Any SB 5.0-5.55 players? Tell us your experience during those times.

PS : forgot to edit the title of the post to ShB instead of SB

Can be any, like something fun/weird/annoying/stressfull/boring/etc experience and transition from SB to ShB.

Also something that you missed during those times, like systems/job skill/etc

(2.0-2.55 post) https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ng-those-times
(3.0-3.55 post) https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ng-those-times
(4.0-4.55 post) https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ng-those-times

oh wait, nothing change compare to current state of the game. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Ninja was in a difficult spot at the start of Shadowbringers. Had to punch in a ton of hotkeys to do... less damage than most other DPS jobs. I think they fixed it by 5.2? It made the start of the expansion quite a transition.

I'll try to be nice so I apologise in advance if my post eventually devolves into ranting.

Shadowbringers as a whole disappointed me, but that's not to say it wasn't all a bad time and that I didn't make good memories. It was the time when a lot of friends of mine got into XIV after all so I was able to still have some fun with the game despite the let downs.

There were a lot of instances I liked doing honestly, and whenever I got bored I'd just queue up/make a party finder group for them because I liked them that much like a handful of Eden's Gate/Promise savage fights and Hades EX. Castrum Lacus Litore and Dalriada are honestly some of the best pieces of content in the whole game and I'd put them up there with the likes of Baldesion Arsenal in my opinion. Even if the rewards and participation rate sucked, they were really fun to do and it was great to mess around in them with essences/lost actions. I overall find Bozja to be a lesser experience than Eureka in my opinion, but I still appreciated its existence nonetheless, it provided a place for me to go to if I was bored and I had nothing else to do.

The job design of ShB was what made me go to the forum in the first place and was easily the biggest disappointment for me in many regards. It just felt like a lot of the good things established in Stormblood was ruined for no good reason. Double/Triple Tornado Kick Monk? Gone. Aetherflow building up towards demi summons on SMN? Nixed. Foe Requiem and MP management entirely on BRD? Removed. SCH having an engaging downtime kit and manual control over Faeries? Reduced to atoms. Shadowbringers started the trend of breaking down what divided the jobs and what made them unique, but unfortunately a lot of people were in the "wait and see" mentality with it which only frustrated me even more. Well. Everyone knows where that got us so there's no use being petty about it now.

The base MSQ was incredible, 5.1 and 5.2 were dreadful, 5.3 was another highlight and then it fell back on its face with 5.4 and 5.5, not as bad as the first two patches though.

Werlyt was... okay? The story was too predictable and the brats were stupid and annoying, at least the villain was proper evil, shame we never really got to fight him ourselves. I felt like Ruby was the best fight out of them, I didn't like Emerald and Diamond was just kind of there, didn't like the arena, as in the background of it, just sky is boring and of course no big transition.

I did not like Eden at all, hated all the lazy rethreads with the reused primals. Story ended up okay in it but in typical XIV fashion, 90% of it is just nothing while everything good is packed into the end.

Bozja was pretty good, did not like the zones too much with how boring they looked but the content was fast paced and the critical engagements were pretty fun. Castrum Lacus Litore and Dalriada to a bit of a lesser extent are both some of the best content the game has to offer, Delubrum Reginae was also pretty good, just the lost actions had too much of an impact in the way that the runs where people barely used them, the runs were excruciatingly slow, like close to an hour for a run feels insane when you have to do it 15 times for a single weapon.

The Nier raids and story was terrible. Everything felt so forced and it didn't fit at all with the XIV universe. Some of the fights were decent, Puppet's Bunker is a pretty good raid on its own. It just really felt like it didn't belong in the game and I'm personally so tired of the Automata hype. The first game is way better and it would have been a better fit for a collab too. At least we got some good glams out of it, except for the last raid which was all around awful and the glams were worthless for the most part as well.

Ishgard restoration was fine. Something to do for crafters, decent way to make money. Diadem was as boring as ever. The ocean fishing I haven't touched to this day, don't really care about fishing personally.

Job design was a downgrade from Stormblood for the most part, though there were some good improvements too. I'm one of the freaks who loved Shadowbringers summoner, the rotation was a lot more fun than this lobotomized iteration we have now, kind of feel embarrassed to even play the job now whenever I pick it up.

What else was there? Oh yeah, the absolute embarrassment of the Viera and Hrothgar release that we're suffering from to this day, that sure was a thing. I was so certain SE wouldn't release gender locked races too after Yoshida made such a big deal out of removing the restrictions going from 1.0. to 2.0 but he sure showed me! And of course the fact that both the races wouldn't have been able to use any headgear at release if it wasn't for a bunch of devs working on it on their own time while keeping it a secret from Yoshida.

Shadowbringers was a pretty fun time for me. My friends and I really enjoyed playing through the base game story together. I was really excited about Summoner gaining Phoenix and switched to maining it over Bard.

Eden was a bit of a mixed bag. I didn't like the recycled primal fights. I did enjoy the VIII music and references. It ended up being the first savage raid tier I ever fully cleared synced.

Bozja was mixed as well. I enjoyed the fight designs a lot more than Eureka, but the zones were less interesting. Mostly I remember being frustrated that the first Bozja zone didn't release until 5.35 when we had Eureka zones earlier in Stormblood.

Nier....I enjoy the the music and the games. But I think it was a mistake to have a major piece of content be an advertisement for a non FF series.

I liked the Ishgard restoration a lot. I love Heavensward and it was great to have a reason to spend time in that city again.

Shadowbringers also had a heavy content drought due to pandemic however I really liked the Bozja story and that was a nice hold over for the time being. I remember spending a lot of time on the Southern front and then finally running CLL. The instances would fill up and a bunch of people would storm the castrum, several wipes were not uncommon but there was some talking and organization that took place so we could complete our objects. I still think it was the best raid in this game. DR was terrible, and felt similar to a normal alliance raid. Dalriada was okay...

DRS was a ton of fun. We had a full 48/48 people and the raids had to be very organized in tasks. A lot of planning and collaboration had to happen between players and even though it wasn't the hardest content I would say it was the funnest.

Since there was only one ult that was kind of a bummer but TEA was a spectacular fight, Alexander's enrage still has to be the most beautiful ability in the game in my opinion and the weapons are the most gorgeous to date.

Besides that all you had was the 100 totem farms for Ex's which is really bland.


People were still accepting of Job design but there was discontent starting to grow from the homogenization of jobs. It still wasn't too bad though. Raiding was good over all with E4S and E8S being particularly good. E12S was good but it wasn't a stand out. Most fights had more flavor than the current ones.


Despite Endwalker having more content than SHB with Criterion/DD/IS the content is not as long lived as the Bozjan exploratory zones so it actually feels worse or on par with SHB. Personally this is why I think I see growing discontentment in the playerbase because the "content schedule" was getting stale in SHB and now it's just so unchanged people have less patience for it.

Most long time players look for depth and complexity in the games they love. But FFXIV has actually been going the opposite direction and directly attempting to eliminate complexity. For example being good at your job in StormBlood was a lot of effort and knowing minute details about how the job worked that gave you an edge so when someone was good at their main people took notice this was less so but still present in SHB. This meant that all content had better replay value since there were constantly things you could master as you played the game

This got watered down in SHB but there were things still such as different burst windows that players had to adapt but we have finally reached a 2 minute static window that's all that matters. Thats my take on SHB, heavily affected by pandemic but with enough good that it was solid. It was a transition period for the new battle design language that was becoming streamlined and the full realization of it feels like EW, where it is so streamlined it has the excitement of a brand new toyota camry.