I guess it's time

[Thayos]

I hardly think anyone considers LoV and Diadem, while being "new pieces of content", is a great thing.

LoV and Diadem were meant to serve two completely different purposes. I think LoV was a great example of the devs trying to "Tanaka" us by giving us content nobody really wanted. As for Diadem, I think that could have been incredibly fulfilling had it been more carefully designed (and the dev team is revamping it as we speak, so we'll see how that turns out).

Both Diadem and Deep Dungeons are meant to be content types that are expanded and kept relevant from here on out, as are the game's other dominant content types. So none of that is really "throwaway content." It's more accurate to call the various pieces of content within each type "repetitive."

And I do get your point about how a lot of the game is just song/dance while doing DPS. And there are downsides associated with that, for sure -- like battles being won based on memorizing patterns rather than using your job's skills.

But I don't view that as a deal-breaker. That's just the type of game this is. The upside of this game's design is that all the jobs are incredibly balanced, and we don't have jobs that are shunned by the community or excluded from certain content types like we saw in XI.

XIV punishes you for not capping out each week

I also don't agree with this.

As a longtime player of FFXI, I find this game to be incredibly FORGIVING for people who don't grind to stay on the bleeding edge of iLevels. In XI, if you fell behind it could take months to catch up... YEARS even if you fell out of line for certain drops in events like Dynamis. Damn, I had to grind dynamis for six to eight hours per week for TWO FREAKING YEARS just to get my rdm hat. And that was just the time spent in the same Dynamis zones.

In XIV, I could leave the game for six months, come back and have a high enough iLevel to succeed in most content within a month or two.