What does Heavensward actually bring to the table as an expansion?

I don't want to be.. contrary.. but you kinda said something in your post which I think you take for granted a bit.

'The expansion is finally released it's a thrilling experience, there's flying mounts, and the story was actually pretty good and intense'.

I pay £24.99 for the expansion. I'm not at HW content yet but from what I hear, there is a great story, big new zones and a lot of fun to be had.

Take most games on market for say PS4 and they are £50+.

So it sounds to me like HW you do get what you pay for. If you choose to continue to subscribe afterwards, then that is up to you, but I don't think you can say it's a bad expansion or has no value because by your own admission it was a thrilling experience and I imagine it's worth £24.99 at least. The subscription fee is mostly to play with friends and level up other jobs etc in my view.

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Originally Posted by Vickii

I don't want to be.. contrary.. but you kinda said something in your post which I think you take for granted a bit.

'The expansion is finally released it's a thrilling experience, there's flying mounts, and the story was actually pretty good and intense'.

I pay £24.99 for the expansion. I'm not at HW content yet but from what I hear, there is a great story, big new zones and a lot of fun to be had.

Take most games on market for say PS4 and they are £50+.

So it sounds to me like HW you do get what you pay for. If you choose to continue to subscribe afterwards, then that is up to you, but I don't think you can say it's a bad expansion or has no value because by your own admission it was a thrilling experience and I imagine it's worth £24.99 at least. The subscription fee is mostly to play with friends and level up other jobs etc in my view.

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Ironically you just basically said the only few positive points I mentioned for the expansion, and the big new zones are pointless once you hit 60 unless you want level up another class as there's nothing else to do in them, and you are forgetting sure, you paid for the expansion, but you also have to pay a subscription for this. so you expect that your subscription is worth paying, if this was a Pay to play where you just buy the client like Guild Wars 2 it would be fine, but you are not, you are paying for a subscription.

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Originally Posted by Evtrai

I'm glad you put it like that, so it boils down that these same issues constantly being voiced here or on reddit, by several people, you would think it's because It's an ACTUAL issue? oh, several people making the same points and the same argument all in common....

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If we judge things by the number of threads created about a topic, then we are in serious trouble - especially in the English speaking forum. I'm not saying that it's not an issue to you, but I don't believe that it's a general issue shared by the majority of players (not forum goers).

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Originally Posted by Evtrai

I don't need to detail my playtime however I'll detail it to you, to demostrate you don't need some extreme dedication to raid or whatever you are talking about, my playtime on heavensward is basically reduced to this:

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I don't need your playtime, because I didn't make your playtime an issue. I did say that it takes more than casual play to actually be able to raid (play end game content including Alex Savage). I say that because you have to completely level and gear up your character including obtaining the absolute top tier gear for your job. that takes a degree of focus and time to do. I don't doubt that once you are at that point, the time commitment is easier since you are only needing to play to cap your tomes and meet your raid group commitment.

However, the most common complaint I have seen from raiders since HW launched is that they are burned our on farming Alex Normal for gear so they can run Alex Savage. If you've farmed your gear from Alex normal, I honestly don't see how you can have done that in the timescales you posted, but even if you did have such good fortune that you were able to, it doesn't alter the simple fact that it takes a degree of focus and time to actually get to end-game with reasonable gear, and that focus and time is not what most (including myself) would consider casual.

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Originally Posted by Evtrai

That's trully some extreme dedication and playtime required to be adept at raiding.

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I didn't say that the time commitment meant someone was adept at raiding, I said that there was a time commitment in order to level and gear sufficiently as well as to meet your static's timetable. But none of this really goes to the point of your criticism or my rebuttal. It's all arguing about details of your specific play, which isn't, and never was, the point of my reply.

I honestly get confused when people complain about grinding in MMOs because that is what the genre itself is built on-- grinding, whether it be for levels, gear, gold, reputation, or what have you. Compared to a lot of earlier MMOs, FFXIV is not grindy at all, and it certainly offers you a larger variety of ways in which to grind than just killing the same mob over and over.

If you don't enjoy grinding of some sort, then MMOs probably aren't the game genre for you, as you aren't going to find an MMO out there that doesn't eventually boil down to "grind stuff to get things."

Answer to OP: Nothing. It is the same cookie cutter stuff. No variety of content :(

I see this discussion in lot of FB groups, gamefaqs, other forums, etc. It's not just a vocal minority methinks...

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Originally Posted by Evtrai

Ironically you just basically said the only few positive points I mentioned for the expansion, and the big new zones are pointless once you hit 60 unless you want level up another class as there's nothing else to do in them, and you are forgetting sure, you paid for the expansion, but you also have to pay a subscription for this. so you expect that your subscription is worth paying, if this was a Pay to play where you just buy the client like Guild Wars 2 it would be fine, but you are not, you are paying for a subscription.

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More content has been promised for the subscription you are paying. GW2 has regular content update, but are all rather minor. You cant expect gameplay overhaul every single expansion. WoW did that for a few expansions and I personally dont think its for the better.

They did also add quite a bit of class mechanic, Enochain for BLM, DWT for SMN, etc. Be glad this wasnt like wow's WoD, no new race or class and barely any new content.

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Originally Posted by Kaurie

I clearly stated in my post that I was referring to DPS.

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My apologies, unfortunately 'DPS' has two meanings in this forum, it either means damage per second or damage dealing jobs. I took it to mean damage per second, you were referring to damage dealers.

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Originally Posted by Kaurie

Tank is the only thing in the game that gets 2 choices, DPS or mitigation/hp. However, in terms of secondary stats, it's widely accepted that Parry doesn't do anything worthwhile. No other stats provide mitigation, so again it comes down to DPS.

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That's the current picture but parry was (once upon a time) much more useful which is why it's dripping off all the tank gear. The fact that SE, in their infinite wisdom, nerfed the crap out of parry (and block) is a mystery to me. I believe the official excuse is similar to the one used for dropping Granite Skin from WHM, damage scaling. Personally if the damage dealt by enemies scales with their level and mine, my mitigation should scale too. You'd have thought that this was something that the designers would have seen coming and considered in their original design rather than changing some fundamentals of jobs to fit their new content.

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Originally Posted by Kaurie

Ignorance is not understanding that adding X stat provides a DPS increase of 2% where Y stat provides a DPS increase of 3%. Neither stat provides anything OTHER than DPS, so choosing Y over X is obvious. Choosing X over Y is ignorance.

I also feel that I was clear that I WANT secondary stats to be more appealing and offer other things than DPS. Unfortunately, as the game is now, it's designed to only focus on DPS. IMO it makes all 2ndary stats worthless as game code.

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Since there is only 1 stat that boost damage done, then the relics do in fact offer opportunity for some side-grades to secondary stats, even if it's just boosting VIT or PIE a bit for more HP or MP.

I absolutely agree about secondary stats, and the nerfing of parry and block really bugs the hell out of me because that's kind of where Paladins are coming from, blocking and parrying for maximum defensive benefit. And yet now, we're by no means the best at parrying, parry itself has been made worthless as a secondary stat, and our ability to block damage has been nerfed considerably. You'd think that since we are by far the crappiest damage dealer in the game, we would at least have been left with superior parry and block capabilities....

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Originally Posted by Elazu

Fully agree with the Alexander part. Adding normal mode was a huge mistake.

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People create their own grind, the only person to blame is yourself. There is nothing wrong with Alexander Normal it was better than what they did before which was dumb down coil and add in echo to make it easier for others to complete. Now with the current model they don't have to "nerf" the savage content when the next patches roll around.

You know what I think the real issue with Alexander is, you can't faceroll it like Crystal Tower, it's the exact same format as crystal tower, get one piece of loot "PER" area and then you are done for the week. In Crystal Tower you could only get one piece, in Alexander normal it's 4 tokens, the slight difference is you get 4 loot instead of just one and it's done with 8 people rather than 24 but there in lies the huge difference. You have to work harder to obtain a weekly reward compared to tower, in tower where it's 24 people working together but each group gets their own loot the reward is still 8=4 and guess what, Alexander works like that now, per area 8=4 and sure you might not get what you want but guess what, it's because its more challenging that people don't like it.

In the end it's on you to continue to do ALexander, if you desire that extra IL from the 190 gear that's on you. When you have 170-180(unlimited tomes) gear and 200-210(weekly tomes) you have to start asking yourself, how much do you actually need that 190, if you are calling it a grind then ask yourself is it really worth it to have "IL 191" because you did alexander weekly and got the gear for it when if you didn't and just got the ring you'd currently be standing at "IL 188" with just the esoteric gear and the ring reward from doing Alexander normal?

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Perhaps you're just pissed off because you feel that you *have* to farm the snot out of it for gear that you can use to take on Savage mode, only to find that savage mode is (as expected) the same content with a harder level of difficulty and better drops. You honestly expected it would be otherwise?

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That is actually my biggest issue (along with somehow losing an interesting story by making it more accessible, here's hoping it gets better). Of course it was expected, but I at least thought that normal mode wouldn't be as stupidly easy as it is and it doesn't mean that I must like the decision.

Coil has always been the only content made for the raiders and now we get to fight the same exact bosses with a few added mechanics, taking away a big part of the thrill of entering and progressing on the hardest content in the game.

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

If we judge things by the number of threads created about a topic, then we are in serious trouble - especially in the English speaking forum. I'm not saying that it's not an issue to you, but I don't believe that it's a general issue shared by the majority of players (not forum goers).

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It's impossible getting a good statistic or sample because there's no control of how much people leaves or stays, what I do know however is that people quits without voicing that they do, because for a lot of them, they forget about the game and never touch it again or remember it, but the people I knew and had the chance to ask why they retire, are pretty much the same issues I currently have, I probably wouldn't have bothered to just not post here and just forget about it, you don't really need to officially know that people is unhappy with a lot of things, you just need to look at your changing envoirment, however I want the game to improve in the future, and the game doesn't improve unless people starts voicing, this is actually from what I remember the same stance people adopted in 1.0 when someone pointed out 1.0 flaws issues with it, and you had an army of people defending it, saying that it's fine, they are having fun with it and see no problems, which is acceptable it was their opinion, except that their cero subscribers and barren servers spoke otherwise, I'm not saying that this is severe as 1.0, but if this trend continues the only people that will ever be satisfied with the game are super casual players, and SE has forgotten that there's a middle between hardcore and softcore, and they are just doing the extreme opposite of both, really hard content or super easy content, and neither party is interested in the opposite as there's no middle ground.