Inevitable Job Simplifications?

[Lyth]

Why is the rotation the focal point, though? Once you've established what you need to do under target dummy conditions, every fight can be reduced down to a variation of that ideal scenario. It doesn't matter whether your rotation has four steps or forty. If rotations bore you now, they would have equally bored you in Heavensward.

The key differentiator has always been fight design, not job design. If players are uncertain whether it's possible to obtain more uptime or not, then you have an actual performance differentiator. And that generally happens when you are given interesting positioning and movement mechanics. The perceived difficulty change after Heavensward has nothing to do with circular AoEs (?) or loss of pet management (???) as was suggested in the OP. It's a trickle down effect from the fact that bosses are designed to position themselves and move in a scripted and predictable fashion to assist you with doing damage.

Somewhere along the line over the past few expansions, fight design feels like it has shifted away from a Trinity based design where boss movement is controlled dynamically by your team (i.e. tanks) in response to less predictable fight conditions to an ARPG type design where the fight designers script the events and movement completely. But job design hasn't reflected that change. Every fight is a target dummy fight, interspaced with standardized intermissions. If boss movement is going to be predictable, then there needs to be a lot more forced movement, not static phases of hitting bosses while watching their cast bars tick up. This also means that players need more interesting movement tools to keep up with increased movement demands.

[Sparkthor]

Why is the rotation the focal point, though? Once you've established what you need to do under target dummy conditions, every fight can be reduced down to a variation of that ideal scenario. It doesn't matter whether your rotation has four steps or forty. If rotations bore you now, they would have equally bored you in Heavensward.

It's exactly my thought, but I wasn't able to express it this way.

On a side note, i think people judge HW as harder than EW is because ressources today are well know and almost instant. Also fight balance is way better and we didn't have any more dps gear locked content (Like Alexander 12 was). Hell, even P8S got nerfed even if people pass it. And today we got guides for every Savage fight the day of the release. And i think this is very impactful on how the game is perceived today : as most people don't even try to understand fight but just copy/paste guides, if they don't use mod to do it for them.

[CelestiCer]

Why is the rotation the focal point, though? Once you've established what you need to do under target dummy conditions, every fight can be reduced down to a variation of that ideal scenario. It doesn't matter whether your rotation has four steps or forty.

Then the counterpoint would be " Why is movement the focal point, over rotation? "

Countless mechanics are resolved with solely movement. Before Extreme? its a snooze-fest making Job execution the focus for Fun. I for example don't value Ultimate difficulty as Fun as I do my Job's gameplay. I tried Ultimate, and the Fun of its difficulty? doesn't outshine the appeal of a fun Job to me. Once Job gameplay is focused to be made shallow in exchange for how exciting gameplay can be around the ASWD/Movement buttons? Now everything becomes boring because you cannot make movement anymore difficult before Extreme. You can however? make Job's have depth and flavor without it coming at the cost of raising the skill-floor, nor raising the skill-ceiling to high.

As for thinking rotation stands in the way of making mechanics? I see no proof of that. If Square wants to make fights where the bosses are hard to hit? they will. Positionals to big of a deal? you get bosses without positionals or even a wall boss. Wanna go a step further? heck they will make it so you cannot hit the boss to focus on movement and execution of mechanics. So I see no proof of rotations or our Job having any ounce of depth or flare or flavor standing in the way of it, aside from perhaps the 2 min raid buffs regarding how well you need to execute that and balance it against DPS checks.