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

[Taranok]

My answer is that I hate the direction EW and DT has been taking encounter design. It's crushing job variety, crushing people at higher ping or with less stable internet (me, that is,) and is likewise leading to the destruction of jobs. But the thing I'm specifically intent on drawing attention to is the 1/2/4/8 mechanics design. 1 (everyone spreads.) 2 (stack with a predesignated partner.) 4 (lite party stacks) 8 (full party stack.) Every single mechanic that has come out since mid shadowbringers has been a variation on this. Every. Last. One. And instead of trying to make unique, new, or interesting mechanics, they started shoving more and move movement into the mechanics they had. This first started with E7S and tornado phase. Just an absolutely ridiculous amount of movement as people constantly spin around the room. The difference between leviathan savage and tornado phase was night and day, a stark difference in how fights were approached.

Then in Endwalker the devs decided to make every arena absolutely massive, and force people to work in these massive awful arenas. It doesn't matter that the mechanic is easy to solve if it takes 4 GCDs worth of movement to solve it. That's a triplecast+swiftcast worth of movement, that's a lot of pressure on healers and casters. E8S shows this off really well. High Complexity is a fun mechanic, but it takes 8+ seconds just to go from spot to spot and you had all of 2 seconds of wiggle room once you get there. My friends started making a pretty important observation. If sprint makes the mechanic significantly easier, it's a badly designed mechanic. Unfortunately, this litmus test has been a resounding positive on almost every mechanic in EW and DT.

When you force this much movement on every single mechanic, the natural conclusion is: "The devs hold cast bars in contempt."

But casters are just the most recent thing to get homogenized. Mitigation has been homogenized throughout all of EW and DT as well to the point where addle and feint are basically tacticians, concurrent with casters being destroyed. Before mitigation, healers were destroyed. When every single mechanic is a party buster that hits for 130% EHP back to back, it's no surprise every single healer has about 15 variations of medica 1 and 2 split between them. They all heal the same way whether players realize it or not. And, of course, the first role to be destroyed by homogenization are, oddly, tanks. When WAR couldn't tank twintania/death sentence without getting straight up deleted, the solution the devs chose was to give them PLD's completely overpowered mitigations. Now every tank tanks identically, save for things like TBN vs HoC or holmgang vs hallowed ground. What does homogenization have to do with this? Well, classes have been following encounters, instead of the other way around. Instead of fixing twintania so a (slightly reworked) WAR could survive, they turned WAR into PLD so it could tank twintania. That is why it matters.

When mechanics design is pushed to this extreme, the only way to make things more difficult is to make mechanics faster (E.G. Less time to react/less room for error) or more tedious (I.E. running across giant arenas.) The mechanics stop getting harder, they just get dumber. Which is what DT is doing.

If this is the direction the devs want to take the game, sure. But I want stormblood fight design, with class expression closer to stormblood. BLM timers don't need to come back, but having a caster that sits still and casts absolutely should. That's the standard for caster gameplay. Also preferably with healers and tanks having the chokehold on their class design removed. Something that can only be done with a massive redesign of the game and a philosophy shift in how to actually diversify jobs.

Focusing on encounter design in DT was a massive mistake if this is their solution to it. The actual issue is much more fundamental to the core design philosophy.