Combat system is beyond saving.

[Absurdity]

Pardon me as I only start played FFXIV at the start of Shb, but judging from everyone review about HW's both job and raid design, it seems that HW is like reverse EW. EW has bad job design with okayish encounter, while HW has okayish job design with bad encounter.

A silly take, aye, but I for one is willing to learn more about job design in pre-Shb era.

Not really, Havensward had great encounters and the most complex, if often unnecessarily clunky and punishing, job design.
It does however still suffer from the stigma of it's first raid tier which was such a ramp up in difficulty from ARR's raids that it almost killed the raid scene.


If you even just look at the Alexander normal raids they are so varied in environment and fight design that it's almost depressing compared to nowadays where everything is just a circle in the void that makes you do some variation of exaflares, limit cut, dynamo, chariot, stack and spread.