Following feedback on the difficulty of content patched in since the release of Heavensward, Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida has announced that patch 3.2 will be a major rebalance. The message to the community is more of a tome, but adjustments will focus primarily on the Alexander: Gordias (Savage) raid, Exploratory Missions, and the Anima weapons that were added in patch 3.15.
Regarding the raid, Yoshida states that while the aim was to introduce a greater challenge at the request of players, the devs may have gone too far, the result being that:
- The difficulty was high to the point that players were transferring to different Worlds in search of groups to beat it.
- The difficulty was high to the point that players were unable to clear the content, and the time in which they were unable to obtain items grew too long.
- Due to the severity of DPS checks, it’s not possible to supplement with item levels only.
The difficulty of the encounter will be lowered with patch 3.2, in addition to rejigging the item level of the Savage weapon concerned.
Exploratory missions were a change of pace for Final Fantasy 14, but they've lead to friction between players who prefer to gather and those who prefer to fight. To address this, the following changes will be hotfixed in:
- More chances for exploration.
- Make a system for matching routes with different objectives such as battle and gathering focused.
- Add variation to the exploration objectives, and make it more fun to explore as an individual party.
- Create set rewards and make it so that farming is not the only objective.
- Reduce the content time, and turn it into content that does not rely greatly on player skill.
Finally, though Yoshida wants Anima weapons to remain time-consuming to obtain, the development team will no longer be using "difficult content" to gate them off. We'll need to wait until patches 3.25 and 3.3 to discover their full meaning, but any future boss requirements will certainly be limited to normal difficulty.
