Why Eureka is a worse form of the Diadem IMO

[MageBlack]

While I'd certainly like to see these things, that doesn't mean it such changes are the minimum threshold by which to see positive change. Consider the HW relics, for instance, and light farming. At least that allowed more avenues of play than Eureka, Eureka, or... Eureka. They could have just as easily gone further, allowing you to loot Key Items from various content types by which to enhance your Relics, ultimately to the same result but with pace approaching a level commensurate to the effort per minute required for harder vs. easier sources of those upgrades.

Personally, I'd love to see open-ended quests by which to pursue relic-craft knowledge or upgrade techniques, which could then be used in the construction of other relics for other jobs, make up at least half the process.

Was the light farming stage the first stage of the HW relic? Honestly asking, I couldnt be bothered to do the HW relic. I managed to get my main class Zeta, by that point i was sick of running from one end of erozea to another. Probably why I like Eureka, one stop shopping. Don't mind if they add in more ways to get to the same goal within Eureka, that's a good idea. Reason I asked about the light farming is because I keep seeing people comparing the later stages of the relic to this first stage of the Eureka weapons and I dont think that is an entirely honest comparison.

There's actually absolutely no reason that would need be the case. Class balance is not held tightly over the leveling process; it's content to simply be tight enough that no one flies off in a rage. What would it matter if the BLU didn't seek out situational ability Y before going into Bartam's Mettle? The difference between a decent and slightly-above-decent BLU is already going to make a larger difference than that skill would. Balance only really becomes a thing at level cap, and so long as there is a fixed total arsenal of spells, the methods of acquisition are largely irrelevant.

The reason you're likely not to see BLU receive actions by alternate means is because there's little exciting alternate content in which to set those methods of acquisition. If a BLU were able to fight a mob well above their own level to receive an action "early", the issue would be less one of balance as, in the process of getting some friends together to go and get the skill from elite mob X, one is left wondering why the open world feels so damn barren.

The systems remain rigid and stale less because they have to as simply for fear of the can of worms opened if the game exposed how much of itself has been left undeveloped, how many opportunities are skipped. It might not take a meteor, even then, for XIV to exit its contentedly sheltered state, but it will at least take a crafty sequence of improvements, each seemingly beneficial in its own right, that each prototype and move towards some far more fleshed out state for the game -- filling in without exposing the voids.

See, this is all wishful thinking. I agree that it wouldnt matter at all for your average hum drum dungeon that you could do with your eyes closed. But are you new to the forums? Honestly asking since there are threads upon threads complaining about Healer DPS, Tank DPS, and they arent even DPS. Even doing an expert dungeon, which is faceroll easy, I have had people go off on me for being "terrible". We flew through it super easy and no one died so I dont even know what his beef was. They will be excluded automatically from most end game content unless they are equipped with the cookie cutter best spec. This isnt anything new.

i don't want it to be that way but I doubt BLU will be what you are hoping for. I'm still a little salty about the RDM, I wanted the En- spells and the -Spikes spells and instead we got...
Ninja and Monk cant even have two separate weapons in each hand for the same reasons!
They cant even include the elemental wheel outside of a close system for fear of one class being preferred over the other.

I could go on but its just frustrating me recalling all the lost potential... I wish I could have cured a ghost to death in 2.0....

[Shurrikhan]

Was the light farming stage the first stage of the HW relic? Honestly asking, I couldnt be bothered to do the HW relic. I managed to get my main class Zeta, by that point i was sick of running from one end of erozea to another. Probably why I like Eureka, one stop shopping. Don't mind if they add in more ways to get to the same goal within Eureka, that's a good idea. Reason I asked about the light farming is because I keep seeing people comparing the later stages of the relic to this first stage of the Eureka weapons and I dont think that is an entirely honest comparison.

Light farming took place over both the ARR relic (late-ish) and HW relic (early-ish), and in both cases lent a huge boost to other content types, especially through ARR's bonus light rotations. As I said, it was far from perfect, but ARR's especially opened up the range of content we saw, rather than requiring a single content form be played ad nauseum to progress.

See, this is all wishful thinking. I agree that it wouldnt matter at all for your average hum drum dungeon that you could do with your eyes closed. But are you new to the forums? Honestly asking since there are threads upon threads complaining about Healer DPS, Tank DPS, and they arent even DPS. Even doing an expert dungeon, which is faceroll easy, I have had people go off on me for being "terrible". We flew through it super easy and no one died so I dont even know what his beef was. They will be excluded automatically from most end game content unless they are equipped with the cookie cutter best spec. This isnt anything new.

Not remotely. I've been a forum regular since around 1.17, and have never been gone from the game for more than a couple months at a time, for less than a half year in total. But I've also been consistently able to prog as non-meta jobs without issue whenever I desired, and as such have found that community-enforced restrictions are rarely ever as tight as the forums allege.

Heck, sometimes the players are far more certain of a given restriction due to irrevocable systemic design than even the developers would excuse. How often do you still hear that SCH is held back by SMN or vice versa, due to their link through ACN? And yet, those jobs' toolkits are each retroactively changed even in their pre-level-30 traits and actions compared to their ACN state; any remaining connection is by convenience, for lack of enough motive to change them, rather than anything unavoidable due to the systems behind class/job design.

i don't want it to be that way but I doubt BLU will be what you are hoping for. I'm still a little salty about the RDM, I wanted the En- spells and the -Spikes spells and instead we got...
Ninja and Monk cant even have two separate weapons in each hand for the same reasons!
They cant even include the elemental wheel outside of a close system for fear of one class being preferred over the other.

I could go on but its just frustrating me recalling all the lost potential... I wish I could have cured a ghost to death in 2.0....

To be fair, I don't care how BLU itself is designed in terms of whether it's conventional or anti-conventional or whatnot. I just worry over the long-term price stagnation could have on the game, and see every element traditionally opposed to the game's current stagnated systems as an opportunity by which development could excuse rejuvenation or future-proofing without seeming to be changing things solely for the sake of change. I suspect, even, that in the lack of longer-term goals or of the ambition to pursue them, the game is more likely to focus its attractions on unnecessary and unintuitive changes, such as that of job gauges, wherein only 3 jobs (NIN, SAM, PLD -- though the last's is a poor excuse for a gauge mechanic) actually needed the more granular metric it provided, or weren't outright easier to track via the Status Bar. I worry that without development approaching some more interesting vision for both the underlying systems and breadth of cohesive content of the game (not merely LoV, GC, etc., unless they interconnect with "mainstay" content), we're likely to see more steps sideways and backwards in design, even whilst -- by too few other things to mitigate attention theretoward -- each of those failures come to annoy us more. I like the idea of BLU, in a proper expansion, among proper systemic revisions, for what it could mean for the game -- not for the job itself, and certainly not for the sake of being "true to" the job.

Heaven-on-High may well be a final straw for me. I don't know. The wasted potential of Palace of the Dead was incredibly disturbing to me, but I had to admit that it served at least as a useful time-sink and as a, if shallow, proof of concept, systemically. But if I don't see any real advancement, amounting instead to just a swap in tile set and mob selection... that may be enough to turn me away from any trust in long-term design.

Eureka, for reasons similar enough to the OP's and others' here, is still probably the most telling example of poor vision, though. All the systems behind it seem almost crafted TO generate dead space, to waste as much of the content as possible once the brief "journey" of the leveling process has been trudged through to completion. Diadem turned into a 1.21-esque glorified camp farm, due in part to too few features or diversions, but Eureka crafted almost every added feature as if to create new fundamental issues (community splitting, dead space, efficiency as loitering, etc.), all while maintaining or exacerbating previous ones (without mob and raid mechanics, this game's combat -- admittedly, like most MMO's -- can be awfully dull, given that it's primarily driven by rotations, and rotations are only made interesting by compromise and matchwork; the netcode simply cannot reliably support more than some 30 players in a single encounter; etc., etc.).

[MageBlack]

It sounds like we are both in the same boat, HoH and the next step in Eureka will be my deciding factors. I enjoyed the first iterations of both but the next ones MUST be a step up from what they originally had. If its just more of the same, I'm out only to return a month before and a month after each expansion. If HoH is still the small square rooms vaguely procedurally generated then It wont be worth it. If Pagos is just another fate train with a new skin, it would be a wasted opportunity by the devs yet again. The tidbits I've heard so far about both seem promising but we will have to wait and see it in action. Maybe its just a self defense mechanism but I tend to prefer being pessimistic of late. That way there are fewer surprises and when I am surprised, its a good thing.