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The only thing I can agree on is the ease of obtaining gear. When you overgear the content the difficulty is going to be reduced to the simplest mechanics because your gear is trivializing the rest.
Take Titan HM for example. It has a hard DPS check that is trivialized by over gearing or building up limit break, a healing check that is trivialized by over gearing, and a personal awareness check that is reduced by over gearing. However, based on your logic this entire fight is just "don't stand in fire".
You realize that nearly every fight can be reduced to tank and spank or avoid AoE when you over gear the encounter enough right? Try running the encounters with a party in ilvl appropriate gear and see if the entire fight is just avoiding AoEs.
You can have ilv 70 before you get to lv50 (I did). Gear should trivialize older content, it shouldn't trivialize content before you can even access it... SE trivialized any gearcheck by designing the game that you can so easily outgear content before you reach it. By doing that, SE has (as you say) "reduced this game to the simplest mechanics." If you're not too lazy or stupid to get the right gear, (or if you have the skill such that you don't need it) this has made the game revolve around dancing, and nothing else.
In your Titan HM example, you can't quite over gear the personal awareness check - at least not with gear that's available before you clear Titan. In ilv 70, you do outgear all other aspects of gear check, but not the dance check. Go to DF and I bet you'll have very little success; often players in full ilv 70+ fail just as hard as anyone else.
I don't understand the gripe here... I mean, yeah it's irritating to have to find 7 other people who know how to dance, and one weak link causes the whole chain to fail... but seriously.
Without dancing, there's too much focus on gear and not enough focus on skill. I find that battles with no mechanics to them are extremely boring battles, whereas dancing battles are kind of exhilarating. To me, fighting Titan in the morning has the same effect as a cup of coffee.
When I played beta, I was thinking, "How freakin' boring! You just stand there and hit the button for your strongest attack over and over!" But when the game launched and I started getting to lv.30 and beyond I was more like, "Whoa, these dungeons are pretty fun!"
Being ilvl 70 before hitting 50 on a DoW/M is a non-trivial task. It either requires you to have crafting classes and gil to craft the gear yourself prior to hitting 50 on a DoW/M, lots of gil to buy the gear off the market board, or another DoW/M already at level 50 to farm tomes with. I see no possible way for a player's very first DoW/M to have i70 gear before hitting 50 without putting a ton of forethought into maxing out at least 2-3 crafting classes and farming up mats and gil.
You are basically going out of your way to over gear your character and then complaining that the encounters get reduced to "dancing", and the fights that don't have this mechanic are reduced to tank and spanks.
If you farm WP, AK and Copperbell/Haukke HM for tomes before attempting any of the primals then yes. There is, however, the option to attempt these instance prior to farming the gear for them.
So what you are saying is that you think that in full 70+ gear that you should just be able to walk into Titan HM and breeze through it because you out gear it?
That's like complaining that encounters in other MMOs are reduced to tank and spanks when you over gear the content.
Frankly I'd like to see them scale down the item level for certain encounters, similar to how they scale down level for low level dungeons, to maintain at least some level of difficulty. In the game's current state it's pretty much common practice to go into a lot of the end game content at 10-15 ilvl above what is actually necessary to complete it.
Okay, okay, okay.. lets say you're right and the gearcheck is NOT trivial. Heck, let's say the gear check is very significant...
Do you want to play an MMO where the only two interesting mechanics are ilvl and dancing????? How much dancing is enough? Aren't there other mechanics you can imagine... or expect from SE???
Play Coil. Nicely tuned fights, if you do them properly.
Twintania has a bunch of nice mechanics with only little to no dancing and is not a simple tank & spank. And even with full 90 you are not overgeared for it.