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

[Ryel]

I didn't quite get the same sense from your full post as I do from your TL;DR: version. You described at length how in your opinion it doesn't take long to get to 60. If it takes players weeks to get to 60, then pray tel how are they saying there is not enough content? Any game that takes weeks to complete is more than worth the cost of the HW expansion, but hitting lvl 60 on a job is hardly completing the expansion is it? I'm actually kind of confused by your post because you spend so long describing how you can level up, and then what happens after you level up, but you're not really addressing the point made.

Read that part again:

This means that anyone with 30 minutes to an hour a day (queues provided when doing dungeons) can easily make their way up from 50 to 60 over a period of a few weeks if their main form of enjoyment is battle content (which btw is required to unlock the crafting / gathering content).

If your pace is faster or slower than that then obviously your personal play experience will be very different, but this game isn't like a lot of other games where leveling to cap often took extended periods of time.

It takes maybe 2 weeks at a mere 30 minutes to an hour a day at it's most casual, but any more than that and you are rapidly approaching the level cap, in fact given that the game was released over summer vacation for a large number of NA players it was quite easy for many of them to hit 60 over the course of a weekend due to how easy the game makes it to get leveling exp.

which means that statements like this:

The point being, for players who play in a very focused and time intensive manner, they can cap their level at 60 within a small number of days, and be farming Alex Normal for Alex Savage, then onto Savage before many players have surpassed lvl 52. Playing in such a tightly focused manner skips huge amounts of content in the game, but there are a fair number of players who only desire to raid, and don't bother with anything else in the game. These are the ones speeding to the end-game and then burning out by voluntarily farming content for gear drops to use when raiding. When those same players start complaining about the content in the expansion not being enough, or being copy/paste from ARR (which IMHO is a completely ridiculous assertion to make), they are complaining from a position that they inflicted on themselves.

If people burn through 10-20% of a game, and get bored, then why should we pay any attention to them for their complaints when they haven't touched the remaining 80+% of the game?

Ignore the fact that you don't actually have to be playing in a focused manner to achieve what you're saying, in fact you just need to be slightly above the most casual of casual play hours.

Game content should not be so shallow that by playing more than 30 minutes to an hour here and there you are essentially on the fast track to invalidating 80-90% of the game's content because the majority of it doesn't have real roadblocks or staying power to make it worthwhile.

If leveling takes virtually no time to get done, and endgame takes virtually no time to get done bar the one raid, then there is an issue with the volume and worth of your overall content, something an expansion is supposed to add more substance to. Instead the beginning of the current expansion not only gave us more of the same while invalidating 99% of the previous content that was released in ARR (ayyyyy coil) but it also further streamlined it so it takes players even less time to blow through multiple ilvls worth of gear sets and content additions.

And yes the content is very much copy pasted (in format) from ARR, lets compare this to systems from the game that shall not be named:

Dynamis
Limbus
Salvage

Over three expansions each one of those were added as a form of endgame content (1 per expac), and while they all followed the same theme of kill mobs, then kill bosses, and get loot they all took very different approaches to how players went about doing so, this doesn't even include the various other endgame events each expansion added like Sky, Sea, and Einherjar or even ENMs, BCNMs, ZNMs, or Nyzul Isle.

The purpose of an expansion is meant to enhance and add more to the game systems that were established as a base foundation (2.0), but in this case the endgame (excluding Savage) has actually become obsolete at a much faster pace than 2.0's initial batch due to various features like easy mode Alex instead of baseline Coil, Lack of a 3.0 launch relic quest, the rapid ilvl climb, and new weekly limits (sup red scrips).

I'm really not sure what it is that people expect to see in an expansion. The expansion of FFXIV added;

New race
New jobs
New level cap
New crafting system
New trials
New raid (with two modes)
New Dungeons
New (and much larger) zones
New FC content (Airships)
New mode of travel (Flight)
New monsters
New gear
New side quests
New leve quests
New hunts
...

All those EXPAND the original game significantly. How is that not an expansion? Seems pretty good to me, it definitely expands the game from what we had with ARR 2.55. Especially considering that this development work was done in parallel with the continual schedule of major patches every 3 months and minor patches every 4-6 weeks in between, along with hot fixes.

What is it that you who are complaining would consider extensive enough or different enough, to satisfy your expectations?


Unless the world has changed significantly, EX mode primals are not "mid-core" content. When released EX primals are end-game, hardcore content, and only become mid-core once nerfs, echo and overgear puts them within reach of the less elite players. This was how it was with ARR, and I have seen and heard nothing different with regard to HW. I think this idea that EX mode primals are less than hardcore comes from hardcore players who have burned out on existing end-game content and won't play other non-end-game content in the game. Seems like people's expectations rescale dynamically as they overgear content and burnout.

You are correct in that the expansion added many of those things, but they are added as framework which is something any MMO expansion is expected to add, things like new zones, races, dungeons etc.

The point the OP, my TL;DR, and many others are getting at is that expansion framework doesn't really mean anything if the systems and the pacing are the same or in some cases worse than it was in 2.0. while the zones are amazing to look at and have great potential so did plenty of the ARR zones that players hardly even return to now. Sure you can praise the new dungeons but that novelty wears off realy quick when the game expects you to run the same 2 of them to cap Eso each week. And a normal raid with no bite not only lessens the appeal of the savage raid as much of it becomes old hat as far as story and exploration goes, it's actually turned off many of the raiders who previously ran coil in the 2.x series.

I said before that i personally enjoy the Bismark Ex fight, but that really doesn't mean anything if i have virtually zero reason to ever run it again because the game gives me no reason or incentive to.

They have amazing framework laid down, they've had it since 2.0; the world looks cool, the battle system is fun, they've been getting better at balancing loot rules (token systems are finally back from 1.0 btw) but now it's time to take larger steps forward and so far we're just seeing more of the same. A game from the same company made over 10 years ago should not have more ambition and substance than their current flagship product, especially after all the attention and commercial success it's now receiving, hence why many players keep hoping they step it up but are disappointed when they just receive more of what we had before.

Also as to your comment about Ex primals not being midcore content, sure they are.

The difference is just the amount of the playerbase that is actually willing to attempt the content, unfortunately so many players are unaware of their actual performance due to things like the lack of an in-game parser (seriously there are like 20 other threads on this), and the fact that the game itself doesn't really encourage players to become more proficient at their jobs (just throw echo at it).

There's also this strange boogeyman mentality when it comes to people putting up Party Finder groups for learning but that's a completely different rant, the point is that outside of savage a vast majority of the content available isn't as hard some try to make it out to be, but many players either don't attempt it at all (cause reasons?) or get discouraged by a handful of unskilled or unlearned groups and give up until echo is added.