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

[NolLacnala]

Although I agree with the OP, I would argue that the game doesn't really prepare any of the roles for late and end-game. RM is an especially sore spot for unprepared healers.

[Darker_Midnight]

Put everyone through Thordan Extreme ilvl synced to 210 without Echo buffs! You can't get to Stormblood without clearing it! That would filter out oh.... maybe 99% of the population.

Not such a good idea maybe...

[Dualgunner]

Put everyone through Thordan Extreme ilvl synced to 210 without Echo buffs! You can't get to Stormblood without clearing it! That would filter out oh.... maybe 99% of the population.

Not such a good idea maybe...

Delete all combat content because that means people will have to press buttons and kill things! You get to Stormblood without any gameplay whatsoever!

Strawman meet strawman.

[Iscah]

Since we "have" to run the same dungeons over and over for leveling, I don't really want to see things made 'harder' in a way that just makes them slower and more tedious to go through. (Thinking of Kingdom Hearts 'hard mode' setting which just doubled the health bar of all the enemies.)

I want to do well at the game, but I know I'm not the best fastest button-presser who can press multiple buttons inbetween each 2.5 second cycle.* I forget to use cooldowns more often than not, and only remember about them near the end of the fight. I'm trying my best, I'm slowly improving, but I don't want to have to be perfect to make it through story content.

*one button, sure, two buttons, maybe, but as a PS4 player I'm forced to spread my buttons across hotbars only accessed by further button presses. I might have to let go of the R2 trigger, press L2, press R2 again, before I can access the button for the skill I'm actually after. Or double-tap the trigger which only works with rather quick finicky timing, and might need a few tries before the hotbar pops up.

I absolutely think there needs to be more in-game training for how to utilise all your skills, preferably solo so you can take your time to understand what they do. An advanced Hall of the Novice setup (or equivalent actually taught by your job mentor) with an example situation for each skill would be fantastic.

One thing also lacking with "just use training dummies" is that as a healer, I can't test out Raise spells on anything. I've been using the standard "Swiftcast/Raise" recommended macro, but it's still taken me a while - and a few failures as a party healer - to understand some of the kinks in it: needing to lock onto the target, and needing to double-check I'm in range because the macro won't refuse to run like the direct spell would, so I'll Swiftcast and announce I'm casting Raise but the spell itself will quietly fail to activate.

[Lelila38]

I'm trying my best, I'm slowly improving, but I don't want to have to be perfect to make it through story content.

Noone is asking for you to be perfect, especially not in story content. What we'd like to see is simply a level of challenge in dungeons, that require you to actually use your skills. For example as a Sch I can play entire dungeons without casting a single heal, that shouldn't be the case.

Also, I'd really like the job quests to be more relevant for the class, as in teaching you how to work your skills. There used to be a Blm quest dedicated entirely to teach you the use only sleep and Pld got one that he would only beat if he managed to keep hate off the squishy npc. But after ARR that suddenly stopped and now it's just button spamming with barely a chance of losing.

[Vstarstruck]

Since we "have" to run the same dungeons over and over for leveling, I don't really want to see things made 'harder' in a way that just makes them slower and more tedious to go through. (Thinking of Kingdom Hearts 'hard mode' setting which just doubled the health bar of all the enemies.)

I want to do well at the game, but I know I'm not the best fastest button-presser who can press multiple buttons inbetween each 2.5 second cycle.* I forget to use cooldowns more often than not, and only remember about them near the end of the fight. I'm trying my best, I'm slowly improving, but I don't want to have to be perfect to make it through story content.

*one button, sure, two buttons, maybe, but as a PS4 player I'm forced to spread my buttons across hotbars only accessed by further button presses. I might have to let go of the R2 trigger, press L2, press R2 again, before I can access the button for the skill I'm actually after. Or double-tap the trigger which only works with rather quick finicky timing, and might need a few tries before the hotbar pops up.

I absolutely think there needs to be more in-game training for how to utilise all your skills, preferably solo so you can take your time to understand what they do. An advanced Hall of the Novice setup (or equivalent actually taught by your job mentor) with an example situation for each skill would be fantastic.

One thing also lacking with "just use training dummies" is that as a healer, I can't test out Raise spells on anything. I've been using the standard "Swiftcast/Raise" recommended macro, but it's still taken me a while - and a few failures as a party healer - to understand some of the kinks in it: needing to lock onto the target, and needing to double-check I'm in range because the macro won't refuse to run like the direct spell would, so I'll Swiftcast and announce I'm casting Raise but the spell itself will quietly fail to activate.

What Lelila38 said, may I ask what made you assume the worst? People are not asking for it to drag on more or to add HP to monsters to make it "harder" we just want something where you actually have to do more then hitting one button, or like Lelila said, queue as SCH, afk follow the whole run. (it is really possible to do that in level 17- 3... 33?)

Hey completing the duty is all that matters right?

[Lelila38]

What Lelila38 said, may I ask what made you assume the worst? People are not asking for it to drag on more or to add HP to monsters to make it "harder" we just want something where you actually have to do more then hitting one button, or like Lelila said, queue as SCH, afk follow the whole run. (it is really possible to do that in level 17- 3... 33?)

Hey completing the duty is all that matters right?

Well not exactly afk, but I can queue Sch for lvl roulette and anything below Brayflox I'm pretty much a green dps and the fairy takes care of healing, unless the tank mass pulls. And I'm not even a healer main.

[Claire_Pendragon]

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. :\

We used to have DPS checks in leveling dungeons, and even with the DPS checks being extremely easy, at lower levels when rotations arent complex yet, people still failed them, A LOT. Most of these DPS checks got nerfed with each path, until we're at the point now, where there's hardly anything you could consider a DPS check when leveling.
(Technically the 1st boss was a DPS check, until the amount of healing was increased, so healers could handle the tank taking a beating from other DPS, and the amount of DPS was raised, so they could just focus on the boss.)

Plenty of bosses have mechanics to teach you some things, such as becoming immune when adds are out, so you learn to deal with adds/mechanics.

But past that, telling a player what buttons to press, isnt a very good idea, nor would it even work. I have plenty of "bad DPS" friends, that even if you tell them what to press, they get annoyed and refuse to press it, because they dont want complication, which is why they picked DPS roles to begin with. (And why so many groups failed minor DPS checks in leveling content, and sometimes still do. Half the groups cant kill the Qarn bees before final sting goes off, even with the nerfs to enemies, and buffs to party's stats)

At the moment SE does have a system in place to help, but it only does so much.
It also doesnt help that you dont have all your key abilities until different level ranges from other DPS, so implementation of a better fix is actually complicated.
(Examples being things like DRGs playstyle being so different at low levels. And how SAM and RDM are not tuned for content below Lv50, so going into low level dungeons they should be doing more than double the DPS of any other DPS at that level range.)

[TaleraRistain]

One big difference between FF and older games was the older games respected the role. A dps in a group nowadays can falter because there is pressure on the tank or the healer to also put out damage and make up the difference. With older games, the roles were clearly defined and they were all necessary. Tanks had to soak the damage and maintain constant aggro, mobs hit very hard so healers had to focus on constantly healing incoming damage, crowd control (which has gone the way of the dodo unfortunately) had to be on the ball to help the party maintain damage taken at a reasonable level by controlling adds or buffing and debuffing, and dps (or dd as they were back in my EQ days) had to push to melt the mobs quickly to lessen the time the other roles had to maintain their actions.

The community is also a bit schizophrenic in their expectations. There are suggestions like I've seen in this thread to up the difficulty curve earlier, but Hydaelyn help us if people can't have their mass pull Expert speedruns.

[Iscah]

Noone is asking for you to be perfect, especially not in story content. What we'd like to see is simply a level of challenge in dungeons, that require you to actually use your skills. For example as a Sch I can play entire dungeons without casting a single heal, that shouldn't be the case.

I think part of the problem is that the dungeon has to be "generic" enough for players to get through with any combination of classes. You can't put in things that need a specific skill if it's possible that nobody will have that skill available.

On the other hand, solo job quests can and should be designed to require use of a specific skill set.

Also, I'd really like the job quests to be more relevant for the class, as in teaching you how to work your skills. There used to be a Blm quest dedicated entirely to teach you the use only sleep and Pld got one that he would only beat if he managed to keep hate off the squishy npc. But after ARR that suddenly stopped and now it's just button spamming with barely a chance of losing.

That sounds fantastic. Were they in 1.0? If not then I failed to pick up on the Sleep tutorial because I've got BLM to 50 and I admit I've never used the spell.

The way the game works now, with gifting you your new abilities at the end of each job quest, is basically the opposite of what you actually need for learning how to use your new skills. Occasionally they work around it by giving you a short first quest basically to give you the skill for the real task (eg. Rogue quest introducing stealth ability) and those are great. There needs to be more of that.

I think if you're not forced to use those new skills, it can be a natural instinct to fall back to the other ones that have served perfectly well thus far, instead of trying to use this new one that you don't understand. (Also I think some of the tooltips aren't that well written and seem confusing when the actual use is quite simple. I do read them all but sometimes need to go over them a few times to actually understand what they're saying.)

The Lv50 healer quests are the only ones I can think of that really make you put some effort into exploring your other skills to try to keep your NPC companion alive.

What Lelila38 said, may I ask what made you assume the worst? People are not asking for it to drag on more or to add HP to monsters to make it "harder" we just want something where you actually have to do more then hitting one button, or like Lelila said, queue as SCH, afk follow the whole run. (it is really possible to do that in level 17- 3... 33?)

Hey completing the duty is all that matters right?

Completing the duty the best that I can is what matters to me. I do press more than one button. I perform as best as I can, I try to make use of all my skills, and that's good enough for story content - but I go pretty awful in the few extreme-level challenges I've tried so far.

Reading through all the topics on this board - not just this one, but all the other ones where the definition of a 'bad player' seems to slide from "someone who doesn't know their basic skills and/or isn't trying" to "someone who clears the dungeon in 30 minutes instead of 20" and it's disheartening. (Arguably a reason for them to bring in a parse/rating/whatever, because I don't know if I'm good or bad compared to the 'average' player or what standard I should be held to, but I hate to think I'm failing and not be able to know it.)

The other thing is, how do you give the healer more to do? Honest question, because I don't know what you're picturing. What is there other than making enemies hit harder so the healer has more work?

And in the case of Scholar, it could be just that they haven't been properly balanced to function in a low-level dungeon. If they can only get away with it up to the low 30s, that's the point at which Scholar properly exists and isn't being modified for a level below their 'starting point'. Plus I imagine it depends on the skill level of the rest of the party.

Anyway the correct answer is, not needing to heal doesn't mean you can go AFK but gives you more time to support the party by DPSing, casting Esuna, etc. and keeping an eye on everyone's HP. Things can always go wrong.