Quote Originally Posted by Reynhart View Post
I still fail to see what lunatic decided that "doing everything you can" meant "doing as much DPS you can" when you're a tank or a healer and designed fights around this.
Unless you mean an SE developer from some point along the way in getting to this particular tank/healer/dps balance, it's no lunacy. The "roles" of healers and tanks are singular checks; there is no analog portion to lived/did_not_live, saved/did_not_save. The only analog portion is how well they managed to contribute generally while meeting those "role" function. (Or really, how well they contributed generally, which was largely through indirect means.)

Quote Originally Posted by Reynhart View Post
Actually, the meta says the exact opposite. Mitigates more than you need to survive and you're probably sacrificing too much DPS for it.
That depends on what you call "just enough to not die". From the tankbuster? Or from the AA that follows within a second of it? Because if it's just the tankbuster, you're likely wasting valuable healer resources—mana, back when that was a larger concern, but more importantly cooldowns. And worse, if they stop trusting that you've left just enough HP for that +/- 5% damage range and have to start shielding you as a result, pre-healing for what HoTs could have managed otherwise, or entering Cleric Stance less often, then it's a pretty severe blow.

As gear strength increases, heals further eclipse the "potency" of mitigation, but as long as you're still fighting hard-hitting enemies, an Inner Beast may well end up with the indirect potency of a Fell Cleave.

The part the bugs me is how quickly the eclipse occurs. It's for that reason I'd like to see a lot more non-percentile or mixed mitigation types in tank toolkits, so that even when a boss is hitting for comparatively less healer uptime loss and reduced total mitigation possible, it doesn't so quickly rebalance tanks to attack mode. Admitedly, there are still no "options" in ideal play between whether and when a tank uses his tank stance or his dps stance apart from composition and setup at best, but at least we'd see the other side of play more often, and would likely be swapping more frequently.

Quote Originally Posted by SpookyGhost View Post
Correct, this game was built for the literal lowest common denominator and since that's been the case since 2.0. I don't see them suddenly making fights like any other RPG in the universe because those guys at the bottom want fights where they can memorize exactly what will happen at exactly what time. Theoretically they could throw a bunch of active mitigation tools at us in 4.0 and change their whole design philosophy, I just don't see it happening. Personally I think they should cut out raiding entirely so that people stop getting confused and thinking XIV actually has some kind of hardcore/midcore edge. It is literally one of the most casual MMOs on the market and I don't find that to be a bad thing, but I feel like their focus is split and that makes the game seem really weird from a hardcore/midcore perspective.
This actually seems off to me. If anything, it's typically the lower-end players I see complaining as a matter of course about the "DDR" fights and their level of memorization required. While I don't doubt they'd then have even more trouble with anything that required analysis rather than spreadsheet rotations if it were abruptly introduced, I do think that if that shift was gradually introduced, similar to through concept-accretion in leveling (better than ours), they'd be some of the biggest fans of/for that change (from sudden or almost trope-like shifts among sequenced abilities that one must ultimately just memorize individually or by procedure to... I'll leave that to your imagination).

I honestly think it comes down to a particular design rut more than it does "catering to a lowest common denominator". That lowest denominator gives up on the stuff much too soon to be an appropriate target audience, and would often seem to like something that can better blend ambiance or peripheral play and tunneling, however the hell that might work.