ELI5: How are the current dungeons hard?

[EiraWoqiso]

For what it's worth, I don't think the castbar determining if you were in the AOE or not has anything to do with the netcode (except for the fraction of a second at the very end if you're trying to greed, or just have awful ping). As Jinglypockets said, the netcode in the game is definitely subpar, but being able to go into what was an AOE right after the castbar finishes isn't netcode, it's game design. Maybe it's game design to get around a different netcode issue, but it's not directly netcode related. It is counterintuitive and a little obnoxious to get used to, especially when some of the animations can take a couple seconds in some of the flashier fights, but once you adapt to it it's hardly noticeable and feels like second nature.

[Jinglypockets]

The most obnoxious thing about the netcode is that the game calculates and assigns how much damage you're going to take from a hit before that damage is actually applied -- usually about 0.5s before the damage actually takes effect, so the timeline looks like:

00:00.0: Boss starts casting Raidwide with a 4-second cast time.
00:03.5: You get assigned 10,000 damage from Raidwide.
00:03.6: You receive an absorb shield for 10,000 health.
00:04.0: Boss finishes casting Raidwide.
00:05.0: You receive 10,000 damage. 0 of the damage is absorbed by the shield, and you still have that shield despite it being applied before you took any damage.

Any mitigation you try to use for a big hit has to be applied *before* that damage gets calculated and assigned, otherwise it does literally nothing.

Which is why my Spreadlo frequently gets wasted if I'm just barely too slow with it, and things like Tank immunities have to be applied well in advance of tankbusters if you want them to actually work.

[Jinglypockets]

For what it's worth, I don't think the castbar determining if you were in the AOE or not has anything to do with the netcode (except for the fraction of a second at the very end if you're trying to greed, or just have awful ping). As Jinglypockets said, the netcode in the game is definitely subpar, but being able to go into what was an AOE right after the castbar finishes isn't netcode, it's game design. Maybe it's game design to get around a different netcode issue, but it's not directly netcode related. It is counterintuitive and a little obnoxious to get used to, especially when some of the animations can take a couple seconds in some of the flashier fights, but once you adapt to it it's hardly noticeable and feels like second nature.

Yeah, people are generally using "netcode" as a shorthand for "How the timing of things works in this game because of the workarounds the dev team has had to put in place as a result of their netcode."