I like to think that I was a good player back in HW and the fights were just factually harder, but at the same time sometimes my static will go back to do old fights at min ilvl and damage aside, the mechs a lot of the time just aren't that bad, when once upon a time I had to prog them for quite a while.

There used to be a time when a11s limit cut was seen as an insane mechanic, where nowadays people just go "oh, another limit cut?". There used to be a time when gavel in a8s was seen as some hugely complex mechanic when if you look at it nowadays, it's really not that bad as far as "role puzzle" mechanics go. I think people just don't really realize just how much raiding knowledge they've internalized over the years when it comes to talking about how much harder some fights were back in the Good Old Days.

I will say that DPS checks were tuned harder back in gordias though, that's not a meme.

Quote Originally Posted by DPZ2 View Post
What is that sentence supposed to mean? There was no stat squish during Heavensward. [edit: my original quote was about HW "at release", not 8 years later]

HW mobs hit harder at level than ARR mobs at level because the development team deliberately made them harder. It was designed to be more dangerous.

I enjoyed the comment thread about this on reddit, especially this comparison: "Just for comparisons sake: The Lv50 Water Sprites in East Shroud have 2778 HP. The Lv50 Ice Sprites in CWH have 8028 HP." [source: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...ficulty_spike/ ]
ARR level 50 mobs on the overworld were designed for people who were fresh 50, in ilvl 50ish gear. By the end of ARR, there were people walking around in ilvl 120 gear, and mobs in HW would be tuned to pretty quickly expect higher ilvls out of players. Expansions always have a jump in enemy HP / damage across expansions because even if they're similar level, the expected ilvl of the player skyrockets in that between-expac period. Early HW mobs might be slightly tankier than say, early SB/SHB mobs, but I don't think that points to a design philosophy to make the game harder so much as it points to the devs being a little clumsier back then.

I can't really say that HW mobs *weren't* any tankier at-level than ARR when you had expected gear levels, but I think it's missing the mark to talk about mobs that exist in the transitional levels of expansion gear, because that doesn't mean they're supposed to be harder play-wise, it just means they thought you'd have a higher ilvl.