Heavensward outstanding expansion....

[Saccharin]

MSQ in content patches were too thin. This upcoming patch bettr be 6 hours long to make up for it.

[Moomba33]

MSQ in content patches were too thin. This upcoming patch bettr be 6 hours long to make up for it.

I would love for the last story patch to be long but I doubt it will be.
SE seems to have made an effort to keep the HW patches short and direct since a lot of players found the ARR ones to be too meandering (the 2.1-2.55 story is often cited as a reason this game needs a jump potion).

[Pintsized]

HW added several annoying mechanisms, not least the hard gating of zones by MSQ progress, destroying the free-form exploration I love and which ARR had.

Frankly, HW was simply ARR repeated, with endless Primals being introduced for no apparent reason; the story justification for some of them was frankly paper-thin.

Nothing in HW was new except for flying which was only there it seems to me to provide the gating mechanism I assume Poshi wanted to make the game more theme-park (think 'tramlines') than ever.

[Silverquick]

I would love for the last story patch to be long but I doubt it will be.
SE seems to have made an effort to keep the HW patches short and direct since a lot of players found the ARR ones to be too meandering (the 2.1-2.55 story is often sited as a reason this game needs a jump potion).

Yeah I found that to be exactly what you are saying...

The first portion of the MSQ in ARR, while at times juvenilish... was at least pretty good anyway and still exciting at times, just not as good as Heavensward. But the extended campaign after that was... well that was the tedius part.

That's the part that felt more like a chore doing, and it was nothing that exciting until the Betrayal. I know a guy in my FC, that was actually working his way through it... until he got to that part and then just died out... I know because I felt the same way doing it.

So I do see why the Jump potions would get really popular at that point.

But once I got to Heavensward after the betrayal... I was like... WHOA!! Ok that one really took off.

[DamianFatale]

You haven't completed it so you don't you know the pain of

A) The wAit between 3.0 and 3.1

B) Being around for diadem's launch

C) the raid being so hard and pointless that it kills off any drive for most of the raiding sCene to complete it

D) Diadem BiS for a few weeks, and then a quick nerf immediately killing it

E) rEd scrips

F) Blue scrips F

G) Crafters are no longer required for melding - YAY, the only thing that crafters could do is now gone! Awesome! Gathering still tied timed nodes, except for a good while all of their time was dedicated to a weekly currency! COOL!

H) a wHole bunch of other disappointing things.

This has been a dreadful expansion.

Cry me a river, if you don't like it, quit. It's like you're staring at the face of all of the positives, and outright ignoring them.

[Cadmar]

Cry me a river, if you don't like it, quit. It's like you're staring at the face of all of the positives, and outright ignoring them.

These are exactly the things that DID make me quit. I'm jumping back in now in hopes that SB can revitalize my experience in what once was my gaming passion. The story really is great in HW but some of the other decision were, at the best questionable, and at the worst, incompetent.

The raiding system in HW really killed it for me. My entire static group basically quit due to the way it was implemented. I don't expect it to change in SB, but I'm going into more eyes open now as opposed to the gut punch that HW was.

Are there some good things, sure. But I would argue that most of the good things have some negative impact as well. Look at PotD. It is a new, fun, and unique experience. That said, I can definitely tell that it is the preferred way to level these days. I have noticed a significant decrease in player ability since I last played and I would bet that much of it has to do with the lack of the real, tactical experience achieved from dungeon leveling. Don't get me wring, I know FATEs were an issue before but it seems much more pronounced now.

I remain hopeful for the future, but I think it is a fair argument that HW was poorly implemented in many ways and potentially a step backward on everything non-story wise.

Side note: Your post comes across as very hostile which seem unnecessary in what has been a pretty fair discussion so far.

[Silverquick]

Look at PotD. It is a new, fun, and unique experience. That said, I can definitely tell that it is the preferred way to level these days. I have noticed a significant decrease in player ability since I last played and I would bet that much of it has to do with the lack of the real, tactical experience achieved from dungeon leveling..

Honestly I have no idea why one would even do POTD unless you're leveling a secondary Job.

Heck the Main Story Quest alone levels you faster than the content for them.

I was consistently about 2-3 levels above the content for the quest level with only doing the MSQ and one Dungeon Roulette on occasion, and FATEs whenever I ran across them.

When I got to Heavensward, I was level 54 doing the level 50 content. And just opening up the level 50 Dungeon Roulette unlock has me already at level 59 along with the MSQ. And at this point anything level 50 is a tad below my level.

I can only assume this is for Secondary Jobs you might want to work up... because outside of that, POTD is kinda pointless.

You'll level a Main Character much faster just doing the MSQ and an occasional extra dungeon here and there.

Plus you'll never unlock any extra content for the game in POTD.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong here... I get that some people do like POTD... but that's only like maybe 2-5% of the game... and if that's all you're doing then you missed playing the other 95% of the game. AND in all fairness, its the same way with the people who are ONLY interested in jumping to the top levels so you can RAID... you brush by the majority of the game only to play this little tiny 10%... and just ignore the rest or feel its just something to skip over... and somehow think this is like... the ENTIRE FFXIV experience for you... well its not...

Step out and enjoy all the content... you might be surprised there's a lot more to the game than you thought.

[thegreatonemal]

HW was an improvement in pretty much every way. as i wasn't around during the ARR i don't have nostalgia for it and can look at them both objectively. Devs had some missteps not telling people how over tuned goardias was until midas was ready to come out which killed the raid scene even more than the community already does to it was the biggest. They made materia actually useful and it has an impact on gear now and provided a way for players to make gil among other things.

[Atlaworks]

Snip

So what you're saying is it's been a terrible expansion for crafters and gatherers. I mean, you're not wrong, don't worry. I still contest that Heavensward's story was really good, PotD is a welcome change to the formula, and they tried new things with Diadem and exploratory missions. Also in Heavensward they finally let me ride other mounts and queue with my chocobo out. Finally, Teioh doesn't need to sit at home gathering dust!

As for crafting and gathering? It's just an utter mess. Scrips are awful, I hate them and want them out my my house. It also introduced the dumbest specialization system ever- they really wanted single crafters to be able to keep up with omnicrafters, so they released a specialization system that did a series of things.

- Limited crafting items to certain specializations, meaning omnicrafting is dead until that equipment set is obselete
- Introduced specialist commands to specialized crafters, which are all an incomprehensible mess(Hey, Whistle), cost scrips to use(Hey, Heart), and are all overall crap
- Actually limited specialized crafters further, due to the actions that weren't pure trash from specs be watered down versions of existing cross-class skills
+ Give +20 craftsmanship/control!
- Frankly made everything worse for all crafters across the board.

Of course, I will say they went through steps to fix a lot of it. Zhloe has gone a great length towards making the red scrip grind bearable enough for me to actually consider it on any given week, and delineations for Heart of the X cost way less blue scrips than they used to- and with Zhloe giving you tons of blue scrips and blue scrips being relatively useless once you buy the seven million recipe books, using them is eventually not a horrible pain.

That's not going into gathering, though I don't gather enough to know other than it combined scrips with that hidden node system, and I didn't like collectable gathering at all.

[Elleia]

The story was leagues better than ARR's, for sure. The content, though, I'm pretty torn on. I took a break shortly after clearing Thordan EX/A3S (so...January 2016 I think) due to the lack of content. I enjoyed coming back and catching up on everything I've missed since then, and I enjoyed this raid tier as well. Starting to fall into that "nothing left to do" stage again, so I'll likely take a break until Stormblood once the last patches drop.