What does FFXIV lack?

[Valence]

We could ask the same thing of some of the playerbase too, given how many of them just want to skip over the MSQ and leveling and go right to hardcore raiding all day. One might think a lot of players WANT "just a boss gauntlet".

It would also explain why they keep demanding that even normal content becomes increasingly harder, because they literally can't stand doing anything that isn't at least Savage tier and up.

I really don't see what the people you describe, wanting to have harder baseline difficulty and removing trash and whatnot, have to do with people that don't like the MSQ and would like to skip it to access the parts of the game that interests them though. I mean maybe there is a venn diagram somewhere, but that's still a huge stretch as a comparison to make.

Even if they aren't asking for Savage-tier specifically, they're still nonetheless asking for everything to be made harder and want everything to be a boss gauntlet.

Take the repeated cries for no walls in dungeons for example, what is that if not people wanting to boss rush even faster? Hell, there's only a handful of people that want the mobs to be dangerous themselves (I can only name me and Valence off the bat), but there's other people who don't want to deal with trash mobs AT ALL to the point that there's been very little mumbling about removing them from the new Variant that's coming up, or how people seemed howling mad about that one Savage tier that involved mobs and seemed relieved when things when back to normal for the rest. I think Deep Dungeons is the only time people seemingly "tolerate" non-boss enemies, but only because most of them are mini-bosses themselves with how quickly they can destroy you, and people probably still treat the actual bosses as the highlights of their runs, not the stuff they had to "put up with" in-between. I wouldn't be surprised to hear if people dislike mob pack FATEs/CEs in Occult Crescent and prefer the boss types, and I know people miss doing Duels from Bozja which were 1-on-1 boss fights too I believe.

Not to say people can't have their harder content/boss-only modes, it just gets a bit tiresome when some people (including the developers it seems) act like that's how the whole game should play, with little to no breathing room for variation whether its opponent type or challenge setting.

The reason a lot of people don't want to deal with trash mobs at all is because the devs have given up on trash in SHB and beyond where most party resource and scarcity mechanics, as well as aggro mechanics, got scrapped for good. Even in SB raids turned into just boss gauntlets. Is it such a wonder that a lot of players, especially the ones that never actually experienced what it was before, think trash gameplay is... trash, and want a focus on bosses, which is where the developers are actually putting in all of their efforts?

It's exactly like any service, if you want to get rid of it, just stop funding it until people complain and ask to get rid of it in favor of other things. It's a clear design direction. They do not know what to do with trash beyond the basic AoEs to dodge because that's what they made the game all about: dodging crap. If they increased the difficulty trash would become like what we have in higher floors of Orthos and Pilgrim (aka no telegraph AoEs that oneshot). So the difficulty has never been a solution. The solution has always been the re addition of actual engaging gameplay battle systems and mechanics to build something solid upon.

Agreed, I think? but only if you mean general battle mechanics (typical vulnerabilities, mobs just not being outright immune to heavy/bind/pacify etc.) rather than anything specific to those trash in particular.

I've been playing since 1.x, and even as far back as ARR, the only thing allowing for interesting trash was hyper-optimizing among Enmity, compositional variance across earlier levels* (especially, say, levels 30 to 40), party DoTs, and sequenced oGCD stuns, scarcely anything to do with the trash itself (all of which remain unchanged). Even by the time Doomspike could be acquired, most was negligible outside of tank-less runs.

* This included things like mass-DoTing, a BLM AoE Sleep (which didn't break from anything other than direct damage back then), and then nuking enemies one at a time in order so that neither heals, tank stance, nor any further uses of Sleep were necessary, for a gain in total kill-speed on fewer than 4 targets, or fewer than 5 if a member lacked AoE (say, DRG before level 40); having Bards kite the melee units in circles while tank dealt with the ranged mobs; using SCH as DPS for the Cleric Stance and greater Maim and Mend trait while a SMN healed and tanked through/via Titan and/or all party members kited melee enemies via Miasma 2; etc.

What few other things existed were almost solely to activate short casts (such as crocs' caudal swipe) to offer some extra indirect mitigation to the tank or just briefly holding an oGCD stun to use it on a mob instead when they'd attempt a special attack or, lacking any such opportunity, an AoE attack that'd otherwise deny safe access to uptime.

Vulnerabilities yes, but it also goes hand in hand with what they allow us to do with job crowd control abilities, that have been weeded out immensely for most classes beyond some role actions (stun, and rphys useless binds that get removed as soon as damage is done, lolwut). They still have some room left to design around this if the devs were even remotely creative, by bringing back ranged mobs for tanks to manage, perhaps even introduce AIs behind that try to stay at range, or to just have situations like Voidmage expose above with healer mobs (that would stop healing if they get attacked), some mobs with no aggro table, introducing some targeting priorities and mob triaging, etc. Although I do feel that the devs seem to think that even this is too hard for the baseline (as seen in deep dungeons as well, just check story floors, they're no different from regular dungeons). It's sad in a way because I do think you can still have all of those mechanics regardless of difficulty if they don't really wipe the party anyway.

But, we still have lost a lot of other mechanics, notably:
- Enmity management for tanks
- Mob positioning (hits in the back doing crits was removed in SB, ranged mobs and patrols stopped being a thing after ARR)
- General party resource management, because MP behaved differently which introduced different constraints on healers and a balance to reach between damage and healing, and this also meant running out of cooldowns and resources was more likely to happen if the DPS slacked off (no I'm not saying bring back running dry of MP/TP and be left with nothing to do type of gameplay though, not everything was perfect and nobody is saying it was)

I only started in HW so kiting mobs was really not a thing anymore unfortunately. At best we still had casters sleeping a mob in low level dungeons at times although it wasn't really mandatory to do and I suspect was a remnant of older days. Still, could help sprouts back then.