My in depth review of FFXIV:

[alexhatesmil]

I stopped reading right there.

Have you done anything past level 40ish? Because from what I have encountered so far, is that there are a few encounters where there's some damage that can't be mitigated by stepping out of the red spot on the ground.

Also like someone else pointed out: time sinks does not equal a harder game. (Not saying this is really difficult before hardcore end game stuff.)

Not to mention the red circles start to disappear as you hit the higher-level encounters. And then you have those rather unforgiving encounters where if a single player forgets to do a single thing, the entire party gets one-shotted (e.g. missing a stun/silence on Dhorme Chimera). Even relatively simple fights with predictable patterns, like Ifrit or Demon Wall, are really easy to wipe on if one person doesn't do his job right.

And this stuff is just starter, lowbie end game.