Other stuff I've remembered from transition to HW and early HW:

I had been around since 1.0 beta and we were told Musketeer class was going to come later, in the actual 1.0 release. When that didn't happen, they kept pushing it back until Tanaka left and Yoshi-P came in, when it was dropped. 2.0 still saw no Musketeer but we finally got MCH in 3.0. I immediately rushed to level it up, thinking that it would get better once it's level 50, and then level 60, but I never got around to liking the RNG proc combat style and dropped it. Like modern DNC, your rotation revolved around fishing for procs, but you had 3 abilities that each had a 50/50 shot (lol) of proccing off each other and it was not fun to sit there pressing 1 over and over and not getting a proc. Still not a fan of wildfire either to this day either.

People complained in-game and in the forums about DRK being a tank and not a DPS and that it wasn't a scythe class. Subsequently, there were a lot of bad DRKs, played by people trying tank for the first time.

AST wasn't that great in patch 3.0 either. A few healer main friends got super excited over it, got it to level 60, and then back to whatever was meta back then. Cleric Stance was still around though and I think it was after HW that it, stoneskin, and protect ended up disappearing. People are still divided on Cleric Stance to this day since stance-dancing gave you better DPS but you had to do more and some people felt that healer shouldn't be responsible for contributing that much to DPS checks. My main problem with it was that I'd go from a phase where I needed to DPS to a phase where I needed to heal and forget I had it on and wondering why everyone is dying.

After these jobs, it feels like SE decided that 2 at a time is better and they've all been much easier and less complex.


The biggest thing I miss from HW is the title screen. I think you can change it manually after already getting the current title screen, but it's not the same as launching the game and getting that song immediately.

Retroactively, it also feels like it was the last time we had a really good hub city. Everything was usually nice to look at and it didn't feel like there was a lot of wasted space like in Kugane or Crystarium, which are expansive and have a lot of neat things, but even in the height of their popularity it felt like they were still partly empty because they were so big. Sharlayan feels busier than Crystarium, but it doesn't fill a lot of vertical space on the screen like Kugane and especially Ishgard had.


I didn't raid in HW but I heard that there was a specific part of Alexander that broke a lot of static parties/friendships.