The Current Status of FFXIV Patch 3.1 and How to Address it Moving Forward

[Alahra]

Even WoW (at least up until WoD) doesn't follow the basic model this poorly. Each expansion (again with the exception of WoD in regards to the classes) came with new groundwork that would set the frame for future content. Heavensward lacks that and they're trying to said those new groundworks during the 3.x patch cycles (which makes it much more demanding as far as time constraints is concerned).

Honestly, I feel like FFXIV does a better job with the content model than WoW did, for me at least. We get more dungeons per Expansion than WoW ever did, at least for now--I'm honestly a bit worried about them going down to 2 per major patch. Are we going to be at 1 per major patch in 4.x? I sure hope not.

But I also don't generally enjoy Raid content, so FFXIV's focus on regular release of low-man/midcore content is much more appealing to me than WoW's Raid-focused model. I also prefer FFXIV's "smaller" Raid scale, which means that FFXIV has been the first MMO where I've actually been interested in raiding to a significant degree (current Savage Alex notwithstanding because of the difficulty level).

But as far as 2.x content goes, you're probably out of luck. They've already touched on roughly half of the content HW brought. We'll likely see a stage that touches on the Primals in some way, and one that touches on the Levequests in some way. Anima already interacts in a small way with Diadem (the crafting mats come from there), but they'll likely tap that in the future, too. If they were already using all of these things in this first step, we'd be retreading 3.0 content again and again in future steps (because there wouldn't be any 3.0 content we haven't already had to do for it), and personally, I'd much rather revisit a little of the older content in each stage so I'm not getting burnt out on the freshest stuff that much more rapidly. At least then, it's a trip down memory lane through something I probably haven't done in awhile (or at all, in the case of Beast Tribe quests).