Increasing difficulty in casual content ≠ Savage

[Sebazy]

I honestly don't remember people complaining about the difficulty of AK in 2.0, rather that it was simply faster to grind WP mainly due to the ease of which you could skip large swathes of trash via boss lockouts.

Demonwall was great because you couldn't rely on simply zerging your way through it, the Bees acted as a great DPS check usually making things rather messy if you couldn't dispose of them quickly with early groups usually LBing the first set then aiming to kill the wall before the second set wiped you.

Pharos Sirius was a different kettle of fish. I'll go out on a limb and just say that the first boss was outright lame. The adds and stacking bomb mechanic were fine, the super fast ground aoes tipped it over the line though and whilst it didn't really cause me trouble as a healer, I can imagine that it must have been horrible as a melee.

The bird boss was a great example of a difficult 4 man boss done right. Whilst the mechanics were a little confusing at first glance, paying attention to debuffs, tooltips and animations cleared things up pretty quickly and the fight was actually pretty easy going if you did the mechanics right. Ignore them and it would quickly punish you by way of a thorough curb stomping that hasn't been seen in a 4 man since.

Not really sure what the deal was with the 3rd boss with the zombie adds, even early on with a sub par group it typically died before enough adds spawned to cause any real trouble. /shrug.

Siren was another great boss too IMO. Choreographing her divebomb/circle aoes would have been the perfect fix to tone her down rather than the outright neutering that SE eventually settled on.

It’s already forgiving enough that it takes multiple stacks of Vulnerability to even make something tickle in normal mode, much less it finally taking 8 to do a tank in.

I really cannot +1 this point enough. The biggest problem with end game 4 man content isn't that the mechanics are too simple, but that you can safely ignore almost everything with little to no risk. Even when you do step over the line and actually manage to get yourself killed, the only real penalty is a chunk of your healers MP to get you going again (Which is only really a penalty in itself if your healer is DPSing fairly hard). Whilst proceeding to kill the boss that bit slower can be an annoyance, it's certainly not going to cause a wipe on the current crop of bosses. I'm fairly confident the current crop of expert dungeons could be cleared by a Warrior and WHM or SCH duo with relative ease with the only question marks being the particularly generous DPS checks on both final bosses.

We don't need to see ultimate grade mechanics or even the return of the likes of Pharos Sirius to be honest. Rather I suspect most would be happy with dungeons that actually legitimately punish you when you repeatedly sit in the fire/cleave/spinny death thing. People can and will adjust to stuff like that, they managed it with AK in 2.0, they managed it with Garuda HM and most even managed it with Titan HM.

Healers messing up or sleeping up might cause a wipe? Good. Healer's shouldn't get an easy ride because they are special snowflakes. On the contrary, whilst I think it's fair not to expect huge DPS out of the average healer if they have mechanics or legitimate damage to keep an eye on, they should still be tested and made to work all the same, be it via forcing them to heal or move.

I did a God Kefka clear tonight

I got curious and stalked the log

That SCH was pretty much flogging themselves to death by way of frighteningly excessive succoring coupled with missed potential out of Lucid Dreaming and Aetherflow. They flatlined in MP 5-6 times in that clear. No surprise they had no mp to do much of anything else. Madness.