Difficulty of normal content.

[Morphiana]

Everyone forgets one key thing about early xpac end game normal content, it is always harder at first due to low ilvls, always. When an xpac begins you have the majority of the community utilizing gear closer to the min ilvl for a dungeon more so than any other point in the xpac's life cycle. This dramatic shift is so noticeable because when Endwalker finished most people had max ilvl attainable for those dungeons / raids and now that isn't true at all.

Why does this matter so much?

The bosses in dungeons / raids go through two phases to oversimplify it:

• You have your learning phase where the boss uses one attack at a time so you can learn the individual ability (this is easy because it is teaching you what each ability on their own does, it isn't trying to take you out just yet)
• The second is the phase where the fight actually begins, when the boss starts combining their moves thus making the fight more complex the longer it goes on (until it reaches a certain limit on combinations).

When ilvl begins to go up across the board for the community, the normal mode content becomes way easier, too easy even (looking at you Hades, not even a shadow of your former self). This has already begun to rear its head, I was in a dungeon as a tank the other day with 2 fantastic DPS and we made short work of the first Strayborough Deadwalk boss because he barely got to use his abilities in combination with one another and keep in mind we're not at max ilvl for these dungeons yet.

Soon, more people will have gear that brings them to the max ilvl be it from normal raids, crafted gear, extremes, tome gear, savage, etc. and you'll be grouped with people who are better equipped in these dungeons with each passing week. As a result, the dungeons will become easier, far easier than they are now.

A more recent example of this was the Endsinger. Look at how stupid easy she became once people hit max ilvl before they lowered everyone's ilvl on that fight. You skipped so much you barely saw her more challenging combinations of attacks or the RP for that matter. The same can still be said of Thordan / Hades / the Endwalker 24man raids which became far easier a month or so after release. They all need the same fix, they're far too easy for a capstone fight or a 24 man raid where you end up skipping the coolest abilities because the max ilvl is set too high.

Are some of the new mechanics a bit annoying? Sure, a couple are. Are some more engaging and fun? Yes.

Most importantly, this will all get easier in time. If after a month you still feel this is too difficult then report back and let us know that because that's roughly the ilvl everyone will be closer to when going into dungeons for the remainder of the expansion.

[Router]

Everyone forgets one key thing about early xpac end game normal content, it is always harder at first due to low ilvls, always. When an xpac begins you have the majority of the community utilizing gear closer to the min ilvl for a dungeon more so than any other point in the xpac's life cycle. This dramatic shift is so noticeable because when Endwalker finished most people had max ilvl attainable for those dungeons / raids and now that isn't true at all.

Why does this matter so much?

Snip

This reminds me of an annoying "feature" of how fights are currently paced.
Bad groups with bad DPS are punished with harder mechanics because the fight drags on, while good groups with good DPS are punished by not seeing some of the harder mechanics... Where does this make any sense? It should be the other way around. I doubt the bad players want to see the harder mechanics, and the good players probably want to skip all the tutorialization. I have no doubt that part of the complaints about difficulty arise from the fact that bad players have to "survive" for an extra couple of minutes in every fight.

EDIT: I should note this mostly applies to trials and raids, since dungeon bosses start looping mechanics very early on. Still, I think it's a frustrating consequence of current design.