FFXIV invests basically zero time and energy into teaching players how to play well, or providing players feedback within the game itself on how they're actually performing. The game doesn't attempt to teach you basic rotations, doesn't ever really stress the importance of riding the GCD (which remains one of the biggest causes of the DPS gap--a lot of people flat-out just don't push buttons as often as they could), and is set up to insulate players from ever really failing and feeling like what they're doing is wrong. Occasionally it just outright teaches bad habits--Hall of the Novice yells at DPS for multi dotting. SSS dummies are better than nothing but are inconsistent across jobs and don't provide context.
Like, yes PF and DF can be pretty bad, but given the zero effort FFXIV invests in helping players not be bad or even giving them a way to know they are bad it's not really surprising.
With unlock and 11 being the cluster that it is, I'd guess that a lot of people PFing Savage post-echo just skip it. Which is a pity in that 11's the best Creator fight, but also makes sense because it's the fight that is going to be the most confusing to do with inconsistent DPS.
New areas and content are story locked but the new jobs will be in old areas and only require being at least level 50 and owning SB.
They really could use a Hall of the Intermediate and Hall of the Advanced. Maybe lock Extreme Primals behind completion of the former and Savage Raids the latter. With a lot of players it's just that they don't even know they are bad and how to prioritise buffs, debuffs and DoTs properly. It's why as a PS4 player I want a parser even if it's personal use only just to see how I'm doing. Dungeons and story mode trials arw so easy that less capable players just see that they are finishing content perfectly fine and they they don't need to get better, which is true since the game doesn't require it off you. Think 24 mans and how many people get carried. Sometimes it can be an absolute slog, but with a half decent group everything is so easy and just melts.
The game doesn't teach you how to play at all, and makes the majority of content so easy that players think they are good enough with no idea how subpar they actually are. I remember when light farms in A1s there was a slow run and a random DPS told the party leader to kick one of three tanks. They just replied that all three tanks were doing more damage than them and to shut up lol
And I forgot about Savage unlock. I assumed everyone in A12 had cleared A11. I can see why there'd be issues now. You could do A9-10 which are so easy and skip right to A12 and ignore the learning curve. It reminds me back in the day when telling people to handle things like in Titan Ex, onky to get the response they never cleared it.
Guess I have to finish it then. I really hate the forced dungeoning this game has to experience the story.
It was worse in ARR, especially with the two dungeons in the Main Story Roulette. They learned from that and Heavensward is done a lot better. How are you finding the it? I thought ARR main story was decent but not all that. But I found Heavnsward fantastic and one of my favourite FF stories.