Why does everyone complain about STORY based MMO's?

[Jojoya]

I'm going to assume you mean from the perspective of an MMORPG player so I'll answer as such.

My post already said what my issues are with FFXIV, but I'll go in detail here:

1. Lack luster mid to hardcore content design
2. FFXIV being a Trinity MMORPG (which it is since tank/healers are required) and treating said roles abysmally
3. Job design

#1 and #3 aren't RPG specific. Those are concerns with any MMO and many other game genres. You even go on to only mention MMO in the rest of the post without any additional mention to RPG.

The concept of the Holy Trinity would be an RPG element though your problem seems to be more with how the roles end up utilized, which is more part of #3 plus encounter design than being related to role play.

When it comes to things that test tanks and healers, they do exist. Does the tank learn the correct times to mitigate and which mitigation to use? Can the healer keep players alive when someone screws up starting a domino effect of unnecessary damage? It can be easy to say those things should be obvious when you're both skilled and experienced at the role but those who aren't will be tested.

Honestly I don't feel like any MMO has had the classes/jobs within a role feel significantly different short of the few games that toss huge skill trees at players and tell them to pick what they want with a limited on how much can be chosen through a point system. And quite frankly, that's the fault of players. They demand DPS?HPS balance so all jobs end up viable and create meta comps to come up with what they think will be best performance. If players truly want unique jobs, then they need to stop creating metas and stop demanding balance. That will leave developers free to stretch their imagination creating truly unique abilities.

And yeah, I can tell you that I found playing all the way through MSQ as CNJ/WHM has been enjoyable. I've done it on multiple characters (I usually alternate between healer/tank when I create a new character for replaying MSQ). It gets fun when I end up matched to a group of sprouts who are still learning the game and i have to really focus on the healing to keep them alive.

But that's me and what I enjoy. I'm not going to claim that someone is wrong for not enjoying it. Everyone has their own personal preferences.

I get that players interested in high end content are disappointed with the healer experience when they are playing with a good group of players. Not everyone is playing for a high end experience, though. It's less the job that needs to be changed and more the encounter design. If tanks are given good self-healing and enough mitigation tools that they require little healer, then more party wide damage is needed to give healers something to do other than green DPS. Arguing healers should be given more DPS tools doesn't do anything to make actual healing more engaging. If you're just going to give healers more DPS tools, might as well remove the healing role completely.

Paglth'an has literally been soloed not long after it dropped

Did you do it?

Did anyone you personally know do it?

Trying to use an outlier as justification for changing things will lead to problems when the vast majority of the player base is not capable of duplicating the feat.