Do you know why the average pf player is so bad?

[Merrigan]

Nah, average players are bad, they have no idea what they're doing. Throw them in an EX trial and see for yourself. Midcore content should be the actual level of average.

If the average content is to become more complex (and it needs to), we need to look beyond midcore as it's currently conceived IMO. Because no, reducing everything to an extreme level would be neither desirable nor pleasant. Let me remind you that in the extremes, it's common to wipe when a player makes a mistake, and that you have to farm memos via the roulette wheel. Without even tackling difficulty as such, i.e. boss pv, strat and the like, there are plenty of ways to make content interesting.

- Tanks are under-exploited to a miserable level. I've rarely seen a game with so much tanking potential, and so little understanding of the role. I'll pass over the absolute necessity of doing away with that bullshit "stance" idea that makes aggro automatic, whatever the dps / healers do: I don't think they'll do it. But even without tackling this problem, we need to exploit all the facets of this role, including placement, which is, in general, non-existent; and force people to think about pulls. What's worse, instances with these problems exist (Damzel, the old version; Aurum Val). We need to make these problems more common, and a little more advanced, and we'll already have a spike in interest.

- Healers... I'm not going to dwell on them. There's a whole thread on current healer problems. So I'll settle for bitching about two things: our heals are too powerful, our mana management nonexistent; and stop abusive rez. We need a rez gauge or something that prevents us from raising an entire raid if something goes wrong (lb3 excluded). As things stand, most people don't seem to give a damn about dying... And rightly so. A debuff, a rez that comes within 10 seconds? It has almost no impact in most content. Smn and rdm should also be limited.

- For dps, give them targets to prioritize (once again: abnormal, completely abnormal that this mechanic, which is nonetheless a basic on MMORPG, isn't a thing on FF) and control possibilities. Example : doton could be the equivalent of wow chaman's earth shattering, and have a chance of interrupting ennemies (oc : we would need more deadly casts for that... And the suppression of Whm miracle's stun).

So, instead of doing a strict equivalent of Extrems, the game should exploit all facets of each roles by changing the instances design. Make things interesting, more demanding in terms of exploiting your jobs abilities.

Edit : funny how the whm miracle's stun is the perfect example of the subexploitation of crowd control in this game.