ELI5: How are the current dungeons hard?

[EiraWoqiso]

The common issues I see stem from people not recognizing "non-standard" tells. If there's not a circle/square AOE on the ground, they don't know it's an AOE. In these situations during normal content, the AOE only appears for a moment, and at that point it's too late because they aren't looking for boss position/cast name tells. Coupled with that, some of the mechanics do have a little more strict execution - nothing more difficult that like, Aglaia-tier difficulty, but still more strict than Endwalker was. Adding these two together, you get a situation where some people don't understand how they're messing up/blame lag, and are struggling to execute the ones that they DO see, so they eat a ton of vulns or other debuffs. They usually are the same people that only play with trusts, so that death is a full wipe instead of a raise/just keep killing the boss situation.

It's a combination of a few things - Endwalker lowering the skill floor below the basement, no ingame tutorial on how these low-intermediate mechanics work (to set the expectation that this is how the game is); and as much as I hate to say it, a skill issue.

[Exani]

They usually are the same people that only play with trusts, so that death is a full wipe instead of a raise/just keep killing the boss situation.

I actually did all the Dawntrail MSQ dungeons with Duty Support NPCs for the first time ever (since the DPS queue times were horrible). I found that running dungeons with the NPCs is a very nice way of learning mechanics. With no other players there is no lag and all the NPCs execute the mechanics "perfectly" so you can just pick one of them to follow around to find the safespot when you are unsure about a new mechanic. You also get to see more mechanics since their DPS is so bad.