I don't think mechanics in normal content need to be deadly to be interesting; giving a damage down is (to someone who is interested in being challenged) a fate near enough to dying, while not causing actual deaths.

Mixing this in would allow for a higher mechanical difficultly (like we're seeing in DT) while providing a lower-stakes environment to learn, and without being overly punishing to causal players who may not even be interested in engaging with harder mechanics.


I also think normal content should have something like variant actions to make healers not the single point of failure when there's not a res caster around.


That said, I am personally happy with the increase in difficulty (in terms of it being harder to correctly resolve a mechanic), especially having less of slowly showing a very easy to resolve version of each mechanic once, which ends up being the majority of the fight once IL creep hits. For any replayable content (which all duty finder content I would argue is), having some challenge even after you know all of the mechanics is a welcome relief from EW where Expert roulette in particular became extremely boring after a while (p.s. can we please keep more than two dungeons in expert, even if that's just going back one more patch's dungeon).