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

[Shurrikhan]

But that's the thing. All of what you listed, I find interesting and never considered it remotely hard. I've never seen people struggling with it like I've seen people struggling with what you say is not above average difficulty.

Then that's where we differ. I've seen quite a few wipes in Tam Tara Hard, in Stone Vigil Hard, in pre-nerf Pharos Sirius, against Mist Dragon, even some wipes against whatever the HW white dragon was called, the last and second-to-last bosses of Keeper of the Lake, in Wanderer's Palace HM, Gubal Hard, and Saint Mocianne's, against the last boss of Ghimlyt Dark, and even the last of Anamnesis Anyder, the first of The Twinning, and the second of Hero's Gauntlet, etc., etc.

In all of Dawntrail thus far, despite leveling almost exclusively via dungeon spam (doing async commission work while in queue as DPS) and doing the daily Expert Roulette to reach weekly caps, there's only been two bosses I've seen multiple wipes on: the last boss of Skydeep Cenote and the first boss of Strayborough Deadwalk. Despite the added movement requirements of, say, Yuweyata last boss, I still have yet to see more than a couple wipes in total not caused by d/cs across all other Dawntrail dungeons. And that's far from a small sample size of runs.

I'll however disagree on that last part, as it is absolutely obvious with a lot of job changes notably the latest BLM patch that they do this specifically to accommodate for increased pacing and DDR.

I disagree. Even pre-prancing BLM could manage the most movement-intensive fights when well played. It was dumbed down not because the fights specifically needed it but because they thought players wanted it dumbed down in that way.

It's become a job about mobility casting, whether or not its spells were long casts by default or not. It's been a job about burning mobility tools in a clever way (or on a memorized spreadsheet per fight) in order to keep casting while moving.

It always has been. Even in ARR under wrap-over MP (able to get a natural MP tick just after using Fire spell, since the MP-regen-prevention was slightly delayed) and double-quickened casts (when you could get a second spell hasted by the opposite element if you queued it fast enough), BLM played around smart use of mobility opportunities. That's always been what made it an interesting "turret" class -- constraints and ingenuity therearound.

The differences since have simply been how much excess one has (how many mistakes one must make before they feel potency loss, and how sharp or cumulative that cost is), but make no mistake that we had those kinds of capacities to min-max around movement even before -- it's not a new concern, nor even a newly emphasized one by any significant margin.

Again, I suspect that the reasons for BLM mobility increases, which are in further excess of need, follow the same lines of reasoning as the simplifications to Monk, Viper, Ninja, etc., none of which were warranted by or required by fight design, either.

Tl;dr: Again, no, we can have fights less limited to DDR under the present kits and we could have managed the current levels of DDR even before each job's latest wave of simplifications. The two merely come from a similar aim, rather than the one requiring the other.