FF 14 has the worst dungeons

[Valence]

DDR has really always been the dominant mechanic in the game, to be fair. The only real difference between the different difficulty tiers in this game is how difficult of a mental puzzle you have to solve (and how quickly you have to solve it) to perform the proper DDR. It's honestly impressive just how much cool stuff they've been able to do for so long with just "go stand in the right spot" being the only real mechanic resolution. But yeah it's finally starting to wear thin. Really worried M5S-M8S is just gonna be another 30 flavors of "this tell means pairs, this tell means spread, remember this stored mechanic for six minutes from now."

How long have you been playing the game? Because that's definitely not what I remember from ARR/HW gameplay.

( and don't tell me "they had AoE telegraphs too" )

But how are you going to make a fight that is completely RNG? You still need restrictions on when things can come out, don't want the possibility for a tank buster to be your only mechanic for a whole minute after all, or even just a minute of raid wides. Once you start adding restrictions to when things can happen, you start to notice patterns. Take this a step further i that you don't want the harder version of attacks to happen at the start of the fight and weaker ones at the end, we now have more structure, reducing the possibilities.

This is before we even mention the fights haven't been increasing more towards DDR, they have always been the same level of DDR. Knowing Titan Extreme's attack pattern so you know when to use your defensives, even Titan Hard has an easy way to remember when Mountain Buster is coming out (Landslide > Rock Buster > Mountain Buster in last phase only). Pick any fight and they are all the same mechanics happening in the same order.

So, what does a fight need to look like in order for you to consider it not 'DDR' like?

Nobody here is advocating for a full rng soup, which this game has never been.