I thought the solo duties were frustrating...

[Supersnow845]

Okay we're now talking about things that matter.

Being able to clear this solo duty has very little to do with one's competence to engage in group content. What is it actually measuring? Ping? As I have said, my friend has cleared everything through 90, usually with duty support. She plays a couple of jobs well enough not to be a drain when playing with others.

I completely agree there's a problem that many people at level 100 don't understand the basics of their job. They therefore have a negative impact when engaging in group content. But gating through duties is not the way to solve the issue. And (somewhat orthogonally) simply making dungeons, trials and raids faster with the same monotonous DDR philosophy is driving some people from the game because it is boring combat design, while clipping off older people due purely to the increasing speed. Something that is massively magnified by bad ping which in turn is an accident of geography.

Here's an idea. You will likely agree that in leveling dungeons, it is the expectation of the player base that tanks pull W2W. Where does one learn this? Should this not be gated? I'd suggest the obvious place to gate ability is in job/role quests. If someone cannot play tank in the way the players expect, they are prevented from doing through a role quest. They either learn or they play another job. Same applies to healers and dps.

The problem at the moment is that bizarre and irrelevant solo duties are gating people from the MSQ for no good reason.

Being able to clear solo duties shows that you yourself are able to meaningfully contribute. I’m not directing this directly at your friend but just in general this game hides how poorly people perform. If you are playing a WHM and kinda just face rolling your keyboard and the WAR is doing 90% of their own self healing you can feel like you are “contributing” when really you are just kinda there. Same as if they were a DPS. How are they aware they are meaningfully contributing? It’s very easy to feel like you are doing your rotation semi correctly only to be told that you are being out DPS’ed by the healer.

If you feel like you are meaningfully contributing in a group setting but are getting walled by solo duties there is a good chance the game is simply hiding your lack of contribution. There needs to be checks every now and then that YOU are reaching the adequate competence level, not that collective group is