The Dead Ends is yet another error in the push to make everything hardcore

[Lemuria]

I've seen more wipes in Keeper of the Lake, no joke. Which is to say, I've seen several wipes in Keeper and zero in Dead Ends. People seemed to struggle more with tree doggo in Don Mheg than with Buff Lazer Turret in Dead Ends, at least from what I've seen so far.

Press X to doubt.

While I'm in total agreement that it's really not as difficult as the OP claims, there are several points that throw a lot of players off.

1. There is literally a doom mechanic on the first boss which isn't obvious unless you mouseover the ailment (needs to be Esuna'd). I've seen healers focus entirely on curing the damage from the puddles and not realise impending death was coming up.

2. Second boss scatters a ton of AoE all over the place. This includes those diagonal lasers while still trying to dodge circular AoE around the edges. No Future also dumps a ton of overlapping AoE markers which almost inevitably catches out at least one player and deals a fair amount of damage. The lasers also have a much bigger hitbox than you would anticipate from the size of the glowing orbs. Melee get caught out by this a lot.

3. Another doom mechanic (this one requiring you to restore HP to full) in the final boss as well as high raid-wide damage (Warm Glow).

I've run this dungeon a fair number of times on different jobs, so I've seen it from all three angles. Tank, DPS and heal. It is, in my opinion, the dungeon which catches out the most players on their first playthrough - especially if going in blind. I agree it's far from extreme trial fights, but I do feel it's a bit disingenuous to completely disregard their arguments. Personally, I enjoyed the greater challenge. No worse than the final dungeon of Shadowbringers MSQ overall (can't count how many kept falling off the arena on final boss there!), but I can at least understand their points.