Shrinking the combat oriented quests does nothing but exacerbate the problem we're talking about. All it does is push the time spent talking and teleporting into a higher percentage which is the exact opposite of what we actually want.
What people actually want is streamlining quests that have no real impact on the overall narrative. Implement a way to trim the fat and actually use Linkpearls to allow us to keep questing in a more timely manner without the offensive back and forth for trivial quests. This improves both the feel and pacing thus pushing the whole experience to a more engaging flow and balanced process.
Regarding alt jobs - sure it's easy, but it's not exactly fun if you care at all about being efficient. There are dozens of solutions available to improve this process flow, but like all changes there are opportunity costs associated. It'd be up to the dev team to determine which make the most sense/least impact, but I have to state that personally I think the existing system is one of the worst feeling. Nothing feels worse than being relegated to the same 1-2 dungeons (that are based on archaic methodologies and systems design and not modernized) in a given level bracket, or dear god PotD...
You're making a really bad assumption that the story is the only thing that allows someone to be invested in content? That's a bit ridiculous... I didn't care about the reason I was going to fight Garuda, but the presentation and music blew me away and had me hooked on trials (Ifrit was less impactful of the original 3). Many different people enjoy many different things for *surprise* many different reasons. I personally love the story content, but I am not some zealot unable to reason that there is a staggering amount of room for improvement.
You're being a bit hypocritical citing WoW as some egregious offender here, when FF14 is pretty well known as the MMO that expects you to carry dead weight (aka players expecting to do everything with no effort at all and a generally entitled playerbase) while simultaneously shielding those players from criticism/feedback. This isn't me defending WoW, It has it's own issues for sure, but it's very disingenuous to cite FF14 in a better light here IMO.
I mean heck:
- How many 24 mans have I joined where I was top DPS as a tank
- How about dungeons where I had players doing less DPS than I was doing more than a full expansion ago?
- How about the tank who did literally nothing but spam shield lob over and over again?
- Don't even get me started on the communities inability to understand the difference between learning, clear, and farm parties and the toxicity surrounding that mess.
- How about FFLogs or parsers and the general lack of accountability or responsibility among the community?
- Healers who are perfectly ok being AFK nearly 80% of a given dungeon run, because they don't DPS?
- DPS who don't AOE because spamming one button is less fun than doing a ST rotation (despite being significantly less effective)?
There's a lot of entitlement and dead weight in FF14.
I'm doing the same thing with my one friend. I think he'll actually really like a lot of different jobs at max level and the raids/trials, but getting him there has been an enormous headache. I'm literally dragging him kicking and screaming so I empathize.