What does FFXIV lack?

[Valence]

This was only on Raw Intuition, which guaranteed parries to the front and crits received from behind (and originally also heals from behind because... XIV and sensible coding have never gone together, apparently). All enemy autos could, at the time, critically strike (and crits couldn't, again because of bizarre coding decisions making them mutually exclusive to RNG mit categories, be blocked or parried), with that chance increasingly mostly just with level disparity, iirc. What was significant was just that you couldn't block or parry attacks from behind altogether.

Yes, thank you, I was trying to recall the exact details. It was parry/block that stopped working when struck behind. I liked this a lot. It asked tanks and parties to be mindful of positioning and orientation.

True, but this was frankly a pretty awful mechanic except when treated as a party-wide consideration. Unless optimized for, it was 6 buttons of bloat for tanks and 1-2 more for all other roles for, at best, a game of The Price is Right based upon the combination of your DPSs' output and --especially once in Stormblood-- their refusal to use their party tools (among which Diversion was decently important). In early ARR, the choice offered different approaches to small-but-threatening pulls, but... nothing else. Large pulls and very small pulls (so, some 80% of ARR and HW leveling dungeon pulls and then 99% of everything else) offered no real choice and therefore no strategic variance.

I disagree, I liked having to adjust my aggro <-> damage output balance depending on the situation. It promoted skill play for those who wanted it. And it left people that didn't care or didn't know about it just use tank stance with full aggro combos and be done with it. That is, for single target, because AoE was... a mess. It had little meaning with WAR/DRK, and PLD was just a disaster before Total Eclipse in SB. But Total Eclipse having no aggro modifier was actually nice, and I wished back then all tanks had one like this, and another like Flash or something in the vein.

The only "balance" it struck was in very rarely preferring Cure over Cure II (and the SCH/AST equivalents of each), since the first healed for 60% as much for just 40% the MP [or effectively 25% for Cure if including Freecure averaged RNG]) and made Regen far more valuable. You still spent no time idling unless oomed by necessary rezzes, and that cost would still be more favorably taken up by the Bard, whose raid buff song at the time only affected elemental magic and whose MP song was a smaller penalty to their own damage than a damage benefit to even just one healer. Apart from that, they simply each further penalized Spell Speed and Skill Speed, since they alone did not increase output-per-resources-spent and meant that a pull could be lost within its first 25s or so even if it took 70s or so to die, simply because lackluster physical DPS meant that they could run out of the ability to hit any weaponskills except every third GCD or so before the mobs died, extending the fight into so late a time that the tank and healer run out of CDs and are inevitably overwhelmed.

On which note, unless it's used as a way to skip ahead on combos and make the GCD more flexible (e.g., by having a GCD of 2s but only being able to sustain an average of 2.25s) AND we start to see reasons to want to stay in or get out as deliberate choices with melee being rewarded commensurately to that increased risk (while casters/rangers get their own due added complexity and variable reward in turn), I really do not at all care to see TP reintroduced. As for MP, I have zero attachment to it, either, and would almost prefer it be used primarily as a shared resource system for special actions (the rest being mostly negligible) instead, akin to HW Ruin III or being used mostly be abilities if we wanted to reduce the frequency of their use without reducing their in-a-given-moment's availability.

/shrug

I'm not speaking about Cure I / Cure II and freecure or whatever. I did enjoy the resource scarcity in single target and bosses though. Most classes had to manage it. Dying literally drained this, overhealing drained healer and party resources, and a lot of the time when parties crashed back then especially in casual content, it was because of people running on fumes and unable to properly recover, and not just enough people failing to dodge a mechanic.

I'm also talking about healer dungeon experience once you got AoE tools, and this has been taken away entirely from the game — and also what made me abandon healing completely after. That was the whole point, like tanks could balance damage and aggro, healers also had to balance damage and healing in accordance to their finite resources, and this meant adjusting to a lot of variables, like the tank's own skill, their gear, but also your DPS gear and skill at burning down mob packs as you described it. The less efficient it was, the more it drained into resources, and I really, really enjoyed this. I didn't exactly enjoy being left unable to do anything once out of TP for DPS classes though, which was one of the bad parts of the design.

That's why I have felt so alienated by the game's direction since ShB, because it literally changed the whole paradigm of everything and that's not what I signed for nor what I liked about the game. People constantly telling me the game has always been the same are full of s*** (not aimed at you there, no offense intended).