What's your first impression of Eureka?

[Priya]

I'm a former XI player; I played for about 4 years before moving over to WoW.

The "XI content" I'd want to see in XIV is Dynamis. If SE were to add a version of Dynamis to XIV it would actually be the most raid-esque zone in the game aside from Crystal Tower/Void Ark/Rabinastre. I think they "tried" to do something similar to Dynamis with Eureka, but they really missed the mark.

A Dynamis-Eureka type place could've been nice:

• Enter as an alliance group - Dynamis could have 64? people in the same instance, but you could do it easily with 24? (it's been a long time; I can't remember exact numbers, but you didn't even need half of 64)
• Roam the zone strategically killing trash (and being mindful of patrols) so as not to get overwhelmed and interrupting/CC'ing (or even kiting, lol) as appropriate
• Kill the bosses - that are always there even if some required trash to trigger; there were no NM spawns you might miss (HNM was separate content)
• Get loot - off bosses AND potentially trash mob drops
• Get relic currency - off everything
• Do relic bosses - or not
• Get loot locked until whatever reset - for Dynamis you were barred from even entering for 3 days, but SE should probably treat it like a regular raid reset instead of a zone lock

1. I'd leave out the annoying Dynamis parts like needing to buy the hourglass to enter, having to wait your turn because of limited instances, and maybe having to get the time extensions to stay inside. Although time extensions were sometimes fun.
2. SE could keep their Eureka elemental wheel if they wanted to, I suppose. It certainly would add another level of play.
3. "Open world" is a concept that doesn't always work because of zergs; they usually have to be tempered with lockouts. In its current form, if Eureka was instanced in some fashion, you wouldn't have the zerg train - not that that would really elevate this particular "content" very much. I know people pine for open world type stuff, but without lockouts on loot drops, endless farming zergs won't stop. You'll need to choose between lockouts/instances and zergs. You also cannot just limit mob credit to the first-hit parties, because doing so leads to claim wars, which are never fun for long.
4. Long NM spawn triggers/timers for progression are kind of lame. We knew that already from book fates, S rank hunts, and OG diadem.

I was hoping Eureka would be something other than a mindless mob grind, but I was prepared to be disappointed. Imo, the best relic phase was the original i90 when you had to kill primals for your weapon, but I like raids/boss fights more than low-effort grinds which is why I play WoW most of the time. I'll just intermittently sub to XIV for events/story updates like I've been doing... until I can't bring myself to do even that. It's a good thing I don't have a house.