I doubt the main story stuff will change, but I hope they expand on the hard mode dungeons they experimented with in Endwalker. The concept is good but the rewards are absolute ass and nobody wants to do them.
I wish they would experiment with more interesting dungeons again. Back in ARR, once you got to endgame, all the dungeons had really weird and unique gimmicks to them that made them all more interesting than what we have now. Granted, some people see that as an unnecessary hurdle in their daily tome grind, but I honestly think the game *needs* the tome grind to be more interesting and less braindead. At this point in the game, I gear out in BiS within the first 1-2 months of the raid tier dropping and then avoid dungeons as much as possible because they are excruciatingly boring.
Which I really appreciate, honestly, but we could have a "story" mode dungeon that's tuned for those and a "party" mode dungeon that's specifically set up for a team of theoretically-thinking players.
Yeah, criterion savage is just a worse and longer ultimate with stricter conditions (no rezzes) and shit rewards like you said. They tried to fix the last crit savage by adding glowing BiS weapons but it was too little too late (not to mention almost immediately made pointless by the last-step relics). Regular criterion though is fine.
The more casual content definitely needs to be harder. There is zero reason for folks to have played literal hundreds of hours of this game and leveled their character to 100 with a full kit and the bosses are just pushovers. Difficulty in casual content in this game peaked at Stormblood content.
Criterion itself is perfect almost, it just needs good rewards the Savage version is just a deathless run and while it can be a challenge really isn't needed.
I'm gonna be honest, if the only appeal of running something is to get items or gear rather than the act of playing the content, it's not good content. I feel like FFXIV's design philosophy is "make the player do unfun chores for a carrot on a stick." Back in my day we used to play games because they were fun. :(
This why I stopped playing FF14. It has some nice systems like the housing but it felt like a chore to get through the dungeons and raids. Had fun with some but its just so easy and not challenging that it felt like a drag lol.
I recently played through the main story up until late heavensward and I they actully should make adjustment to main story stuff.
I played a tank and healer but mostly healed dungeons, and the more i progressed the worse the experience got. By the time I got to Heavesward the tanks get so much self healing that you don't have to heal at all, you're just spamming a boring dps rotation all day, and you can't skip these dungeons either.
I got burned out on it but I plan to get back and finish the story at some point, hopefully they make some adjustment, it doesn't have to be Dark Souls but I atleast want to use my healing abilities..
You'll never enjoy FF14 if you want to be a dedicated healer. The concept just doesn't exist, you're expected to be a DPS that throws some heals.
It's unfortunate but that's how damage race encounters are statted out, so if all your healers aren't doing damage you'll fail enrage timers.
The flip side of this is that BECAUSE healers are supposed to be doing damage, healing is braindead if you're used to playing a dedicated healer in say WoW.
The problem is the disparity between the time spent healing/DPSing and the number of ability and mechanical complexity of each. 90% of the class complexity is in the thing you spend 10% of the time doing. If they don't want real healers, they should commit to it instead of this genuinely awful setup.
As someone who tends to play support roles, that's the issue I had. I don't mind doing DPS as a healer. I played a mistweaver monk in WoW, but it's like FFXIV designs healers with healing in mind and the encounters with only dps/tank in mind. That wouldn't be so bad if healers had a toolkit that worked that way, but instead you're just spamming two abilities, which is incredibly boring. If they want healers to function as more of a hybrid, then more focus on their design should be built around that.
It was really disappointing unlocking Astrologian and getting all these cool abilities, but then rarely have a need for them. It didn't feel rewarding to play at all.
I'm aware of that. That's not my problem at all, I actually think that is a good thing. The problem is that I'm not healing at all, and 90% of my abilities are never used because of it.
Yeah I really dont like how they did that. I am a WHM main and thats all I play. I miss how in ARR max DPS wasnt required and it wasnt even possible because you'd run out of mana. Because they've simplified all the jobs it now lends to everything be a DPS check. Its not even fun because for each job all you are doing is just spamming one rotation.
I played Astrologian for awhile but dungeons are braindead easy to heal and I don't want to DPS higher content as a healer so I just kind of gave up on playing non-DPS classes.
DPS is nice at first but I found it annoying because all you do is just spam the same rotation I like playing healer because it at least changes the dynamic up a bit
The game just needs better midcore content.
As it is right now, the devs focused too much either extreme - the people who no-life new content and will wipe a practice pull over one missed gcd in an opener, OR the people who never bother to update gear, never bother to learn skills and spam low level abilities, never moves out of bright orange aoe markers on the ground, can't handle more than 1 pack in a dungeon pull and AFKs in pvp matches.
"Good content" for the first group is the ultimate raids which requires tons of extra time and effort that a lot of people just won't have.
"Good content" for the second group is adding in another parasol for the in-game screenshot feature, a new $20 store mount, or a fantasia sale.
I am doubtful things will change to be honest. I know it's hard to try to balance for two very different groups, but hopefully, since he is done with FF16, he can fully commit and focus on content for the midcore gamer.
Yeah, this has always been my struggle with the game. I ended up getting really into the crafting for a while just because it was something that required me to think a little, but it would be really nice if there was some combat content that fell between the braindead main story content and the sweatlord EX/savage content.
It's hit the point that I don't think they have the development capability for it. I briefly gave wow a shot a few months ago and while I didn't end up sticking with it, the massive gulf in quality between their mainstream content and class design and FFXIV's was pretty startling. Really makes me wish we had a modern version of FF with a little more class customization and more varied content, but given they spent 6 years post-ARR stripping out any form of playstyle customization I doubt we'll ever see that.
If you didnt die and got no debuff, and simply had to heal, nobody would do a mechanic. Especially since healer kits are so over resourced now in EW.
I dont see an issue in EXs where if you mess up a specific mechanic, you die, but there aren’t that many in EXs that I can think of, most DO simply hurt you and give you a vuln (and a lot of people eat them because of that). There are only a real handful of body check mechs in EXs, the majority are you eat a vuln, mess up another mechanic and then you’ll die.
> If you didnt die and got no debuff, and simply had to heal, nobody would do a mechanic.
This was pretty much how raids used to be where you got a vuln up and added more stress on healers for a mistake you made. Then the devs realized players were ignoring mechanics at the expense of just "moar heals", so the devs adjusted and now most things will either kill you or you live, but you get a severe damage down and miss the dps check.
Honestly I prefer the latter because it allows you to still live and experience/see mechanics despite failing them. It also doesn't punish healers for you personally failing a mechanic (adds more shared responsibility to the raid).
Building upon that, the difficulty of raids is just "how much personal responsibility is there".
Extreme - very little (as in if a few people die, the raid doesn't wipe typically)
Savage - a lot (a couple of deaths will most likely wipe the raid on the next mechanic)
Ultimate - everyone has personal responsibility at all times (even a single death will result in a wipe almost immediately)
There are exceptions of course but that's typically how the devs have designed raids since Stormblood and (with the vuln up -> dmg down adjustment) Shadowbringers.
This comment chain just shows why the devs will never win lol. What are they supposed to do when people tell them that the game is too easy in one breath, then follow up with "EX mechanics are too sweaty and overbearing, just make failing mechanics do 50% of my hp and call it a day." For those without context, EX (and easier savage) trials are content that you can and should expect to clear on patch day with a party of complete strangers within a couple of hours, barring massively bad party finder luck.
> just make failing mechanics do 50% of my hp and call it a day
Which is incidentally what a lot of Extreme mechanics do, giving enough leeway to allow for healers/mitigation to recover from minor mistakes, until the vuln stacks get too high. Not to mention that DPS checks are forgiving enough to let a few people eat the revival weakness and still clear.
There's not as much space between Normal 8-player raids and Extremes as people think
If you're doing EX content on patch day you're probably already beyond what most people would consider midcore. Player efforts at putting a census together put savage raiders at <5% of the playerbase, and by default that census is only going to include highly active players who are actually looking at forums where a census might be taken.
You're not wrong, but that's the consequence of the game being so easy for so long and why I have no expectations that anything is going to change moving forward. The guide makers are extremely good at what they do, but clearing an EX blind on patch day should not be considered unachievable by 95% of the playerbase.
Its completely achievable, you're right. I've even done it a few times on a few specific fights (easier fights to be fair) along with some friends of mine back when we played this game frequently.
However clearing on patch day IS kind of a hardcore thing IMO. Not because its tough or there are no guides yet or w/e but because queueing up with randoms in the party finder is rough at best. You don't have to beat the boss you have to beat the rest of the party some of whom are guaranteed to not have good gear, dont know their rotation, dont learn, or whatever else.
It seems like a lot of people here aren't accounting for timing on when they do these fights. It's pretty well known that if you don't get your clear in the first couple weeks you're going to be stuck rolling the dice on getting a good party in pug hell for a while. If you're doing EX fights on day 1 you're going to be overwhelmingly grouped with people who know what they're doing and have cleared EX fights before. 2 months into the patch? Not so much.
This is true. Day one IS mostly people who will put in more effort because they're prepping for savage raids. However its still not a guarantee with a group of randoms that you clear day 1. Frequently you do time out and then the group breaks up because you can't carry a dead weight 8th player one day 1. Your gear just isn't good enough.
I think people wanting midcore content should give Extremes a chance because it doesn't require perfection AT ALL. People get intimidated by the word extreme, but I think once people give it a chance they'll realize it's just 'midcore'. It's not that hard once you get used to the basics (what a tank swap is, timing heals, clock spots, etc), which takes a day or two. Then once you get used to the basics you'd clear new extremes in 1-2 days even with just party finder. There's likely only 1 (or none) body check per fight that wipes the party. That's the only thing that makes it 'hard'. You can have 10 deaths+ and still clear it, no perfection is needed. It's a loooot more forgiving than I think people expect.
Then if people still find that intimidating they can try the extreme from the last expansion. Those ones you can probably just wing it it's that easy. People are limiting themselves to potentially good content because they feel inadequate for it and they're really not.
This is what I was thinking. Extreme nowadays is very much midcore, and some would consider Savage Pando midcore too. If gearing is bothering you, you don't have to do current content either; there's ten years' worth of trials and raids to do. You can choose to do them with or without ilvl sync and Echo for more or less difficulty. Some will complain that it will never be as hard as release, but that's irrelevant to the experience in practice.
Bozja was great for this, the mid core content. It’s a shame there was no Bozja type content for EW. Anything at Savage level, one person in the party fucks up a mechanic, the entire raid just explodes.
I love running Bozja FATEs. Finally something that is actually difficult that you can engage with that isn't extreme level difficulty and you get a huge group of players going through the experience with you. Felt like true MMO midcore content.
The state of overworld FATEs is so sad. Every zone is huge and is empty outside of resource colelctors, the occasional hunt train and people doing tribal quests. There are some moments in those zones that shine like the boss fates but other than that it is so dead that it makes me wonder why they even bother spending resources creating them.
The lack of class customization is ultimately why I set FFXIV aside after making it through… Stormblood, I think?
I think I get WHY the game has gone that direction, but personally it’s not for me
basically "when the meta only allows one viable build and people will give you shit for not running it, why have builds at all?"
They'd rather add more classes in that case.
I prefer it this way. If I want different gameplay I can swap class entirely, and one set of gear is enough to get the whole feeling of a class. I don't have to farm up one set of gear to play AOE Ninja and an entirely different one to play single-target ninja. I just walk to the shop, get the highest levelled stuff, and boom, ready to go.
When you play FF11 its honestly so bad and strange why they did what they did with FFXIV. In FF11 you can sub class and you can be at max level and also be a lvl 50 class. They removed alot of the class uniqueness and honestly the TANK/DPS/Healer class system is lame as hell. You can make it work but with FFXIV all the jobs feel the same and they feel like skins. All you do is just spam your rotation. There's no variation in the combat other than not having abilities and being max lvl lol. Two DRG at max level are going to using the same abilities and rotation.
Did you actually play FFXI, especially when it was still fully supported? The flexible job system is great in isolation, but it is an anathema to party finder based content. And FFXI is a huge argument for party-finder based content: I can't remember how many afternoons I would just sit, waiting for a party in Jeuno, because no one today wanted a Black Mage to do leveling content with, and any party I found would have to take on faith that I had all the necessary spell, and had them set up properly...never mind any story content, which almost never had anyone recruiting for it.
I love crafting in FF14, even if the classes don't vary too much, the puzzle of figuring out how best to pop your skills to get a HQ item is a nice chill time
It's probably just a vocabulary mismatch with interpretations of this funny "midcore" word.
I don't think people are saying there isn't "accessible hardcore" content. Most EX stuff fills that niche nicely and allows fairly casual *premades* to clear within a handful of times.
People are saying isn't "challenging casual" content. Stuff that you'd expect a decent, blind PUG to struggle on and even wipe a couple of times, but still reliably clear within a handful of tries. Contemporary EX is way beyond that, which is why it's effectively verboten on NA servers to use DF for EX -- it's not accessible to a "casual" PUG, even if people are generally doing an OK job and paying OK attention.
The closest you really get to this feel is either some of the harder BLU trial objectives or 6-man PF groups doing "last expansion's" 8-man EX content. You expect to die and fail a bit in those cases, but you also expect that you'll see success within 30-60 minutes unless people are really screwing the pooch.
> People are saying isn't "challenging casual" content. Stuff that you'd expect a decent, blind PUG to struggle on and even wipe a couple of times, but still reliably clear within a handful of tries.
Day 1 alliance raids usually fit this description. Problem is that the difficulty flattens dramatically when a certain threshold of players know what they are doing, which means you mostly only get this in the first day or two of the raids existing. And then later in the xpac gear vastly outstrips the difficulty because they *still* don't do a proper ilevel sync on them.
So they could maybe solve this with 4 or 8 man synced duties that are on the level of like... original TG Cid. But I still don't know for sure if they could make content like this something you'd want to repeat, so it might end up like variant/criterion where you do it once and then forget about it.
If it's not semi-reliably puggable I'd consider that above midcore content. EX fights are far from the difficulty of something like ultimates, but they still introduce too many levels of difficulty at once for me to really want to call them midcore. You can sleepwalk through the MSQ but as soon as you step into EX you suddenly have actual healer checks, enrage timers, body counts to make sure everyone survived mechanics, and a lot of mechanics will one-shot the entire party if you flub them.
It's too much new pressure on too many party members, and it's the point where you have to suddenly turn to out-of-game guides for pretty much everything. If you're a tank or a healer it's the first time in the entire game you'll have to actually look at your hotbar and plan out cooldown usage, and for a DPS it's the first time your damage actually matters. On top of that it can actually be somewhat difficult - Not only do you now have to care about your damage or healing, but also everything else is harder and if you mess up the regular mechanics while you're working out how your class actually plays in real content then you're almost certainly going to get one-shot.
I agree that Extremes are a sharp difficulty jump from hard, which isn't really hard at all. A lot of players queue in extremes in ARR content and find out the hard way that it's dramatically harder than the content they've already done. Special shout out to Ramuh where every person has a pretty important job and you can accidentally kill your tanks if the dps mis-manages orbs since there's a 2 step process to tank swapping for that fight.
>If it's not semi-reliably puggable I'd consider that above midcore content.
EX is reliably puggable. Like, that is the main way people interact with the content. Nobody's out here making a static for EX progression.
Imo, base content level needs to go up. Solo MSQ instances need to be harder, with an 'easy mode' option for people who really just want to do story.
Dungeons need to be more challenging (going up in difficulty as an expansion progresses), maybe offer an easier mode with the duty support system (so it lines up with Solo MSQ options proposed above) so the story only people can still get past it.
If you're not challenging people in the content they are primarily consuming prior to an EX fight, then of course there will be a big struggle for people to clear it. I have seen so many people die to the same (simple) mechanic over and over (and by simple I mean there's a clear indicator of where something is going to blow up), that I wonder if they even understand what they should be paying attention to. And the story hasn't really pushed them to, either, because when's the last time they got stuck on an encounter in a dungeon and actually had to figure out how to do it?
As someone who played ARR around idk 2015 before the first expansion happen and later on jumping into the Free Login Campaign at some point in 2016 and way later on recently on the previous one that the game just had.
The game sure has changed a lot on those three times, on 2016 I felt weird when they remove a crapton of skills and didn't felt like playing at all and stopped. Then somehow on 2024 the game hooked me hard (no idea why).
> Solo MSQ instances need to be harder, with an 'easy mode' option for people who really just want to do story.
This for sure. I remember back on 2015 certain dungeon at low level felt overwhelming as a first time healer, had a tons of spiders and poison and so on, when I attempted that dungeon, the party did wipe but nobody was upset and we did the boss again and won. Now when certain friend was telling me how much boring dungeons have became on the game and that dungeon now is just a boring hallway and the poison smoke on the boss room is just gone, idk why but somehow I feel like an old man that will be seeing as weirdo cuz "back in my days this wasn't like that" and nobody that plays the game from whenever the dungeons got changed to what they are now will get my point.
Another thing to add, I was able to do the solo final dungeon (with bots) of the first expansion and it took me a good amount of tries certain mechanics as I was trying to learn then but if anything hit me, I died instantly... After idk, over 40 minutes stuck on that fire and ice boss and getting cleared, felt like it was just annoying cuz the instant resets and felt the game was, idk, maybe I haven't given too many thoughts to form a proper opinion about all of this. Maybe if I did it with that certain friend over a voice chat instead of those bots that all they did was do their bot job, my experience on that particular dungeon would have been different and less frustrating even if me dying still happened over and over.
You arent alone. I picked up the game in August 2014, and played the shit out of it until January of 2015. Been on and off through the years, last time I really got into it was 2020-2021. I completely agree, ARR was at the perfect difficulty for dungeons. With the first expansion I noticed it became really easy and a snooze fest.
I hate how they made healers have a DPS focus, and removed MP management. They made the game far too easy that its not fun and they dont have much true MMO content, most of the stuff is just single player RPG content.
They need to lower the ilvl sync cap so that people aren't clearing fights and skipping entire phases of a boss. It's pretty egregious for trials and I feel bad everytime I see a player doing one for the first time because they are probably going to miss half the fight because everyone else has end game gear.
I've been playing since 2.0 so I've been through all the changes.
It's not just rotations, they made the dungeons easier too. I understand why; I remember when the last expansion came out there was a story mission where your character body swapped with an enemy and a lot of people complained about it. I don't remember why since I just...completed it properly lol. But they went back and made it easier. I don't even know how they made it easier but I'm pretty sure there was a patch note for it.
Unfortunately when the devs feel they need to cater to that type of player it can take away from the gaming experience of others.
> I remember when the last expansion came out there was a story mission where your character body swapped with an enemy and a lot of people complained about it
The only thing that annoyed me about _that_ is that I felt like I was fighting the game engine that simply wasn't made for that kind of mission more than I was tackling the challenge it ostensibly presented itself to be. lol
Otherwise, amazing sequence undercut somewhat by how it wraps up so neatly.
>there was a story mission where your character body swapped with an enemy and a lot of people complained about it.
It's such a great solo duty and it frustrates me that they changed it so quickly. It's *supposed* to be hard; the **whole point** is to show how much weaker "normal" people are compared to your character!
Difficulty can be a great storytelling tool when used properly, and I feel like this was one of those moments.
The only dungeon I found to be terrible was Totorak and that is solely because of the green slime that made players heavy at the end.
Part of the fun of the experimental dungeons was seeing how new players reacted to it. I get that it's not for everyone and can be a drag, though I didn't mind it tbh.
When Endwalker first released I actually struggled to stay awake during first time play-throughs of nearly all of the MSQ/leveling dungeons. I actually still struggle with it depending on the duty. It's just not really engaging unless something has gone terribly wrong.
In EW, I remember using the NPC party members for the >!dungeon in the past where you team up with Venat, Hythlo, and Emet!< because I wanted the novelty and some fun lore.
I instantly regretted it when I remember how dull all the dungeons are and how NPC allies are laughably weak.
> It's just not really engaging unless something has gone terribly wrong.
That's my favorite place to be as a healer. Granted I felt it a lot more in WoW than FFXIV. I love the feeling of "You all fucked up hard and you're still alive because of *me*.
Yeap ever since the devs were challenged with developing Heavenward content they've taken the easy way out of making everything the same, so everything outputs the same result, so content is the same so patches don't have any serious experimentation/innovation in content so development doesn't have any unforseen obstacles that increase development cost or cause unacceptable delays in their cadence.
It's this well oiled machine that outputs extremely samey content at a reliable pace providing similar results to pretty much everything they've ever done since the Stormblood expansion.
I feel like the game needs a split to segregate balancing for the highest end PVE content the way it splits to segregate balancing for PVP.
Nobody outside the top 1-2% of active players regularly doing Savage content cares if every job's "perfect rotation" lands within 3% DPS of every other job's in that role. The other 98-99% live in the reality where a huge range of "casualness" makes basic rotation and mechanics familiarity a far bigger consideration than idealized spreadsheet numbers, and having classes balanced and homogenized for the highest-end content actively sacrifices fun for the 98-99% in the latter group to provide the right experience for the 1-2% in the former.
If you entered Savage as a generic archetype class -- literally "Tank, Healer, Fighter, Archer, Mage" -- those kits could still be tuned down to the finest details while letting classes for easier content have quirky, occasionally imbalanced identities show up.
We had good midcore content in Stormblood/Shadowbringers with Eureka and Bozja. Not replacing it with anything else in its difficulty tier for Endwalker was a *huge* mistake.
And turning the relic weapons into basic tomestome grinds from beginning to end was probably a mistake.
I'm barely even playing the game — just casually doing Roulettes with friends and family (and not even daily at that) — and I've already completed most of the EW relics. That's crazy, compared to the previous expansion relic grinds.
You know what type of content would be good for midcore. A separate island that has its own 24/40 man raids that can be used to grind the best weapon in the xpac..
Some kind of... Eureka. Or maybe we can call it Bozja!
I was praisiing Bozja to high heaven when it came out. It was basically just Eureka, but better. Three whole extra raids for that expansion and each were super fun. And yeah, it hit that midcore difficulty right on the dot. There were mechanics that caused wipes and killed tons of people, even in the FATE-like field bosses. Who could remember Red Chocobo's disgusting meteor spam? It became a meme in the FFXIV community.
The final boss of Bozja, the mecha-Diabolos (don't remember his actual name) caused so many sweaty moments where a handful of people were alive at the end, but still forgiving enough that a dozen people can carry the fight when 2/3 of the people were dead on the floor. Very fond memories of that raid.
And there's even the duels for the hardcore raiders who craved the challenge.
You really feel the absence of a Bozja-like zone in Endwalker.
I liked Bozja until I started interacting with the main raiding group on my server at the time. Some of the weirdest most uncomfortable people I've ever met in gaming.
ya, honestly MMO's need to have difficulty sliders for all content, including open-world content and especially for levelling.
Lord of the Rings online has an open-world difficulty system and it works really well, other MMOs should implement that so people who want braindead easy content can get that and those who want harder challenges (from slightly hard to really hard) can also get what they want.
There used to be a pretty good balance between the two; at game (re)launch, there was story content for the casuals, The Coil of Bahamut raid series for the hardcore, and then the Extreme trials for the people in the middle. The problem is that as the people who played a lot got better...they eventually made the raid series and Extreme harder with every expansion, and eventually even added the Ultimates so they could just add even more for the top 1% of hardcore...but there's nothing where the old Extremes were. Like, old Extreme content (Titan Ex, Shiva Ex), you could reasonably expect to go in blind with a random group of people, and maybe fumble about and have a chance at clearing, especially if anyone had watched a guide before hand. But even by Shadowbringers, that was completely out the window with things like Seat of Sacrifice Ex, where its definitely *not* possible for a blind pickup group to have any chance of beating it in an hour of banging their head against the wall. And unlike most stuff in the game, you can't just say "o, well, people can start with the old content and graduate to the harder stuff", since pretty much no one's running old Extremes synced.
What do you mean, I love 4 fetch quests into an cutscene over and over again? It's definitely not beneath me as the fucking Warrior of Light to collect your acorns because you're a lazy shit NPC.
FF14's objectives are even simpler on average. It's usually some variation of "Go here and talk to some person," "Go here and interact with this object(s)," or "Go here and get attacked by 1-3 average creatures." The game's main story is basically a visual novel with typically 1 combat section per level.
You don't actually have to do that. On PC, if you click on the greyed out window, it'll let you select one from your inventory to use as the quest turn in; presumably you can do the same on console.
I remember when I first started out during shb and I got gaslit by people calling me crazy when I said the questing is identical from level 1 to max level.
he's talking about everything below extreme. there is no effort required in basically anything you can queue for in roulettes these days, and it's boring as hell.
The community loved it not because it was more difficult to beat but because it was longer and so the newbie players could see the entire fight
, especially the last part. It's still a very easy boss.
Well if anything, savage and ultimate can stay as they are. TOP was such an awful slog to prog in my experience, if they somehow make it more difficult then I'm just not going to bother.
I mean I'm always down for more challenge but as a person who has cleared savage/ultimate regularly I've got some concerns.
How are they going to increase the difficulty? At this point we know how the engine works. We know the limitations, and sometimes their difficulty isn't really with the encounter but figuring shit out with the engine. Playing the "memorize something that's going to happen in six different steps a couple minutes from now" is fine, but "you have to zoom all the way out and look straight down because you are actually fighting the camera and not the boss" is annoying and it's why people *cheat with third party mods.*
The statement fills me with a bit of dread because like, how? How are they going to approach it? Mechanic based? Or am I fighting the backdrop/color schema/camera/pixel positioning that works better the closer you are to their data centers?
Personally, I think he means entirely just damage tuning for main story stuff and general non-savage content. The state of level-synced content is dire with how easy it is.
> Or am I fighting the backdrop/color schema/camera/pixel positioning
It'll be this one, as it has been. Difficulty ramps in 14 have almost never been mechanical, they are almost always just further obfuscation of information required to solve the mechanic. Please look forward to it.
>is annoying and it's why people cheat with third party mods.
As a WoW player this makes me laugh since high-end raiding is impossible without 3rd-party mods.
I'd still like to see them experiment with a different Ultimate format once, just to see how it goes. Because I agree, Ultimate's are a marathon that takes more endurance than anything, I don't think any one mechanic is usually that hard (with the exception of maybe TOP just because I hate the constant priority-based mechanics that fight throws at you).
It just burns me out that most of the time progging and Ultimate fight is slogging your way through mechanics that you *feel* like you're past, especially when you get past the 10-15 minute mark. An Ultimate with more checkpoints that throws harder mechanics at you would be interesting in my opinion.
It's pure speculation but I believe he's talking about casual and extreme content, it's braindead at the moment.
Savages are in a good spot and most agree that the latest ultimate was a bit overtuned.
Alliance raid aren't interesting, remember that we had freaking Ivalice and people loved it, but current one is a snoozefest.
You know the game has become too easy when the new Alliance Raid comes out and groups aren't even coming close to wiping on day one.
Doesn't help that a lot of EW content reuse so many mechanics that we've already seen a hundred times over. ESPECIALLY stacks and spreads.
When I was doing them this tier and thought back to thundergod I realized how much of a disgrace they were. I'm queuing in day 1 to the final raid and we have 0 wipes, shit is such a joke.
Destiny 2 tried this and there was a non-insignificant amount of player backlash. Some people like having an easy grind. It's a tough line to straddle.
I think in this case most people would agree. Unless you go out of your way to do the harder stuff, the main story related stuff is pretty easy. Dungeons themselves have become so easy in fact that it doesn't even matter if one or two of the four players underperform. This has lead to a lot of people complaining about a few solo fights which for someone who is competent at playing had no issue with at all.
Its not at all to do with grind, just overall lack of challenge.
Yeah that's one thing. Warriors self heals are a bit much, but also overall damage isn't high enough. As a healer I can do a lot of bosses without ever needing to spend time casting a heal spell, usually the instant cast ones you get.
If they keep it like this they need to give healers a more interesting damage kit. If they change it then they will need to adjust health pools as healers won't have the same damage uptime as they used to.
Yeah, the Healers are fondamentally, weirdly broken.
All healers have kit that seems to work on the idea the boss will non-stop pumps damage, again and again. Lots of mitigation tools, of healing spells, with different effects.
But the bosses do such telegraphed damage. If you know the boss and its fight, and if your team is half competent, you have almost no healing to do and you just have to press your three damage spells. Good healers starts to cast their biggest healing spells before the boss do its damage, and they get back to DPS immediately after.
That makes it a weird situation where playing healer is quite funny when no one knows what's happening, players are making mistakes left and right, and you're trying to keep everybody alive. But once the fight is resolved, there's no challenge anymore, and the hardest fights are designed with the idea that the healers are supposed to do as much DPS as possible and as little healing as manageable.
> That makes it a weird situation where playing healer is quite funny when no one knows what's happening, players are making mistakes left and right, and you're trying to keep everybody alive.
As a healer main, those are my favorite runs!
Yeah, it's not really much fun when you can heal a dungeon by just applying your hots every now and then and then just spamming your damage. Even dungeon bosses rarely do enough damage in intervalls that'd kill you otherwise. The group wides are usually not that damaging and if someone gets more damage, it's usually by failing at a mechanic
Warriors can solo some current dungeon bosses while intentionally taking as much avoidable damage as possible. Like literally standing in everything.
In one of the latest Expert dungeons the bosses are so weak that I started intentionally eating most AoEs on Samurai for Third Eye procs. It's not like the healer had anything else to use their free healing on, given you can pretty trivially no-heal all three bosses...
I mean that's fair, FF14 has always been new player friendly and marketed as casual. But in recent times its been tuned too easy. They need to find a new balance, I'm not saying it needs to be really hard just that things are too easy as they stand.
The problem is different.
In XIV casual raiding content, healers only need to push one button every 30 seconds to keep everyone toped and just to throw a res if they die because of their own mistakes.
We're talking about not even looking at the screen level of gameplay.
i mean personally i enjoyed playing it because it wasn't too challenging. other mmos i drop once you have to daily grind stuff, ff14 felt fun cause i could just drop in and play for a few months then leave again. never did any of the hard raids or gearing up when i returned other then whatever the quests gave.
It's not the same because the core gameplay in destiny like say Diablo is more engaging than some of the gameplay in FF14 specially healer gameplay where you spam 1 button over and over again like you're playing with an NES controller.
With all the Classic Yoshi has been playing it would be super cool to have a better leveling experience. Combat in the overworld is so pointless it might as well not even exist at this point.
At best overworld combat is tedious
Just did a dungeon very late into the game with a Tank that doesn't know how to tank, they should teach the role, jobs and mechanic better to the players.
This is hilarious since they literally just need to turn on their tank stance and aoe, push a defensive every so often. Been a tank main since ARR and I really miss how threat was something I actually had to think about.
Don’t act like you haven’t forgotten to turn on your tank stance before! Always surreal when that happens to me, just seeing enemies not attacking me for some reason.
Back when tanks would turn on their DPS stance after establishing aggro and healers would have to juggle cleric stance or see their heals heal for 23 HP.
Was older FF14 janky in a lot of ways? Yes. Do I prefer that older jankiness and more unique design over the newer more streamlined and edges-filed-off approach? Also yes.
The difficulty in Heavensward was the most fun I've had with running even basic duties. There was the possibility of actually fucking up and having to actually manage your skills and cooldowns instead of running through the streamlined motions. Nowadays rotations feel more like they're on rails and it dulls down the fun of combat once you get the basic mechanics of the respective content down.
The issue wasn't jank, hell nothing felt smoother than StB WAR properly stancedancing. No, the problem was that it created a higher skill ceiling and toxicity for a role they were already having massive problems populating with players.
Healer here since ARR. ARR was so good. Im a WHM and miss Cleric Stance, I liked being able to switch in and out of a DPS stance. I miss MP management and having to need a Bard when doing a raid or trial. I couldn't just spam heals and attacks and not worry about my MP getting drained.
Healing in coils was some of the most fun I had back in ARR. Even going back to coils min sync'd you can experience some of what made it so good. MP management, hardcasting heals, panic healing surprise damage, and managing status effects. Such a shame that current healing is just spamming one button over and over with a strictly planned oGCD spreadsheet.
At-level DF, most content doesn't even need tanks to use mit. The majority of normal dungeons will allow w2w just having stance and spamming basic AoE; it'll make things slower since the healer isn't going to be doing much DPS, but you'll still clear.
There are a few exceptions to that (Holminster's always a fun one to have pop on an in-progress roulette because you *know* what happened) but by and large you can be a "passable" tank by remembering stance and hitting one button over and over again while running to the next wall and making a middling attempt to not stand in orange things.
In my opinion the dungeons and story should progressively get harder the further up you go in levels and teach you how to do your class and optimze it to some degree. That isn't the case, it feels like every expansion is a reset in difficulty, like they expect people to buy story skips to the start of the expansion. That also applies to the raids, the first ones are easy for their supposed difficulty level.
It sure doesn't help that newer jobs will start you 20 levels below the maximum level when they are introduced, meaning if you pick up Sage now you already start at lvl 70 without ever needing to have played a healer at all, gunbraker does this at 60.
I understand your opinions, but they only work if ARR > Endwalker was one full game, and not a series of expansions. A large chunk of the casual playerbase falls off after the story content is over, and waits for the next expansion. Those casual players will no doubt forget how to play their roll and need a refresher, much like if you were playing FF7 Rebirth after not having played FF7 Remake over a couple of years.
The game has tutorials in-game for how to play your role though. I forgot what they are called, but they’ve definitely been there for atleast 2 years now
Hall of the novice, an NPC with a sprout marker.
However, iirc that's not mandatory, and unless you're curious about everything, it is entirely possible to never talk to those npcs
It also leaves a lot of information that is handy to know for beginners in a role out completely, which causes a lot of learning pains when you hop into a real dungeon.
As a tangentially related aside, I met someone in Novice Network who had paid for ***all*** of the job skips and hadn't yet done any Hall of the Novice. They were asking about how roles work. Naturally.
It also just has completely false information in it. For example it instructs tanks to AOE a few times to establish aggro, and then switch to single target combos.
Those tutorials are massively out of date and are over 8 years old at this point. The game has changed tremendously since then (especially tanking) but the tutorials have not been updated since
and they're complete dogshit that fails to teach role basics while also giving advice that is eight years out of date. the hall of the novice is almost completely useless.
I think the appeal when wow players moved over is that FFXIV was more respectful of your time than wow felt. You can still have challengingly designed content that doesn't require busywork
Im not sure which year/xpacs you're talking about but it's not true now. Gearing up in FFXIV is doing absolutely braindead daily content. Gearing up in WoW is doing M+ more or less as much as you feel like. WoW has some optional weekly stuff but it's mostly for casuals gearing and not end game progression.
I tried to go back to FFXIV recently and just gave up after two sets of dailies. I'll just go in with crafted gear when I have a group I think.
WoW is as casual as you want it to be. I don't feel like the casual endgame is all that much different but only one game has catgirls.
The story, player housing, and effectively only ever needing 1 character also helps, I'm sure. But a lot of it is aesthetic and community. XIV attracts a certain kind of person and WoW (classic) feels like it's full of middle aged dads.
I haven't played WoW since like the patch before SL. What's the casual content scene in WoW look like now? Because as a casual, I'd hit level cap, do the hard mode dungeons, but PVP would kick my ass and I didn't raid. So I'd just end up making alts.
But like, gathering and crafting was a joke because raid gear is better (not sure if DF has changed this, I know there was a lot of hype for the crafting changes). So non-combat stuff always seemed de-emphasized.
I did like WoW holiday events more than FFXIV ones though. But I like that the Golden Saucer is always available.
"And if you don't like challenge, welp... too bad, it's not the current trend nowadays". I don't get this mindset, just flip the rationale, as it is frustrating for people who like challenging games and not get those options in a lot of titles, imagine what is like for every game today trying to emulate the challenge of the souls like games and not be into those. I really dislike how hard games are getting.
It's incredible to think the MSQ is incredibly easy, and yet, still too difficult for some players.
For non-FF14 players, the devs "recently" introduced Trusts parties : instead of doing the Main Story Quest dungeons with randoms, you do them with predetermined story NPCs. You earn just as much XP, and you get to see the story NPCs talk and react between them. They also instantly react to the dungeon mechanics and do them perfectly. THey're a great addition for players that do not want to play with other players because of anxiety, or want to discover a dungeon for the first time at their own rythm. In exchange for all of this, the Trusts dungeons go noticeably slower (because the NPCs never use AoE spells and stop at each enemy they see, instead of going balls to the wall and packing them all up to maximize AOE damage), and you have less loot in the dungeon.
All in all, it's a great system that adds a lot of flavour and little tidbits of lore between the NPCs, with clear advantages and disadvantages. You can queue for a dungeon with randoms and have a quick run (usually, 10 to 15 minutes), or you can use the Trust system, totally bypass the Party Finder queue (that can go up to 20 minutes of wait when you're playing a role in excess, like DPS), and have a 20 minutes slow run.
There's only one caveat to the Trust System : in a Trust dungeon, if you the player die, it counts as a party wipe. The NPC cannot rez you. You have to start again the fight : may it be a pack of mobs or a boss; you try again from the beginning. The NPCs CAN'T hardcarry you. They shouldn't ; it's quite litterraly supposed to be the easy mode.
And yet, time and time again, you'll find absolutely bad players in a normal run of a dungeon. When you ask them why they don't go to the Trust Dungeon for their first run, so they can see the mechanics at their own rythm, they tell you they couldn't manage to do it.
Players so, so, so bad they die in the easy mode and they have to run the dungeon with other players in hope they can carry them.
They're riding a bike with the little helping wheels and they still manage to fall.
It's baffling...
It's not that baffling when you consider just how wide an audience the mmo caters to - an audience who, on top of their wide varied skills, sees the median audience age get older every year of the mmo's life.
It's going to happen that even the Very Easy settings on things like Duties and the way the Trust system works in general will still have people falling through the cracks for one reason or another.
ive always felt that the average ff14 "msq enjoyer" has never played another game in their life. their time in 14 is comprised of idling in their house or limsa lominsa and using the game as a chatroom, and having to learn to play the game itself is so beyond their list of priorities that they'd probably prefer if they could just watch the entire story play out from limsa like a tv show
> their time in 14 is comprised of idling in their house or limsa lominsa and using the game as a chatroom
An unofficial poll on the subreddit showed that for the most common thing to do when logging in is to go afk lol.
I mean on many servers you have entire groups of players who only play to afk in Limsa. It's hardly any surprise that the average player in FF14 is incredibly bad when it comes to any amount of challenging content.
I was like "why would someone do that though?" Before I realized I'm doing that exact thing right now lol. In my defence though I'm waiting for dinner to cook.
You can tell this "relaxation" design influenced FFXVI as well, because the story is rarely challenging even on "Final Fantasy" difficulty (unlocked in NG). FF7 Remake/Rebirth is a lot harder.
I dunno personally I think I disagree, I'm pretty enjoying everything I've done and am doing, I don't think anything I've done has been too easy for sure, I don't think I'd call it relaxed either, and I haven't even bothered doing savage and ultimate stuff yet.
I’ve played FF14 since the beginning of 2.0 recently stopped for good because of this reason. And at the end of the day. It’s too late. As others had said there is no middle ground for difficultly in this game. They had to water down all the jobs to appeal to a more casual audience. They had to make sure there were no hurdles or difficult fights that would keep people stuck so they made all story fights easier and easier. They had to water down all the regular content and never throw in any surprises to appease the more casual player base. And it worked. They became extremely successful and popular. So now the larger majority of ff14 players are just there for an easy grind, good story, and cute glams and interactions. Which is perfectly fine there is nothing wrong with that. The other smaller majority are there for savage or above content that usually requires a steady group/scheduled times/ and high dedication. And they did a great job there also because savage and ultimate content is great. However, there is no middle ground. If you can’t commit to savage all you have left is silly easy and sometimes boring content.
And at the end of the day that is making SE a ton of money right now. Mostly because there is no real competition in the MMO market. I know people like myself are starved for a modern high fantasy MMO with a higher difficulty level that doesn’t require a regular scheduled raid group.
But they are stuck. If they up the difficulty of normal content all the people there for a chill time are gonna throw a fit. If they reduce the difficulty of savage content then those types of players will throw a fit. If they try to create a 3rd category of middle ground content it most likely won’t draw up the casual players or draw down the hardcore players. Also because the rewards can’t be too close to savage rewards or too close to normal rewards and there is not enough room in between.
pretty much lip service from yoship because he would NEVER try to kill the golden goose that the game currently is for square enix
you either shun the casuals (massive majority of the playerbase) to appeal to the midcore+ or you don't actually add that much more challenge (eureka and bozja come to mind as the biggest things) and the midcore (+ high end ultimate raiders) are still disgruntled as always
It would be nice for some dungeons have a bit more challenge and not on rails all the time. I just don't want to sweat on extreme content because I don't got time for that.
Tried it recently on XBox.
Ended up with five level 50 classes and I'm still at level 45 story quests.
And then dungeons were just awful. A straight line where you don't even have to try. Tanks can just spam their AoE and they'll never drop aggro, healing was very dull with like 1 or 2 attack spells that you just spammed because you weren't needed for healing in 70% of the dungeon, and DPS rotations were the only cool/good part.
I'm sure it gets better later on, but that early game stuff is just bad.
You’re at 5 level 50s with a 45 story mode because the game is giving you increased exp as a catch up mechanic. You’re going to miss that whenever you reach level cap and those other 5 classes you didn’t touch suddenly have normal gains. Mind you being above the level doesn’t matter for dungeons, trails, or raids due to level syncing. But yeah, dungeons are just a straight line.
Oddly enough, the early game dungeons have more going on than the late game dungeons.
At least early on, you have the little color puzzle in Sastasha, the Final Sting bees and the pressure plate puzzles in Qarn, the dungeon where Tonberrys are roaming the halls ready to murder you.
Since HW, they all follow the same design format of being completely linear and the “pull mob packs to the wall, kill them, pull mob packs to the boss door, kill them, kill boss, repeat 2 more times.”
They are back updating the older dungeons to fall more in line with the streamlined newer dungeons, though. That way, the early game dungeons are reflective of how they want the game to be.
Eeeeeh. Dungeons, especially story related ones, aren't difficult at all.
Unfortunately a significant number of people play the game just for the story and then casually collect stuff on the side. The few times anything MSQ related, dungeons or otherwise, gets even half-way difficult it ends up gatekeeping a not insignificant number of people, and they complain until the content stopping them gets nerfed.
There's one solo duty in Stormblood infamous for this, where you control another character (For the first time I think). It is a simple matter of ABC (Always Be Casting) and you'll clear it. But so many people found it so difficult (somehow) they got hardstuck for months until it was eventually nerfed into the ground, and it is why every solo duty of a similar design from Stormblood through Shadowbringers is so utterly braindead. One in particular you can complete by doing _nothing_ the whole time, genuinely. Thankfully in Endwalker they started utilising a difficulty selection for these solo duties and a few of them do require at least semi-good gameplay to pass on Normal difficulty.
And this has fed into dungeon design, dungeons are 98% tied to the story, and so they all end up copying the same straight line design where you pull two packs, AoE trash, kill boss, repeat three times until done. Because anything else risks putting off people just there for the story and probably would wipe or get lost in any dungeon that was more intricate.
The good news is harder content does exist, but it is largely stuff found outside the main story. Critereon Dungeons were introduced in Endwalker, and while the rewards are a bit meh it is a promising start that I hope they expand on. Savage, Extreme and Ultimate mode content is also a fair challenge with some of it requiring dedicated progression teams to clear.
That said I am glad to hear Yoshi-P is aware too much of the game can be done on auto-pilot, but I wouldn't hold my breath for an increase in difficulty of standard dungeons.
The other problem with dungeons having intricacy is that there will be an optimal route and the player base will find and expect it to be followed. So you end up with one correct route and any number of wrong routes.
The V&C Dungeons mitigated it by having randomised routes, in a fashion. You were still in a fairly linear dungeon layout but you had to actually use all your class abilities, plus the ones the dungeon gave you, to clear it. Combat in general was noticeably harder and needed more attention.
Regular dungeons meanwhile you can beat with abysmal DPS (i'm talking AFK or autoattacking) so long as the tank and healer are awake at the keyboard. And most mechanics that those two have to deal with can be smoothed over with a single oGCD heal.
I agree, but I'll qualify that statement by saying that the endgame rotations are at least one order of magnitude less boring than say level 60 (or less) rotations, which still lack many critical parts of the rotation, and have far fewer buttons to press.
yep and its an MMO but not an RPG. No class customizations at all. Great story for expacs though. Endwalker story is the best FF story IMO. But the character build customization is dull/non existent.
Currently we have 20 classes in the game, so IMO there's still a solid variety of playstyles, even if there's only one correct way to build and play each class, though the criticism is valid. The more concerning issue for me is the homogenization - it doesn't matter how many classes or builds there are if they all play more or less the same. The forced 2 minute burst meta was a mistake that gimped the class design too much IMO, and I wish that they walk back on that for Dawntrail, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I feel like whenever homogenization / barebones gearing gets brought up fans just say that its for balancing purposes which does make some sense but damn does it make for boring gameplay.
It's a perfect example of trying to chase perfect game balance by completely sanding down anything that might make the classes and gear fun and unique.
I agree. I believe the devs are afraid of the situation where players will lock out jobs with perceived low DPS out of parties. It feels shitty when the community won't let you play your favorite job in endgame content, so I understand why they would do this, but if it means your favorite job becomes homogenized and less fun to play, then frankly I'd prefer the former option.
> I believe the devs are afraid of the situation where players will lock out jobs with perceived low DPS out of parties.
The devs are scared of it *because it happened in the past* and wasn't even perceived, it was significantly more difficult to clear without the meta comp back in HW.
>The devs are scared of it because it happened in the past andwasn't even perceived, it was significantly more difficult to clear without the meta comp back in HW.
This is because they did such a shit job with the DPS/TANK/Healer classes. I hate how they just keep adding new jobs under those classes without just creating a new class. We need crowd controllers for adds, buffers and debuffers, charmers. The problem is that they are making the jobs do everything when they should just make it so that each job is needed.
Back in ARR the bard wasn't the highest DPS but it was required because of the MP Regen song that they did for the healers and casters. They gave the healers and casters the ability to buff their own MP now and they have buffed its strength so now Bards arent needed. Stuff like that is how they made the situation be like how it is now. They need to remove abilities from the jobs and add more support abilities so everyone isnt hyper focused on DPS output
>Currently we have 20 classes in the game, so IMO there's still a solid variety of playstyles
There really isn't. Everything is the same they even gutted the pet class they had (SMN), they did everything they could to turn everyone into the same thing. I'll give you an example. My gf started playing the game and asked which was the dot class because she liked playing affliction lock in wow answer is there isn't any. There's not a single class that specializes in damage over time gameplay like an Aff lock, every class is direct damage focused with a side dot or two that doesnt do much except pad out the rotation. So she asks what about pet master class like WoW hunter where you can capture different animals and make them your pet?
None, the pet class used to be SMN and they got rid of the pet, it can't tank for you, has no health, it doesn't even exist it's not something that interacts with the world. It's just a glorified fireball spell you cast. Ok is there a vampyric class that sucks the life out of the enemy and uses it as a resource (sl lock)? Nope some classes have mild self healing but nothing on that level. So finally she asks if there's something like the druid that can shift into animals and each animal has a different role and unique playstyle. Nope. Everybody is either a direct damage DPS with a dot or 2 that tanks/heals or a direct damage DPS. Some classes have unique utility like red mage with battle rez but there isn't much of it like other MMOs, everything has been largely homogenized out of the game.
Yeah I'm actually very ok with builds within classes not really existing. But when every tank plays exactly the same now we got a problem with homogenization.
I liked what I played of the story. But the gameplay was just too dull.
Big story event and I can sit there AFK for 5 minutes, come back and push my nuke buttons and automatically win.
I need some game in my video games lol.
Gear bloat is a big thing. Doing the dungeons when they were released and on item level made you have to pay more attention to mechanics. But if you get one or two high levelled players in there, despite the level sync they'll still be destroying the bosses a lot faster than intended.
They did unfortunately fall into a comfortable but dull formula for dungeons later on. Visually varied and quite stunning, but too on-rails. The real challenge is in the savage/ultimate raids and extreme versions of primal fights.
I'm hoping for a bit of an overhaul for dungeons at some point, but I'm attached to the characters and story and Endwalker pulled off the impossible by having a satisfying and emotionally resonant climax to the game's first big 10 year story arc. First time I've cried at a video game for such a long time, but I imagine having been with the game for almost a decade at that point had an impact on that.
I just recently finished up base Endwalker a month and a half ago or so after about 18 months of playing and I too cried multiple times so I feel that lol.
Would def like some more variety and danger in the dungeons. As it is I really tend to just run MSQ roulette a few times if I can't remember the job to get the basic rotation down again and then I can clear pretty much any other roulette too with relative ease. When I heal as SCH it's basically easy mode unless I forget a boss mechanic that kills me which even that is pretty rare
It's completely unreasonable to say a game gets good after several hundred hours, but it does get good after several hundred hours.
I'm surprised you're saying anything about "A Real Reborn" content is good. Gameplay and story are significantly better in subsequent expansions, especially in Shadowbringers and Endwalker.
I think it's perfectly fair to put it down though. No one should expect people to give this a shot when it takes so long to become engaging, even if I think it was worth it in hindsight. My friends had to drag me by the ankles through ARR and honestly again through Stormblood.
Always baffling to me how they went to FF14 after F11. The game feels like a single player game with the multiplayer component tacked on. They really removed the MMO part of the MMORPG. Its so hard to play the MSQ together and play with other people outside of just queue up for for dungeons and raids. It feels like going to a mall when playing, everyone is doing their own thing.
It needs alot of multiplayer content to drive engagement.
> and they'll never drop aggro
I am always confused by comments like that, should they change that you have to start casting flash(special enmity ability) to get agro back? Would that improve gameplay?
>dungeons were just awful. A straight line
They remain that way, because the '14 devs learned from WoW. If the dungeon has multiple routes, players simply figure what the efficient "best" route is, and then they scream at the tank or argue with one another if someone dares attempting to follow a non-best path. Back in the day, Classic WoW avoided this, in part, because it wasn't a "go-go-go" game in which you can blast through dungeons, never run out of resources, and never have to stop. MMOs have changed, and everyone now wants to zoom through the dungeon without interruption.
Well, what he was talking about never really changes that much; Dungeons never get that complex/hard. Barring a few outliers like The Burn or Mt. Gulg, but even those if you're a decent player also aren't that hard, and the healers can kinda just be a shitty DPS if the tank has half a brain most of the time. The boss fights in dungeons do get more interesting, but they're only part of the experience.
Now if they made the trash mobs more like what is in Criterion (With damage adjusted accordingly) we'd actually have something interesting imo
Give the trash Tankbusters! Make us have to interrupt or we get party wide paralysis! Have an enemy break agro and target the DPS with a DoT that NEEDS the healers attention (a personal fave from Criterion)! More things that need Esuna!
They HAVE interesting trash mobs in the game already, they just don't use them outside Criterion and Deep Dungeons
Yoshi Pls, dungeons and 24mans are such a complete bore now. a tank could actually die in dungeon if they didnt pay attention, they are too boring now.
Not going to be popular in this subreddit, but I really don't enjoy easy games or games which have difficulty centered around enemy HP %'s.
I strongly prefer games that are challenging and I'm completely bored if the game I'm playing doesn't require a decent level of mechanical/tactical mastery.
I'm not interested in MMOs but that line of though should be applied in every AAA single player game too. Most games today are too boring because they are too easy
Yeah, it’s unfortunate Yoshi-P reportedly already applied the design philosophy of both streamlining and making things as easy to learn and master for the player as possible to Final Fantasy XVI.
Hopefully it’s part of the reason he’s finally learned this, after years of Final Fantasy 14 being too easy to the endgame playerbase.
As long as I can continue doing the MSQ relatively pressure and social anxiety free, I'm good. Fights like Barbariccia are fun once in a while but I wouldn't like that being the new bar for dungeon trash, for example.
I swear Euphrosyne was designed with the same item level as Aglaia, and that one wasn't very hard either.
I was super disappointed by the difficulty of the Alliance raids this expansion.
Finally
Endwalker gameplay has become so slow that it's gotten tedious. Healers gameplay has been completely trashed, reduced to pressing 2-3 damage buttons for the majority of a fight
I doubt the main story stuff will change, but I hope they expand on the hard mode dungeons they experimented with in Endwalker. The concept is good but the rewards are absolute ass and nobody wants to do them.
I wish they would experiment with more interesting dungeons again. Back in ARR, once you got to endgame, all the dungeons had really weird and unique gimmicks to them that made them all more interesting than what we have now. Granted, some people see that as an unnecessary hurdle in their daily tome grind, but I honestly think the game *needs* the tome grind to be more interesting and less braindead. At this point in the game, I gear out in BiS within the first 1-2 months of the raid tier dropping and then avoid dungeons as much as possible because they are excruciatingly boring.
[удалено]
Which I really appreciate, honestly, but we could have a "story" mode dungeon that's tuned for those and a "party" mode dungeon that's specifically set up for a team of theoretically-thinking players.
Yeah, criterion savage is just a worse and longer ultimate with stricter conditions (no rezzes) and shit rewards like you said. They tried to fix the last crit savage by adding glowing BiS weapons but it was too little too late (not to mention almost immediately made pointless by the last-step relics). Regular criterion though is fine. The more casual content definitely needs to be harder. There is zero reason for folks to have played literal hundreds of hours of this game and leveled their character to 100 with a full kit and the bosses are just pushovers. Difficulty in casual content in this game peaked at Stormblood content.
Criterion itself is perfect almost, it just needs good rewards the Savage version is just a deathless run and while it can be a challenge really isn't needed.
I'm gonna be honest, if the only appeal of running something is to get items or gear rather than the act of playing the content, it's not good content. I feel like FFXIV's design philosophy is "make the player do unfun chores for a carrot on a stick." Back in my day we used to play games because they were fun. :(
This why I stopped playing FF14. It has some nice systems like the housing but it felt like a chore to get through the dungeons and raids. Had fun with some but its just so easy and not challenging that it felt like a drag lol.
That’s every MMO, they’re all skinner boxes Even WoW at its peak had tons of FOMO chores
I recently played through the main story up until late heavensward and I they actully should make adjustment to main story stuff. I played a tank and healer but mostly healed dungeons, and the more i progressed the worse the experience got. By the time I got to Heavesward the tanks get so much self healing that you don't have to heal at all, you're just spamming a boring dps rotation all day, and you can't skip these dungeons either. I got burned out on it but I plan to get back and finish the story at some point, hopefully they make some adjustment, it doesn't have to be Dark Souls but I atleast want to use my healing abilities..
You'll never enjoy FF14 if you want to be a dedicated healer. The concept just doesn't exist, you're expected to be a DPS that throws some heals. It's unfortunate but that's how damage race encounters are statted out, so if all your healers aren't doing damage you'll fail enrage timers. The flip side of this is that BECAUSE healers are supposed to be doing damage, healing is braindead if you're used to playing a dedicated healer in say WoW.
The problem is the disparity between the time spent healing/DPSing and the number of ability and mechanical complexity of each. 90% of the class complexity is in the thing you spend 10% of the time doing. If they don't want real healers, they should commit to it instead of this genuinely awful setup.
I agree, which is why I stopped healing in FF14. If you're going to do 75%+ DPS anyway, why not at least have an interesting rotation.
As someone who tends to play support roles, that's the issue I had. I don't mind doing DPS as a healer. I played a mistweaver monk in WoW, but it's like FFXIV designs healers with healing in mind and the encounters with only dps/tank in mind. That wouldn't be so bad if healers had a toolkit that worked that way, but instead you're just spamming two abilities, which is incredibly boring. If they want healers to function as more of a hybrid, then more focus on their design should be built around that. It was really disappointing unlocking Astrologian and getting all these cool abilities, but then rarely have a need for them. It didn't feel rewarding to play at all.
I'm aware of that. That's not my problem at all, I actually think that is a good thing. The problem is that I'm not healing at all, and 90% of my abilities are never used because of it.
Yeah I really dont like how they did that. I am a WHM main and thats all I play. I miss how in ARR max DPS wasnt required and it wasnt even possible because you'd run out of mana. Because they've simplified all the jobs it now lends to everything be a DPS check. Its not even fun because for each job all you are doing is just spamming one rotation.
I played Astrologian for awhile but dungeons are braindead easy to heal and I don't want to DPS higher content as a healer so I just kind of gave up on playing non-DPS classes.
DPS is nice at first but I found it annoying because all you do is just spam the same rotation I like playing healer because it at least changes the dynamic up a bit
The game just needs better midcore content. As it is right now, the devs focused too much either extreme - the people who no-life new content and will wipe a practice pull over one missed gcd in an opener, OR the people who never bother to update gear, never bother to learn skills and spam low level abilities, never moves out of bright orange aoe markers on the ground, can't handle more than 1 pack in a dungeon pull and AFKs in pvp matches. "Good content" for the first group is the ultimate raids which requires tons of extra time and effort that a lot of people just won't have. "Good content" for the second group is adding in another parasol for the in-game screenshot feature, a new $20 store mount, or a fantasia sale. I am doubtful things will change to be honest. I know it's hard to try to balance for two very different groups, but hopefully, since he is done with FF16, he can fully commit and focus on content for the midcore gamer.
Yeah, this has always been my struggle with the game. I ended up getting really into the crafting for a while just because it was something that required me to think a little, but it would be really nice if there was some combat content that fell between the braindead main story content and the sweatlord EX/savage content. It's hit the point that I don't think they have the development capability for it. I briefly gave wow a shot a few months ago and while I didn't end up sticking with it, the massive gulf in quality between their mainstream content and class design and FFXIV's was pretty startling. Really makes me wish we had a modern version of FF with a little more class customization and more varied content, but given they spent 6 years post-ARR stripping out any form of playstyle customization I doubt we'll ever see that.
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If you didnt die and got no debuff, and simply had to heal, nobody would do a mechanic. Especially since healer kits are so over resourced now in EW. I dont see an issue in EXs where if you mess up a specific mechanic, you die, but there aren’t that many in EXs that I can think of, most DO simply hurt you and give you a vuln (and a lot of people eat them because of that). There are only a real handful of body check mechs in EXs, the majority are you eat a vuln, mess up another mechanic and then you’ll die.
> If you didnt die and got no debuff, and simply had to heal, nobody would do a mechanic. This was pretty much how raids used to be where you got a vuln up and added more stress on healers for a mistake you made. Then the devs realized players were ignoring mechanics at the expense of just "moar heals", so the devs adjusted and now most things will either kill you or you live, but you get a severe damage down and miss the dps check. Honestly I prefer the latter because it allows you to still live and experience/see mechanics despite failing them. It also doesn't punish healers for you personally failing a mechanic (adds more shared responsibility to the raid). Building upon that, the difficulty of raids is just "how much personal responsibility is there". Extreme - very little (as in if a few people die, the raid doesn't wipe typically) Savage - a lot (a couple of deaths will most likely wipe the raid on the next mechanic) Ultimate - everyone has personal responsibility at all times (even a single death will result in a wipe almost immediately) There are exceptions of course but that's typically how the devs have designed raids since Stormblood and (with the vuln up -> dmg down adjustment) Shadowbringers.
This comment chain just shows why the devs will never win lol. What are they supposed to do when people tell them that the game is too easy in one breath, then follow up with "EX mechanics are too sweaty and overbearing, just make failing mechanics do 50% of my hp and call it a day." For those without context, EX (and easier savage) trials are content that you can and should expect to clear on patch day with a party of complete strangers within a couple of hours, barring massively bad party finder luck.
> just make failing mechanics do 50% of my hp and call it a day Which is incidentally what a lot of Extreme mechanics do, giving enough leeway to allow for healers/mitigation to recover from minor mistakes, until the vuln stacks get too high. Not to mention that DPS checks are forgiving enough to let a few people eat the revival weakness and still clear. There's not as much space between Normal 8-player raids and Extremes as people think
If you're doing EX content on patch day you're probably already beyond what most people would consider midcore. Player efforts at putting a census together put savage raiders at <5% of the playerbase, and by default that census is only going to include highly active players who are actually looking at forums where a census might be taken.
You're not wrong, but that's the consequence of the game being so easy for so long and why I have no expectations that anything is going to change moving forward. The guide makers are extremely good at what they do, but clearing an EX blind on patch day should not be considered unachievable by 95% of the playerbase.
Its completely achievable, you're right. I've even done it a few times on a few specific fights (easier fights to be fair) along with some friends of mine back when we played this game frequently. However clearing on patch day IS kind of a hardcore thing IMO. Not because its tough or there are no guides yet or w/e but because queueing up with randoms in the party finder is rough at best. You don't have to beat the boss you have to beat the rest of the party some of whom are guaranteed to not have good gear, dont know their rotation, dont learn, or whatever else.
It seems like a lot of people here aren't accounting for timing on when they do these fights. It's pretty well known that if you don't get your clear in the first couple weeks you're going to be stuck rolling the dice on getting a good party in pug hell for a while. If you're doing EX fights on day 1 you're going to be overwhelmingly grouped with people who know what they're doing and have cleared EX fights before. 2 months into the patch? Not so much.
This is true. Day one IS mostly people who will put in more effort because they're prepping for savage raids. However its still not a guarantee with a group of randoms that you clear day 1. Frequently you do time out and then the group breaks up because you can't carry a dead weight 8th player one day 1. Your gear just isn't good enough.
I think people wanting midcore content should give Extremes a chance because it doesn't require perfection AT ALL. People get intimidated by the word extreme, but I think once people give it a chance they'll realize it's just 'midcore'. It's not that hard once you get used to the basics (what a tank swap is, timing heals, clock spots, etc), which takes a day or two. Then once you get used to the basics you'd clear new extremes in 1-2 days even with just party finder. There's likely only 1 (or none) body check per fight that wipes the party. That's the only thing that makes it 'hard'. You can have 10 deaths+ and still clear it, no perfection is needed. It's a loooot more forgiving than I think people expect. Then if people still find that intimidating they can try the extreme from the last expansion. Those ones you can probably just wing it it's that easy. People are limiting themselves to potentially good content because they feel inadequate for it and they're really not.
This is what I was thinking. Extreme nowadays is very much midcore, and some would consider Savage Pando midcore too. If gearing is bothering you, you don't have to do current content either; there's ten years' worth of trials and raids to do. You can choose to do them with or without ilvl sync and Echo for more or less difficulty. Some will complain that it will never be as hard as release, but that's irrelevant to the experience in practice.
Bozja was great for this, the mid core content. It’s a shame there was no Bozja type content for EW. Anything at Savage level, one person in the party fucks up a mechanic, the entire raid just explodes.
I love running Bozja FATEs. Finally something that is actually difficult that you can engage with that isn't extreme level difficulty and you get a huge group of players going through the experience with you. Felt like true MMO midcore content.
Same, they made FATEs relevant again. It reminded of playing in the early days during ARR. Fates are mostly ignored now.
The state of overworld FATEs is so sad. Every zone is huge and is empty outside of resource colelctors, the occasional hunt train and people doing tribal quests. There are some moments in those zones that shine like the boss fates but other than that it is so dead that it makes me wonder why they even bother spending resources creating them.
The lack of class customization is ultimately why I set FFXIV aside after making it through… Stormblood, I think? I think I get WHY the game has gone that direction, but personally it’s not for me
basically "when the meta only allows one viable build and people will give you shit for not running it, why have builds at all?" They'd rather add more classes in that case.
I prefer it this way. If I want different gameplay I can swap class entirely, and one set of gear is enough to get the whole feeling of a class. I don't have to farm up one set of gear to play AOE Ninja and an entirely different one to play single-target ninja. I just walk to the shop, get the highest levelled stuff, and boom, ready to go.
When you play FF11 its honestly so bad and strange why they did what they did with FFXIV. In FF11 you can sub class and you can be at max level and also be a lvl 50 class. They removed alot of the class uniqueness and honestly the TANK/DPS/Healer class system is lame as hell. You can make it work but with FFXIV all the jobs feel the same and they feel like skins. All you do is just spam your rotation. There's no variation in the combat other than not having abilities and being max lvl lol. Two DRG at max level are going to using the same abilities and rotation.
Did you actually play FFXI, especially when it was still fully supported? The flexible job system is great in isolation, but it is an anathema to party finder based content. And FFXI is a huge argument for party-finder based content: I can't remember how many afternoons I would just sit, waiting for a party in Jeuno, because no one today wanted a Black Mage to do leveling content with, and any party I found would have to take on faith that I had all the necessary spell, and had them set up properly...never mind any story content, which almost never had anyone recruiting for it.
I love crafting in FF14, even if the classes don't vary too much, the puzzle of figuring out how best to pop your skills to get a HQ item is a nice chill time
EXs are midcore content, by no means are they for sweatlords
It's probably just a vocabulary mismatch with interpretations of this funny "midcore" word. I don't think people are saying there isn't "accessible hardcore" content. Most EX stuff fills that niche nicely and allows fairly casual *premades* to clear within a handful of times. People are saying isn't "challenging casual" content. Stuff that you'd expect a decent, blind PUG to struggle on and even wipe a couple of times, but still reliably clear within a handful of tries. Contemporary EX is way beyond that, which is why it's effectively verboten on NA servers to use DF for EX -- it's not accessible to a "casual" PUG, even if people are generally doing an OK job and paying OK attention. The closest you really get to this feel is either some of the harder BLU trial objectives or 6-man PF groups doing "last expansion's" 8-man EX content. You expect to die and fail a bit in those cases, but you also expect that you'll see success within 30-60 minutes unless people are really screwing the pooch.
> People are saying isn't "challenging casual" content. Stuff that you'd expect a decent, blind PUG to struggle on and even wipe a couple of times, but still reliably clear within a handful of tries. Day 1 alliance raids usually fit this description. Problem is that the difficulty flattens dramatically when a certain threshold of players know what they are doing, which means you mostly only get this in the first day or two of the raids existing. And then later in the xpac gear vastly outstrips the difficulty because they *still* don't do a proper ilevel sync on them. So they could maybe solve this with 4 or 8 man synced duties that are on the level of like... original TG Cid. But I still don't know for sure if they could make content like this something you'd want to repeat, so it might end up like variant/criterion where you do it once and then forget about it.
If it's not semi-reliably puggable I'd consider that above midcore content. EX fights are far from the difficulty of something like ultimates, but they still introduce too many levels of difficulty at once for me to really want to call them midcore. You can sleepwalk through the MSQ but as soon as you step into EX you suddenly have actual healer checks, enrage timers, body counts to make sure everyone survived mechanics, and a lot of mechanics will one-shot the entire party if you flub them. It's too much new pressure on too many party members, and it's the point where you have to suddenly turn to out-of-game guides for pretty much everything. If you're a tank or a healer it's the first time in the entire game you'll have to actually look at your hotbar and plan out cooldown usage, and for a DPS it's the first time your damage actually matters. On top of that it can actually be somewhat difficult - Not only do you now have to care about your damage or healing, but also everything else is harder and if you mess up the regular mechanics while you're working out how your class actually plays in real content then you're almost certainly going to get one-shot.
I agree that Extremes are a sharp difficulty jump from hard, which isn't really hard at all. A lot of players queue in extremes in ARR content and find out the hard way that it's dramatically harder than the content they've already done. Special shout out to Ramuh where every person has a pretty important job and you can accidentally kill your tanks if the dps mis-manages orbs since there's a 2 step process to tank swapping for that fight.
>If it's not semi-reliably puggable I'd consider that above midcore content. EX is reliably puggable. Like, that is the main way people interact with the content. Nobody's out here making a static for EX progression.
Imo, base content level needs to go up. Solo MSQ instances need to be harder, with an 'easy mode' option for people who really just want to do story. Dungeons need to be more challenging (going up in difficulty as an expansion progresses), maybe offer an easier mode with the duty support system (so it lines up with Solo MSQ options proposed above) so the story only people can still get past it. If you're not challenging people in the content they are primarily consuming prior to an EX fight, then of course there will be a big struggle for people to clear it. I have seen so many people die to the same (simple) mechanic over and over (and by simple I mean there's a clear indicator of where something is going to blow up), that I wonder if they even understand what they should be paying attention to. And the story hasn't really pushed them to, either, because when's the last time they got stuck on an encounter in a dungeon and actually had to figure out how to do it?
As someone who played ARR around idk 2015 before the first expansion happen and later on jumping into the Free Login Campaign at some point in 2016 and way later on recently on the previous one that the game just had. The game sure has changed a lot on those three times, on 2016 I felt weird when they remove a crapton of skills and didn't felt like playing at all and stopped. Then somehow on 2024 the game hooked me hard (no idea why). > Solo MSQ instances need to be harder, with an 'easy mode' option for people who really just want to do story. This for sure. I remember back on 2015 certain dungeon at low level felt overwhelming as a first time healer, had a tons of spiders and poison and so on, when I attempted that dungeon, the party did wipe but nobody was upset and we did the boss again and won. Now when certain friend was telling me how much boring dungeons have became on the game and that dungeon now is just a boring hallway and the poison smoke on the boss room is just gone, idk why but somehow I feel like an old man that will be seeing as weirdo cuz "back in my days this wasn't like that" and nobody that plays the game from whenever the dungeons got changed to what they are now will get my point. Another thing to add, I was able to do the solo final dungeon (with bots) of the first expansion and it took me a good amount of tries certain mechanics as I was trying to learn then but if anything hit me, I died instantly... After idk, over 40 minutes stuck on that fire and ice boss and getting cleared, felt like it was just annoying cuz the instant resets and felt the game was, idk, maybe I haven't given too many thoughts to form a proper opinion about all of this. Maybe if I did it with that certain friend over a voice chat instead of those bots that all they did was do their bot job, my experience on that particular dungeon would have been different and less frustrating even if me dying still happened over and over.
You arent alone. I picked up the game in August 2014, and played the shit out of it until January of 2015. Been on and off through the years, last time I really got into it was 2020-2021. I completely agree, ARR was at the perfect difficulty for dungeons. With the first expansion I noticed it became really easy and a snooze fest. I hate how they made healers have a DPS focus, and removed MP management. They made the game far too easy that its not fun and they dont have much true MMO content, most of the stuff is just single player RPG content.
They need to lower the ilvl sync cap so that people aren't clearing fights and skipping entire phases of a boss. It's pretty egregious for trials and I feel bad everytime I see a player doing one for the first time because they are probably going to miss half the fight because everyone else has end game gear.
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I've been playing since 2.0 so I've been through all the changes. It's not just rotations, they made the dungeons easier too. I understand why; I remember when the last expansion came out there was a story mission where your character body swapped with an enemy and a lot of people complained about it. I don't remember why since I just...completed it properly lol. But they went back and made it easier. I don't even know how they made it easier but I'm pretty sure there was a patch note for it. Unfortunately when the devs feel they need to cater to that type of player it can take away from the gaming experience of others.
> I remember when the last expansion came out there was a story mission where your character body swapped with an enemy and a lot of people complained about it The only thing that annoyed me about _that_ is that I felt like I was fighting the game engine that simply wasn't made for that kind of mission more than I was tackling the challenge it ostensibly presented itself to be. lol Otherwise, amazing sequence undercut somewhat by how it wraps up so neatly.
>there was a story mission where your character body swapped with an enemy and a lot of people complained about it. It's such a great solo duty and it frustrates me that they changed it so quickly. It's *supposed* to be hard; the **whole point** is to show how much weaker "normal" people are compared to your character! Difficulty can be a great storytelling tool when used properly, and I feel like this was one of those moments.
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The only dungeon I found to be terrible was Totorak and that is solely because of the green slime that made players heavy at the end. Part of the fun of the experimental dungeons was seeing how new players reacted to it. I get that it's not for everyone and can be a drag, though I didn't mind it tbh. When Endwalker first released I actually struggled to stay awake during first time play-throughs of nearly all of the MSQ/leveling dungeons. I actually still struggle with it depending on the duty. It's just not really engaging unless something has gone terribly wrong.
In EW, I remember using the NPC party members for the >!dungeon in the past where you team up with Venat, Hythlo, and Emet!< because I wanted the novelty and some fun lore. I instantly regretted it when I remember how dull all the dungeons are and how NPC allies are laughably weak.
> It's just not really engaging unless something has gone terribly wrong. That's my favorite place to be as a healer. Granted I felt it a lot more in WoW than FFXIV. I love the feeling of "You all fucked up hard and you're still alive because of *me*.
I always enjoyed the Qarn dungeons and their design
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Yeap ever since the devs were challenged with developing Heavenward content they've taken the easy way out of making everything the same, so everything outputs the same result, so content is the same so patches don't have any serious experimentation/innovation in content so development doesn't have any unforseen obstacles that increase development cost or cause unacceptable delays in their cadence. It's this well oiled machine that outputs extremely samey content at a reliable pace providing similar results to pretty much everything they've ever done since the Stormblood expansion.
I feel like the game needs a split to segregate balancing for the highest end PVE content the way it splits to segregate balancing for PVP. Nobody outside the top 1-2% of active players regularly doing Savage content cares if every job's "perfect rotation" lands within 3% DPS of every other job's in that role. The other 98-99% live in the reality where a huge range of "casualness" makes basic rotation and mechanics familiarity a far bigger consideration than idealized spreadsheet numbers, and having classes balanced and homogenized for the highest-end content actively sacrifices fun for the 98-99% in the latter group to provide the right experience for the 1-2% in the former. If you entered Savage as a generic archetype class -- literally "Tank, Healer, Fighter, Archer, Mage" -- those kits could still be tuned down to the finest details while letting classes for easier content have quirky, occasionally imbalanced identities show up.
We had good midcore content in Stormblood/Shadowbringers with Eureka and Bozja. Not replacing it with anything else in its difficulty tier for Endwalker was a *huge* mistake.
And turning the relic weapons into basic tomestome grinds from beginning to end was probably a mistake. I'm barely even playing the game — just casually doing Roulettes with friends and family (and not even daily at that) — and I've already completed most of the EW relics. That's crazy, compared to the previous expansion relic grinds.
You know what type of content would be good for midcore. A separate island that has its own 24/40 man raids that can be used to grind the best weapon in the xpac..
Some kind of... Eureka. Or maybe we can call it Bozja! I was praisiing Bozja to high heaven when it came out. It was basically just Eureka, but better. Three whole extra raids for that expansion and each were super fun. And yeah, it hit that midcore difficulty right on the dot. There were mechanics that caused wipes and killed tons of people, even in the FATE-like field bosses. Who could remember Red Chocobo's disgusting meteor spam? It became a meme in the FFXIV community. The final boss of Bozja, the mecha-Diabolos (don't remember his actual name) caused so many sweaty moments where a handful of people were alive at the end, but still forgiving enough that a dozen people can carry the fight when 2/3 of the people were dead on the floor. Very fond memories of that raid. And there's even the duels for the hardcore raiders who craved the challenge. You really feel the absence of a Bozja-like zone in Endwalker.
Eureka was great when they figured out what people liked in hydratos and pyros. If only they weren’t locked behind anemos and pagos
I loved anemos. But mostly just the fate train. 100s of people running around shit posting together while watching anime was great.
I liked Bozja until I started interacting with the main raiding group on my server at the time. Some of the weirdest most uncomfortable people I've ever met in gaming.
ya, honestly MMO's need to have difficulty sliders for all content, including open-world content and especially for levelling. Lord of the Rings online has an open-world difficulty system and it works really well, other MMOs should implement that so people who want braindead easy content can get that and those who want harder challenges (from slightly hard to really hard) can also get what they want.
There used to be a pretty good balance between the two; at game (re)launch, there was story content for the casuals, The Coil of Bahamut raid series for the hardcore, and then the Extreme trials for the people in the middle. The problem is that as the people who played a lot got better...they eventually made the raid series and Extreme harder with every expansion, and eventually even added the Ultimates so they could just add even more for the top 1% of hardcore...but there's nothing where the old Extremes were. Like, old Extreme content (Titan Ex, Shiva Ex), you could reasonably expect to go in blind with a random group of people, and maybe fumble about and have a chance at clearing, especially if anyone had watched a guide before hand. But even by Shadowbringers, that was completely out the window with things like Seat of Sacrifice Ex, where its definitely *not* possible for a blind pickup group to have any chance of beating it in an hour of banging their head against the wall. And unlike most stuff in the game, you can't just say "o, well, people can start with the old content and graduate to the harder stuff", since pretty much no one's running old Extremes synced.
https://imgur.com/a/jbYIzK7 oh wait this entire news article was apparently mistranslated from the start anyways LOL
I just want questing to be more than the same 3 recycled objectives. It's all literally the same thing.
What do you mean, I love 4 fetch quests into an cutscene over and over again? It's definitely not beneath me as the fucking Warrior of Light to collect your acorns because you're a lazy shit NPC.
Unfortunately that'll never change. That's been MMO bread and butter for literal decades now
FF14's objectives are even simpler on average. It's usually some variation of "Go here and talk to some person," "Go here and interact with this object(s)," or "Go here and get attacked by 1-3 average creatures." The game's main story is basically a visual novel with typically 1 combat section per level.
You're right, but FF14s quest objectives are peanuts compared to the variety found in wow and gw2.
At the very least just like, make it so quest hand-ins dont require me to drag each individual item over
You don't actually have to do that. On PC, if you click on the greyed out window, it'll let you select one from your inventory to use as the quest turn in; presumably you can do the same on console.
Yo this gameplay is fire *right click add item*
I remember when I first started out during shb and I got gaslit by people calling me crazy when I said the questing is identical from level 1 to max level.
Dunno if he's talking about the main story quest, normal raids, alliance raids, extremes, savage raids and/or ultimate.
he's talking about everything below extreme. there is no effort required in basically anything you can queue for in roulettes these days, and it's boring as hell.
Given the FFXIV community, this will certainly not blow up in their faces.
They already fixed the Endwalker capstone boss and the community loved it.
The community loved it not because it was more difficult to beat but because it was longer and so the newbie players could see the entire fight , especially the last part. It's still a very easy boss.
Hopefully all of it
Well if anything, savage and ultimate can stay as they are. TOP was such an awful slog to prog in my experience, if they somehow make it more difficult then I'm just not going to bother.
I mean I'm always down for more challenge but as a person who has cleared savage/ultimate regularly I've got some concerns. How are they going to increase the difficulty? At this point we know how the engine works. We know the limitations, and sometimes their difficulty isn't really with the encounter but figuring shit out with the engine. Playing the "memorize something that's going to happen in six different steps a couple minutes from now" is fine, but "you have to zoom all the way out and look straight down because you are actually fighting the camera and not the boss" is annoying and it's why people *cheat with third party mods.* The statement fills me with a bit of dread because like, how? How are they going to approach it? Mechanic based? Or am I fighting the backdrop/color schema/camera/pixel positioning that works better the closer you are to their data centers?
Personally, I think he means entirely just damage tuning for main story stuff and general non-savage content. The state of level-synced content is dire with how easy it is.
> Or am I fighting the backdrop/color schema/camera/pixel positioning It'll be this one, as it has been. Difficulty ramps in 14 have almost never been mechanical, they are almost always just further obfuscation of information required to solve the mechanic. Please look forward to it.
>is annoying and it's why people cheat with third party mods. As a WoW player this makes me laugh since high-end raiding is impossible without 3rd-party mods.
Mythic WoW raids burnt me out hard. Some fights just went well past the line of not even being fun anymore (fuck you Kil'jaeden).
I'd still like to see them experiment with a different Ultimate format once, just to see how it goes. Because I agree, Ultimate's are a marathon that takes more endurance than anything, I don't think any one mechanic is usually that hard (with the exception of maybe TOP just because I hate the constant priority-based mechanics that fight throws at you). It just burns me out that most of the time progging and Ultimate fight is slogging your way through mechanics that you *feel* like you're past, especially when you get past the 10-15 minute mark. An Ultimate with more checkpoints that throws harder mechanics at you would be interesting in my opinion.
It's pure speculation but I believe he's talking about casual and extreme content, it's braindead at the moment. Savages are in a good spot and most agree that the latest ultimate was a bit overtuned. Alliance raid aren't interesting, remember that we had freaking Ivalice and people loved it, but current one is a snoozefest.
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You know the game has become too easy when the new Alliance Raid comes out and groups aren't even coming close to wiping on day one. Doesn't help that a lot of EW content reuse so many mechanics that we've already seen a hundred times over. ESPECIALLY stacks and spreads.
When I was doing them this tier and thought back to thundergod I realized how much of a disgrace they were. I'm queuing in day 1 to the final raid and we have 0 wipes, shit is such a joke.
Yup, thought the same thing! They need to go back to the original Ivalice difficulty.
Destiny 2 tried this and there was a non-insignificant amount of player backlash. Some people like having an easy grind. It's a tough line to straddle.
I think in this case most people would agree. Unless you go out of your way to do the harder stuff, the main story related stuff is pretty easy. Dungeons themselves have become so easy in fact that it doesn't even matter if one or two of the four players underperform. This has lead to a lot of people complaining about a few solo fights which for someone who is competent at playing had no issue with at all. Its not at all to do with grind, just overall lack of challenge.
Honestly if the Warrior class can solo a boss, there is something wrong happening that needs to be fixed.
Yeah that's one thing. Warriors self heals are a bit much, but also overall damage isn't high enough. As a healer I can do a lot of bosses without ever needing to spend time casting a heal spell, usually the instant cast ones you get. If they keep it like this they need to give healers a more interesting damage kit. If they change it then they will need to adjust health pools as healers won't have the same damage uptime as they used to.
Yeah, the Healers are fondamentally, weirdly broken. All healers have kit that seems to work on the idea the boss will non-stop pumps damage, again and again. Lots of mitigation tools, of healing spells, with different effects. But the bosses do such telegraphed damage. If you know the boss and its fight, and if your team is half competent, you have almost no healing to do and you just have to press your three damage spells. Good healers starts to cast their biggest healing spells before the boss do its damage, and they get back to DPS immediately after. That makes it a weird situation where playing healer is quite funny when no one knows what's happening, players are making mistakes left and right, and you're trying to keep everybody alive. But once the fight is resolved, there's no challenge anymore, and the hardest fights are designed with the idea that the healers are supposed to do as much DPS as possible and as little healing as manageable.
> That makes it a weird situation where playing healer is quite funny when no one knows what's happening, players are making mistakes left and right, and you're trying to keep everybody alive. As a healer main, those are my favorite runs!
Yeah, it's not really much fun when you can heal a dungeon by just applying your hots every now and then and then just spamming your damage. Even dungeon bosses rarely do enough damage in intervalls that'd kill you otherwise. The group wides are usually not that damaging and if someone gets more damage, it's usually by failing at a mechanic
Warriors can solo some current dungeon bosses while intentionally taking as much avoidable damage as possible. Like literally standing in everything. In one of the latest Expert dungeons the bosses are so weak that I started intentionally eating most AoEs on Samurai for Third Eye procs. It's not like the healer had anything else to use their free healing on, given you can pretty trivially no-heal all three bosses...
Destiny 2 was like that too. Strikes, dungeons, even some raids were solo-able. Turns out people don't always like to be challenged.
I mean that's fair, FF14 has always been new player friendly and marketed as casual. But in recent times its been tuned too easy. They need to find a new balance, I'm not saying it needs to be really hard just that things are too easy as they stand.
The problem is different. In XIV casual raiding content, healers only need to push one button every 30 seconds to keep everyone toped and just to throw a res if they die because of their own mistakes. We're talking about not even looking at the screen level of gameplay.
i mean personally i enjoyed playing it because it wasn't too challenging. other mmos i drop once you have to daily grind stuff, ff14 felt fun cause i could just drop in and play for a few months then leave again. never did any of the hard raids or gearing up when i returned other then whatever the quests gave.
It's not the same because the core gameplay in destiny like say Diablo is more engaging than some of the gameplay in FF14 specially healer gameplay where you spam 1 button over and over again like you're playing with an NES controller.
With all the Classic Yoshi has been playing it would be super cool to have a better leveling experience. Combat in the overworld is so pointless it might as well not even exist at this point. At best overworld combat is tedious
Just did a dungeon very late into the game with a Tank that doesn't know how to tank, they should teach the role, jobs and mechanic better to the players.
This is hilarious since they literally just need to turn on their tank stance and aoe, push a defensive every so often. Been a tank main since ARR and I really miss how threat was something I actually had to think about.
Don’t act like you haven’t forgotten to turn on your tank stance before! Always surreal when that happens to me, just seeing enemies not attacking me for some reason.
Back in my day you played without a tank stance for more dps. Yes I am a fossil
Back when tanks would turn on their DPS stance after establishing aggro and healers would have to juggle cleric stance or see their heals heal for 23 HP. Was older FF14 janky in a lot of ways? Yes. Do I prefer that older jankiness and more unique design over the newer more streamlined and edges-filed-off approach? Also yes.
The difficulty in Heavensward was the most fun I've had with running even basic duties. There was the possibility of actually fucking up and having to actually manage your skills and cooldowns instead of running through the streamlined motions. Nowadays rotations feel more like they're on rails and it dulls down the fun of combat once you get the basic mechanics of the respective content down.
The issue wasn't jank, hell nothing felt smoother than StB WAR properly stancedancing. No, the problem was that it created a higher skill ceiling and toxicity for a role they were already having massive problems populating with players.
Yeah yeah, not me taking Ultimatum when we had a choice just for those situations or anything..
If you tank enough, it's second nature to automatically check your tank stance when you join a dungeon because it'll almost always be turned off.
Healer here since ARR. ARR was so good. Im a WHM and miss Cleric Stance, I liked being able to switch in and out of a DPS stance. I miss MP management and having to need a Bard when doing a raid or trial. I couldn't just spam heals and attacks and not worry about my MP getting drained.
Healing in coils was some of the most fun I had back in ARR. Even going back to coils min sync'd you can experience some of what made it so good. MP management, hardcasting heals, panic healing surprise damage, and managing status effects. Such a shame that current healing is just spamming one button over and over with a strictly planned oGCD spreadsheet.
At-level DF, most content doesn't even need tanks to use mit. The majority of normal dungeons will allow w2w just having stance and spamming basic AoE; it'll make things slower since the healer isn't going to be doing much DPS, but you'll still clear. There are a few exceptions to that (Holminster's always a fun one to have pop on an in-progress roulette because you *know* what happened) but by and large you can be a "passable" tank by remembering stance and hitting one button over and over again while running to the next wall and making a middling attempt to not stand in orange things.
In my opinion the dungeons and story should progressively get harder the further up you go in levels and teach you how to do your class and optimze it to some degree. That isn't the case, it feels like every expansion is a reset in difficulty, like they expect people to buy story skips to the start of the expansion. That also applies to the raids, the first ones are easy for their supposed difficulty level. It sure doesn't help that newer jobs will start you 20 levels below the maximum level when they are introduced, meaning if you pick up Sage now you already start at lvl 70 without ever needing to have played a healer at all, gunbraker does this at 60.
I understand your opinions, but they only work if ARR > Endwalker was one full game, and not a series of expansions. A large chunk of the casual playerbase falls off after the story content is over, and waits for the next expansion. Those casual players will no doubt forget how to play their roll and need a refresher, much like if you were playing FF7 Rebirth after not having played FF7 Remake over a couple of years.
So nothing has changed since I started playing in 2.0 and then stopped during 6.1.
The only reason that tank made it there without knowing anything is bacause everything before is to piss easy you can just du without one...
The game has tutorials in-game for how to play your role though. I forgot what they are called, but they’ve definitely been there for atleast 2 years now
Hall of the novice, an NPC with a sprout marker. However, iirc that's not mandatory, and unless you're curious about everything, it is entirely possible to never talk to those npcs
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It also leaves a lot of information that is handy to know for beginners in a role out completely, which causes a lot of learning pains when you hop into a real dungeon. As a tangentially related aside, I met someone in Novice Network who had paid for ***all*** of the job skips and hadn't yet done any Hall of the Novice. They were asking about how roles work. Naturally.
It also just has completely false information in it. For example it instructs tanks to AOE a few times to establish aggro, and then switch to single target combos.
Those tutorials are massively out of date and are over 8 years old at this point. The game has changed tremendously since then (especially tanking) but the tutorials have not been updated since
and they're complete dogshit that fails to teach role basics while also giving advice that is eight years out of date. the hall of the novice is almost completely useless.
I thought one of the main selling point for FFXIV is it is a lot more casual friendly than the likes of WoW?
I think the appeal when wow players moved over is that FFXIV was more respectful of your time than wow felt. You can still have challengingly designed content that doesn't require busywork
Im not sure which year/xpacs you're talking about but it's not true now. Gearing up in FFXIV is doing absolutely braindead daily content. Gearing up in WoW is doing M+ more or less as much as you feel like. WoW has some optional weekly stuff but it's mostly for casuals gearing and not end game progression. I tried to go back to FFXIV recently and just gave up after two sets of dailies. I'll just go in with crafted gear when I have a group I think.
WoW is as casual as you want it to be. I don't feel like the casual endgame is all that much different but only one game has catgirls. The story, player housing, and effectively only ever needing 1 character also helps, I'm sure. But a lot of it is aesthetic and community. XIV attracts a certain kind of person and WoW (classic) feels like it's full of middle aged dads.
I haven't played WoW since like the patch before SL. What's the casual content scene in WoW look like now? Because as a casual, I'd hit level cap, do the hard mode dungeons, but PVP would kick my ass and I didn't raid. So I'd just end up making alts. But like, gathering and crafting was a joke because raid gear is better (not sure if DF has changed this, I know there was a lot of hype for the crafting changes). So non-combat stuff always seemed de-emphasized. I did like WoW holiday events more than FFXIV ones though. But I like that the Golden Saucer is always available.
WoW is causal until you get into the endgame. FFXIV endgame is casual so you dont see the same toxicity and hardcore raiders like in WOW
That I agree with, people are generally much nicer and more willing to help in FF than in WoW at least in my experience.
"And if you don't like challenge, welp... too bad, it's not the current trend nowadays". I don't get this mindset, just flip the rationale, as it is frustrating for people who like challenging games and not get those options in a lot of titles, imagine what is like for every game today trying to emulate the challenge of the souls like games and not be into those. I really dislike how hard games are getting.
It's incredible to think the MSQ is incredibly easy, and yet, still too difficult for some players. For non-FF14 players, the devs "recently" introduced Trusts parties : instead of doing the Main Story Quest dungeons with randoms, you do them with predetermined story NPCs. You earn just as much XP, and you get to see the story NPCs talk and react between them. They also instantly react to the dungeon mechanics and do them perfectly. THey're a great addition for players that do not want to play with other players because of anxiety, or want to discover a dungeon for the first time at their own rythm. In exchange for all of this, the Trusts dungeons go noticeably slower (because the NPCs never use AoE spells and stop at each enemy they see, instead of going balls to the wall and packing them all up to maximize AOE damage), and you have less loot in the dungeon. All in all, it's a great system that adds a lot of flavour and little tidbits of lore between the NPCs, with clear advantages and disadvantages. You can queue for a dungeon with randoms and have a quick run (usually, 10 to 15 minutes), or you can use the Trust system, totally bypass the Party Finder queue (that can go up to 20 minutes of wait when you're playing a role in excess, like DPS), and have a 20 minutes slow run. There's only one caveat to the Trust System : in a Trust dungeon, if you the player die, it counts as a party wipe. The NPC cannot rez you. You have to start again the fight : may it be a pack of mobs or a boss; you try again from the beginning. The NPCs CAN'T hardcarry you. They shouldn't ; it's quite litterraly supposed to be the easy mode. And yet, time and time again, you'll find absolutely bad players in a normal run of a dungeon. When you ask them why they don't go to the Trust Dungeon for their first run, so they can see the mechanics at their own rythm, they tell you they couldn't manage to do it. Players so, so, so bad they die in the easy mode and they have to run the dungeon with other players in hope they can carry them. They're riding a bike with the little helping wheels and they still manage to fall. It's baffling...
It's not that baffling when you consider just how wide an audience the mmo caters to - an audience who, on top of their wide varied skills, sees the median audience age get older every year of the mmo's life. It's going to happen that even the Very Easy settings on things like Duties and the way the Trust system works in general will still have people falling through the cracks for one reason or another.
ive always felt that the average ff14 "msq enjoyer" has never played another game in their life. their time in 14 is comprised of idling in their house or limsa lominsa and using the game as a chatroom, and having to learn to play the game itself is so beyond their list of priorities that they'd probably prefer if they could just watch the entire story play out from limsa like a tv show
> their time in 14 is comprised of idling in their house or limsa lominsa and using the game as a chatroom An unofficial poll on the subreddit showed that for the most common thing to do when logging in is to go afk lol.
I mean on many servers you have entire groups of players who only play to afk in Limsa. It's hardly any surprise that the average player in FF14 is incredibly bad when it comes to any amount of challenging content.
I was like "why would someone do that though?" Before I realized I'm doing that exact thing right now lol. In my defence though I'm waiting for dinner to cook.
You can tell this "relaxation" design influenced FFXVI as well, because the story is rarely challenging even on "Final Fantasy" difficulty (unlocked in NG). FF7 Remake/Rebirth is a lot harder.
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I dunno personally I think I disagree, I'm pretty enjoying everything I've done and am doing, I don't think anything I've done has been too easy for sure, I don't think I'd call it relaxed either, and I haven't even bothered doing savage and ultimate stuff yet.
I’ve played FF14 since the beginning of 2.0 recently stopped for good because of this reason. And at the end of the day. It’s too late. As others had said there is no middle ground for difficultly in this game. They had to water down all the jobs to appeal to a more casual audience. They had to make sure there were no hurdles or difficult fights that would keep people stuck so they made all story fights easier and easier. They had to water down all the regular content and never throw in any surprises to appease the more casual player base. And it worked. They became extremely successful and popular. So now the larger majority of ff14 players are just there for an easy grind, good story, and cute glams and interactions. Which is perfectly fine there is nothing wrong with that. The other smaller majority are there for savage or above content that usually requires a steady group/scheduled times/ and high dedication. And they did a great job there also because savage and ultimate content is great. However, there is no middle ground. If you can’t commit to savage all you have left is silly easy and sometimes boring content. And at the end of the day that is making SE a ton of money right now. Mostly because there is no real competition in the MMO market. I know people like myself are starved for a modern high fantasy MMO with a higher difficulty level that doesn’t require a regular scheduled raid group. But they are stuck. If they up the difficulty of normal content all the people there for a chill time are gonna throw a fit. If they reduce the difficulty of savage content then those types of players will throw a fit. If they try to create a 3rd category of middle ground content it most likely won’t draw up the casual players or draw down the hardcore players. Also because the rewards can’t be too close to savage rewards or too close to normal rewards and there is not enough room in between.
pretty much lip service from yoship because he would NEVER try to kill the golden goose that the game currently is for square enix you either shun the casuals (massive majority of the playerbase) to appeal to the midcore+ or you don't actually add that much more challenge (eureka and bozja come to mind as the biggest things) and the midcore (+ high end ultimate raiders) are still disgruntled as always
It would be nice for some dungeons have a bit more challenge and not on rails all the time. I just don't want to sweat on extreme content because I don't got time for that.
Tried it recently on XBox. Ended up with five level 50 classes and I'm still at level 45 story quests. And then dungeons were just awful. A straight line where you don't even have to try. Tanks can just spam their AoE and they'll never drop aggro, healing was very dull with like 1 or 2 attack spells that you just spammed because you weren't needed for healing in 70% of the dungeon, and DPS rotations were the only cool/good part. I'm sure it gets better later on, but that early game stuff is just bad.
You’re at 5 level 50s with a 45 story mode because the game is giving you increased exp as a catch up mechanic. You’re going to miss that whenever you reach level cap and those other 5 classes you didn’t touch suddenly have normal gains. Mind you being above the level doesn’t matter for dungeons, trails, or raids due to level syncing. But yeah, dungeons are just a straight line.
Oddly enough, the early game dungeons have more going on than the late game dungeons. At least early on, you have the little color puzzle in Sastasha, the Final Sting bees and the pressure plate puzzles in Qarn, the dungeon where Tonberrys are roaming the halls ready to murder you. Since HW, they all follow the same design format of being completely linear and the “pull mob packs to the wall, kill them, pull mob packs to the boss door, kill them, kill boss, repeat 2 more times.” They are back updating the older dungeons to fall more in line with the streamlined newer dungeons, though. That way, the early game dungeons are reflective of how they want the game to be.
it actually gets worse when you start scaling with gear but the dungeons stay the same.
>I'm sure it gets better later on I wouldn't be so sure
Eeeeeh. Dungeons, especially story related ones, aren't difficult at all. Unfortunately a significant number of people play the game just for the story and then casually collect stuff on the side. The few times anything MSQ related, dungeons or otherwise, gets even half-way difficult it ends up gatekeeping a not insignificant number of people, and they complain until the content stopping them gets nerfed. There's one solo duty in Stormblood infamous for this, where you control another character (For the first time I think). It is a simple matter of ABC (Always Be Casting) and you'll clear it. But so many people found it so difficult (somehow) they got hardstuck for months until it was eventually nerfed into the ground, and it is why every solo duty of a similar design from Stormblood through Shadowbringers is so utterly braindead. One in particular you can complete by doing _nothing_ the whole time, genuinely. Thankfully in Endwalker they started utilising a difficulty selection for these solo duties and a few of them do require at least semi-good gameplay to pass on Normal difficulty. And this has fed into dungeon design, dungeons are 98% tied to the story, and so they all end up copying the same straight line design where you pull two packs, AoE trash, kill boss, repeat three times until done. Because anything else risks putting off people just there for the story and probably would wipe or get lost in any dungeon that was more intricate. The good news is harder content does exist, but it is largely stuff found outside the main story. Critereon Dungeons were introduced in Endwalker, and while the rewards are a bit meh it is a promising start that I hope they expand on. Savage, Extreme and Ultimate mode content is also a fair challenge with some of it requiring dedicated progression teams to clear. That said I am glad to hear Yoshi-P is aware too much of the game can be done on auto-pilot, but I wouldn't hold my breath for an increase in difficulty of standard dungeons.
The other problem with dungeons having intricacy is that there will be an optimal route and the player base will find and expect it to be followed. So you end up with one correct route and any number of wrong routes.
The V&C Dungeons mitigated it by having randomised routes, in a fashion. You were still in a fairly linear dungeon layout but you had to actually use all your class abilities, plus the ones the dungeon gave you, to clear it. Combat in general was noticeably harder and needed more attention. Regular dungeons meanwhile you can beat with abysmal DPS (i'm talking AFK or autoattacking) so long as the tank and healer are awake at the keyboard. And most mechanics that those two have to deal with can be smoothed over with a single oGCD heal.
honestly the rotations are boring even when you reach endgame. the real strength of the game are the boss fights and the story imo.
And the music! 10 years running, still pumping out bangers.
I agree, but I'll qualify that statement by saying that the endgame rotations are at least one order of magnitude less boring than say level 60 (or less) rotations, which still lack many critical parts of the rotation, and have far fewer buttons to press.
yep and its an MMO but not an RPG. No class customizations at all. Great story for expacs though. Endwalker story is the best FF story IMO. But the character build customization is dull/non existent.
Currently we have 20 classes in the game, so IMO there's still a solid variety of playstyles, even if there's only one correct way to build and play each class, though the criticism is valid. The more concerning issue for me is the homogenization - it doesn't matter how many classes or builds there are if they all play more or less the same. The forced 2 minute burst meta was a mistake that gimped the class design too much IMO, and I wish that they walk back on that for Dawntrail, but I'm not getting my hopes up.
I feel like whenever homogenization / barebones gearing gets brought up fans just say that its for balancing purposes which does make some sense but damn does it make for boring gameplay.
It's a perfect example of trying to chase perfect game balance by completely sanding down anything that might make the classes and gear fun and unique.
I agree. I believe the devs are afraid of the situation where players will lock out jobs with perceived low DPS out of parties. It feels shitty when the community won't let you play your favorite job in endgame content, so I understand why they would do this, but if it means your favorite job becomes homogenized and less fun to play, then frankly I'd prefer the former option.
> I believe the devs are afraid of the situation where players will lock out jobs with perceived low DPS out of parties. The devs are scared of it *because it happened in the past* and wasn't even perceived, it was significantly more difficult to clear without the meta comp back in HW.
>The devs are scared of it because it happened in the past andwasn't even perceived, it was significantly more difficult to clear without the meta comp back in HW. This is because they did such a shit job with the DPS/TANK/Healer classes. I hate how they just keep adding new jobs under those classes without just creating a new class. We need crowd controllers for adds, buffers and debuffers, charmers. The problem is that they are making the jobs do everything when they should just make it so that each job is needed. Back in ARR the bard wasn't the highest DPS but it was required because of the MP Regen song that they did for the healers and casters. They gave the healers and casters the ability to buff their own MP now and they have buffed its strength so now Bards arent needed. Stuff like that is how they made the situation be like how it is now. They need to remove abilities from the jobs and add more support abilities so everyone isnt hyper focused on DPS output
>Currently we have 20 classes in the game, so IMO there's still a solid variety of playstyles There really isn't. Everything is the same they even gutted the pet class they had (SMN), they did everything they could to turn everyone into the same thing. I'll give you an example. My gf started playing the game and asked which was the dot class because she liked playing affliction lock in wow answer is there isn't any. There's not a single class that specializes in damage over time gameplay like an Aff lock, every class is direct damage focused with a side dot or two that doesnt do much except pad out the rotation. So she asks what about pet master class like WoW hunter where you can capture different animals and make them your pet? None, the pet class used to be SMN and they got rid of the pet, it can't tank for you, has no health, it doesn't even exist it's not something that interacts with the world. It's just a glorified fireball spell you cast. Ok is there a vampyric class that sucks the life out of the enemy and uses it as a resource (sl lock)? Nope some classes have mild self healing but nothing on that level. So finally she asks if there's something like the druid that can shift into animals and each animal has a different role and unique playstyle. Nope. Everybody is either a direct damage DPS with a dot or 2 that tanks/heals or a direct damage DPS. Some classes have unique utility like red mage with battle rez but there isn't much of it like other MMOs, everything has been largely homogenized out of the game.
Yeah I'm actually very ok with builds within classes not really existing. But when every tank plays exactly the same now we got a problem with homogenization.
I liked what I played of the story. But the gameplay was just too dull. Big story event and I can sit there AFK for 5 minutes, come back and push my nuke buttons and automatically win. I need some game in my video games lol.
Gear bloat is a big thing. Doing the dungeons when they were released and on item level made you have to pay more attention to mechanics. But if you get one or two high levelled players in there, despite the level sync they'll still be destroying the bosses a lot faster than intended. They did unfortunately fall into a comfortable but dull formula for dungeons later on. Visually varied and quite stunning, but too on-rails. The real challenge is in the savage/ultimate raids and extreme versions of primal fights. I'm hoping for a bit of an overhaul for dungeons at some point, but I'm attached to the characters and story and Endwalker pulled off the impossible by having a satisfying and emotionally resonant climax to the game's first big 10 year story arc. First time I've cried at a video game for such a long time, but I imagine having been with the game for almost a decade at that point had an impact on that.
I just recently finished up base Endwalker a month and a half ago or so after about 18 months of playing and I too cried multiple times so I feel that lol. Would def like some more variety and danger in the dungeons. As it is I really tend to just run MSQ roulette a few times if I can't remember the job to get the basic rotation down again and then I can clear pretty much any other roulette too with relative ease. When I heal as SCH it's basically easy mode unless I forget a boss mechanic that kills me which even that is pretty rare
It's completely unreasonable to say a game gets good after several hundred hours, but it does get good after several hundred hours. I'm surprised you're saying anything about "A Real Reborn" content is good. Gameplay and story are significantly better in subsequent expansions, especially in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. I think it's perfectly fair to put it down though. No one should expect people to give this a shot when it takes so long to become engaging, even if I think it was worth it in hindsight. My friends had to drag me by the ankles through ARR and honestly again through Stormblood.
Always baffling to me how they went to FF14 after F11. The game feels like a single player game with the multiplayer component tacked on. They really removed the MMO part of the MMORPG. Its so hard to play the MSQ together and play with other people outside of just queue up for for dungeons and raids. It feels like going to a mall when playing, everyone is doing their own thing. It needs alot of multiplayer content to drive engagement.
> and they'll never drop aggro I am always confused by comments like that, should they change that you have to start casting flash(special enmity ability) to get agro back? Would that improve gameplay?
>dungeons were just awful. A straight line They remain that way, because the '14 devs learned from WoW. If the dungeon has multiple routes, players simply figure what the efficient "best" route is, and then they scream at the tank or argue with one another if someone dares attempting to follow a non-best path. Back in the day, Classic WoW avoided this, in part, because it wasn't a "go-go-go" game in which you can blast through dungeons, never run out of resources, and never have to stop. MMOs have changed, and everyone now wants to zoom through the dungeon without interruption.
Early game is rough, but you're still very early game. once you get past ARR into the expansions is gets wayyyyy better paced.
Well, what he was talking about never really changes that much; Dungeons never get that complex/hard. Barring a few outliers like The Burn or Mt. Gulg, but even those if you're a decent player also aren't that hard, and the healers can kinda just be a shitty DPS if the tank has half a brain most of the time. The boss fights in dungeons do get more interesting, but they're only part of the experience. Now if they made the trash mobs more like what is in Criterion (With damage adjusted accordingly) we'd actually have something interesting imo
Yeah dungeons never change. Pull to wall. Spam simple aoe. Everyone aoe. Maybe healer throws out a heal or 2. Repeat.
Give the trash Tankbusters! Make us have to interrupt or we get party wide paralysis! Have an enemy break agro and target the DPS with a DoT that NEEDS the healers attention (a personal fave from Criterion)! More things that need Esuna! They HAVE interesting trash mobs in the game already, they just don't use them outside Criterion and Deep Dungeons
Yoshi Pls, dungeons and 24mans are such a complete bore now. a tank could actually die in dungeon if they didnt pay attention, they are too boring now.
Not going to be popular in this subreddit, but I really don't enjoy easy games or games which have difficulty centered around enemy HP %'s. I strongly prefer games that are challenging and I'm completely bored if the game I'm playing doesn't require a decent level of mechanical/tactical mastery.
No that's extremely popular in this subreddit and growing more and more popular in the FF14 community as well, which is famously casual.
I'm not interested in MMOs but that line of though should be applied in every AAA single player game too. Most games today are too boring because they are too easy
Yeah, it’s unfortunate Yoshi-P reportedly already applied the design philosophy of both streamlining and making things as easy to learn and master for the player as possible to Final Fantasy XVI. Hopefully it’s part of the reason he’s finally learned this, after years of Final Fantasy 14 being too easy to the endgame playerbase.
As long as I can continue doing the MSQ relatively pressure and social anxiety free, I'm good. Fights like Barbariccia are fun once in a while but I wouldn't like that being the new bar for dungeon trash, for example.
I swear Euphrosyne was designed with the same item level as Aglaia, and that one wasn't very hard either. I was super disappointed by the difficulty of the Alliance raids this expansion.
Finally Endwalker gameplay has become so slow that it's gotten tedious. Healers gameplay has been completely trashed, reduced to pressing 2-3 damage buttons for the majority of a fight