Yoshi-P says that the Final Fantasy 14 team is taking aim at the game's same-y combat jobs and 2-minute-meta, but that'll come after Dawntrail tackles its encounter design

Final Fantasy 14: Dawntrail, much like how Endwalker tackled the new player experience, seems poised to start chipping away at some of the game's most persistent problems—namely, that FF14 is a little too straightforward nowadays.

That's not to say you can't find difficult content for your masochistic heart—Extremes, Savage content, Ultimates (and if you're really self-loathing, buying a house)—rather, Endwalker lacked a casual-to-midcore experience that offered much of any challenge. It's something I talked about in my retrospective last year.

That's down to a few things that are, in isolation, actually positives for the game. Telegraphs are very straightforward and have a shared vocabulary, and the game does a good job of teaching you how everything works over its big, stonking, hundreds-of-hours long story. However, once you get any kind of max-level competency, grinding out your dailies loses its lustre pretty quickly. You're either doing organised group content that requires all your focus, or brain-off dungeon runs, with very little in-between.

Fortunately, according to an interview with Multiplayer, it looks like director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) is still interested in tackling that problem. I should note that the following quotes are machine-translated, though I've noticed very similar sentiments shared in other interviews with the game's director during the recent media tour.

«I've talked about it often … in general, we have directed development towards reducing player stress, and as a result we have made certain decisions,» says Yoshi-P, referencing an increase in the size of raid boss 'target circles', which allowed melee classes to have a far easier time keeping up their DPS during Endwalker's raid tiers. "[They] eventually became too large … Likewise, when it comes to specific mechanics, we received feedback from some players that they didn't like [them], as a result we decided to no longer implement them."

Yoshi-P goes on to say that these responses