Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[KaldeaSahaline]

I think there is definitely a happy medium hidden in here somewhere and I think something that could be done to gently increase dungeon difficulty (in optional content only of course) is to just increase the damage enemies do considerably and perhaps add some extra effects to those attacks to make them less ignorable.

How about bosses. Make Mothorbit less predictable and cause every hit not on the tank to give the player damage down. For every stack of damage down the boss gets a stack of damage up. Now if your BLM eats the obviously telegraphed AoE it's more than "eh, I'll Tetra it" and if the puddle gets dropped in a bad place the healer can't just run in and eat it then Esuna the heavy off/heal up.

Here is a post I made a while back about Motherbit:

A good example could have been like the first boss in Fractal HM. Instead of all her bits being active from the get go, they could be frequent periodic spawns. The first one spawns, tank grabs it (and boss obv) and then the DPS/tank/healer kill it. When the boss casts his wall laser move, it revives the current number of bits dead. If any are alive - they also maybe shoot a laser across the direction they're facing (making the follow up mechanic harder). Then this layers on with more bits each time, thus more lasers and more tank damage. Eventually getting overwhelmed.

The point I wanted to draw attention to is that encounter design can dictate a healthy balance of difficulty and engagement without being overbearing. This teaches you that doing mechanics matters, because if you fail, you have direct consequences that are likely to snowball more failures, before eventually overwhelming you. Gear helps assuage these concerns, but if ignored can and will still prove deadly, unlike their current philosophy.

Stats basically just don't matter. the only one you ever need to look at is Item level. every other stat in the game could be totally removed. even the primary's. because there all dictated and hard capped by item level anyway... just equipped the highest ilevel piece you have for the slot and go. you don't even need to look at the other stats. they are meaningless

This is why it's such a big complaint that gear is just boring because none of the stats actually matter. and thus gear is all dull boring and trash

I've echoed this before as well. With how much Yoshi complains about the amount of data stored in gear, I'm nearly 100% confident they could remove everything from gear and make it strictly cosmetic (a la BNS) and tie "stats" to some other easily tuneable knob, thus freeing up a ton of balancing time and improving the database weight. However, it would require some creativity...

I disagree, some jobs playability is influenced by how much you have of a determined stats, like SAM and their 1-3 Sen openers, not to mention BLM and their 2 actual builds in terms of stats.
True WD and main stat will always triumph, but I don't really think you want something like wow were a 30 ilvl difference might mean that the higher ilvl item is worse than the one currently equipped for stats alone and frankly they are moving away from that apparently

There weren't a ton of cases where 30 ilvl was worse based on secondaries in Legion short of a handful of fringe cases. Not counting set bonuses, but that's it's own barrel of issues.

While it's true a few jobs have some pretty key breakpoints, I'm fairly confident they could easily be tuned via another knob should gear ever go strictly cosmetic.