Half baked, it has to be said.

[Synaesthesia]

Dude, your griping about purely aesthetic parts to game and trying to pass them off as 'critical'. The exception might be BLU, but as a limited job it is sidelined to side content and anything having to do with BLU, only affects BLU.

Homogenization of jobs within a role, encounter design, job design, questionable decisions of where to allocate resources; these are the critical aspects to the game that needs to be addressed. Hairstyles? Job sound effects? Please.

I agree completely. There are individual jobs and even entire roles that are suffering from everything from balance issues to monotonous gameplay and basic usability. It irritates me that they came up with all of these assets to patch up a sideshow while there are classes that are losing population and not having fun.

[Arazehl]

Why do you post from a level 1 alt and not your main? As it is, I can't give your post serious credibility, based on your experience with those classes mentioned, other than attention seeking.

[Avidria]

Well, the new races do certainly feel half baked. Unfortunately. :/

[TheMightyMollusk]

My only big complaint is that I think they should've put the long-term grindy stuff (relic, deep dungeon, etc) as a priority over Ultimate, simply because more people are going to go for it. It would keep more subscriptions active. But I admit that, as someone who isn't into Ultimate, my opinion is biased.

[YellowCrystarium]

They should be designing quality content for the vast majority of subscribers, not just for the 1%. It is the majority of subscribers who do the more casual content that pays Square Enix's bills, or at least FFXIV's division.

[Vahlnir]

They should be designing quality content for the vast majority of subscribers, not just for the 1%. It is the majority of subscribers who do the more casual content that pays Square Enix's bills, or at least FFXIV's division.

I mean, even the "1%" deserves to be thrown a bone.

[Lersayil]

I mean, even the "1%" deserves to be thrown a bone.

Completely true, but priorities should be in place I think. We are sort of missing any new combat oriented long-term format content (a damn mouthful, but basically things akin to deep dungeons, Eureka-esque areas or relic quests).

Personal biases aside, I think its safe to say, that at least one such content should be introduced early to keep more subscriptions active before introducing bite sized hardcore and side content.

[YellowCrystarium]

I mean, even the "1%" deserves to be thrown a bone.

The 1% have received Ultimate raids with shiny weapons as goodies, as well as blue mage being allowed to participate in savage raiding completion, though not many people do that either. It is about time the majority got something of equal value, with equal time investment.

[Vidu]

I dont really have the energy to properly reply to such a topic again (seriously, if you're that unhappy about minor things like hairstyles and headgear... maybe just look for a different game at this point?), but I wanted to at least comment on the whole "flashy animation"-thing by saying how thankful and happy I am that dancer doesnt have flashy, glowly, screen shaking stuff - because that flashy, glowly, screen shaking stuff is giving me headaches. So bad infact that I've turned the effects of other people down and only leaving my own on, while avoiding playing certain jobs (outside of leveling them to max-level) like WHM (Holy) and BLM (Flare).

I love the elegant, flowing animations of the dancer and I dont feel that it would be much in the "spirit" of this elegant class to blow stuff up in a huge explosion. Its an elegant flow, a dance - not blowing stuff up... I dont need a big finishing move that lets my screen explode in sparkles and leaves me with a dizzy head and the urge to lie down, drop the job or turn off even the animations for my character.
If you want to play a job with flashy animations: Take your pick from BLM, SMN... basically the jobs that have them.

[SenorPatty]

Overall, the game is half baked. There are high point of excellence like the msq and several aesthetics, including job animation, sounds and looks but as usual, a lot of the side content is very thin, not generally well received or not updated (looking at you GC). When looking globally at the jobs ( we're up to 17 now), the impression that I get is of one where it feels like the department overseeing them had a deadline they could not meet and they could simply not come up with fresh ideas to implement in time to keep the jobs distinct. These uninspired job changes naturally gave way to more job homogeneity though, somewhere in the cracks, they somehow succeeded at making some jobs work better than ever ( like MCH) and others tweak them just right enough so they feel wholesome (like SAM and DRG). And then, there are the healer jobs, which enough has already been said about them.

As a theme park mmo, if anything I'm just simply more disappointed that although it's clear at how barebones things are overall, nothing in the schedule regarding how content is distributed has changed. It's one thing to keep the schedule the same because things generally work well, it's another when things aren't. I don't have the metrics regarding BLU activity, other than the actual census regarding it, the chatter ingame about it and reddit/forums but from perspective, it wasn't such a big hit pre-shb and still isn't up to now. Imo, it wouldn't such a big, glaring problem if other, more significant content had been released alongside of it. The new pvp map was released alongside it but it is universally agreed that pvp is not content that carries such depth to say that it overshadowed the new BLU content. Hence, BLU's scrutiny and disappointment rises ever more as people just can't help but shrug and take their "scheduled" break because SE has unintentionally groomed them to recognize content lull when they feel it.

Perhaps before, aside from hitting its few but very important highs, there was lot of average mids and very few lows but now it's the reverse: all the average stuff has become low, either because the passage of time has rendered them that way or because the team changed them into that.