DPS stressors vs. Mitigation stressors

[Vyrerus]

Actually the survival requirement weren't low in ARR

Some corrections/Observations:

Ultima's Bane -> That is an example of a hard swap. You must swap before 5 stacks or you die, end of story.

Spiny Plume -> The penalty for not swapping the Spiny Plume wasn't against the tanks, it was a hard party wide bust for tank incompetence. If you got three stacks, you would explode causing massive damage to everyone, generally only survivable with VIT melded accessories/latency/raise luck. This is a unique mechanic that I have not seen repeated in this fashion.

Ifrit Ex -> Due to the chain tether, swapping was controlled by the fight, often requiring a tank to take the full 5 stacks of Suppuration, and to try and swap while the OT still had the chain would result in the chained tank's death.

Turn 4 Dreadnaughts -> The first Dreadnaught needed to eat the 4 spiders, because otherwise physical DPS would go resource dry, necessitating resource singing, lowering raid DPS, failing the overall DPS check of the fight. This phase was proceeded by the double Spinner Rook + 4 spider phase, so you needed to have resource for AOEing that. The only Dreadnaught not fed spiders in this fight would be the second one, ideally.

The tank meta "changed" starting in Second Coil. DPS checks started to really ramp up then, and it became apparent that not a lot of people were up to them, resulting in many groups only using two tanks if absolutely necessary, in order to have more DPS in the group. Tanks also started regularly full timing either pentamelded i70 accessories or STR accessories entirely, in order to help meet these checks. The Turn 8 boss was the first boss in the game to have over 1 million HP, having about 1.01 million HP iirc. There was also a Dreadnaught add with just under 100k HP. With a hard enrage time of 11 minutes, this meant the raid needed to do one hundred thousand damage every minute. This required a raid DPS of somewhere in the ballpark of 2000, and a good DPS at the time in entry level gear was capable of roughly 300~400. A good tank, in entry level gear, but with STR or Pentamelded accessories was sitting around 200~250. Every little bit mattered.

The first Savage mode raid came in this tier as well, showing the playerbase an even greater need for high DPS.

As for general raid, Swap or Die came into play more in Final Coil. Turn 11 had Main and Secondary Head. Turn 12 had Revelation.

It is weird to see Lyth's character's eyes. I got too used to the blindfold.