The new player experience and how FFXIV fails as an MMO.

[Valence]

I don't think the two have virtually anything to do with each other. Nor are the latest dungeons particularly "harder" than before; the "be here by X time" objectives are merely more visible. Casual content now has fewer and/or more lenient DPS checks, less need for coordination, and generally less cognitive load even before factoring in job kits.

Tanks can't die because the devs decided that people are more likely to play tanks, reducing queue quota bottlenecks, if they can be demi-gods, and healers are 20 shades of excess healing and a skill and a half of anything else because they decided that'd draw the most overall appeal to healers, not because we needed to save cognitive load for the present fights that, on average, take no more or take even less thinking ("monkey see, monkey do" included). When AST was running Sleeve Draw, Spread, and Royal Road and optimizing outcomes under varied conditions and per different compositions, we still had Mist Dragon offering far more difficulty than most Dawntrail dungeons.

Which two? I'm not sure to see what parameters you're referring to?

Difficulty is subjective. I find DT dungeons a lot more difficult than they've been in any expansion. The "be here by X time" mechanics are tenfold in comparison to what they used to be, and their pace has been cranked up significantly so that the bosses shotgun them at you without any respite, which is the most notable in luigi's mansion and tender valley, but they're merely the extreme end of the spectrum.

There has never been any DPS checks in dungeons, let's be real for a minute. Coordination? What coordination? What was there to coordinate?

I do agree that job kits have made way to encounters, that was my whole point. Tanks cannot die, healers are superficial, there is no mana or resource management left on any job, healing tools are through the roof, no more positioning problems, etc, because that's where the bulk of the engagement used to be, and this is also why trash packs that haven't changed unlike the bosses have become just... a bland afterthought. I can see that some people would find it harder because DDR talks to them more, which is fair. My point has always been that I do think however that the old model is superior not because of my own tastes, but also because it allowed to support struggling players a lot better whereas today you can't do much to help someone that is going to keep standing in the bad and die instantly again and again.

The Underkeep really is a bizarre outlier and I can't imagine what happened in the design process.

I remember going through that wondering when the oh-so-funny gimmick mechanic was going to rise up and kill me, and it never did.

We'll see how it goes with the next dungeon in august. In my opinion it will be a big tell whether or not they rescinded on their dungeon difficulty changes they brought with DT.