Dungeons we need to talk dungeons

[Shurrikhan]

Sure, that's the point, but a 4 person party empirically has a much higher point of failure than an 8 person party does though, which is exactly Yoshi-P's point.

Yeah, of course... but why is that necessarily an issue? It's an altogether different form of difficulty. It takes less damage to end you, but you're also dealing with less damage.

If the healer dies in a 4 person party and you don't have a SMN/RDM, it's an automatic failure (assuming its actually tuned difficulty wise that a tank can't just perpetually self heal themselves).

That's not even true in mid-high tier Mythic+ (and their equivalent rez-capable DPS). Granted, there are more tools there, such as CC and self-healing tools, which increase one's potential responsibilities and engagement ("difficulty") even as they make recovery more achievable (and a given fight more "accessible"), but if fights that much harder are still doable, having more than a single difficulty level isn't going to suddenly turn dungeon-running into a repetitive wipe-fest off of the smallest possible mistake outside the average player's control.

Take a look at Pharos Sirius when it was first released; the dungeon was leagues more difficult than its competitor released at the same time as it, on top of being far harder than most dungeons. If you had a bad healer, you were automatically GG before the dungeon even began.

Which competitor? Moreover, only the first and last boss truly demanded a healer, even pre-nerf. The rest of the dungeon, I ended up three-manning many a time while waiting for a refill. It wasn't nearly so auto-fail as you make out.

Contrast an 8 person party where you not only have greater odds of having a rezzer dps in your party, but also a 2nd healer that can salvage the run.

But you also then need to contrast the 4-man experience to the possibilities for player kills provided by 8-man mechanics at equivalent difficulty, the stronger tank-busters that would leverage cotanks external mitigation and the near-guarantee of a shield and the cotank rotating in for their CDs, the tighter DPS checks per their being a lower standard deviation in group output, many more potential one-shot mechanics precisely because a rezzer is likely to survive, etc., etc.

btw one the most appalling experiences in my gameplay so far is the way experienced players treat newbies on reset days (Tuesday) in the first fight of the tier.

This, btw, is one of the most noticeable downsides of trying to funnel every (highly distinct) type of player through the same weekly/daily grind loops, especially in a game so centered around (stale) reward schemes.