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The vault was really fun. I enjoyed guiding new players through it on a variety of jobs. It was satisfying watching a pt go from wiping at the dps check to eventually clearing it almost perfectly.
Light farming, the fate grind, and the stupid books were all horrible to grind.. as was whatever step(can't remember), where you had to farm esoteric in aetherical chemical research facility.
Heavensward was where both the community started to go in a direction that I disliked, but I also met some friends I still hang out with from time to time til this day so it wasn't all bad.
Ishgard is and always will be my favorite city in the game ans I've had my homepoint set there since back then. I loved the story.
Never sleep sucked and so did trying(and failing) to find and join a static for Alexander.
Those are just a few of the things that come to mind. Had its up and downs but overall its been my favorite expansion so far
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Still the Best time i had in the Game. The community was very, VERY welcoming. People were genuinly nice, not "forced by rules nice" like today. They liked to engage with each other cause we weren't all to much back then. Today people just engage with the ones they want IF they want and miss many opportunities to meet nice new people. I try to engage with people these days but i often just get ignored because i do not seem to fit their target aesthetic.
Savage was brutally hard but i loved the Feast that released a bit later. Made Top 100 for the Season 1/2 Reward and people genuinly knew you if you were in that List. It was an entirely different feeling than Today. "Do you wanna join us for this content? Would you like to do this and that with us?" This isnt a thing Today anymore.
Today you are judged by what achievements you got/bought and are immediatly visible. So if you didnt buy or earn a ultimate Weapon you best stay in your House you still have from back then. Cause Houses were WAY easier to get. I bought a medium sized Lavender house on one of the best spots years ago because my server was simply empty back then. The sentiment and "culture" of this Game, this world even, has shifted 180 and for me it is sad to see.
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I have a lot of fond memories of HW. It still has my overall favourite music and aesthetic in the game.
My friends and I loved Ishgard from the moment we learned about it in the level 35 ARR quests and it felt great to finally cross the bridge over.
Normal modes were added for raids so we were really happy to play the Alexander story as it came out.
Unsyncing was added for old content so we finally got to finish the Coil story.
Palace of the Dead was released and my friends and I had lots of fun with it. Though I don't think we made the descent to 200 until SB.
HW was also a time where pretty much everything got more irritating mechanically for current content.
Jobs got more difficult with more buff timers to manage such as blood of the dragon for dragoon and enocian for Black Mage. Bard became a partial caster with Wanderer's Minuet which was a stance at the time. I hated it and joined the legions of bards complaining on the forum.
No free AF gear from the 60 job quests. The AF had to be bought with tomestones. I remember grinding Gubal Library for gear to meet the ilevel for Aetherchemical Research Facility.
Crafting was really frustrating with even leveling crafts requiring timed nodes and hidden materials. Crafters and Gatherers both had weekly capped scrips. An earlier post in this topic went into the mess that was Favours for gatherers.
Even Triple Triad got more annoying with the addition of many npcs with irritation rules like Chaos and Random, and very short windows of availability to play them. I quit TT until the addition of the Battle Hall and loosened restrictions later in the expansion.
Job balance was a mess. Things aren't perfect now but they were much worse then. Others have mentioned issues like PLD being unable to block magic and being shunned in the raid tier and AST Balance being overbuffed over the course of the patches.
Tanks were using melee dps accessories since tank accessories only had vitality and didn't boost their damage. This caused tension in the duty finder when lower skilled parties could not handle big pulls with these lower hp tanks.
Healers had to meld accuracy to hit things in ex trials and up.
Gordias Savage was really overtuned and broke many statics. Party Finder was limited to your server only and died for many small servers. The initial relic grind was horrendous. Diadem launched and failed. Lords of Verminion was dead on arrival. I remember getting an apology from the devs for the state of the game in 3.1 because things were so dire.
The game has shifted to be too homogenized these days. But I get why. The devs are overcompensating for the lows of HW.
Edit: Found Yoshida's statement on 3.1: https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...Moving-Forward
Not so much an apology as an acknowledgement of issues.
It is funny to see replies complaining about the relic being delayed even back in HW days