Quote Originally Posted by Rilifane View Post
The difference with dungeons there is variety on many levels which leads to a very different rhythm when running dungeons. They're easy, they're casual but they don't get stale. And although you can skip a lot, only about 1/3 of groups in leveling dungeons actually do it; most do full runs because they're fun and the skippers usually only skip a bit here and there and not 3/5 bosses with the majority of the trash. No single layer of variety is the deciding factor (e.g. varying amounts of bosses, different layouts) but all combined make for a dungeon experience that never feels repetetive.

The most variety you have in terms of rhythm in FFXIV is whether a tank pulls one or two packs at a time.
FFXIV had some of it to a degree once but they purged it and made dungeons into sterile "2-3 pack > boss, rinse & repeat" corridors that look nice but that's it. It's efficient, it's dev-approved, it's the same you will do in pretty much every single dungeon, no way around it.

My sub will run out tomorrow unless we botch our last reclear today, already been back to WoW for several weeks, having a lot of fun there with no intention of returning in the foreseeable future and I have a long list of things I look forward to doing. It has a number of issues and maybe not all of them get fixed but they're types of issues I can work with just fine. It has more than enough positives to make me shrug off the negatives.
There's no nostalgia here, there's experience from playing it, looking at it carefully and deciding "Yep, this is what I enjoy and will continue to enjoy".
I played WoW at least a decade ago so I know their dungeons have many differing paths, but that still doesn't solve the XIV problem of "no one runs the alternate paths anyway so why have them" problem that the devs have put themselves into. They could go the WoW path and put extra bosses and such behind alternate paths, but this community wouldn't care unless it's day 1 and you want the map achieve, or there's other rare stuff in those boxes (though they'll not care once they have them). I'm not against more variety in dungeons beyond "have an extra pack to pull, as a little treat" like we currently have, but most things just... wouldn't work because of what I mentioned in the post you quoted.

I also didn't mention anything about WoW nostalgia, so why is that being brought up (or perhaps I'm misunderstanding, lmk)? I'm honestly happy for the people who have found WoW to be fun again after multiple (reportedly) unfun xpacs made them leave for a while, I'm glad it's scratching that itch for you. Play what makes you happy, and if XIV improves for you to be enjoyed again, even if it's in the future, great! If not, I hope you do continue to play what makes you happy, that's what gaming is for.