Why the hate with endgame fights?

[CosmicKirby]

Fun would be endgame that an entire FC can do, with more than eight people and not reliant on a single boss's pattern dancing. Fun would actually be some variation in group comp and tactics, maybe even using all that useless CC we have to stage enemies and making tanks have real offtank duties that require tank stance and judgment on which mobs to tackle next.

Can you actually use examples of your ideas here? There was CC/kiting/more in-depth Off tank adds back in Coil, they really weren't as noteworthy as you might thing. Most of the old raids in WoW similarly did such things. It usually amounts to some players gaining a new assigned role that really isn't as fun as you might hope.

Tanking and Healing need significant reworks if they want to adjust the damage dealing meta. Throughputs are too high and active mitigation comes mostly through cooldowns that aren't reliant upon stances.

FFXI Byakko: get your endgame FC cleared and able to visit an entirely seperate zone called Sky, and navigate its dangers to get the item to pop the god Byakko, who himself was part of chain of Gods all linked together to summon the big boss Kirin. The zone was actually open to other players, whether leveling (beastmasters) or getting other pops. The fight used your entire FC and had room for players of all level of skill.

So, you WANT very LARGE swathes of content tied behind difficult fights? I thought many people were not wanting this, complaining that Coil was story locked or that extra versions of fights were Savage only?

Spoilers: Any fight in any MMO ever that had 'room for players of all skills' are pretty bad. Doing such a difficult task usually requires:
1.) The boss has so much health and there's basically no cap to the amount of players you can bring, so you just bring everyone with a pulse (Ala WoW 40 mans)
2.) "Everyone contributing" includes people who supply the raid. If you want to make this feel more worthwhile, you start adding virtually mandatory and long farming requirements. IE consumables or gear that's so useful or potentially even required that for every X hours of attempts you need Y hours of farming for materials. This was all of Vanilla WoW, it was harsh and required far, far more hours to actually raid. Know what you're asking for here.

FFXIV Byakko. Take five minutes to unlock a circular arena with one boss that only 8 people can enter. Beat on the boss for a week till you get his pattern, then either do it a little more to get a weapon that may last you 3-4 weeks, or do it till your sick of it to get maybe a 1-3% chance at a mount. Everybody dps's, and tanks or heals as little as possible.

"Tanking or healing as little as possible" is called efficiency. The more picky the requirements are on efficiency, the harder a fight is. Is the itemization and loot tables for primals bad? I'd mostly agree. But the way they're handled is pretty above average as far as MMORPG raid bosses goes.

The harder normal content gets, the more likely players will do it in statics, and vote abandon over trying to get it done. If you do trial roulette a bunch, you know people tend to do this on trials as it is; I've joined many in progress as tank.

Right, which is why I'm curious as to your suggestions above. FF11 and Vanilla WoW were certainly rewarding in that time and effort were weighed more heavily than raw performance, but this comes at a very significant time-cost for most players, which really isn't a popular trend these days. (See: any complaints of Relic Weapons)

I'm more of an advocate for 3 tiers of difficult for endgame. As of now, we have a hodgepodge of WoW Normal/LFR for our one 'Normal" difficulty. And our Savage difficulty is somewhere bouncing between "Heroic/Mythic". The problem only made worse by the hard limit of 4-6 bosses per patch at most.