The Dead Ends is yet another error in the push to make everything hardcore

[Avidria]

Press X to doubt.

While I'm in total agreement that it's really not as difficult as the OP claims, there are several points that throw a lot of players off.

1. There is literally a doom mechanic on the first boss which isn't obvious unless you mouseover the ailment (needs to be Esuna'd). I've seen healers focus entirely on curing the damage from the puddles and not realise impending death was coming up.

2. Second boss scatters a ton of AoE all over the place. This includes those diagonal lasers while still trying to dodge circular AoE around the edges. No Future also dumps a ton of overlapping AoE markers which almost inevitably catches out at least one player and deals a fair amount of damage. The lasers also have a much bigger hitbox than you would anticipate from the size of the glowing orbs. Melee get caught out by this a lot.

3. Another doom mechanic (this one requiring you to restore HP to full) in the final boss as well as high raid-wide damage (Warm Glow).

I've run this dungeon a fair number of times on different jobs, so I've seen it from all three angles. Tank, DPS and heal. It is, in my opinion, the dungeon which catches out the most players on their first playthrough - especially if going in blind. I agree it's far from extreme trial fights, but I do feel it's a bit disingenuous to completely disregard their arguments. Personally, I enjoyed the greater challenge. No worse than the final dungeon of Shadowbringers MSQ overall (can't count how many kept falling off the arena on final boss there!), but I can at least understand their points.

I mean by all means doubt me, but I really was just sharing my (of course anecdotal) experience. I've seen groups wipe to trash in Keeper and Don Mheg, I've seen groups wipe multiple times in a row to the first and last boss in Keeper, I've seen groups fail to deal with the tethers on Tree Dog in Don Mheg and wipe more than once because of it (despite me explaining what to do), etc. etc. I mean I've also run both of those dungeons more than this one, maybe I've just been lucky so far, but I've seen and had less problems with Dead Ends than I have with other dungeons in the past.

While I'm, again, 99% sure the OP is trolling, just based on their other posts on page 1, I also have acknowledged the dungeon has some tricky mechanics. I just also think saying it's egregiously more difficult than any other dungeon in the game just isn't true, and to say it's indicative of a trend toward making story content "hardcore" is disingenuous at best and absurd at worst. (Edit to clarify I'm not saying that's your claim or anything, just... in general. To the thread and the sentiment of it)