What do we have to look forward to with Dawntrail?

[LittleImp]

The HW with the massive artifact weapon chains? The Heavensward with THREE new classes that weren't braindead? The Heavensward which released more than 1 dungeon pet patch? The same one with Diadem (RIP lol) and no cut trial series? The one that introduced workshops and exterior housing changes? And scrips, and deliveries (IIRC), and specialization, and timed nodes, and in which gear wasn't copy pasted over and over and over again and so on? I'd actually be surprised if EW had more content in terms of just instanced stuff alone, but even if it did, HW was a way more rounded and complete expansion with hardly any of the lazy stuff you say nowdays, and they had probably less than half of the current player base and income flow but hey.

People shitting on HW is just the new talking point. They think they can get away with it because a lot of newer players didn't actually play the game during HW. It's kind of like how people will just make things up about JP because the language barrier makes it difficult to fact-check. HW was a place where SE was still building out the core experience of the game, and a lot of features were implemented for the very first time; Systems that have become so incredibly core to what the game is now that people just take them for granted and consider them 'baseline' features.

[ReynTime]

People shitting on HW is just the new talking point. They think they can get away with it because a lot of newer players didn't actually play the game during HW. It's kind of like how people will just make things up about JP because the language barrier makes it difficult to fact-check. HW was a place where SE was still building out the core experience of the game, and a lot of features were implemented for the very first time; Systems that have become so incredibly core to what the game is now that people just take them for granted and consider them 'baseline' features.

But something something Diadem flopped something Gordias too hard ragequit something.
Speaking as someone who also played during Heavensward, the level of ragequit people bring up from back then is grossly exaggerated. I was in one of the largest FCs on Aether and practically nobody there stopped playing during Heavensward regardless of Diadem and Alexander pre-redesign. At worst the raid scene was in danger. But that scene was even smaller than the small percentage it represents today.
Those people also fail to grasp that not everyone dislikes the "janky" job design, and once again they love to exaggerate on the "unbalanced" mechanics ruining job meta ir the likes of PLD "being banned", when anyone can look up and see how many PLDs were actually recruited in the clears.

Even Alliance Raids were a blast back then. BECAUSE people died. I MISS the Wiping City experience. The 12 Simps of Venat series and even YorHa are such a snoozefest.

[Tetsujin]

People shitting on HW is just the new talking point. They think they can get away with it because a lot of newer players didn't actually play the game during HW. It's kind of like how people will just make things up about JP because the language barrier makes it difficult to fact-check. HW was a place where SE was still building out the core experience of the game, and a lot of features were implemented for the very first time; Systems that have become so incredibly core to what the game is now that people just take them for granted and consider them 'baseline' features.

If that is true (I don't come here that much) I can't fathom why, because its biggest sins IMHO were 1.) Horrible laggy servers which was a problem for me raiding and 2.) 3.0-3.1 extreme/savage content being infernally hard because devs only playtested per mechanic instead of the entire fights as a whole and the break in content at the time. The lag was circumvented easily (thank you, Mudfish) pretty easy, thankfully, and patches came in with a lot of cool stuff.