Thank you for increased difficulty

[Bourne_Endeavor]

No, it wouldn't, especially on trash. Isolating the one mob you need to stun is not fun. Maybe on bosses, but you can't really react fast enough if the stunner fails to do so. The more tactics you add, the more ways players can fail, and apparently you can't trust the players to do well with easy content now. Why on earth add more?

Because it had a layer of actual strategy to an otherwise standard fight? Leg Sweep may as well not exist with how utterly worthless stuns are in this game. One aspect I love about Deep Dungeon is needing Stuns and Silences at the ready because mobs on the higher floors will ruin your day. It's far more interesting than pulling everything to an arbitrary wall and spamming your aoe abilities until they all die. At least it is for me.

3 fights out of how many?

And a lot of ex primals are considered easy by forums, and some savage tiers. Thordan ex is a high bar to not be considered faceroll.

Do you have selective reading? I listed no less than eight fights. Even counting only the EX Primals, Dual covered only three of them are "faceroll." Nonetheless, a lot of the EX Primals in Stormblood are easy, relatively speaking. Lakshmi and Byakko are especially bad. The forums say it's all easy doesn't magically mean they aren't wrong. People saying such typically use older primals as a frame of reference.

Yeah, I have. The problem is they increased the speed of incoming damage, so when i try to slowball it, the dps can now die from an attack that they could survive if topped off. And the mechanics that affect us all are now faster and rely on greater raid positioning and awareness, so they take hits more often. The bosses feel slightly tuned a bit more, so they also take more damage with more spent in mp. I'm generally aware of overhealing and stuff, but when attacks now start doing 26k damage or more stacked, when it was 14k, you're gambling a lot more on raid members keeping themselves up. If i gamble wrong, and they die to damage they could survive, it doesn't matter if i did 500 more dps when they do 500 less due to raise penalty.

And honestly, the least appealing thing in the world are this game's ex trials. By the time I've cleared, I'm so sick of the thing that I don't even care about the mounts. The idea that casuals are just chomping at the bit to get into them is hilarious to me, how you feel about pagos is how some feel about them.

No offense, but it sounds like you need more practice experimenting with what you can get away with. Alphascape normal isn't not tuned that drastically higher than its predecessors. Nevertheless, there comes a point where people dying isn't your fault. If they keep getting hit by Larboard/Starboard in o11n, there is only so much a healer can do. If they die, well, it's on them. Holding back your DPS spells in case people mess up will only make you a complacent healer, which, ironically, makes adapting to a given situation much harder. Back in HW, I often find "pure healers" far worse at healing than DPS centric ones. Why? Because only the latter knew how to maximize their heals whereas the former burned through the MP panicking and couldn't adapt.

While you may feel that way. I grow increasingly disappointed with some of them. Shinryu feels incomplete, Lakshmi and Byakko are laughable, and while I enjoy Susano quite a bit, he's fairly easy. Tsukiyomi is probably the best designed, though I have yet to do Suzaku EX. That being said, I never said casuals were "chomping at the bit," I simply preferred when EXs weren't an afterthought that die within a lockout. This another reason I want the normal modes to be more challenging, that way people who aren't interested in harder content still have something to look forward to. And if they find EX too daunting a task, they're not bored with the easier alternative. Instead, we see people whining everything is too hard and have an expansion where all the optional raider content got nerfed save for arguably two Savage fights and Ultimate.

Keep in mind, you may find EXs a slog but plenty enjoy them. Comparing them to Pagos is laughably disingenuous. There's a stark difference between mindlessly grinding brain dead trash mobs and actually being asked to turn your brain on.

No, shin was just a jump up. I usually compare it to nid story, especially the add phases. I mean, 3 mobs with one wandering for Nid, 3 sets of adds with 3 meteor drops that can easily kill players with shin. But this is the faceroll thing again, you can't even say it was harder, because peopel jump on you over it.

And it doesn't matter if gradual, you still reach a point where you bow out. Its just better that its in ex content than in story, because the former doesn't gate content for people.

Because it wasn't hard. That doesn't mean it isn't a good difficulty for story mode. You seem to have this strange belief those things are mutually exclusive. Neither Shinryu nor Nidhogg are hard unless you're wholly inexperienced. They are, however, properly tuned for a story fight.