MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Seera1024]

We're going to run into a problem with healers that does not exist with DPS.

What does someone who decides to DPS want to be doing? They want to DPS.

What is the consequence if they don't DPS or DPS poorly? Generally it just takes longer to clear the instance when it comes to content in the MSQ. A party is highly unlikely to fail because a DPS is bad at their job. It can be annoying in such a party but most will shrug and accept it's going to take more time to clear the dungeon. The DPS gets to remain in the party without being accountable for their poor performance.

What does someone who decides to heal want to be doing? Some want to just heal. Some want to switch between healing and DPS as needed. Some want to DPS with only an occasional tossed in as support.

What's the consequence when the healer does the healing portion of their job badly? The party has a much higher chance of failure in MSQ content (depends on experience and skill of the other party member, what level the content is and sometimes what tank job is being used). The party is also a lot more likely to kick a poor healer than they are to kick a poor DPS.

Why should healers have to meet a higher standard to retain their place in a party than DPS has to?

SE does not want groups to be failing in MSQ content. They also don't want players getting kicked from parties just because their skill isn't up to a random standard set by far more experienced players. And so the healing jobs get designed to make healing more approachable in MSQ content by the average player.

I don't think it's a good solution to either problem but it does mostly solve them. The party is less likely to fail if it has an inexperienced (or uncooperative) healer. The healer is less likely to be noticed and be kicked from the party when the group is getting through the dungeon without much trouble.

The question becomes is it creating new problems that are more troublesome for SE to solve (a net decrease in the number of players willing to queue as healer) and if there are better solutions that could be used to solve the original concerns (would changing healing toolkits or encounter design make things more engaging for experienced healers without overwhelming the inexperienced healer).

Not sure why you quoted that by me to go onto something unrelated to what I was posting but on topic for the thread currently.

Some roles will likely always have more innate responsibility than others. Healers will likely always have the highest responsibility. They have to deal with mechanics and heal. Tanks can to some extent ignore some mechanics and not impact the party to a significant degree.

But there is likely a combination of toolkit changing and encounter design that would be needed for the perfect balance of accessibility and feeling of engagement.

[kevin_satron]

Well im kinda feeling the same to be honest. Especially older content where dungeons/trials are getting easier and easier each expansion/patch with higher ilv gear (the syncing in this game is not good).

i understand that there are people that just want to enjoy the story and dont want to face a hard content to continue the story, especially disable people since the devs want "Everyone" to be able to play it without a problem. More people = more money = more content

I do feel like the difficulty is increasing each expansion, but only until shadowbringers. I think they only do difficult duties for side stuff like AR, Trials, and normal raid. But with endwalker, i feel like the difficulty for normal content isn't as hard as previous expansions. Ivalice is my favorite AR because of the difficulty, i really like first 2 Nier AR because of the difficulty. But the 3rd nier raid and the twelve gods 1st AR is pretty disapointing because of how simple the mechanics are.

[ForteNightshade]

I feel like you've never been part of a truly mediocre party or you have a warped idea of what the average skill level of the player base is.

To be frank, the overwhelming majority of runs I have at all levels of content are distinctly run of the mill. This idea the "average player" is what you'd see on Tales From Duty Finder is grossly exaggerated. In fact, since Endwalker released, I could count on two hands how many of those runs of I've had despite spamming enough dungeons to not only cap nearly every week but level almost every job to 90.

Nevertheless, to humor your mediocre party. I recently had a run of P3N with several new players. In total, we had a staggering 29 deaths over a 13 minute fight. Despite pressing more GCD heals than I have in any Savage encounter thus far, I still only had 50 combined healing uses (GCD/oGCD) compared to 163 Dosis III casts. Now before anyone jumps in to comment there would have been less deaths if I simply healed more instead of DPSing. Almost all of them were to people standing in AoEs or not understanding the mechanics. The only way I could have prevented some—strong emphasis on some here—would be GCD shielding literally every single time a mechanic happened. Which is not only incredibly boring but simply a poor use of MP management. I did also die myself at one point because I can only mitigate so much and boss autos hurt.

My overall HPS output was also only 300 below my AST co-healer. So anyone assuming I forced the brunt of the work onto them would be mistaken.

Even with this utterly clown fiesta of a run, I still spent the overwhelming amount of time freely able to press the same button. And a run like this is extremely uncommon. Simply put, we aren't healers in this game, we're gimped DPS who occasionally heal. Sometimes moderately in an exceptionally bad group but never more than we DPS.

[SargeTheSeagull]

Though I think the game is very easy to me, I do agree with the other people who have replied. Making normal content harder is not viable. What I think they should do is rework how level/item level sync works so that old content can't be completely steamrolled. For example, when it was new it would take around 7-10 minutes to down susano or lakshmi. Now, you can take both of them out in about half that. That's not what I'd call accessible, that's just too easy. It's even worse for post ARR trials like Shiva or Leviathan. I got Shiva in trial roulette just yesterday and it took two minutes. If I were a new player, I'd be very underwhelmed by that. I think the actual difficulty of MSQ content is fine the way it is, they just need to redo syncing so older content can't be melted quite as much.

[Ivtrix]

I think they need to gate the MSQ behind the ultimate raids

im tired of casual players thinking they have a right to the story

[Shibi]

I think they need to gate the MSQ behind the ultimate raids

im tired of casual players thinking they have a right to the story

Gate it behind housing. That's even tougher than the ultimates.

[Ivtrix]

Gate it behind housing. That's even tougher than the ultimates.

thats an even better idea, throw triple triad on top of it too, have to complete 100% of what you have access to before moving on to the next expansion

card games are serious business

[Derio]

Look at at the reworked dungeons to be able to work with Trusts. Most of those bosses were extremely dumbed down. Copperbell mines is the big one that was changed almost completely in terms of boss mechanics for each fight.

[Sesera]

Look at at the reworked dungeons to be able to work with Trusts. Most of those bosses were extremely dumbed down. Copperbell mines is the big one that was changed almost completely in terms of boss mechanics for each fight.

So sad the game went to quite challenging where you had nothing to do on copperbell second boss and just ignore mechanic on last boss it was a dungeon for real gamers.

[Absurdity]

So sad the game went to quite challenging where you had nothing to do on copperbell second boss and just ignore mechanic on last boss it was a dungeon for real gamers.

Old Copperbell was turned into a joke because SE never updated the bosses to account for our increased potencies. In terms of actual mechanics the old one had a lot more interesting ideas that weren't just the usual "don't stand in the bad" dance.


I do agree that some of them fall flat, like the 2nd boss having you stand around and do nothing for most of the time, but the idea for the original Gygas fight, having to deal with infinitely spawning adds and burning down the boss before you get overwhelmed, was a lot more interesting than "dodge big telegraphed aoe, then dodge big telegraphed donut aoe, repeat".

The problem was that after 3 expansions where our potency numbers got bigger and bigger the boss simply fell over before the fight even really started.