Thoughts on changes made to the game

[Sindele]

Because of powercreep you can defeat a boss in EW and never see half of the mechanics.

Take Nald'Thal. The scales, You may never see it anymore because he dies too fast, let alone all of the "Underworld" stuff he does with switching colors and heads. And this is not to mention the remainder of the game. So many trials, raids, and dungeons, are just complete push overs form older content.
Take A9, The Refurbisher. It routinely kills folks because no one knows the mechanics, but also dies just after Full-Metal Faust is defeated. Cruise Chaser skips entire phases and will go straight into Eternal Darkness easily. Alexander Prime can die before or just as it casts "Summon Alexander", doing Time stop once or twice.

The content is completely trivialized, you can fail mechanics several times in a row, and never die. You almost have to TRY to fail, so if someone does fail, its always "this guy must be trolling".

Sure. That things could be reeled back and sync levels dropped is a much more compelling argument. Being able to power through and skip mechanics just isn't anything new - this was happening in SB at the absolute latest and frankly good groups were doing it in HW. If anything, you could argue that the existence of scales - and subsequently skipping scales - has made it a much more obvious problem.

"Go do Savage". What a lame answer. I do Savage and it sucks. Partner up, Spread, Light Party Stacks, Raid Wide, Tank Swap. The entire experience is so rigid, planned, scripted, whatever you want to call it. With the number of body checks in savage force you to restart time and time again after small mistakes. I've seen many people refer to it this way, its like playing Dance Dance Revolution. Savage isn't hard as much as its tedious. What will you say next? Go do Ultimates? What then?

But again - it was always this way. You have been playing Dance Dance Revolution the entire time, apparently without realizing it. And let's be frank - have you ever seen what passed for difficult content in 2013? Again, this isn't a case of the game getting worse, or design principles changing significantly - it's you outpacing the average skill growth and expectation.

If you find Ultimates too easy, well, congratulations. You can comprehensively say at that point that you have beaten the game. Do you expect an infinite well of curated content specifically tuned to every skill level in all existence, dynamically adapting to your desired expression of skill? I would also love that, but there are some notable limits to what is possible in reality.

The two-minute meta is the end result of homogenization and lazy design/balancing. And should honestly just have a whole essay about by itself. Its a culmination of several different factors that I could go on literally forever.

I would love to see it, because I think on this point we're likely to agree. A lot has been lost in the pursuit of neutralization here. I just think it also deserves note that this is something some players have specifically asked for. You're not just being handed this from on high - some people actually wanted this, even if they got monkey's pawed in the exchange.

The TOS is a problem. And without trying to sound like a certain someone who frequents the forums, they do not enforce their "3rd party tools are cheating" bit. They, however, will take action if you are even just a little frustrated or in disagreement. I've had a friend who just started the game after EW released. In Sastasha, he was only single pulling and a DPS told him to pull everything. He said he wasn't going to. He was reported and had to talk to a GM shortly after. He tried the game and at the first disagreement someone had with him, his first interaction with another player, and he got a strike on his account. He has not played since.

I just can't agree from personal experiences, and I find a lot of the anecdotal claims to be short on evidence. I'd love to know what really goes on in the GM cubicles, but I have not yet been successful in bribing any current or former GMs into giving me a copy of the company policy book. Still trying, though. Cash prizes! Anyone?

[KenZentra]

But again - it was always this way. You have been playing Dance Dance Revolution the entire time, apparently without realizing it.

I dont think it has. Sure, we've always dodged AoEs, but we've had other mechanics in harder difficulties that didn't have a "Go here to dodge thing or prevent overlap".

Ifrit had tethers you had to deal with, and constant knockbacks put onto healers. As well as, a tank swap that was really up to how much the tanks could handle before needing to switch. And of course the Nails that you can defeat at your own pace, depending on how much the healers can handle. You dodge AoEs of course, but to sum it up, the largest emphasis was on managing buffs, debuffs, and adds rather than dodging AoEs.
The same can be said of nearly of all of ARR as a whole, and a fair bit of HW.

Zodiark and most of Rubicante (for current expansion examples) can be cleared with a dorito on someone's head that knows where to go with everyone else being blind.

[Mikey_R]

Ifrit had tethers you had to deal with,

Which amounted to just staying near each other, then, consider you always killed the nails in a certain order, it really wasn't that hard to do.

constant knockbacks put onto healers.

Which amounted to them standing in a certain spot to not be annoying.

As well as, a tank swap that was really up to how much the tanks could handle before needing to switch.

Normally 3, however, he does sometimes do 2 debuffs quickly one after the other, which is why you end up with 4 sometimes. Considering 5 is death, 3 is the best to swap at.

And of course the Nails that you can defeat at your own pace, depending on how much the healers can handle.

Until you take too long and he kills you from enrage.

You dodge AoEs of course, but to sum it up, the largest emphasis was on managing buffs, debuffs, and adds rather than dodging AoEs.

Of which buffs/debuffs/doing any mechanics comes down to solving what the devs are asking of you, then you just do the dance that is asked of you.

The same can be said of nearly of all of ARR as a whole, and a fair bit of HW.

Sorry, but all fights are DDR. You can try and say otherwise, but is is a case of, if you have X go to Y.

[Sindele]

I dont think it has. Sure, we've always dodged AoEs, but we've had other mechanics in harder difficulties that didn't have a "Go here to dodge thing or prevent overlap".

But at the same time as Ifrit: Garuda, Titan, ADS, Twintania...

Most mechanics, once strategy optimization takes place, get reduced down to choreography. And to be fair: it's hard to avoid this between the 8 person limit and the underpinnings of XIV's system design. (For better or worse, this is also a consequence of the healing paradigm and intimately tied to a lot of the healer complaints in recent years, particularly after homogenization broke the back of AST cards and green DPS in general.)