The difficulty of Normal Content in this game needs to increase.

[Absimiliard]

Time is not the only metric. If an encounter is fun I don't want it to end as fast. Brutal efficiency doesn't always win. How would you categorise housing and glam then? Not everyone plays like a robot.

I mean, housing is just masochism at this point. Good luck even getting one. And glamour.. well, we all know that's the true endgame. I don't know that I've ever seen a glamour (or mount, for that matter) farm party interested in taking the fights slow and easy, though.

I agree that not everything needs to be subject to absolute efficiency, but the majority of people queueing for roulettes aren't there because we find the encounters fun. Most of us just want it over with. My own solution was to just always queue for them as WAR (unless a friendly healer is queueing with me, in which case I'll run DRK or GNB for the higher overall DPS), thereby removing the need for a healer almost entirely. This frees the healer up to spam their 1 key with maximum efficiency while I keep myself and all of the DPS alive. WAR's damage is a wee bit gimped, but its kit is uniquely well suited to compensating for other people's screw-ups in casual content.

[KeshLives]

I agree that not everything needs to be subject to absolute efficiency, but the majority of people queueing for roulettes aren't there because we find the encounters fun. Most of us just want it over with. My own solution was to just always queue for them as WAR (unless a friendly healer is queueing with me, in which case I'll run DRK or GNB for the higher overall DPS), thereby removing the need for a healer almost entirely. This frees the healer up to spam their 1 key with maximum efficiency while I keep myself and all of the DPS alive. WAR's damage is a wee bit gimped, but its kit is uniquely well suited to compensating for other people's screw-ups in casual content.

You can, of course, play the way you wish, but, for me, if there's a pet peeve with the MMO genre, it is the drive for efficiency in all things, *that gets pushed by people who like it, onto people who want nothing to do with it*. I HATE the whole push for speed speed speed at all times *IN NORMAL CONTENT*.

Sure, if you're doing Savage/Extreme/Ultimate content, whether raid or trial, by all means, optimise as much as needed to get the job done. I understand that completely, been there, done that, if not necessarily in FFXIV. If you're fighting a timer, ala M+, sure. But normal content has nothing of the sort.

But, the whole drive to shave 120 seconds from Sastasha or Cutter's Cry, or Holminster's Switch, or <pick some normal dungeon or trial> drives me bonkers. In the name of saving two minutes, they'll pull too much, kill the tank three times, and of course, completely lose the time they were supposedly trying to save in the first place. Makes no logical sense to me at all.

[Amarande]

I agree that not everything needs to be subject to absolute efficiency, but the majority of people queueing for roulettes aren't there because we find the encounters fun. Most of us just want it over with.

Yeah, this is the real elephant in the room with roulettes (for dungeons, anyway. For trials and raids, it is the fact that there are over 40 different encounters each, and trials in particular often have tricksy bits that can easily go south if people forgot what to do. Which they will, mind you, if nothing else because of roulettes' natural bias towards the lowest end most braindead content simply because the natural progression of things means they get queued for more often, so you really don't get to stay in practice on things like say Diamond).

In a nutshell, people insist on queuing for stuff that they don't enjoy, then project on the people for whom it is greener and still fun.

The trouble is you need those tomestones, I suppose. Hunt trains help, but that brings in another form of grumpery, as it necessitates that culture of "hunts belong to the Discord, don't touch unless you're told it's ok" and the loss of the ability to just go and pick off a hunt (A ranks were nominally made for 8, right?) with your FC/buddies without catching mass contumely and salt.

But otherwise, what could you do? I guess you can spam PotD at 90 but the weekly time investment in that (it's what, 45 runs to cap? Not counting uncapped needs for crafting etc.) would actually be pretty painful.

But, the whole drive to shave 120 seconds from Sastasha or Cutter's Cry, or Holminster's Switch, or <pick some normal dungeon or trial> drives me bonkers. In the name of saving two minutes, they'll pull too much, kill the tank three times, and of course, completely lose the time they were supposedly trying to save in the first place.

Omg this. It happens on all levels of content too. Savage as well, when I did Sigmascape back in the day basically every O5S group would insist on attempting the ghost cheese, even though almost no PUGs got it right and even one mess up meant losing more time than you stood to save (to be fair, as a healer main, I also can appreciate why the cheese was wanted more and more later in the tier, as there was a mechanical as well as time aspect).

As for the bifurcation of seriousness and loss of the middle, btw, here is the Y Combinator comment I referred to earlier:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34714698

I actually wonder if this is a driver for the ugly shift in MMOs - between working adults feeling pushed out by the time and scheduling issues (therefore, weakening the presence of the older generations) and the younger generations who may have just never really known the "kinda serious, but not like a job" tier culture because team events growing up are now an eerily similar kind of all or nothing?

[Absimiliard]

But otherwise, what could you do? I guess you can spam PotD at 90 but the weekly time investment in that (it's what, 45 runs to cap? Not counting uncapped needs for crafting etc.) would actually be pretty painful.

You might have just stumbled upon the only actual use for variant/criterion dungeons.

[Absimiliard]

But, the whole drive to shave 120 seconds from Sastasha or Cutter's Cry, or Holminster's Switch, or <pick some normal dungeon or trial> drives me bonkers. In the name of saving two minutes, they'll pull too much, kill the tank three times, and of course, completely lose the time they were supposedly trying to save in the first place. Makes no logical sense to me at all.

Dungeons and trials low enough in level that tanks lack their self-sustain tools, I can agree on. It's important to gauge what your group is capable of handling and proceed appropriately. In higher level content, however, there is really no excuse for a non-DRK tank to die. I say this less as a shot at healers and more at the tanks themselves, as three of them have kits that allow them to be almost, if not entirely, capable of self-sustaining in most content below savages. Even should the healers and DPS falter, those tanks should be more than capable of handling wall to wall pulls in a way that prevents issue.