What's wrong with FFXIV's PVP?

[Snowborn]

Your first point discusses about the lack of mitigation but then your second post wants to nerf what small terrible mitigation we have?

I wouldn't call the mitigation we have small--I would call the mitigation that specific jobs as part of their particular kit (like Samurai) small. The shared mitigation is powerful. It's strong enough to make you almost completely invulnerable for 5 seconds + keep you sustained in combat against anyone's abilities for a good long while. It makes 1v1s pointless. It's what has us locked into the meta of "the team targets the easiest person to burst down and do it" mindset. And the reason why melees get the short end of that stick is they're the only person everyone can target basically. Ranged, the ability to attack from a distance, is super powerful because of the effect it has on targeting.

Because people burst down healers and no one but WHM can defend against that, as a SGE Protect and REcuperate (because of my TINY hp pool) is the only thing that keeps me alive half the time.

If you got bursted down 1 on 1, then that's because you don't know how to use your defensive abilities. No one should be killing you fast enough 1v1 that your team can't come help you. And if it's a team bursting you down, it's because you aren't positioning yourself correctly to avoid that (or couldn't, say you were pushing). Melees, like samurai, cannot currently defend themselves against getting bursted down AND have to expose themselves to it in order to do anything. As a healer you can hang back at the start of the battle and you should.

SAM along has multiple gap closers that also do damage and as someone who literally just had a match with a SAM who had it in for me the whole match, are not underpowered against range in literally any way.

Gap closers help you get in, but they do nothing to protect you once you're in. It can negate the advantage a ranged player has on you in a 1v1 situation, but the problem is that it only makes that person targetable to you (not the rest of your team) while making you targetable to the WHOLE enemy team. It's basically suicide unless other people go in with you and if you have a bunch of ranged players on your team they won't. It's not in their interest to expose themselves to you, so ultimately they wait for you to die and then they die. They have super powerful defensive cooldowns, but there's not much incentive for them to put themselves into situations to use them voluntarily.

With some team comps a lot of this isn't an issue. If you have 3 melee players on your team, or 2 and one of them can do a fair bit of CC & disruption things are going to be fine. But you will never find a samurai that performs well who is stuck on a team with 4 ranged people unless the people he's up against are completely incompetent. It just doesn't work.

[Tobias_Azuryon]

If you got bursted down 1 on 1, then that's because you don't know how to use your defensive abilities. No one should be killing you fast enough 1v1 that your team can't come help you.

It's nice of you to think that the team even looks at healers in the back getting ganked and helps them even when pinging a milliion times lol. My "defensive abilities" are "e.dosis" that's it. And pnuema which has a cast time which can be easily interrupted and due to purify jank and classes (like SAM) having stun, just prolongs the inevitable. Even if I get it off the SAM can also recuperate which means its burst will easily outdo my mitigation lol.

In a perfect world with premades where I COULD hang back and do my job that'd be one thing, but as of right now if I so much as blink in the general direction of a WAR/WHM/NIN/SAM, I'm target numero uno (which makes sense) but have no ways of dealing with that like WHM. (Stun, easy self heals, protect dps and easy LB). It's not saying you CANT take down a WHM, it's just that by default they have a lot more than me and saying "you're not using your defensive abilities" when I have guard and edosis isn't really saying much lol.

Melees, like samurai, cannot currently defend themselves against getting bursted down AND have to expose themselves to it in order to do anything. As a healer you can hang back at the start of the battle and you should.

I wish I could play the games you're playing where a healer (especially SGE who is required to be in melee range with the smallest hp pool and kardia only working on its target so we have to actively be selfish and remove our group utility to help ourselves in order to do our highest potency damage) can just "hang back" lol. It's rare if ever, and especially if the party is getting stomped it's really hard to just watch them do all the work while I spam dosis from the sidelines. WHM can literally get in, cast aoe protect, and group heal and still flee and still have more cc options on top of the aforementioned LB lol.

Gap Closers

SAM has a better version of Nebula that allows them to get a dps boost and burst a single target and again I wish I could play the matches where you are in where a SAM gets deleted for pushing behind the main party because maybe then I wouldn't hate them haha. I have sat there being wailed on while party members just dick around. While ONE melee vs multiple ranged may not be great, the case in which this has occured is so few that it borders on impossible. The lack of communication tools and team coordination is the problem, not the kits and definitely not the self heal/mitigations.

Another thing that might help explain the problem...

Samurai doesn't have enough mitigation to tank for 4 ranged players if they end up grouped with them and they have no choice but to try to.

Yeah they shouldn't be able to tank that regardless. That being said your teams inability to coordinate and/or refusal to is an issue with both the playerbase, the lack of communication tools, and the human ability to be selfish twats lol. SAM shouldn't be given more mitigation/survival because it can't tank 4 ranged, but the matchmaking definitely needs to be made better so not only does that not become a recurring instance, but that the role is not "required to" which goes back to balancing issues that aren't specific to SAM.

[Snowborn]

your teams inability to coordinate and/or refusal to is an issue with both the playerbase

I don't think it's my team's fault. They, like you, are afraid of dying because they think they aren't very tanky (even though they aren't that much less tanky than anyone short of a WAR or a PLD). So they don't go in. They sit themselves at a comfortable max range and start attacking a target. This means they only expose themselves ultimately to their target. This keeps them from dying, but it makes them an unattractive target both from a coordination aspect with the enemy team and just from how targeting naturally works (which is really clunky and awful in FFXIV). When 4 people do this and one person doesn't (because they literally can't), the odd man out will die. Every time. I don't know what anyone can be expected to do differently.

You're not wrong that restricting matchmaking so we don't end up with that team comp will make this less common, but then that runs into other problems. People don't want role-based queueing. Draft-mode for ranked would help. There are a lot of solutions that don't line up with what I suggested.

As for your problems with how things are designed, I can't speak to your perspectives--maybe there are problems to be fixed there too. But it's gotten to the point that I don't play ranked anymore because I constantly get paired up with ranged players and the same thing happens every time. If you have any suggestions on what I can do so I can continue to progress in ranked (short of changing jobs), I would love to hear it. As is, I don't have any confidence in the design and I feel like I'm just screwed. I cannot get out of Diamond and into Crystal, maybe I hit my skill limit--but I feel like the problem is with the design.