"Nothing to do"

[Jeeqbit]

Oh boy. You know a franchise has hit a rough patch once these topics start popping up...

People have always said this. I saw people saying this in Heavensward and Stormblood. So it must always be "there's nothing to do that I'm personally interested in" rather than that they have every single achievement, mount, minion, etc.

[Basteala]

People have always said this. I saw people saying this in Heavensward and Stormblood. So it must always be "there's nothing to do that I'm personally interested in" rather than that they have every single achievement, mount, minion, etc.

I don't recall seeing it overmuch in SHB and EW. Also wasn't content in HW infamously rough and carried by the story beats?

[Jeeqbit]

I don't recall seeing it overmuch in SHB and EW.

You may not have seen it, but I can say for sure that I saw people complaining about it in Stormblood. I was more interested in RP and catching up on missed quests/jobs/beast tribes and so on at the time and quite tired hearing all these "nothing to do" complaints. I got into hunting and people were collecting mounts, so I thought why not do that with them since it gives content longevity.

In EW, these forums were full of "nothing to do" complaints (sound familiar)? If you didn't see it in EW then you must not have so much as glanced at these forums.

wasn't content in HW infamously rough and carried by the story beats?

No, content wasn't that rough. Think of it as being like Dawntrail content except no telegraphs hardly. No tank buster indicators, no arrows saying "this mechanic happening, stand here!", stack markers were only added half-way through the expansion. They had less overall nut and bolt mechanics to work with than they do now. They also gave the party more responsibility (placing permanent AoEs on the ground for example) which is now exclusive to High-End content.

Aside from the lack of indicators, arrows and telegraphs, what made Heavensward tougher was:

• Vuln stacks for messing up (and they were more devastating than now)
• Jobs had less ability to deal with the mechanics (hardly any off-GCD heals, way less tank mitigation/selfheals, so even trash hurt and made you rely on the healer), no universal knockback immunity.

and jobs were too easy to mess up:

• Combos expired after a few SECONDs
• you had to look at enemies to auto/block
• ranged attacks or stray GCDs broke combos
• positionals were a much bigger deal for damage
• you had keep-up buffs that were hard for most of the casual playerbase to keep up properly
• rotations were not clearly explained so people did them wrong (doing a fraction of their damage potential)
• there was less leeway so tunnel vision was common
• doing one thing wrong would cost you the ability to use high-damage parts of the rotation for ages
• dying reduced main stats not just substats which was devastating
• a lot of abilities were "I use them but wish they were better stuff" (think physical mit being like Dark Mind was but worse)
• the jobs weren't particularly balanced and couldn't necessarily deal with all things very well (ie. paladin against magic).

But despite all that, I was still farming Expert roulette in Heavensward in the same "it's braindead on farm" way as I do now. It's just more refined and polished now in my opinion.