Quote Originally Posted by Ardentrage View Post
They could still choose to telegraph moves but could also include reactive mechanics.
They do have reactive mechanics in the sense of a fight like Rathalos, where you observe the animations to determine how to react. They actually had a lot of animation stuff in ARR, but moved toward cast bars the further into Heavensward we got. Tanking some ARR content is like playing a different game because of how it's all about feeling out when it will do a tank buster or watching animations.

To compare unresponsive vs responsive let's look at two different games by the same team. Let's say there is an AOE attack in FFXIV that is telegraphed for 3 seconds indicated by a boss animation. if you are attentive you can dodge the mechanic with little room for error. Then the AOE snap shot occurs on the ground in .3 seconds. If you are hit then 3 seconds later you take damage.

Then in FFXVI there is an AOE attack that happens in .5 seconds. You can dodge, and there is little room for error. If you are hit then you instantly take damage with zero delay.
It's not an entirely fair comparison though. FFXIV has to account for reaction time (let's give that the .5 seconds), then ping (which could be as high as .4 seconds if you are far enough), then the reason to limit everything by a tick rate of .3 seconds is that it's processing more than 1 client and potentially 50-500 in some cases, such as the Chi FATE. If we added all that together we at least justify a 1.2 second telegraph. To be fair, there are a few situations where SE does make us dance out of aoes faster than normal, but normally we just have 3 seconds or more.

Back to the comparison, to new players the system in FFXVI is more intuitive, and doesn't have to be explained through metagaming.
I agree that it's not as intuitive to new players, but it is more consistent. Knowing for a fact it always snapshots when the cast bar ends is a lot more consistent than trying to figure out where in the animation the snapshot occurs for each individual mechanic.