Quote Originally Posted by LeonKeyh View Post
What are the "long pauses" in Relict that you're talking about? The Porxy sucking in air and the Pushback+AE? The Sprite's cloud "phase"? I don't think those are that bad. There could be more to them to justify the fact that you stop paying attention to your rotation and have full attention on AEs, but I hardly feel like those are as annoying as you find them. It's definitely not as bad as the last boss in Mt Gulg.
In general, any moment in a boss fight where you don't get to actually fight anything for an extended period of time is pretty much dead space that allows self-buffs to drop off, combos to fall off. It's not good design. It actively clashes with gameplay that has more or less been set in stone for years, and ShB is the worst it has ever been in that regard. If I ever, EVER need to watch a teenaged anime girl bash the ice prison of another anime girl with a hammer again, or bounce between platforms while awkwardly paced dialogue plays out before combat starts anew, while the raid's buffs and combos fall off, it will be too gosh darn soon.

Lengthy phase changes were often a means to help people get resources recovered and cooldowns lined up. But TP has been gone for a while now, MP has been normalized, and cooldowns have generally been set in such a way that organized and dedicated players have developed strategies to line up burst phases across a wide range of DPS jobs.

At some point, spectacle has become more important to encounter design than the actual "playing it" part of the game. I guess if FF14 is a big content theme park for FF fans, watching cutscenes take greater and greater precedence over time is an amazing allegory to the rest of FF as a whole.