Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
Ultimately, it boils down to an easy solution. Come 5.0, make content have some teeth and reduce healer potency. Now healers have to focus more on healing. Considering I have seen how you play, would that not be preferable? Many healers want to heal more, but also recognize the game simply doesn't necessitate it.
That comes from gear creep in the game. You start Swallows Compass with i350 or better gear and it literately has no teeth. I've gone into it with my SCH who didn't have an i3xx weapon but otherwise had all i360 gear from my WHM. This goes back to basic JRPG design. You either outlevel the content or you outgear the content or both, to make it easier. The trouble is that, even in old SNES JRPG's is literately the fastest solution when you've outgeared and outleveled the content will sideline the healer. In single player games, it is fine to do that, in a MMORPG it turns every piece of content into "boring" for the healer.

The solution really calls for less stat inflation from gear to begin with. The entire gear reward design in this game effectively requires you to have the best gear from the previous piece of content, but doesn't actually penalize players for skipping the gear from the previous piece of content since it's no longer BiS. Unless content is going to be designed to ignore the defensive properties of the player gear, so it doesn't matter, it simply will never have any teeth. Yoshi-P is caught in a no-win scenario here because setting ilevel caps to all content to only allow +10 from minimum would make most content "hard enough" but it would likely leave the bottom third of the playerbase unable to complete it by any means without being carried. Where as having such little room makes bothering to even get better gear and materia pointless, it would have the opposite effect and make even savage content easier, since players would only need to outgear the dungeon, not obtain the BiS gear.



Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
Curiously, for all your insistence of raiders being toxic, you seldom see kicks from average players who actually try.
Being kicked by raiders once, is one time too many. You and others wonder why I have such a axe to grind against parser users, the first and only time I was kicked without any communication at all from any party, in 2.5 both DPS players had fflogs in their lodestone profiles,which is what made me aware of that sites existence. This was on The Keeper of the Lake during Expert roulette, which up to that point I had cleared plenty of times, and even with a party with a tank who was wearing DPS gear. I'm willing to roll with what I get on DF, the raiders should not be kicking players for "play style" differences, especially not from dungeon content. The impression I get from the forum raiders is that they check players lodestones and fflogs and kick players just to improve their own parses.

What makes you think I would ever want to play with a parser user after that? No doubt I've played with people who were parsing everything because they're concerned about their ranking on that site, but I don't want to hear it. It is cheating, it violates the ToS, so I'm objectively right. If SE's unwritten policy is to ignore parser users, then they are just going to have an arms race escalation between players building tools that reveal more invisible information from the game until someone crosses a line. That FFXIV ACT plugin is also the basis for the radar tools and callout automations, and even that cactbot plugin has the entire combat script for everything, and is used to reveal anything that the game client is told in advance for.

Quote Originally Posted by Bourne_Endeavor View Post
Regardless, have you a source or are this statistics pulled from Narnia? Because current estimations based on players who have the Lunar Kamuy puts Tsukiyomi clears at 7%. Savage clears have ranged between 10-20% since Creator. And the unofficial census Lucky Bancho does purposely cuts off his calculations when a tier ends. Therefore, the highest level anyone can have clearing Sigmascape Savage is i370. That 1% applies only towards Ultimate.
That only means Lucky Bancho theoretically more accurate as they are only counting clears before gear creep sets in. It would be nice if SE posted clear rates for content themselves so we can quit having this argument about clear rates. Right now, I doubt few players have legitimate clears in hard content, be it parser usage, bought carries, or whatever.

Why do I even care? How does someone else cheating themselves affect my ability to play the game? Have you ever been at school or a job where your performance is measured by doing things by the book, and you're near the top of your ability, and then you see the scores posted for other people on your team and you end up at the middle or bottom? Then you're the one that is told to improve, meanwhile the people above you continue to game the grading metric by doing things wrong, and creating more work for other staff to fix their mistakes. I have a real bone to pick with people who insist they aren't cheating, when they absolutely are.

The analogy here is that "the meta" is the result of cheating. The meta doesn't play by the rules the system goes by. It only exists because the game doesn't punish "pushing the work to others", in that post I quoted of yours about tanking, if you turn tank stance off, you are forcing the other players to have to use their enmity reduction if you make a mistake. If you are are a healer, and focusing on DPS, you're forcing the players to use their self-heal, and thus reducing their DPS in the process. The healer DPS doesn't count in the content design, the DPS's DPS does.

If the game's regular content "had more teeth", the healer should never have time to throw Stone/Malefic consecutively, the tank or party should be bleeding enough that taking 5 seconds to throw stone twice would result in the tank or the healer's death without the tank using a CD. Yet on the healer forums we keep seeing players asking for more DPS skills as a healer, because they want to be a green DPS, they do not want to be a healer. The tank, likewise, should lose enmity the second they are out of tank stance, and the fact that doesn't happen shows a large blindspot with how content is designed (the content always assumes the tank is in tank stance.) If they are not in tank stance, they are not "a tank", and the healer should become the primary target of any mob that isn't being targeted. If there's only 3 mobs, you can drop tank stance and the DPS can all deal with one add, and the healer can use party healing without becoming the target. Yet, that's not how the game's logic works. Even in the single player content like the MCH level 50 job quest or the MSQ solo duty where you fight the GC's, where there are belligerent healers present, you the player are not going to fight the belligerent tank first unless they're actively preventing you from getting to the belligerent healer. Those belligerent healers are always casting healing magic because you're damaging the belligerent mob group. If you sit there long enough without doing anything, you might see the belligerent healers cast stone.

The Squadron's even do this. I leveled MCH, MNK and NIN entirely from the squadrons because that was faster than waiting for the DPS queue. You can quite literately, start the dungeon, target a mob group, and tell your squadron to attack, while you sit back and watch. The healer will heal more often, because the mobs die a little slower without your participation, but the Squadron healer has access to all the level 50 role actions and skills of the conjurer, even when they are not in level 50 content. And by having everyone have a level 5 buff, the trash mobs can always be completed without your participation when you're on DPS. What does this tell us about DPS's responsibility? If it wasn't for there being mechanics to bosses, they could probably clear most of the bosses too.

So, what are the issues with current content design?
1) The tank's "tank stance" isn't really mandatory, thus you get blue DPS activity, this is because enmity generation assumes the tank stays in tank stance. If the tank drops tank stance, the enemies should delete the tank from their enmity table. This still allows the tank to do this purposely, but the way it works right now, the tank is getting the benefit of being a tank without being in tank stance. Belligerent mob groups rarely have tanks, and players know to finish them off last because they do less damage to the party and have larger HP pools. Single target bosses pretty much do not need the party tank in tank stance if the rest of the party doesn't generate more enmity than them.
How I'd fix it - leaving tank stance should reset enmity as if the tank was ko'd. After all, there's no longer a tank.

2) The healer doesn't have enough to do, and casting high-enmity healing like Medica II to allow for green DPS activity should rip enmity away from the tank if the tank is not in tank stance. With single-target bosses, this ultimately doesn't have any meaningful use since there is only one target, hence most players just spam Medica II without consideration of the tank. On trash, casting Medica II should always be a mistake, and when the Squadron does it, they always follow it with the enmity dump, but they never cast Medica II the way "the meta" assumes.
How I'd fix it - The most obvious thing to do is remove regen/aspected benefic and medica II/diurnal aspected helios from being skills to actions with CD's. But perhaps a better change would be to put the regen effect entirely on a separate skill so that "the next cure/medica/benefic/helios/physick will add X seconds of regen/shield of potency Y to a maximum of (capped) seconds" and then fold Medica and Medica II into the same skill, and Cure/Cure II into the same skill, and benefic/benefic II into the same skill, and Helios/Aspected Helios into the same skill. For Nocturnal AST's that would swap regen for shield. If you have two WHM, or two AST or one of each, then the regen effect is added instead of overwritten. It would at the very least allow healers to benefit from each other's buffs. There are two pieces of content in the game (both in the MSQ Roulette) where the healer is the better tank, because the boss has no teeth, and by purposely creating enmity from Medica II, all the adds are drawn automatically to the healer.

3) DPS are ultimately allowed to underperform, even in punishing content. The healer and tank should not have time to DPS, they should be performing their role at all times. Which means that if the tank or healer have time to use single target DPS, then all the DPS are underperforming. We already have the gauges, they tell the player what they should be doing, but ultimately there is no imperative to do anything at all. If the tank or healer stops what they're doing, the party would immediately fail. If the DPS stop what they're doing, they can continue to do nothing.
How I'd fix it - Pretty much, as also observed from the squadron content, the fix here really needs to be that the tank and healer DPS be effectively zero relative to DPS contribution. That would not be very fun at all for the tank or healer, so perhaps the mechanic that is needed here is for the mob groups to have their own healers. Thus if the party DPS are under-performing, the belligerent healers will have no problem keeping their group fully healed. The party healer and party tank will not be able to kill the belligerent healer by themselves as the rest of the belligerent party would kill the party healer if the tank tries to drop tank stance to help DPS the belligerent healer.

4) Mobs spawned do nothing until hit or a few seconds. Okay this really needs to ask the question of why. Mobs are always at the disadvantage because the player is always allowed to get the first hit in, thus they can be stunlocked at spawn. What should happen is that hostile mobs should always LoS (Line of Sight) attack players at spawn.
How'd I'd fix it - This is really a problem of latency, sure it might not be fair to players to suddenly be attacked before seeing the mob spawn, but perhaps maybe the spawning process can make sure that the mobs are not spawned within players auto-attack range to prevent that.

5) Trash mobs are generally toothless, and so is their AI. So? Classic JRPG formula is you outgear and outlevel them, you should be able to sneeze on them and they die. The problem here is that levelsync and ilevelsync doesn't actually bring these anywhere close to having teeth. Sure I may have to use a different strategy for the Squadrons to account for the AI doing stupid things like chasing the invulnerable monster around, but the trash mobs, even the Squadron can defeat quickly with only one DPS. What's the point of having the trash mobs if they're not an obstacle? They're just a few road cones to knock over once you hit the sync point. In an experienced party, the tank can do a wall-to-wall pull of them, and they are stupid enough to follow while ranged players can hit them and they ignore it.
How'd I'd fix it - If the tank moves more than 15y away from the mob's spawn point, the mob will lose interest and resets it's enmity, and recovers it's hp completely if there's nobody else on the enmity table. More to the point, to prevent bots from being able to complete dungeons, also reset the mob if they can't hit the target after 5 seconds without a status effect (eg stun) preventing them. If another player lands a hit on a tagged mob without the tank generating enmity, then the mob should defend itself.