Honestly, What's the verdict for you?

[Ranhansha]

they are atleast improved that i really dont need to bother and farm them over and over again, i never said phantom jobs are really great, its the opposite i even said they need more tuning (dont know if it was here or in another thread)

I mean... They are really limited. Unless you have one of those necessary jobs, they are just an extra button to add a bit of extra damage, tank or heal. Basically what you did with Logos but with limitations. What's even worse, you can't play the ones you like if you want to level others or you won't get mastery points. No one thought the system through. Or they did but they didn't care because it's a time sink. Don't get me started on the price of the stuff and how you only get like 80 silver coins per FATE but you need like 20k for a set. Oh, only one FATE or CE spawns at a time in the whole map. Which is also really convenient for Demiatma farming. Not intentional at all because the game LACKS content and we need people to waste their time. I don't know how anyone could believe OC is properly designed.

[AvoSturmfaust]

I mean... They are really limited. Unless you have one of those necessary jobs, they are just an extra button to add a bit of extra damage, tank or heal. Basically what you did with Logos but with limitations. What's even worse, you can't play the ones you like if you want to level others or you won't get mastery points. No one thought the system through. Or they did but they didn't care because it's a time sink. Don't get me started on the price of the stuff and how you only get like 80 silver coins per FATE but you need like 20k for a set. Oh, only one FATE or CE spawns at a time in the whole map. Which is also really convenient for Demiatma farming. Not intentional at all because the game LACKS content and we need people to waste their time. I don't know how anyone could believe OC is properly designed.

But thats one of the issues, people always think about "i need to level dem with CEs so i cant play my favorite job" but let me tell you, open your own gold farm group which doesnt require a certain phantom job ( i mean a few will use meta jobs anyway) and you see how fast you can level them, i did 3h 2 days ago and finished 3 jobs, its way faster and quicker then CEs and for CE´s i can still use the ones i like

[ForteNightshade]

They might not innovate enough but they do try new things each expansion, technically:

• ARR: everything that was in ARR
• HW: Normal/Savage, Diadem, Deep Dungeons, Squadrons
• SB: Ultimates, Blue Mage, Eureka (Diadem-like area) being tied to relic, Logos Actions, Command Missions (squadrons), Doman Mahjong
• ShB: Ishgard Restoration, Trusts, CEs, Ocean Fishing
• EW: Variant, Criterion, Island Sanctuary, introducing single player-esk mechanics into an MMO (story NPCs following you like FF8, proximity following NPCs, a Metal Gear Solid duty, or In From the Cold).
• DT: Chaotic, Beastmaster, apparently the Deep Dungeon will work differently

Whether those were well implemented is another story, but they at least reserve capacity in their schedule for experiments.

The problem is every single one of those new things recently has been done with the safest of kid gloves on or implemented incredibly poorly. Often times both.

Criterion had literally zero reward structure making it the least completed content in the game's entire history. It's actually shocking how bad the Savage version performed. Island Sanctuary had less depth than Farmville, a facebook mobile game from 2009 and Eureka Orthos is literally copy/pasted Heaven on High.

Now we get to DT and it's essentially the same problem: a complete lack of innovation and everything played extremely safe. Chaotic is the sole exception where they actually did something that took some actual risks.

This "safety first" approach has simply become stale for a lot of people because even new content doesn't feel new. Or it lacks polish which has become an alarmingly regular occurrence of late. I'd like to believe say, Deep Dungeon, will work differently, but I'll be shocked if their big "innovation" amounts to more than "we changed the size of the rooms." We have two expansions worth of evidence showcasing they don't take risks at all nowadays.

Edit: Just to bolster my point further with a recent example. Let's look at Cosmic Exploration, a piece of content people were genuinely excited for. All it amounted to was one massive levequest system with an insane grind for a reskinned mount. While the higher level crafts being less macro-able can have its interest. I suspect people wanted more than a levelquest equivalent that the devs themselves abandoned years ago. Which speaks volumes in its own right. They brought back a system even they thought wasn't good enough in prior expansions. Now if they did something to elevate it, perhaps that could be interesting. They didn't. And as a result, Cosmic's population cratered within a week of its launch--to the point servers are routinely missing advancement objectives now because nobody cares to bother.

[PercibelTheren]

Some people try to rationalize it with "Clearly all the 1.X and ARR boomers moved on after EW, so they pivoted to the Shounen Jump audience", but I don't see how people in their teens would put up with the long stretches of absolutely nothing happening in DT's MSQ.

Also, what teenagers? MMO in general is not a teenager genre and a sub based one? Most people I know who play XIV are in their twenties and thirties, if not older.

[PercibelTheren]

This is exactly it. Fine, there's all this stuff to do just like before but instead of inhabiting a world with rich characters and an engrossing story it's now hard to care about anyone or anything that's happening.

This is a big pain point for me also. The entirety of the DT MSQ, all I could think was "man,I just don't care about any of this". I tried. I really wanted to get invested but the characters were shallower than a puddle. The Scions were cardboard cutouts of themselves.

[IdleBlood]

Why people force their brains to play a game really.

[Raikai]

Why people force their brains to play a game really.

Many of the people who play still have an attachment to a certain aspect of the game, thus giving them hope that what's not right will change around.

I quit back last October, but a friend gifted me with a month worth of game time for me to see how the game changed/improved (since there were some). It's been a bit over 2 weeks, but I'm not quite sure if I'll use all the time, really.

[TaleraRistain]

I will give them a pass if this system you mentioned is completely brand new, but it isn't. Phantom jobs are yet another version of logograms and lost actions. Heck, OC isn't ff14 first field operation, it's their third one. FF14 isn't a 3 year old mmo game, it's been 10 years already.

Also, a lot of "new thing" they gave us are just old things repackaged. It beat the purpose of "experimenting".

Fourth. People forget about the original Diadem.

I just noticed a small detail that somehow bothered me a lot: During the OC's intro here's zero dialogue reference or easter egg if you're a Scholar who completed the job's storyline. May seem really minor, but they do have history of referencing jobs you have when they make sense into quests. Imagine being a scholar with a fairy out and being confused about what Iris is.

I kept thinking if this is just a small manifestation of the lack of polish in Dawntrail questing experience as a whole.

Yeah that part bugged me, too. I have a level 100 scholar. I would have accidentally called her Lily not wondered wtf she was.

It's especially egregious when I'm doing post-EW with my hubby on an alt and we're almost to Lapis and everyone is falling over themselves to comment how I'm familiar with reaper.

[Gokki]

Honestly, my issues with FFXIV aren't fixable by "just more FFXIV". Doubling the content won't help with anything. it's things like lack of basic functions like glamour log, chat bubbles, UI fixes and general annoyances that persist despite having YEARS to fix them. The story peaked in Shadowbringers, and it has been downhill from there. EW had some very high but also very low points, and DT's ratio on those skewed more towards the low despite having similar design language. There's so much potential and it hurts how obvious some of it is to implement but... i think the devs are just not that skilled or competent and are just trying to keep the wheels going to a schedule than actually work on the things i care about.


There have been great new things, like the graphical and character improvements, improvements to jobs, the general quality is higher, the relics are better this time around and even OC has a bunch of improvements compared to eureka/bozja despite some other drawbacks. But the technical debt and lack of core improvements are hurting the game in the long run.

[Gwenkatsu]

i think the devs are just not that skilled or competent and are just trying to keep the wheels going to a schedule than actually work on the things i care about.

And even the things I'm not interested in are a clown show nowadays. I don't raid in this game, but seeing how they utterly effed up entrance to the new super hard raid in OC just leaves me speechless.
It feels like a free ride on the Titanic, where the captain has already left the ship, and now some untrained sailors at the wheel are desperately trying not to hit that huge white thing starboard ahead...
While in the galley the crew sings and dances as if everything is fine, and the cook brews the same old coffee for the fourth time "because the passengers always liked it so much".
Hm... I recently watched Pirates of the Caribean another time, somehow I feel a bit nautical today.