MSQ Difficulty and Exclusion

[Jojoya]

You seem to be conflating two very separate issues.

DPS players queuing as healers for a fast queue and healers wanting to improve their enjoyment in their class.

Healers can ask SE to do things to improve their class just because there are a few rude DPS players who queue as healers for a fast queue.

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).

I do mean the trust system, yes, since they are retrofitting all older MSQ content to be trust-compatible and my understanding is this will also apply to future stuff given Yoshi's aspiration to allow the game's main story to be playable as a single player, as an option. Hence implementing such options within that framework. It'd provide more flexibility for how they design fights in the MSQ if they could provide an option for players who simply want to clear without much trouble an easy option that can be selected via the trust system (with reduced rewards or something after the first clear.) Similarly, as you mention, you could do harder modes too without too much hassle.



Unfortunately those "petabytes of statistics" don't seem to stop SE from making errors - sometimes abysmal ones. But like Hyu mentioned, I am referring to the extension of the trust system to MSQ dungeons/trials.



We'll see how those turn out in practice. I'm glad they made the step of adding them, at least.



Yeah, by "future stuff" I mean future MSQ content, i.e. the dungeons and trials linked to it. I don't recall them discussing what they'll be doing with MSQ content in future patches (they'd said their aim was to retrofit older stuff by 7.0 and onwards), but given that it is an aspiration of Yoshi's to make this a feature of the game, I'd expect it will apply to future MSQ content too and will be designed to be ready for this. I agree with your sentiment, either way.

Does this mean that you're also suggesting that players should be able to complete roulettes using Duty Support/Trust if you feel that MSQ difficulty should be increased since those are an option? Otherwise they're still going to be part of the roulette queues since that's the end game for many of them as the other poster pointed out.

We're waaaaaay past this "Well healers need to learn to do their PRiMArY RoLe" hokum. Primary role is healing? Please. It needs to happen maybe once or twice a minute in a -mediocre- party in content below Savage.

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.

[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.

[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.