FF14 is not made for hardcore players.

[linayar]

I have mentioned this in other threads but I'll say it again here...

I think FFXIV's issue is being extremely unintuitive. Some rotations are long only for the sake of being long vs being fun. Some boss encounters are mechanically dense but don't allow much room for in the moment counter-play and only really allow pattern memorization.

UIs need to be set up by players and some may be better at that than others.

Controller players sometimes need to look up guides not just for good crossbar layouts but for how to target.

With some unintuitive design and encounters that seem to be more pattern than anything we end up with a game that has a fairly normal skill ceiling but a very high skill floor.

Are you good at recognizing and memorizing patterns? Have you done this encounter before? Is your UI good? You will be probably be fine.

Are you using the default UI? Is this your first time doing the encounter or are you not so good at patterns and better at counter play? You may struggle.

I would disagree with job rotations being "extremely" unintuitive. I think if people would read the tooltips and not be in a rush to just start battling, most would be able to figure out a decent rotation. Long rotation doesn't mean unintuitive, and fun is subjective and does not necessarily correlate with the length of the rotation. After all, if the fight is long enough, hitting 11111 and hitting 12345 are the same number of presses.

That said, I'm always in favor of less unique buttons, not for intuition's sake, but for convenience's sake, but not make the buttons change too much in midfight like in PVP.

Pattern is also a simple way to make people learn about a fight. The problem isn't the pattern, it's that you sometimes need to read the tooltips for buffs and debuffs or NPC/enemy text to understand what the mechanic is or what to do unless you already have someone who knows and can tell you. So, here, I would say it can be unintuitive if you don't read all the information about the fight.