Quote Originally Posted by Hruodig View Post
And it's on se to change that in a meaningful way, which they have utterly failed to do time and time again so far. Ultimately the meta will always revolve around maximizing raid dps in order to clear encounters faster-as long as the win state continues to be "reduce boss's hp to 0", that will not change.
And this is what I do not understand about encounter design in FFXIV. It's overly focused on tank busters so you have to have a tank front and center. If reducing the boss HP to 0 as quickly as possible is the goal, then the best strategy for the boss is to kill the healer and the DPS and ignore the tank. It strikes me that with a lot more adds, crowd control to protect healers and DPS becomes more important. So if our gear and abilities are able to largely mitigate the damage of adds, yet the adds could quickly shred the non tanks; the best way for the tank to kill the boss quickly is to maintain good crowd control of the adds, and intercept large focused AoEs. After all, with even rudimentary AI, Bosses should know that killing healers takes priority over tanks, and killing DPS comes next to reduce the rate at which they are taking damage.

But encounters are frequently designed around a single Boss, large front cleaves and AoE Mechanics that affect everyone. So the MT keeps the boss pointed in the right direction to avoid cleaves and the DPS beat the living crap out of the Boss from behind. Followed by everyone dancing to the new AoE tune. I think that we need more adds in boss fights and less emphasis on central AoEs. Make the tanks earn their living by keeping others alive, make it more interesting than simply popping a CD to mitigate a tank buster.