Playing an expansion as current content has been a lacklustre MMO experience

[strawberrycake]

If you are a professional game critic, sure. If you are recommending a game for someone else to play, yes. If you are continually disappointed that the choices you would have made for game design are not the choices made by the actual development team, not so much. Feel free to be critical. Just don't whine about it when someone else's ideas of what deserve criticism are different from your own, because, frankly, the only one who can be critically objective is that professional game critic, who does not play the game after assessing it.

Do the mechanics in this game work? Obviously.

Was the 2-minute burst window a development team design, or was it a meta that became so popular the developers decided to incorporate it into the game officially? Chicken, meet egg. The majority of players will look at you and ask, 'what burst window'?

Was the choice to create everything instanced a good one back in 2014? Absolutely. It allowed members of different worlds to play a dungeon together.

Is that choice still a good one in 2022? It provides a means to increase the number of players leveling in a particular zone, as an example. Would you rather have a queue for each zone in the Open World during an expansion launch?

Are classes losing their uniqueness? It depends on what you mean by 'unique'. The playstyle for a Black Mage is indeed different from a Red Mage. The difference between Dancer and Bard is high enough that one is chosen for raids more often than the other. Your definition of 'unique' will be different from mine.

So, as for the 2 min burst, raiders pre-warned that it would be a horrid idea, same with the DPS meta pre Shadowbringers. They just didn't listen lmao.

DPs and Burst meta were wholely on them, The Synergystic meta is what everyone wanted to keep. I was there back in Stormblood when they scrapped it.

Edit: Also they choose to BLATANTLY ignore that only high end groups specifically went for brute forcing content with DPS. The game was way more open ended back then and now it's a lot more linear, which, frankly kinda sucks.

Edit 2: ALLLSOO, The 2 Min Burst Meta is such a bad idea that it makes them look like Liars when they say all jobs are viable. The Synergy based Meta THEY get rid of was better for the game and more healthy for players looking to get into savage, tho the Skill Cieling was higher, Lowering the floor actively gave the, a bigger work load. That being said I don't think they shouldn't lower the floor, but they could have done it with fixing how viable all jobs were AND by keeping more play styles of raiding, and not just brute forcing bosses.