Quote Originally Posted by Evergrey View Post
That's also one thing, a lot of the danger evolves around 1-shot mechanics and if too many fail one there's not enough time to recover from it.
If instead a fight have less 1-shit but more heavy hitting attacks instead.
It's been a while since I played any other MMO on a regular basis so can't really come up with any good comparisons.
But in those the bosses mostly hit more frequently and the fights aren't designed to always be foguth in a more or less stationary position like FFXIV boss arenas.

Regardless, maybe it's not the lack of healers to do during downtimes in a fight that's the major issue, but that the fights themselves are designed in such a way that there aren't much for the healer to do.
Bosses hit in a slow fashion, almost each and every hard hitting ability has a several seconds castbar.
The fights leave little for accidents to happen for healers to heal up.

Before we didn't have stuff like Tankbusters adding a visual marker on a player, and many of the boss's skills weren't marked either.
This is honestly why something like Barbariccia EX were so well liked, it's probably the most unanimously praised fight in EW, an opinion I share. Rather than relying on debuff overload, or a really precise positioning for every member of the team, Barb was fast, there was always something happening or to plan for, damage was frequent, and one player making a mistake usually did not cascade into an immediate unrecoverable situation. But the underlying mechanics were straightforward to understand, there was no need for a twenty page toolbox or a 15 minute YT video. The fight builds upon itself, and I even think tanks have a solid time in there. There's a lot of good there. I think every role got their time to shine in that fight somehow.

But I will highlight that it's not "too many" people failing a mechanic leading to a wipe. It's one person doing something major, or sometimes minor incorrectly, and the result is the entire party exploding instantly. It's okay to have those things in fights. But when it's every fight, I feel that it starts breaking the trinity somewhat, outside of the more common issues detailed in this thread, because you didn't wipe because "the tank didn't get aggro" or "the dps check was failed" or "the healers were out of MP", you failed because Player 5 was out of position on mechanic sequence 4, or Player 2 didn't read their partner's debuff correctly and did 999999 damage to the group.

I feel that it promotes really frustrating and darwinistic perspectives for progressing through content.