The 4 person party system, and why it's always a bad idea.

[Mishakai]

Look at it this way.. Light parties of 4, full parties of 8, raid groups of 24. 24 is about a big a group you can feasibly manage for raiding anymore. Take that light party to 5, now we have full parties of 10, raid groups of 30.. Getting 24 people together is going to be an effort in and of itself, bump that to 30, might as well be back in the days of 40 man raids that took half a day to organize.

[Meklore]

While I understand your intentions and cannot disagree on the value of your opinion, it's a good idea.
The problem is that the entire enmity system would have to be overhauled to accomplish this.
There would be more damage dealers that generate more enmity on a mob making tanking even more 'stressful' than it already is.
Having more damage dealt by more players would mean that the healers would also be drawing more enmity by virtue of having to heal more players.
This in turn would mean that the tank would have to generate even more enmity to keep the attention of the mobs off even more players and there aren't enough enmity generating tools to do that.
Just my 2 gil.

[Altheras]

Look at it this way.. Light parties of 4, full parties of 8, raid groups of 24. 24 is about a big a group you can feasibly manage for raiding anymore. Take that light party to 5, now we have full parties of 10, raid groups of 30.. Getting 24 people together is going to be an effort in and of itself, bump that to 30, might as well be back in the days of 40 man raids that took half a day to organize.

Typically in WoW with the 5 man parties, you'd have 5 man groups, 10 man groups, and then 25 man groups. The structure would just be a bit different once you got up to 25 man groups, you didn't have 5 tanks and 5 healers, you'd have usually 2-3 tanks and then 4ish healers allowing for the rest to be DPS.

Having said that though, I've yet to see what the 24 man group makeup is going to be like for FFXIV, I doubt it will be 6 tanks, 6 healers, and 12 DD though, now that I think about it.

[Yoko_Kurama]

I'd just like to take the time to say that so far as a level 50, I notice that when people die, I as a summoner raise more people back to life than most healers. Maybe i have bad luck but i tend to end up in parties who care more about healing the tank and themselves than bringing anyone else alive so i am usually the one who stops dpsing to raise others.

I suppose that can be looked at as a good thing, perhaps they felt that by giving other classes tank and healer abilities you essentially have a backup tank and healer ready to go so maybe that is why they thought it was ok to have 4 man team situations? Personally i wish there were a lot of dungeons or instances or situations which required forming alliance parties of 20+ to do content, and i don't mean fates where noone is talking to each other because everyone just needs to attack stuff, i mean situations which require huge amounts of people to actively coordinate their next move to survive. People talk about how this game is still at launch, you know what?

When Aion launched i went from open beta and played the first month until I lost my part time job at the time, at launch there were situations where you and two or three full parties could jump into the other factions world and literally fight every person from the other faction that came after you. I'm talking you and 30 others coordinating taking out any player you see as quickly as possible and then moving fast because once players noticed your group had invaded that world they would be in their own general/trade chat letting everyone on that server where 30 people were running around and eventually it would be your 30 people vs WAVES of other players until your group got wiped. The exhilaration was beyond anything i've felt in this game. So yeah to the OP I am also disappointed with all this content meant for small groups.

[Altheras]

While I understand your intentions and cannot disagree on the value of your opinion, it's a good idea.
The problem is that the entire enmity system would have to be overhauled to accomplish this.
There would be more damage dealers that generate more enmity on a mob making tanking even more 'stressful' than it already is.
Having more damage dealt by more players would mean that the healers would also be drawing more enmity by virtue of having to heal more players.
This in turn would mean that the tank would have to generate even more enmity to keep the attention of the mobs off even more players and there aren't enough enmity generating tools to do that.
Just my 2 gil.

Yeah I see your point. I wasn't so much suggesting a change now as they'd have to rework the ENTIRE game around the idea. They'd have to buff mob HP and basically change the whole system which I know they would never do. I was more questioning why the decision for such a small party size to begin with. It seems a bit odd of a choice given how much more of MMO populations tend to lean towards DD roles.

[Altheras]

I'd just like to take the time to say that so far as a level 50, I notice that when people die, I as a summoner raise more people back to life than most healers. Maybe i have bad luck but i tend to end up in parties who care more about healing the tank and themselves than bringing anyone else alive so i am usually the one who stops dpsing to raise others.

It's nice to see a DD who stops and helps res, often times I find myself being the only one who bothers, having the other healer not even bother to res me if anything happens, let alone help me get tanks back up. Sometimes I just res til I'm oom and still have people shouting at me for resses with the caster DD just ignoring it and DDing and the other healer just trying to keep the remaining people alive.

I also would like to see more larger group content that's more involved than FATEs. We can only hope that such things show up in future patches.

[Ryios]

Yeah I really don't understand why SE didn't stay with the 6 person part and 18 person alliance they had in ffxi, that system worked well. 6 is the perfect size for a party.