We're going to make the game a bit more tolerable for melee DPS

[Empressia]

honestly we need more melee friendly boss like Aceron sure his pattern spots is fun

[Migosha]

Garuda EX is pretty easy if the melee are competent. They can simply eat the WW straight on with defensive cooldowns. Pretty trivial to 4x melee that fight.

That's true EMX, but don't forget a point: you're doing GarudaX with a complete ilvl90 gear. The battle wasn't intended to be done with that, it's "tuned" for ilvl80 or something like that I believe. At that level of stuff even with CD you got high chance to get a deadly hit. And most DRG going on that fight aren't ilvl90. They will learn to avoid the WW, but that hurt dps a lot and make a group wish to take a distant rather than a melee, who at best will dps less and at worst will die.
At least as DRG we got a lil advantage toward monk as our gear got more defense than magic defense. So far it's the only AoE I watched that is physical type, every other avoidable/unavoidable aoe i checked on the primals is magic type and makes us (DRG) the squishiests of the group :/ You can check on every Titan/Ifrit aoe in your logs in live you're always the one that takes the more damages in the group (I am at equal or superior ilvl than the other, ilvl 89 so that's not a matter of gear, and of course that's without BfB up). What I couldn't check is if a MNK/BRD got a little HP than us at equal equipment to counterbalance that inequality. At first thought, I would have said DRG would be pretty resistant and easier for healers to keep alive, in fact we are the worst class for them, taking more mana from them than any other class. For exemple, sadfully tested on TitanX yesterday: if the whole group takes a full stomp with no heals everyone survive except me, the last hit of the stomp bring me down, while BRD/BLM/SMN survive. At that moment you really feel lonely.
Does any other DRG confirms that, or am I missing something?

[Vodomir]

That's true EMX, but don't forget a point: you're doing GarudaX with a complete ilvl90 gear. The battle wasn't intended to be done with that, it's "tuned" for ilvl80 or something like that I believe. At that level of stuff even with CD you got high chance to get a deadly hit. And most DRG going on that fight aren't ilvl90. They will learn to avoid the WW, but that hurt dps a lot and make a group wish to take a distant rather than a melee, who at best will dps less and at worst will die.

The gear doesn't really have that much impact on the Garuda EM fight. You just have to adopt your strat to a melee friendly version. There are strats that allow for amlost maximum melee uptime without the risk of ever having to dodge a Whicked Wheel or even take it to the face. Strats have been posted across several threads (incl. this thread), so I'll leave it up to you to dig them up.

[Allyrion]

The only meaningful "the fight is harder" is with turn 2 ADS where the melee have fun moving the rot around. Even that is obviated by the stack method (although that method has other impacts so I wouldn't recommend it).

I agree partly and that speaks well of the balance to some extent, however I don't think the difference is negligible or trivial.
Now, it is. I'm not sure about your static but we didn't one shot any of these fights.
Not saying they're difficult, but a melee is a minor hindrance and having 2 is a straight up handicap.

When content is on farm, it's a horrible time to judge it. I'm not saying gear makes it trivial.
It doesn't, in most cases. It's the fact that learning the fight with two melee is significantly harder than with one.
There are added mechanics or a larger margin for error.

Maybe it's just cause progression is the only time I really consider a fight important.
Who cares what happens when it's on farm? Take 4 melee to down Garuda EX for everybody's first time. That'd be horrible.
Take 4 range, and it'll probably be pretty smooth. That's all I'm talking about.
You're adding to the learning curve the more melee you bring and, worst of all, you're probably making it harder on your healers/tanks when they could have focused on other things when learning the fight.

Larger error margins or mechanics are the things you try to eliminate in a fight to get it down.
Coming as a melee, you bring that with you for the job you picked. At least, for our group, I don't find that trivial.