What era of design was your favorite?

[Misutoraru]

Interesting, contrary to many players here, SB is my least favourite except the overall job designs and alliance raid. My personal favourite would be ShB for overall plot, map design, FATE and Bozja, with exception of job changes, worst alliance raid and really dislike the remove of job quest and turn into role quests instead

[Lunaxia]

Heavensward. That's when I remember really having fun levelling. The jobs had a lot of jank, but they all felt very different from one another and for the most part had interesting mechanics. I've played WHM, SMN and DRK, so Stormblood didn't do much for me and Shadowbringers was the beginning of the end in terms of jobs actually feeling unique and engaging. When they wrenched a bunch of abilities from the healing classes and homogenised them out into the same action/ animation was when I really started to lose enthusiasm. I was so sore over losing Divine Seal, though I guess we have Temperance and PI now.

But I've been in DF farming poetics on various classes recently and find myself missing how some of them used to play. Things like how we used to be able to choose whether to spread out a card or give it to a single party member on AST, actually having to manage enmity both as MT/ OT and as jobs with high aggro, I was even in a mess of a Titan run as a green DPS and low on MP (a lot of dying) and we had a BRD running around still, and I actually felt nostalgic for when Mage's Ballad used to be a thing for healers. I miss when players could actually help and affect each other as a group instead of being isolated to our roles with the occasional damage buff or heal, to be honest. It had its flaws, but duties felt much more connected and alive. Streamlining everything has taken a lot of the joy out of playing.

[kyyninen_kirahvi]

I think there's a an era of design statsis ShB onward. What I mean is that there hasn't been any significant development in the jobs. In Shadowbringers the healers got leveld and demolished. Small tweaks but not much and after that in EW and DT has just been a healing action for the sake of healing. In EW summore was completely reworked and then was given basically nothing to advance the job etc. New coats of paints and potencies for old actions, finisher after finisher, etc. I know game and job design is hard, but it's clear thet there aren't enough people taking care of how jobs are developed and designed.

To answer the question Stormblood

[Kohashi]

Honestly, strictly speaking of raid tier + ultimates. EW was amazing. DT is awesome too in those aspects as well. I really enjoyed the raids, the music, and the themes. I love that the color of the gears is no longer muted and washed out.

I can't speak much about class design, but I also don't really care much about it. If I don't enjoy the class or role, I don't play it, I play something I enjoy.

[Kozh]

Except for some jobs, SB hands down

[Taranok]

Interesting, contrary to many players here, SB is my least favourite except the overall job designs and alliance raid. My personal favourite would be ShB for overall plot, map design, FATE and Bozja, with exception of job changes, worst alliance raid and really dislike the remove of job quest and turn into role quests instead

It's worth noting you listed early shadowbringers designs. ShB has a very stark split between tier 1+DRS and tier 2+. Tier 2+ is when the high-movement faster pace encounter design started becoming a thing, as seen with E7S tornado phase and E8S light's rampant. Bozja is mostly but not entirely closer to tier 1 than tier 2, with Zadnor+the mini instance closer to what would become EW/DT gameplay than Stormblood gameplay, but far enough removed to kind of straddle the line between stormblood's better gameplay and EW's worse gameplay.

Or, to put it more simply, you mentioned Stormblood design mostly at its peak.

[Basteala]

Gameplay wise? Stormblood. Fights had punishing numbers, classes as I understand it were less homogenized, but even looking at the content as a SHB baby, there was a good balance between fight complexity and class complexity. DT has embraced opposite extremes with simplistic classes and chaotic fight mechanics with a lot of "gotcha" mechanics.

[Fawkes]

Heavensward. Stormblood added job gauges and most jobs didn't need one so we had to suffer through years of gap closers that needed 10 points of juice to use to justify having a meter.

[Valence]

Heavensward because it's the only era that had a fully fleshed out battle system that still made sense, with true MMO/RPG elements, even with their flaws.
Stormblood outdid it on some job concepts and ideas though, but I'm still biased toward HW.

[ovIm]

Firmly HW, not counting all the QOL we got over the years. Sure, some classes were jank, but the design principles were there and could have been improved.
ARR gave us some killer cool dungeons though. And Stormblood brought us some interesting experimental stuff too, ofc, like Eureka.