Why do people avoid getting better at the game?

[Jojoya]

Dungeon difficulty has slowly gone up in terms of mechanics, but the overall difficulty has gone down based on the maximum survival threshold of our job's toolkit went up in a party setting. Look no further than how tanks improved from Stormblood's dungeons in a 4-man / Shadowbringers' dungeons during Shadowbringers expansion and Endwalker dungeons in a 4-man currently.

A lot of players are reaching their effective skill cap after a decade of content difficulty growth. SE has to be cautious about increasing difficulty in the MSQ as s result. They're going to have performance data they can analyze to see where players start having difficulties.

That's going to disappoint those seeking increasing challenge, especially if SE doesn't increase the amount of side content with higher difficulty.

There's a huge reason why people say healers feel very superfluous in dungeons for that reason, and would rather have more engaging DPS gameplay when they are stuck pressing 1-1-1-1-1-1-1 in Endwalker -- and is magnified even more than Shadowbringers now that tanks no longer require as much attention on external healing with each passing expansion. Between big differences in maximum ILVL sync through gear and lots of skills, there's so much leeway that the difficulty feels like it has gotten lower, especially with how predictable mechanics are once you seen them enough times.

I rarely feel superfluous as a healer but then I stick to the more casual friendly content where we're more likely to run into players who are skill challenged.

That's where SE starts having problems when it comes to healer design. Too many abilities overwhelm healers who are better off in casual content. Not enough abilities and you bore healers in high end content.

Makes me wonder if MMOs should add in horizontal progression with respect to abilities within content. I'm thinking in terms of something like Duty actions but with a more general use within an encounter compared to the Duty action very specific use. But that also edges dangerously toward the borrowed power systems that WoW was using and which were ultimately leaving players unhappy.