My main gripes with this game

[MoofiaBossVal]

1.Mob leashing range is atrociously narrow, if I pull from max range with a spell or ranged attack then a simple sidestep to avoid an attack can be enough to make it leash back with immunity, this is especially painful with FATE bosses or huge HP sponges, which directly brings me to the next point:

2.Most of outdoor and solo-duty content feels to dull, and don’t get me wrong here, there’s a difference between easy (which story content has too be for obvious reasons) and outright dull. In General the whole questing framework in this game seems way too repetitive and predictable. Go to purple circle, kill 3 sponges, go to next purple circle, enter/leave hideout 20 times, next quest.

Outdoor content never stops being braindead dull, sadly. You're never going to have interesting battles like on Timeless Isle. I guess maybe the hunts have more stuff going on (particularly the world bosses) but often times there are so many people and so many effects going off it's hard to see the AoE markers, and the mechanics are often one shot, so you often die before you had a chance to do anything about it (unless you're playing a ranged job and standing away from the boss). So you join a group and get rezzed over and over through the fight until you win.

Bozja is an endgame grind zone that has overall "harder" enemies, but they don't have challenging movesets like a timeless isle mob. They're just amped up numbers so you need other people to DPS down those damage sponges in a timely manner or a healer to help you survive. The Fates are definitely fun, though.

4.No one talks ever. Now I get that it’s a Japanese MMO (I know first-hand that no one talks ever in japan-centered MMOs) but still I’m playing on EU servers and it’s basically the same eerie silence everywhere. I don’t expect the 24/7 spam and meme talk of W*W, but this is kind of creeping me out.

Yeah. FFXIV is less social than WoW. People just greet at the start of an instance, maybe throw out some tips if it is a trial, then everyone says "GG" or "ty" at the end and that's it. You can join an FC, but you spend most of the game reading dialogue, travelling to the next NPC to read dialogue, watching cutscenes, or doing solo instances. Once you make it to endgame and unlock Bozja, then you will have content you need other people for. Talking to other people while doing Bozja is quite fun.