ARR or Heavensward Classic

[Fyrebrand]

The only benefit of a classic version would be getting the missing parts of ARR MSQ back instead of losing them forever.

Like that part of the quest to go see Ramuh, where the sylphs disguise themselves as the Scions and you have to figure out who's real and who's fake along the way. That element was cut out of the MSQ, but there's still mention of doubt over "the real Thancred" or something. For newer players who never experienced this quest in its original form, that makes no sense at all.

[Iscah]

Like that part of the quest to go see Ramuh, where the sylphs disguise themselves as the Scions and you have to figure out who's real and who's fake along the way. That element was cut out of the MSQ, but there's still mention of doubt over "the real Thancred" or something. For newer players who never experienced this quest in its original form, that makes no sense at all.

IIRC it doesn't quite make no sense because you arrive at the tail end of the chaos to all of them still talking about the sylphs pranking them, but it's still a major loss and any time the topic of the ARR adjustments comes up, people always raise this as an example of them being too brutal with their editing. It really should have only lost the minor step of helping some no-name Wood Wailers recover from being powder-bombed, while retaining all the part with the Scions.

At minimum, they really should have turned a lot of the cut quests into sidequests that pop up at the appropriate points, especially if quests involving the major characters can have some kind of "temporarily available detour" that has to be done at that point or you miss out.

Someday I'd like to do a "quest review" thing and look at what should have been kept or not. There are some things that would have been better retained, while other parts of MSQ still have some pointless bogging-down that could go.

[Yuella]

Neither. I prefer a mixture of HW and Stormblood. Remove TP, keep aggro management with tank stance and dps stance, keep cleric stance

[Jeeqbit]

Anyone who played since then knows how much Quality of Life we've had since then. It's easy to forget just how much we've had, but if any of us went back to then, we'd miss all the Quality of Life and want to return to now.

Contrary to what you see everyone say, most of what SE has done since ARR has been improving the game.

There is far too much Quality of Life for me to even remember off the top of my head, but they include things like cooldown resets upon wiping, not needing to level another class to 15 to unlock your job, not needing to level other jobs for basic role actions, removal of bloat like Featherfoot and Keen Flurry, action/ability upgrading so we don't have to make macros, cone targeting, disable right-click selection of minions and players in battle, hide quest list during instanced duty, alliance raid roulette, normal raid roulette, cross-world PF, [Duty Complete], [Duty Complete (Weekly Reward Unclaimed)], [Practice], PF search, sounds when a party fills, world visiting, DC travel, having 999 stacks instead of 99, being able to teleport to a dungeon boss arena after it locks if you didn't get there in time, listing teleport destinations by expansion, PLD having aoes, tanks having aoe combos, tanks physical mits now mitting everything, not needing to face a target to auto, not needing to face a target to block, ranged attacks not resetting your combo, combos taking longer to expire, buff timers displaying in the party list, waymark saving, more waymarks, mount speed increases (we used to move super slow due to PS3), chocobos no longer in the party so you can queue for duties with it out, double the max food and gysahl green duration, flying in ARR and all mounts can fly, a 4000 cap on hunt currencies instead of 1000, old tomestone gear is pre-augmented, mount and minion favorites, New Game+, unlock quests being blue...

There are a few things people miss from these expansions. But it really is just a few things. Most of it would be a nightmare if we went back. And it's not that they really want things to be as they were then, but rather that they want things to be punishing or sophisticated in the way they were then but not in the same way.

For example, there could be more complex substats... but I don't think people really want them to be like Heavensward like they claim. Because then we had parry, an RNG stat for useless physical mitigation; we had physical mitigation like Foresight and Sheltron and Raw Inuition, elemental mitigation that was useful against only a specific cast in specific fights and therefore useless, and Accuracy which you had to stack to 100% or your combos got interrupted all the time. The substat system was more complex, sure, but not in a good way and I think people mean to do it in a "good way" rather than to copy Heavensward.

[Post]

All that's really gone from that era could mostly be simulated in the current game by tweaking battle content stuff:
Direct Hit as a stat doesn't apply outside of like... BRD's Battle Voice chance until level 61 (it was introduced in StB; enemy's hp was never balanced to address this outside of specific rebalanced fights like story Ultima Weapon)
Basic weapons kill/spell potencies get associated boosting traits for every expansion level range instead of only at 84 (so combos aren't hitting 1.5x as hard as they did when that content was current)
Remove Vit from pre ShB accessories except fending

It's impossible to put the genie back into the bottle with regards to:
enmity (even just supercharging tank stances enmity generation at 71+ would leave every other job devoid of the many enmity management tools they once had)
AoE damage (was once greatly tied to TP and MP costs as a limiting factor and was also one of BLM's original strengths being resource-free; now fights like t4 and a2s are even more laughably trivial comparatively to their peers; this also doubled down on how trivial dungeon trash is to wall to wall pull)
Dungeon mechanics (trusts exist now and their battle design wasn't made with AI companions in mind, so now we just design around their inability to do things players can do, like yeah while moving, react to other players or reposition enemies)
Maybe the last one could be alleviated going forward by making separate trust versions of dungeons, but at this point not many people seem to think people wanting more variety in dungeons are worth giving a shit about.

Edit for above: reset cooldowns on wipe was a HW change.
The dungeon boss teleport actually forces you into a boss, even interrupts a cutscene you may be watching and rewarding players that don't wait until their team is ready to pull
We still have purely physical and magical mitigation
Keen Flurry provided a way to mitigate and survive certain attacks for DRG (which were more plentiful in that era of the game), who now has nothing but hp recovery, also a tool from that era of the game from both bloodbath (MRD) and Second Wind (PGL)
I get what you're trying to say, but many of these QooLs are just 'differences'. Hell, we could teleport and return in combat in ARR, but they REMOVED that one for some reason.
The game's largely the same except they've removed a ton of systems from battle content and added basically nothing in their place.

[Jojoya]

It's all in the name ! Choose.

They won't be what you remember. You know too much now.

[DiaDeem]

[Asdif_Laoeg]

Heavensward. But only for the Monk Gameplay. That was way better then the current one. But to be honest, the current one ist the worst version of Monk.

[Allegor]

I started playing literally a month or so before SB release so I'd be curious to see how things actually were during HW, but also have to admit that I'd be greatly demotivated to play due to the lack of DNC, Hrothgar, a significant part of my glamours, and the 4.0 hairstyle I've had on my Roe since. Yes, I am vain like that lol

[Absurdity]

Neither. I prefer a mixture of HW and Stormblood. Remove TP, keep aggro management with tank stance and dps stance, keep cleric stance

TP was still a thing in both expansions.

No.

The qol changes from later on are immense. No one would want arr classic or hw classic.

This has some major "You think you do, but you don't." energy.