What do you think about 3.X patches?

With Stormblood being so close, I was thinking about my experience with FFXIV and the fferences between ARR and HW. So, I decided to share with you my opinions just to see if I'm the only one feeling the way I do about this game.

This post will be quite long, sorry! Generally speaking, I enjoyed 2.X patches more than 3.X's. I'm more interested in the fightings, which I probably explain why.

1.Dungeons. The expert roulette was less boring in 2.X. While the new dungeons look nicer, having just 2 of them per patch reduces the variety. In the end, the expert roulette throws you in always the same duty (Baelsar's Wall now). I hope they'll give us 3 new dungeons per patch in stormblood (dividing them into an easy – intermediate – hard would make things even more interesting);

2.I think gating content should be a thing again. Back in 2.X, you couldn't fight certain primals if you hadn't killed the previous one. It wasn't painless (I know), but somehow it kept older content relevant, plus it made sure that the players challenging the newest primals were somehow trained or properly geared.

3.Primals. The 2.X's primals gave accessories and weapon (except Garuda, Ifrit, Titan and Leviathan): this helped gearing secondary jobs. If Bismark and Ravana didn't dropped only weapons and if clearing Bismark Ex was a requirement to unlock Ravana Ex,I think players would have had more reasons and more long-term objectives to work towards.

4. Raids. The same applies to the raids. I like the idea of having an “easy” mode and a “savage” mode. However, to me being able to access to the latest raid tier without having cleared the previous one is such a waste. Lots of people (me included) didn't even try A4 and A5 or A7 and A8. Even if I wished to, recruiting a training party for these duties would take ages (or days) now. For the future, I hope they will release an easy and a normal mode for the raids. Plus, I hope they will start nerfing the normal mode with the same pace they used to nerf Coil. I remember the complaints about nerfs and that's why when they start with the nerfing, they could add an extra mode, which will allow players to play each turn as it was intended pre-nerf. Clearing the normal mode would still be a requirements to unlock the next tier of raids. In the end, what I suggest is doing something similar to what SE did with Second Coil.

To me, Heavensward every patch felt like a rush to clear everything before the next patch was released.


5. PVP. I don't understand PVP and why SE is trying to push us towards PVP even if it seems that the majority of the player base isn't interested in it. I understand that players investing time in PVP should be rewarded with mounts and glamours etc, but I wish they started to put cool rewards in other PVE content as well.

6.I liked the Palace of The Dead and hope SE will continue to update and enhancing it. Floor 51 – 100 was a big improvement. I don't think that requiring a pre-made party for the remaining floor was a big idea though....

7.Gear progression. This what bugged most. Compared to 2.X, with Heavensward I coulnd't properly gear more than one job I think it was because the relic quests required a huge amount of tomestone (mostly eso and lore), still in 2.X by the time of 2.5 all my class at lv50 were properly geared and I could join all the primals and raids regardless of the job I chose. I was so unlucky with the Void Ark – Weeping City – Dune Scaith drops, not to mention Alexander raids (not the savage ones). Basically, I was able to properly gear 1 class only with shafts, bolts etc .. by the time these fights were farmable it was super hard to join via DF and when I did my roll were horrible. I hope that in Stormblood it will be easier to maintain a good iLVL even with those jobs that are not your main.

8.Alliance-raid. I'm happy they changed the number of drops per boss. However, to me the Void Ark was boring. Weeping City and Dune Scaith are a bit more challenging, but when they start to become old it would be so much better if SE could make them shorter. There was a time when Yoshida said they were taking into consideration reducing the older alliance raid to content for 8 party members or removing the trash mobs. Please do it!

9.Exploratory missions: at first they didn't seem too different from hunts, but I think that with time they will have an identity of their. Generally speaking, I like the new content they tried to include in these new patches (Aquapolis as well) and I hope that even if they are not perfect, SE will continue to improve them even during the Stormblood era.

10.Hunts: they were messy back in 2.X and so they are now. Too many people fighting in the same place, too many complaints. To me it would be great if they were somehow similiar to the mobs you fight during treasure hunts, where each party has its own set of mobs to kill.

11.Crafting and gathering. I think that the new scripts, the collectables etc allowed more people to get into these features. I personally don't like crafting or gathering (the idea of waiting for a node to spawn doesn't excite me as I don't have many hours per day to invest in the game), but I'm happy SE tried to encourage people towards these activities in a soft way.

I hope that Stormblood will be more fun than Heavensward, even though I'm a bit concerned about the battle system (I like the way it is now and I don't want something easier or, worse, brainlessly easy) and the new jobs (even if according to what Yoshida said, they won't release 3 new jobs within the same expansion, I think that having a new tank, a new healer and a new dps would reduce the DF's waiting time).

Dungeons: I honestly don't really care that we only got two per patch, i liked most of the HW dungeons for the most part.

Primals: Bismarck sucked but Ravana was great, the trials added started off so well with Thordan being one of best in terms of the actual fight and difficulty, Sephirot was also good but Niddy,Sophia and finally Zurvan just became so easy.

Raids: Alexander was not as good as coil. A3s was frustrating as hell but god i loved it, Midas was just right in difficulty and Creator while fun doesn't have much of a lifespan.

Crafting/Gathering: Never do favours and weekly capped scrips again. They shouldn't be treated the same as combat classes, so damn glad scrips weren't mandatory later on.

24man raid: Void ark was boring and too easy, Weeping city is probably one of the best they've done aswell as Dun scaith.

Hunts: Why are these still a thing?.

PvP: They did get some much needed attention but they shouldn't push it as much, i don't see it ever being an E-sport.

Diadem: I really hope you've improved it...

Okay, I'll play this game.

1) Dungeon development I think has been fine with two exceptions: not enough dungeons at the start so players don't get burned out on them off the bat, and restricting expert roulette just to two dungeons. Best approach for expert roulette I think would've been to let it lag behind a tier so it'd be four or more dungeons instead of two, allowing for more randomized content and reducing how quickly players would burnout on that content.

2) The only reason why I loved gated content was because of people throwing some ninja party invite and--without saying anything--queue for something and then I get to laugh as someone says "aww, someone doesn't meet the requirements" and then everyone gripes and moans because they have to do the same dumb fight they've done hundreds of times because someone isn't on their level. Yes, it does make past content relevant, but so do those annoying people overly obsessed with mounts or achievements or whatever idiotic excuse they have to try and drag me into fights I don't feel like doing.

3) I would've loved to see more items dropping from primals, especially weapons that aren't immediately pointless when a) new content comes out, or b) crafted versions that look way cooler become available with far less effort required. Fortunately, the storylines for them aren't too bad, and normal versions of the fight required for story aren't so bad. Now if only those versions dropped something to at least provide some sort of incentive to help people getting through it....

4) So the quest chain for story mode of Alexander (at least last time I checked) required you to do every single raid. Maybe with each tier introduced, the previous one(s) got streamlined so that you're not stuck for 2 hours in Duty Finder for each raid because of no one doing them, which isn't necessarily all that bad. Some people like doing old content, and that's all well and good, but others like only running current content, and that has to be respected as well. Also Alexander: The Creator is now considered the benchmark for raid development, which is definitely good enough for now. The only real complaint I have is a mid-level version of raids that would better transition players into savage, but the drawback there is that raids would become too WoW-esque and too difficult to balance at every level. Overall, raids are pretty good where they are right now.

5) In 2.X, PvP was next to nonexistent, only done by a select number of players who wanted some of the coolest and (mostly) goofiest-looking glamour that the game had to offer. With all the additions to PvP, it's not as much "trying to push us toward PvP" so much as enable the players who do like PvP a better experience as well as maybe provide players who aren't normally into PvP a little something to do when they're burnt out on raids or in need of venting that stress caused by the RNG nightmare known as crafting. As for those "cool rewards in other PvE content", we call that "tomestone gear".

6) It's been stated that they're stopping Palace of the Dead at floor 200, but bringing in a new deep dungeon for Stormblood. Looks promising, especially since it'd be the first time I'd have something to level when it comes out.

7) I was on the same boat: had everything ilvl 120+ in 2.55, then found myself having to find a way of gearing multiple jobs throughout the expansion....and then I realized that this was a good thing. It made me focus more on one or two jobs rather than being that "jack of all trades, master of none". As bad as it seems, it means you manage to become better at a couple of jobs, which is why the gear progression isn't all that bad. The only real issue I have is (for lack of a better term) power levels: in an attempt to make gear advancement more relevant, stats now grow at a much faster rate compared to 2.X, meaning that stats by 4.5 might err on the side of absurdity.

8) I'd love to see older 24-player raids brought down to 8-player just to see how much they would have to completely redesign those raids, especially the tower raids since they're all inherently designed for three separate raid groups. Void Ark I think wasn't as much of a challenge just to readjust players to that mass raid playstyle. Overall, I think all the 24-player raids are pretty much perfect as they all are currently.

9) Hopefully they'll do better with exploratory missions, because right now, they're utter flops. Lots of potential, yes, but needs more incentive to run them.

10) I honestly don't know why hunts are still relevant these days. They were great back in 3.0 when that was the only source for tome gear upgrade items, but after that, there wasn't much point. Maybe something for starting 60s, but after that, there's just nothing worth doing for hunts.

11) Crafting and gathering I think is better than it was in 2.X, but I do feel that the specialist system was a failed attempt to promote player cooperation when the vast majority of Western players just aren't that cooperative, and is now watered down to a state of near-pointlessness. Moogle dailies also make it fun to level crafters since you always get at least one quest that doesn't involve crafting, and what stuff you do have to craft isn't all that difficult.

As for your final comment, I do have to point out something: adding DRK and AST didn't change DF waiting times in Heavensward, and new tanks or healers won't change it in future expansions because usually most of the people playing those jobs were playing other jobs in the exact same role.

Generally liked what they did with hw wanna see what they do with diadem. as far as raids go fix the loot system please

1. Dungeons: Never felt that having less dungeons was bothersome or boring, as we got a lot of other ways to earn tomestones in HW, so I barely did dungeons at all anyways.
And at least (most..) HW dungeons were original, while a lot of ARR dungeons were ones we had before, just with a handful of extra barricades thrown in.

2. Gated Content: I doubt this will happen, but yeah, I actually liked that.
At the same time, I worry because SE is obviously not able to properly balance the difficulty properly for that (as in, starting with the easiest and getting more difficult from there).

3. Primals: Yeah, that would be nice :/
Since no other content drops jewelry but savage raid/tomestones, the options were always so limited when gearing up. I'd love to have more options again.

4. Raids: No, I think the system is fine as it currently is.
My complaint about the raids are the difficulty level (A3S, lol), the lack of actual importance to the story and the lack of ways to go from NM to savage - NM is so easy that you can faceroll it all the way through,
savage so much harder that you'll instantly hit a brick wall unless you know what you are doing - and nothing else in the game required that.
I'd like NM to build up to savage, with the final turn of NM being just below the first turn on savage difficulty.

5. PvP: To be fair, there is SO much more stuff that is exclusive to PvE content than PvP will ever get...but yeah, as someone who also does not like PvP, it's annoying how much they try to push us into doing it despite all the resisting.
So far, I have only met 1 single person who did lots of PvP thanks to the Garo event and when he got all the loot said "That was actually fun, I want to continue".
Everyone else I know got angry and frustrated for the past few weeks and those who finished sighed full of relief, happy to never having to return to that.

6. PotD: I love PotD and everything about it. No changes except expanding upon it, I hope it won't end for real with only floor 200.

7. Gearing Alts: I 100% agree. I play 5 classes very actively, and in HW could only gear up 2 out of those 5 at all.
The amount of tomestones the relic takes is ridiculous, and it's the only reliable way to gear up, since everything else relies on RNG.
My other 3 prefered classes even still have some ilvl 200 pieces that are only going away now because of the PvP gear from the Garo event.
It sucks how I have to pick only 2 jobs to actively play because the others are too low to enter most content.

8. Alliance Raids: With everyone outgearing content so much when it's no longer relevant, everything dies so fast that 24-man raids take less time than most dungeon runs. I don't feel that this needs to change in any way.

9. Diadem/Aquapolis/etc.: I hope they continue adding new, exciting ideas that break the formula of dungeons and raids up a bit. I always enjoy them very much, I just wish there was less RNG involved in all of them.

10. Hunts: I honestly wish hunts would just go away entirely...there is nothing exciting about them, and any time they become relevant again, it's just a giant sh*tfest waiting to happen..

11. Crafting/Gathering: I like the concept of specialists, and I like how both professions became more accessible.
On the other hand, some requirements are getting ridiculous (yes I'm looking at you, HW fishing..).

12. Story: While it's great that the MSQ is now more focused and less fetch quest-y, I enjoyed the ARR storyline a lot more.
We had a lot of time to get to know these characters and become invested in them, so anything that happened felt very impactful.
The same can't be said about HW - we just constantly get characters thrown at us that we've either never seen before or barely had anything to do with,
are supposed to care about what happens to them, before they vanish from the story again just as apruptly as they came.
I understand making the MSQ more focused, but they should give us the chance to actually get to know these characters in optional side missions if they want to streamline the MSQ, not just take it away entirely without replacement.

Additionally, ARR side characters eventually got their own storylines, dungeons, hidden eastereggs and closure (just look at everything concerning Edda ;)),
while in HW, those of us who care about the side characters that initially have no quests are left in the dust because nothing every happens with them besides their own little easteregg story.
At best, you could argue the little Miqo'te girl in Idyllshire and Khloe's weekly book are connected, but that's assumption only, nothing the game actually gives us.

Sorry, added my own #12 because story and lore is why I play RPGs, so that's the most important part for me :)