The general player base needs to improve

[Gallus]

And you see no problem there?

Not gonna judge whether it's right or wrong, but if that's what the majority of the playerbase feels comfortable with, I'm afraid we all have no choice but to adapt to it. Personally, I do agree there's a certain degree of lazyness among the FFXIV community when it comes to handling relatively complex mechanics, but I too think it has nothing to do with SE and more with the community wanting something specific from this game. Players spend 10 times more gil in glamour than they do in anything else. That should give you a hint.

[ThirdChild_ZKI]

but if that's what the majority of the playerbase feels comfortable with, I'm afraid we all have no choice but to adapt to it.

We definitely do not have to adapt to it. And yet we do.

We don't have to adapt to simply having the bar set low and it being lowered because people will continue to be too lazy to meet already watered down challenges.
We DO have to adapt by improving. Players improve by being challenged, or through a self-motivated desire to be better, but if there's no reason or incentive to be better, both SE and players can neither gauge their improvement, nor offer proportional challenge/effort in the future.

[Dzian]

stuff.

I think a big part of this isn't so much the mechanics of a given fight more the resources players have that allow them to trivialize so much stuff.

The reason it doesn't really make a difference if a hit knocks 50% of your up off or 75% for example isn't really down to how powerful a healers cures are. It's more down to those healers have near infinite mp.

Same can be said with raising dead players raising a players that's died isn't usually a problem because healers can toss out a half dozen raises and still have infinite mp. There's rarely any consideration for resources. Oh he's dead swiftcast raise straight away. You've nearly always got enough mp. The swiftcast cooldown is probably the only thing that stops you getting raised straight away.

It's the same with dps. A lot of people these days consider invigorate a waste of a role skill because outside of some trash pulls tp is a virtually infinite resource on most jobs these days.. Even if players die 2 or 3 times they still don't really find themselves tp starved.

And in a way it's the same with tanks the difference between tank stance and dos stance is negligible in terms of how hard you get hit and once again because healers have virtually infinite mp it really makes no difference. If being in tank stance meant a cure 1 would heal you but being in dos stance meant you needed a cure 2. Which would actually drain the healers mp that much quicker it might actually make a difference but as is. It just doesn't matter cos you'll never run out of mp anyway.

If a healers had finite mp for example then a dps being hit for 50% hp or 75% hp would likely matter more.

Same kinda thing with to. If being weakened slowed your to regen it might actually matter more that you died. Instead of just being able to get right back into it....

All in all resource management has become largely laughable of late. Which i think is definitely a contributing factor to how easy everything is.

[Tridus]

If a healers had finite mp for example then a dps being hit for 50% hp or 75% hp would likely matter more.

It's one Cure II either way, unless you need them to full right this second (which you usually don't). That has lots to do with how powerful healer cures are, although if MP was scarce people would probably actually use Cure I occasionally at 70.

[RiyahArp]

I think a big part of this isn't so much the mechanics of a given fight more the resources players have that allow them to trivialize so much stuff.

Think I discussed this with people sometime. You'd wind up making healers dps less, and use more globals for healing. You'd also have some pretty hard limits; it would be a guaranteed wipe because you'd have no way to fix a mistake. If two dps die, it'd be back to start. That's making this more of a different game than it is now.

[HyoMinPark]

You'd wind up making healers dps less, and use more globals for healing.

Aren’t healers supposed to be using more globals on healing abilities? Wouldn’t a change that called for healers to actually have to use more globals to heal be a good thing? I’m all for healer DPS, but healing in this game is extremely trivial. There are so many fights were you don’t even have to use HoTs like Medica II or Aspected Helios or Whispering Dawn because the non-HoT providing equivalents (Medica/Cure III, Helios, or Indom) do most of the healing for you.

[RiyahArp]

Aren’t healers supposed to be using more globals on healing abilities? Wouldn’t a change that called for healers to actually have to use more globals to heal be a good thing? I’m all for healer DPS, but healing in this game is extremely trivial. There are so many fights were you don’t even have to use HoTs like Medica II or Aspected Helios or Whispering Dawn because the non-HoT providing equivalents (Medica/Cure III, Helios, or Indom) do most of the healing for you.

Well, we kind of have this with red mage, and red make healing can't really get people to full health from raise without maybe 4 GCDs. That means if they raise and the hit that comes after is large enough, we can't really save them, nor can we really do much if the tank forgets a cooldown and loses 75% health instead of 50%. You get some hard limits to how much you can react since you spend more GCDs/time to do specific levels of healing, and you have less spare GCDS to convert to emergency heals from DPS. That means anyone who screws up is going to be on the floor longer and be more vulnerable when they get up, and be unable to deal with mechanics.

You'd not make healing harder. You'd make DPSing a lot harder and they'd be able to wipe the raid much easier.

[Tridus]

Well, we kind of have this with red mage, and red make healing can't really get people to full health from raise without maybe 4 GCDs. That means if they raise and the hit that comes after is large enough, we can't really save them, nor can we really do much if the tank forgets a cooldown and loses 75% health instead of 50%.

Most other trinity game healers have a variety of heals for this. When things are going well, you use your MP efficient heals. When stuff like that happens, you burn MP and use your high HPS ones to recover. Do that too many times, and you run out of MP. And yes, if you wipe because of that, your group wasn't doing the mechanics correctly so you probably earned it.

XIV's problem is that this stuff doesn't exist. Virtually all heals have the same cast time (either one GCD, or instant, Medica II and a hardcast Raise might be the only exceptions). MP efficiency doesn't matter because MP management is so easy that it's irrelevant, time efficiency is the only consideration. Burst healing is so powerful that you can recover any amount of health loss except "all of it" in seconds, and then you're back to flinging rocks. That is what results in needing vuln up, one shots, and enrages to challenge a group. You *can't* challenge them by trying to run the healers out of MP by simply making avoidable damage hurt a lot, which is an encounter design other games can do.

You get some hard limits to how much you can react since you spend more GCDs/time to do specific levels of healing, and you have less spare GCDS to convert to emergency heals from DPS. That means anyone who screws up is going to be on the floor longer and be more vulnerable when they get up, and be unable to deal with mechanics.

I spend more than half my GCDs DPSing. We are nowhere near close to the point where that's an issue.

You'd not make healing harder. You'd make DPSing a lot harder and they'd be able to wipe the raid much easier.

You've got it backwards. Having fewer one shot mechanics and making it harder for healers to constantly recover big damage taken is making DPS easier, because you can now eat a mechanic without dying. You can't do it three times in a row, but you can recover it at the expense of healer time and MP. It's making healing harder but requiring healers to use more time and MP recovering from those mistakes.

[RiyahArp]

The thing is though, we are not really getting "gradual" now, with some of the suggestions. A DPS check with potential DPS down...we already have with Nidhogg hard in the add phase. I'm not sure there is any strong infirmity similar. We're talking about fairly hard mechanics with decent timers, and they won't be appreciably different than from ex fights or easy savage ones.

The only way this dungeon can be different is that bosses have HP pools that don't take fifteen minutes to kill, don't have a strict enrage that kills you at 15:01, and have slower mechanics. To be honest, you're probably looking at ARR EX primal difficulty in a boss or so, as if we had full poetics synced. So if you introduce this, you kind of are going to make a big step up in difficulty, based on the casual player's reaction.

I think it's probably better overall if you just kept current ex level trial difficulty, and just required it for story completion if you wanted to do that. Optional experts would just get ignored; there's no real reward that you can't get in other ways in this game from them.

[KaivaC]

The thing is though, we are not really getting "gradual" now, with some of the suggestions. A DPS check with potential DPS down...we already have with Nidhogg hard in the add phase. I'm not sure there is any strong infirmity similar. We're talking about fairly hard mechanics with decent timers, and they won't be appreciably different than from ex fights or easy savage ones.

The only way this dungeon can be different is that bosses have HP pools that don't take fifteen minutes to kill, don't have a strict enrage that kills you at 15:01, and have slower mechanics. To be honest, you're probably looking at ARR EX primal difficulty in a boss or so, as if we had full poetics synced. So if you introduce this, you kind of are going to make a big step up in difficulty, based on the casual player's reaction.

I think it's probably better overall if you just kept current ex level trial difficulty, and just required it for story completion if you wanted to do that. Optional experts would just get ignored; there's no real reward that you can't get in other ways in this game from them.

The expert roulette already probably doesn't get used as much as level and 50/60 dungeons. If you increase the potential rewards with harder experts, that's incentive for players to optimize themselves through these. And if players choose not to do it, that's really no different than how the expert roulette is being used now. As it stands, expert is pretty much used as faceroll 5 days a week to cap out whatever the current tomes are for the week.

Much of what was discussed is gradual...it's just that with the nature of the forums, I think your somehow getting it twisted that all of the suggested new expert dungeons should immediately go straight to this. That's not the case at all. You can easily step up the difficulty over a course of dungeons. And again, you wouldn't start seeing truly challenging dungeons until the end of 5.0, which is probably, like, two years away, given the timeline of how HW and SB went. You can hit players with EX/Savage level mechanics without those mechanics being Savage/EX level. Most mechanics in the hard content can be easily stepped down. I mean, shoot, if healing was a major issue, then you could easily have a boss hit a healer with healing potency down at the start of the fight.

You could easily hit all DPS by shaving their current (not max) MP/TP down and throw in some mechanics that gets players used to quick thinking. There are so many tools that the devs could use that wouldn't jump dungeons straight into Savage. I'm not sure why you're not seeing it, or why you're thinking that implementing anything from Savage would automatically be Savage-level mechanics. And on the comment about experts and rewards - I know you saw some of the thoughts I had about how to incentivize players into going into the new Experts. Adjust the rewards appropriately - again, best way to do this in my eyes as I type up this quick sentence without thinking too deeply on it: offer up to 200 current tomestones over the weekly cap, and give gear that is about 5 or 10 levels below the 1st level of the current raid tier. Or better yet, if Eureka is successful, offer up accessories or food that enhances certain stats or skills (naturally make it unique and untradable). Say, right about now - offer up 355 gear in these harder expert dungeons (put a loot lockout on them to prevent farming). Thoughts like that.

Honestly, I really don't see the harm in this at all. These new expert dungeons could create content for the midcore, and for casuals hoping to go to a midcore level as far as player skill goes.