I’ve been thinking about this since the thread first started – I dunno what the consensus is, but…at Level 70, I would like to see tougher content being implemented. The lead up to Shinryu was not good…it was mostly just the same old pulls with monsters hitting harder and harder. I get that this isn’t a traditional FF game, but generally at this level in most games, there is an expectation that you can handle harder stuff (unless you went with a no-leveling challenge…but that’s something else entirely).

At this point, I feel like the mobs shouldn’t be just AoE fodder. It doesn’t help that the devs really haven’t done a good job at teaching players how to deal with certain mechanics, and I support additional Hall of Novices. But when the next expansion hits, it’s safe to assume that we will be hitting level 80, and if we’re still dealing with the same thing – pull big, heal through it, AoE mobs – then something is wrong. Gates don’t necessarily work as intended, because all it does is make players less likely to voluntarily run places like The Vault if they don’t need to run it. I also understand that maintaining the playerbase and increasing subscription numbers is also a huge factor in this, so I get that the developer has to keep a majority of things at a casual level.

There just needs to be a point where runs just don’t come down to ‘big pulls, AoE them down’.

On that note, when the majority of the content (leveling dungeons) is spent AoEing mobs down, that definitely doesn’t help with a lot of players learning their rotation strictly in-game.