What does FFXIV lack?

[Aidorouge]

I don't want to sound rude or dismissive and genuinely want everyone to have fun with the game.

But no one gets walled in the MSQ.
You either have trusts which now even have a "retry" at bosses, get help clearing by others like an MMO is supposed to or you can set the difficulty for solo missions to easy.
Taking a second try or a third with trusts isn't a shame. Even raiders sometimes die to dungeon mechanics but the ability to actually do fail is part of the fun a video game brings.

I did, I absolutely got walled during the MSQ at various points. I couldn't just bring NPCs for Crystal Tower, Susano, Hades, or Warrior of Light, I needed to find other people that:

1. Actually existed and were willing to do it.
2. Weren't going to get mad if I failed something and died.

Suffice to say both of these things were in short supply, with Dynamis being so dead I was FORCED to data center travel for everything only to then mostly run into people who were not nice and patient at all (especially on Aether). It was bad enough getting kicked during Ivalice, as that was side content I guess I didn't "deserve" to be in given my skill level, but getting kicked over Seat of Sacrifice? Which I NEED to do in order to just see the damn story? That was the exact moment I lost what little trust I had in the playerbase and just wanted to use NPCs for everything because it was clear I wasn't playing an MMO anymore, if I ever was.

But like I said, NPCs aren't available for all mandatory MSQ content, and even the changes they made to Trusts with the "Willful" buff was added AFTER I had already finished Shadowbringers, so it wasn't something I could rely on back then. Not that it matters if I once again get stuck on an MSQ trial in EW/DT and have to once again rely on other players who clearly don't want to deal with me and get upset at anyone failing on "easy" content in EW, or will have a good laugh when I get filtered in DT's harder stuff.

I also did indeed struggle with solo duties in Stormblood and Shadowbringers, specifically any time they made me control different NPCs and ESPECIALLY when I had to heal while doing DPS because I'm not adept at being a healer. People can say all they want about how healing is so simple you can't fail but when you've never actually done the role before, you under and overestimate when you're supposed to do one thing or another and then people end up dead and it's undeniably YOUR fault. (Also AOE heals don't seem to work on NPCs in solo duties for whatever reason, and that's a large part of what makes healing players easier to manage in other content.)

And failure's fine in a single player game, but in a multi player one practically nobody has tolerance for that, not even in normal content it seems, and I myself don't like being dead weight that has to be carried across the finish line. It's better to just avoid other players in this game most of the time because I don't want to be a burden and nobody would want to put up with me anyway.
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No one in their right mind bats an eye if you make a mistake in a dungeon or trial (outside the WoL QTE or not using tank LB there).

Yeah, well, guess who failed the QTEs on their first try of Undying Gasp and Seat of Sacrifice and then got accused of being "another R-word or troll from Dynamis"...

They were unanimous votes, and certainly soured whatever "big damn hero" moment the developers were going for in the cutscenes when I finally cleared them later on knowing my Warrior of Light is such a massive screw-up they died on "baby mode" mechanics. (Though even the story its self makes us out to be such a useless weakling without NPCs to bail us out that I question why we're still considered the main hero of the game.)
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That said though, I am of the opinion, like I said before, that we have a bit too much focus on hard content right now while normal content is thrown in like the unwanted child.
I simply don't agree with the notion that the normal content is in any way too hard.
I played too many video games in my life to think that.

Maybe not hard for you, but I've definitely had problems, and at first it was just "ah well, I'll just not worry about this piece of side content" but then the MSQ kept cranking it up too and soon enough I didn't have much of anything to do or became discouraged from trying further.

There's just something so absolutely unforgiving about FF14 compared to literally any other MMO (or real-time RPG) I've ever played, and something about the community that's equally unforgiving when failure inevitably happens (outside of their pro-gamer static I suppose). The game constantly demands perfection of some kind that I'm just not capable of and there's no hands reaching out to pick you up and dust you off, they're reaching out to throttle you for causing a wipe or making something take longer than it should have because you wasted their time that you were never "entitled" to.