What if Tanks were treated like Healers?

[vetch]

I don't say this to demean or to brag, I say it as a matter of objective fact: to make content 'fun' for players of a higher skill caliber, it would have to be so hard as to exclude players of a lower skill caliber. You wouldn't want to be gated out of content because it's too hard for you to keep up, would you?

Yes I would, and in fact this has been a primary premise of video games for 40 years; you have to learn the game to proceed through the game. This is a good thing, because being challenged at or near your skill level is necessary for intellectual stimulation.

You cannot design an interactive battle so easy that there's no one who can't complete it. But trying to tune the duties so they can be cleared by the worst players, then requiring all players to play them over and over and over for levels, gear, & tomes breeds resentment in everyone who's not being engaged. To capture both groups of players, both types of content are required.

Square almost got it right with Criterion dungeons, but they missed the important fact that the better players don't want to do harder dungeons in addition to their crappy boring expert roulette grinds, they want to do harder dungeons in place of them, for actual progression rewards.

The only way to keep 'casual content' 'casual accessible' is to have the healing requirements be less threatening which... is exactly the situation we're in now. And the justification of 'well if you want to have fun, there's Savage/Ultimate for you' has been tried, tested and proven to be a stupid stance to have. 'Increase HPS required' does not fix the issue of 'EX roulette is not fun for the veterans who know how to play healer well'

Increasing damage buttons doesn't either, because I don't switch to healer to press different damage buttons. I'm resigned to the fact that there will be downtime but I'm completely indifferent to whether there are 2 or 12 damage spells to hit during it. If I'm in the mood to play a healer, I want to triage. I want to make decisions and alter my actions moment to moment based on variances in the gamestate. Black Mages get to do it. Why are they the only ones?

Also, I think I would resent having to do as much rotation work as an easy DPS like SMN only to still do 60% of the damage of one.