Quote Originally Posted by HikariKurosawa View Post
The other problematic part about all the difficulty being in the input half of the design is that, it eventually becomes total muscle memory even with all the nuanced tricks you guys are using to optimize your rotations. When that happens, all you experience is easy encounters which also go more or less into muscle memory over time. Once you know the mechs of a fight, it just happens naturally. What you are claiming you want is a mindless experience with trivialized difficulty in the content. What standardized rotations lead to is more complex encounter design that actually ends up feeling dynamic and constantly engaging. You can't have it both ways, and it is better for the difficulty to come from the encounter more than the inputs. It leads to more engagement from newer players on top of more enjoyment from veterans who have already mastered their rotations.
This post is utterly nonsensical. How can you argue that rotational complexity is taking away from encounter difficulty, yet claim in the same breath that difficult rotations don't matter since they become "mindless" with muscle memory? If that's the case, then rotational complexity should have no problem existing alongside encounter difficulty; if it becomes "mindless", then you're not expending any cognitive load on your rotation, therefore you should have no problem focusing on difficult fights.

I truly do want difficult fights, I really do. People argued near the beginning of Endwalker that raids can be more difficult now that they've simplified a bunch of jobs. Yet all we got were savage fights with 0% downtime, and the most insultingly easy Alliance raid series since the beginning of this game. I was expecting Pandaemonium to be E8S levels of difficult, and Myths of the Realm to be three times as hard as Ivalice with how much the jobs were neutered going into Endwalker. Yet, they couldn't even deliver on that. It beggars belief how someone could make the claims you're making after three of years of getting the exact opposite. May I make a suggestion? Before you make your next post, I would advise logging onto the game and this time to try playing it with your eyes open.