The XIV encounter recipe in a nutshell

[Jeeqbit]

Well first there is the slowly boiling frog analogy. Water gets hotted and hotter but slow enough that you keep up with it right? Until at some point you notice you're seriously having problems and that's what happened to me in EW

That makes sense if the issues started in ShB for you. I just remember as far back as Heavensward people saying to me "it's just in, out, reused mechs" arguments and so I thought "if it's been like that since HW, then what actually changed now?"

I suppose other things can keep people occupied in the game through that time though - such as the social aspects (RP, venues, BA/DRS, FC events, statics, hunt communities).

I think there are two especially notable things that made this issue more obvious in Endwalker:

• The giant hitboxes and re-centering thing forced them even more into the "in, out" thing and made it even more obvious, since you couldn't realistically drag the boss around for mechanics anymore. The solution to that was mostly to have mini versions of the boss do mechs instead or have arena-based mechanics. This is one of the things they are supposed to be backtracking on but I'll leave it to everyone to decide if they have - it's still a bit early in the expansion.
• Expert roulette only having the same 2 dungeons, one of which has always been in it for 8 months. If you do this daily for 8 months you get so used to the script that, no matter how difficult or complicated or fresh the mechanics, they become absolutely braindead to execute and then all you see seared in your mind is more of the in, out, left, right stuff. This is a consequence of no longer making sidequest dungeons and they'd really just benefit from merging Expert and Level 100 Roulette together to increase variety. For example, the last MSQ dungeon beat me up at first on Viper but after months of doing it, it's absolutely braindead. In the past, it was always 2 new dungeons in that roulette every 3.5 months.

It's not just about encounter lego and bricks, it goes way beyond this. It encompasses the battle system, the game direction and feel, and what as a player you're being asked to do in any fight encounter.

True, there have been a lot of other changes (aka removals) that take away things that potentially distracted from how it had in, out, stack, spread before, so maybe it's easier to notice due to everything else being streamlined.

You'll admit though, that encounters didn't use to be stack, pairs, spread, chariot, dynamo all the time either.

It didn't in ARR for sure, although a lot of ARR dungeons actually seem to predate ARR and were ported from 1.0, with certain changes. They were a lot of different things in HW too, like both the Hullbreaker Isles from ARR/HW respectively. Based on what they said, this is the design they want to return to (with hindsight of what doesn't work), and I can see they have at least tried in the new dungeons.

If they haven't returned to that design enough then we can hope that they try harder with it. I think Dawntrail is meant to be about getting the battle content to the right place again and they may not have meant they'd succeed right off the bat. So perhaps the best place for us to start is to give reviews of the new Dawntrail dungeons specifically and what is good and what isn't (Dawntrail raids and trials too, depending on ones' interests).

I have seen many wipe on the first boss

I've done it for months and not seen a single wipe, but I've seen it come very close. But y'know, nothing can kill a Warrior, so I'm bias.