Current State of End-Game Contents - A Blog Post from A Japanese Player

[Litre]

But your playing skill is how you adapt and handle the mechanics. To remove them means you're effectively hitting a training dummy, which has almost zero skill investment or fight variation.

I don't call memorization of a completely scripted battle as skill or fight variation. If anything, in FFXIV the only time you'll be adapting to anything is if a pre-scripted mechanic hits someone who was careless and you have to raise them while juggling healing, push the phase, compensate the DPS loss, etc... And yes this requires skill, and you'll be able to show off just how good you are, if only that nasty mechanic didn't kill half your party and silence the other half.

If someone screws up, but having good gear was able to compensate for that, wouldn't that be a benefit? What's wrong with that? It gives you a damn good reason to strive for better gear, if the other reasons weren't enough.

[Raenryong]

snip

The more mechanical fights (such as T6/T7) are scripted, but the victims of abilities frequently changes, requiring different responses - adaptation. T7 has the nice "ramping difficulty" aspect with the arena becoming more dangerous as the fight progresses (and petrifaction being added). Mechanics being very deadly add a punishment for failure, as they should. If you could just ignore mechanics or power through failing them, they may as well not exist.

Gear does help a great deal, it just doesn't guarantee you victory from the outset.

I don't even know why people are complaining about mechanics suddenly - even Coil 2 is very mechanics-light compared to most MMOs... you haven't seen anything yet!