Quote Originally Posted by Tridus View Post
It can be a real culture shock when people hit Ex/Savage and suddenly start being told they're doing bad DPS when nothing has ever told them that before and it hasn't mattered at all. A tutorial won't fix that. If you want to fix that, you need to surface that information a lot earlier. IMO you also need to up the difficulty of levelling and expert content so that poor play is more punishing, because if you can stand in absolutely everything and be carried by the healer, what's the harm?
This here is why I get so tilted over the eased difficulty we've seen since mid-Heavensward. Look no further than Sunsao and Lakshmi EX, where the excuse was "people are learning their new abilities!" Fast forward to Shinryu EX and pf is a complete shitshow. Why? The former two didn't allow people to learn but simply made it far easier to carry bad players since you scarcely even need six people for either. Shinryu, on the other hand, exposed those detrimental to the party. The easier casual content becomes, the less people pay attention because nothing reinforces the notion they should. A friend of mine actually got a tank who had never touched Savage before and said "I cleared V4N. Shouldn't be that much different." They legitimately thought normal was just a slight tier below. Honestly, I suspect many newer players have similar opinions only to get absolutely decimated.

If the devs ever truly want to shrink the skill gap, they need to stop coddling and make reasonably paced difficulty curves. Considering they've come out saying The Vault was too much for leveling healers, I won't hold my breath...