Why the hate with endgame fights?

[KaivaC]

Kaiva, what do you think "raising the difficulty curve" means? If you think royal menagerie is easy, the only things harder above it are o1s and susano/lakshimi. O1s and lakshimi are too gimmick laden to be good teaching experiences. If your goal is to raise difficulty to bridge between casual and savage, that 70 trial is going to have to be like an ex trial, with shinryu hard pushed down to about 63, and probably the easier ex trials at 60 taking the place of thordan, right down to 50 ex trials ending the main scenario. You can't raise dungeon difficulty much because you'd massively slow them down, either via trash or bosses, and there's a limit to how hard they can be made when you don't have your full kit. Look at Brayflox hard final boss for an example-the bombs can be really hard for people to deal with if they don't have a point blank circle aoe.

Just annoying, no one ever really thinks about what changes actually mean for players in real practice.

You can raise the dungeon difficulty. Having a bunch of trash mobs does not equate difficulty...they are currently little more than AOE fodder. I wish to see the devs start to get away from this mindset of filling dungeons with trash mobs to add in a false sense of difficulty for dungeons. It's already too late to do anything about the dungeons we have now, but future dungeons need to start having a better difficulty curve. Realistically, now that we'll be hitting patch 4.2, even though I know the dungeons are going to essentially be the same type of content, just with different scenery and different bosses, this would ideally be the point where we start seeing the difficulty start to step up and force players to pay attention. If it's not MSQ, why can't the dungeons start having fewer mobs that start challenging each role?

Lakshmi's difficulty results from not paying attention after learning her fight and non-communication. Honestly, the hardest part of this fight falls onto the OT because they need to maintain their aggro to keep the party from being cleaved. Is the fight itself gimmicky? Absolutely. But it is definitely a good learning experience because it forces the entire party to work together. Healers stack with each other, DPS pairs off, and tanks stick together generally throughout the whole fight. Pay attention to which add has a bubble and avoid killing them if they do not have one. Always pop a Vril while Lakshmi is in Chancala mode. Even without the Vril gimmick, once you actually are in a clear party, what's so difficult about those things? And I don't mean from the perspective of a player in a trap party.

O1S is not gimmicky. You've dealt with ice floors before in a few dungeons. Again, like with the Lakshmi example above, once you learn the fight, it shouldn't be difficult to deal with practically any of the mechanics, save for the part with Alte Roite going to the edge. And even that isn't difficult to deal with - the MT just has to bait him, while the rest of the party pays attention to which way he is facing.

As for your Brayflox example, I dunno about each and every DPS job (I do know that SMN would have a little bit of a hard time with that), I believe all tank classes have an AOE attack by 50. I've done runs there on PLD where I was the only one using AOE during that boss fight, and I've been able to make a safe zone for the party. It's not that hard, players just need to stop being lazy about things like this.