The game is very easy

[ssunny2008]

All you are doing is re-affirming my statement that you should play a different game. FFXIV has been continuing this design for years now and its not going to change to what you want, so why stick around? SWTOR has literally gotten worse over the past few years and guess what? I stopped playing it because the balance in pvp has become a joke and at one point they went nearly 3 years without a single new raid and next month they are nuking all the classes removing basically all of their utility....Guess what I wont be playing?

I know what happened to the game and what´s gonna happen with the new expansion. But it doesn´t change the statement, that the classes and raids have gameplay-wise way more uniqueness and variety to offer than FF14. That the game lost a lot of support has been the curse of Anthem. That they´re nuking the classes out of their existence yet, is just another move FF14 is doing with each major-patch for years now. It´s called casualization. Funny thing you mention the loss of the utility there, but don´t see the flaws and lost / missing utility in the class-design here.

And yeah, SE continues their road of dumbdowns for years now... maybe we should stop it at some point? As i´ve said, i promise that the time will come, when you sit here like me, because it has become "too much braindead, too much grind" and your favored classes got nuked out of their existence thx to some casuals who never really played them.

Have you ever actually cleared an ultimate, or are you just talking out of your ass? Because it sounds like the latter.

I´ve played them far enough, but never finished them. But i can promise it wasn´t my mistake that the permawipe, caused by the same 1-2 persons over and over again, lasted into "just timewaste".

Alex is close yeah, but the other 2 are getting outscaled already, even with the downsync. You can skip some major primal-mechanics at UwU with enough DPS. And enough DPS doesn´t even mean to run a 100 parse.
All of them has a bunch of strict pattern. So you do nothing else as you did before. You do the same stuff again and again, optimize automatically and wait until the last guy in the raid manifested the fight into his brain. Playing it completely blind might be somewhat more of a challenge, but you´ll never find a blind static unless you go for the world first. The most poeple can´t play without guides or bots in this game. The real challenge is still to remember "where to move when", and that´s a thing a lot of ppl have issues with, but definately not me.

No, I meant that the people who aren't griefers are usually the ones that end up the most bored. There's a sweetspot between not good, good, and very good at the game where the game is at its most boring. It's where you're good enough to clear Savage relatively smoothly, but lack the time, energy, patience, or people necessary to push yourself to the next level, i.e. doing ultimates, pushing your damage to its limit, etc. Almost every job in the game has dozens upon dozens of micro optimizations you can do on a fight-by-fight basis in such an environment that adds up to about as much complexity as the game has ever had in the past.

The problem that a lot of people are encountering is that the game itself never pushes you to take advantage of this complexity. You have to seek it out yourself. But the game was never particularly more challenging than it is now, jobs (as a whole) included. Jobs like Paladin (and tanking in general), Black Mage, Red Mage, and Dragoon have only gotten more mechanically involved over time. The removal of things that only existed as reasonable challenges at the baseline (enmity management, enochian, etc) doesn't actually change that. I guess another problem is that a lot of these baseline challenges were removed before people realized how meaningless they were, but I don't actually think that's a problem.

None of what I'm saying applies to healers (and ranged DPS to a much lesser extent), though. They've just gotten shafted more and more as the game has gone on.

Micro-optimization is still a self-made challenge and nothing which the game forces. You either like it or not.. for me personally it´s just timewaste to greed for 2-3 more percentiles or to waste that pot into a fight that should be a 100% clear without some. (Based on gear, knowledge etc...) If a full-equipped party isn´t able to clear XY without potions, then they seriously just don´t deserve the kill, same with the use of healer LB3, but anyway... the fights are not engaging or rewarding enough to play them multiple times unless friends need some help. The time is better used in RL or other games.

If you enjoy it "to push yourself on the next level", then its up to you, but it´s nothing complex or challenging at all. Some parses aren´t even well reasonable for that. Of course things go faster and easier if you´ve 7 top players in your party with the same attitude or skilllevel, maybe even theorycrafted the last DPS out of the fight. It´ll automatically be a higher parse than playing with the most randoms. Or you´ve RNG... i mean, i had more than enough tries back in Eden with 22k or 24k on MNK. Crit and chakraprocc luck ftw! (And yes, it has been with the same players.)

The game has been more challenging, even if a lot of poeple claim that it has been caused "by being punished". But it´s exactly that... if something is forgivable and overfilled with QoL features, it´s not a challenge. You can missplay and noone cares... but if it´s punishing?!
The game had way more stuff to take care about in the past, way more variety and uniqueness. I´ve mentioned a list earlier... but a major example would be the waste of all the debuffs / buffs the FF-series offers. We stuck on vuln-stacks now, Esuna is never used by 90% of the whole playerbase... so well... i do even wonder why caster still stuck on Mana, when it´s a braindead management unless you´ve to rezz. And what about all the re-used and clear boss-pattern with more and more telegraphs?
And talking about the MSQ... easy buttons, or even the patched coincounter in AV, like real? Aren´t that 100% proofs that the game got easier?

Poeple who´ll get used to gaming pretty fast won´t have any issues anyway. But it still matters how the classes and the content feel to play and ofcourse how hard missplays are getting punished. Call it clunky, call it meaningless, but every bit we had to care about was a bit more than we have now. It matters a lot if you´ve to press 20 or just 10 buttons, if you´ve to play 6 or 2 positionals, if you´ve to take care about 30s Dots or 45s ones. It also matters if you´ve to play your rotation well or if you´ve a braindead tankstance to keep aggro with autohits.
The list is endless and this game lost a lot of its engaging and rewarding feelings when it comes to the gameplay. More than enough classes got dumb´d down and we don´t even have possibilities to mix up our own gameplay.