What are your thoughts on FFXIV's combat?

[Atelier-Bagur]

This is a 9 year old MMO soon. The game needs to evolve and keep things fresh to maintain momentum and growth. ARR through to Shadowbringers all felt unique in their own way.

ARR was a rebirth as it's name suggests
Heavenward was almost as thorough a rework as ARR in terms of gameplay.
Stormblood was a comparatively weak expansion in some regards but even so it still ushered in many significant rethinks not only of classes but also the importance of side content such as Eureka.
Shadowbringers brought with it a new found focus on accessibility and narrative.

Endwalker is pretty clearly aimed at riding the coattails of Shadowbringers huge success but as a result, it lacks it's own identity as an expansion. It's just doubling down on the same highlights as Shadowbringers (And IMO falls short at doing so).

To give an example of what I mean, look at how a typical raider will tackle each new Expansion release.

Level a job through the MSQ > Spam Dungeons to get basic tome gear > Spam primals to get Primal Gear > Wait 2 weeks for Normal Mode Raids > Farm 2 weeks of tokens for Normal Gear > Buy/craft Crafted and Penta Meld it > Wait 2 weeks for Savage > etc

This routine has remained strangely intact from Heavensward through to Endwalker with the only change being the relative ease of materia now vs back then. I'm really not sure why.

There are plenty of other areas SE could throw curveballs at us again. Bozja's raids were a decent curveball, lets see more of that elsewhere to break how formulaic and by the numbers the core gameplay loop is in places.

Kinda hard to already judge EW when you're going with the perspective of a completed expansion timeline with Shb if you're bringing up stuff like Bozja and all of its raids which were things that were added in post-Shb patches. To me, I already feel like EW is giving way more bang for its buck with not only concluding the 10 year story, but also all the new forms of content we're getting such updating the old ARR duties in the msq, adding in duty support for those old dungeons, pvp rework, new quality of life features and now with 6.2 we'll be getting 2 new forms of mid-core content with variable and criterion dungeons and island sanctuary along with additional duty support for HW and lets not forget they're finally going to do the initial graphical updates transition within post-EW up to 7.0

Bozja was literally a slimmed down version of Eureka (a piece of content from SB) that while I absolutely enjoyed it; lets not kid ourselves with how much of a mess and unfinished the overall content was. They were being ambitious and we did get some additional fun raids, but the werent able to fulfill a lot of the ideas that were planned for it, relegating to rushing the whole experience. Its a shame but oh well.