Raids - exploitative bosses which leads to possibility of fewer tanks/healers.

[Ferocious]

Decided to make this topic to mainly address the weak points in FFXIV's raids, which I believe are one of the reasons why we have fewer tanks/healers. The fact that current content is easily exploited without even out-gearing it tells us that SE really needs more strict testing on future content. By an exploit, I don't mean a cheat but rather the fact that people can easily bring 1 healer / 1 tank to their raids to face roll through the boss fights. This was especially true with HM Primals, but as a fix, SE implemented the stacks mechanic on tanks for Extreme Primals and higher dmg output, so two healers also become necessary to bring.

But with recent findings, one tank and one healer methods are once again possible with extreme garuda and titan. Not sure about ifrit. Besides that, one tank method is possible with all coil turns as well except for turn 4. This allows the teams to bring one additional dps and burn the boss faster even when they don't really out-gear the content. I can see this becoming worse once the gear ilvl increases with patch 2.2.

In my past experience with MMO's, bringing more than one tank and healer in raids was an absolute must. There were mechanics such as adds buffing the boss when too close, so the OT had to keep the adds away while MT on main boss. This sounds kind of like Garuda EM, but guess what... a dps can tank the other add in Garuda EM, so why did they not test this mechanic?! Same goes for stacks mechanics in fights like Turn 1/2 and Titan EM. They're all doable with one tank if your healers are good. Why not implement harsh results like a guaranteed wipe at certain stacks, so bringing more than one tank is a must? This is what other MMO's do.

As for healers, much of the content is solo healable because one healer can do everything. For example, WHM has strong tank heals, strong AOE heals and even some dmg mitigation spells. In other MMO's, there were separate healer jobs for tank healing, AOE healing and dmg mitigation/purifier healing. I guess it's something too late to fix in this game because it would require complete overhaul for healers. We will be stuck with seeing content solo healable in the future because once your healer is geared, they can do it all without the help of another healer.

Now my point is, all of these 1 tank / 1 healer methods encourage players to bring the "best of the best" tank and healer to their raid. Whenever a new tank tries to join a fight that is heavy on mechanics, they get rejected and the party rather brings someone more experienced/geared to solo tank it for them. Everyone loves the easy methods where they get to bring more dps than it was meant to be. Since SE has been trying to encourage more to play tanks/healers, maybe this is where they should begin. Make the content play like it's supposed to and not get exploited by "lets try to get rid of one tank" schemers out there.

[Ashira]

"Let's have less ways to do things." would have sufficed.

I think it's a good thing that we can choose which setup we want to use. Are we balanced? Is our DPS lacking? Do we need more healing? We can change our party formation depending on our strong and weak points.

[Nekodar]

1T, 1H, 6D is usually limited to groups with skilled and well equipped tank and healer. The average tank and healer is not going to do Coil Turn 1 with 1T/1H, if they even get there.

There's only three fights where it's really common to go 1T, 2H, 5D otherwise: Ifrit HM, Titan HM and Coil Turn 2 (with 1T, 3H, 4D being more common).

In short, just because something is possible doesn't mean everyone can do it that way. The majority still need to do it the "proper" way outside of the three fights mentioned.

Also, if SE didn't want people to have the ability to do raids/trials with non-standard setups, they would restrict entry to only the standard setups. The very fact that you can enter coil or the primals with any setup you want is indication enough that they don't mind it.
Also, if they did restrict entry to only standard setups, you'd see lots of cries from people that WANT to try non-standard ways of doing content.

[Nayto]

DPS is the name of the game... for all RPG intensive elements.

A strong defence only prolongs things... especially since we have many players with ADHD. Why do you think people like Speed-Runs?

The mathematician will always find ways to clear things faster and more efficiently...

[AdvancedWind]

Actually, I've seen a full coil win with 1 tank, including T4.

I also disagree with your points on doing 1 tank / 1 healer being "faceroll" wins. The vast majority of groups learning the fight are not able to employ such tactics, as they require absolute knowledge of the encounter. You can't even solo heal something as simple as Titan HM unless the entire party dodges everything without failure, or you vast outgear everything to the point you could just use Titan egi as a tank and go 7DPS 1 healer. The 2.1 fights make it extremely hard to go 1/1/6, the only real exception being Garuda. Just because a few groups manage to do it, doesn't mean the vast majority of the population will attempt it, specially for pugging.

Ultima insta kills tank on 5 charges and you can only really reset it once as far as I know, Titan and Ifrit will kill the tank almost surely regardless of what he does and requires some pro tier battle rezzing and healing to make solo tank viable. The only video I've ever seen of solo tank Titan EX, the tank died, and had 2 healers anyways.

There's very little point on doing 1 tank coil unless you really want to cut your "45 minutes of raiding" to "39,maybe 38 minutes of raiding", only Twin really makes some sense to solo tank, and that's far from a "faceroll" strategy anyways. This is not something any "regular" group will do until Coil is already on farm.

What I mean is:

A - most endgame fights already do a pretty good job at "forcing" the traditional pt setup
and
B - it's actually good that, given enough skill and practice, you can find ways out of that setup if you want to.

[Myrhn]

T change from the norm, 2T 2H 4D, you have to out-gear said content. For Titan HM we can 1T 1H 6D even with a bikini equip just people have to dodge and know the fight. For garuda EX a ilvl65 group wont be able to change the norm set up but people that are ilvl80+ maybe less than ilvl80 can because the our-gear the content. Saying you dont really have to out-gear the content in order to change the party make up is false in my opinion, with the exeption of Ifrit HM and Titan HM since you only need one tank.