Healers Exist for DPS fun only?

[QooEr]

You would be correct. I believe E8S and E12S are still impossible to clear week two without healer DPS. Both their DPS checks, especially E8S, is surprisingly tight. Sadly, in their recent interview on Ahk Morning, they kept emphasising how E11s and E12S were the absolute highest they could stretch the difficulty for those respective floors. Which is... disconcerting to say the least. E11S' heal check is only at the very end, which you inevitably start skipping in a decent static and while Promise can be intense at times, Gaia is pretty free until the end.

id very much prefer if theyd put heal checks and harder mechanics in the middle of fights than at the very end so you cant skip them as the tier gets older

[Lyth]

id very much prefer if theyd put heal checks and harder mechanics in the middle of fights than at the very end so you cant skip them as the tier gets older

This is a very sensible idea, but most fights make a point of introducing the basic mechanics individually early so that you have a rough understanding of what each action does before they start introducing variations on a theme. That's one of the reasons why you tend to get your first raidwide and tankbuster relatively early, just so you learn to recognize the action names before proceeding to the more interesting stuff. Many of the harder mechanics challenges in fights tend to happen when several simpler mechanics end up resolving at the same time, so that's why you tend to see them later on in a fight when the basic 'vocabulary' has been established. The exception to this is when they introduce a puzzle mechanic or intermission, but those often do show up mid fight.

One thing that they have changed around this is removing percentage-based phase transitions, because those did have a big impact on your ability to bypass mechanics based on your damage output (skip Soar or disband) (in addition to being quite messy in some cases).

I think you'll always run into the issue of your raid dps output truncating and simplifying fights. This is fine, because often if you're first progressing through a fight at a gear level that's appropriately challenging for your group, you'll probably have a few people dead and run up into enrage at least once. I think if you want a progressive healer check that ramps up over the fight and on mechanical errors, the ideal way to do that is to give the boss a stacking damage buff over time as a sort of soft enrage. Granted, they tried this with A7S at one point (every player death gave the boss a stack), and it was really quite painful to progress on because of how quickly things snowball.

[ForteNightshade]

id very much prefer if theyd put heal checks and harder mechanics in the middle of fights than at the very end so you cant skip them as the tier gets older

Same. Take Voidgate, which is easily the most interesting mechanic of E10S. Any good group will skip it entirely by week four at the latest. Although, it's skipable as early as week two, I believe. Without Voidgate, Shadowkeeper only has one noteworthy mechanic, which just happens to be the worst one—that being the orbs. Cloud doesn't quite suffer from this as her last phase is essentially a repeat but all the others do.

[Boizinho]

Same. Take Voidgate, which is easily the most interesting mechanic of E10S. Any good group will skip it entirely by week four at the latest. Although, it's skipable as early as week two, I believe. Without Voidgate, Shadowkeeper only has one noteworthy mechanic, which just happens to be the worst one—that being the orbs. Cloud doesn't quite suffer from this as her last phase is essentially a repeat but all the others do.

Cloud is an excellent example of doing it right. Empty Plane is the highlight of the fight, and I really enjoy the fact that I still get to do it even this late into the tier where everyone is horribly overgeared. E10S and E11S are just kind of sad now though. You mentioned Voidgate already, but E11S arguably doesn't really test you until Cycles which you just don't see anymore. E2S had this same problem as well, with a mechanic of the same nature and with the same name.

Backloading the mechanics is obnoxious no matter when you're doing the fight. Early prog? Every wipe takes 15 minutes. A bit later when people are geared up a decent amount? It takes until the very end of a fight to find out if your PF "farm" group is actually going to be a farm group. Near the end of the tier? You get "savages" with less going on than Cloud Deck EX.

For anyone familiar with TCGs/CCGs, these fights feel like playing against a beginner's insanely greedy deck with nothing to play for the first 10 turns. The whole game they threaten to play their amazing high-cost, game-winning card, and then unceremoniously die on turn 8 without having ever done anything.

[ForteNightshade]

Cloud is an excellent example of doing it right. Empty Plane is the highlight of the fight, and I really enjoy the fact that I still get to do it even this late into the tier where everyone is horribly overgeared. E10S and E11S are just kind of sad now though. You mentioned Voidgate already, but E11S arguably doesn't really test you until Cycles which you just don't see anymore. E2S had this same problem as well, with a mechanic of the same nature and with the same name.

Backloading the mechanics is obnoxious no matter when you're doing the fight. Early prog? Every wipe takes 15 minutes. A bit later when people are geared up a decent amount? It takes until the very end of a fight to find out if your PF "farm" group is actually going to be a farm group. Near the end of the tier? You get "savages" with less going on than Cloud Deck EX.

For anyone familiar with TCGs/CCGs, these fights feel like playing against a beginner's insanely greedy deck with nothing to play for the first 10 turns. The whole game they threaten to play their amazing high-cost, game-winning card, and then unceremoniously die on turn 8 without having ever done anything.

E11S is just sad nowadays. Granted, PF still sees the beginning of Cycles despite having echo but even a casual static should be easily skipping that. At which point, he's basically a glorified normal mode fight with higher damage. E2S at least has enough going on that skipping Quietus cycles doesn't feel quite as bad but I agree. They sort of get it right in E8S, though I can't tell you have many times I've wiped to Icelight Dragonsong or Mirrors. Granted, E8S' problem is the lengthily cut-scene but that's a different argument. E3S is probably one of the worst examples this whole expansion on gear ruining a fight. It's so heavily backlogged. Levi does practically nothing for 5-6 minutes, which means the majority of his fight, you basically auto-pilot.

The third fights in general were not great this expansion; with Idol of Darkness being one of the worst fights they've ever designed, especially as a healer. But I digress.

While I hated the repetition of Stormblood raids, I actually would be okay if more fights were setup like Cloud where the "highlight" mechanic is repeated only at the very end with the expectation you'll skip in a static.