Do encounteres (specifically Extremes) FEEL different now?

[Post]

I think it's likely we'll all disagree on what we feel that's different.

I don't think anyone paying attention would reasonably say that the encounters today are the same as they always were. Maybe in certain regards, but by and large, no. They're designed very differently now.

It's worth noting that there's a huge, deliberate shift by the developers in 3.4. YoshiP specifically stated that they felt that Gordias and Midas were too hard, and made an effort to make both the trials and savage raids easier with Creator.

This is reflected in Sophia: beginning in 3.4 and every fight afterwards, including dungeons, falling off a cliff no longer meant that you could not be rezzed without releasing to the entrance. The design team talks about Sophia in advance as having its difficulty designed around "memory and puzzles" (it has short-term memory mechanics and addition equations with the scales) and not "long-rope jumping" (so-called from Sephirot where if one player died during color phase, at least 1 other person would die but generally it could easily lead to a wipe or an unrecoverable state).

They apologized to the teams that enjoyed the previous difficulty level, but felt that those players were in the minority and intended to make more difficult content for them down the line. Gordias and Midas savage may not be too difficult in a vacuum, but certainly with how much more difficult the jobs were to play in HW compared with ARR and how tightly tuned they encounters were, the overall difficulty was such that much of the playerbase could not keep up with the sudden difficulty spike and many players flocked to certain servers, killing the raiding scene on many others. After Creator, YoshiP says they're satisfied with the engagement and progression of players in Creator, and that they intend to keep the savage difficulty around that level from there on.

I personally think that they attacked the difficulty on too many fronts simultaneously and they've swung well far into the other direction. I think jobs could stand to have a little more complexity added to their ceilings and fights could stand to be a little more challenging without being so difficult that they're off-putting. Forcing every job to work in a 2 minute window kind of pigeonholes their design a bit. And I think Gordias' #1 sin was that it was boring, not that it was too hard; the difficulty can be forgiven if it's also fun.

Responding to the above poster, tankbusters and group wides were homogenized starting in StB. During Heavensward, except for Thordan Ex and Zurvan Ex (whose tankbuster is unique anyways), all tankbusters and group-wides are telegraphed visually instead of cast bars. Even then those two had mid-busters without telegraphs. The auto attacks began to stop simultaneously in Stormblood Exs, and have been gone from raids since ShB, as have auto attacks critting, which, fine, they got rid of Awareness, tank's old crit immunity tool, anyways.