The difficulty curve in the game has... problems...

[CirenInus]

I think ddamage and healing meters only matter when you cannot kill a boss before an enrage timer or going for world first. Without monitoring dps or healing output you'd have no clue who is responsible for doing low damage or not topping off the raid fast enough and who to replace. Its toxic and cutthroat but necessary given the difficulty of the content.

[Inanegrain]

i ran p1s when it released with my fc and for a month straight i didn't get a single piece of gear. largely in part to our static having multiple people who would run it before the rest of us because they wanted to prog faster. every week it would be 1 chest runs. progging feels really bad when u continue to see everyone else getting kitted out with BiS. the static folded before we even made it to p2s.

According to everyone in this thread anyone can do it at any time, at any gear level, without addons, without experience, exclusively through the PF and saying otherwise makes you wrong and/or a negative Nancy and/or a quitter, etc...

You just have to be willing to eat pavement ad infinitum and apparently put 3x as much time into getting a party together than you spend actually progressing. Having no deaths on the first Channeling Flow after only 3 pulls, and seeing Kampeos Harma after only 4 pulls seemed like progress to me...

I don't know your motivations and how good you are. I'll give an idea of how someone may have progressed.

I start out and reach the end on "expansion" and I'm only exposed to dungeon/trial boss, I do not know the fundamentals of the game, that it isn't reaction based and freestyled whatever job I was on. I dipped my toes into EX and was dragged as a corpse to the end of it by a "school bus" as I read and studied the guide just for the EX instance while freestyling horribly.

I immediately knew that I'm not meant to do this because I know nothing at all of this part of FF14 and the things I were playing before with intensity was racing. The FF14 content turned into "I'm going to beat up this striking dummy/SSS target repeatedly." I failed the SSS dummy but I did read up and understand whatever job I pick to learn, a bit.

Got bored again the next EX instance where I'm somehow inspired to attempt to farm an EX, maybe the music was really great and inspiring. To avoid being carried through like a corpse, I went back to hit the SSS dummy again, while getting food and craft gear melds and some normal raid gear till I actually managed to break the SSS dummy. Final EX of the tier.

It took me several PFs and I roughly cleared it... 1-2 weeks after it's release. I went back into practice groups after clearing and kept brushing up till I felt confident about the mechanics, I was still bad and kept drifting on my job unknowingly.

Then, at some point, someone pushed and reminded me that I was in a JP dc, they suggested I use High End Duty Finder to farm it after being confident from several PFs.
I wanted the farm to end, I wanted to finish the instance faster so I can be done with it.
I still kept drifting, but it was getting less and less severe, but still bad, eventually, I did it over 130+ times because it didn't give me the mount and I only did it because I knew I can. Randoms kept track of me, some of it. Character limit