/sigh
No, it's not. My point was it's a mechanic that people likely haven't seen and that isn't easy to understand.
In ALL the other examples, it's pretty obvious that you're supposed to hide behind the objects, and not doing so also makes it obvious what is happening, which the "lightwaves cause crystals to explode but they don't damage things standing in the shadow of another crystal" does not do. The point was clear, I'm not sure why you don't want to see it.
Look at Fenrir's mechanic. The fight clearly shows an AOE telegraph emanating from the boss. Do the Lightwaves do this as they approach a crystal? No, they do not. Meaning it's not even clear where the explosions are coming from if you don't already understand the mechanic and how it works. Garuda's rock pillars? Same thing. You can see the boss, you can see the animation of damage coming from her, it's extremely clear. Moreover, the rocks take damage and interact with the environment, so you can tell which ones aren't as good to hide behind. Crystal scorpion, been a while since I've done that fight, but I believe its aoe and the animation of it is very clear (the line aoe with the spikes flowing from the caster to the target?) as to what he is doing and where the origin is.
Contrast the Lightwave/Crystal mechanic.
There are no telegraphs. So you can't tell where the damage will becoming from/is coming from. If you take someone into the fight the first time, don't explain the mechanic to them, and the rest of the party doesn't go to the safe spot, that person probably has no way of knowing what happened and when they die, no way of knowing what killed them, where it came from, or what the trigger is. Even just the Fenrir telegraph (which shows the entire map being hit with the AOE and doesn't explicitly indicate the safe zone) would have made it better, but the fight doesn't even give that. And the explosions as I pointed out make no visible change to the crystal model, so you can't even tell or suspect that they're the things emitting the explosions since there's no visible tell before OR after to examine to puzzle that out. The attacks also occur quickly, meaning if the party doesn't know the mechanic, a wipe can happen almost immediately unless you have a Tank pop an invuln, so the rest of the party can't even see the mechanics play out to figure out what killed everyone since the screen will fade to black and reset the fight.
This isn't "moving the goalposts", this was my entire point: For people who have not done Savage or Ultimate content (and maybe even for those who have), this is the first time that mechanic was used in the entire game, and it has no obvious tells, telegraphs, or ways to determine what's happening, and kills people fast enough to prevent it.
For Statics that run stuff together over and over and figure this out for a living, as it were, they can get it because they'll run an encounter 100 times doing different things and having some players just stand around and watch what's going on. But you don't get that with PF randoms, and that's usually not the way PF works out.
Extremes are not Savages, and are not supposed to be Savages.
I remember the first time I considered trying a Savage (E1S), the big thing that got me was how they remove the telegraphs. You might get some of the Normal mode attacks, but you have to either look at what the boss is doing, the name of the spell being cast, or remember a set pattern. This is distinct from Normal content and Extremes I'd done up until that time, which might be rough but at least provided telegraphs so players could see what was going on. You might die, but generally could see what killed you, like Innocence's star explosion being knicked by the person with the AOE laser or you standing in the wrong color of Susaku's platform as the firebird flew around the outside setting the different segments off.
But now, we're seeing that more and more in Extremes. That'd be fine if we had some other content at the difficulty between Normal and Savage to be between Normal and Extremes, but we don't.
Content that you can puzzle out with a team of 8 friends dedicated to spending hours doing it doesn't work well for PF randoms where some people will join a group that says "learning party, fresh prog" and still drop after two wipes. Completely different audiences, and the Devs need to remember that.
They already create Ultimates AND Savages for those folks. They need to remember Extremes aren't that. And if they are going to be going forward, they need to introduce something else between Normal and Extremes.
Hell, they probably need to do that ANYway.