clear why you died. You stood in the bad being the most common example. And since all normal content has the simple goal of not wiping before the boss dies, that’s enough feedback for that half of the equation. Dawn trail tries to improve those skills for players by decreasing the time between tell and attack, increasing attack/mechanic frequency, and layering more mechanics over each other earlier in fights then you’d see in previous examples. The Trials and Normal Raids in Dawntrail do feel like a decent on ramp toward extremes in the not dying half of the game. The place they still need to vastly improve on is the pressing buttons half of the game. I’ve seen so many people starting out in Extremes or Savages and have absolutely no idea what a proper rotation is, what GCDs and OGCDs are, or have any idea how to deal even mediocre damage. And that’s completely fair because the game never teaches you that at all. When those people try to move into high end content it’s an absurd wall to relearn how to play the game they’ve been playing for 200 hours of MSQ and I’ve seen that wall destroy multiple casual statics of hopeful raiders where the enrage becomes a mathematical certainty even if no one died and there is nothing the group can do besides having 3 or 4 players spend 20 hours watching tutorials and practicing rotations to try and unlearn habits built up over all that time.
And all it takes is a 4:30 minute video... Jokes aside, GCD uptime and weaving are such fundamental skills beyond normal content (but still immensely helpful there and normal content is a great place to practice them as a beginner...) - that there is not even a mention of this in SOME form somewhere in the game is sorta like if "rolling" was a hidden mechanic in a Dark Souls game.
Couldn't have said it better. When I started raiding with Eden Savage I had no idea how to effectively play dancer at all since I had been throwing my buttons at bosses at random. Why? Because XIV didn't tell me what to do. Yes, the job quests told me how to use my skills but not in which order or what even to do with the capping bar and feathers. It took my static lead and a youtube excourse to learn my job properly. Since then I always thought that it was weird and kinda stupid that you don't have any chance to learn your rotation through the game if you aren't a mathematic person for how to stack timers and understand the walls of text in skill descriptions. As a mentor that's just sad to see.
@@menardyxiv Makes me wish that it should be mandatory to beat the Stone, Sky, Sea dummies for an end-game fight, before you're allowed to queue for extreme trials etc. i.e. Just beat the first one, to prove that you actually can press buttons without being a liability to the party.
Every other piece of content in the game is dumbed down to be uber casual, and the only other option they give you for difficulty is balls to the walls you better have a degree in physics and 7 other people who are willing to slam into the wall with you or you lose. I just want a ramp into that stuff, not, choosing between nothing mattering or everything mattering.
A thing alot of people either don't know or don't want to realize is that every lvl 50 and onwards content was once max level Endgame content and i still think it should be treated that way. Not as a simple hurdle for some casual fun, but after you are level 50 you basically are done with the tutorial and should have learned a thing or two since the Game gave you the needed tools for it. Dawntrails max level content and dungeons are very good and this is how it should be for casual content. The thing is that if the casual content is more demanding, but beatable if the player knows the basics of the Game. Basics they had more than enough time to learn. Casual content in Shadowbringers and EW for example was beatable for people who did not even played the straight up basics even tho they put at least a 100 hours into the Game. With that i mean not high level raid rotations, but people who literally press only one button and do not their basic combos. I am one of the latter players, and i was very dissapointed with the last 2 expansions on a Casual level where everything was just a sweep and forgettable, while Savage was quite fun and ok, the difference was way to deep, and the problem is that so many players are now catered for braindead content that even a slight more difficult spike that is beatable by simple knowing and executing the basics of the game are to afraid doing.... the simple casual content. Its a mistake SE did, because by making the casual content as braindead like it was in ShB and EW they hurted the game so much more than DT currently does. At least i was very close to ending my Sub after playing since HW. DT's current difficulty is one reason why i am still playing, because if it would have been not like it is now. i would be gone because the Game was way to easy if you dont play Savage, and Raidlogging is simply not worth the Sub. Also yeah as many others say, SE needs to rework the Jobs hard, Tanks are since Shadowbringers absolute unfun to play its unreal.
I say this time and time again. The story never makes you learn how to play, it's always over 90% dialogue and cutscenes and less than 10% actual gameplay, and no I'm not making these numbers up, Endwalker has about 45 hours of story with less than 5 of instanced gameplay (dungeons, trials and story duties). Throughout the story players don't get to practice combat enough and are not incentivized to at least read through their skills. I often see people saying that the story is no place to challenge yourself to the limit, while I agree that it shouldn't be too hard, it should constantly make sure that you are aware of the fundamentals and punish you if you are not. This is also an online game, players are constantly engaging with eachother, and while most of us have the patience and are willing to help newbies learn, we also expect the new players to put in some effort of their own to not make interactions seem like a major waste of time.
Screw the noobs, if a game is too hard, don't play it, just like it's always been since games became mainstream, the fact se will lower their bar just to keep some dweeb who's scared of outside paying a sub is a joke
this video perfectly encapsulates what I've long thought about FFXIV being a nearly impossible game to design. The only point I'd add is that, unlike a single player game, an MMO relies on retaining subscribers to stay afloat and continually provide new content. The catch being that FFXIV's hardcore raiding scene is entirely subsidized by the "casual" playerbase. The MSQ content has to be easy enough to be clearable by anyone, because ramping difficulty, even with adequate teaching in game, cannot accommodate players that simply do not wish to learn. Many people suggest making the hall of the novice mandatory, making sure people know how to do proper rotations, etc etc etc by max level, but any roadblock you put down is effectively a subscriber loss, because many people just opt to give up rather than improve. Any singular challenge that is "too hard" could singlehandedly kill the playerbase due to the linear nature of the game. I agree that robust tools to teach those willing to learn should be in the game and clearly signposted, but making it mandatory is not necessarily the solution people think it is. It's clear the design team is very passionate about making "high-end" content, given that raiders are eating good this expac (upcoming Ultimate, Chaotic, Raid Tier, Criterion, etc), but passion obviously does not keep the lights on. And the stats point out that, obviously, appealing to a hardcore audience cannot support a game as big as XIV. The only misstep I think the devs make constantly is refusing to budge on job design and continuing to take decision-making and friction away. I understand the frustrations being addressed, but given the way that casual content is designed in this game, I think there is actually well enough room in the game for simple and complex jobs to coexist in the same role. Dragoon, for instance, should be designed for people who like what current Dragoon offers, instead of being sanded down so that anyone can feel like they've "mastered" it.
I would advocate 100% to put roadblocks everywhere to teach markers, rotation, uptime etc (very very soft roadblocks) and give an OPTION to skip/easymode after failing just once. Even very casual players see a message "Oh you failed, wanna skip this or try easy mode?" as an afront to their pride and suddenly they will try to improve. Or not, and just take the option and move on.
@@menardyxiv Isn't this essentially what solo duties do, though? The problem is that once players make the decision to switch to Easy or Very Easy for one of those duties (because they couldn't or don't want to improve to pass on normal) they just do the same thing again and again for every subsequent solo duty. Essentially, the moment they start falling behind they just give up on ever being able to do the content without easy mode or being carried hard by other players in dungeons. Personally, I think the only way to cater to such players is to give up on them ever improving and simply let them do Duty Support dungeons also on "easy mode" so they can single-player themselves through the story. That way everyone else can play the content with the intended challenge.
it's important to remember that what people talk about on social media and forums is not the experience of the average player - it is the experience of only people at the extreme ends. i didn't encounter a single person actually having complaints in-game, even if they wiped once or twice from going in blind
I can agree and disagree with your statement. Agree because I also haven't seen someone complain in-game. But disagree, because I've had players that could only pass the first boss in Alexandria by being on the floor and the other players 3-maning or even 2-maning it. The second time I went into Tender Valley, I had two players that died to the first 2 mechs of the Barrel Tender 3-4 attempts in a row (unfortunately one was the healer) and they just rage-quit after. And there is plenty more examples, but those are the most prominent ones I remember. On the flipside I myself died like an idiot on the last boss in the new 7.1 dungeon (Yuweyawata Station) because I didn't understand the arched line telegraphs the first time I saw them and we had to reset, as I was on healer. But it didn't bother me, instead I was excited that I didn't just win against a boss I had never seen before. Unfortunately that was the only struggle we had in the dungeon.
@icecreambone This is a common thing said in many game communities online but it ignores the fact that often times in-game isn't the time or place to be talking about these kind of issues. People generally don't talk about things without being provoked and alongside that, live discussions are often more difficult to be held for many people. Partly because it's easier to fully formulate your opinions in text without the pressure of needing to keep up a certain pace of dialogue and partly because chances are if you suddenly go on a tirade in-game it's just going to be met with "Sir, this is a Wendy's" style responses. It's places such as this video or online forums that people understand to be the places to have these kind of discussions and choose to air out their opinions.
Speaking post-FRU, they're both correct, and it's likely a deliberate choice. One of the biggest complaints for years was that the gap between Normal and Hardcore content was too great. What they've done is fulfil every possible request at the same time, by giving the raiders a breather with a comfy Savage tier and easier Ultimate, whilst also raising the floor by making dungeons require more attention. The dungeons still aren't that difficult to anyone who has experience, but even I've noticed myself getting caught a couple of times now and then like "Whoops, I should've paid attention there".
I have learned that going through Palace of the Dead is a good way to ingrain the use of skills in different scenarios. Same with Fate farms as they have diverse mobs.
I think an easier way to fix this problem would be to spread difficulty between job, role and fight design again. Job rotations and role responsibility have been gradually eroded to the point of being boring and tanks and healers are barely even required in casual content. This means that only source of difficulty is now not standing in AOEs and that alone must be difficult enough to provide a challenge. If they re-introduced enmity management and increased mitigation/healing requirements in casual content somewhat, avoiding AOEs could be made a little easier, and I think that would create a more well rounded game that would be less boring for experienced players and less overwhelming for casuals.
Unfortunately, it's the complete opposite. There's a reason the game has consistently moved in the opposite direction of your suggestion and it's because increasing the challenge and importance of roles like tanking and healing makes players not even want to TRY to get good at them. It's also a horrible experience for other players who are stuck with a totally incompetent tank or healer that doesn't want to or can't improve. Ironically, the conscientious players that understand the importance of the roles (and therefore most likely to not be obliviously shit at them) are put off playing them because they don't want to be responsible for letting a group of players down. I mean seriously, it's not like casual content in Dawntrail is even difficult. But you're expecting people that can't grasp really quite obvious "don't stand in the bad place" mechanics to somehow grasp the more subtle mechanics of enmity management and damage mitigation?
@@NabsterHax That is not a Game problem, its a player problem, a Problem other MMO's solve by letting the players solve it among themselves. Catering to a small percentage of players who dont want to learn the nuances and differences of another role hurted the dedicated Players of said role now for way too long. It is quiete simple even if not nice to hear, but it is the simple "gid gud" if you are a player and dont want to learn Tanking wich also includes Aggro Managment or Mitigation, then you simply shouln't play it, same with Healing. FFXIV is the only MMO i know that trivializes its roles that much, it is a joke on its own. I am speaking as a former Tank who still has not went over 5.0 back in 2019, wich has destroyed the entire fun of the role in a heartbeart for "accessibility" wich was not even that difficult to learn if one was dedicated enough to read a couple of lines.
@ If you want a successful MMO, “player problems” are game problems. Please let me know of any other MMO with a similar level of success as FF14 that has a higher responsibility in terms of roles in grouped content. The only remotely comparable games I can think of are GW2, which as I understand also trivialises role responsibilities, and WoW which is a toxic antisocial cesspit.
@@NabsterHax There may have been a reason behind these changes but it wasn't a good reason. It doesn't matter how much you streamline the combat system. The people who aren't interested in learning still won't learn. Trying to design the combat system to appeal to this portion of the playerbase is a recipe for disaster. You can have systems like enmity management without affecting bad players. Bad tanks can sit in their +def/+enmity stance and just deal less damage and bad DPS players will deal less damage and inherently generate less enmity anyway. All it would do is increase the skill ceiling again for more experienced players by allowing room for optimisation and skill expression. Granted, I haven't spent anywhere near as much time in WoW as I have in XIV but even as someone with 0 experience dipping into the game in recent years, I experienced less toxicity there than I have in XIV. If you spend a modicum of time learning how your class works and don't try to take parties that you have no right to be in hostage, people will leave you alone and let you do your thing. Even if you want to dismiss WoW as a "toxic, antisocial cesspool", it's currently a lot more successful than XIV is...
What we could do to help casuals who are just there for story and those who want to play and MMO and interact and do content with others is that we could have duty support locked to story mode experience of dungeons etc but when signing up with other players you get standard experience.
Its not just upping the difficulty. 7.0 they upped the uniqueness of mechanics. Way more personal dodging and arena effects. Makes fights memorable and constantly engaging. Whereas EW had just so many left to right front to back donut to circle aoes that it felt just formulaic. Every fight in arcadion is memorable. Stuff like the sinkhole in the arena in the 7.1 dungeon boss is fun and memorable. And of course dodging the puppets and honey bees charms.
I mean to be frank, the monster hunter sometimes can also give you spikes of difficulty that are based on something that the rest of the game doesn't really teach you. Like Fatalis that punishes you for playing too passively with a rather tight timer compared to any other monster or Alatreon that required dealing certain amount of elemental damage to prevent its nova from killing you, while the rest of the game is pretty much raw damage meta through and through barring a few weapons. Even though the threshold wasn't actually all that hard to hit if you are playing well, it ended up being a major problem for many players. Even not mentioning that I feel like usually you can faceroll most monsters untill it suddenly gives you something far more difficult.
People need to accept that there is content (Chaotic, Savage and ultimates) that they are not ready for, and actually needs to spend time learning it. And accept that if they are not doing so, for whatever reason, they won't be able to clear that content. But no, it's an MMO and needs to cater towards casuals that even after 100 levels and hundreds of thousands of hours still don't know how stack markers work
I still don't see how dawntrail dungeons are too hard. You can survive failing a mechanic one or two times, if you can't learn after that then wtf are you doing?
@@anteprs7908 the mechanics are very clearly telegraphed and are almost completely obvious, baring your literal first time playing a dungeon you shouldn't be messing up too much. All the dungeon mechanics are presented individually with clear indicators before bosses combine them. I.e if the boss has its appendages in a part of/facing a certain direction of a room, then don't be I that part of the room, simple.
I think it's because some people don't even know how to control the game. I was watching a streamer playing the story and she was in Shadowbringers playing with two hands on the keyboard. She plays with the camera facing one way, and any time she has to move the camera around she has to take one of her hands off her keyboard. She struggles in any fight that has multiple things happening in the arena at once. I have genuinely no idea what she's using that 2nd hand on the keyboard for. I imagine a lot of other people play this way too and it would explain a lot.
The moment I saw that the regular dungeons had a difficulty spike and after attempting to do a DPS roulette during the first week and being stuck for EONS as the healer died again and again and again, I just had to delay my dps leveling, it was *insufferable*. Like, I knew from the let go that this would be hard on the casuals that were used to baby-button pressing and mechanics, and I'm not like mad or anything that I got stuck as this is also HOW people learn and try to get better but holy fluff man... as a main healer, I had to ensure I queued as healer to both not be stuck for eons, but also to *help* the dps and tank that just wanted to clear/get their dailies done. I hope it stays the norm, people need to be challenged, the difficulty in EW was literally SLEEP INDUCING aside a very small number of bosses, heck even Yoshi-P acknowledged this, and combat wise this expansion so far has been a banger. Also.... you can literally do these dungeons with the TRUST SYSTEM, there's literally ZERO REASON if you're feeling anxious that you can't spam the dungeons a couple of times with it until you feel comfy enough tackling it with random players in roulettes you know? HOW MANY GAMES HAVE SUCH A SYSTEM? I swear, people are way too pampered and used to being coddled to an extreme degree in this game... I'm perfectly fine with CASUALNESS as I enjoy just turning my brain off in a roulette to a degree and just chill to music or something but I don't want it to put me to sleep man.
I believe a person's capacity to improve is proportional to their drive to seek it out. If they only rely on stuff being spoon-fed to them, they'll only ever do the bare minimum. The game doesn't force the player to do much to get through MSQ but when given something harder, it's up to the player to rise up to the challenge, instead of complaining that it's too hard because they don't want to do the extra effort of learning themselves. The people making guides would have needed to engage with the game, read it's tooltips and experiment in the first place to make their guides.
Another part to this is intuitiveness of mechanics. When you get the basics down of tankbusters, spreads, stacks, look-aways, the game starts building off those core mechanics to shape new ones. With the knowledge of 'oh this is like [Blank]', those mechanics become a lot more manageable. Yet when completely new things get added, if it appears similar to another mechanic yet functions completely differently, the player will feel betrayed. Think Calcabrina from HW, she has a lookaway-ish marker, yet it's actually a cleave targeted on a player. Or the mist dragon completely freezing and incapacitating you during the dissipation phase, which doesn't indicate at all that you shouldn't hit the dissipated dragon. What about AOEs that go off in a particular order without clearly indicating what order, such as the vague indication of the first boss of Alexandria's 7 AOE barrage? Or SB raids having untelegraphed or poorly telegraphed knockbacks? Not to mention Eden Shiva's abhorrently telegraphed knockback, where the only indication is a cast bar that isn't descriptive whatsoever. Or the idol in Eden: Iconoclasm where the portals for whatever reason store the laserbeams contrary to the portals immediately letting them through, going against the core principle of portals. All these examples and many more, to show you that player will feel betrayed by these "Gotcha!" moments. Good mechanics should build off what you've learned in the past and be more puzzle-like, where you should figure out what's going to happen as the boss sets things up, to then solve it when things go off. When you die to a mechanic, you should go "Ahh. I see." and not "Oh game, you scumbag." This aspect of game design is very hard as well and I think dawntrail has done this very well. EW set things up to be puzzle-like and built off mechanics a bunch. Now DT is getting creative with it, while the mechanics stay fun, unique and intuitive. Big props to squenix for nailing this.
There is a really important part of this that needs to be discussed, and that is the currency systems FF14 uses. Because of the currencies revolving around completing content, of any kind usually, players who just want to "cap their currencies" or "just give me my easy tomes" become a seperate problem. Anything hard or slightly time consuming is just out the window. Take the alliance raid problem. People will literally just leave anything "difficult" which is funny because none of the alliance raids are difficult, and take a penalty, instead of just doing the content. Then, they never learn. Personally, I think that currency sources should be much more limited and the poetics gear should just have a flat, small gil cost for new players/leveling. (You could also rework the heavensward relics that need poetics) This would encourage people to get into optional content that actually teaches things, or learn extremes. While im absolute not advocating for locking currency like current tomes behind extreme and savage, a massive increase in the amount you get from clearing them could incentivize it and help the player base improve. Honestly, I have been loving the difficulty of dawntrail so far. The fights are mostly fun, engaging and I love that so much more than just queue in, press 1 2 3 with a few other things and sleep through the content. And anyone that is wanting to play the game hyper casual, just ERP and clubbing or crafting. Cool, good on you. Dont complain about content you dont even want to do please, and also who cares if you have gear at that point? Whats the point of working on your BiS ilvl if you arent going to use it.
I like a lot that you bring in a topic that I didn't touch on at all in the video. Rewards absolutely play a role in players desiring easy content. I think its a minor influence though compared to other aspects, e.g. the frustration of the difficulty spikes, the game failing at every turn to teach - and to bring up something that wasn't in the video, it being an MMO. Yes, in MMOs a relevant amount of players are so focused on the social aspect of the game, every "gameplay" surrounding it is just a nuisance.
One of the big issues with the difficulty of the game especially through the story is how being overgeared, along with the stat squish, makes older content an utter joke. You can stand in aoes on purpose and barely take any damage. Even if you fuck up, you’re not punished, and if you have just one player who knows that they’re doing it’s very difficult to fail. If the syncing to content was stricter, people would not only have to learn and improve much earlier, but also be able to experience fights the way they were designed and intended. I’ve been helping some friends progress through the story, and any time we do content, whether it be a dungeon, trial, raid, we do it with Minimum item level / no echo, if possible, and the experience is far more enjoyable for everyone. They’re barely past level 50 yet they now already show more competence than over half the players I see in your typical expert roulette. They’re even picking up and clearing fights such as those in coils with ease. People won’t learn if you don’t give them a reason to or force them to. Outside of improved tutorials and guidance, the game could do with punishing people more for doing things wrong. A stricter sync on item level would be a really simple way to quickly improve this in the short term while they implement better guidance and difficulty curves.
Back in arr this paradox didn't really exist. The dungeons difficulty actually taught people their jobs. With dungeons teaching you that you needed to stun/ interrupt enemies, breyflox teaching tanks bosses needed to be moved, taught healers esuna was required to remove poisons. And was the first big difficulty spike of the game (this being at level 30) This paradox really became a problem when storm blood released, as leveling has become far too fast. The dumbing down of older dungeons to allow for NPC support has not helped in to slightest.
I’m a new player to FFXIV and I’m quite astonished at how easy the story content is. I don’t remember any other MMO I’ve played operating like this. And I don’t understand why exactly since the whole point of this genre is to help eachother if something is too challenging. The story could’ve had some ”call for help” button for newbies that called for the assist of other players. That way veterans could explain important things and maybe also get some unique co-op rewards. Player interaction seem to be mandatory only when you’re expected to already understand much about the mechanics of the game.
I still don’t understand people complaining that DT MSQ content is too hard. I definitely consider myself a casual player. I only do normal versions of raids just for the story, I don’t farm them for gear, I don’t do savage, have never attempted an ultimate, and I found nothing in DT that was too difficult. That said, I’ve only just started the 8 man raids for DT, and haven’t started the 24 yet. But as MSQ goes, and even the optional level 100 dungeons, it’s been occasionally challenging, but not _that_ hard, such that, as a casual, I feel overwhelmed.
I agree that DT had a major difficulty spike after being used to EW. But at the same time, EW babied everyone with attacks from bosses that you could just fully ignore and not be punished. I think DT is how the game should have been for the past couple years. Dungeons are fun and require just a little interaction to beat without it becoming a trial or extreme fight. At the same time, I feel like they toned down the difficulty on extremes and savages to bridge the gap between dungeons and endgame content. I mean I killed EX2 on my very first pull which was highly disappointing but a good thing for new or less experienced players. and the same thing happened with the new ultimate today with it being the fastest cleared ultimate to date. having easier to digest mechanics but executed faster than we're used to. I am of opinion that the game didn't become harder or easier but rather became more balanced across the entire spectrum of expected difficulty.
I am just lucky that my husband is a gamer and was able to help me through these things. I had never played an MMO before - even being able to see where the f**k my quests were was difficult for me. I had no idea what all the terms meant... AOE? GG? Stance? Tank? DPS? I had no clue whatsoever. I didn't even realise I could get a chocobo until my husband showed me the quest was there on my HUD. 2 years later and I'm progging M4S with ny static, have no main bc I love to optimise and learn almost every job, and I'm heavily into the lore and the community and also in a relationship with Haurchefant Greystone (OK ignore that last one). The game not providing more help to TRULY new players like I was is, in my opinion, robbing them from the real joy of being part of an MMO community.
I would argue that a huge aspect of the learning part of FFXIV comes from its multiplayer design. Unlike a lot of other games, FFXIV encourages positive play and rewards people for being nice. As such, that means most players tend to be more patient, help out with learning stuff, and even go out of their way to help new players. FFXIV has one of the most positive communities out there, which is in part due to the game design that promotes this mentality. Additionally, the game doesn't punish very harshly, you don't lost much if you go down to a boss. This is WAY better then other games that can wipe out hours of progress with a single mistake. Hell, even other similar games, like WoW, often end up taking brutal amounts of time to clear a lot of their content, so when mistakes are made, there is more incentive to be negative about it and ruin the experience. I agree that the teaching/tutorial aspect of FFXIV is lacking, but I think this is balanced out by the community being helpful, most content is easy to practice without punishment, and you are incentivized to try every class, learn new strategies, etc, etc. Granted, the main line story still has this problem of difficulty spikes, and Dawntrail was CERTAINLY a step up, but I think they're trying a new approach with this expansion, aka going for the harder bosses to spice things up. If players are just getting into FFXIV now, it can certainly be a blockade, but the reality of getting into an MMORPG is that you need to start from the beginning, otherwise you're handicapping your experience. There will always be a place for players to buy story skips and whatnot, but I think this lends to an idea that Dawntrail should be for everyone, and its simply not. We're at expansion 6, version 7.0. If you're jumping into FFXIV now without playing any of the earlier content, then there is no excuse for not being able to handle the harder stuff happening now.
If you meant it balances out in a "fun experience" kind of way, as in FFXIV's lack of teaching players and thus having to deal with extremely underskilled players isn't as bad because you can keep re-trying without wasting time and because the community is nice - then yes, I can agree to that. Otherwise I disagree - not because I don't think the FFXIV community is nice, (it really is), but because it does NOT balance it out at all. This sometimes even toxic positivity has as much the effect you say, as it does the opposite: You are 100% right that if someone ASKS for help they tend to get help and in nice way too. BUT! The fear of being punished for even suggesting someone to improve keeps a lot of genuine feedback and criticism back. Why bother telling a player whos absolutely terrible at the game at level 100 that they could do better? You're putting in effort and they might report you for trying to help. Your other point - absolutely agree that FFXIV reducing the time you lose from a wipe is great, most people coming from WoW appreciate it as well. But then, given how friendly FFXIV is towards re-trying things, how come some players still can't even do the basics at level 100? I am not sure which of the two you meant, so I tried to interpret it both ways. Lastly, those that genuinely ask for help and want to improve are also the ones that end up looking guides and practice, which isn't the kind of player the game fails with its design.
I think the problem with the difficulty debate in this game, for me at least, is that the result is entirely based on what role you play. Ranged phys dps is incredibly easy because you're so much more free to move around the arena and have pretty much zero animation locks. Play a melee DPS, and you've got the same complexity in your kit, but now you have to manage distance from the boss and try to keep the few ranged options you have available for when you're forced to move away. Add to this positioning for flank and rear hits, which can also be locked off from you. For certain bosses in DT, I can run them on dancer or machinist and barely have to think, but if I play reaper or dragoon it takes a whole lot more thought just to play at my usual level. There are some fights I have no idea how black mages have been managing tbh.
Thats the thing. I've seen people who are ATROCIOUS at the game who say things like "I played this game for 1000 hours, I know how to play xyz". They are so entitled and arrogant because of the lack of challenge - that if there actually is challenge that hits them in the face with "well you didnt actually learn jackshit in 1000 hours" they just blame the game for being too hard, rather than accepting that they need to improve. Its why I mention expectations in the video. Players expect trivial brainless dungeons because they are used to it - even someone who just played through the first few expansions, spent 100-200 hours in trivial content.
I've played the game almost every year since the closed beta. The difficulty and teaching issues is a problem that Square Enix has created by themselves with every expansion, starting very gradually with Stormblood then getting worse and worse with each expansion. It is NOT an issue that has existed in this game since its beginnings and the downfall really started to show with Shadowbringers. The game currently is an absolute joke. The first 4 years with ARR and HW were by far the most difficult for new players to go into, but were highly rewarding and satisfying. Dungeons started out extremely simple, but teaching you the very basics of how you needed to play the game, which was in essence, to pay attention. To the encounters themselves, the tooltips for the skills you obtain and to players usually giving friendly advice. Of course you always get the bad players and the "you don't pay my sub", but no matter how any game is made, they will exist. Did it ever teach you directly how to play your job or what to do with each and every mechanic? No, but as with other games, it gave you resources at a very gentle pace to make you think yourself. Of course with Heavensward just playing a job was incredibly difficult, but by then you'd already be either interested or not in continuing the game and be interested in learning further than the game has told you. Was it perfect? Not even close. You still had story content which were heavily specific mechanic dependent like The Steps of Faith, Thornmarch and (though optional) The Dragon's Neck. The Steps of Faith being a long DPS check that required the use of environmental damage like ballista and cannons to deal enough damage. Thornmarch requiring a certain kill order to make the fight trivial and to not deal damage to the King. And The Dragon's Neck does a twist on the DPS to purely do mechanics in sync with the tank for half the fight to not wipe to the knockbacks, in addition to having a lot of different mechanics to avoid. I loved this fight and I hate SE for nerfing it so hard. And that's the reason why no one's learning anything. SE decided to start making sure their Trust system could do any and all content. Even before that, they decided to nerf old duty finder content to the ground because they were "too difficult". But they weren't... Experienced players were usually very willing to give advice on how to clear content, as many players just enjoyed playing the game and sharing it with new players. The Chrysalis is a fight that I think was a perfect difficulty spike for healers and tanks (The first time I did this content was as a WHM). It taught you absolutely everything in the simplest of ways. First, deal damage on what's essentially a training dummy. Healer and tank needing to do their job to survive, making sure to heal and use tank cooldowns properly for the Double and Triple attacks. Then, you deal with absorbing the orbs going to the center, which should quickly teach you that you need to alternate between the two different orbs. The third orb which spawns an add is probably the one which is the most counter-intuitive as you don't want to absorb it, but it was more of a bonus mechanic if it was done properly. After another set of those two mechanics and introducing a teleport and line AoE, there's a raid wide AoE that the healers need to deal with before you enter the portal, where every single buff timer gets increased tenfold as you enter. You want to stay outside for as long as possible to not carry the bleed inside, but also use every cooldown you have. Then the easy strategy was always to use LB3 on the meteor while tanks needing to soak falling meteors. Then you get back out, where healers need to heal tankbusters and AoEs, tanks need cooldowns if they have any left and DPS need to do their job. It was difficult in ARR to clear that fight the first time, but given its simplicity, it wasn't overwhelming, as by that point you'll already have done content that had more nuanced mechanics like Leviathan, Snowcloak and Keeper of the Lake. But it was more direct in punishing you and forcing you to learn how to deal with significant tankbusters. My first attempt and managing to clear it after 30 minutes is still one of my most cherished memories of playing the game, because the fight was basic and taught you the remaining piece that you could have avoided until then, just raw and quick damage output. Of course this fight became easier with every expansion from Stormblood and onwards, and now it's an absolute joke of a fight because of all the changes made to jobs and the ease of playing the game. With the end of Heavensward we also got the stack markers, which honestly was the beginning of the end for good content. Now SE is giving every single mechanic in pre-Stormblood content a marker to show what it is and that completely removes any incentive for players to learn the game's basics. They're treating their new players like zombies, all content below the max level becomes trivial for any new player going in solo queues because of how extremely unbalanced the gear sync is. A player who has gear that matches the level they are on pre-50 does maybe at most 60% of the damage as a player that's above level 60. All of this low level content is also incredibly boring and easy for anyone getting them in levelling roulettes, so there's no way for a new player to learn anything unless they're a tank. Even as a tank, because of the norm that this content should take 10 minutes at most, you'll have DPS and healers pre-pulling for the tank. Because the low-level content itself has absolutely no challenge at any point, the only way to actually make sure the content stays relevant and to teach players how to play the game, is that the content's default difficulty should be what minimum item level is now. The Stone Vigil was a tough dungeon until even as late as the end of Stormblood, it being nearly impossible to pull wall to wall, but now it's so easy, anyone level synched down could do it. But SE has no clear intentions to solve this issue properly and I have absolutely zero faith in any change that they'll ever do. The main game is doomed to a slow death. Every expansion will worsen this issue and the addition of the Trust system is BY FAR the worst decision they have ever made for this supposed "MMORPG". That should be a system that exists when the game has barely enough players to keep duty finder alive, not when the game has millions of players (soon not to be even a million). As a disclaimer, I have spent 20000 hours in this game until now. I barely spend time outside of raiding. I went from playing the game for 9 hours on average per day during Heavensward, to never going above that each week. I have also done all the pieces of content that released in the game (Not all on release patch), excluding FRU as I stopped caring for ultimates after clearing TOP. I've raided in the game since Gordias, first as WHM then BLM in Midas, but never did any harder content in ARR itself. I still easily remember how I treated and played the game in ARR as a new player, as I was the WHM who primarily healed and didn't do much damage to make sure my party stayed alive. In ARR and HW, doing damage was a bonus, not an expectation as a healer in duty finder (it's in the name "healer").
It's not really that simple of an issue, either. Before EW, one easy to spot problem was that for all of ARR and much of HW, fights truly were kind of braindead. boss mechanics were barely existant, it was pretty much just "move out of the AoE before it goes off" and little else, and the difficulty clearly was supposed to come from more complex rotations that have since been gutted, so stormblood suddenly having actual mechanics and needing you to figure out tells and predict AoEs catches people off-guard... but it's so sudden and jarring that it just comes off as "bad design" and you will get carried through the fights by a more competent party anyway so, literally who cares?, and that continued until you caught up and made the choice to either git gud to do current non-casual content or to become the kind of player that only subs on patch day to quick clear the new stuff. So basically, you learning or not would almost entirely come down to wether you befriended people during the journey that taught you how to do stuff, likely from an FC. since then, however, many of the mandatory dungeons earlier in the game have been reworked to better tutorialize how mechanics will work later in the game, such as the copperbell boss using overlapping AoEs to teach people to think and figure out that the one that appeared first will go off first, so that problem has been majorly mitigated; people no longer go for a hundred hours thinking all there is to the game is stepping out of danger bubbles. Additionally, while some dungeons are mechanical spikes, every expansion, every single one, actually sees a spike in how hard things hurt and how much damage enemies can soak in dungeons. If you try to stick to the basic strats without learning to use your new buttons, your healing quickly will not keep up with pulls, and enemies will start taking forever to die, at which point not realizing something's wrong that you should be adressing is kinda on the player. Yes, it's true that the game overall does a poor job on teaching players about it's evolving gameplay, but it's also true that a big chunk of the problem comes down to players refusing to read, try things and in general, *learn*, and continuing to design content for those players makes it extremely boring for the majority who actually learned to play. Sure, I cringe whenever I see one of "those" players on a duty, but it's mostly because they're not exactly that common anymore.
As I said, most casual players dont want to go OUT OF THEIR WAY to learn, they want the game to teach them by playing, like any good tutorial does. FFXIV is one of the worst games in this regard, because it not only barely teaches anything at all (without resorting to text dumps that noone likes to read) - but half the time it teaches the WRONG lesson too.
you reminded me of that last boss in the... Post MSQ dungeon, in the stormblood,i think? That does not show cleaves before the very last second. After Heavensward i legit hated that. Like, the only things i was looking at, were castbars, and FLOOR. and when this bastard started his "No aoe markers for you sprout" i was furious and hated that sooo much. Good thing i was a tank, and got a capable healer, no matter the vulns, he healed my ass so hard i didn't die,maybe he swore a healer oath that no new player should die on him or smth. And, on the same note, when i completed WoL trial in SHB, i got into Bozja, (wanted my first relic, and after watcing a guide i landed in it) and, Ice and fire on WoL wasn't that bad. Like a dot, that's annoying, and nothing more. But Castrum lacus litore (or whatever this "Mini raid" is) killed me with it. And had 0 idea why. Why it kills me here, but not there. Later down the line i figured out that "Optional content" is the reason. Everything with blue quest mark is a lootbox of sorts. it's either gonna give you a nice emote, and pat you on the back (beast tribes) or throw you in an active WARZONE where you lll BE DELEVELED, PUNISHED, AND LAUGHT AT (atleast only by a dialogue window).
@@red11rus85 akshually, you're thinking of the final HW dungeon right before SB, baelsar's wall I think. SB is when the design changed towards predicting AoEs before they appear, and that boss was the tutorial and warm-up for that; you're expected to eat the first cleave, and from it notice that every time he jumps to a corner of the arena, he'll cleave everything ahead. TBF it's an incredibly transparent tell after you see it once... it's just that after so long of "just step out of the danger poodles" content, the very concept of anticipating them takes a while to click. Much easier back when that dungeon was current content and was being *farmed*. You'd eventually figure it out. But yeah, generally, msq-mandatory duties give a lot of leeway with what will and won't kill you, so a decent healer can carry through everything. Which we are now seeing the consequences of.
The difficulty in DT casual content do not even feel any harder than what I remember as the status quo for casual content when I started (end of HW/start of SB). That of course based on how that content was back then before all the years of powercreep completely trivialised it.
Every fight that isn't current content is heavily neutered by level & gear sync, so already early on players learn to disrespect mechanics because they don't matter. FFXIV isn't consistent at all when it comes to difficulty like the video pointed out. One example of this is how rarely bosses or enemies need to be interrupted from finishing a cast - I think Endwalker had 2 enemies/bosses that needed to be interrupted in MSQ dungeons. Another example is how rarely removeable debuffs appear, I think EW again only had 1-2 of these - I only remember the first boss in Dead Ends having a debuff that could be removed and should, but there's probably another example. Just these two types of mechanics really need to be used 10x more often, because players just forget that they can deal with these, and it's such a missed opportunity to keep engagement up. Doesn't help that most dungeon bosses are as dangerous as wet noodles, and the only real threat level is how bad your party is during double pulls. Before I quit my subscription, I ended up banning myself from doing Expert roulette, and I would just leave the duty entirely if I got Crystal Tower in Alliance Roulette, because it was so mindnumblingly boring that my brain was leaking if I did those duties. Square really need to learn that casual content shouldn't be feeling like you're battling training dummies, it's excruciatingly boring. If I pay money to play a game, I do it because I want to be engaged by the game, not bored witless. Edit: Speaking of not learning, god how I hate the sound of Medica 2. White mages love using it to solve literally anything, even when nobody is injured as if it applies aoe shields. That spell is way too cheap for how much it achieves, and basically trivialises the existence of Medica 1 and Cure 3.
"White mages love using it to solve literally anything, even when nobody is injured as if it applies aoe shields." I mean, it does apply regen, which can heal future damage. Especially in lower level group content it's just the easiest way to ensure everyone is topped up without having to do any spot healing.
Also some part where the missing constancy hurts a lot. Stack Markers, why you cant stack some and some not? Like Sycrus Tower you can stack all 3, why? Is there not enough room? Lol Or what happend to me in DT, i was in this ghost expert dungeon and at the last Boss Träumerei i get the stackmarker as Tank (PLD) i want to take it solo with Invulv and it killed me.. wtf?! (Not 100% sure if this is right but a stackmarker in A8 works the same way) I can take stackmarkers in Extreme Trials solo with Invulv but not in a expert? Rly?
That big chicken hits hard as hell lmao. I stupidly said to 2 friends to use guardian armor since they were pretty bad at the game, now that we are on MR end game they are suffering for it. (And me too cuz I'm carrying their ass lol). But they are getting better, one cart a time.
and what feels even worse for our starter conjurer/white mage.... dying early in a dungeon boss fight and watching the tank keep everyone alive with tank self-sustain and healing. As if they weren't even needed. Yes that WHM was me once.
That tank was me, many times, unfortunately. Very fun for me, but must really suck for the healer. It goes to show how easy dungeons are. I don't mind them being approachable (e.g. mechanics resolving slowly) but them not dealing enough damage to even need a healer, well, uh...
@@menardyxiv I mean that problem comes with the type of game a MMORPG is in itself, I often see that if you give too much agency and independence to the tank, the healer is punished and if you give too much impact to the healer the tank is punished. Sadly for 5 years or so that I played FFXIV I had never felt a balance in player impact and agency outside of raiding wich is really sad, cuz I was bored out of my mind for like 60% of my playtime since I played tanks on casual content.
Warrior especially can do that. There have been a few moments in 4-man duties where I play WAR, the healer and 2 DPS have died to a boss and I am 1v1 the boss. I know all the mechanics to dodge and heal so I can stay alive indefinitely to very slowly kill the boss solo, but I usually will self-unalive with a boss AOE anyway because solo will take WAY too long
As someone who plays only SCH and GNB, I have been on both sides of the fence. I've been the healer that died early. I've been the tank that was in a position to solo the fight. I have only really committed to the full fight one time, at the end of Vanisapti. The reason was I wanted to see how well my new HoC did as a sustain. I literally had the other three cheering me on as well, so I didn't feel guilty. Normally as a tank, I will find a way to end the fight if there is a lot left. I value time more than anything, and soloing takes a lot of it. As a healer, if I die in a fight, I cheer the tank on. I get to watch the show, relax, do something else while it is going on. I've never felt irrelevant from it, personally. Its simply a matter the tank actually knows WTF they are doing. I like running with those tanks as I heal, so I don't have to pay as much attention. That's just how I am generally.
They went back and reworked some of the older dungeons, they could have made them a bit more challenging, instead if anything they are even more trivial.
I like running dungeons the first time with NPCs to get little extra lore bits, but as a healer in the 95 dungeon I found the NPCs actively pushing me with player AoEs into other AoEs and I needed at least one wipe to win. The mechanics can be a bit too vague, hit hard enough to down me stacked up like that, and so punish me with up to ten extra minutes of tedium for not catching one mistake in time for having the audacity not to run with players since you going down with NPCs means restarting the fight; rather than enjoying the style and combat mechanics, now I'm annoyed and just want to get it over with
Fellow healer here. Agreed.I started pre shadowbringers and after this was invented I liked to run with them. It got more challenging even with npcs, and they are kinda "sabotaging"? XD You have to think for yourself and actively learn mechanics. I still hate this one dungeon with insta kill on the first boss. I had a bad day and if you're running with others and there is one a-hole (in my case black mage who was p*ssed they weren't top dps anymore) and let it out on me. The WHOLE dungeon. - It's not about that stuff is getting more "interesting" but the playerbase of hardcore raiders who are being assholes. (The people who grief and try to kill you so they can solo.) I don't mean there's not nice people but the ones I meet after the WOW people flooded in... The playerbase changed. Even in raids fellow healers don't do their job because of some SHINEY numbers on some website. I'm a decent healer as well. I know my kit. But if you rn a dungeon the first time with others and DIE - aren't you supposed to learn the new mechanics? Dawntrail brought in so many new asshole players I want to vomit. (sorry for the wall of text and I love my fellow black mages u guys are usually chill but holy shit are there sometimes edgelords out there! - Coming from the healer who wanted to play blm but gm said we need healing. I have so much salt I love to hate my job. ;_; )
As the old Etrian Odyssey adage goes. “If the boss doesn’t kill you at least once, it was too easy” it appears that the dungeon design has improved since Endwalker. Also, trust npcs intentionally deal garbage damage to incentivize you to run with other players, the bosses are still like 3 minutes long at most. You are supposed to learn by dying, that is generally how video games work. That’s why the shortcuts now take you directly to the boss room. Also nobody is intentionally trying to kill you so they can solo, that would be incredibly pointless and just waste their own time.
Yeah, it's absolutely the game's responsibility to teach players how to play the game. And while you're right that Yoshi-P and the crew don't have infinite resources, it's baffling why they didn't do that when they were first making the game. I guess they have the mentor system and FCs to try and combat the fact that the game doesn't really teach you how to play it, but the mentor system really could use an overhaul. As a mentor, you're just expected to play a mentor roulette every day, but to *really* mentor someone, as in real life, you have to come alongside them and help them multiple times because people need repetition. You can't just learn a fight once and then expect to do it expertly every time. You need more and more practice with it.
The forums are like 60% trolls, I wouldn’t take them too seriously. I kinda disagree on the wiping making learning nothing. Like in the burn, you see exactly what the aoes do, so after you wipe, it’s pretty clear what killed you, and when the boss does the exact same thing next pull, you know what to do to avoid it. I do agree that Ff14 should have a more consistent difficulty curve though.
Content creators are happy thats its harder but i have more people than ever quitting roulettes if they get a hard one or people complaining about bosses, such as the first walk of deadwall.
So there's an issue with this video and it's the whole thing really. The 'difficulty' thing and the 'outside resources' is an MMO thing as a whole. Not XIV, not GW2, not WoW, not Runescape, not EQ, but MMOs as a whole genre is like this, because it's intended to be community based. Things are discovered, normalized and utilized by the community, for the community, not by the devs. People expecting an ENTIRELY ONLINE EXPERIENCE to hand them information (when things are written in detail) of what their abilities do. Instead of READING this information, they refuse to use these tools and are shocked to find out at 100 that Lucid recovers MP or that sheltron is mitigation. People cry and complain that the "MMO" aspect of XIV is dead when it's still alive and well, just not how it used to be. We still as a community need to show each other how to do things and learn how to do things.
This is the best video on this topic I've seen. This topic has been extremely divisive, and I've been treated like a troll for even beginning to criticize how difficulty is handled in this game. I think your assessment is accurate and brave.
Another aspect that hit me hard, and I assume isn't unique: I've played since Heavensward, off and on. I haven't really played seriously since Stormblood, I complete the story in a few weeks and don't log in for 2 years. My class is now a totally different beast, my hotbars are reset into that weird mush of menu icons they love, and now I can alleviate all wait times and anxiety by simply playing with NPCs? Awesome... until I reach the final trial and suddenly I have to play with real humans. Well I'm just not prepared for that and now 7 other humans are gonna have to put up with me learning what the trial is (so many months after release) and it's awful! I really wonder what this is going to do to the playerbase in the future because it certainly screwed with me. It's like... incredibly geared towards anti-social casuals, right up until it isn't. I remember all those level 50 dungeons had weird and fun mechanics that weren't really in much of the rest of ARR and you had to learn because you'd see them twice, maybe three times if you were all a bit rubbish. I was quite excited to see them again, only... now everything melts at that level, you don't see or learn anything because the bosses barely have a chance to get going. Nobody wants long dungeons with delays, everyone is always watching the clock in roulettes, but where else are the casual players going to regularly train? Difficulty is definitely a big issue, but the sheer length of dungeons is what most people seem to gripe about in the moment. Novice Chat is always full of mentors complaining about the work and time they put into suffering with unskilled players. I'm sure that motivates some to make sure they know how to play, but it demotivates me.
@9:11 If players do the alliance raids and regular raids; then they will have seen these mechs before. Yeah there might a slight change to them; but nothing in DT was outright new or never seen before. Im not a hardcore player - never touched a savage in my life; nor do I use addons that count damage done - but Im more than just a casual player. I just play the content that we are given on a regular basis.
Cure vs Cure II feels like a job design issue and IMO it's part of a larger problem where the team behind the job balance/design just isn't very good at their job. Think of all the times jobs had to be overhauled or reworked, or when something got overtuned to being OP, or undertuned to the point of being a party finder pariah. And every 2 years the problem gets worse as 2 more jobs are added to the mix
You either dodge trivial and mind numbingly boring aoe puddles or you have to do mechs with assigned party members or else whole group wipes. Thats the content this game offers.
Which is why I CBF doing ff's harder content. Feels more like some weird dance test rather than reacting and responding to what's happening, and I had enough inane tests and lectures in Uni.
TBH: The class quests should teach you how to use the spells you get every 10 levels. Or for example cure 1 should upgrade into Cure 2 since there is basically no use for Cure 1 after getting Cure 2.
Intersesting comparison using Monster Hunter since they have been going through the opposite problem as 14, where people are complaining it is becoming too easy and casual friendly. Also the same problem exists in MH that you outlined for 14, how to play your weapon isnt fully explained and only dedicated people are going to go out of their way to understand many aspects of the mechanics they have to deal with in MH. Jumping off walls, slide attacks, spinning down the spine on dual daggers, aggrivating monsters, which perks are good, gems, etc are largely community taught. Also thinking about it the difficulty has a similar curve to it, the floor may be higher but you wont really run into a problem until nergigante where there is a spike of getting one shot by his dive. But overall I do like and agree with your sentiment that 14 can improve their progression and teaching to equip players for bigger challenges rather than relying on the community to be the tutorial after someone already put 100 hours into the game
There is another very important reason why some players cant be good. Its their skills which are already at their ceiling. We have many players not able to improve due to age and other challenges. A MMO throws in many people from different backgrounds. Some people cant just git gud.
XIV fails to provide players any real urgency to learn how to play Jobs properly or to improve. The games MSQ difficulty sits largely at just don't die & press buttons randomly & you can practically do this all the way till the end of DT MSQ, because that's all it takes. For many? this lack of challenge can be boring, so the next step up is usually " Extreme Trials " where from almost nothing mattering? suddenly everything matters. Square gets players complaining about it being to hard even at max level and hits us with more Job homogenization - rinse and repeat every Expansion - You attempt to appeal to everyone? - You end up appealing to no one My main favorite Job got simplified for over 3 expansions with no end in sight... I can't speak for other Jobs, but I do see Square adding any depth back to any other Job. With Jobs this bland? we rely heavily on content for fun, when obviously Square is not going to increase the difficulty of all types of content across the board. Even if Yoshi-P tells us to " Just go play Ultimate ", the format of Ultimate? might not be for everyone when a lot of players wished their Jobs to have a bit more excitement to it that would make doing content regardless of its difficulty? more Fun. - Make Jobs satisfying to play? and it amplifies all Content - But make Jobs easy/bland? and now the Content better shine Unfortunately 95% of the content is a cake-walk, pair this with simplified Jobs? and we have recipe where a good chunk of the players just get bored of it to fast or are left with Job changes that aren't pleasing because it simplified their Jobs expansion in expansion out. Some of us are being told to wait until 8.0 - but with a history of Square taking away features / depth / complexity from almost every Job, and giving nothing really back in return besides more of the same that isn't exactly thought provoking Job-wise? many aren't holding their breath for it. And all of this isn't exactly a problem for Square cause Job gameplay and providing the best entertaining content isn't their priority, its to keep provide mediocre content enough to have us continue to be subscribed. Its why we get the same rinse and repeat formula of Dungeons with 2 to 3 mob-pack into the next boss room as one example. Game becomes predictable and we complain about a content draught. But it is sadly apparently " Good enough " cause players remained subscribed for either exactly because its so carefree? or for other reasons ( Friends / Community / Being attached to their Character & virtual belongings / Owning a House etc ) XIV in my opinion? has 1 big flaw that is a missing selling point when it has so much to offer. XIV has almost everything you can ask of a MMO, even if it feels more like a RPGMMO then it is MMORPG. But the 1 big selling point to me its missing? is " Job Gameplay ". Cause to me it doesn't scream like the Nr1 reason we play XIV? is because the Jobs are crack cocaine addictively fun to the point we get withdrawal symptoms cause we aren't pressing a button for another second... its just mediocre. I wish this to change, but Square's trajectory seems to just be to keep making Jobs easier. - Interacting with most PvE combat Content is optional - But all players will have to interact with a Job to do said PvE combat content - We make Jobs bland, boring, simple? and we rely heavily on content - Once an Expansion has content dips? we get content draughts - We complain? we will get another Job simplification/homogenization like before - Cycle continues When will this stop? who knows... I personally have given up with seeing my Samurai not be dumbified yet again next Expansion. FFXIV remains kinda fun, just not as fun as it could be.
My question is: Why does the story have to be trivially easy ? If you look to another very casual beloved MMO Guild Wars 2, it's very clear that you really don't need to do that. Some of the GW2 story missions are quite challenging yet still there is no outcry about them in the comunity. Im an ultimate raider currently playing through GW2 and I am suprised how often I get my butt cheaks clapped on a story boss or event.
What I hate is the difference in difficulty from the msq compared to instanced content now. The first 4 levels of dawntrail's msq only requires u to kill 1 enemy in over 10 hours of gameplay. And then you have to do the first dungeon which feels like a completely different game. These levels give u new abilities to use without really letting u use them outisde of dungeons to understand how they work and without like a warmup to even focus.
Researching outside info has always been a facet of MMOs. The whole nature of MMOs is community. And if a player somehow manages to get hardwalled by a piece of content, well, that happens in almost every RPG. Then you either bang your head against it, ask a friend or look it up. Gaming.
I feel like the biggest killer of new players in EW and in DT are not disabling FULL BATTLE EFFECTS, since if you try doing a lvl 90 or lvl 100 alliance raid with full battle effects then you will be blinded and will die to mechanics that you were unable to see under 5 different explosions and personally i managed to get quite far in the game with just playing a TANK since i could survive pretty much everything so i barely learned from my mistakes and even today i have 3158 tenacity so i can just stand in AOE´s and ignore all incoming damage :D
I have tried multiple friends to get into the game, but they all quit somewhere in stormblood because they got bored to death from how mind-numbingly easy the game is.
Is not so much of a difficulty problem as is a "spend time in a game" problem. PF does not make it easy to schedule a run, instead you have to open the pf and wait. Which is a non issue for someone with all the time in the world. But an issue for someone who only have a set amount of time to play the game. Set schedules with the same people helps enormously. Something that PF does not help with on any way or form. Hardcore is about time, not difficulty. How much time are you willing to give a game. Time you may has well be using doing something else. A casual gamer may end up becoming a midcore gamer. But is not likely to be or even want to be a hardcore gamer. Lets face it, the battles are just scripts that repeat over and over. Is a memorization game. Not a skill game.
Honestly as someone who was new to mmos. And caught up to msq right when dt released. The dungeons ARENT that hard. If you pay even a little attention. You know what to do. And what you did wrong (save for maybe the doll boss and the grabbing mechanic). People want to get stuff for free and no challenge and the second there is challenge there is complaining. Expert dungeons should be slightly harder then normal so that it teaches you a little for exs. Feel like that is the progression path. Do experts. Then normal raids. Then exs and so on. If you don’t want to have any challenge at all in a game just watch a movie at that point.
One take I don't see mentioned a lot, but I am guilty of having it, is people in the end game not wanting harder or more interesting 'farm' content. I'm talking about getting tomestones and the like. When I am gearing during a tier, I am very much a 'I want to speedrun this asap.' Don't get me wrong, I LIKE the 'get to a cap of resource for deterministic loot' method they have. I'm one of the few that doesn't think there is really a gearing issue in FF14 it seems like. However, when I am hitting those Expert dungeons, I am wanting things to die asap. I will find whatever shortcut of things to avoid I can, etc... The first boss of the 7.1 dungeon? Fuck the adds, I will heal the shit out of the group through the vulns if I have to, but kill the boss quick. If I can make a spread-lo for people to ignore the mechanics, I want people to ignore the mechanics and DPS harder. As a tank, I very often use my tank privalige to keep uptime and ignore things. I just want the dungeon to be over as quickly as possible. I say this with full knowledge my mindset is PART of the problem with the balance of this game. It's great to have more challenging and remotely punishing dungeon content, but only for the first or second time there. After that, I just want to speed run the things and be done with them whenever I set foot in them again. Roulettes are great, the system is awesome to keep older content active and used, but once you are no longer the casual still learning the game they can wear thin too.
I think a huge part of that is just how little engagement the game allows you to have in character progression. The easiest way to reach your caps is to just faceroll experts, or join a hunt train. Other than that, you get 4 pieces of loot, IF you're a Savage Raider. But we're expected to do that week after week for months between even numbered patches. And we've now extended that gap. It's now, what, 4.5 months between major patches, which is 9 full months between gear tiers? It's miserable, and nobody wants to do that, but if you don't, you're missing out on upgrades. There's no actual reason why they can't uncap tomes when they add the Alliance Raids. And for that matter, absolutely zero reason why the raids themselves should be capped. You're adding in the catchup gear anyway, why not just let people have it?
@@Zyart Don't get me wrong, I can see why many might dislike it. I, personally, don't gear more than one alt job on a character, and I run 2 characters at a time all in PF. Heck, I even got bad luck on one of my characters and had to buy one weapon and was 4 weeks of clears to get the 2nd. I know it's not perfect, but for someone like me, I don't dislike it either. I know when I clear, I will get my loot x number of weeks out regardless. I don't feel insane pressure to get done right away and find the time between content relaxing.
Gear can be fixed very easily: 1. Cumulative cap. Total tomestone cap week 1: 450, week 2: 900, week 3: 1350. If you missed previous weeks, you can just grind up the ones you missed. 2. After spending a fixed amount of tomestones and books from savage floors, all gear is halved in price (half tomestones, half books). The "spending X" part is as a measurement of you roughly finishing one gear set (since they need different amount and types of tome pieces, an approximation is the best we can do).
@@Zyart To be fair, unless you're planning to do the latest ultimate, you don't *need* any gear upgrades. There's no point in boring yourself to death with pointless reclears for gear that's going to be item-synced in every other piece of content anyway.
My annoyance isn't the easy vs hard debate. It's the fact that most old content like bozja relies on parties and pf isn't always reliable. You can solo but it is an insanely massive grind. Would be nice if it was scalable based on current instance population.
The difficulty shouldn't spike, it should be a gradual increase IMO. Have npcs ask for Esuna and heals (even in fates when you can't heal them with AoE heals or tank for them with aoe tank skills.) There is so many little instance that could throw players a tip but it doesn't and then you wonder why you get such a hard time the first time you do some duties. Good difficulty is when the game allows the difficulty to match the learning curve. FF14 doesn't, it's "let other people carry you through trials and if you fail a duty you can instantly select a very easy mode." Thus learning nothing at all.
I strongly believe that 90% of live service players are way way way worse at games than single players games. All of mmos/live service have a core structure of activites on the story/daily where you must be braindead to constantly fail and not complete it (not counting disabilities ofc), and just a few activities that are challenging, relegated to a specific hard mode instances. Outside of a compeltely new game introducing challenge as the expected experience for a new player and rivolutionizing the market, it's a lost cause to try to force the large community to have their brain on for a mandatory activity imo.
not me confused this entire video that The Burn was(/is?) a challenging dungeon... like im v much a casual player, never done an extreme synced, haven't gone past Stormblood yet, unless I'm REALLY confused by a class I'm not looking up guides. But I went into the Burn the first time and cleared it just fine. No deaths, nothing was that difficult to understand... so is this video talking about a previous version of the Burn that got nerfed or is the Burn still supposed to be a hard dungeon? bc i am confusion... The Ghimlyt Dark was harder than the Burn... not trying to dismiss the points made in this great video or brag or anything, i'm just genuinely confused to hear that the Burn is supposed to be a difficult dungeon........
Probably got "Duty Support Nerfed". Final boss of Burn used to be one of the hardest regular dungeon bosses in the game pre-Dawntrail imho. Hit like a truck, punished you for mistakes, had simple but quick mechanics and could wipe out bad or more inexperienced players.
The Burn (specifically the last boss) is more of a challenge for healers playing with incompetent team mates, because things like standing in the icy puddles gives a DoT, and doing certain stuff wrong will also trap a player in ice. All this on top of having a higher than average healer workload due to constant AOE spam from the boss. It's like being a healer in Aurum Vale when your team mates are bad players and do stuff like pull the entire room, or forget to eat the fruit in the boss fight, etc.
I don't blame the content. There is just a gap way too large between the high-end player base and the normal content playerbase and unfortunately since SB the developers have cultivated easy content as the norm. I do't see any issue with keeping normal mode content trivial. It is made to be experienced as part of the story. If they want to up the difficulty in dungeons what they should do is make a new difficulty for dungeons and add them to endgame, gives something for both.. Content doesn't need to be inclusive. Make content for the people who would do that content.
What i think they should add for new players is a system that teaches you your class. At certain levels you have to take on job quests and while yes they have tool tips for the skills, I think they need to implement into the quest of the job instead of 'heres a side story of why job exists and new skills read your tool tips'.
Were you not around for the release of SGE? Because people literally were constantly yelling about how hard the SGE jobquest was, when it was literally so easy if you read more than 2 tooltips. Players dont read lol. It doesnt help that they make new skill descriptions incredibly long and honestly confusing now as well, with the additional effects and changing skills etc.
@michaelbart7014 I don't think I was clear. I agree players don't read tooltips, but they don't necessarily explain skills well either (as you already stated). What I meant was making these tips clear in how the class works. For example, hall of the novice exists to explain ground indicators and fights, there should be better explanations in game for class jobs and how they work instead of just sending a player off with a written manual that's bland and confusing. I played that SGE and can see how people would be confused about the class. Granted I'm a person who will look up tutorials and what not to make my life easier in game, but I think that's the issue. The game requires too much outside sources to understand how to play. I'm all for saying git gud and fuckin read, I agree, but I think the game also fails in those areas to reach people how to play.
I had few issues with a couple of dungeons but with some practice and understanding of the bosses i had near to no issues killing the bosses. Still i didn't want to play those dungeons again i find them tiresome and the fact that the new gear don't make you feel stronger is a major letdown. I understand wanting a challenge and sometimes i like it too but if it isn't worth the effort i rather play another game
The unspoken issue is that most of the ways that the game can give you proper and detailed feedback, is to go against the TOS. Many of the tools for how you perform next to your fellow player; hitting your positonals, your hit box, or even the details of how you died are all 3rd party tools. Many casual players will form bad habits or belive things that are not true because there is no way to get the data to check unless you get these tools, and because they are against TOS anyone of them that is offended by the outcome against there ego has an easy way to seek vengeance on those who told them there skill is what is leading to defeat. The game is too hard in its original state to for the average player to do all the content. Imagine if monster hunter hid your HP, Damnge to the boss and hit feedback. That is what it is like playing FF14 the way the dev indent with how much information is hidden. While veterans of Monster hunter could do without that feedback, a new player would be hung out to dry.
So true, I played WoW from TBC to BFA, and I've been playing XIV since 2013. I remember during a raid in WoW being kicked out and the RL telling me, "You're not pulling your own weight, your DPS is too low." That drove me to improve and become a better player. This same thing would never happen in XIV. For a new player without guidance, it is borderline impossible to realize.
Now that's a silly take. If you're not interested in tackling hardmode content in ffxiv, you don't have to, and for casual content you don't need to play optimally to clear. Not at all. As a main tank I'll hop on casual content on a healer, not know what half my buttons do and still clear. I've done all tank, all healer and even all dps synced dt dungeons with my friends and cleared no problem. WoW encourages sweatiness with its design, FFXIV shields you from it, so you're allowed to go to sweatiness voluntarily if you want it. And yeah, if you wanna get good you'll have to earn it, the game is not gonna hold your hand there like you're a toddler, I'm sorry. Btw, most people I know have act, modding this game is trivial. If you're at a place where you can use that data and are even interested in it at all, getting the tools is the smallest hurdle in the process.
It is true. In my opinion they should add feedback to the game. NOT a damage meter. But they could add something after a single-boss duty, a window, that shows you values like XIV-Analysis does, like GCD uptime (most important skill for dps). This does not compare you to anything. Its just a funny number (Hey, you had an uptime of 80%, keep it up mister player, you can still improve a lot!) - and even casuals see a number like this, especially if its color-coded, and want to improve it. They won't go look up guides to do it (and as I said in the video, they shouldn't have to), but suddenly a desire is there. Same on deaths, many "standard" deaths, like dying to avoidable AoEs, dying to spreads overlapping could come with a death log and a hint why you died. None of this is the same as the 3rd party tools we have available and thats why its great.
@@menardyxiv The issue I have found in damnge meter, is when other players know your information. This can be easily set to private with it only showing your personal performance with a rank. Then perhaps something like analysis. Abuse comes from people seeing the information of others so no player will have to worry about other players being able to see this information, and if they want to ask there help they can then freely give the information. This is why I talked more in feedback, postionals are the worse for this on design since there is no audio, or visual feedback if hit correctly. We have the ninja bunny in the game, imagine the job if that was not in it to show you the muda combo's were not done. Feedback is important to know you did things right, so having healrs get a healing AND DPS score would work well to inform new players that they are responsible for both, as well as tanks having a score for over all damnge mitigated and DPS. A death log for all the things that killed you will also help, other games have this as well built in. I will be now using the assumption of the sprout player who is trying to get the cure fishes now since it seems casual players is a term that covers a wide verity of players. We already have a dmange meter in PVP, the community can handle a little feedback.
![What makes Ultimate, Savage, Extreme different? [FFXIV High End Raiding]](/img/n.gif)
Barely finished this before FRU - I hope that doesn't impact the video negatively. I wish everyone good luck who attempt FRU right away.
Sorry, but I won't try FRU. My skills are not optimal. X3
in hindsight… HAHAHA
This expansion is dealing with growing pains that it should have addressed waaaaaaaay long ago. Upping the difficulty was good but they need to really help players grasps their jobs as a whole.
Edit: A good example of this would be how they introduced viper and pictomancer, they explain the class and have you practice it before giving you a basic challenge. It gives you time think about the skills and how you want to set up your hotbar. I want that applied to all classes. Make Hall of Novice mandatory and show example of how to use less used skills like arm"s length, rampart, interject, reprisal and so on.
@@anteprs7908 shit take, casual content (especially combat content) doesn't need to be literally brain dead like it was in EW. people are just mad that they finally have to learn the game after just holding W and pressing 1-2-3 in dungeons for 2 expansions. even a game like super mario bros has an overarching risk of death. "casual" MMOs like guild wars 2 could get you killed in the open world. if they don't want to actually interact with the game they might as well go watch a movie or something
@@anteprs7908I couldn't imagine playing an mmo for hundreds of hours and not want to learn how to play it. It does not take much effort to perform decently in the average DF content, and I'm tired of people complaining that it does.
And before you assume: No, I'm not some hardcore raider, I just prefer to learn and perform well in a *party-oriented game*
@@anteprs7908 You say that like they're making dungeon bosses like they do savage bosses. We're seven expansions in. Shit should be harder the further you get into it. Instead we get the majority of EW bosses being the equivalent to something found in early level dungeons. At that point its just bad design.
Personally I believe challenge should come from the content and not from job design. Especially in a game where they expect you to be playing multiple jobs in endgame content. Some of the best designed jobs in this game are some of the simplest. WAR, PLD, and VPR come to mind. Jobs should be able to be played almost instinctively. Fight the boss, not your hotbar.
@@1337penguinman calling PLD or VPR "some of the best designed jobs in the game" is some HILAROUS cope, and thats coming from a PLD main
Sorry ahead of time if this is going to sound like whining, but the worst part of it for me is the sense of entitlement XIV players seem to have? So for reference, I started playing in Shadowbringers after things were already very streamlined to be new-player accessible and relatively intuitive. But seeing this same playerbase go into endwalker was insane. People act as if it's expected for you to just carry them through any sort of obstacle whatsoever, without ever having to use an inkling of their brain or thought, and act pissy when you want them to do their job and play the game in GROUP CONTENT that requires group input.
It's borderline griefing. Joining a level 100 expert roulette dungeon standing in aoes and them complaining that they died, not using aoe, not using mitigation, not using 90% of your kit and playing like you're still level 30, that shouldn't be allowed. It's frankly ridiculous that 10 years into the game 100 levels later, we're STILL dealing with people who do (and these are real examples I have witnessed myself) ZERO damage scholar, no dot, no broil, just sitting there and spamming succor. samurai who do not use iaijutsu (no midare, no higanbana) just 1-2-3, NO SONG, NO DOT BARDS. it's absolutely ridiculous! And sure, some of them might not know. Some of them might have job skipped or story skipped. but why is that OUR problem to deal with?
It's like if you joined an intramural sports team for soccer (or football for non americans), and you join as a goalie. Why then, are you complaining that you have to block the ball from entering the goal? Why are you playing a DPS if you aren't going to do damage??? Why am I as a healer doing 3-5 times more damage than a samurai? And people can talk about toxic dps meters and fflogs and whatnot but I don't NEED those to tell when someone is playing god-awful and completely useless to a party. If a black mage does nothing but spam blizzard 3, I can see that with my own eyes, I don't need ACT to tell me that. If I see that the bard does not play any songs and the samurai does not use any iaijutsu, I can *see* that. Why are you playing a tank if you don't want to tank? Why are you playing a healer if you don't want to heal? It's actually insane the people that have the audacity to join content of their own free will and choose to play this game and then complain that they dont get to sit and do nothing and get carried through content. It's my biggest pet peeve with this playerbase.
And also the reason I say I joined in ShB is because I *WAS* a new player. And you know what? I LEARNED. I learned how to play the game, and be a DECENT OKAY AVERAGE PLAYER. If I, someone who had no experience with this game whatsoever can do it, it's not unreasonable to expect other people to reach a mediocre level of mastery, which is really more than enough for anything this game requires. People really act like it's unreasonable or ableist to expect healers to press ONE BUTTON, to do a filler spell when nothing is happening and there is no damage coming out, or to press ONE BUTTON to do a damage over time spell twice a minute. Or press ONE BUTTON to do aoe when there are 3 or more enemies. It's absolutely ridiculous! I've literally never seen any other game community be so resistant to playing their own game than xiv players are, it's insane.
Thats exactly one of the issues that comes from the flat difficulty curve. What happens if you never challenge players? Their expectation becomes to mindlessly AFK through things, because "thats how it has been so far". And if that expectation is suddenly challenged - boom, you get people crying about it.
And as I said, its understandable they complain, but its also unreasonable.
This. 💯💥
its crazy how you gonna play an mmo and not bother researching, YouTubing or looking things up? to learn or improve. like this is not FF10 loves 😒
@@mouuuuuu9000 it's not even about research necessarily either. cuz like i'm sure some amount of casual players will just play through the game and call it a day and not think about it too hard. but what i really don't get is getting to level 100, in the triple digit levels, 100+ hours into the game, and then not pressing 80% of the new fancy buttons you get? Like I don't get why you play at that point, what is the purpose of getting and unlocking all these new job actions and skills and spells that you just don't use? Because it feels *good* to use them, that's where the fun of playing the game is. Unlocking fancy new weaponskills and cool big magic explosions and flashy attacks is literally half the sellling point of mmo expansions. I just don't get it. it's just this fundamental lack of desire to engage with the game at its core that completely baffles me.
@@metaknightmare1234 right and im 100% with you
100+hrs in a game at this point you love this game and to me loving a game = wanting to be better at it or at least trying to be better at it and since ffxiv lowkey dont teach you shit unless you’re in a helpful FC you would want to start googling stuff up lol
The sounds of cure 1 and physic are ingrained in my brain and everytime I'm tanking expert roulette I take a time to reflect on my life when I hear them.
Physick is extra painful because ADLO IS JUST BETTER WHAT ARE YOU DOING WHY ARE YOU SPAMMING PHYSICK ON ME AT FULL HEALTH
@@Jorvalt it's extra funny that emergency tactics is there if you actually need pure healing too so adlo is also better for pure healing
Hearing physick is even worse when you don't have a scholar in your party...
If you hear it once during the whole dungeon, it's usually a simple misclick as I'm a main healer and SOMETIMES brain just goes brrrr and I press cure 1 instead of cure 2.
Other times I just like using it for the heck of it in isolated situations because why not
@@DualXZ Why do you even have it on your hotbar
I think a good middle ground was joining an “oops all healers” jueno run for me. No pressure, negligible consequences, we had one newbie to the raid. It took a while and mechs definitely started looping, but boy was it fun figuring out how to get past the stuff we couldn’t interrupt. By the time we got to the last boss our “tanks” were consistently surviving the TB’s. Super fun and a great note to end the year on :)
1:22 I still stand by the idea that Cure II should be an upgrade and not a separate ability, and Freecure should be removed. I will DIE on this hill.
Also, after watching the whole video, holy shit, YES. PLEASE. Players need to be challenged. They need to be taught. There are too many people who grow complacent playing their job wrong that when they're faced with a modicum of challenge they cry and bitch and moan that the game is being unfair to them when the reality is that they just haven't properly developed their skills.
It would solve the issue, not in an elegant way, but honestly, its a design mistake right now, because it just so clearly baits players into the wrong behavior.
WoW tried to add triage healing in WoD(?) but FFXIV never had that in that form. So the whole idea to spam a low-cost low-impact healing spell is so out of place.
It is rough because many MMO developers have metrics, numerous WoW devs, Yoshi P himself, GW2 devs, Everquest, etc. all have stated that the vast majority of people who play their games want to turn their brain off and would rather quit the game than improve. For every person who says "dang that was a bit difficult, let's go again" you have five who go "I'm done, it is too hard." Although all of the developers would rather try a more proper difficulty curve the fact that people take breaks, lapse in their subscription, life hits them, is a live service, etc makes it almost impossible to do so without the executives coming in and being extremely mad.
Back when WoW introduced mandatory tutorials, they found that 25% of players didn't or couldn't complete the tutorials and the forums were filled with people saying that mandatory tutorials were a terrible idea. It proper spooked the MMO industry and as such outside of some tutorials, they no longer made tutorials mandatory. The improvements to the Hall of the Novice are welcome and they do teach more standard universal mechanics to new players but they are not mandatory at all and a new player can completely miss them. Another example that might have spooked the FFXIV developers in their design philosophy was in Korea and China people were surprised that they actually had to play the game and said that ARR dungeons were too hard, along with too much reading (ironic since their games and media require a shit ton of reading and idioms) that it almost caused FFXIV to fail in China and Korea. It was only really a change in strategy, marketing, and new team handling those versions that FFXIV was saved and is thriving in those countries.
FFXIV when too far in the easy route (for normal content, savage and ultimate got harder and harder and followed closer to the proper difficulty curve) to the point that even casual players were a bit bored of the encounter, hence the slight course correction in DT.
@@Blahblah-oo7lk about the tutorials on FFXIV
is why FFXIV devs do rewards players for doing the tutorials, to give a incentive for them to bother to do them, nice threads and accesories what boost exp, so people has a reason to bother to learn(if not just become somewhat familiar) mechanics, two of the bad points of tutorials is what they are boring and unrewarding, and FFXIV ones are boring, but they reward you for bothering to do them
FFXIV will never be anything other than a furry ERP simulator ever again because the devs want the money that catering to people using the game as a glorified sequel to Second Life ie the lowest common denominator produces and the braindead Redditor playerbase defends the decisions and therefore the profit margins of a corporation over their own player satisfaction and game enjoyability by claiming this just makes good business sense and it's better to have a shit, adulterated, degenerate ERP game with barely anything at its core to bite into or engage with than to not have the game at all. Worse, influential micro e-celebs within the FFXIV community will make this argument as well despite knowing better and talking at length in their own rants and videos about yearning for the Heavensward era and wishing challenge would come back to the game.
@@ReinhartSchneider Learn how to use the mechanics of your keyboard to write a better, cohesive, rant.
For me the big spike is the lv 60 lab dungeon. This one is DESTROYING sprouts. New players are never told they can move inside an orange aoe after it disappears instead of waiting for the actual attack animation to be done so they get rolled over by that in and out mech with the fire and ice balls.
Exactly this. The biggest spike in the whole game. So many sprout parties wipe there
No? This is standard stuff
@@magamisic5924 Not at all. The mech is simple but the timing is stricter than most things in msq. It is also unforgivable and will kill if missed. Any time rollos drag me there and there's a sprout in the team, he inspect the floor like never before. I've had runs with all sprouts parties and these always results in MANY wipes because of that single mech. I tell them to follow me closely, I put the dorito on my character. It does not matter, they get nuked a whole bunch of times before it finally clicks. Nothing else in the msq does that.
that's fair but like. how do people not figure out that 90% of aoes dont linger? or even slidecasting? that stuff feels really intuitive
@@benjimaxbobjohn slidecasting is not beginner thing. At that point of the game most of new players have not figured out that aoe can be dodged without having to wait for its animation to finish.
As a relatively new player in between ARR and Heavensward content right now, I think my biggest gripe with the game is that the main story thus far hasn't taught me how to actually play my class at all- it took doing a bunch of palace of the dead to get a better grasp, though I still have much to learn. If I were relying on the story to teach me how to play I would be screwed if I attempted harder content.
its usually not too hard to pick up arr classes since youll get abilities slowly
but once you get classes past HW they get increasingly annoying to learn
sage was notably a pain to learn since it has no true combos so you just gotta read *everything*
what classes are you struggling with?
@@Luxia-f1e I wouldn't say I'm struggling, but as someone who's liking tanking classes the game has done an awful job of teaching me when the best time to pop times like Mitigations is, I've had to look elsewhere for that.
Yeah, this: People don't get how little the game teaches. It teaches some EXTREMELY basic stuff like 1-2-3 combos and BLM Astral/Umbral, but that's it. It doesn't even teach what an oGCD or weaving are, fundamental skills to know to be good at the game. People are asking for harder content not realizing the game teaches very little AND the content we have is mechanically far more complex than anything we've had to date. Compare any DT boss to any ARR boss and tell me that the ARR ones aren't mechanically simpler. "Circle aoe, maybe a cone, the rare line...that's it" is not more complex than even the simplest EW bosses - the "easy" expansion is more mechanically complex than that.
@SubduedRadical the sad part is many of the old ARR dungeon bosses have been updated with modern mechanics to kinda help but combined with being older content and the mechs being slow people may easily not remember or feel its no biggie since it doesn't hurt that much
The sad thing is that the game *did* challenge players in the MSQ outside of dungeons with some of the Stormblood solo duties, but when some people were unable to bypass the basic skill checks presented in them, they whined until they added easy mode so they could brute force it and bypass it without actually improving.
Heck in the MMO genre which spooked many developers was the reveal that many WoW players couldn't complete the mandatory tutorial, which sent reverberations throughout the industry.
@@Blahblah-oo7lk Do you talk about a tutorial in FF XIV or the time in WoW where they tried to implement a mandatory scenario required for unlocking to automatic dungeonfinder?
Because in WoW with Mists of Pandaria they implemented the Proving Grounds, which should be a Solo Scenario that teaches you in a Tutorial everything you need to know for your role. In Warlords of Draenor they thought that they should make it mandatory for the groupfinder for heroic dungeons so that every player goes in there with the basic skills needed and so from gearing there goes into higher content.
The problem whas that it whas not only so badly patched but also that so many players where so bad and could not complete it, that after WoD they stopped it because it whas one of the reasons why WoD whas the WoW expansions that failed so hard that it halved the player numbers.
So with Legion ongoing they instead continued to make the game even easier and easier except for the Raid difficulties above normal and whenever they tried to decide to up the difficulty for everyone, they instead got a crashing downfall in player activity. So with the newest update they kind of gave up and just give second best loot in an easy solo mode while the group players have to through hard modes.
My problem here is you either “don’t step on the orange puddle” or “memorize 34 attack patterns with assigned light party, counterclockwise while keeping uptime, while you also run southeast with your assigned party member”. There is just no in between.
I love Bozja/Eureka, the issue is we get one exploration zone every 86 years and it’s normally introduced later on the expansion, if anything.
My solution would be introducing an exploration zone at the beginning of an expansion and build on it throughout the whole cycle, that way midcore players have something to do and grind all the time.
Massively agree there needs to be more "midcore" content. This is fun for casual players who want a bit more of a challenge AND more hardcore players that want a break from the rigidity of hard 8 man content. Bozja was a blast just hopping in with a few friends and trying to navigate the chaos of groups with varied skill levels.
@@NabsterHax Early extremes are midcore content. Its just there is a huge jump to requiring coordination in that 8 man content and can clear while being dead the whole time in story content.
Other games would push people to this content overtime....either with exclusive rewards or gating more of the game behind it.
However, there is a large number of players who do not want to be pushed even to extreme level of content which requires coordination and they can get through any content by getting into queue with someone who carries them through all the story content. They are never given a fail state that stops them from progressing the story or content.
@@zekego people don’t need to be pushed to do content they don’t wanna do. I don’t have the patience or the time to do savage, current extremes or ultimates, I also like doing Eureka/Bozja type content, which is a huge grind at your own pace. There should be content for everyone, not only hardcore or super casual.
@@PapiKamikaze Sure, except the vast majority of content in the game is casual. There are people doing expert runs that have no idea on how to play their class and only hit a couple of buttons. They expect to be able to clear while doing this because the game does a really poor job giving negative feedback about their performance.
Other genres have a greater expectation from the player as more hours are invested. And this is even true in most MMOs.
FF14 on the other hand has people complaining about the difficulty of normal dungeons because they wipe and refuse to learn a mechanic.
@@zekegoeh, I'm not sure I agree with that necessarily. Casual combat content includes: dungeons, trials, normal raids, alliance raids, variant dungeons, exploration zones, uh... maybe hunts, the story floors of deep dungeons?
Sounds like a lot but a lot of that is one time only. Content introduced in 7.1 was one dungeon and one alliance raid you'd ideally do weekly. A casual player starting from 2.0 will have a lot of content to go through, a casual player who's caught up and beaten the old expansion's content will find themselves doing one alliance raid clear a week very quickly.
Meanwhile, hardcores will always have a new tier of savage, Ultimates, Criterion and Criterion Savage, Chaotic A. raids, extremes, all of which are repeatable. Technically roulettes are repeatable, but as soon as you're capped on 450 there's virtually no point to doing roulettes for that week.
This is a breath of fresh air, finally someone acknowledges that both things can be true - that the content can be both difficult or easy.
This was the first savage tier I completed. This is also the first expansion where some of the dungeon and trial bosses have made me want to jump off a cliff. And that Alliance raid... holy crap.
Something I dont think a lot of people take into account when making retrospectives like this is the fact that FFXIV is an ongoing game that has changed it design philosophies over its lifetime. In ARR and Heavensward, the game was upside down compared to now. Fights were always easy, even back then, but especially in HW, your class mechanics balanced on a razor's edge, you had several spinning plates you had to juggle, and if you dropped any of them, your DPS soured into nothing for the next minute. You couldnt have complicated fight designs, no one would be able to maintain their class.
In Stormblood, the designers realized this made for boring gameplay in the long term, and so made the journey to flip the script. Classes would no longer be difficult to maintain, they'd largely maintain themselves as long as you were pushing buttons. Instead, the difficulty would come from the fights, leading to the designs we saw in Shadowbringers, Endwalker, and now Dawntrail.
Unfortunately, this means that all the fights in ARR, HW, and even some of StB are now hilariously braindead, because you have easy fights with the now-easy classes. The only way they can fix this is by going back and redoing all the content from two and half expansions with modern fight sensibilities, and like... They're just not gonna do that, lets be real.
I'm glad to the see the new Hall of the Novice, it will help. But this game really needs an in-depth Hall of the Novice for each individual class that teaches you have to play it, tips to keep in mind, and some rules of thumb.
First time i ever died in a dungeon in FFXIV when i started out was in The Sunken Temple of Qarn. The reason was stat i was standing in the AOE punch zone of the Temple Guardian and chose to not move because up to that point no AOE in the entire game has dealt high enough damage to make moving matter. If i didn't do extreme trials or savage raids for fun in the free trial i imagine id never learn how to do proper rotations.
I think just upping the damage for making mistakes in dungeons in early content would give players more reasons to improve.
I feel the difficulty of dawntrail dungeons have been increased significantly compared to what we used to have pre-dawntrail. This is a good change in the right direction because you can make the encounters engaging while punishing players moderately for their mistakes. In endwalker, people could go afk and clear a dungeon, that is how easy it was. Regarding extremes, I think they have done an outstanding job, especially with Zoraal Ja and Queen Eternal, both of these fights have phases that are VERY punishing if a player dies; therefore, it gives the non-savage players a taste of what savage is supposed to be. Also Valigarmanda is an amazingly designed fight. Nevertheless, if difficulty keeps increasing steadily, it will be so long before the CORE audience complains and Square send us back to E.W standards. After all, these people are the very same reason of why they simplify/nerf classes so it can appeal to the hyper casuals who can't press more than 3 buttons in rapid succession.
You do realize that there is a variation in people's ability. I am old if I practice 24 hrs a day I will never be as proficient as someone 20 years younger. FFxiv doesn't seem to be catering to this variable ability any more. Not everyone can be a gun player.
@@anteprs7908 I honestly don't know what you think casual players are but i know a bunch of casual players who like the new dungeons, since even tho they don't wanna raid or do hard content they still want to be challenged for the content they do, they dont want the game to play itself which was literally how EW was, you could stand in EVERYTHING and still most probably survive, and if you think the game is dying because casuals are leaving then youre just wrong, its actually the opposite, the veterans and midcore/hardcore players are leaving, why? because we are done with the boring job designs, the boring fight designs and broken promises.
honestly, i have not seen game go as hard casual mode as this and you say they are killing it for the casuals? XIV is struggling as MMO because it tries to cater for everyone, that is why there is actually really little hardcore content or content that lasts for long, meanwhile there is actually a LOT of casual content
@@anteprs7908 did you actually just say that expert dungeons are midcore content? those are literally normal dungeons, and you know why casual players are leaving? because that is what they do, they play the game for X amount of time, they don't get attached to games, meanwhile people who matter, the midcore/hardcore players who get attached to games and are willing to support the devs, those matter, the moment a new game the casuals want to play arrives, they will just quit, that is how it is, appealing to casuals means getting a quick buck for it, appealing to loyal but "minority" players means slow but steady money and loyal player base.
most of your "midcore" content isnt actually midcore content, like eureka or bozja for example, what makes those midcore content? you lose EXP when you die? like oh no, dying is bad, who coudlve thought? dying SHOULD be bad, you should be punsihed for dying, but that does not make it hard content, if you honestly think that game is "too hard" when you cant just hard smash your head to a wall and expect it to fall before you do, i cannot understand how you can get on with life
@anteprs7908 No. The dawntrail dungeons are not midcore level content.
If we want a good level of midcore content we can talk about stuff like the field operations in bozja or a fair few extremes like zodiark
@@anteprs7908 do you geniunely have a neurological disorder your typing is so incoherent and rambly that its like the typings of an insane person
Free cure is an old mechanic leftover from a time when players had to actively regulate their main stats and mp levels. There was no default 10000mp for all jobs. Your mp was directly linked to your stats and its was up to you how much you had. Some players chose to have massive mp pools with much smaller heal and damage numbers while others chose to have much smaller mp pools that they would have to maintain with ethers and juice (ether still has the same function of providing a quick hit of mp but juice used to give an mp or hp regen feature depending on the type of juice). If you went with the low mp but massive output build that was huffing ether drinking juices and spamming shroud a cure 1 was effective enough to be usable in content. I remember cure 2 being worth 75% of your tanks health while cure 1 was worth 50% if your build was right. They just did a bad job of optimization if they wanted this mechanic to remain viable.
I'm 95% sure the only reason Cure 1 still exists is because it has a legitimate use-case in the hardest level 50 content. Stuff like Coils still has a lot of random, continuous but inconsistent damage that needs to be healed actively, but if you try to do that only with cure 2 you can run out of mana fast. It's just from a completely different era of encounter design, and short of redesigning those encounters to have the same consistent and predictable damage profiles as modern raids there's not a lot to be done.
I completely disagree @4:40. The game has tooltips. You legitimately have a video just before this of a White Mage, with Swiftcast off cooldown in The Burn GCD'ing whilst someone is dead on the ground. Is this the game failing to teach the player Swiftcast allows a player to instantly cast a spell? Or a failing of the game and others teaching the player Raise can be used to revive a fallen player? No, they're making a choice not to raise. (Also, this is going to sound dumb but I actually DID need to look up something in Portal, because the game never taught you that you could open doors in the game by interacting with it so after clearing the first pit on the final test chamber, I was stuck. Funnily enough, puzzles didn't stop me, a door did.) The claim of XIV not letting players practice is also insane. FFXIV doesn't FORCE people to get better, yes, but at the same time, it doesn't FORCE people to do the bare minimum. Every time a player is entering ANY piece of content they can be pushing themselves to be better but many don't. In line with this you state "People have to go out of their way to look up guides", but they also don't need to at the base level. There's the Novice Network where you could ask "/n Hey, so I'm struggling on White Mage, does anyone have any advice?" Realistically, the problem is mentality of players. I still remember a decade ago asking a tank in my FC how to tank, I have taught a bunch of people how to play jobs in the game. You can read tooltips, ask for help in Novice Network or Free Companies, and hell, I've risked ToS violations and given legitimate advice in dungeons.
What's insane is when you talk about things being so easy most of the time then the spikes... even the difficulty you claim is not real. You rate Holminster, and Zot as non-existent difficulty? The amount of wipes and deaths on those two dungeons are much more than I've ever seen in Amaurot or Dead End even back when they were poorly geared at the start of an expansion. Where's Endsinger? Warrior of Light? Shinryu? None of them exist on your spreadsheet cause you're looking at dungeons only and even then, only mandatory ones so Aurum Vale which new players DREAD isn't on there. Even your example solution doesn't even work as all you did is took your fake chart and went "The solution is we STRETCH this and make players HAVE to be better" but it doesn't work that way unless you force players to get better, which in this game is to put individual roadblocks in the way or to increase the risk of wasting time for others. Guess what... we had the first, and people complained, and then SE introduced difficulty options for solo content to make it easier. We had the second and SE implemented forced cutscenes in MSQ dungeons because people were kicking new players to be more efficient, resulting in a bad situation for all.
Simply put I believe you're wrong at the core of your argument. The game allows players to improve, every single dungeon is an opportunity for players to choose to do better. When the devs have had instances, or even job design that force players to be better they have complained until it was changed. SB, ShB, and EW design was a result of these requests and was a steady difficulty decrease when it came to jobs, yet players don't know what they want and some of their requests if performed would actually break the game's design. We cannot somehow force players to get better without rolling back many of the changes to design philosophy of late HW, SB, ShB, and EW and spending pointless amounts of dev time, especially with how their reworks to make XIV more single player friendly have also reduced difficulty.
I'm sorry but your entire argumentation is unreasonable and devoid of logic.
Double standard: You struggled with interacting in portal, but say tooltips should teach in FFXIV when tooltips (like freecure, cure 2 vs cure 1) are literally teaching the wrong lessons - and you can argue that you should have looked up keybinds in portal where you would have seen an interact key.
You cannot base your entire argument on me not mention every single point a person MIGHT struggle with and then claiming I rate them as trivial just because I left them out. Thats just maliciously interpreting things to fuel a fake argument.
And yes, players failing to improve is exactly the problem - but the designers can majorly fix this. They can't make everyone be decent, but they can do a miles better job than this. You mention they should ask in NN? NN is full of toxicity and misinformation, add to that that ASKING PEOPLE is a 50x bigger wall for people than looking up a guide and you see how thats not an argument in your favor.
It feels like you just filled in the gaps as poorly as you could to make an argument that has no meaning.
@@menardyxiv I'm sorry this is so long, but me simply saying "You're wrong" without providing the reasons would be pointless.
As for my pointing out Portal, I didn't know I could open a door in Portal because nothing in the game prior to that point had said that I could so I assumed it wasn't possible. To expand; The testing was mostly done with Valve employees, people who had played Half-Life 1 or 2 who knew the doors of the game from Half-Life and that in that game they could be opened. Not once was it actually taught in Portal itself. The issue was the information wasn't even made available to the player in game. This was a literal example of the game assuming outside knowledge that it itself did not provide. Yes it had an interact button, yes there was doors in the environment, but no they hadn't been something you did interact with or could interact with until this point, as only buttons and objects you could hold were. Tooltips are the opposite, they ARE in the play environment (some of them are a bit vague though especially in relation to tick speed which isn't in the tooltips and I'll give you that, but generally yeah, info is right there) and all players have access to that information.
But lets move onto your actual points; You want to bring up Freecure teaching the wrong lesson and it kind of does. It's from A Realm Reborn and is based on how people healed back then. In part because of the different mana economy and in part because healers didn't DPS and generally weren't expected to. Now the question is "why remove an Out of Mana tool?" which is all it is nowdays. I'll shift to another example with how you're claiming it's 'bad teaching' first and then come back to Freecure. The same could be said about Physick and Adloquium. Some new players will see Physick heals more than Adloquium and spam it to try to catch up once a person's HP is low and then put Adloquium on the target only when HP is full. Freecure could be removed so people don't get the wrong idea but then what about Physick? At higher level play it's niche, but still has rare use cases, e.g. catchup in double shield comps or OoM situations in things like Alliance Raid. That second example is also a place where Freecure matters because even a little bit of extra healing there helps, but SE could simply rebalance MP costs to remove Cure and Benefic entirely thus solving any confusion yet then OoM situations feel like they have less pressure since you can still spam a decent sized heal on demand and entirely remove hero moments that come from it, and it still doesn't really solve the poor learning entirely cause it doesn't help Scholar.
Even beyond there on the same line of thinking and one I see more often than cure spammers especially at higher levels; How do we solve all the players who don't use their group abilities in trash pulls? For WHM, this would obviously include Temperance, Asylum, and even Medica III. How should the game teach players that these abilities that help in AOE situations should also be used in solo cases if you'd be losing usages by holding, or even to replace less powerful single target options (Medica III is 1000MP for 1175p over 15s vs Cure II being 1000MP for 800p)? Simply telling people would work since if you don't it's a difficult thing to teach with gameplay? But that itself has a problem since if it directly explains how to play, any/all updates that may impact this in the future would need to be reflected in said content (we actually had this happen with Hall of the Novice when an update made one of the fights temporarily impossible due to Holmgang). These problems don't really have solutions that are as easy as "don't teach people the wrong way to play" since the base way people play is often the wrong way.
As for you stating I'm claiming you rate pieces of content not mentioned as easy I did this because of your "example graph" which doesn't really have spikes or even increases for said pieces of content, same reason I called it fake, it's made to prove a point, not to show what you claim it shows. To claim I'm taking your graph in bad faith is blatantly false, and in all honesty I could flip your argument back at you, since if what you're stating NOW is true you ignored points where average players regularly find difficulty and where the game asks them to be better, and then stated that the occurrence was rarer than it actually is, when it often happens a few times an expansion on the MSQ side of things. Side content even more-so. Like, if we just look at MSQ, we get, per expansion, between 15 and 18 pieces of required content. Generally per expansion you'll find 2-3 dungeons and 1-2 trials that people struggle with at an increased rate on MSQ, so somewhere in the range of 15-30%. As an example, lets go with ShB. People struggled on launch with Holminster and especially its pulls, supposedly (according to you) Amaurot, and Warrior of Light. We had 6 launch dungeons, 5 post launch dungeons, 3 launch trials and only 1 trial post launch since rest were sidequest. So a total of 15. That's 1 out of every 5, or 20% of the MSQ group content, and that's without any real nitpicking about "oh people found this fight KINDA hard" or "I've seen a decent amount of wipes or near wipes on _____" to which we'd probably see 1 or 2 other trials added and Heroes Gauntlet and possibly even Anamnesis Anyder could be included. The pieces of content I counted in that 1 out of 5 people were actually seeing common wipes on this content for a decent time after launch (much more so than surrounding content) or you claimed it as difficult, and the others listed below that have difficulties that are uncommon but I've definitely seen more than enough wipes, solo tank finishes, or DPS raise required to state people have had some level of difficulty on them.
We have more harder pieces of content on the MSQ path than most acknowledge. It's simply that people can get dragged through every piece of harder light or full party content, and the stuff they can't be dragged through they have complained about until it was made more accessible. I even gave you the example of the solo content which players complained about until SE allowed for different difficulties of which we got "easy" and "very easy". So lets say they do increase difficulty in light/full party Duty Roulette content to force people to get better. Well if people are straight up making content take too long because they're struggling it will result in people being kicked as most people want to avoid stepping even close to the ToS and often that can lead to players who are underperforming abandoning the game, same as if we were to remove Easy and Very Easy as these players wouldn't be able to pass the content at all. I would refer you to "Tales from the Duty Finder", it has some pretty good evidence of players who are entitled whilst others simply don't want to put in any effort at all.
And yeah, the reason I bring up NN is because it was a tool added by SE with the intent to allow experienced players to help new players. I never said it wasn't full of toxicity, or there are no players who are full of misinformation, but you acted like the only way people have to learn is to leave the game which is false. In ARR and some of HW we didn't even really have that Novice Network, or even FFlogs to review, let alone we had only a couple people making guides for jobs, mostly on UA-cam. If you wanted to get better, you simply COMMUNICATED and asked people who were more experienced than you, you READ the tooltips and pieced things together yourself, and hell, here's another for you; the guides don't pop out of nowhere. People have to make them or they wouldn't exist, so they take the information from the game (not from other non-existent guides) test theories often via spreadsheet math and disseminate that to the public in guides. This all came from people getting better themselves and learning from what they could take from the game and making tools to help them and others get better. Guides just help people skip most of the steps people have had to go through over a decade of this game and its updates to make things MORE accessible.
SE themselves have over and over tried to make getting into the game and through the content easier for players because time and time again players have asked for it, and simply put, you haven't even made an argument against it being PLAYERS CHOICE to not improve only stated "Square-Enix could make it better" when you've ignored all the reasons it is like this in the first place. What's insane is I'm defending SE here when I'm someone who frequently wants the opposite of what they've done. I want choice for more OPTIONAL challenges in the story, like for hard, and very hard in solo instances instead of having to click off the Warrior of Light buff only to find out it is mitigating SIXTY PERCENT PLUS of the incoming damage (rendering some things actually impossible), but I don't just want the game to be harder for people who just want to enjoy the story or hang out with friends. This is an MMO, and that ease of access and the social aspects help keep the game alive.
@@lilithalicedark The problem is you only look at dungeons. I mean the MSQ as a whole. For 90% of the time you are not in a dungeon or trial. You are in cutscenes, reading text or doing the most barebones fetch-quests.
If I made an accurate graph, not only would that have taken hours, but it would be completely unreadable. Sure you can argue its inaccurate and are right, but you know you're watching a YT video, not reading a 150 page university paper on difficulty.
Its the same misunderstanding you seem to have with players. They don't want to put in the effort. And they don't need to. The designer (and here, the person making the video) can do it by simplifying things and making them approachable.
A simplified graph does a billion times better job illustrating the issue than an accurate one, while also being easier to make.
@@menardyxiv How are you supposed to get better at the gameplay aspects during non-gameplay parts? That kind of makes cutscenes and reading text redundant areas in which you can't really improve player skill, and generally they're not able to just be replaced with combat to the same effect or would be extremely cost limiting to do.
But lets say we increase field instance difficulty for the "fetch" quests. You'll likely see a repeat of the Red Chocobo situation we saw in SB. Where large groups of players were getting wiped by story mobs and people were healing others to get those players through their quests. In fact, in 5.21 SE eventually even nerfed the Red Chocobo's of Uninvited to allow easier access to Save The Queen content, and this was side content, MSQ it'd be the same if not with more outcry, but if we make them instances, well the Easy/Very Easy difficulties being added at player request nips that.
You have stated I have a misunderstanding with how players "don't want to put in the effort... they don't need to". Simplifying anything doesn't change that. You can simplify all you want but you need to change one part of that earlier problem. Either they must be made to want to put in the effort, or they must be made to need to put in the effort.
Your graph is a good representation of this. You COULD have put in more effort, but you didn't NEED to. So the question becomes was the problem that making the graph more accurate was too complicated or was if not worth the effort for something unnecessary even though you know you could have?
In the end I am simply trying to point out, the developers cannot fix both it being too easy and too hard, because it's not too easy because the effort you want to or need to put in is up to the player. Cause yes MSQ is very easy, but alongside this we have optional content going up to needing really high level play for 18+ minutes to clear, or even endurance gauntlets of up to 10+ hours if you want to take on a solo Deep Dungeon. Best SE could do is add hard options for MSQ for people who'd like more of a challenge there too, but that'd be optional. It's also not too hard as there is only pain points in group content where people can be carried and the reason for the state we're in in regards to MSQ is because of SE doing what the community has requested. These are the same people who say "______ is too hard", so it's redundant at this point because they never were willing to put in the effort to the game even when it was actually required, instead the effort went to complaining.
@@lilithalicedark The problem is, you imply that anyone BUT the devs can change player behavior on a large scale, but that never works and never has and never will.
Only the game's design can fundamentally alter the dynamics (=how players interact with the mechanics.
Take the bonus you get for having someone in the party that hasn't completed the duty. That fundamentally made everyone much more accepting and happy about newcomers.
And similarly the game can be designed to MAKE players want to improve and make them improve without them even realizing it (or consciously wanting to). It's simply a design problem.
E.g. the game gives 0 feedback how you were doing in a duty. If after an extreme or savage fight you would get a window (that you can disable too), that simply showed you your gcd uptime % with nice color-coded numbers and maybe small hints how to improve, that would go a long way to making players improve and want to improve.
I remember starting in 2.3 and my onboarding friend talking about Brayflox being a healing check since a bad healer couldn't get you through the final boss, or Sunken Temple of Quarn being a dps check because if your dps couldn't do basic mechanics or target prioritize it would be a painful experience. It's hard to tell now if patches to the game made those challenges ultra trivial or it was just improving past the need for other players, but at the time I genuinely felt those little spikes in difficulty and the need to do your job right for the sake of everyone else.
I've enjoyed the video as a balanced discussion. However, there are a couple of things I would like to add. I know adding every single point would make this at least an half an hour video but I feel like these are important:
1) how you experience the difficulty curve and difficulty spikes in FFXIV is massively affected by when you started playing. For myself for example, the difficulty graph has A Realm Reborn (ARR) and Heavensward (HW) in a higher difficulty and it goes down over time. For me the examples given as massive difficulty spikes weren't that big of a difficulty spike. It's one of the criticism I have of the devs. I believe the stuff they pulled in ARR and HW would've been better off being introduced around now-ish. However, if you start ARR now, it's pretty easy due to how sync down works. You can brute force pretty much everything (ice dragon is no longer wiping everyone left right and center). The age of the game has flattened previous difficulty and difficulty spikes. They've also reworked a lot of the ARR fights which leads into my second point;
2) There are 2 different types of difficulty. One related to jobs and one related to fight mechanics. MSQ focuses on teaching the players what mechanics markers mean and how to handle them. In fact, the current trend of the game seems to be making the jobs mind-numbingly easy whilst going all out on mechanics. I believe this is one of the growing pain points between devs and the community.
Funny you picked Conjurer as an example because the job quests (which I think is what the devs originally wanted use to teach you how to play your job) is all about how just healing is not good enough. You need to do damage. However because it's not outright stated and simply implied it goes over a lot people's heads. Hall of Novice actually tells healers to dps but that's optional. /shrug
Those are my 2 gil.
This is the first time I've watched any of your videos. I was expecting a bunch of whining and not much value. I was pleasantly surprised that this was a very thoughtful critique. As an ARR player, it's always nice to have constructive criticism of the game.
Thank you. Thats what I am going for, looking at things from multiple angles, analyse, maybe make a suggestion if it makes sense, but I try not to judge, even in my prog liars video.
Indeed, whining seems to be quite common, especially among the hard-core player base, so it's refreshing to see balanced viewpoints
I just want a mechanic in a casual dungeon to surprise me the first time I see it in a new dungeon in the 5th expansion of a videogame. Mechanics don't need to be hard, they should just require you to respect them i.e. you should definitely die if you overlap two aoes or stand in the boss' gigantic murder attack that he spent 8 seconds charging.
There is a very severe problem with mmos that's very obvious in WoW which is the coddling of the playerbase until the point their brains rot and they don't learn anything. If you've ever stepped into an LFR fight or a normal fight, you'll know exactly what I mean. Bosses targeting a gigantic laser directly at a player and literally 10 people standing in it only to get hit for like 30% of their life bar. If a mechanic isn't punishing, why should anyone ever learn how to deal with it? This lead to the average skill level of the WoW community in the casual playerbase to atrophy at an unbelievable rate.
It still shocks me in a full 24 player alliance raid to see all 24 players perfectly resolving a dance mechanic that doesn't have an "obvious" hitbox (i.e. literally drawing on the floor where you shouldn't be). That is a MAGICAL feeling and it never fails to make me gasp as a former high level raider in WoW who has had the misfortune of winding up in groups with people like the former.
This is why I severely disagreed with Square massively revamping all of the old dungeons to trivialize them in order to accomodate the duty support and trust system. I actually got depressed when I hit The Keeper of the Lake in a leveling roulette because I remember first hitting that fight in the MSQ and requiring a good 4~ pulls from my group to clear it. It taught mechanics and ideas that I hadn't yet seen in the game before. Additionally, fights feel half as long as they used to be, especially in trials which would sometimes wipe a new group a few times. When you make these fights totally braindead, it amplifies the coddling problem so much. Players will reach lvl 80~ before they even really need to consider the enemy boss they're fighting to be a threat. Thus completing the same paradox that modern WoW suffers through; casual content is too easy, and hard content is too hard.
On the positive side, I feel like the MSQ roulette dungeons (prae, castrum, ultima) are much more interesting to practice in now. Not "enough" - main issue I have is that nothing really kills you, like trying to die is real effort.
Same as WoW dungeons on normal/heroic, or even M0 or M+ 1-5. Players learn to disrespect mechanics there...
@@menardyxiv The new mechanics on Prae and Castrum actually threw me for a loop the first time around, they really need you to pay attention a little.
@@anteprs7908 🤡
@@anteprs7908 I've seen people survive a boss clear getting up to 6 vuln stacks. Dungeons don't do enough damage to punish players who ignore mechanics. Healing dungeons below 80 can cause me to doze off from how little I have to do, honestly
@@Cobra0798 Some Bosses have just these kind of "Afk-Check" like the first one in Qarn and the First and Last boss of Dead Ends. If you dont pay attention, you'll die of doom. And these are pretty much the only Dungeon Bosses in which i remember fatal Mechanics (Beside Ascian Prime, but that Guy is just a Raidboss that got lost and ended up as a Dungeon Boss. His in-Out mechanic is a Sproutkiller)
Pharos Sirius mental scars finally healing in the dev team after all these years
I have some new friends who started playing high end content with me and its crazy how there is literally no single content that would teach them how to do their lore in high end.
I heal but i never tank so helping my tank friend on higher difficulty content is hard and even in prog parties the expectation is that you only come once you know how to play... but you wont know how to play unless you watch a video. Its crazy that we have to learn to play a game from a video and not from the game.... I now started doing the unreal trials with them which is kind of a good middle ground but it was not out until months into the expansion... and so we went into extreme trails then savage raid, both where they were shittalked from time to time for not dealing enough dmg or not tanking/ healing well, without exception none of the times people offered explanation what to do. Now they have done M1s and we tried to do the new extreme trial, they said after going through m1s it was much easier to catch up for mechanics, as half the mechanics are similar. Once it becomes easier to learn mechs, they finally could start working on their rotations... People tend to forget that if you want to play an mmo you WANT to have new players get into its content. If you shittalk everyone left right and center, and the game is not accomodoting appropriate learning ground, all you will get is an elitist community with no growth and a decreasing player base... cause what can you do between patches when you did everything else if you aint doing the harder content? We even did Eureka on the downtime, fully cleared with BA and weapons creation.
Sorry you had poor experiences. If I speak up, which is only rarely (thanks to their policies) I always offer to teach, even if it takes me an hour or more.
And I agree, just shittalking people does not help things, especially for more casual players.
Now, please don't understand this the wrong way, but I think that in WoW, which I consider inferior in many regards especially community-wise, the open toxicity does at least provide feedback to players that they are doing badly.
In FFXIV, if the boss dies, players tend to think they did their part in accomplishing it, even if they underperformed HORRIBLY - sometimes so bad that being 7 players instead of 8 would have been easier.
But this is just a 1/10 in feedback vs. a 3/10. Neither is desirable. The game should give you non-biased, nice and reliable feedback that doesn't make you feel bad, but allows you to feel good about making progress on your personal skills.
And if the game did that, I would much rather people not be toxic/shittalk - so FFXIV is a step closer to the goal.
Oh my god I hate cure 1 so much. A few days ago I was tanking in Dohn Mheg and we kept wiping to the trash mobs because the white mage wouldn't holy and would instead just spam cure 1. I told them not to do that and the 2 DPS players who were in the same FC as them straight up told me "it's just a game" and "you were rude". Unsurprisingly the dragoon player also didn't do any positionals whatsoever and all the bosses took forever. I bet the black mage was pressing random buttons too but I couldn't tell because I have others' attack effects turned off. 3 years ago if you were in a Shadowbringers dungeon and you didn't know how to play the game you'd be actively griefing, but with every new expansion it seems the bar of expectations get lower and lower.
Another funny thing about those 3 is that I was looking at their plates in the dungeon to see how new they were (the WHM had literally only that job unlocked and the other 2 had multiple level 90 jobs) and saw the DPS players were e-dating. When I finally got out of the dungeon I tried to check their plates again and they were now privated 🤭
BRUH I JUST CHECKED THEIR LODESTONE PROFILE RIGHT NOW TO CONFIRM AND THEY'RE ALL PRIVATED
EDIT: OH WAIT I OPENED IT IN AN INCOGNITO TAB AND I'M JUST BLOCKED LOOOOOOOOOL
I personally hate holy spam because it stun locks enemies before they cast anything and then they cast everything all at once after being stun locked. You should stun when they're casting, not before.
@@tc-tm1my you're meant to holy spam because it's like 7 entire seconds of invincibility for the tank every pull, so they can save their defense buttons once the enemies can move again. also, yknow, its your only AOE attack besides glare IV and assize, so what else are you gonna press during groups.
Great video on a topic I think about a lot!
I think they’ve done a decent job with the new Hall of Novice stuff in 7.1 teaching a lot of the common markers so that new players camore aware of that stuff going in. And in terms of not dying, the game does an okay job of generally being clear why you died. You stood in the bad being the most common example. And since all normal content has the simple goal of not wiping before the boss dies, that’s enough feedback for that half of the equation. Dawn trail tries to improve those skills for players by decreasing the time between tell and attack, increasing attack/mechanic frequency, and layering more mechanics over each other earlier in fights then you’d see in previous examples. The Trials and Normal Raids in Dawntrail do feel like a decent on ramp toward extremes in the not dying half of the game.
The place they still need to vastly improve on is the pressing buttons half of the game. I’ve seen so many people starting out in Extremes or Savages and have absolutely no idea what a proper rotation is, what GCDs and OGCDs are, or have any idea how to deal even mediocre damage. And that’s completely fair because the game never teaches you that at all. When those people try to move into high end content it’s an absurd wall to relearn how to play the game they’ve been playing for 200 hours of MSQ and I’ve seen that wall destroy multiple casual statics of hopeful raiders where the enrage becomes a mathematical certainty even if no one died and there is nothing the group can do besides having 3 or 4 players spend 20 hours watching tutorials and practicing rotations to try and unlearn habits built up over all that time.
And all it takes is a 4:30 minute video...
Jokes aside, GCD uptime and weaving are such fundamental skills beyond normal content (but still immensely helpful there and normal content is a great place to practice them as a beginner...) - that there is not even a mention of this in SOME form somewhere in the game is sorta like if "rolling" was a hidden mechanic in a Dark Souls game.
Couldn't have said it better. When I started raiding with Eden Savage I had no idea how to effectively play dancer at all since I had been throwing my buttons at bosses at random.
Why?
Because XIV didn't tell me what to do. Yes, the job quests told me how to use my skills but not in which order or what even to do with the capping bar and feathers.
It took my static lead and a youtube excourse to learn my job properly.
Since then I always thought that it was weird and kinda stupid that you don't have any chance to learn your rotation through the game if you aren't a mathematic person for how to stack timers and understand the walls of text in skill descriptions.
As a mentor that's just sad to see.
@@menardyxiv Makes me wish that it should be mandatory to beat the Stone, Sky, Sea dummies for an end-game fight, before you're allowed to queue for extreme trials etc.
i.e. Just beat the first one, to prove that you actually can press buttons without being a liability to the party.
Every other piece of content in the game is dumbed down to be uber casual, and the only other option they give you for difficulty is balls to the walls you better have a degree in physics and 7 other people who are willing to slam into the wall with you or you lose. I just want a ramp into that stuff, not, choosing between nothing mattering or everything mattering.
A thing alot of people either don't know or don't want to realize is that every lvl 50 and onwards content was once max level Endgame content and i still think it should be treated that way.
Not as a simple hurdle for some casual fun, but after you are level 50 you basically are done with the tutorial and should have learned a thing or two since the Game gave you the needed tools for it.
Dawntrails max level content and dungeons are very good and this is how it should be for casual content.
The thing is that if the casual content is more demanding, but beatable if the player knows the basics of the Game. Basics they had more than enough time to learn. Casual content in Shadowbringers and EW for example was beatable for people who did not even played the straight up basics even tho they put at least a 100 hours into the Game. With that i mean not high level raid rotations, but people who literally press only one button and do not their basic combos.
I am one of the latter players, and i was very dissapointed with the last 2 expansions on a Casual level where everything was just a sweep and forgettable, while Savage was quite fun and ok, the difference was way to deep, and the problem is that so many players are now catered for braindead content that even a slight more difficult spike that is beatable by simple knowing and executing the basics of the game are to afraid doing.... the simple casual content.
Its a mistake SE did, because by making the casual content as braindead like it was in ShB and EW they hurted the game so much more than DT currently does.
At least i was very close to ending my Sub after playing since HW. DT's current difficulty is one reason why i am still playing, because if it would have been not like it is now. i would be gone because the Game was way to easy if you dont play Savage, and Raidlogging is simply not worth the Sub.
Also yeah as many others say, SE needs to rework the Jobs hard, Tanks are since Shadowbringers absolute unfun to play its unreal.
I say this time and time again. The story never makes you learn how to play, it's always over 90% dialogue and cutscenes and less than 10% actual gameplay, and no I'm not making these numbers up, Endwalker has about 45 hours of story with less than 5 of instanced gameplay (dungeons, trials and story duties). Throughout the story players don't get to practice combat enough and are not incentivized to at least read through their skills. I often see people saying that the story is no place to challenge yourself to the limit, while I agree that it shouldn't be too hard, it should constantly make sure that you are aware of the fundamentals and punish you if you are not. This is also an online game, players are constantly engaging with eachother, and while most of us have the patience and are willing to help newbies learn, we also expect the new players to put in some effort of their own to not make interactions seem like a major waste of time.
Screw the noobs, if a game is too hard, don't play it, just like it's always been since games became mainstream, the fact se will lower their bar just to keep some dweeb who's scared of outside paying a sub is a joke
Having to explain that 60x5 potency is better than 80 potency.
Midcore content and balanced difficulties are the future.
They don't know how to make midcore content though
this video perfectly encapsulates what I've long thought about FFXIV being a nearly impossible game to design.
The only point I'd add is that, unlike a single player game, an MMO relies on retaining subscribers to stay afloat and continually provide new content. The catch being that FFXIV's hardcore raiding scene is entirely subsidized by the "casual" playerbase. The MSQ content has to be easy enough to be clearable by anyone, because ramping difficulty, even with adequate teaching in game, cannot accommodate players that simply do not wish to learn. Many people suggest making the hall of the novice mandatory, making sure people know how to do proper rotations, etc etc etc by max level, but any roadblock you put down is effectively a subscriber loss, because many people just opt to give up rather than improve. Any singular challenge that is "too hard" could singlehandedly kill the playerbase due to the linear nature of the game. I agree that robust tools to teach those willing to learn should be in the game and clearly signposted, but making it mandatory is not necessarily the solution people think it is.
It's clear the design team is very passionate about making "high-end" content, given that raiders are eating good this expac (upcoming Ultimate, Chaotic, Raid Tier, Criterion, etc), but passion obviously does not keep the lights on. And the stats point out that, obviously, appealing to a hardcore audience cannot support a game as big as XIV. The only misstep I think the devs make constantly is refusing to budge on job design and continuing to take decision-making and friction away. I understand the frustrations being addressed, but given the way that casual content is designed in this game, I think there is actually well enough room in the game for simple and complex jobs to coexist in the same role. Dragoon, for instance, should be designed for people who like what current Dragoon offers, instead of being sanded down so that anyone can feel like they've "mastered" it.
I would advocate 100% to put roadblocks everywhere to teach markers, rotation, uptime etc (very very soft roadblocks) and give an OPTION to skip/easymode after failing just once.
Even very casual players see a message "Oh you failed, wanna skip this or try easy mode?" as an afront to their pride and suddenly they will try to improve. Or not, and just take the option and move on.
@@menardyxiv I think this is probably the best way of going about it
@@menardyxiv Isn't this essentially what solo duties do, though? The problem is that once players make the decision to switch to Easy or Very Easy for one of those duties (because they couldn't or don't want to improve to pass on normal) they just do the same thing again and again for every subsequent solo duty. Essentially, the moment they start falling behind they just give up on ever being able to do the content without easy mode or being carried hard by other players in dungeons.
Personally, I think the only way to cater to such players is to give up on them ever improving and simply let them do Duty Support dungeons also on "easy mode" so they can single-player themselves through the story. That way everyone else can play the content with the intended challenge.
it's important to remember that what people talk about on social media and forums is not the experience of the average player - it is the experience of only people at the extreme ends. i didn't encounter a single person actually having complaints in-game, even if they wiped once or twice from going in blind
I can agree and disagree with your statement. Agree because I also haven't seen someone complain in-game.
But disagree, because I've had players that could only pass the first boss in Alexandria by being on the floor and the other players 3-maning or even 2-maning it.
The second time I went into Tender Valley, I had two players that died to the first 2 mechs of the Barrel Tender 3-4 attempts in a row (unfortunately one was the healer) and they just rage-quit after.
And there is plenty more examples, but those are the most prominent ones I remember.
On the flipside I myself died like an idiot on the last boss in the new 7.1 dungeon (Yuweyawata Station) because I didn't understand the arched line telegraphs the first time I saw them and we had to reset, as I was on healer. But it didn't bother me, instead I was excited that I didn't just win against a boss I had never seen before. Unfortunately that was the only struggle we had in the dungeon.
@icecreambone This is a common thing said in many game communities online but it ignores the fact that often times in-game isn't the time or place to be talking about these kind of issues. People generally don't talk about things without being provoked and alongside that, live discussions are often more difficult to be held for many people. Partly because it's easier to fully formulate your opinions in text without the pressure of needing to keep up a certain pace of dialogue and partly because chances are if you suddenly go on a tirade in-game it's just going to be met with "Sir, this is a Wendy's" style responses.
It's places such as this video or online forums that people understand to be the places to have these kind of discussions and choose to air out their opinions.
Speaking post-FRU, they're both correct, and it's likely a deliberate choice.
One of the biggest complaints for years was that the gap between Normal and Hardcore content was too great. What they've done is fulfil every possible request at the same time, by giving the raiders a breather with a comfy Savage tier and easier Ultimate, whilst also raising the floor by making dungeons require more attention. The dungeons still aren't that difficult to anyone who has experience, but even I've noticed myself getting caught a couple of times now and then like "Whoops, I should've paid attention there".
I have learned that going through Palace of the Dead is a good way to ingrain the use of skills in different scenarios. Same with Fate farms as they have diverse mobs.
I think an easier way to fix this problem would be to spread difficulty between job, role and fight design again.
Job rotations and role responsibility have been gradually eroded to the point of being boring and tanks and healers are barely even required in casual content. This means that only source of difficulty is now not standing in AOEs and that alone must be difficult enough to provide a challenge.
If they re-introduced enmity management and increased mitigation/healing requirements in casual content somewhat, avoiding AOEs could be made a little easier, and I think that would create a more well rounded game that would be less boring for experienced players and less overwhelming for casuals.
The return of Aggro managment would be something that would bring me back to tanking in a heartbeat. It was one of the most fun things about tanking.
Unfortunately, it's the complete opposite. There's a reason the game has consistently moved in the opposite direction of your suggestion and it's because increasing the challenge and importance of roles like tanking and healing makes players not even want to TRY to get good at them. It's also a horrible experience for other players who are stuck with a totally incompetent tank or healer that doesn't want to or can't improve. Ironically, the conscientious players that understand the importance of the roles (and therefore most likely to not be obliviously shit at them) are put off playing them because they don't want to be responsible for letting a group of players down.
I mean seriously, it's not like casual content in Dawntrail is even difficult. But you're expecting people that can't grasp really quite obvious "don't stand in the bad place" mechanics to somehow grasp the more subtle mechanics of enmity management and damage mitigation?
@@NabsterHax That is not a Game problem, its a player problem, a Problem other MMO's solve by letting the players solve it among themselves.
Catering to a small percentage of players who dont want to learn the nuances and differences of another role hurted the dedicated Players of said role now for way too long.
It is quiete simple even if not nice to hear, but it is the simple "gid gud" if you are a player and dont want to learn Tanking wich also includes Aggro Managment or Mitigation, then you simply shouln't play it, same with Healing.
FFXIV is the only MMO i know that trivializes its roles that much, it is a joke on its own.
I am speaking as a former Tank who still has not went over 5.0 back in 2019, wich has destroyed the entire fun of the role in a heartbeart for "accessibility" wich was not even that difficult to learn if one was dedicated enough to read a couple of lines.
@ If you want a successful MMO, “player problems” are game problems.
Please let me know of any other MMO with a similar level of success as FF14 that has a higher responsibility in terms of roles in grouped content.
The only remotely comparable games I can think of are GW2, which as I understand also trivialises role responsibilities, and WoW which is a toxic antisocial cesspit.
@@NabsterHax There may have been a reason behind these changes but it wasn't a good reason. It doesn't matter how much you streamline the combat system. The people who aren't interested in learning still won't learn. Trying to design the combat system to appeal to this portion of the playerbase is a recipe for disaster.
You can have systems like enmity management without affecting bad players. Bad tanks can sit in their +def/+enmity stance and just deal less damage and bad DPS players will deal less damage and inherently generate less enmity anyway. All it would do is increase the skill ceiling again for more experienced players by allowing room for optimisation and skill expression.
Granted, I haven't spent anywhere near as much time in WoW as I have in XIV but even as someone with 0 experience dipping into the game in recent years, I experienced less toxicity there than I have in XIV.
If you spend a modicum of time learning how your class works and don't try to take parties that you have no right to be in hostage, people will leave you alone and let you do your thing.
Even if you want to dismiss WoW as a "toxic, antisocial cesspool", it's currently a lot more successful than XIV is...
Ha that's funny, I noticed your name in passing and thought neat, a Golden Sun reference. Two days later I find your video :P
What we could do to help casuals who are just there for story and those who want to play and MMO and interact and do content with others is that we could have duty support locked to story mode experience of dungeons etc but when signing up with other players you get standard experience.
Its not just upping the difficulty.
7.0 they upped the uniqueness of mechanics.
Way more personal dodging and arena effects. Makes fights memorable and constantly engaging.
Whereas EW had just so many left to right front to back donut to circle aoes that it felt just formulaic.
Every fight in arcadion is memorable.
Stuff like the sinkhole in the arena in the 7.1 dungeon boss is fun and memorable.
And of course dodging the puppets and honey bees charms.
I mean to be frank, the monster hunter sometimes can also give you spikes of difficulty that are based on something that the rest of the game doesn't really teach you. Like Fatalis that punishes you for playing too passively with a rather tight timer compared to any other monster or Alatreon that required dealing certain amount of elemental damage to prevent its nova from killing you, while the rest of the game is pretty much raw damage meta through and through barring a few weapons. Even though the threshold wasn't actually all that hard to hit if you are playing well, it ended up being a major problem for many players.
Even not mentioning that I feel like usually you can faceroll most monsters untill it suddenly gives you something far more difficult.
People need to accept that there is content (Chaotic, Savage and ultimates) that they are not ready for, and actually needs to spend time learning it.
And accept that if they are not doing so, for whatever reason, they won't be able to clear that content.
But no, it's an MMO and needs to cater towards casuals that even after 100 levels and hundreds of thousands of hours still don't know how stack markers work
4:23 PTSD activated
I still don't see how dawntrail dungeons are too hard. You can survive failing a mechanic one or two times, if you can't learn after that then wtf are you doing?
They are only hard for people with the reaction time of a grandpa and the attention span of a goldfish.
@@anteprs7908 the mechanics are very clearly telegraphed and are almost completely obvious, baring your literal first time playing a dungeon you shouldn't be messing up too much. All the dungeon mechanics are presented individually with clear indicators before bosses combine them. I.e if the boss has its appendages in a part of/facing a certain direction of a room, then don't be I that part of the room, simple.
I think it's because some people don't even know how to control the game. I was watching a streamer playing the story and she was in Shadowbringers playing with two hands on the keyboard. She plays with the camera facing one way, and any time she has to move the camera around she has to take one of her hands off her keyboard. She struggles in any fight that has multiple things happening in the arena at once. I have genuinely no idea what she's using that 2nd hand on the keyboard for. I imagine a lot of other people play this way too and it would explain a lot.
i think it depends on how intuitive the mechanic, if you get hit by an aoe but it's not an obvious pattern you will probably get hit by it again.
The moment I saw that the regular dungeons had a difficulty spike and after attempting to do a DPS roulette during the first week and being stuck for EONS as the healer died again and again and again, I just had to delay my dps leveling, it was *insufferable*.
Like, I knew from the let go that this would be hard on the casuals that were used to baby-button pressing and mechanics, and I'm not like mad or anything that I got stuck as this is also HOW people learn and try to get better but holy fluff man... as a main healer, I had to ensure I queued as healer to both not be stuck for eons, but also to *help* the dps and tank that just wanted to clear/get their dailies done.
I hope it stays the norm, people need to be challenged, the difficulty in EW was literally SLEEP INDUCING aside a very small number of bosses, heck even Yoshi-P acknowledged this, and combat wise this expansion so far has been a banger.
Also.... you can literally do these dungeons with the TRUST SYSTEM, there's literally ZERO REASON if you're feeling anxious that you can't spam the dungeons a couple of times with it until you feel comfy enough tackling it with random players in roulettes you know?
HOW MANY GAMES HAVE SUCH A SYSTEM? I swear, people are way too pampered and used to being coddled to an extreme degree in this game... I'm perfectly fine with CASUALNESS as I enjoy just turning my brain off in a roulette to a degree and just chill to music or something but I don't want it to put me to sleep man.
I believe a person's capacity to improve is proportional to their drive to seek it out. If they only rely on stuff being spoon-fed to them, they'll only ever do the bare minimum. The game doesn't force the player to do much to get through MSQ but when given something harder, it's up to the player to rise up to the challenge, instead of complaining that it's too hard because they don't want to do the extra effort of learning themselves. The people making guides would have needed to engage with the game, read it's tooltips and experiment in the first place to make their guides.
Another part to this is intuitiveness of mechanics. When you get the basics down of tankbusters, spreads, stacks, look-aways, the game starts building off those core mechanics to shape new ones. With the knowledge of 'oh this is like [Blank]', those mechanics become a lot more manageable. Yet when completely new things get added, if it appears similar to another mechanic yet functions completely differently, the player will feel betrayed.
Think Calcabrina from HW, she has a lookaway-ish marker, yet it's actually a cleave targeted on a player. Or the mist dragon completely freezing and incapacitating you during the dissipation phase, which doesn't indicate at all that you shouldn't hit the dissipated dragon. What about AOEs that go off in a particular order without clearly indicating what order, such as the vague indication of the first boss of Alexandria's 7 AOE barrage? Or SB raids having untelegraphed or poorly telegraphed knockbacks? Not to mention Eden Shiva's abhorrently telegraphed knockback, where the only indication is a cast bar that isn't descriptive whatsoever. Or the idol in Eden: Iconoclasm where the portals for whatever reason store the laserbeams contrary to the portals immediately letting them through, going against the core principle of portals.
All these examples and many more, to show you that player will feel betrayed by these "Gotcha!" moments. Good mechanics should build off what you've learned in the past and be more puzzle-like, where you should figure out what's going to happen as the boss sets things up, to then solve it when things go off. When you die to a mechanic, you should go "Ahh. I see." and not "Oh game, you scumbag."
This aspect of game design is very hard as well and I think dawntrail has done this very well. EW set things up to be puzzle-like and built off mechanics a bunch. Now DT is getting creative with it, while the mechanics stay fun, unique and intuitive. Big props to squenix for nailing this.
The only "challenge" 14 has is knowing where to stand, it's sad.
There is a really important part of this that needs to be discussed, and that is the currency systems FF14 uses. Because of the currencies revolving around completing content, of any kind usually, players who just want to "cap their currencies" or "just give me my easy tomes" become a seperate problem. Anything hard or slightly time consuming is just out the window. Take the alliance raid problem. People will literally just leave anything "difficult" which is funny because none of the alliance raids are difficult, and take a penalty, instead of just doing the content. Then, they never learn. Personally, I think that currency sources should be much more limited and the poetics gear should just have a flat, small gil cost for new players/leveling. (You could also rework the heavensward relics that need poetics) This would encourage people to get into optional content that actually teaches things, or learn extremes. While im absolute not advocating for locking currency like current tomes behind extreme and savage, a massive increase in the amount you get from clearing them could incentivize it and help the player base improve.
Honestly, I have been loving the difficulty of dawntrail so far. The fights are mostly fun, engaging and I love that so much more than just queue in, press 1 2 3 with a few other things and sleep through the content. And anyone that is wanting to play the game hyper casual, just ERP and clubbing or crafting. Cool, good on you. Dont complain about content you dont even want to do please, and also who cares if you have gear at that point? Whats the point of working on your BiS ilvl if you arent going to use it.
I like a lot that you bring in a topic that I didn't touch on at all in the video. Rewards absolutely play a role in players desiring easy content.
I think its a minor influence though compared to other aspects, e.g. the frustration of the difficulty spikes, the game failing at every turn to teach - and to bring up something that wasn't in the video, it being an MMO.
Yes, in MMOs a relevant amount of players are so focused on the social aspect of the game, every "gameplay" surrounding it is just a nuisance.
One of the big issues with the difficulty of the game especially through the story is how being overgeared, along with the stat squish, makes older content an utter joke. You can stand in aoes on purpose and barely take any damage. Even if you fuck up, you’re not punished, and if you have just one player who knows that they’re doing it’s very difficult to fail.
If the syncing to content was stricter, people would not only have to learn and improve much earlier, but also be able to experience fights the way they were designed and intended. I’ve been helping some friends progress through the story, and any time we do content, whether it be a dungeon, trial, raid, we do it with Minimum item level / no echo, if possible, and the experience is far more enjoyable for everyone. They’re barely past level 50 yet they now already show more competence than over half the players I see in your typical expert roulette. They’re even picking up and clearing fights such as those in coils with ease.
People won’t learn if you don’t give them a reason to or force them to. Outside of improved tutorials and guidance, the game could do with punishing people more for doing things wrong. A stricter sync on item level would be a really simple way to quickly improve this in the short term while they implement better guidance and difficulty curves.
Back in arr this paradox didn't really exist. The dungeons difficulty actually taught people their jobs. With dungeons teaching you that you needed to stun/ interrupt enemies, breyflox teaching tanks bosses needed to be moved, taught healers esuna was required to remove poisons. And was the first big difficulty spike of the game (this being at level 30)
This paradox really became a problem when storm blood released, as leveling has become far too fast. The dumbing down of older dungeons to allow for NPC support has not helped in to slightest.
I’m a new player to FFXIV and I’m quite astonished at how easy the story content is. I don’t remember any other MMO I’ve played operating like this. And I don’t understand why exactly since the whole point of this genre is to help eachother if something is too challenging. The story could’ve had some ”call for help” button for newbies that called for the assist of other players. That way veterans could explain important things and maybe also get some unique co-op rewards. Player interaction seem to be mandatory only when you’re expected to already understand much about the mechanics of the game.
I still don’t understand people complaining that DT MSQ content is too hard. I definitely consider myself a casual player. I only do normal versions of raids just for the story, I don’t farm them for gear, I don’t do savage, have never attempted an ultimate, and I found nothing in DT that was too difficult. That said, I’ve only just started the 8 man raids for DT, and haven’t started the 24 yet. But as MSQ goes, and even the optional level 100 dungeons, it’s been occasionally challenging, but not _that_ hard, such that, as a casual, I feel overwhelmed.
I agree that DT had a major difficulty spike after being used to EW. But at the same time, EW babied everyone with attacks from bosses that you could just fully ignore and not be punished.
I think DT is how the game should have been for the past couple years. Dungeons are fun and require just a little interaction to beat without it becoming a trial or extreme fight.
At the same time, I feel like they toned down the difficulty on extremes and savages to bridge the gap between dungeons and endgame content. I mean I killed EX2 on my very first pull which was highly disappointing but a good thing for new or less experienced players. and the same thing happened with the new ultimate today with it being the fastest cleared ultimate to date.
having easier to digest mechanics but executed faster than we're used to.
I am of opinion that the game didn't become harder or easier but rather became more balanced across the entire spectrum of expected difficulty.
I am just lucky that my husband is a gamer and was able to help me through these things. I had never played an MMO before - even being able to see where the f**k my quests were was difficult for me. I had no idea what all the terms meant... AOE? GG? Stance? Tank? DPS? I had no clue whatsoever. I didn't even realise I could get a chocobo until my husband showed me the quest was there on my HUD.
2 years later and I'm progging M4S with ny static, have no main bc I love to optimise and learn almost every job, and I'm heavily into the lore and the community and also in a relationship with Haurchefant Greystone (OK ignore that last one). The game not providing more help to TRULY new players like I was is, in my opinion, robbing them from the real joy of being part of an MMO community.
I would argue that a huge aspect of the learning part of FFXIV comes from its multiplayer design. Unlike a lot of other games, FFXIV encourages positive play and rewards people for being nice. As such, that means most players tend to be more patient, help out with learning stuff, and even go out of their way to help new players. FFXIV has one of the most positive communities out there, which is in part due to the game design that promotes this mentality.
Additionally, the game doesn't punish very harshly, you don't lost much if you go down to a boss. This is WAY better then other games that can wipe out hours of progress with a single mistake. Hell, even other similar games, like WoW, often end up taking brutal amounts of time to clear a lot of their content, so when mistakes are made, there is more incentive to be negative about it and ruin the experience.
I agree that the teaching/tutorial aspect of FFXIV is lacking, but I think this is balanced out by the community being helpful, most content is easy to practice without punishment, and you are incentivized to try every class, learn new strategies, etc, etc. Granted, the main line story still has this problem of difficulty spikes, and Dawntrail was CERTAINLY a step up, but I think they're trying a new approach with this expansion, aka going for the harder bosses to spice things up. If players are just getting into FFXIV now, it can certainly be a blockade, but the reality of getting into an MMORPG is that you need to start from the beginning, otherwise you're handicapping your experience.
There will always be a place for players to buy story skips and whatnot, but I think this lends to an idea that Dawntrail should be for everyone, and its simply not. We're at expansion 6, version 7.0. If you're jumping into FFXIV now without playing any of the earlier content, then there is no excuse for not being able to handle the harder stuff happening now.
If you meant it balances out in a "fun experience" kind of way, as in FFXIV's lack of teaching players and thus having to deal with extremely underskilled players isn't as bad because you can keep re-trying without wasting time and because the community is nice - then yes, I can agree to that.
Otherwise I disagree - not because I don't think the FFXIV community is nice, (it really is), but because it does NOT balance it out at all. This sometimes even toxic positivity has as much the effect you say, as it does the opposite:
You are 100% right that if someone ASKS for help they tend to get help and in nice way too.
BUT! The fear of being punished for even suggesting someone to improve keeps a lot of genuine feedback and criticism back. Why bother telling a player whos absolutely terrible at the game at level 100 that they could do better? You're putting in effort and they might report you for trying to help.
Your other point - absolutely agree that FFXIV reducing the time you lose from a wipe is great, most people coming from WoW appreciate it as well. But then, given how friendly FFXIV is towards re-trying things, how come some players still can't even do the basics at level 100?
I am not sure which of the two you meant, so I tried to interpret it both ways.
Lastly, those that genuinely ask for help and want to improve are also the ones that end up looking guides and practice, which isn't the kind of player the game fails with its design.
I think the problem with the difficulty debate in this game, for me at least, is that the result is entirely based on what role you play.
Ranged phys dps is incredibly easy because you're so much more free to move around the arena and have pretty much zero animation locks.
Play a melee DPS, and you've got the same complexity in your kit, but now you have to manage distance from the boss and try to keep the few ranged options you have available for when you're forced to move away. Add to this positioning for flank and rear hits, which can also be locked off from you.
For certain bosses in DT, I can run them on dancer or machinist and barely have to think, but if I play reaper or dragoon it takes a whole lot more thought just to play at my usual level. There are some fights I have no idea how black mages have been managing tbh.
People who think dt normal content is too hard seem to forget that they're level 100 and hundreds or even thousands of hours deep into an mmo
Thats the thing. I've seen people who are ATROCIOUS at the game who say things like "I played this game for 1000 hours, I know how to play xyz". They are so entitled and arrogant because of the lack of challenge - that if there actually is challenge that hits them in the face with "well you didnt actually learn jackshit in 1000 hours" they just blame the game for being too hard, rather than accepting that they need to improve.
Its why I mention expectations in the video. Players expect trivial brainless dungeons because they are used to it - even someone who just played through the first few expansions, spent 100-200 hours in trivial content.
I've played the game almost every year since the closed beta. The difficulty and teaching issues is a problem that Square Enix has created by themselves with every expansion, starting very gradually with Stormblood then getting worse and worse with each expansion. It is NOT an issue that has existed in this game since its beginnings and the downfall really started to show with Shadowbringers. The game currently is an absolute joke.
The first 4 years with ARR and HW were by far the most difficult for new players to go into, but were highly rewarding and satisfying. Dungeons started out extremely simple, but teaching you the very basics of how you needed to play the game, which was in essence, to pay attention. To the encounters themselves, the tooltips for the skills you obtain and to players usually giving friendly advice. Of course you always get the bad players and the "you don't pay my sub", but no matter how any game is made, they will exist. Did it ever teach you directly how to play your job or what to do with each and every mechanic? No, but as with other games, it gave you resources at a very gentle pace to make you think yourself. Of course with Heavensward just playing a job was incredibly difficult, but by then you'd already be either interested or not in continuing the game and be interested in learning further than the game has told you.
Was it perfect? Not even close. You still had story content which were heavily specific mechanic dependent like The Steps of Faith, Thornmarch and (though optional) The Dragon's Neck. The Steps of Faith being a long DPS check that required the use of environmental damage like ballista and cannons to deal enough damage. Thornmarch requiring a certain kill order to make the fight trivial and to not deal damage to the King. And The Dragon's Neck does a twist on the DPS to purely do mechanics in sync with the tank for half the fight to not wipe to the knockbacks, in addition to having a lot of different mechanics to avoid. I loved this fight and I hate SE for nerfing it so hard.
And that's the reason why no one's learning anything. SE decided to start making sure their Trust system could do any and all content. Even before that, they decided to nerf old duty finder content to the ground because they were "too difficult". But they weren't... Experienced players were usually very willing to give advice on how to clear content, as many players just enjoyed playing the game and sharing it with new players.
The Chrysalis is a fight that I think was a perfect difficulty spike for healers and tanks (The first time I did this content was as a WHM). It taught you absolutely everything in the simplest of ways. First, deal damage on what's essentially a training dummy. Healer and tank needing to do their job to survive, making sure to heal and use tank cooldowns properly for the Double and Triple attacks. Then, you deal with absorbing the orbs going to the center, which should quickly teach you that you need to alternate between the two different orbs. The third orb which spawns an add is probably the one which is the most counter-intuitive as you don't want to absorb it, but it was more of a bonus mechanic if it was done properly. After another set of those two mechanics and introducing a teleport and line AoE, there's a raid wide AoE that the healers need to deal with before you enter the portal, where every single buff timer gets increased tenfold as you enter. You want to stay outside for as long as possible to not carry the bleed inside, but also use every cooldown you have. Then the easy strategy was always to use LB3 on the meteor while tanks needing to soak falling meteors. Then you get back out, where healers need to heal tankbusters and AoEs, tanks need cooldowns if they have any left and DPS need to do their job.
It was difficult in ARR to clear that fight the first time, but given its simplicity, it wasn't overwhelming, as by that point you'll already have done content that had more nuanced mechanics like Leviathan, Snowcloak and Keeper of the Lake. But it was more direct in punishing you and forcing you to learn how to deal with significant tankbusters. My first attempt and managing to clear it after 30 minutes is still one of my most cherished memories of playing the game, because the fight was basic and taught you the remaining piece that you could have avoided until then, just raw and quick damage output. Of course this fight became easier with every expansion from Stormblood and onwards, and now it's an absolute joke of a fight because of all the changes made to jobs and the ease of playing the game.
With the end of Heavensward we also got the stack markers, which honestly was the beginning of the end for good content. Now SE is giving every single mechanic in pre-Stormblood content a marker to show what it is and that completely removes any incentive for players to learn the game's basics. They're treating their new players like zombies, all content below the max level becomes trivial for any new player going in solo queues because of how extremely unbalanced the gear sync is. A player who has gear that matches the level they are on pre-50 does maybe at most 60% of the damage as a player that's above level 60. All of this low level content is also incredibly boring and easy for anyone getting them in levelling roulettes, so there's no way for a new player to learn anything unless they're a tank. Even as a tank, because of the norm that this content should take 10 minutes at most, you'll have DPS and healers pre-pulling for the tank.
Because the low-level content itself has absolutely no challenge at any point, the only way to actually make sure the content stays relevant and to teach players how to play the game, is that the content's default difficulty should be what minimum item level is now. The Stone Vigil was a tough dungeon until even as late as the end of Stormblood, it being nearly impossible to pull wall to wall, but now it's so easy, anyone level synched down could do it. But SE has no clear intentions to solve this issue properly and I have absolutely zero faith in any change that they'll ever do. The main game is doomed to a slow death. Every expansion will worsen this issue and the addition of the Trust system is BY FAR the worst decision they have ever made for this supposed "MMORPG". That should be a system that exists when the game has barely enough players to keep duty finder alive, not when the game has millions of players (soon not to be even a million).
As a disclaimer, I have spent 20000 hours in this game until now. I barely spend time outside of raiding. I went from playing the game for 9 hours on average per day during Heavensward, to never going above that each week. I have also done all the pieces of content that released in the game (Not all on release patch), excluding FRU as I stopped caring for ultimates after clearing TOP. I've raided in the game since Gordias, first as WHM then BLM in Midas, but never did any harder content in ARR itself. I still easily remember how I treated and played the game in ARR as a new player, as I was the WHM who primarily healed and didn't do much damage to make sure my party stayed alive. In ARR and HW, doing damage was a bonus, not an expectation as a healer in duty finder (it's in the name "healer").
It's not really that simple of an issue, either.
Before EW, one easy to spot problem was that for all of ARR and much of HW, fights truly were kind of braindead. boss mechanics were barely existant, it was pretty much just "move out of the AoE before it goes off" and little else, and the difficulty clearly was supposed to come from more complex rotations that have since been gutted, so stormblood suddenly having actual mechanics and needing you to figure out tells and predict AoEs catches people off-guard... but it's so sudden and jarring that it just comes off as "bad design" and you will get carried through the fights by a more competent party anyway so, literally who cares?, and that continued until you caught up and made the choice to either git gud to do current non-casual content or to become the kind of player that only subs on patch day to quick clear the new stuff. So basically, you learning or not would almost entirely come down to wether you befriended people during the journey that taught you how to do stuff, likely from an FC.
since then, however, many of the mandatory dungeons earlier in the game have been reworked to better tutorialize how mechanics will work later in the game, such as the copperbell boss using overlapping AoEs to teach people to think and figure out that the one that appeared first will go off first, so that problem has been majorly mitigated; people no longer go for a hundred hours thinking all there is to the game is stepping out of danger bubbles.
Additionally, while some dungeons are mechanical spikes, every expansion, every single one, actually sees a spike in how hard things hurt and how much damage enemies can soak in dungeons. If you try to stick to the basic strats without learning to use your new buttons, your healing quickly will not keep up with pulls, and enemies will start taking forever to die, at which point not realizing something's wrong that you should be adressing is kinda on the player.
Yes, it's true that the game overall does a poor job on teaching players about it's evolving gameplay, but it's also true that a big chunk of the problem comes down to players refusing to read, try things and in general, *learn*, and continuing to design content for those players makes it extremely boring for the majority who actually learned to play.
Sure, I cringe whenever I see one of "those" players on a duty, but it's mostly because they're not exactly that common anymore.
As I said, most casual players dont want to go OUT OF THEIR WAY to learn, they want the game to teach them by playing, like any good tutorial does. FFXIV is one of the worst games in this regard, because it not only barely teaches anything at all (without resorting to text dumps that noone likes to read) - but half the time it teaches the WRONG lesson too.
you reminded me of that last boss in the... Post MSQ dungeon, in the stormblood,i think? That does not show cleaves before the very last second. After Heavensward i legit hated that. Like, the only things i was looking at, were castbars, and FLOOR. and when this bastard started his "No aoe markers for you sprout" i was furious and hated that sooo much. Good thing i was a tank, and got a capable healer, no matter the vulns, he healed my ass so hard i didn't die,maybe he swore a healer oath that no new player should die on him or smth. And, on the same note, when i completed WoL trial in SHB, i got into Bozja, (wanted my first relic, and after watcing a guide i landed in it) and, Ice and fire on WoL wasn't that bad. Like a dot, that's annoying, and nothing more. But Castrum lacus litore (or whatever this "Mini raid" is) killed me with it. And had 0 idea why. Why it kills me here, but not there. Later down the line i figured out that "Optional content" is the reason. Everything with blue quest mark is a lootbox of sorts. it's either gonna give you a nice emote, and pat you on the back (beast tribes) or throw you in an active WARZONE where you lll BE DELEVELED, PUNISHED, AND LAUGHT AT (atleast only by a dialogue window).
@@red11rus85 akshually, you're thinking of the final HW dungeon right before SB, baelsar's wall I think. SB is when the design changed towards predicting AoEs before they appear, and that boss was the tutorial and warm-up for that; you're expected to eat the first cleave, and from it notice that every time he jumps to a corner of the arena, he'll cleave everything ahead. TBF it's an incredibly transparent tell after you see it once... it's just that after so long of "just step out of the danger poodles" content, the very concept of anticipating them takes a while to click.
Much easier back when that dungeon was current content and was being *farmed*. You'd eventually figure it out.
But yeah, generally, msq-mandatory duties give a lot of leeway with what will and won't kill you, so a decent healer can carry through everything. Which we are now seeing the consequences of.
The difficulty in DT casual content do not even feel any harder than what I remember as the status quo for casual content when I started (end of HW/start of SB). That of course based on how that content was back then before all the years of powercreep completely trivialised it.
Every fight that isn't current content is heavily neutered by level & gear sync, so already early on players learn to disrespect mechanics because they don't matter.
FFXIV isn't consistent at all when it comes to difficulty like the video pointed out.
One example of this is how rarely bosses or enemies need to be interrupted from finishing a cast - I think Endwalker had 2 enemies/bosses that needed to be interrupted in MSQ dungeons.
Another example is how rarely removeable debuffs appear, I think EW again only had 1-2 of these - I only remember the first boss in Dead Ends having a debuff that could be removed and should, but there's probably another example.
Just these two types of mechanics really need to be used 10x more often, because players just forget that they can deal with these, and it's such a missed opportunity to keep engagement up.
Doesn't help that most dungeon bosses are as dangerous as wet noodles, and the only real threat level is how bad your party is during double pulls.
Before I quit my subscription, I ended up banning myself from doing Expert roulette, and I would just leave the duty entirely if I got Crystal Tower in Alliance Roulette, because it was so mindnumblingly boring that my brain was leaking if I did those duties.
Square really need to learn that casual content shouldn't be feeling like you're battling training dummies, it's excruciatingly boring. If I pay money to play a game, I do it because I want to be engaged by the game, not bored witless.
Edit: Speaking of not learning, god how I hate the sound of Medica 2. White mages love using it to solve literally anything, even when nobody is injured as if it applies aoe shields. That spell is way too cheap for how much it achieves, and basically trivialises the existence of Medica 1 and Cure 3.
"White mages love using it to solve literally anything, even when nobody is injured as if it applies aoe shields."
I mean, it does apply regen, which can heal future damage. Especially in lower level group content it's just the easiest way to ensure everyone is topped up without having to do any spot healing.
Also some part where the missing constancy hurts a lot.
Stack Markers, why you cant stack some and some not? Like Sycrus Tower you can stack all 3, why? Is there not enough room? Lol
Or what happend to me in DT, i was in this ghost expert dungeon and at the last Boss Träumerei i get the stackmarker as Tank (PLD) i want to take it solo with Invulv and it killed me.. wtf?! (Not 100% sure if this is right but a stackmarker in A8 works the same way)
I can take stackmarkers in Extreme Trials solo with Invulv but not in a expert? Rly?
They won't struggle against anjinath yeah, totally. I definitely don't stupidly get carted once when I play through the game again.
That big chicken hits hard as hell lmao. I stupidly said to 2 friends to use guardian armor since they were pretty bad at the game, now that we are on MR end game they are suffering for it. (And me too cuz I'm carrying their ass lol). But they are getting better, one cart a time.
@@cablefeed3738 I would argue world version of Anjanath is an awful pile of jank and thus not really your fault
and what feels even worse for our starter conjurer/white mage.... dying early in a dungeon boss fight and watching the tank keep everyone alive with tank self-sustain and healing. As if they weren't even needed. Yes that WHM was me once.
Laughs in warrior
That tank was me, many times, unfortunately. Very fun for me, but must really suck for the healer.
It goes to show how easy dungeons are. I don't mind them being approachable (e.g. mechanics resolving slowly) but them not dealing enough damage to even need a healer, well, uh...
@@menardyxiv I mean that problem comes with the type of game a MMORPG is in itself, I often see that if you give too much agency and independence to the tank, the healer is punished and if you give too much impact to the healer the tank is punished. Sadly for 5 years or so that I played FFXIV I had never felt a balance in player impact and agency outside of raiding wich is really sad, cuz I was bored out of my mind for like 60% of my playtime since I played tanks on casual content.
Warrior especially can do that. There have been a few moments in 4-man duties where I play WAR, the healer and 2 DPS have died to a boss and I am 1v1 the boss.
I know all the mechanics to dodge and heal so I can stay alive indefinitely to very slowly kill the boss solo, but I usually will self-unalive with a boss AOE anyway because solo will take WAY too long
As someone who plays only SCH and GNB, I have been on both sides of the fence. I've been the healer that died early. I've been the tank that was in a position to solo the fight. I have only really committed to the full fight one time, at the end of Vanisapti. The reason was I wanted to see how well my new HoC did as a sustain. I literally had the other three cheering me on as well, so I didn't feel guilty.
Normally as a tank, I will find a way to end the fight if there is a lot left. I value time more than anything, and soloing takes a lot of it. As a healer, if I die in a fight, I cheer the tank on. I get to watch the show, relax, do something else while it is going on. I've never felt irrelevant from it, personally. Its simply a matter the tank actually knows WTF they are doing. I like running with those tanks as I heal, so I don't have to pay as much attention.
That's just how I am generally.
They went back and reworked some of the older dungeons, they could have made them a bit more challenging, instead if anything they are even more trivial.
You're lv100, act like it
I like running dungeons the first time with NPCs to get little extra lore bits, but as a healer in the 95 dungeon I found the NPCs actively pushing me with player AoEs into other AoEs and I needed at least one wipe to win. The mechanics can be a bit too vague, hit hard enough to down me stacked up like that, and so punish me with up to ten extra minutes of tedium for not catching one mistake in time for having the audacity not to run with players since you going down with NPCs means restarting the fight; rather than enjoying the style and combat mechanics, now I'm annoyed and just want to get it over with
Fellow healer here. Agreed.I started pre shadowbringers and after this was invented I liked to run with them. It got more challenging even with npcs, and they are kinda "sabotaging"? XD You have to think for yourself and actively learn mechanics. I still hate this one dungeon with insta kill on the first boss. I had a bad day and if you're running with others and there is one a-hole (in my case black mage who was p*ssed they weren't top dps anymore) and let it out on me. The WHOLE dungeon. - It's not about that stuff is getting more "interesting" but the playerbase of hardcore raiders who are being assholes. (The people who grief and try to kill you so they can solo.) I don't mean there's not nice people but the ones I meet after the WOW people flooded in... The playerbase changed. Even in raids fellow healers don't do their job because of some SHINEY numbers on some website. I'm a decent healer as well. I know my kit. But if you rn a dungeon the first time with others and DIE - aren't you supposed to learn the new mechanics? Dawntrail brought in so many new asshole players I want to vomit. (sorry for the wall of text and I love my fellow black mages u guys are usually chill but holy shit are there sometimes edgelords out there! - Coming from the healer who wanted to play blm but gm said we need healing. I have so much salt I love to hate my job. ;_; )
As the old Etrian Odyssey adage goes. “If the boss doesn’t kill you at least once, it was too easy” it appears that the dungeon design has improved since Endwalker. Also, trust npcs intentionally deal garbage damage to incentivize you to run with other players, the bosses are still like 3 minutes long at most. You are supposed to learn by dying, that is generally how video games work. That’s why the shortcuts now take you directly to the boss room.
Also nobody is intentionally trying to kill you so they can solo, that would be incredibly pointless and just waste their own time.
@@shawnscouten5184 Etrain Odyssey? This is FFXIV screw that adage
Yeah, it's absolutely the game's responsibility to teach players how to play the game. And while you're right that Yoshi-P and the crew don't have infinite resources, it's baffling why they didn't do that when they were first making the game. I guess they have the mentor system and FCs to try and combat the fact that the game doesn't really teach you how to play it, but the mentor system really could use an overhaul. As a mentor, you're just expected to play a mentor roulette every day, but to *really* mentor someone, as in real life, you have to come alongside them and help them multiple times because people need repetition. You can't just learn a fight once and then expect to do it expertly every time. You need more and more practice with it.
The forums are like 60% trolls, I wouldn’t take them too seriously.
I kinda disagree on the wiping making learning nothing. Like in the burn, you see exactly what the aoes do, so after you wipe, it’s pretty clear what killed you, and when the boss does the exact same thing next pull, you know what to do to avoid it.
I do agree that Ff14 should have a more consistent difficulty curve though.
Content creators are happy thats its harder but i have more people than ever quitting roulettes if they get a hard one or people complaining about bosses, such as the first walk of deadwall.
So there's an issue with this video and it's the whole thing really. The 'difficulty' thing and the 'outside resources' is an MMO thing as a whole. Not XIV, not GW2, not WoW, not Runescape, not EQ, but MMOs as a whole genre is like this, because it's intended to be community based. Things are discovered, normalized and utilized by the community, for the community, not by the devs. People expecting an ENTIRELY ONLINE EXPERIENCE to hand them information (when things are written in detail) of what their abilities do. Instead of READING this information, they refuse to use these tools and are shocked to find out at 100 that Lucid recovers MP or that sheltron is mitigation.
People cry and complain that the "MMO" aspect of XIV is dead when it's still alive and well, just not how it used to be. We still as a community need to show each other how to do things and learn how to do things.
This is the best video on this topic I've seen. This topic has been extremely divisive, and I've been treated like a troll for even beginning to criticize how difficulty is handled in this game. I think your assessment is accurate and brave.
Another aspect that hit me hard, and I assume isn't unique: I've played since Heavensward, off and on. I haven't really played seriously since Stormblood, I complete the story in a few weeks and don't log in for 2 years. My class is now a totally different beast, my hotbars are reset into that weird mush of menu icons they love, and now I can alleviate all wait times and anxiety by simply playing with NPCs? Awesome... until I reach the final trial and suddenly I have to play with real humans. Well I'm just not prepared for that and now 7 other humans are gonna have to put up with me learning what the trial is (so many months after release) and it's awful! I really wonder what this is going to do to the playerbase in the future because it certainly screwed with me. It's like... incredibly geared towards anti-social casuals, right up until it isn't.
I remember all those level 50 dungeons had weird and fun mechanics that weren't really in much of the rest of ARR and you had to learn because you'd see them twice, maybe three times if you were all a bit rubbish. I was quite excited to see them again, only... now everything melts at that level, you don't see or learn anything because the bosses barely have a chance to get going. Nobody wants long dungeons with delays, everyone is always watching the clock in roulettes, but where else are the casual players going to regularly train? Difficulty is definitely a big issue, but the sheer length of dungeons is what most people seem to gripe about in the moment. Novice Chat is always full of mentors complaining about the work and time they put into suffering with unskilled players. I'm sure that motivates some to make sure they know how to play, but it demotivates me.
@9:11 If players do the alliance raids and regular raids; then they will have seen these mechs before. Yeah there might a slight change to them; but nothing in DT was outright new or never seen before.
Im not a hardcore player - never touched a savage in my life; nor do I use addons that count damage done - but Im more than just a casual player. I just play the content that we are given on a regular basis.
Cure vs Cure II feels like a job design issue and IMO it's part of a larger problem where the team behind the job balance/design just isn't very good at their job.
Think of all the times jobs had to be overhauled or reworked, or when something got overtuned to being OP, or undertuned to the point of being a party finder pariah. And every 2 years the problem gets worse as 2 more jobs are added to the mix
I need something between normal and extreme. Savage and some of the ex are simply too hard, at this point it become a job and stop being a game.
You either dodge trivial and mind numbingly boring aoe puddles or you have to do mechs with assigned party members or else whole group wipes. Thats the content this game offers.
Which is why I CBF doing ff's harder content. Feels more like some weird dance test rather than reacting and responding to what's happening, and I had enough inane tests and lectures in Uni.
Try Bozja.
@@Angel_Flashyes, we need more Bozja. Hopefully shades triangle in 7.2 can fulfill that.
One more Peak for Aurum Vale 😁
TBH: The class quests should teach you how to use the spells you get every 10 levels. Or for example cure 1 should upgrade into Cure 2 since there is basically no use for Cure 1 after getting Cure 2.
Intersesting comparison using Monster Hunter since they have been going through the opposite problem as 14, where people are complaining it is becoming too easy and casual friendly.
Also the same problem exists in MH that you outlined for 14, how to play your weapon isnt fully explained and only dedicated people are going to go out of their way to understand many aspects of the mechanics they have to deal with in MH. Jumping off walls, slide attacks, spinning down the spine on dual daggers, aggrivating monsters, which perks are good, gems, etc are largely community taught.
Also thinking about it the difficulty has a similar curve to it, the floor may be higher but you wont really run into a problem until nergigante where there is a spike of getting one shot by his dive.
But overall I do like and agree with your sentiment that 14 can improve their progression and teaching to equip players for bigger challenges rather than relying on the community to be the tutorial after someone already put 100 hours into the game
There is another very important reason why some players cant be good. Its their skills which are already at their ceiling. We have many players not able to improve due to age and other challenges. A MMO throws in many people from different backgrounds. Some people cant just git gud.
But that dungeon boss is insanely easy, its straightforward compared to other bosses in Dawntrail harder to learn only on the first time around.
XIV fails to provide players any real urgency to learn how to play Jobs properly or to improve. The games MSQ difficulty sits largely at just don't die & press buttons randomly & you can practically do this all the way till the end of DT MSQ, because that's all it takes. For many? this lack of challenge can be boring, so the next step up is usually " Extreme Trials " where from almost nothing mattering? suddenly everything matters. Square gets players complaining about it being to hard even at max level and hits us with more Job homogenization - rinse and repeat every Expansion
- You attempt to appeal to everyone?
- You end up appealing to no one
My main favorite Job got simplified for over 3 expansions with no end in sight... I can't speak for other Jobs, but I do see Square adding any depth back to any other Job. With Jobs this bland? we rely heavily on content for fun, when obviously Square is not going to increase the difficulty of all types of content across the board. Even if Yoshi-P tells us to " Just go play Ultimate ", the format of Ultimate? might not be for everyone when a lot of players wished their Jobs to have a bit more excitement to it that would make doing content regardless of its difficulty? more Fun.
- Make Jobs satisfying to play? and it amplifies all Content
- But make Jobs easy/bland? and now the Content better shine
Unfortunately 95% of the content is a cake-walk, pair this with simplified Jobs? and we have recipe where a good chunk of the players just get bored of it to fast or are left with Job changes that aren't pleasing because it simplified their Jobs expansion in expansion out.
Some of us are being told to wait until 8.0 - but with a history of Square taking away features / depth / complexity from almost every Job, and giving nothing really back in return besides more of the same that isn't exactly thought provoking Job-wise? many aren't holding their breath for it.
And all of this isn't exactly a problem for Square cause Job gameplay and providing the best entertaining content isn't their priority, its to keep provide mediocre content enough to have us continue to be subscribed. Its why we get the same rinse and repeat formula of Dungeons with 2 to 3 mob-pack into the next boss room as one example. Game becomes predictable and we complain about a content draught. But it is sadly apparently " Good enough " cause players remained subscribed for either exactly because its so carefree? or for other reasons ( Friends / Community / Being attached to their Character & virtual belongings / Owning a House etc )
XIV in my opinion? has 1 big flaw that is a missing selling point when it has so much to offer. XIV has almost everything you can ask of a MMO, even if it feels more like a RPGMMO then it is MMORPG. But the 1 big selling point to me its missing? is " Job Gameplay ". Cause to me it doesn't scream like the Nr1 reason we play XIV? is because the Jobs are crack cocaine addictively fun to the point we get withdrawal symptoms cause we aren't pressing a button for another second... its just mediocre. I wish this to change, but Square's trajectory seems to just be to keep making Jobs easier.
- Interacting with most PvE combat Content is optional
- But all players will have to interact with a Job to do said PvE combat content
- We make Jobs bland, boring, simple? and we rely heavily on content
- Once an Expansion has content dips? we get content draughts
- We complain? we will get another Job simplification/homogenization like before
- Cycle continues
When will this stop? who knows... I personally have given up with seeing my Samurai not be dumbified yet again next Expansion. FFXIV remains kinda fun, just not as fun as it could be.
My question is: Why does the story have to be trivially easy ? If you look to another very casual beloved MMO Guild Wars 2, it's very clear that you really don't need to do that. Some of the GW2 story missions are quite challenging yet still there is no outcry about them in the comunity.
Im an ultimate raider currently playing through GW2 and I am suprised how often I get my butt cheaks clapped on a story boss or event.
It doesn't. I just say it can be easy while still being engaging and teaching players the game.
What I hate is the difference in difficulty from the msq compared to instanced content now. The first 4 levels of dawntrail's msq only requires u to kill 1 enemy in over 10 hours of gameplay. And then you have to do the first dungeon which feels like a completely different game. These levels give u new abilities to use without really letting u use them outisde of dungeons to understand how they work and without like a warmup to even focus.
Researching outside info has always been a facet of MMOs. The whole nature of MMOs is community. And if a player somehow manages to get hardwalled by a piece of content, well, that happens in almost every RPG. Then you either bang your head against it, ask a friend or look it up. Gaming.
Hands down the best breakdown of the issues we are facing in the game out there.
I feel like the biggest killer of new players in EW and in DT are not disabling FULL BATTLE EFFECTS, since if you try doing a lvl 90 or lvl 100 alliance raid with full battle effects then you will be blinded and will die to mechanics that you were unable to see under 5 different explosions and personally i managed to get quite far in the game with just playing a TANK since i could survive pretty much everything so i barely learned from my mistakes and even today i have 3158 tenacity so i can just stand in AOE´s and ignore all incoming damage :D
I’ve done Drs and UWU on full battle effects, it’s not that bad.
@@shawnscouten5184 Damn you are crazy :D, but good job!
I have tried multiple friends to get into the game, but they all quit somewhere in stormblood because they got bored to death from how mind-numbingly easy the game is.
Is not so much of a difficulty problem as is a "spend time in a game" problem. PF does not make it easy to schedule a run, instead you have to open the pf and wait. Which is a non issue for someone with all the time in the world. But an issue for someone who only have a set amount of time to play the game. Set schedules with the same people helps enormously. Something that PF does not help with on any way or form.
Hardcore is about time, not difficulty. How much time are you willing to give a game. Time you may has well be using doing something else. A casual gamer may end up becoming a midcore gamer. But is not likely to be or even want to be a hardcore gamer.
Lets face it, the battles are just scripts that repeat over and over. Is a memorization game. Not a skill game.
Honestly as someone who was new to mmos. And caught up to msq right when dt released. The dungeons ARENT that hard. If you pay even a little attention. You know what to do. And what you did wrong (save for maybe the doll boss and the grabbing mechanic). People want to get stuff for free and no challenge and the second there is challenge there is complaining. Expert dungeons should be slightly harder then normal so that it teaches you a little for exs. Feel like that is the progression path. Do experts. Then normal raids. Then exs and so on. If you don’t want to have any challenge at all in a game just watch a movie at that point.
One take I don't see mentioned a lot, but I am guilty of having it, is people in the end game not wanting harder or more interesting 'farm' content. I'm talking about getting tomestones and the like. When I am gearing during a tier, I am very much a 'I want to speedrun this asap.' Don't get me wrong, I LIKE the 'get to a cap of resource for deterministic loot' method they have. I'm one of the few that doesn't think there is really a gearing issue in FF14 it seems like.
However, when I am hitting those Expert dungeons, I am wanting things to die asap. I will find whatever shortcut of things to avoid I can, etc... The first boss of the 7.1 dungeon? Fuck the adds, I will heal the shit out of the group through the vulns if I have to, but kill the boss quick. If I can make a spread-lo for people to ignore the mechanics, I want people to ignore the mechanics and DPS harder. As a tank, I very often use my tank privalige to keep uptime and ignore things. I just want the dungeon to be over as quickly as possible.
I say this with full knowledge my mindset is PART of the problem with the balance of this game. It's great to have more challenging and remotely punishing dungeon content, but only for the first or second time there. After that, I just want to speed run the things and be done with them whenever I set foot in them again. Roulettes are great, the system is awesome to keep older content active and used, but once you are no longer the casual still learning the game they can wear thin too.
I think a huge part of that is just how little engagement the game allows you to have in character progression. The easiest way to reach your caps is to just faceroll experts, or join a hunt train. Other than that, you get 4 pieces of loot, IF you're a Savage Raider. But we're expected to do that week after week for months between even numbered patches. And we've now extended that gap. It's now, what, 4.5 months between major patches, which is 9 full months between gear tiers? It's miserable, and nobody wants to do that, but if you don't, you're missing out on upgrades. There's no actual reason why they can't uncap tomes when they add the Alliance Raids. And for that matter, absolutely zero reason why the raids themselves should be capped. You're adding in the catchup gear anyway, why not just let people have it?
@@Zyart Don't get me wrong, I can see why many might dislike it. I, personally, don't gear more than one alt job on a character, and I run 2 characters at a time all in PF. Heck, I even got bad luck on one of my characters and had to buy one weapon and was 4 weeks of clears to get the 2nd.
I know it's not perfect, but for someone like me, I don't dislike it either. I know when I clear, I will get my loot x number of weeks out regardless. I don't feel insane pressure to get done right away and find the time between content relaxing.
Gear can be fixed very easily:
1. Cumulative cap. Total tomestone cap week 1: 450, week 2: 900, week 3: 1350. If you missed previous weeks, you can just grind up the ones you missed.
2. After spending a fixed amount of tomestones and books from savage floors, all gear is halved in price (half tomestones, half books). The "spending X" part is as a measurement of you roughly finishing one gear set (since they need different amount and types of tome pieces, an approximation is the best we can do).
@@Zyart To be fair, unless you're planning to do the latest ultimate, you don't *need* any gear upgrades. There's no point in boring yourself to death with pointless reclears for gear that's going to be item-synced in every other piece of content anyway.
My annoyance isn't the easy vs hard debate. It's the fact that most old content like bozja relies on parties and pf isn't always reliable. You can solo but it is an insanely massive grind. Would be nice if it was scalable based on current instance population.
...it's is.
The only things you can't do solo in bozja are the final "dungeon" of both areas. And Del.
The difficulty shouldn't spike, it should be a gradual increase IMO. Have npcs ask for Esuna and heals (even in fates when you can't heal them with AoE heals or tank for them with aoe tank skills.) There is so many little instance that could throw players a tip but it doesn't and then you wonder why you get such a hard time the first time you do some duties. Good difficulty is when the game allows the difficulty to match the learning curve. FF14 doesn't, it's "let other people carry you through trials and if you fail a duty you can instantly select a very easy mode." Thus learning nothing at all.
I strongly believe that 90% of live service players are way way way worse at games than single players games. All of mmos/live service have a core structure of activites on the story/daily where you must be braindead to constantly fail and not complete it (not counting disabilities ofc), and just a few activities that are challenging, relegated to a specific hard mode instances.
Outside of a compeltely new game introducing challenge as the expected experience for a new player and rivolutionizing the market, it's a lost cause to try to force the large community to have their brain on for a mandatory activity imo.
not me confused this entire video that The Burn was(/is?) a challenging dungeon... like im v much a casual player, never done an extreme synced, haven't gone past Stormblood yet, unless I'm REALLY confused by a class I'm not looking up guides. But I went into the Burn the first time and cleared it just fine. No deaths, nothing was that difficult to understand... so is this video talking about a previous version of the Burn that got nerfed or is the Burn still supposed to be a hard dungeon? bc i am confusion... The Ghimlyt Dark was harder than the Burn... not trying to dismiss the points made in this great video or brag or anything, i'm just genuinely confused to hear that the Burn is supposed to be a difficult dungeon........
I think they very recently made some changes to it.
Probably got "Duty Support Nerfed". Final boss of Burn used to be one of the hardest regular dungeon bosses in the game pre-Dawntrail imho. Hit like a truck, punished you for mistakes, had simple but quick mechanics and could wipe out bad or more inexperienced players.
The Burn (specifically the last boss) is more of a challenge for healers playing with incompetent team mates, because things like standing in the icy puddles gives a DoT, and doing certain stuff wrong will also trap a player in ice. All this on top of having a higher than average healer workload due to constant AOE spam from the boss.
It's like being a healer in Aurum Vale when your team mates are bad players and do stuff like pull the entire room, or forget to eat the fruit in the boss fight, etc.
I don't blame the content. There is just a gap way too large between the high-end player base and the normal content playerbase and unfortunately since SB the developers have cultivated easy content as the norm. I do't see any issue with keeping normal mode content trivial. It is made to be experienced as part of the story. If they want to up the difficulty in dungeons what they should do is make a new difficulty for dungeons and add them to endgame, gives something for both.. Content doesn't need to be inclusive. Make content for the people who would do that content.
They're not difficulty spikes in dungeons, they're soft gear checks.
What i think they should add for new players is a system that teaches you your class. At certain levels you have to take on job quests and while yes they have tool tips for the skills, I think they need to implement into the quest of the job instead of 'heres a side story of why job exists and new skills read your tool tips'.
Were you not around for the release of SGE? Because people literally were constantly yelling about how hard the SGE jobquest was, when it was literally so easy if you read more than 2 tooltips. Players dont read lol. It doesnt help that they make new skill descriptions incredibly long and honestly confusing now as well, with the additional effects and changing skills etc.
@michaelbart7014 I don't think I was clear. I agree players don't read tooltips, but they don't necessarily explain skills well either (as you already stated). What I meant was making these tips clear in how the class works. For example, hall of the novice exists to explain ground indicators and fights, there should be better explanations in game for class jobs and how they work instead of just sending a player off with a written manual that's bland and confusing.
I played that SGE and can see how people would be confused about the class. Granted I'm a person who will look up tutorials and what not to make my life easier in game, but I think that's the issue. The game requires too much outside sources to understand how to play. I'm all for saying git gud and fuckin read, I agree, but I think the game also fails in those areas to reach people how to play.
great video, I haven't played dawntrail but from the footage the dungeon looks like it's variant dungeon level of difficulty?
I had few issues with a couple of dungeons but with some practice and understanding of the bosses i had near to no issues killing the bosses. Still i didn't want to play those dungeons again i find them tiresome and the fact that the new gear don't make you feel stronger is a major letdown. I understand wanting a challenge and sometimes i like it too but if it isn't worth the effort i rather play another game
The way i see it is that its a skill issue and new or casual players just need too look around see whats going on and not stand in big flashy aoe's
The unspoken issue is that most of the ways that the game can give you proper and detailed feedback, is to go against the TOS. Many of the tools for how you perform next to your fellow player; hitting your positonals, your hit box, or even the details of how you died are all 3rd party tools. Many casual players will form bad habits or belive things that are not true because there is no way to get the data to check unless you get these tools, and because they are against TOS anyone of them that is offended by the outcome against there ego has an easy way to seek vengeance on those who told them there skill is what is leading to defeat.
The game is too hard in its original state to for the average player to do all the content. Imagine if monster hunter hid your HP, Damnge to the boss and hit feedback. That is what it is like playing FF14 the way the dev indent with how much information is hidden. While veterans of Monster hunter could do without that feedback, a new player would be hung out to dry.
So true, I played WoW from TBC to BFA, and I've been playing XIV since 2013. I remember during a raid in WoW being kicked out and the RL telling me, "You're not pulling your own weight, your DPS is too low." That drove me to improve and become a better player. This same thing would never happen in XIV. For a new player without guidance, it is borderline impossible to realize.
Now that's a silly take. If you're not interested in tackling hardmode content in ffxiv, you don't have to, and for casual content you don't need to play optimally to clear. Not at all.
As a main tank I'll hop on casual content on a healer, not know what half my buttons do and still clear. I've done all tank, all healer and even all dps synced dt dungeons with my friends and cleared no problem.
WoW encourages sweatiness with its design, FFXIV shields you from it, so you're allowed to go to sweatiness voluntarily if you want it. And yeah, if you wanna get good you'll have to earn it, the game is not gonna hold your hand there like you're a toddler, I'm sorry.
Btw, most people I know have act, modding this game is trivial. If you're at a place where you can use that data and are even interested in it at all, getting the tools is the smallest hurdle in the process.
It is true. In my opinion they should add feedback to the game. NOT a damage meter. But they could add something after a single-boss duty, a window, that shows you values like XIV-Analysis does, like GCD uptime (most important skill for dps). This does not compare you to anything. Its just a funny number (Hey, you had an uptime of 80%, keep it up mister player, you can still improve a lot!) - and even casuals see a number like this, especially if its color-coded, and want to improve it.
They won't go look up guides to do it (and as I said in the video, they shouldn't have to), but suddenly a desire is there.
Same on deaths, many "standard" deaths, like dying to avoidable AoEs, dying to spreads overlapping could come with a death log and a hint why you died.
None of this is the same as the 3rd party tools we have available and thats why its great.
@@menardyxiv The issue I have found in damnge meter, is when other players know your information. This can be easily set to private with it only showing your personal performance with a rank. Then perhaps something like analysis. Abuse comes from people seeing the information of others so no player will have to worry about other players being able to see this information, and if they want to ask there help they can then freely give the information.
This is why I talked more in feedback, postionals are the worse for this on design since there is no audio, or visual feedback if hit correctly. We have the ninja bunny in the game, imagine the job if that was not in it to show you the muda combo's were not done. Feedback is important to know you did things right, so having healrs get a healing AND DPS score would work well to inform new players that they are responsible for both, as well as tanks having a score for over all damnge mitigated and DPS.
A death log for all the things that killed you will also help, other games have this as well built in. I will be now using the assumption of the sprout player who is trying to get the cure fishes now since it seems casual players is a term that covers a wide verity of players.
We already have a dmange meter in PVP, the community can handle a little feedback.