Expansion is only temporarily enjoyable. Fails to fix all main flaws.

[Fatshine]

I will try to be as unbiased as possible. These are my opinions and experiences, so if you care to read OP, or anyone else, I am not trying to change the game to cater to only myself. I actually have no concrete suggestions that are long thought out. I will just throw out ideas and share what I think about this game.

I have been playing actively since April 2014. So I have a year and 3 months playing FF14. In that time I grew to love this game. The only other MMO I have ever played in my life is DC Universe online. In my time playing FF14, I made cool friends, met assholes, played various battle classes/jobs, raided, etc. The only thing I have not delved into is crafting/gathering (yet). I loved most things about this game. Then came Heavensward.

The story, new huge areas, flight, new job skills, excitement of new dungeons, new gear (some re-skins that are available to more jobs), made me so happy and giddy. Shortly after I beat the story, I started hunting and looking for new statics to be raid ready. As soon as this happened, I started to enjoy the game a lot less, and see what I actually didn't like about ARR. It hit me like a truck. I was now doing the same shit as before. I was failing at hunts (even in a party actively hunting, I would miss A's and S ranks. People were relentless on my server with early pulls), and I was grinding tomestones (Myth, Soldiery, Poetics) in order to gear up again so that I can run EX primals for a weapon (like Shiva's Diamond weapons), to then raid. Huh, felt familiar. Let's see hunts still blows (grinding for new sands, oil) and the only time hunts were awesome were in patch 2.4 I believe, basically the patch when most were not hunting anymore, I don't remember which). Law is Darklight 2.0, and I was in a rush to be at the top again. It felt so awful that I decided to become a "casual". I decided to play at my own pace, I decided to stop hardcore raiding.

I admit, it stung hard seeing people with Hive weapons and max geared while I wasn't. My competitive nature urged me to do the same shit again, but playing the story at my own pace made me see how free I was playing. People in my LS and free company were farming Ravana EX by like the 3rd day of early access. Now I see how SE played it real safe. No I am not calling them lazy. I know they worked their asses off, but I already got through the best part of the expansion in my eyes. Soon we will get a new Crystal Tower, Syrcus Tower, World of Darkness with more of the same formula, and a new relic weapon to go through hell with. There is no real fundamental change.

What can they do? I honestly don't know seeing how my MMO experience is limited. Perhaps like a base defense/horde mode? Open world PVP? Further character customization? 2man dungeons? (Like DCUO duos mode and no not overgeared lv unsync), raids that involve environmental interactions? (No not just pressing 1 button to active a shield like in Leviathan EX or Bismarck), I really don't know. I can't really put my finger on it, but take away the shiny wrapping paper, and 3.0 is more of 2.X. This is why I will have a different approach to playing because it works for me. I can only suggest the awesome things I loved in DCUO, but that MMO is vastly different. SE said it themselves that ARR was more about building a foundation. Now is the time to gamble with new ideas. Do I really want to go through 3.X and then do the same in 4.X?

[Reinha]

I admit, it stung hard seeing people with Hive weapons and max geared while I wasn't. My competitive nature urged me to do the same shit again, but playing the story at my own pace made me see how free I was playing. People in my LS and free company were farming Ravana EX by like the 3rd day of early access. Now I see how SE played it real safe. No I am not calling them lazy. I know they worked their asses off, but I already got through the best part of the expansion in my eyes. Soon we will get a new Crystal Tower, Syrcus Tower, World of Darkness with more of the same formula, and a new relic weapon to go through hell with. There is no real fundamental change.

My experience is that the majority of people in MMOs want the best gear to come from challenging group content so I don't see FFXIV's model changing anytime soon. Adding ranked pvp would be one way of adding variety to group content but I believe a lot of competitive raiders would be unhappy about having to pvp to speed up gearing. Open world content would have to be competitive (tagged by 1 group, long respawn, changing location) to not be too easy and to not resemble the existing format of raids, and people already complain about the open-tag hunts being too exclusive... This is why I think that dungeons, trials and raids will remain the primary source of gear or currency in the future.

After playing during 4 different expansions of WoW, I've reached the same casual mindset as you. (This is a subjective feeling about the subject so don't take offense people!) It's exciting to be a part of the first wave of progress each time new group content is released, but after I witnessed a few gear resets i.e. expansions I realized how superficial the competition for the newest and best gear was. There will always be another raid, another dungeon, another trial and another gear vendor, and it's like a neverending treadmill of killing enemies for bounty which will eventually be rendered worthless. I ended up quitting my raid team in WoW and it felt really relieving to not have to make time for raiding and to keep my gear in shape.

Nowadays I don't mind taking my time leveling, reading quest text and doing things that don't advance my character, because in the end I pay to be entertained. I focus on lasting things like the story experience, titles, pets, mounts, class leveling and getting money for housing. I saw a fc message a few days back telling people to get ready for Alexander and I was genuinely happy I didn't have to hurry to finish questing and to get gear. It's hard to let go of the competitive attitude at first but in the end it's worth it to some people.

I'm very happy I found FFXIV as it offers a casual story based experience that I've enjoyed from the start. There's grinds, easy group content and world content but also challenging stuff for those days I'm in the mood for it. However, I understand that this might not be enough for the more competitive players. Those who would like bigger amounts of raid content might be better off looking for different games to play on the side. (WoW still makes top quality raids, for example.) The resources of the dev team are limited after all and they will probably continue creating a lot of casual content, just like they have for the past 2 years, in order to maintain their core audience. As a poster on the first page said, it's a conscious design choice made to attract a certain gamer crowd, not a flaw.