The general player base needs to improve

[Bourne_Endeavor]

They could have done that in Sigma Normal rather than story mode. It makes no sense Shin is harder than Kefka and a longer fight to boot. It makes no sense that the third boss of the new sigmascape is harder than Kefka ffs. It's obvious they design fights based on what they think is cool, and then when they are all done, half-ass balancing. Like the poster said about Rab being in day one, its only because hashmal and to a lesser extend mateus are much tougher than ardath and rofocale, yet both are the first two fights instead of the last one.

You cannot equate Shinryu and Kefka because they aim to accomplish different things. Shinryu was the conclusion to Stormblood's main story; the final boss in a single player game in a sense. Kefka, meanwhile, is simply a prelude to a much harder variation. Now I will say normal mode raids should be noticeably harder to serve as a proper difficulty curve in lieu of the absolute jokes they are. Alas, you're the one who keeps insisting they can't possible do that. So...

And I suspect they did that with Rabanastre to make it easier if people bail once obtaining their loot. Since it didn't work, and only served to render the second half of Rabanastre an absolute bore. I hope they abandon it in 4.3. Give me back Weeping City and Dun Scaith.

grats, you did it with a plus 50 or more ilvl difference than when it released, along with players (especially healers) who do know every single mechanic. If you used MCH, you also did it with one of the least penalized jobs in term of adapting to movement mechanics in this game. Only thing easier is tanking it.

I did it with a friend in i290. I was on DRG; she on AST. Neither of us had an issues the second lockout. The first? We got an idiot Warrior who refused to listen to any advice, died to Tidal Wave five times and claimed the healers were rude when they finally lost their patience with him. Shinryu is not a difficult fight by any means. He's simply not braindead easy.

I get too frustrated over this for my own good. I shouldn't, but it's exactly like you said; people vary in skill and ability. What I worry about is that the people who are good will shift the game like they did with HW again, which was a lot worse for medium to lower skilled people, and even high end people too.

That only happened because the developers didn't test Gordias properly. They looked each individual mechanic with God Mode on and assumed everything flowed together. Their lack of testing the entire sequence of mechanics from start to finish is what created the mess we received. Gordias will never happen again because they already rectified the mistake which caused it. Unfortunately, it has made them incredibly cautious in all content. They even claimed The Vault was too much on leveling healers when it's among the best dungeons for precisely forcing tanks and healers to prioritize their actual role instead of being pseudo-DPS.