Hopefully constructive criticism regarding the current state of FFXIV

[Valence]

1.) I personally enjoy the slightly more difficult dungeon content. The problem is I don't enjoy the dungeon format. After years of playing FFXIV the standard format of the dungeons have become bland, I unfortunately don't know how you could adjust the dungeons to make them more enjoyable. Maybe people could give more constructive feedback on this subject.

The same way any decent tabletop GM can conceptualize and customize a dungeon's battle content really. Amount of bosses, enemies, swarms, environmental effects during a fight, adds to take care of, ranged adds that can only be taken down by ranged, enemy healers to primary... In fact the old guildhests had a lot of nifty ideas to play around.

Bosses are also the most boring part since they're just mini version of the same old DDR already found in trial and raid bosses with the same mechanics in the same circular rooms (or if they feel daring, a square, le gasp). Remember that raids actually used to have more than a boss before Stormblood? Or the variety found in Coils?

Trash mobs could take example on what I consider to be the most successful part of Criterions, which is... the trash! It doesn't have to be as challenging, although criterion trash is nowhere close to its boss difficulty, it's closer to the upper end of casual. It's very varied, no two packs look the same, there is environmental effects going on, and mechanics on how to handle them.

3.) There are a lot of complaints about the lack of content, I somewhat agree, but I'll take a different approach to it. In endwalker we weren't given an expansion zone or relic grind and I believe that exasperated the issue. The expansion zone is releasing on par with previous expansions eureka was 4.25 and bosja was 5.35 but I believe in the future it needs to be released at launch to keep the casual playerbase happy.

This is what has been done in ARR and HW.
- In ARR: the first stage of relics was part of the VANILLA content.
- In HW: the first stage of the relics was part of the 3.15 content, Diadem 1.0 also appeared in 3.1.

Why this has been pushed back again and again I do not know.

4.) Job homogenation, the jobs of ffxiv feel very similar to each other, in some cases that's a good thing in other ways it's bad. It's good in terms of balance, lining up raid buffs, and playing efficiently, but it's bad because it makes jobs feel boring over time. My suggestion would be to take notes from WOW, I fully understand it's a nightmare to balance and the playerbase will attack you for balancing issues, but I believe it could be very healthy for the game as well as good for the immersion and role playing aspects of the game.

I want to challenge the idea that it's either balance or variety (or a slider between both), at least a little. Adding more and more layers of complexity doesn't necessarily mean a balancing nightmare. It's definitely harder to conceptualize and make viable initially, but the more variables a system has, the less clear metas, or at least ultimately objective metas can emerge, and the more they'll actually evolve and change. The more variables, the more different options can also emerge within the meta itself. It's been notably proven within the RTS genre, as the more playable factions one adds, the less stale and static the meta turns, with less clear dominant choices, and a lot more counterplay.

Obviously in the realm of XIV, encounters have by definition little to no variables since they're fully scripted, which tends to act against it, but still for the aforementioned reasons, adding more variables within the jobs and the battle system itself can only be a positive in my opinion, because balance has always been a problem, whether it is today or before, so the game has actually gained nothing out of it over time, not even balance.

And if the devs don’t want people to disband during levelling roulette, this makes a problem where tank and healer can’t be hard to play when doing the trash pulls. Imagine how many parties would disband if both your tank and healer needed to be good at the game in order to complete a dungeon. The devs have chosen “smoothness” at the expense of making dungeons less interesting to players who are familiar enough with how to play the game.

That's what they want you to believe, in my opinion. I've played since HW and support jobs didn't use to be the brainless slop they are today, and people were doing fine. True, i've seen some parties with wipes a little more back then than today. That's part of the challenge, but instead they decided that the challenge should instead be at the individual level with DDR mechanics everywhere, a tank that cannot die even with 16 vuln stacks, and a healer playing cheerleader just in case one of those pesky DPS die (why is the trinity still a thing again at this point?).

This community and its dev have become incredibly whiny when it comes to dungeons. Dungeon takes one minute too much? Immediate salt, but only behind the veil because doing it in public could get them reported. A duty actually fails? It's the second coming of the apocalypse.

I'd even dare and say that the less we confront players with some responsibilities per role, the more clueless they'll be whenever one crops up right in front of them. Dzemael has never ever been a problem more than it is today before they reworked it. We actually had people being pulled into the abyss all the time and it was actually FUN. Fortunately they kept the ranged mobs and patrols, which has never been done again past vanilla ARR and it's a shame, because it also encourages skilled play without making the run impossible otherwise.