/Accuse @ the devs: have you set us up to fail...?

[RichardButte]

Something occurred to me about how XIV's leveling experience does (or does not) prepare players for max level play...

(FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE DO NOT GET CONFUSED AND BELIEVE THAT I AM ACTUALLY SUGGESTING THESE BOLDED POINTS. I'M SAYING "WHAT IF...?" AS A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT ONLY):

Imagine if these changes were made to the game:

• Monsters in dungeons level 69 and below only attack tanks, regardless of enmity level, and ignore other players entirely.
  
• Players in dungeons level 69 and below cannot fall below 90% health. If an attack would reduce their health below 90%, it will be set to 90% instead.

Now, if these changes were to go into the game (and they should NOT), tanks and healers would arrive at level 70 having no clue whatsoever about how well they're ACTUALLY playing their classes, and they'll find out the hard way the first time they're thrown into a situation where those skills are tested.

This would be an awful way to prepare players for the endgame, yet this is exactly what DPS players endure: the game asks next to nothing of you and gives you no means to gauge how well you're actually playing your class, allowing your performance to not matter...

...Until the sudden and often humiliating moment arrives when it DOES!

For starters, this is bad game design: the game should be teaching the player how to better play their class as they level it, including giving them feedback mechanisms that allow them to test what works and what doesn't, thus learning at their own pace.

Beyond that, isn't this kind of...cruel?

I've heard horror stories of DPS players in a dungeon/raid coming up against their first ever DPS check and being thoroughly humiliated before being kicked from the group, hesitant to ever use the duty finder again after.

It's not that at all that they're bad players, it's that the game failed to properly teach them how to play at a level it later EXPECTS them to play at (DPS checks aren't just for savage raids, either).

I know the devs don't want to go the parser route that's their call, but please, give us DPS players SOMETHING to go on so we can learn to play our classes as we level like tanks and healers do.

I don't care if it's an icon that only we can see that turns red when we're slacking and green when we're killing our rotation, but we need some form of teaching feedback.

Without it, we're wandering out into the DF completely unprepared, setting us up for the most toxic experience this game has to offer, and that's exactly what you're trying to avoid. :\