the normal content is too easy

[HyoMinPark]

Some of the ease is likely them undertuning just a bit to compensate for the stat squish. From what I understand from some WoW players, it took a full expansion for them to get the tuning just right after their stat squish.

I doubt that the stat squish had a significant effect on difficulty outside of a handful of situations (e.g., Dun Scaith hits harder now than it did in ShB for certain bosses; they actually had to heavily adjust UCoB because simply applying the stat squish resulted in the raidwides flat out killing the party even with stacked mitigation). The content was still suffering from decreased difficulty before the squish happened. P1S is almost the same difficulty as O1S—the latter of which is notorious for being cleared in one pull. The only thing that sets P1S apart Alte Roite is Intemperance is a gotcha mechanic.

SB was easier than HW in a lot of aspects, but the fights were still engaging enough for it to be relatively excused, in my opinion. ShB really started the trend of the devs heavily leaning on “accessibility” and using it as an excuse to neuter both content difficulty and job complexity. At least in SB, the easier fights could be excused because jobs still had layers of complexity to them. Now, it’s like a double whammy: easier content and a lot of the jobs are heavily streamlined and without nuance/complexity. I know I have a heavy bias as a healer main—but I was a physical ranged main prior to ShB and I honestly cannot even enjoy the role anymore because of the insistence they should be Baby’s First DPS.

I don't expect much from normal content but any old content should be balanced to be as similar as possible to when they launched to at least retain the normal level of difficulty. People skip and ignore so much mechanics in old fights that the supposed normal difficulty is very easy instead.

The state of Orbonne is truly sad. The first tier 24-mans suffer the most since they never implement item level syncs for them—but usually the third one retains some semblance of original difficulty because of the minimum item level being closer to the max item level for that expansion. But Orbonne is a sad, sad shell of itself thanks to the double whammy of auto Echo and TGC being nerfed into the ground. I never agreed with either decision because I liked how there was a fight that actually punished for trying to cheese or ignore his mechanics.