Mao has question for everyones about DDR-style boss fights.

[ovIm]

I can never fathom why they just funnel themselves down one path (I mean I could, it's because ultra-scripted DDR fights are very cheap to produce on the programming level). It's like these fight designers don't care about being creative and going the extra mile to squeeze every ingenious idea they can out of the, frankly, horrible engine. They seemed to have tried to do that in HW and SB.

Just look at the complains given over the years by players, and how often it was proven that CS3 game designers are unable to properly understand their own game. Of course, players are stupid and have no idea about game design (and I am counting myself right in there, I only see the things now that they have unfolded), so of course the complaints were awful. But I'd argue that a proper game designer would have understood the complaints, and would have adjusted the issues differently.

What was said: "we hate how synching debuffs is difficult"
What was meant: "due to multiplicative damage calculation, trick attack is a black hole that sucks in every other cooldown, since it is not optimal to not use CD's under TA"
What CS3 did: "lets put every damage cooldown on the same timer"

What was said: "keeping uptime is hard"
What was meant: "with how strict we have to adhere to our resource generation due to damage CD timers, any loss in uptime makes our burst worse"
What CS3 did: "lets make enemy hitboxes massive so players can always hit the enemy"

[Kazuke_Miso]

Just look at the complains given over the years by players, and how often it was proven that CS3 game designers are unable to properly understand their own game. Of course, players are stupid and have no idea about game design (and I am counting myself right in there, I only see the things now that they have unfolded), so of course the complaints were awful. But I'd argue that a proper game designer would have understood the complaints, and would have adjusted the issues differently.

What was said: "we hate how synching debuffs is difficult"
What was meant: "due to multiplicative damage calculation, trick attack is a black hole that sucks in every other cooldown, since it is not optimal to not use CD's under TA"
What CS3 did: "lets put every damage cooldown on the same timer"

What was said: "keeping uptime is hard"
What was meant: "with how strict we have to adhere to our resource generation due to damage CD timers, any loss in uptime makes our burst worse"
What CS3 did: "lets make enemy hitboxes massive so players can always hit the enemy"

Well, it's hard to not kneejerk react to feedback when you don't have a vision, after all.

[GartredZW]

It honestly feels like they'd rather design a different type of game entirely. These feel like they'd be at home in a platformer, or beat-em-up where the moveset you use isn't as important as the level design.
It's natural to play the earlier fights as you get more acquainted to the game. For example, before I even started Heavensward, I did the extreme primals multiple times, and finished the coils of bahamut raids synced. It was a lot of fun.
Now, doing fights released more recently, it feels like I was lied to in what to expect. Most mechanics are just "Trial and error until your group figures out the esoteric way it operates" or "just follow hector strat"
I can't really see myself learning a fight by just seeing mechanics and maybe getting small hints from someone in the group. Stuff like P9S limit cut. P12S Para 3 and limit cut. M4S sunrise sabbath.
Mechanics like these are fun to do in the moment, but you can't have difficult and heavily involved mechanics like that at the same time as they're trying to make the game easier and more accessible. That's why they decided to start ruining jobs with oversimplification.

Personally, I don't even think they intended this change at first. I think this is just a result of slowly trying to design better fights over time. They keep trying to one-up themselves with more mechanics coming out faster that need to be more complex. If they don't do that, then it risks critique for fights feeling samey and boring.

[AmiableApkallu]

*snip*

At this point, I have no idea what anyone actually means by DDR, because the original game is just you standing, more or less, in one spot hitting buttons on cue, which is barely any different from "preferring to stand in one spot or do one thing over standing in some other spot and doing some other thing," which applies to every single example you gave -- there are preferred ways of dealing with those mechanics, all of them, and you even described some of those preferences. They are also perfect examples of the bit you omitted, "how well the game convinces us to suspend our disbelief or otherwise distract us from that basic reality," and of thematically connecting mechanics to the encounters -- which was my point.

If anything, DDR is about being required to take some action at some specific time. See ape thump chest? Feed ape banana. That "whacky mechanic" is DDR.

Which is why I intentionally didn't refer to DDR -- near as I can tell, it's always been with us. I don't see that as an issue.

"Running everywhere like frogs in a blender"? Yeah, sure, because that sort of thing is being cranked up higher and higher without encounters (consistently) providing any thematic reason for that to be the case.

[Voryn]

While some people are able to define “DDR” in an understandable way, the definitions seemingly varies per person so the more important things are what specific things it sounds like the specific person is disliking and why, and what they seemingly prefer instead.

Regarding OP’s original question, if I use a definition of “scripted, movment-only” mechanics for “DDR” then like them because I enjoy splitting my attention between the mechanics and my rotation and trying to do both as well as I can, which this type of design is able to give me. But how much fun I’m actually having varies based on the specific mechanic and which job I’m playing because it depends on how much of my brain I have to use.

For mechanics that are just the same movements it depends on what it actually asks me to do and whether I still need to pay attention. M1S’s first quadruple crossing, which is the exact same one or two movements every time (just varies based on your role or strat), is boring. UWU Garuda phase gets really boring after a few pulls because only variation is where the clones spawn, and to me none of the movements are that interesting to do. Meanwhile I’ll especially enjoy DSR P7’s exaflares because the movement is more fun to do, even though it can be done the same way every time due to being a simple “victory lap” mechanic. I also really like UWU Ultimate Annihilation because I at least have to pay attention to when things happen so I can move at the right timing, even if the movements are the same each time.

When I actually have to figure out which movement to do or which of the possible spots to go to? It depends on the individual case as well. M3S Quadroboom/Octoboom Lariat is the worst offender since it’s literally just in/out + stack/spread. But “complicated” puzzles can become boring if it turns out there’s just simple tricks to solving them, like the Cachexias in P6S. On the other hand M3S Chain Deathmatch is really fun to me despite the AOEs themselves just being left/right cleaves, as I need to look at multiple things to figure out the two steps I need to do. I also really like UCOB Nael quotes since there’s many different things to pay attention to.

So the general trend for me is that I’ll enjoy the movement-only raid mechanics as long as they’re not too easy. It often works out because everything becomes a little harder than it sounds on paper because I’m simultaneously having to do my rotation, and if playing healer or caster I need to try my best to keep my gcd rolling as much as possible (which at the moment takes a lot of effort for me since I’m not good at healer/caster yet). When I get comfortable with mechanics then I try to also be as perfect as I can about my damage output so that I’m still engaged. But now I’m bored of DRK (my main in Endwalker, but it’s less interesting in Dawntrail and I’ve also just gotten better at it too) and I have to switch to GNB.

[Azurarok]

I usually hear the raid gameplay referred to as Big Jump Roping (大縄跳び） in JP, the term supposedly dating back all the way to T5. It's multiplayer, but it's less working together and mostly just trying to not trip up the rest of your team and become a burden.

One blog post on the topic described the issues I have pretty well:
"FF14's battle design boils down to managing fight gimmicks (moving around, managing buffs/debuffs) while performing your rotation (doing damage). However, in no small part due to the devs greatly simplifying rotations over the patches, the focus has shifted much more to the former.

The thing is, most players just follow the guides put together by teams that managed the early clears to go through these fights. What that means is, that half of the game is largely just a test of your ability to follow directions. The other half, managing your rotation, is the only real part where your actual skill as a player can be expressed, and there's been less and less room for it."

[Mawlzy]

It honestly feels like they'd rather design a different type of game entirely. These feel like they'd be at home in a platformer, or beat-em-up where the moveset you use isn't as important as the level design.

Starting to think they want a raid simulator and little more.

[AllenThyl]

At some point you really have to wonder if we're seeing a Renathras reborn.

Or maybe it's a Lala thing.

Could have been worse, like having to buy a new service account with all expansions every 2 months just to cry about this game for years like a bitter ex that simply cannot get over the fact that the other person found someone better, while asking someone actively progging UCoB with all the logs publicly visible where their clear is, even after the clear, because one actually thought that the Nael phase was "truly random" but then got called on their bluff. So I think we all got lucky here :>

There IS randomness in that fight though. It arises from choices made by players. Fight allows for some wiggle room. Is little or no tolerance for that in current fights.

That is some serious level of denial about the reality of the fight design. The "wiggle room" you have in low level dungeons is because they are designed as learning opportunity for new players. Good healers can keep a party alive even through high stack counts. The same is true for nearly all of the normal content, even normal raids. Casters standing in attacks for uptime sake, simply taking vuln stacks. Even dps can often survive standing in boss aoes in normal fights, or exploding towers, or not breaking chains, or not hiding behind the stone pillar with the tether and just taking it while the healer heals the damage in Ampador Keep (hard). That doesn't mean you had much of "player choice", it only means that the mechanics are tuned in a way that you can fail them.

Is either do fights in particular way or group wipes. Is not quit so extreme as this in dungeons buts is quite pronounced in savage fights.

That is simply not true. Every tier different strats for different mechanics have been developed, some feature more widespread adoption than others. Sometimes, bad strats would be stuck on a datacenter, even when better ones came out (p8s snake1 "prio" on Chaos ...). It's not about doing mechanics in a "particular" way, it's about solving the mechanics. And yes, not correctly solving a mechanic should have consequences, especially in higher difficulty content, because that's the whole point of higher difficulty content. If mechanics can be ignored and the encounter still cleared, there would be nothing difficult about it.
In CODCAR, the raid can survive 1 or 2 exploding towers with normal mits, several ones with tank LBs. In m4s, the party can either hypermit the transition or use tank lb3. In the new EX4, groups are opting for one mechanic to just hypermit it and everyone taking a vuln stack over bothering with resolving that mechanic fully. So by your definition, that means these encounters allow "wiggle room" and "player choice", thus invalidating your whole complain in the first place.

Is now more like just arcade game. If is what players want though, then maybe that the way game should go. Mao already movings on.

Again: The fight design as always been scripted like that. Yes, while the game was younger and the player population less experienced, the fights had a little less going on at the same time. Doing Blue Mage achievements was pretty eye opening for that.

Mao already movings on.

You announced your intended departure weeks ago already.

[Raim]

I think the devs got things all backwards. We need simpler fight mechanics, and more complex job rotations in 8.0.

[Awful]

From what I've seen is that they wanted to eliminate "friction" from job design and put it into encounter design which allows any job to excel as long as you're hitting your 2 min raid buffs with the other 7 people in your group all while dodging mechanics. Where in HW and SB it was more punishing leading to deaths and actual DPS checks to impact if you clear or don't now they've gone the other way where if someone trips up you either wipe the group or you can barely scrape by because the next mechanic wasn't a body check.

Now that the job friction is gone the encounter is what brings friction and exemplifies their vision that oops you didn't stand in a tower or didn't properly stand in your clock position so you and someone else or the raid is dead, they've homogenized all roles and jobs so that regardless of what you are there's personal responsibility combined with the encounter dance, which once you learn it you can do the fight easily.

An example is HW Bowmage (BRD) where if you had to move you'd use the DRG cross class ability Feint which was instant but did worse dmg then if you slid cast over to where you had to go, now phys range can move freely and without consequence, BLM has had it's kit revamped for this patch, healers are eerily similar, VPR was made easier a month after DT, tanks would get auto attack crit so you'd have to plan Awareness usage, you get the idea.