Bowl of Embers (Hard) Gripes
Let me preface this by saying I love the actual encounter design a lot and I'm not complaining about the difficulty at all. I could probably write a much lengthier post about how many things they got right/drastically improved on from the Darkhold designs. However, there are two major things that are just... grating on me and keeping it from being as fun as it should be. I'm wondering how many people share these frustrations, how many think they're fine, what other perceived problems there are, etc..
Animation Lock
This is a WoW-style "movement" fight, and I personally think that's fine, but getting hit with an eruption/plume because you can't move due to an animation that started before the cracks/magma even appeared is just annoying. There's also the lag factor, where you're well out of the way but still get hit anyway (sometimes this gets you even without animation lock). This makes me believe that their playtesting is leading them to tune for no lag and unstressed servers when those aren't the realities we're facing in the live game. "Get out of the fire" mechanics aren't fun if you can't actually get out of the fire even when you're paying attention and react quickly.
Bland Tanking (GLA)
Our block rate (with trait) against Ifrit must be, what, 2% without Ambidexterity up (and not very impressive with it up either)? In addition, cross-class Featherfoot 2 and Foresight 2 even with affinity seem to almost always wear off without dodging/parrying a single attack. I feel like I lost gameplay and just gained a truckload of HP to compensate, which isn't a terribly rewarding experience. I guess it's either time to test which DPS/tank hybrid beats GLA this time or just suck it up and daydream of Paladin.
I do expect to beat this, and I'm sure plenty will, but I think the above issues remain either way (unless there's some hilarious trick that prevents him from even using eruption/plume which would be more disappointing than both of these combined).