Quote Originally Posted by AdamFyi View Post
It’s a way to introduce players to the tells of the encounter early on so it doesn’t catch them off-guard. Later on, the boss mixes the tells with other mechanics and the player has to figure out how they interact. Once you learn it though, it becomes repetitive, but will always be useful for players still learning. If the boss ends up spending the first 3 minutes of the encounter using only tank busters, then the fight is basically a training dummy at that point. He’ll transition into the add phase without ever using any of his other mechanics, and that sounds equally as boring.

There’s only so much encounter time you can allocate to randomness. Adding rules to the randomness makes the fight predictable again. If you want a prime example of a random fight, take a look at Urth’s Fount (Odin’s Trial).
I imagine they’d still have limiters on how often a mechanic can occur so this exact scenario doesn’t happen. Going back to the buster example, sometimes the boss opens the fight with one, but now there’s a percentage chance that they’ll do it twice in a row, but it caps at 2 so after that they’ll move on to a different mechanic and won’t use the buster again for a set time. You’d still see all the mechanics you’d need to they just wouldn’t happen in a specific order.

Is it totally random? No not really, but I think adding in some element of unpredictability would make encounters far more interesting than they are right now. The fact that I can know when I’m going to heal, and what exact oGCD button I’m gonna press at the specific point in the fight because the mechanics and my CDs align with each other screams a problem to me. It starts feeling like the fight is accommodating for me instead of me adjusting to it.