I know we've heard a lot about body checks and their increasing prevalence, but I think the notion of a "soft" body check gets lost in the quibbling over what constitutes a "true" body check. Body checks, for the few people unfamiliar, are a functional-yet-obnoxious way to create difficulty. You design a mechanic in such a way that you kill the entire party if one person messes up or is dead. Towers in P10S is one; there are 8 towers. If ONE person is out of place or dead when the 8 slots open up, it explodes and basically kills everyone. There are no shields or mitigation that rescues it. You watch the empty spot, look at your healing and support kit and think, "well great. I can't do anything to stop this. We're all just going to die." Body check mechanics have been devaluing reactive play and caster raise utility all expansion.

What I'd call a "soft" body check is perhaps even more prevalent than "true" body checks. Sometime after Heavensward, I can't remember when, Square changed a piece of design philosophy, presumably to curb cheese strategies. E.g. if someone gets a stack marker and dies, the stack marker just moves to someone else. Light party stacks that target both healers: if one healer dies, well good luck. The other stack is going to hit a random person and you have zero way of telling or truly mitigating the effects from it. While the ubiquitous (and getting rather stale, come on Square) Healer Light Party Stack With Magic Vulnerability isn't exactly a body check, since you probably won't wipe to it, it's still yet another mechanic that the healer defensive kits can do sweet F-all about. Sure the party may or may not wipe...but some random Dragoon might get the party stack alone in the corner, with zero forewarning and a guaranteed instant death even if you unload what you can. Partner fire stacks in P9? If one person's dead, sucks to be you. Someone might take it alone and just die. It might move onto a random pair and just kill those two, no saving them other than the Raise afterward.

Difficult content should be difficult, sure, but Square's design philosophy hasn't done jack to alleviate the boring healer job design. As much as I harp on boring kit design (and BOY is it boring), the fight design is really hostile to player agency. Potential to rescue a flagging run is more often down to how fast you can raise people and heal them up, not how well you can keep the party actually consistently alive. That part is pre-planned. Mistakes are punished by death, followed by the unpreventable death of 1-7 more people because soft and hard body checks are waaaaaaay too rampant.