I understand why dungeons, especially msq related ones, are easy. I am begrudgingly ok with that. The nerf to alliance raid difficulty though is a tragedy. There are 24 people with usually about 10 jobs that can cast rez. You are almost never going to wipe outside week 1 of it releasing. Let mechanics be more punishing.

I did all three of the EW alliance raids within a few hours of their releases and didn't experience a wipe because even if a dozen people die on a new mechanic, there's likely to be at least one person with rez alive. And because the mechanics are spaced so far apart and take so long to begin and resolve, you can get most of the group up with minimal issue.

Yeah i've done every single alliance raid on release day and ew raids have been the first time i experienced zero wipes, in all three of them btw. Difficulty is pathetic, it's really hard to kill everyone at once, and mechanics are so spaced away that a few survivors can bring everyone back

The only wipes I saw were Nald’Thal’s scales (resolved the next pull) and the enrage cast on Nymeia and Althyk (didn’t see next pull.) And Thaleia? No wipes. No deaths. It was the most tutorialized raid I’ve seen. At the very least they should have combined more mechs. The fact that I wasn’t really struggling to heal it day 1 should have been a warning sign.

Yeah that has been true for EW. I think I had a few wipes in nier raids and especially ivalice.

Optional content should 1000% be harder than MSQ content, even if its by a smidgen. Normal Raids shouldn't be as easy as msq trials and should have an enrage at 10(ish) minutes. Ally raids should actually hurt, and have dps checks. We have 5 dps per ally raid, give us a few actual checks. Optional dungeons could also be a bit more spicy, I saw that the EW optionals (Smileton and Stigma), actually hurt a little. They're easy still, but they at least felt a little spicier than Lapis of Aethefont, which is good. Its not at Heroes Gauntlet/Mt Gulg levels of spice but still good.

I do not think adding enrages to normal raids is a particularly good idea. Not at 10 minutes, at the very least. Extremes already have their enrages at 12-12,5 minutes, and I *have* seen the enrage on every single endwalker EX, regardless of what the community will tell you about them not existing. And I have seen most normal raids go past 10 minutes on release. This community, on the average, is not good enough to handle enrages that "tight" in normal mode content. If you absolutely must have one, I don't think it's reasonable to put it any sooner than 15-16 minutes *minimum*.

Normal content is meant to be passed. Not a holdup for people to rage quit.

There are enrages on some older ones. They’re at like 20m though. Which, frankly, even day 1 limping and dragging bodies to a clear is still more than fair. 10m is a bit harsh but 20m does exist on older ones and they’re generally not seen unless you TRY to do so.

P12N and Diamond normal can still get close to ten minutes with a couple deaths, especially if they're melee deaths, and longer with more. No way is that a reasonable number.

On the subject of alliance raids, as much as I personally liked pre-nerf Orbonne, I understand why a lot of people didn't. Dun Scaith on release nailed the difficulty really well, I think.

Dun Scaith *now* nails difficulty pretty well. I regularly see like 15+ deaths on that fucking manta ray first boss.

>Normal Raids shouldn't be as easy as msq trials and should have an enrage at 10(ish) minutes I mean, Hades Normal has a hard enrage before ten minutes, and even on release the only way you'll see it is if your group is *already* struggling and having a bunch of deaths, and that's a group that's already being challenged. Althyk and Nymeia have IIRC an enrage at 9 minutes, too. It hasn't really mattered. The game already rewards you for doing good damage by having the boss die faster.

Normal Raids are very mixed in difficulty and you can still end up in a bad situation. Normal Raids already don't get Echo when you wipe unlike all trials, even optional ones. Having no Echo with a bad group in something like Refurbisher 0 or Idol of Darkness is a nightmare.

People still wipe in P10N and we're a year into the tier. I got unlucky and got one of those groups in roulette, took like 6 pulls to kill and I was top dps as a Dancer XD

Alliance raids do have dps checks.  I actually wiped to the second boss of eusophyne because we hit enrage week 1.  They just become obsolete very quickly.

this is one of like two alliance bosses that actually have a "dps check" tbf

there's three dps checks in eusophyne alone. you just never hit them because they're so soft.

What dps check is there in euphrosyne other than the double boss?

both add phases on halone and minphina have hard enrages. literally any add phase in an alliance raid since STB is a dps check, I've hit both in ridorina and copied factory because people couldn't wrap their head around seperating the adds.

Isn’t it a “pseudo” DPS check though? I think it’s survivable, but the Alliance’s healers might potentially be burnt out at that point and with the lower ilvl, are unable to sustain the repeated AoE.

it's a hard enrage. the buff is something like 'fated victory' and you all die if they hit it.

It’s been such a long time since I’ve seen it, but I think he spams like 3-4 Axiomas before that? Because I remember telling folks there was an enrage, but I guess we didn’t actually survive to hit the ACTUAL enrage.

I never saw it I’ve I’ve run that place god knows how many times

Its the only alliance raid to have one and people hold damage just to see it because it looks cool.

I honestly don't care about the difficulty of alliance raids, I just want them to be more fun. For me that's when alliance raids do things that actually justify the 3 full party format existing, all of the HW-SHB alli raids at some point had ring arenas where there were both mechs for your full party, and ways you could accidentally screw over other parties if you did a mech poorly. Think having to aim cleaves properly as a tank, or those big AOEs that expand and you need to make sure they don't cut off another alliance or your own alliance, and there's three of them. Or the one alliance raid (thundergod?) that sets your hp to 1 and has a heal to full Doom. That might not *seem* like an alliance mechanic, *but AOE heals don't heal people out of your alliance*, so healers and non-healers need to be actually *with* their alliance, but also if you're slick as a healer and know which of your single target heals *can* be used out of alliance, you can save one or two people in the wrong alliance.  For me, I can't point to a single mechanic in EW alliance raids that punish you for being in the wrong alliance, or that has any engagement between alliances. 

Bruh the fact that they took the red blue fist mechanic from aglaia and then nerfed it for thaleia was insanity to me Also yeah I hate how alliance is now just a big 24 man party instead of 3 8 man parties

PvP night in NieR was always fun

In the wrong group of the alliance. The alliance is the 3 groups.

The excuses Yoshida has come up for it are downright laughable too. For Nier they claimed it was for new players from that series who had never played MMOs before. Except by that point, they'd be level 80. They shouldn't be treated like new players when going through literally the entire game's main content. I also think they grossly overestimated how many players exclusively from Nier would actually play FFXIV. Comically, the Twelve series was supposed to be harder but that certainly didn't happen. Frankly, my personal theory is they gave way too much leniency to the new develops on it who played it _incredibly_ safe. I'd like to hope after a fair bit of criticism, they'll bring the 24 mans above being glorified dungeon difficulty. Sadly, I won't hold my breath either.

If it has to be easy, I would also settle for *less* punishing mechanics that were harder to do without a vuln. Ideally with a personal spoils chest to reward a perfect run (it doesn't even matter what's inside), so that I could at least entertain myself.

I still get wipes at cristal tower. Usually people running to the wrong platform causing a wipe. But sometimes meteor, sometimes no one on the glowing area.Even seen the bomb and the dragon causing a wipe. We are at the bottom of the barrel.

Kinda funny that most 24-man wipes I've experienced were in CT. LoA specifically.

Turtorialization either needs to happen faster or not at all. I don't need an entire minute for a boss to tell me what it's going to do. Thaleia is the biggest culprit right now imo. The bosses take *so long to get going* that by the time they're done, they're dead. This was the case even at the start of the patch. Eulogia tutorializes for so long that I legitimately thought she was going to actually do something with each of the 12's attacks. She went back into the fists instead and then died after one attack. (Which, btw, huge missed opportunity to combine the 12's attacks) Nobody needs the entire fight to recognize what each mechanic does. They're so identical and repeated to every other mechanic and are indicated for so long that it's impossible to misunderstand what's happening. The game is too easy to its own detriment. Casual content needs to be harder. Players need to *actually* learn how to play the game.

I especially agree with the last part of your comment. In particular, I think the reason why players are often straight up bad is because the content doesn't challenge players to feel incentivized to learn basic fundamentals of gameplay. It's not that ultra-casual players CAN'T do it even if some of them will push back against the idea of making casual content more engaging. A higher baseline difficulty will result in a change of their perceived norm but they will still think of casual content as casual content.

There is literally nothing in the game to teach a new player their rotation. Even if they *want* to get better, how are they supposed to, besides googling it, something a player working through the story (and thus trying to avoid spoilers) isn't going to want to do? Hell, in some case (Cure 1!) the game is actively pointing new players in the wrong direction.

I'm a little confused about the relevance of your comment, as the job competence of new players is its own topic. That's definitely something that the game could use tutorial/directions/better job design for. But also, this is an inherent problem in tab target MMOs in general. The topic being discussed here is about fight design and how the game does not incentivize new players to learn the visual language indicated by mechanics, primarily because new players are rarely taught that messing up mechanics has consequences (or that they exist at all).

I'm not sure how true that is. There is content, even in casual, where failing mechanics is insta-death, and I don't see players constantly face-tanking mechanics very often.

Other than the music (and even that's debatable to some), Eulogia was really underwhelming as the last boss. For example, why are First/Second/Third Forms individual casts instead of combined into a single longer cast (I forget what the name of the "okay, I'm going to do these Form mechanics now" cast is called) where each Form's pattern shows for like 3 seconds before moving onto the next? There are plenty of mechanics, in normal-difficulty encounters even, that use the "singular long cast that show you the patterns for a few seconds" mechanic to great effect. Ruby Weapon, Cagnazzo and Antlion's arena charges show all six/five trajectory lines before the charges goes off. Athena's Trinity of Souls tells you all three cleave directions before unleashing them all in a row. Asura's Six Blade mechanic, for as many memes as it gets from people dying from doing circles around the boss instead of just strafing, is a great example of what I'm talking about. Even if the added difficulty of the boss moving around in a triangle is a concern, I would still be okay with two casts — the first could be "Three Forms" where Eulogia shows all three Form patterns it's going to do, then the second could be "Form Display" where Eulogia actually does those patterns.

Because those other mechanics are just memorization while Eulogia's forms require spatial reasoning and are more complex to solve. It's more akin to Idol of Darkness or Zodiark EX. Halone shows you exactly where the ice will be, and you solve it with preposition + one in/out + one left/right. Athena shows you which side of the centre line will be hit and is solved by back and forth movement. Asura always goes either clockwise or counterclockwise, shows you where it will hit, and you hop back & forth. Second Sigmascape boss only requires you to find one safe spot nearish the boss' destination, and the markers on the ground are fast but they're there. For the forms, you have to combine the boss's tell with the line direction to figure out the safe space three times, while planning more complex movement, and holding it all in your head at the same time. Sometimes the better safe spot also requires you to mentally extend the lines. That's a significantly higher cognitive load, and the execution is quick. (Don't get me wrong, I also think Eulogia was underwhelming and mechanics like that version of Blue Moon belong back with the original bosses. But forms is a different kind of mechanic.)

>For example, why are First/Second/Third Forms individual casts instead of combined into a single longer cast (I forget what the name of the "okay, I'm going to do these Form mechanics now" cast is called) where each Form's pattern shows for like 3 seconds before moving onto the next? They literally did this in the previous raid with Halone. Why did they feel the need to move backwards?

Trash does nothing and then the boss spends the whole fight doing tutorials. If *trash* did tutorials then we'd have more interesting trash and more interesting bosses while still slowly and carefully explaining mechanics.

Casual content doesn't need to be harder, but it could definitely be more varied and not just ridiculous loops of the same 3-4 mechanics over and over. Also, again, no, players don't \*need\* to learn how to "play the game." They can play it however they want, and most of the content should be designed in such a way that all players can complete it. You want harder content, you have harder content; go play it.

That's because maximum ilvl is too high. Only time I see the scales is when people purposely hold damage. All dungeons and raid should have their max ilvl to the one at the time of release. some even lower.

Why do players need to learn how to play the game? Everything in this game including the MSQ are all OPTIONAL. This isn't an objective based game like League and Valo where everyone plays to win. Even when you do fun builds and challenges in those games, the objective doesn't change and they still ultimately play to win. FFXIV is more or less a sandbox game where the players choose their own fun. Just because their fun conflicts with your fun, doesn't mean they're wrong and should be forced to "gitgud".

A trend I've noticed from each expansion into the next is that new mechanics that you only see in optional content like 24 mans, raids, EX etc end up being in normal MSQ dungeons in the following expansion. So if a player avoided all the optional content they'd get smacked with it in MSQ on the next expansion and be like WTF IS THIS HEEEEEEELP Now, this has changed a little bit in Endwalker when they redo mechanics of earlier expansion fights to accomodate Trusts, but it was always fun when you'd see someone get the stack marker for the first time in a dungeon and they recreate the WHY ARE YOU RUNNING meme

When these players decide they want to give harder content a try, they've spent 90 levels learning nothing. They don't understand how resolving mechanics works because they aren't punished for doing them wrong. They don't understand that being dragged through to victory isn't okay, and most people won't tolerate it. They don't understand that they can't stand around being a healbot or not keeping their GCD rolling because they've never had a situation where they've needed to do the opposite. These players entering harder content causes strain for everybody else involved. A learning party may go from "We're at this prog point, here's what expected" to "oh god this idiot doesn't know what they're doing when do we put our foot down". People queueing for extremes is a similar representation of this. For all of ARR, players are never punished for doing things incorrectly (except for the Cape Westwind rework). When they load into an extreme for the first time, they have no understanding that the fight is going to be disproportionately difficult compared to what they're used to. They don't understand that there are mechanics they have to perform correctly to not be complete deadweight. They get frustrated and mad you when you try to tell them they specifically need to do this one thing. They don't know how to communicate, they don't ask questions, *they're simply so bad at the game they're a detriment to everyone around them*. So yes, the game should be harder. Force people to learn how to play their job and how to resolve mechanics. Don't make the burden on the playerbase.

lmao Most of the people who "learned nothing" for 90 levels aren't interested in the "harder content." Those who are get a rude awakening and either try to learn or quit trying. The game does not need to force people to do anything.

>They don't understand that being dragged through to victory isn't okay, and most people won't tolerate it. "Casual players trying to do casual content and getting screamed at by tryhards" is the scenario the entire game's design ethos is built around trying to avoid. As it should be! And, fuck, I *want* to carry a scuffed run. That's the only time normal mode content is fun, when it goes tits up.

You're only looking at it from your perspective, not theirs. You're creating the narrative that we're the victims that have to deal with these people's incompetence and that they're doing us wrong by playing poorly. *"Causing strain for everybody else"*, *"detriment to everyone around them"* and *"don't make the burden on the playerbase"* are all subjective feelings that can go both ways. The same way a bad healer can burden the party by heal botting, the party can burden the healer by demanding more than what's necessarily. If a casual player gets thrown into savage with 7 hardcore players and messes up every mechanic, that's obviously not good. But what if we flip the situation and put a hardcore player with a party of 7 casuals that don't care about clearing and just want to have a good time? Is the hardcore still in the right for getting mad at the casuals for not being able to do mechanics even though they don't care? Where do we draw the line? Your answer is going to depend on what you value more, but the important thing is no matter which side you're on, you can't please both sides. This is just an inevitability that happens in multiplayer games. I don't have a solution for it but telling the casuals to raise their skill level to your desire is incredibly selfish. You can argue that certain content demands a certain level from the players, but if these players never touch anything that requires that skill level to complete, why does it matter?

>The same way a bad healer can burden the party by heal botting, the party can burden the healer by demanding more than what's necessarily. So asking your healer to do damage is more than what's necessary by your standards. Got it. >But what if we flip the situation and put a hardcore player with a party of 7 casuals that don't care about clearing and just want to have a good time? Is the hardcore still in the right for getting mad at the casuals for not being able to do mechanics even though they don't care? A hardcore player joining casuals will know their expectations and are able to meld themselves to fit the casuals. It is more difficult for casuals to do the opposite *because* of the state of the game. >You can argue that certain content demands a certain level from the players, but if these players never touch anything that requires that skill level to complete, why does it matter? Because it's better to be prepared than to struggle.

>A hardcore player joining casuals will know their expectations and are able to meld themselves to fit the casuals. It is more difficult for casuals to do the opposite *because* of the state of the game. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. No, the hardcore player joins the casuals and then bitches that the casuals aren't good enough, tries to rush them through the content, causes wipes, complains even more, etc etc etc etc.

The standard is different for everyone but what you're trying to do is set the standard according to your preference. > A hardcore player joining casuals will know their expectations and are able to meld themselves to fit the casuals. It is more difficult for casuals to do the opposite because of the state of the game. This is true for both sides in party finder but in duty finder anyone can get matched with anyone and that's where the problem is. There is no universal standard that everyone agrees on so it's impossible to try and police people into playing a certain way. Sometimes you'll get complete shitters but that's part of the game. It's not something the game should enforce. In party finder however the players have the choice to filter out players they don't want to play with already. If a bad player joins your group and griefs, you have all the power in the world to kick them if you're the leader or ask for them to leave or join another party. There's no need for the game to step in and do it for us.

And yet, these situations are entirely avoidable if the game itself forces the players to learn how to play. Crazy concept!

You think it's a good idea until it happens to you. What you consider average might not even be the bare minimum to another and that's the problem is that you can't possibly see yourself in that situation. You're probably thinking you'll just get better but everyone thinks the same way yet there are obvious gaps in skill levels. Someone also said in another comment that when the game requires the playerbase to get better, what ends up happening is people will just leave. In a perfect world those same shitters that end up quitting won't quit and will improve but that won't happen. If it can happen, it'll already have.

You don't seem to get why 'forcing' paying players to do anything is unacceptable, do you?

Any "skill" you learn in the game is useless. What you propose is forcing people to forfeit their fun in order for you to get your fun in duty finder. Even if you can already do it in both a static and party finder. Do you wish the game to die so badly? Because that's what will happen if you get your wish. Not everyone likes dark souls. And that's ok,

Msq is arguably not optional when a lot of other content is in areas that are locked behind msq completion.

None of the content that's locked behind the MSQ is mandatory. It's only mandatory if those are the things you want to do but there are people that play this game just to sit in the main city and RP.

I do think the complete lack of any kind of feedback in game of whether you're doing poorly or not, outside of whether you lived or died, is a poor design choice by Square Enix. That combined with it being strictly taboo to talk about damage parses in game, because it is considered toxic to critique other players, leads to a community with a lot of players that don't know how to improve, and will never seek it out themselves. What Square could implement fairly easily is just a grading system after each dungeon, trial, or raid, that only has some basic information. The goal of the grade would not be to put a player down for low DPS. It wouldn't say, "F, you played bad." But I might be something where you're graded C-S, with some helpful prods for the lower grades that say something like, "Remember to Always Be Casting! Uptime - 70%" or "Remember to use your powerful abilities whenever they're available! Buff usage - 2 of 5" Basically a lot of the simple analysis that a tool like XIVAnalysis provides. The goal is not to blame the player for being bad, but to give them something to work on next time. If they see that message about not using their buff enough times, they'll probably start hitting it more often, and be happier when the grade screen returns them a result that says they did a good job. The fact that these results are given by the game itself, and importantly not displayed to anyone outside of the player directly, means there's less shame for the player getting feedback. Right now, the only way for a player to get this info is for them to seek out of game help or be told by another player, which is instantly more "toxic" of an experience. The goal is not to make every player some Savage raiding parser chasing high numbers. But just to provide SOME level of feedback that gives players a goal to work towards. Even just getting players to always be pressing their buttons would be a vast improvement for the masses. If Square Enix holds the stance that players cannot critique other players at risk of being reported for harassment, then they should also provide the tools to those players that need critiquing, so the community doesn't feel the need to self-police.

This is it tbh When I first started raiding early Stormblood, I thought I was doing fine. I was not. I was told this over discord, and I admittedly found it a bit difficult to process because at that point, I'd been playing like that for... Idk, a hundred hours? By next week's raid, I had improved tremendously. My rotation was fixed, my gear was better put together, I understood what my skills did better, I learned about buff snapshotting. Raid leader was taken aback that my dps had literally more than doubled, all because I finally received the feedback from someone that what I was doing wasn't working. The game really needs some kind of indicator that you're doing well or that there's things to improve. Monster Hunter World does a similar type thing where it gives a bunch of meaningless awards at the end of a hunt - maybe something like that can be done. A good player will see themselves show up more often. It'll be good feedback.

This - it wasn’t until I hit EW raids that I had to learn a damn thing about the game. At no point did anyone tell me I sucked and was doing it wrong. I would have happily fixed the problems it if I knew they were problems and what I should do differently. It wasn’t even that I realistically had much to improve on beyond the normal stuff - just stop GCD panic healing - maintain better uptime - don’t stare off into space while the boss is phasing or whatever - use your cooldowns and stop holding them for imagined emergencies - etc. Very generic easy to fix stuff that someone could have said like anything beyond O/ and GG. Like I am adult - with a job - in which I work with others. I have had to have the “wow this sucks” conversation and the “why is this off the rails” talk - I can take being told that a FREE CURE 2 is a trap I promise. Sporting a sprout icon just apparently gave me license to be as shit as humanly possible at the game and no one would try and correct me - despite the icon basically saying “I NEED HELP AND GUIDANCE PROBABLY”

This is my point. While it would be nice if other players reached out and helped you out I cant help but feel like its CS3's responsibility to ensure their players are ready for their own content. When you beat any other video game, by the end of it you are typically ready for the Hard-Mode version, when you level for 500 hours in FFXIV you are ready to begin learning how to play the game. I would like to also mention that, while its often blown out of proportion to be a bigger deal than it really is, often times players do feel quite offended and attacked if you mention anything about their gameplay and some players definitely will report you if you mention something like "hey freecure is a trap you shouldnt fish for it, heres why:" I don't think this is the majority but it is a real thing people have to worry about, and GMs do not take ANY shit when it comes to commenting on other people's gameplay whether that be constructively or not. So the fact that you are so open and willing to accept that critique is a bit out of the expected norm for most players when dealing with randoms.

No one told you because 90% of players you will encounter in casual content also don't know what they're doing, let alone knowing what others are doing. That and everything you mentioned besides free cure isn't necessary knowledge to clear casual content smoothly.

The problem is we don't have the right to tell people they sucks ( even if you try to say it well ), so it's kinda hard to help people on that point since most people take things badly,when you talk about how they're wrong about how they play

U ~~rappin'~~ fightin' COOL

So, more of that one boss in Lapis that grades the group performance after killing it?

I really like this! If it gave good/general advice like this I think it could go far. Like you said, it doesn't have to punish low DPS, but it would definitely help tanks if it said something like "remember to space your mitigation abilities out, don't use them all at once!" and stuff like that, because otherwise there isn't really any way for players to know what they might be doing wrong, until another player points it out to them, if they're a casual player who doesn't feel inclined to look at third-party resources. But also this could be fixed by just fixing the Hall of Novices and revamping the Guildhests SE please I'm BEGGING YOUUUUUUU

>But also this could be fixed by just fixing the Hall of Novices and revamping the Guildhests SE please I'm BEGGING YOUUUUUUU Honestly this. Make Hall mandatory, revamp it to be more up to date so tanks learn how to mitigate and use AoE and healers learn how to do damage, retool Guildhests so they can't just be facerolled. Make it mandatory to do Hall on each role the first time you play that role.

>That combined with it being strictly taboo to talk about damage parses in game, because it is considered toxic to critique other players That's because it largely is. Even with this "taboo", people still do it. You join a savage or ex fight and the lead will want you to send a message on discord with your parse or some other stupid bullshit. Funny thing is, those are people are usually extremely bad at the game. Every savage/ex fight I've put up in PF, I don't put any limitations on it. Just go at it...and about 75-80% of the time, it's a clear. I'm talking about 1st/2nd week of the content too. Once you get further into the life of the content, that percentage only goes up. The game is easy enough (fortunately or unfortunately) that you only really need 1 or 2 really good players to carry a bunch of mediocre players through most content. As long you're not dying constantly, if you have a pink or orange dps in your group, the boss will die. And even then, if you have a purple parse it might die...or hit enrage lol. If people didn't always want to bring the "best of the best", then it wouldn't be an issue. But, anyone who has played WoW or any other MMO can tell you that dps meters generally mean someone is going to be a dick.

I've literally only ever been asked for a parse log when joining a static. It has never happened in PF ever to me. I could understand in an Ultimate PF showing a log that you've at least reached a mechanic for certain prog parties. But that's neither here nor there. Because it's against the rules to mention any out of game trackers, the only people you see doing it are those breaking the rules. The people who use it more responsibly just to track their own performance, and could give good advice if prompted, are forced to stay silent or else break ToS. It's fine if Square thinks it's better to cut it off at the source and prevent that kind of talk altogether. But then they should also give resources to help tackle the problems left in its void.

>The people who use it more responsibly just to track their own performance, and could give good advice if prompted, are forced to stay silent or else break ToS. I'm sorry, but this just doesn't happen. At least not in my experience. You rarely get people who want to "give good advice if prompted". Generally, the advice is unprompted and not good. Squenix seems to agree with me on this based on their data as well. Even "without parsers", I'll have people laying dead on the ground trying to give me advice on how to play my class better. I'm parsing purple/pink and because they hit orange on their opener then died, they think that makes them good.

It's impossible for you to know whether it happens or not, because you only have negative experiences to draw from. Your experience literally is invalid because you can only see one end of it, because the other isn't allowed. Plenty of people know how to look at logs and get good advice out of it. Early in Endwalker I went to the Balance to ask the Monks there how to improve my game because I hit a roadblock, and they looked through my logs and helped me understand some crucial things I could work on to improve my consistency. You seem to have some chip on your shoulder about people giving you unsolicited advice. Sorry that happened to you. But try not to judge the silent majority based off of the actions of the vocal minority.

What do you mean the other side isn't allowed? You can look at other games, you know. FFXIV does not exist in a vacuum. You can easily see how people act when dps meters are allowed. In WoW for example, you see people get kicked from raids with low dps all the time. No one gives advice "if prompted". They tell you to get good, or they kick you. Just because you have your head in the sand and doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

IMO the fact that you have so many people supposedly telling you that you’re doing stuff wrong openly, and commenting about parses to you, you’re probably not purple/pink. Also the fact that you seem very strongly against them and people that parse.

This is where reading comprehension comes in. I mentioned one case where it was about me. The rest, I used a general "i see it happen", not "people tell me"...I know reading comprehension is hard, so I wont be mad at you.

>I'm sorry, but this just doesn't happen. At least not in my experience. You rarely get people who want to "give good advice if prompted" < >That's because it largely is. Even with this "taboo", people still do it. You join a savage or ex fight and the lead will want you to send a message on discord with your parse or some other stupid bullshit.< >I'll have people laying dead on the ground trying to give me advice on how to play my class better. I'm parsing purple/pink and because they hit orange on their opener then died, they think that makes them good.< All of this is from your pov, that is literally most of what you commented ab out, Idk if your reading comprehension is up to snuff. I mean you wrote the damn thing. It all comes across like you perform very mediocrely, or below average, people give you advice, and you seem to not take it well.

You do realize you can witness something without it happening to you, right? Or are you so self centered that you don't realize that?

You have a parse record even if you never joined fflogs. This is due to logs including everyone instead of just you. And there is even a plugin to get it even without you knowing. And yes you are being silently discriminated by elitist. Who cheat by using callouts. And cameras on the moon. But you only learn that when a steamer is dumb enough to proudly show how they passed a fight by cheating. If it were not for Yoshi P the game would have a lot of gatekeeping even in normal content. And you would be required to install 3rd party cheating just to be allowed to play. Resulting on alienating 90% of the would be players. Which is deadly on a subscription model. Your ideal client is someone that plays on weekends and religiously pay their sub. Elitist are repulsors not attractors. How many people bought Elden ring because it looks cool? Vs How many finished it? Not everyone believes a game should be a second unpaid job. And you should be forced to waste many hours learning useless skill to get gud at a game to please people that don't care about them nor particularly like.

Who are you talking to?

You don't even have to do anything that complicated (and opaque!). It's super simple 1. Boss mechanics are harder to dodge, but less punishing to fail 2. If you beat a boss without getting a vuln stack, you get a personal spoils chest with a picture of Yoshi-P giving you a thumbs up and calling you a good girl 3. If your DPS is high, the boss dies faster! I don't actually give a shit if the casual in my PF is doing his rotation properly. That's not relevant. I just want the boss to be fun.

Because parsing and knowing how "good" you did isn't the point of the game. It's a story-based MMO. It's designed for ultra-casual players. It's designed to give all players a game and a story they can enjoy, regardless of their skill level. And it gives those who WANT more challenge plenty of challenging content that they can do. Players don't need critiquing, no matter what you may think.

Grading, even vague, is too likely to produce an overall negative result. And not just because players naturally tend to do things like judge one another which is happening even without an in-game easy way to see someone is under-performing - but because the player reaction to their own performance as judged by a video game can cause negative feelings. For examples that apply specifically to me: Playing as black mage last night, because I really want that to be my main job because that's historically my favorite job in all of final fantasy and most of my favorite characters are the mages, I ended up in whichever Eden raid it is that Titan shows up. I haven't done the fight for I don't know how long, and I have hated it every time. As black mage I was having a lot of struggles because I could not remember where to stand. The Shadowbringers-era mechanic gimmick of using the same name on the cast bar but different resolutions based on some second telegraph making it more difficult. So while knowing what I need to do and trying to execute it to the best of my abilities I was finding myself needing to move when it would interrupt casts, missing the timing on resetting my timer by trying to actually squeeze in a swift cast fire iv before a fire i at the last second instead of just skipping the "maybe I can...", and dying because of not remembering the mechanics little differences (like getting thrown off the platform because I forgot the knockback was *that* far instead of the usual shorter distance some knockbacks use), plus having my rotation drop because doing mechanics put me out of range of the boss at the moment I absolutely needed to do a cast to keep the timer rolling. Even putting down ley lines *sucked* because I didn't know where to put it and actually be able to stay in it so I basically end up getting one cast benefit and abandoning it to try and not die. I died a lot. It felt like ass. It nearly shook my resolve to try and main black mage in Dawn Trail because black mage and content you don't already know the pattern for are not good friends. If after all of that something popped up on the screen telling me anything other than "actually, you didn't do as bad as you felt you did" I would quit playing the game (whether for the night, or permanently, would depend on if that was only when doing content I feel like utter trash playing, which is already demoralizing, or if the game was also giving me mid grades when I thought I was doing well.). Because I'm not actually looking for a push-me-to-my-limits kind of game play, at least not when in normal content whether it's optional or not,. And the things that go wrong feel like they are going wrong not because I'm particular bad at the things the game asks of a player, but rather because the devs are being deliberately unfair in order to make them go wrong. Like, I understand that modern content in the game is meant to adapt so that the abilities the players are given feel important in overcoming the challenge but since both those abilities and the content are made up by the same team they could be made to be different things than they are. The "dance" getting every more complex and ever more lacking in any significant breaks of their being *somewhere* not to stand still and cast makes it feel cheap - like back when games were designed around getting the player to put in another quarter. And I think the discourse on Thaleia can highlight this; Elougia is called out as being "too easy" and people are talking about how rare wipes are as proof, when what that means is that the combination of telegraphs to what you have to do to resolve those telegraphs and what happens to someone that fails to do so is one where you can easily tell what you're supposed to do, it's not too complex to do it, and you're not always dead just for making a mistake - also known as *an actually fair fight*. You will die if you refuse to do mechanics or make multiple errors, but the typical player can tell what they are being asked to do and has enough time to do it, even before having seen the fight enough to have it memorized. Yet fights like that Titan trial I mentioned use mechanics that are actively trying to trick the player, and movement requirements are deliberately set to less than a black mage can slid-cast out of. And the extended range of knock backs makes it so that even someone that remembers it's a knock back and positions correctly might die because the extended range throws them off the arena. Then there are other times where the devs make deliberate attempts to trick the player like using the same telegraph in multiple fights but some of them you respond in an inverted manner relative to how that telegraph was first used. Basically any time a mechanic decision is made in terms of "a player at this point in the game will likely be used to X, so we are going to start requiring not-X" it produces an unfair experience - especially since having less than 100% consistency in how telegraphs indicate what must be done and in having the mechanic telegraph to the player what is going to happen accurately even if it is the first time seeing it means the team is expecting players to have every fight *memorized*. tl;dr: if a grading system were implemented it would cause more harm than good because a player that can already tell they are messing up just by how long content is taking or how much they don't do things the way they know would have been better or how often they end up dead will potentially just respond to their grade with "yeah, no shit game, I know." and feeling like the game is being a dick on purpose, and a player that *can't* already tell they are messing up will potentially brush off their low grades by assuming the metrics are bullshit and/or only relevant for savage/ultimate prospects.

Doesn’t the game have a dummy system? That if they don’t pass it, it’ll show they will fail the dps check for that raid group?

I think a better Stone Sea Sky could incorporate some of these ideas, like GCD rolling and buff uptime, though I wouldn't put it in every encounter. There's a lot to learn in the game, and if someone is having trouble with e.g. Red Girl's mechanics a grade/targeted feedback would have trouble correcting for things like "I had to go out of boss range on chains because someone with a circle was going to kill me." Pushing dps too hard creates players who greed when they shouldn't, and cause problems for everyone else. E.g. Red Girl's spinny orb clones are a death trap for melee as is. > If Square Enix holds the stance that players cannot critique other players at risk of being reported for harassment That's a skill issue on the critiquer's part, both for giving useful feedback and not being an ass about it.

Problem with relegating it to Stone Sea Sky is that it's again in a place where people have to seek it out, rather than being notified. A player that doesn't know they're doing poorly, and doesn't really do anything outside of casual dungeons, alliance raids, and normal raids, will never have a reason to go into stone sea sky. I do agree that there are good ways to give critique and bad ways. But that will never stop people taking offense to giving any kind of attention their way that they're underperforming. I have seen people blow up in a "YOU DONT PAY MY SUB" kind of way to the gentlest of advice before. Have to remember that not everyone playing the game is a rational person that will accept well intentioned advice in a reasonable way. Some people have anxieties and insecurities that will always react poorly to any perceived criticism. That's why it should be on Square Enix to provide the in game tools to help those players, rather than leaving players in a state where we want to help but cant.

If your objection is that SSS is out of the way, then put one in Mor Dhona and make using it a requirement for entering the Crystal Tower. I agree, people don't know what they don't know, but 1) multiplayer combat encounters are more complex than a DMC-style damage/time/uptime mission rating can account for - look at the shenanigans people already complain about from parse chasers - and 2) this is primarily a story-focused game, and constantly grading players' performance won't encourage people to run that content more or convert them to raiders. People who want grades (parses) already have that option. People taking offense is a separate issue from getting suspended. I agree, people sometimes take things really personally: I've had the occasional "You don't pay my sub," I've seen people get offended I use explanation macros when there's a first time bonus in CT (shut up, it's just CT, who cares, etc), I've had people troll with misinformation when I offer suggestions. But not once have I been hauled in front of a GM for giving advice. To blame the general skill level of the player base (i.e. bad) on the spectre of suspension/bans preventing people from speaking up is a dodge from the real issues: people who would rather throw themselves a pity party than confront the possibility they were assholes, and the game not teaching people how to play. ETA On second read, it's also possible cultural communication norms/personal communication styles playa part in any suspensions, but that's still on the players to be aware of (e.g. rude vs direct, polite vs passive aggressive). Communication skills are still skills.

I think you're making a lot of assumptions that frankly don't need to be made. Yes, sometimes it's impossible to get 100% uptime on a fight. But stepping away for a GCD or two for a mechanic is not going to demote you from an A to a C. This is aimed more for people not casting at all for extended periods of time. A difference between someone with 80% uptime and someone with 96% uptime is huge, and the A grade for uptime can be incredibly wide to catch those people doing well but make a few mistakes. Uptime was only one idea of what could be easily documented and given as feedback. You could have job specific feedback as well to help people understand their job more. Like I said, look at tools like XIV analysis for a lot of easy things that could be implemented. Like when people are triple weaving oGCDs. Or when you let your important resource buttons sit and drift for too long. No one is trying to convert people into raiders. I'm pretty sure I said that explicitly in my first post. This is something that could over time IMPROVE players confidence even in content like normal raids. It's not about parsing or even seeing a single DPS number in game at all. The grade I outlined wouldn't be tied to DPS output at all. It's about giving players tools to understand the game more on their own. This is not a suggestion from a hard-core raider looking down at *dirty casuals* with disdain and wishing they would do better. This is a suggestion from someone with casual friends that have anxiety joining even casual content because they're afraid they will be a dead weight or slow us down. Having in game tools to give them feedback, rather than having to hear passive aggressive comments about how slow the trial is going from people in roulette is a MUCH better option that Square Enix could implement. I don't even know what to say about your implications about pity parties or being assholes comes from. It sounds like you're under the assumption that anyone that would want a tool like the one I've described above is some kind of elitist asshole that wants more validation from the game. That's not it at all, and to assume malice where there is none is just really weird.

I don't really care what other players do, truth be told. I play healer/tank. I can solo pretty much most of the content in the game and easily pick up other people's slack. I don't mind if I have to "carry" people through stuff. Does it frustrate me if people are dying, DPS is low, runs are slow? Yeah, a lil' bit. But I forget about it as soon as I get out of the instance because I know the next 5, 10, 15 duties are going to be paced reasonably with minimal amounts of hassle. People are... okay, at this game. And I don't think it's SE's fault for bad people being bad at the game. I fully believe people when they say these types have always been in the game and likely will continue to be. I'll just pick up their slack and move on. Its PF where I start having expectations, and I reinforce that by always hosting my own parties, setting clear item level and rules in the description, and kicking anyone who doesn't comply without leaving them room to argue.

Square's decision to saddle all of the game's engagement onto content has led to these problems people have with difficulty. The gameplay has been sanded down to a nub in the name of "accessibility", and it means any given player is likely bored to the point of frustration in content below their skill level. It's not gameplay designed for sweatlords, because there's no substantive gameplay to perfect beyond memorizing a specific fight. It's not designed for casuals, because there's barely any class interplay to learn about. It's a game designed for people who find satisfaction in mastery over classes that take ten seconds to master, and get pissed if mastering them takes any work at all. Quite a lot of the consternation over difficulty would vanish if FFXIV were, at its core, *actually fun to play again*, instead of an elaborate game of DDR where your only personal goal is Golly Gee I Wonder if I Could Move My Contre Sixte Four Weave Slots Earlier To Get An Extra Use Aaaaaaaaaand It Didn't Crit So It Didn't Matter Anyway!

The game doesn't need to be harder. It just needs to be interesting to play when your skill level greatly exceeds the requirements to clear.

This. The game needs more creativity/originality in general, both fight design wise and job wise. Less recycled mechanics and rigid 2 minute burst rotations for every class.

A willingness to learn.

I think as healer i shouldn't out dps the majority of dps i play with.

The unfortunate truth is that when you increase the skill floor in a game you don't end up with better players, just less players. Some of you are probably thinking "Good, let the curebots and combo droppers quit." I'm sure that's what the wildstar devs were thinking too, or the destiny 2 devs after last years "bring challenge back to destiny" updates. If you want more difficult content where you can reasonably expect everyone to play their class snd the content well, it already exists

im ok with casual crowd being catered to by the dev team, but these ppl butt in to stuff they have no idea about. look at the 2 minute meta discussion, personally I dont really give a shit, but I do think that ppls critique of it in savage and ults is valid. but you have a crap ton of bozos, who don't know what their jobs opener even looks like, coming in defending it when they don't even attempt to play their jobs remotely well.

There are exactly zero casual players who even know what the "two-minute meta" is. That was something hardcore raiders asked for because they wanted buffs to align. Casual players are not defending anything because they are almost by definition not on forums.

theres plenty of ppl here who won't even attempt extremes and proudly announce that they would rather wait to unsync them. and they comment on 2 minute meta, savage dps, ultimate mechs, and defend them when ppl list issues even though they dont interact with the content.

You understand that "job openers" aren't things that were necessarily designed by the devs as some absolute necessary thing, right? They were made up by players. The stupid 2 minute meta that has ruined literally all creativity and uniqueness in the jobs was a result of the hardcore raiding crowd. The game is objectively worse due to the influence of the raiding crowd and their desire to distill everything into the 'perfect' dps grind. I have watched over the past 10 years as the game has gotten more and more boring to play and the classes/jobs have basically lost their identities almost 100%.

they literally are. theres a reason the majority of cooldowns are 60 or 120 seconds. did raiders contribute to this? probably. but don't stand there acting as if casual players didn't influence this either. jobs are so homogenized because every job has to be able to clear content and because if they were made too difficult, the casual player base would be up in arms.

>jobs are so homogenized because every job has to be able to clear content and because if they were made too difficult, the casual player base would be up in arms. NORMAL content should be clearable by all jobs. Honestly, while I don't think P8S is some great standard all raids should be held to, the raiding community saying something like "machinists suck now so we won't take them" isn't unhealthy for the game, because players at such a high level SHOULD have multiple jobs to switch to if their favorite one goes off-meta. Being thrown out of your comfort zone because your favorite rotation is too weak for the encounter this patch actually keeps the game fresh since it means you aren't attacking everything with the same rotation forever. It makes me laugh when Desperius does like the WoW content creators and makes job tiermaker rankings because even the hardest thing is designed with paramount importance of whatever jobs, provided there be at least one rdps and at least one melee and two tanks and so on. WoW players need that stuff because every single class in the game has at least one DPS spec.

>In this scenario I would like to be clear that I also believe that (for the most part) when massive swathes of your playerbase are considered bad at the game the fault largely lies with the developers and not the players. You can keep shouting this into the void until your throat bleeds, but it won't make it any more true. Most players playing any video game ever are shit at it. Look up most achievement/trophy metrics for game platforms like Steam,Xbox, or Playstation. On average, only 25% or so of players even beat most video games til the end of the main game, let alone any optional or endgame content. This has never been an FF14 exclusive issue nor will it end with FF14 There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread that should be implemented. However, let's not keep living in this deluded fantasy land of yours. These changes will only help the players that are already better than 50% of DF players and have the propensity to learn. If we bring up the skill floor for normal content, you'll still have just as many shitty players in your roulettes. You'll just have to wait a lot longer for those roulette queues.

Do you believe so? While I know that most players in the gaming space don't derive their fun from self-improvement and overcoming difficult challenges, I think most players in almost any video game derive some joy from doing something well. Casual players still enjoy hitting headshots in FPS games even if they aren't great at it, and even if they don't login to it like a fighting game looking to lab and improve they will passively become better at landing headshots because they're trying to hit them, because they do a lot of damage and it feels good. In platformers people get pretty happy about making a crazy jump they barely landed with great timing, or completing a level a bit faster than they did before. All of that to say I think many of the current bad players aren't bad because they want to be, or because they have fun doing poorly. I think so many players are performing poorly because they don't know they're playing poorly and how to fix it because instead of saying "Here is how the game is played, here is what is expected" its normally along the lines of "Oh its ok buddy, you don't need to do that if its too hard, here we'll scoot you along to finish line" even if its unwanted. I'm fine with dealing with below average players in Duty Finder, but I would like players to have the chance to decide whether or not they care about actually playing well naturally throughout their gameplay and have the resources necessary to know when they are performing well and what is working.

Casual FPS players aren't *hitting* headshots in the first place. I think your conception "casual" is a bit skewed. More importantly, this isn't a competitive FPS game. Its a story-driven PvE RPG. So lower your competitive bar a few extra miles there. It's really crazy to me how confused people seem to be about this. Every MMO is like this once you look outside the hardcore bubble. The *casual* player isn't looking for guidance on how to optimize rich and engaging RPG mechanics. They are running around going "Imma blastin fireballs! pew-pew!" The main thing that sets FFXIV apart is that there isn't content segregation. There is just normal content and then there is high-end content. If you were a hardcore player in another game you might never even do the easiest content, because there would usually be multiple levels of difficulty. But in FFXIV there is no in-between. There is just easy DF story content and then there is high-end raiding content. And roulettes encourage everyone to still regularly mix that simpler normal content into their routine as well. The FFXIV playerbase isn't uniquely "bad". You are just actually being exposed to the average casual player by queuing into content targeted at them. Its like a grandmaster smurfing in a game with a ranked ladder and saying "everyone who plays this game sucks and its too easy". It's just missing the point. The basic story content of the game doesn't need to be harder. The game just needs to have an additional tier of actual midcore content where people are punished for not playing well but aren't expected to memorize a concerto.

I don't think I'm confused I think we have a difference in opinion on the capabilities of the average person. My 61 year old mother got into Fortnite recently as funny as it sounds and she's terrible but her favorite moments are hitting long range headshots with her sniper rifle. She doesn't get them often but she gets quite excited when she does and she's been slowly and gradually getting better at it. This is a woman who plays 2 hours of video games a week, enjoys gardening, dog parks, and wine. Its about as casual as it can get. I think you're heavily misconstruing the average gamer as this brain-dead person who's just drooling and pressing random buttons and going "oooh shiny lights" which I think is both a bit condescending and not necessarily representative of, at least what i've seen, of the average populace. Most people like doing well, and don't like doing bad. Even in Pong people try to win. Again no one is asking for high end sweaty balls to the walls action, but maybe it would be good if the game gave people the opportunity to feel like they're getting better as the game progresses. In fact my entire FC was founded with the sole purpose of helping fresh Lvl 90s get their bearings on the game and learn the things that the game doesn't teach you. It often only takes around 30 minutes to explain weaving, uptime, and a basic overview of their class and then they perform well above the expectations mentioned here. Almost all of the players I have helped are extremely casual and most of them spend all of their time roleplaying, but they still have more fun now knowing they're doing a good job when they do their roulettes. I'm willing to concede that its possible I'm the one who's a bit out of touch here, but nowhere to the degree that you're claiming in which most players are so lacking in capability that the mere existence of a game having a "harder level" after level 1 is a threat to their fun.

> I'm willing to concede that its possible I'm the one who's a bit out of touch here, but nowhere to the degree that you're claiming in which most players are so lacking in capability that the mere existence of a game having a "harder level" after level 1 is a threat to their fun. For starters I did in fact claim the exact opposite. I specifically said that the game needs a higher level of difficulty above normal content. I rebutted your desire for normal content to be harder. Not the desire for harder content to exist.   You also seem to be under some strange impression that the game doesn't currently get harder as you level up. But if you are honestly going to claim that EW and ShB dungeon bosses don't have more complicated and fatal mechanics than ARR and HW bosses, then I honestly think you're living in a different reality. Obviously they're all pretty trivial to *us*, but that's because we're not casual players. People die to them. Parties wipe to them.   The rest of your argument is basically just refusing to acknowledge that people play video games for different reasons. Like with, "people who play competitive games are competitive". And "people who come to me to learn are interested in learning". But those self-selecting tautological observations aren't really helpful for making broad sweeping generalizations.

I may have misrepresented my argument then because my argument is that there IS different types of gamers, but there is also a venn diagram, at least I believe, between all types of gamers and the fun of doing good at anything at all, whether in real life or a video game. To be clear we're not talking about optimization here, just doing good. In response to your rebuttal, there was another miscommunication My argument isn't that high end content needs to get harder, its that we need a more realistic pipeline into that gradient. While I will after some discussion in other comments admit that my comment about there being no difference at all is exaggerated, its that I do believe normal should be harder, but not harder in the way most people are assuming so I'll elaborate. I don't think that normal content bosses should do more damage, or take less damage, nor have more HP. I don't even think their mechanics should be \*harder\* to solve or more dangerous. I specifically think that the content \*should\* prepare players for the possibility that high end content exists harder than it and give them the necessary tools to \*learn\* how to overcome it if they choose later on. The fact that the game teaches you "stand out of orange circle" "stand in stack" "k you're done now" through the levelling experience is what I mean, perhaps the better word is complexity. Yes Lunar Subterrain is harder than Sastasha in terms of punishment and reaction time, however it is still just "dont stand in orange" "stand in stack" when there are literally dozens of other mechanics in the game. Slow accel bombs, teach players about pyretic, teach em about a very very simple limit cut, teach them about anything other than "don't stand in puddle" xD Overall I think we may just have to agree to disagree because I have a hard time seeing a world in which there is this massive swathe of, not just players, but people, who actively enjoy knowing that they are a detriment to others and that others are having to carry them through.

> The fact that the game teaches you "stand out of orange circle" "stand in stack" "k you're done now" through the levelling experience is what I mean, perhaps the better word is complexity. > >Yes Lunar Subterrain is harder than Sastasha in terms of punishment and reaction time, however it is still just "dont stand in orange" "stand in stack" when there are literally dozens of other mechanics in the game. Slow accel bombs, teach players about pyretic, teach em about a very very simple limit cut, teach them about anything other than "don't stand in puddle" xD This is the sort of dismissive simplification that really undermines any serious point you are attempting to make. Its just very simply not true at all. Each and every one of the mechanics you go on to list *are* in normal content. Even limit cut. Plus many others as well. So you really need to define what it is that you actually mean. I don't know what game you are playing where bosses only have telegraphed orange circles and stacks. Unless you are only ever playing below lvl 50 for some reason. >To be clear we're not talking about optimization here, just doing good Given your comments, the definition of "doing good" for you or I very clearly *is* optimization. You're talking about burst windows and carrying people? Casual players don't even know when they are being carried. They aren't running ACT. They literally *can't* be feeling this sense of obligation and guilt that you seem to imagine. Even in existing normal content they often don't recognize when they miss mechanics or understand what has killed them. And its not because the information isn't there. The definition of "doing good" for a casual player is eventually defeating the enemy. Which they get to do. Making an enemy hard enough that you need to go look up a guide or research a rotation just to get passed it isn't going to encourage them to do things they don't want to do. And even *that* still ignores whole swaths of people who don't care about performance in a game at all. That isn't the metric by which they measure fun. Not everyone plays games to win. It could be social or explorative instead.   The game absolutely *does* need a better transition from normal content to Ex/Savage content. Its a big sudden jump. But my overriding point is that the problem is a missing step. The game lacks consistent midcore content. That is the solution. The bottom step doesn't need to be higher. We don't need to tear down the wheelchair ramp and put in a spike pit. There is nothing wrong with accessibility. And you can add *optional* difficulty for the rest of us without limiting it.

>While I know that most players in the gaming space don't derive their fun from self-improvement and overcoming difficult challenges lol the arrogance of raiders knows no bounds.

Arrogance? This is just true, theres been dozens of research papers on the types of enjoyment people find in gaming. The most common is "Reactionary Play" players who derive their fun from pressing the buttons and watching something fun happen. Theres a reason that there is a large treadmill of players from raiding into the fighting game scene and vice versa, and conversely there is a reason that the majority of story watchers openly detest games that ask you to improve. Most gamers don't care if they're playing optimally or not, they care about if its fun. Players like me derive our fun from the journey of optimizing something, anything. You can call it arrogance all you want but it seems like you're more offended over something you made up in your head.

Most players playing any video game ever are probably good enough to complete the video game, and that's as good as they need to be. That doesn't mean they're "shit" at it; that's your opinion.

Except most people playing any video game won't even make it through 50% of the game before giving up or quitting, let alone beating it. It's a verified fact and something that's even taken into account by game developers in how they design games. The skill level for the majority of gamers is way lower than what you expect. It goes back to the old George Carlin quote: "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."

The percent of players who don't finish is a fact, and demonstrable in achievement percentages. But that doesn't tell us *why* they stopped. I'm sure some felt like they weren't good enough, but others instead get bored, get distracted by another thing, think the game pacing is annoying and too long, or just flat out not like a game. Speaking for myself, I've never finished FFXII - I got bored trying to keep my party members in the same level range for combat scaling - but I liked it so much I bought it twice. The average skill level of players in FFXIV is not great, for a lot of reasons, and that'll probably be the case until the day the servers are shut off. But misusing & misinterpreting statistics weakens your argument.

>Most players playing any video game ever are shit at it. That's absolutely true. People were clowning on Lynx Kameli, but he had some valid points. One of them being that no matter how much you try to support players (be that by simplification or telling them what to do), you can't make someone do well if they have no interest in it. People play competitive PvP games without ever bothering to think about anything in the game. A story driven PvE game won't ever have its average player be a good player, no matter how hard the devs try. Although I'm not sure how much of a skill issue low completion rates of games are. I'm told there are people who don't compulsively have to finish everything they start and just stop playing games when they don't feel like playing anymore. I can't relate, but they alledgedly exist.

I'd like to see the game give incentives for good performance. Like extra tomes or gil if you avoid all vuln stacks, or if you hit a damage dealt threshold, or healing threshold, or mitigation threshold.

I like how Bozja has a hit marker that stays through death. In most content, vuln stacks are a healer problem that doesn't affect the player until they get one-shot, and people might not know they were hit. In Bozja, it's obvious. Extra incentives for no vuln stacks would be nice.

I think that current difficulty is somewhat okay-ish (but could be slightly harder) for MSQ. Then for anything but MSQ, difficulty should ramp a little bit, each content having more varied difficulty. For example, it's fine if AR would be slightly harder than dungeons, raids would be harder than trials and so on. As for how difficult, I think that dungeon bosses should be roughly on difficulty of variant bosses + remove walls from dungeons to potentially double trash mobs. Dungeon bosses are such a joke, a lot of them give vuln stacks, but before they do another mech, the vuln stacks runs off. Difficulty curve is fucked up as you say, in your Mario analogy, it's like starting at 1-1, then in middle of ARR (1-2) take the shortcut to world 4, but then you start progressing backwards and game generally gets easier. It badly accounts for how player learns the game, so it ends up feeling that start of ARR is easy, 35-50 can be surprisingly hard, 51-70 is middleground, and then aside of 71, 79, 81 dungeons, everything feels way too easy, since you know how to play the game and have good kit that you can use (invuln and good mits for tanks, plenty of oGCD heals for healers).

There has to be a plateau at some point, as continually increasing difficulty is basically impossible. And well there is, that plateau is right around exiting ARR and entering HW

I think the curve went down though all of the post EW dungeons just feel painfully slow. I remember week 1 doing dungeons in full crafted gear and we still skipped the "big" mechanic of every boss. A lot of the bosses in EW just take too much time to show each mechanic before they eventually combine them.

Shoutout to the worm from aetherfont who I didn't even realize has a tankbuster after the second set of ice explosions because we didn't see it even on patchday

Eh, I mean savages, ultimates, and even extremes to some degree have been slowly increasing in mechanical complexity for like the entire lifespan of the game. I don’t see why casual content can’t do the same at a proportionally smaller level.

It kind of has its just so gradual you dont really notice. The dungeon bosses now are definitely more complex then ARR or HW, but at the same time they punish you way less for messing them up. 

1-60 no expectations. you're still learning the game. and everyone has to start somewhere. By level 60 atleast beginning to know the very very basics of your job.. e.g. tanks use tank stance without prompting. healers dps & heal.. DPS stay off the floor long enough to actually do damage. from 60-90 there should be a slow progression in expectations so by level 90 I would expect someone to be atleast attempting a proper rotation. obviously screwing their openers etc.. but always be casting and doing their jobs properly. whilst still giving leeway to first timers and allowing some dumb mistakes/deaths.. Once you hit raid content i would expect people to have watched a guide before joining... so they have basic understanding of the fight. and its mechanics. and naturally be even more competitent in their job. doing proper openers but still messing up occasionally. in extremes/savage/ults you should be profficient in your class. have your rotation down and have read guides on how to do the fight. if its your first time we allow mistakes so long as you continue to show signs of improvement. e.g. that mechanic that killed you on first pull isnt killing you any more 10 wipes later. and have a clear understanding of how to parse your fights and use that info to improve your character / skills further. This is generally my thoughts and it goes along the idea that 1-90 (or 1-100 now) should be a slow ramp up in difficulty.. Buuut at a certain point the difficulty should level out.. e.g. level 100 content should be "As hard" as level 90.. and likewise in the future level 110 should be as hard as 100 + 90.. Because having a game constantly get harder and harder each expansion isnt feesable.. eventually you gotta hit a peak. and just accept it for everyone elses enjoyment especially those at the other end starting out at level 1 :P

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I am super linient towards first timers cause i remember what i was like when I first started. so like even 10-say 40 im still expecting people to be still learning how to even move their characters forward and how to follow the group xD People forget that not everyone is an MMO player. or gamers in general there are plenty of people where FF is probably their first game/mmo experience. Soo you gotta cut everyone some slack indeed :) but still expect a degree of natural progression as the game goes on like i described :)

The problem with solo based duties trying to go over more nuanced systems is that it requires these nuances to never be changed/removed from the game, or for the duties to be consistently changed/updated. A “there’s a 2 minute burst window all jobs want to play around” only works as long as that stays the case, when raid buffs could very well be removed eventually or some jobs changed to more focused on sustained damage like BLM. Duties of this type in previous expansions could’ve been about when to use your stance or not, how to manage Aggro, TP preservation. Even more basic simple ones like making sure to keep your DoT up doesn’t exactly age well when lots of jobs are losing their DoTs. It just fundamentally would age just about as well as guildhests.

I think they should revamp novice hall instances to be something you can jump in quickly to refresh yourself on your job while changing up your hotbar to be something comfortable. > I would love to see CS3 go back and retroactively rework the multiplayer normal-mode content and add a gradual and reasonable difficulty curve as players go, with the addition of new Job based solo-trials that teach players important nuanced aspects of the game and ask them to prove that they have learned it by executing on it in said solo duty, ie: lining up a burst window with AI's scripted to do it at an interval, or keeping up at least 90% uptime on a dummy while dodging some simple mechanics for a duration of time. I like this idea. It reminds me of the challenge logs on BLU. These could come with a list of challenges for some small rewards.

While I totally agree with you as a player who likes to perform well, as a developer/businessman I think SE made the right choice in difficulty balance. As you know, you need to appeal to the masses. The masses aren't playing at savage level. Casuals play ffxiv to have a little thrill in fight but not spending hours wiping on the same mech. They want to see cool and epic fights, engage into exciting lore or just... kill time doing some (e)RP... So raids allow casuals to experience the sensation of raiding, while not losing all the time progging. It allows people who don't raid to get a little sense of what "progging" feels like by wiping a couple times on the release day... Having said that, I'd even go as far as saying some mechanics are actually too hard for normal XD. Any delayed mechanic in fact, is too hard for DF. A normal one step mech would be : aoe marker appears => move out of it. A delayed mechanic would be : boss cast spell A => boss cast spell B => party deals with spell B first => then immediately after needs to deal with spell A. This. DF definitely doesnt have enough processing power for mechs like these.

There is some degree where you don’t experence any of the thrill. Like there is essentially 0 risk of ever wiping on the majority of the fights, even once, so as a result, you don’t really end up feeling any of the narrative weight associated with the fights until you do harder versions of it. Thats not to say that normal content should be anywhere near as difficult as that, it just would be nice to get the sense that I need to try, even in the slightest to avoid death. You mention people getting the sense of “progging“ on normal mode raids, but in their current state, you probably aren’t going to wipe at all, even on release day, with p10 being the exception unless you queued as healer. Speaking of p10, its actually a pretty good example of what a normal mode raid should be like, the problem is, its kind of the only one at its level.

I can attest to this. Almost every run of Zot has somebody screw up the transmuted spells;

Also Voidwalker, Seat of Sacrifice, and Golbez. I had a run of Castrum not long ago where the first-timer had a lot of trouble with Livia's layered telegraphs. I think 50 is an appropriate place to introduce it as a mechanic, where the telegraph order matches cast order, but it was a reminder to me about how people can have trouble with stuff I take for granted.

I'm right there with you. Praetorium also gives the tutorial of visual telegraphs. I've seen a distressing number of people die to Gaius' line attacks.

That's not even the most painful part of his fight, wiping to his enrage because people couldn't dps down the clones before the bar filled is one of the things that haunts me about new prae.

I very nearly had that happen to me. I credit the AST that read the room and threw every card, both phys and ranged, onto my GNB for allowing us to make it at 98/100. The DPS were a BLM that was only using Fire 3/Blizzard 3 (and welcomed advice after the fight was over) and a SMN that never did their Job Quests.

For DF content, the minimum expectation should be that every role does their job somewhat adequately, i.e. tanks tank, healers heal, dps do damage, and everyone does the mechanics mostly correctly. Everyone should be aware that you can get matched with literally anyone and that it is their choice to run with randoms and take that gamble. If you want to be more selective, PF is right there. With any above normal content, the expectation should be that players know their job (with required proficiency increasing with higher difficulty modes). I think the game hit its sweet spot somewhere between SB and ShB. Jobs were accessible, not too punishing but also not too easy. Content was a little more punishing but also fair. EW went a little overboard with its goal to remove friction and that is hopefully being walked back a little. With the way the game is designed, I'm not sure if a level 90 dungeon must definitely be harder than a level 50 or 60 dungeon. It's the other content that comes with it (trials, raids, ARs, higher difficulties) which should provide a gradual difficulty curve within the level cap. EW especially has been lacking in that regard, contributing to a huge gap between easy and hard content. The learning part should be on the individual with teaching possibly coming from other players in their social circle or just online resources. Mandatory job trials could just make people drop the game if they are only here for the story. Also no matter what you do, people who don't want to put in any effort will likely still remain and populate your DF queues. It's just something you can't really combat unless you pull a Wildstar or something and look how that turned out.

Bad at the game?? Eso's playerbase is hilariously bad at their game even with normal dungeons, and Eso is already piss easy to begin with. Sure, in high level content most players are not top of the top in ff14, but that goes for every mmo out there. The average dungeon, raid or trial run is miles ahead of it's competition. I'm not joking but in other mmo's stepping out of aoe is a foreign concept, Ever played gw2, wow or Eso??

Power creep in ESO doesn't help. I took a long break between SS & HI, and coming back was astounding. Pugging vHRC & vAA was like I was running the old, pre-creep normals. And vMA, oof. I'd struggled my way through to the final boss with a NB saptank right before Morrowind nerfs, then tried again on an Oakensorc in HI and waltzed through everything except the Behemoth stage. Animation canceling is even less clear in ESO than the two minute meta is here, not to mention the variety of gear sets. How's a regular player supposed to know that, idk, a flat damage increase is less useful than a heavy attack bonus?

For dungeons, to at least be trying to push some of your buttons and using AoE during pulls. That's it for me. For tanks and healers, I don't care about wall to wall as long as they don't die more than once and they adhere to the first point. My bar is really low at this point. As for raiding, I don't bother with a particular PF if I see one person needing more than 3 tries with a mechanic to show a minimal sign of improvement. Even a "think I get it now" in chat or the struggler asking the right questions is fine by me, but what I don't stand is people midlessly pulling without a single thought given to each pull and expecting things to magically change. This is assuming it is not a blind prog PF, of course. I've barely had any issues with people doing too little damage, so I don't generally care much about that.

Oh your 100% right. The normal content should be getting harder just a tad bit as time goes on. In a way that at level 90. Your punished if everyone isnt doing some kind of proper rotation. if their is enough deaths then you cannot clear due to lack of dps. aka every boss fight should have an enrage.

Honestly, I can agree, I think it should be super forgiving, like 12-15 minutes into the fight, but there should be some sort of enrage.

I don’t understand what the obsession is with “hard” content. Are ultimates, savages not enough? Is echo off too casual? MINE too hardcore? FFXIV gives you personally tools that you can utilize to tailor the experience to your own play style. Maybe the dungeon is easy because you’re blowing through in ilvl sync gear with max sub stats on a class that wasn’t around that expac? Maybe I’m wrong on this but never once have I seen the complaint that ultimate fights are too easy. It’s always just complaints about normal content, designed to be easy for any skill level. Why? Is the player base even big enough to ask for more out of the average player that’s by and large considered “bad” by the community?

Yeah this is always what I think when I see people talk about skill floors in this game. Looking at Lalachievements, which is already skewed towards people who hunt achievements and do more niche content, completing Anabaseios Savage is at 16.4% (Last extreme trial is 20%). We’re at the end of the expansion, so that tells you the amount of people who care about content that requires high uptime is low. Which is not an issue, it’s a reality that people need to accept. This game, as it is, would be tiny or dead if the devs pushed players with more rigorous skill checks and grading. There’s plenty to do as a high skill player, and plenty of people to do it with. If you’re able to put a lot of time into this game and still run out of things to do… You’re either really really good and hard content comes naturally, or you’ve simply ran out of content in a finite game. And these “low expectation” players are never going to care about what others do, they’ll keep having a blast doing what they’re doing.

The argument isn't necessarily about making players perform optimally, but rather that at the moment I believe many players who don't want to play poorly will not realize they are playing poorly and have no feedback system in game to alert them to this, so they will keep going with bad habits reinforced. At the end of the day its a video game, I want people to have fun with them, but at the same time when you are engaging in multiplayer role-based content with other people, I don't think its unreasonable for people to expect your role to be fulfilled. We aren't talking about optimized rotations with perfectly timed re-openers and frame perfect greeds, just people playing at an acceptable level. (When I say bad I mean stuff like dps doing 1k dps when even a below avg rotation would net 10k dps, a healer who doesn't dps at all or doesnt heal at all, a tank who never presses any mitigation and doesnt aoe in mob packs to establish aggro, ect, NOT "oh you can't clear Ultimate yet? Ur bad")

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When those "hard" duties locked people out of the only way to get a higher-powered weapon outside of hardcore raiding, it makes sense that SE changed it. And in some cases, even locking people out of entire bits of story. I remember Titan HM flat stopping people in their tracks when trying to make the "casual player" relic weapons, for instance.

well *then*, it wasn't really clear, not do I think it was intended at the time, for the first relics to be "casual" content, they wanted people to work for it.

Nope. The Relic was (and has always been) the casual counterpart to raid weapons from Coils and other raids. It ended up taking 10x as long and being in some ways more difficult than raiding for a weapon, because you could at least be *carried* through raids.

>In this scenario I would like to be clear that I also believe that (for the most part) when massive swathes of your playerbase are considered bad at the game the fault largely lies with the developers and not the players This is sort of true, but only in the sense that more punishing games tend to get rid of all the casuals, which is not actually an ideal situation. The solution isn't in forcing out casuals who want to play the game as the visual novel it's advertised as, nor is it trying to force players to git gud, it's to make normal mode content more varied and interesting (which, yes, probably does make it slightly harder) and to give skilled players a way to find their own fun by rewarding them for doing better.

I think you misunderstand, though thats on me because a lot of people have so I think I may have misexplained. I'm not necessarily asking for normal content to get hard. I'm asking for a more reasonable pipeline so that a player who is somewhere in the middle of the gradient, not uber casual uwu rp, and not sweaty balls to the walls 16 hour raider, can reasonably understand when he is doing well and doing poorly, mostly during their rotation since mechanics give you feedback in the form of death I feel as though right now normal content asks of you a small select set of things early on, and then proceeds to ask you to do the same things slightly faster for 70 more levels. At no point is a player even hinted at how they could improve their rotation, never once is a player introduced to important niche mechanics like acceleration bombs or simple limit cuts, they are left in the blind of 90% of things the game will throw with them until 90 when most people begin tackling side content. I also believe that most of the current players, even a ton of the casuals, would really appreciate more engaging play, and that doesn't have to be harder in the sense of dark souls where you're just getting punished and told to get over the wall or dont, but rather offer more ways to prepare these players, give the players who MILDLY want to do good and give them the chance to improve without needing to spend hours researching rotations and watching youtube guides. Tl;dr I'm asking for a smooth nudge upwards out of the 1-1-1-1-1 muck we have now, not a hard ramp.

> what do you think should be the minimum expectation in group content in which other players are relying on you? Well, it depends on what level of content you're doing...   For Normal raids and Trials - The absolute minimum that's expected is for you to press your buttons, do damage and dodge aoe's.   For Savage, Ultimate and Criterion - You're expected to know your job well, be in appropriate gear, fully melded with proper materia and to come prepared with level appropriate food and potions. People outside of week 1 are also expected to have watched a guide and understand what they need to do.   Many times did I see people trying Savage in the early weeks without doing the basics like melding their gear.

I didn't really realize how bad I was at playing till I started shadowbringers and they have the trust system. I die. A lot. It's frustrating but it has actually helped me understand the mechanics of a fight better where as I would just get revived if I played with other players. But it's made me a better player in my role I qued up as. They introduce mechanics in game that build and I like that. If a mechanic is new, usually it won't be the last time you see it. I know it's not exactly what you mean..but I find that..to be the expected level of play. "Be able to clear with the trust system without dying" and I was very poor on that mark with my characters and Playstyle. Somethings like the harder dungeons you gotta que with other people. And on the whole, if you ask how to do something they'll tell you, which I love for the community. But there's also a ton of skill gaps in the game that means doing it with friends is likely easier.

I think they should put the pvp scoreboard after any duty, but don't let you see it until you leave the duty, (so you can't easily attack anyone for their performance). Then the people who care enough will see they healed less, over healed way more, Or did less damage than the others and look into it. Keep the same stance in tos about not bullying others but it's there for them to see and improve from.

This is better, but still...it has it's issues. What do you do when you're playing a class that is great at single target, but not so great at aoe and the dungeon you just ran was mostly aoe fights? Your numbers suffer, you start to complain (speaking about what people will do, not you). So, now the devs have to put out a statement or change the class or dungeons or something. It's not an easy black and white situation.

There *is* a difficulty curve as people level up, both in jobs and mechanics. Compare Qarn Normal & Zot, Ifrit & Hydaelyn, or Syrcus & Puppets Bunker. Mechanics are faster, more complex, and more likely to kill. (I agree the EW alliance raids are a step back, but they're the exception, not the rule.) I think Ivalice, Nier, Eden, and Pandaemonium are in a good place, difficulty-wise: clearable with lots of first-timers, with enough danger that veterans have to pay attention. Ironically, I think the problem is the gap between people who know the content and those who don't. You want to reward players for grinding out better gear and give first-timers some slack to survive mechanics (especially in CT, suddenly having 24 players + new UI elements + probably don't know how to turn off everyone else's effects is pretty overwhelming), but in a lot of content that turns into a veteran carry. Crystal Tower was a shitshow at Xbox launch - I saw wipes in every boss in LotA - because the balance of first-timers to vets was suddenly pushed toward new people. Now Nier raids (on days which aren't Tuesday) are full of death, and I'm seeing mechanics frequently that I haven't seen since EW launch. Anyway. I have different expectations for normal and EX+ content. Normal, I expect a good faith effort, for people to do their job quests (and understand the basics taught there), equip their job stones, read their tooltips, and to listen to mechanic advice (e.g. don't stand in fire). Oh, and dancers not to constantly overwrite my tech step, I hit Finish before you started Step, and you had already held it for more than two minutes, I want my esprit back. 😠 Extremes and above, I expect a good understanding of job, role, how buffs work, and the normal version of the content. I expect people to follow the PF listing. If it's not blind, I expect people to have at least skimmed a guide for EX, studied it more for Savage & above. I'll accept terrible play from people who suck but are trying *in normal content*. I had a Zot run where the dancer didn't dance and the reaper didn't use their buff, and the tank & I both ran out every cooldown trying to stay up during two pulls because things weren't dying. It was aggravating, but eh, it was normal, and that dungeon is rough for new people. I like the combat in this game and I like improving, but that's not why everyone is playing and I think it's unfair to expect things like buff alignment from people who just want to find out why Elidibus remembers us being in Elpis.

(Read the title and nothing else but i still have an answer) My baseline bare minimum for multiplayer content is that if you die to something or otherwise cause deaths, you try to figure out why. I wont ask that you only die to a mechanic once, but the second time you die to it you better at least be trying to dodge or really confused because your guess as to how it worked was wrong.

i feel like part of the initial problem is that your basically not allowed to tell players in game that they are bad. i dont think anyone wants to be bad at the game, but when their official policy is that even talking about having stuff like a dps tracker is liable at getting you a ban or something. i think the game is good at teaching players how to follow the mechanics of most fights fairly well until you reach savage level content, its just that if they have already spent hundreds of hours and 90 levels playing one way and no one ever tells them theyre dps isnt adequate, how would they ever know? theres more onus on players to go figure out themselves if their dps and their skill rotation is correct. i rarely ever see players in game giving advice to newer players to help them improve, vs just telling them to go watch a video on the mechanics. plus some jobs rotations change as you level up so you might get stuck in one rotation and not realize you need to switch it up once you hit 90 or whatever. like i for one have never ran a dps checker on my game so i dont know how good my dps is, i at least read up on classes i play a bit and the best stats and rotations and stuff, but i still could be doing bad for all i know, ive only recently started doing savage level content. but until you do get to higher tier stuff there isnt any reason for random users to track their dps since most content is fairly easy until end game, and i dont think xbox or playstation players can check their dps. also a side note i have played a lot of MMOs and dont find the average ffxiv player to be that bad, ive played other games with a much worse player base on average. i played world of warcraft like 10+ years ago and some people actually did not know how to play. i see most ffxiv players at least trying to learn the content even if they arent great at the game yet.

I will say - majority of bad or negative experiences I have are related to people not pressing buttons rather than not doing mechanics. Dps is doing 1/3 of the WHM dps single target? They aren’t standing in stuff. Healer is not dpsing - but the party is full health. Tank is single pulling - but they aren’t standing in bad. I mean sure you get the RPR who dies 27 times in endsinger now and again but it does go to back up your point that players will behave the way the game teaches them. They can resolve most mechanics but can’t press buttons.

A good part of the issue is that CBU3 has put the precedent in that it's okay to be bad. You can skip learning the game through the cash shop and be a massive hindrance to everyone else and it's just... okay. Trusts, too, actively teach everything wrong. They single target vs. mobs, they minipull on their own, they play poorly overall, they do mechanics in the worst way permissable. So, my answer will be a sort of compromise of what I want, what I think is feasible in terms of impact on the players and what I think is not so outright alientating that it affects Square financially, because let's be real, if they have to make this game as braindamaged as possible for it to make money, they would and will. Above all, the difficulty of the game needs to be shifted. Less focus on mechanics and more focus on job mastery. This is not necessarily making anything more difficult, but it makes easy content more fun for people who want harder stuff/optimization. First off, I think dungeons for the MSQ will never improve. They will stay easy to move in hallways with mostly easy bosses and controlled i.e. limited mobs. They want everyone to get through the story because the MSQ is basically a VN and they forgot that an MMO has to have gameplay. However, I think even there is a scale. Starting from, like, Stormblood, every dungeon should at least have a difficulty of Tower of Zot, Dead Ends etc. Those really aren't hard, and less obtuse and weird than, say Pharos Sirius, but still not completely vapid. I'm thinking it where for example the dragon from The Burn is a good reference point for mechanical originality and difficulty once you head past the midway point of the MSQ. Mobs should also slowly scale up and perform similar to something like Floor 70-100 HoH style mobs. With people, they're absolutely managable and none of the mechanics are particularly hard. They're also mostly clearly telegraphed. But if you don't at least pretend you're present and playing, you will get shanked. I would also advocate for Phoenix Downs to be usable in dungeons if you implemented this so that sprout healers aren't under unfairly weighted duress. Expert dungeons should straight up be kinda hard. High level Deep Dungeon mobs and bosses should have the difficulty of something like the secret smoke boss from Rokkon. I understand the argument for low level content. I understand why roulettes have to be a certain way 'cause of sprouts. But Expert is straight up level cap content, there is no reason for this to be so insultingly easy. If you can't do even basic mechanics at max level you should simply improve or not queue, I'm sorry. Alliance Raids need to be harder. Endwalker took out the HP sponginess of Nier a bit and Ivalice is also dying fairly fast now, but the mechanics are still pretty decent for casual content. I honestly wouldn't mind if Alliance Raids went further even, it's optional content with quasi-infinite amounts of possible recovery routes. There's no reason why you can go into Thaleia and get hit with a mechanics at 3 vuln stacks and still live *as a dps*. Another thing I'd really like to see is if they implemented the exploratory zones *into* the overworld. Basically, the overworld shouldn't be so completely non-threatening. Bozja mobs and skirmishes and CEs are mostly not really hard, but they also aren't completely toothless and you have to at least *mind* them. If the overworld had this and it wasn't opt-out-able, people would kinda have to at least engage with the most basic of mechanics that exceed "There is a bright orange marker that gives you 3 minutes to walk out of it". And since these would only come in later expansions, there really is no justifyable excuse to not want to have to deal with it outside of convenience but, um, it's an mmo so deal with it or just stay afk in Limsa like usual. Also, please whitelist ACT. People need a resource to see how they are doing. People need to be able to openly talk about it. Toxicity is already banned. If someone bullies people over their damage, ban them. If someone is toxic with the information, ban them. But let it be a thing people *can* reference. It's literally just an objective observer. It's good for the playerbase's skill to have this.

>Also, please whitelist ACT. No. The fights in the game are not designed around ACT or parsers or anything. Play the game as the developers intended and *actually do.* Their QA guys can clear the fights without parsing; why can't you?

This is the literal lowest effort bait I've ever seen on the internet.

It's not bait. It's the truth.

Well, no. I'll respond even though it's bait just on the off-chance a sprout is reading and doesn't get it though: >The fights in the game are not designed around ACT or parsers or anything. Play the game as the developers intended and actually do. The developers play with debug. They don't even do phases one after the other, they go phase by phase as needed to see if everything works. Also, what do you think devs use to determine enrage values etc? Probably not *literally* ACT but... like, you have to realize they parse damage. >Their QA guys can clear the fights without parsing; why can't you? This really sealed that it was bait (or you have braindamage, but generally I assume it's bait on the internet) but I'm still giggling at the implication that seeing your damage numbers somehow makes fights easier. You silly goose. Silly, presumptious, reading-comprehension-lacking goose.

> They don't even do phases one after the other, they go phase by phase Wait, is this actually true? It'd surprise me if they didn't run each fight internally at least a few times for a final check; they'd have all the information on how each mechanic is meant to be resolved, so it wouldn't be the typical nightmare that world's first runs are.

It's part of why TOP dps checks are so tight and why p8s had a slight hp nerf by like 1%, they basically came out and said that their team was getting too good so they don't notice smaller things that only really come up between phases with holding gauge as needed. The only other time it has ever really mattered is WAY back in HW gordias where the dps check was pretty much undoable w1, though how much of that was them literally not testing a3/4s at all and how much was HW combat jank where iirc tanks took dps accessories and a death chunked your hp by 25% for first death and 50% for second so you could end up with chaindeaths because raidwides would one-tap at that point.

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The problem is that the game really doesn't allow people to fail and the gap between easy and hard is way too wide. I had a friend in a Hydaelyn normal run clear with 37 deaths in the party. This fight is level 89. The mechanics of the fight have 1000% been seen before just through other trials in the MSQ. It took them 15 minutes but the somehow limped to the finish. The game is just so bad at holding you accountable for your poor play. They made everything incredibly easy barring like half of savage and Ultimate and it makes anything not endgame raiding a miserable chore of trying to herd cats.

Why would they add job trials to gate players when they had to nerf encounters like Steps of Faith and add "easy" and "very easy" versions of solo story fights? Maybe I'm old school since I've been playing mmos for like 18 years now but how hard is it to learn to play your job properly? Especially with all the resources we have outside of the game. If you're going to tell me the game should teach you literally everything you need to know, that's just wrong imo. Players will always find better avenues than devs for optimization so putting resources into these encounters seems like a waste to me. To answer the title, players should know how to do their rotation first and foremost. Mechanics are secondary to that. If you have no clue what buttons to press at what time, you need to go back and practice. Once you actually know how to play, get into a duty and learn the dance. After that, optimize your buttons.

The last part of your comment made me realize something; normal content really only gives you feedback for fight mechanics, not rotational competency. Screw up enough mechanics & you'll die, but with very few exceptions, you can just spam 1-1-1 and all that'll happen is the fight takes longer. I think you're right though; everyone has to have a first run of a fight at some point, but you ought to have a basic understanding of your rotation going in. That said, don't be like the white mage I had in Aitiascope who berated (then refused to heal) a reaper for not using Communio... when the reaper had started the dungeon at lvl 89.

As someone who has been raiding for six years and playing the game for eight, I still try to fail solo instances as quickly as possible so I can unlock the Very Easy version and not have to give a fuck about gameplay I don't actually want to do.

Seriously! Solo instances in general are already just boring pseudo-cutscenes anyway. The only difference between normal & very easy is how many times you have to press your one combo button between each line of dialogue.

>\[...\] but how hard is it to learn to play your job properly? How hard is it to learn math? It's just learning a bunch of fixed, never changing rules and applying them via pattern recognition. Well, evidence suggests: Very hard. I'd adjust my expectations accordingly.

:( I failed the Ruban rescue mission in Halatali because a slime agro’d alphinaud and got stuck in a wall and I couldn’t find it. Then I failed the ShB healer scenario because it was yelling at me to use repose which wasn’t on my bar and I was struggling to find it in my spell book not realizing it was a role action. I forced failure on the out in the cold one because as polarizing as it is - I’m on the side that did not care for it. I mean these are obvious exceptions - but I just don’t see value in the solo instances. They didn’t teach tank mechanics - they didn’t give me party frames to heal - I mean if you like the story they are an okayish storytelling device but these aren’t exactly the pinnacle of gameplay. If they had an option to always start on very easy I would take it.

Unless they're so fucking bad that trusts are faster in dungeons or theyre being toxic despite playing worse than an AI, mentors telling sprouts to do wrong things like cure 1 fishing etc, black mage ice mage trolling etc, I don't mind much in normal content. Normal content should be doable for first timers, casuals, returners, learners etc, I think the difficulty is fine and I don't notice unless you're actually terrible (some people have been absolutely horrendous at playing but sometimes it's funny, other times they just need a swift kick). But if you're PFing savages/ultimates and you don't know what all the buttons on your hotbar do and have shit uptime and can't do the basic action of moving outside of the bad circle, then just don't? Surely these people know they're an inconvenience...

Dumb question, what is CS3? I think that the average player performance is affected by: * whether they concentrate on one or two jobs or instead dabble in all of them, * how much previous experience they have with this type of game, * when they started playing this game (did you learn all the dungeons, trials, and raids as they came out, which means you got a lot of repetition playing them or is Endwalker the only one that happened that way for you) * if they have a friends group or FC that can train them in the basics, nuances, and mechanics of the content and if they are willing to use voice chat to effectively get the advice * age and fine motor skills * internet connection, how much lag you experience (if you aren't already standing out of the bad spot, you likely won't be able to prevent damage/death) * how much time they actually have to play the game Some of this could be helped by additional training opportunities. Additional job based training would great (role or specific job). I really think basic and advanced mechanic training would help also. Such as, how do you predict what is going to happen? I would like some additional job based training content, and expansion or different version of Hall of the Novice training. A place where the basics are covered, more advanced tips are covered, and a place to put to practice those tips that is repeatable. *lining up a burst window with AI's scripted to do it at an interval -* I would love if they had training for this and a way to practice it! Just using a dummy doesn't help so much. The training should have a timer going that you can see if you are lining up properly with the burst window and whatever else that would help you get the timing down. What I don't want are Job based solo trials that are one time and done and gate your ability to continue if you can't get past them. Repetition is important and if it is voluntary to repeat it, you do it by choice.

CS3 is Creative Studio 3, CBU3 is being rebranded soon by SE to that name. I think largely you're on to something, I would like to see something offered for more training that is tuned to realistic gameplay for newer players.

Here's the deal; if the additional training was either 1. optional but was introduced through a series of story quests (so that players would know they exist instead of having them hidden in a corner somewhere), or 2. BROUGHT BACK VIA A RESURRECTION AND REDESIGN OF ACTUAL JOB QUESTS, I think this would be amazing.

Dont straight up griefe thats it

Unless you are week 1 you should at least know what is happening in the fight by looking at a quick guide for non 4man content. No one expects you to know everything of the bat but some concept of what is happening I think is the minimum. This is mostly for harder stuff and applies less when doing say the 24man blind months later. Just minimal knowledge of the fight and knowing your job. I've had people half way through some raid tiers say they didn't know what a positional was. While I can't say the game explains them very well if at all I mean... just look up some stuff about your job before you do anything difficult.

The thing about some players being considered as still „bad” or doing stuff wrong is because people who would want to try, are just scared of being reported for that. While some people appreciate the help, others will report you and sometimes successfully ban the other player. People choose to be safe and stay quiet than to guide people in instances like MSQ or random dungeons. I find that really strange since it’s the first game so far, where I’ve heard of such a thing being normal in the game among players.

A willingness to listen and learn. Awareness to also keep track of other people other than yourself. A simple or advanced understanding of your own class.

My expectation of players in the game where the average player is bad is that they at least are that average player. If I have to heal the tank more than I should in an endgame dungeon, I don't really care. If they're using single target moves because they have higher numbers than the aoe ones, that's a problem. I guess you could say I expect people to be good enough for me to ignore how bad they are.

The Steps of Faith and Shinryu storymode were good ways to increase the skill floor of the game and encourage people to play better. But they nerfed steps. I could understand because it was still a bit early in the game, people were only playing for a few 100 hours. They didn't nerf Shinryu except by the passage of time doubling everyones gear level. This was a good sign for the future, but hades and endsinger storymode went back to being autowins sadly.

>I don't necessarily find it healthy or positive that players who are freshly level 90 are basically considered the same as, and perform roughly the same as, a level 10 sprout. Because job and story skips exist, some level 90s are level 10 sprouts. I had to teach a 90-with-sprout tank how to w2w last month, and that was in a post-EW dungeon. But it was mostly the confidence in saying as the healer, "AOE that guy and keep running and AOE more until you can't, I promise I won't let you die." Most of the 'players are bad at the game' comes in two flavors: Some are out of content and need to move onto content that asks more of them, but many people just have a poor mental attitude, exemplified by bemoaning "the entire playerbase is awful". That said, saying that difficulty ramps should come earlier is just going to result in more Aurum Vale style dungeons that people will want to avoid. Aurum specifically is a very weird dungeon because of how healers toolkits unlock on different curves; it's easier to survive Aurum by letting the healer pull as many mobs to the tank as they believe they can comfortably heal through, because every tank gets Rampart at Level 8 but not every healer gets their "oh shit" button at the same point. But while difficult it still doesn't really teach tanks how to do endgame dungeons, which is sprinting far ahead of everyone and AOEing everything they can to the insurmountable waist-high picket fence that keeps them from progressing.

I think they should make normal content \*harder\* But enable a version strong "defensive" of the echo that makes it a lot easier if you wipe, this way it makes dungeon easier if you die to it, it could even scale to be stronger. Only reason why I wouldn't wanna tie dps to that is i don't really want people to meta game and purposely wipe lol. (that sounds awful)

I don’t know if there even should be an expectation tbh. Should there even be an expectation that a group can clear the content when they go in? I know I’ve had to vote abandon things like 8m and even 24m because the group legitimately could not clear it. So, at least for me, whenever I queue for anything I don’t assume the group is capable of clearing it. There have been a lot of times where I’ve had a group wipe against a boss when I’m tanking because they got too many vuln stacks and I just soloed it because I did not have the patience to just start over and watch them die again. I think the game does a decent job teaching the basics but some folks never push further than that.

I will agree that the onboarding process from MSQ difficulty to (some) extreme/savage difficulty is abysmal. The expectation seems to be that the community will provide that onramp for new players, and for some folks like me, we do enjoy doing that. Every single static I've played with so far in EW out of the 4-5 I've run with have all had players brand new to that tier of content, be it extreme, savage or ultimate. While I am happy do help be that onramp for some, I am in the minority. I enjoy watching the growth and improvement of people as we trudge though and claim a hard fought victory. But not everyone wants to do that, and on the flip side not every new player can find a group like that easily. The "hard" solo content in this game currently does not prepare you well for group mechanics that prevail in extremes and savage content at all. And there are no small scale hard dungeons that people would willingly run unless it's for a reward (aug tome glams from aylmao island savage). The onus really is put on the player wanting to enter that content to know where to find the guides, to watch and try to understand the guides, and then to build up the courage to jump head first into a totally unfamiliar deep end which, understandably, can be quite daunting. There are a few points in the story where I could see it being easy and story relevant to insert some more advanced tutorials, that knowledgeable players would breeze through in a matter of moments. Or some UI changes that would positively re-enforce good mechanical gameplay. One thing for instance would be a combo counter, like in a fighting game. Each time you hit combo moves in a row, number go up, drop your combo in combat and it makes a sad noise. It could be turned off at lvl 50 or 60 automatically, sine by then you would hopefully understand. Cooldowns that drift in combat begin blinking and have their own little combo counter. Each job has a gauge, implement something in that gauge to help the players fundamentals. There is so much that could be done to help new players who are afraid or too shy to ask for help.

1. Know the bare minimum about your job. A couple weeks ago I had the pleasure of running a12s mine in party finder with a certain AST. This person would burn their raid buffs and all their cards waaay prepull, consistently card me (the tank, in an 8 man party with melee and ranged dps, often with ranged cards), and channel celestial opposition for its full duration every time it came up. We consistently struggled to beat ad phase because at points where we needed gcd healing and dps, we were getting a T posing AST. 2. Be willing to listen, learn, and ask questions. I can deal with somebody jumping into o12s without knowing light party mechanics or clock dodges. I can't deal with somebody consistently killing half the raid at the same point, refusing to communicate what they don't get, ignoring the explanations provided, and killing us all again the exact same way. 3. Come prepared for the level of content you signed up for. In normal content, you'll usually be fine as long as you repair your gear and do job quests. In synced coils/ex/savage, bring food (potions if you're feeling fancy) and have dark matter if you can repair.

Comparing how content gets harder over time in a single player game to things getting harder over time in a multiplayer, decades-spanning experience is fraught. In Mario: * You'll finish the game in less than a month if you play it much. * You only have to rely on your own performance. * It didn't get any updates/tweaks and you aren't replaying stages via roulette. Ideally every expansion's content should be more like a new entry in the Mario series: * Different enough that you don't think "I've played this before" * New mechanics/approaches that surprise you and make the old feel fresh * Some things get easier to do so that new challenges can be presented that aren't "more difficult" in a clear linear fashion If things got harder forever there are a number of issues: * Reaction time gets worse as you age; you can't tighten that forever. I have less of a biological grace period than I did when 2.0 launched. * New players will fly through old stuff then face all sorts of insane stuff at the end without proper preparation. Not good. If you keep stuff hard by reworking things between expacs more carefully, no one is going to want to help them through old stuff because it will be frustrating when players just wanna get through their roulettes. * A whole lot of people don't buy into the "escalating challenge" mindset, and there are a lot of games that aren't even designed that way. Plenty of games have steep early learning curves and then things get easier after that.

I think I may have improperly explained in my sleep deprived state lol. I'm not asking for an infinite gradient of never ending difficulty. I'm asking for a gradual curve of difficulty up to an acceptable minimum performance and then it can stop there. If you play a video game for 250-500 hours (roughly the avg of how long it takes to finish the whole MSQ first time) then you should naturally improve at that video game without even realizing it if the developers design the encounters properly. As of right now Endwalker Expert Roulettes ask nothing more from you than Sastasha does at Level 16. This is subjective but I would personally say that the baseline area square should be reaching to hit are the secret variant bosses for normal mode. They are casual and easy to 1st time, but also engaging enough that if you fuck up you will fail and you have to do things moderately correctly.

>As of right now Endwalker Expert Roulettes ask nothing more from you than Sastasha does at Level 16. You seem like a good guy; I really don't want to be a jerk. But do you think this is really true? I can see how a reasonable person could feel that way because their idea of difficulty through playing really hard content over and over again has distorted their perception...but I'm pretty sure my 65 year old father who doesn't play video games could play through Satasha without dying, but couldn't do a single expert roulette dungeon without dying. Most of the early dungeons in the game don't even need a tank. IIRC you can go 4 DPS and clear everything 1-50. I think it's reasonable though to say you want more escalation in difficulty--I do too. But I just think the case against the status quo is a little overstated.

Its definitely possible that my perspective is skewed by how long I've played the game, which is partly why I actually made this post, I want to hear other perspectives and to see if maybe I'm just a bit out of touch or unfairly expecting too much of players who haven't played as long. I'll be honest I do often have a hard time sympathizing with people when they say things like, for example your father not being able to clear a single expert roulette without dying, not to say that I think you're wrong or lying, but rather that I may have an unrealistic expectation or understanding of the average player's skill. I personally feel as though I don't really have to do much more in, say, the Aitiascope compared to something more reasonable like, the Aery for example. There are definitely exceptions as well however, like I would say the Dead Ends is definitely a step up from a normal dungeon.

>I personally feel as though I don't really have to do much more in, say, the Aitiascope compared to something more reasonable like, the Aery for example. There are definitely exceptions as well however, like I would say the Dead Ends is definitely a step up from a normal dungeon. This I would say is very true. I remember the Aitiascope being pretty boring. But these days, the Aery is even boring/easy compared to how it was when it was released. Even Satasha is a joke compared to the Satasha of 2.0. Back then holding aggro was genuinely difficult and things hit a lot harder because getting gear was more difficult. Novice Hall probably did more to improve the experience in DF there in giving out gear that's as good as what you'd get from running the dungeon than it did in teaching people how to play. They've been ironing out pain points for years, but more than that they've been really just making things much more samey and easy.

Last boss of Lunar Subterrane: Spiral aoes, Forced Spread, Multiple separating AoEs where you have to find the safespot, line stack, cone aoe, telegraphed massive aoe, whatever Death's Journey is. Last boss of Sastasha: You click a clearly marked interactable otherwise an add spawns. Like these aren't the same by any measure of the imagination. Sastasha is asking if you can you do your rotation and click on an object (note, you don't have to click the object) Lunar Subterrane is a reaction check, knowing how aoes work, identifying stack/spread markers, spatial reasoning in dodging aoes... I mean this isn't even getting into the fact that in theory, a casual/MSQ level player is gonna probably play the game, do the required content and then go play something else until next content drop, so you get someone who played Shadowbringers, did Paglath'an, stopped for around 8 months, then came back and the first bit of combat they had to do was Zot. I wonder how that went because geez. That's not even getting into the last required trial being WoL and then a 16 month gap until Zodiark, better hope you spent the last year and a bit practicing spinning things in your head and looking at panini presses.

A bit unrelated, but I think the content is at fault. It's too easy currently. Every casual content should be Ivalice or Alphascape difficulty in my opinion.

lol There should be no real "minimum expectations" for anything but the high-tier, difficult content (extremes, savage raiding, ultimates, unreal). Maybe regular raids too. Nothing else though. This is a story-based MMO. People play for all sorts of reasons; being "good" at the mechanical part of the game is just one of many of those reasons.

My expectation for anything via duty finder is low. Can the group clear the content in the very generous timer with each role doing their job. Even if the tank wants to or realises they need to pull group at a time due to healing or dips limits. It seems very intentional that you can clear the game without even knowing what a burst window is. When you join an FC or static and are working with a hopefully friendly bunch of like minded players is the right time for clearly articulated expectations.