Another advice for dodging: pay attention to the castbars. Not your own, the enemy castbar(s).
Forget what you know about WoW, it's not important. FFXIV is a different game, having done this or that will help you little if at all in FFXIV and on the contrary, may even confuse you and lead to you approaching things the wrong way - like dodging.
There is nothing stupid or unpredictable about dodge timings and don't get confused by some people claiming "yeeaaaaah it's just the stupid server ticks haha". That's an excuse for being too slow. Pulsing effects are on the server tick and thus tick roughly every 3s but regular skills are generally not.

Almost every skill snapshots the damage when the cast completes. Animations (and sometimes even telegraphs) are largely irrelevant. If it has a castbar, watch the castbar to see how much time you have to dodge. If you are inside the danger zone when the cast completed it doesn't matter if you managed to make it out of the telegraphed area before the explosion went off or dodged the enemy effect. You will get hit.
There are some skills that have a castbar but don't follow this pattern but they're rare and it's something that affects savage and ultimate mostly.
Even most things like bomb boulders exploding have a castbar, you can see them listed as untargetable enemies with the bar next to them.
If a skill doesn't have a castbar, watch the telegraph. If you still stand inside as it's about to disappear you will get it. Again, it doesn't matter if it looked like you dodged the explosion of the effect going off.