Quote Originally Posted by ASkellington View Post
increased healing
The problem with "increased healing" requests is that there is a wide disparity in how non-healers play. Between not gearing up properly, not popping mitigation, and not respecting mechanics, it is too easy for the average casual player to keel over if they aren't bothering to learn how to play. And FF XIV is designed around the accessible notion that players really don't need to learn how to play the game.

While I would like to think that we could balance some X amount of more damage to heal, the reality is that it is *extremely* probable that any more damage would result in on average more wipes, which in turn would result in more conflicts between players, more complaints lodged at the game for slowing grinding down, and more players quitting the game for it being too difficult/toxic. The way the game is designed now is to create robust party composition by having so many redundancies that it is difficult for players *not* to clear as long as they have either a decent tank *or* healer and ideally at least one decent DPS.

And here's the rub. I don't mind wipes (most of the time), overcoming them shows character and cameraderie. I don't play content unless I am prepared to have to work for it, and when I do have to tap out I generally recognize that it due to *my* preparedness, not my parties'. So I think the game's community *could* benefit from being less grind-oriented and more okay with slowed down content. I think the game's community *could* benefit from being encouraged to communicate more.

But I also recognize that this is a pipe dream for two reasons. The first is that the majority of people who engage in online content generally want to avoid social responsibility, so the toxicity is never going to go away no matter how easy or difficult the content is. And the second is that, even if toxicity were minimized and players adulted up and learned to communicate and respect each other better, any increase in difficulty would still result in a drop-off of subscriptions because players would either get frustrated at not being able to do the mechanics, or simply wouldn't have the sort of low-brainpower destressing activity they might be expecting from XIV.

And I recognize that is huge amount of defeatism to infer from just wanting to do more healing, but it is the reality we are facing. FFXIV's success has been soundly defined by *reducing* complexity and difficulty. The game it is now just doesn't want to overburden players with strategy, at least the sort that requires optimal use of abilities. Instead it has decided to *downplay* the importance of which buttons players are clicking in casual content, and instead *upplaying* a more visceral, visual, and direct form of gameplay that is effectively just attacking and dodging. And while I definitely have doubts as to the longevity of this paradigm, they do appear to be sticking it for the immediate future because it *sells*.