Quote Originally Posted by Crescent101 View Post
I think they misunderstood the feedback. Not wanting the boss to disappear and lose uptime didn't mean "make the entire arena a hitbox." The point was finding the uptime and adjusting strategies to maximize uptime while doing mechanics is part of the fun. We just didn't want the boss to literally disappear. Now we lost that seemingly due to what might have been a mistranslation. It makes me worried about Dawntrail.
"The 120-second burst windows and the limitations of player uptime on bosses are aspects where we received lots of player feedback, and have undergone lots of trial and error. We tend to run into issues with encounters that temporarily prevent players from targeting the boss, so we've significantly reduced the frequency of bosses becoming untargetable. Furthermore, we've reduced the frequency of what our team calls "sports meet phases," where the boss becomes untargetable while players run around the arena to resolve mechanics. We received lots of feedback regarding them, primarily from our players outside of Japan. I have the impression that more players enjoyed resolving mechanics while attacking the boss, and I feel the same way when I play the raids myself, so a lot of bosses are designed for maintaining uptime nowadays. That said, certain mechanics can only be expressed through these "sports meet phases," so I'd like to keep an eye on striking a good balance to incorporate both designs."

Unfortunately he doesn't mention the enlarged hitboxes at all but only the fact that they want bosses to remain targetable and that players enjoy being able to attack the boss while doing mechanics. Meaning that uptime strats for smaller hitboxes would still fit that definition. They probably just couldn't make it work and so enlarged the hitboxes as a crutch, rather than change the mechanics to allow for better uptime on smaller hitbox bosses.