Dawntrail has been my second favorite expansion !

[Basteala]

I'll bite. You seem friendly enough so I'll try to keep the worst of the bitterness from this.

Battle content

The raids, dungeons, trials and chaotic has been a massive improvement from Endwalker's battle design..

I will say that the dungeons, at least, were an improvement over how lackluster EW's dungeons were. That's fine. My big concern with encounter gameplay is how it's becoming less about player ability and more about memorization. Making the game more accessible is fine, but it can be frustrating, even for casual players, when most of the challenge comes from a "gotcha" moment. Part of the challenge in the past was managing your class's intricacies while doing the fight mechanics: with different jobs having different hurdles from some mechanics. If the fights feel samey as they do to a lot of people, part of it comes from the jobs really not having any unique gameplay of their own. To me it'd be like if a game had a great world and story, but really bland, uninteresting characters. That's how I'm finding 14's gameplay in a nutshell right now.

Story

Look there was plenty of issues to be discussed here with the villain Zorall ja and Wuk Lamat, the lack of focusing more on Krile /Erenvile ect. however, I think the majority of the player base didn't quite understand the concept of the overall story...

This kind of ties into the end of my last point. A story can have a good concept, and I think DT does, at the end of main, at least. Regulators are an interesting idea in and of themselves. The idea of Endless is an interesting philosophical debate...or at least it would be if it wasn't inherently doomed from the start.

But none of that really mattered overmuch to me because the lead character (Wuk Lamat) and the antagonist for most of Main (Zoraal Ja) WERE so poorly executed. Not making the player character the main character now and then is fine, but it runs a big risk because you're losing free engagement and banking on someone else's story to carry the weight of expectation. Wuk Lamat fails to do that.

Post is better, and I like "True Sphene", but I need to see more to be hyped again. I'm not excited, and I hate it. I miss when I *was* hyped for MSQ content.

Man I tried to trim this but two parts it is.

[Basteala]

Graphical updates

There are plenty of areas in the game that look so much better...

It's fine for the most part. But there are times you get weird segmented lighting that's just a real eyesore.

PVP Balance

Respectfully...PvP balance to a lot of players is like Ultimate Raid balance. Sure it's nice, but a lot of people aren't going to care at best, or at worst, be upset that with all the elements of the game they're unhappy with that this was their choice of focus.

Issues I have seen
I have plenty of issues with job balance ( looking at you pictomancer for 2 patches !) MCH/SMN feel underwhelming

As a black mage I feel this in my soul.

[PercibelTheren]

The problem with "sometimes, you have to let things go" as a theme is that we have been beaten over the head with it so many times in the MSQ (hello, the entire thing with Ascians) that it's just annoying at this point.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

The problem with "sometimes, you have to let things go" as a theme is that we have been beaten over the head with it so many times in the MSQ (hello, the entire thing with Ascians) that it's just annoying at this point.

It’s like they struck a mine of gold back in ShB when they try out that theme then try to replicate all that glory without understanding why they worked.

Typical corpo approach, tbh.

[Bitmoar]

It’s like they struck a mine of gold back in ShB when they try out that theme then try to replicate all that glory without understanding why they worked.

Typical corpo approach, tbh.

The train scene with Smile blasting in the background actually made me laugh out loud with how obviously it was trying to recreate Mt Gulg and failing miserably. I was already feeling like we had to be in some kind of fever dream going from finding the golden city, to ignoring it, to Wuk's Disney ascension party, to random wild west interlude picking up feces.

[PercibelTheren]

The train scene with Smile blasting in the background actually made me laugh out loud with how obviously it was trying to recreate Mt Gulg and failing miserably. I was already feeling like we had to be in some kind of fever dream going from finding the golden city, to ignoring it, to Wuk's Disney ascension party, to random wild west interlude picking up feces.

I will never understand why that sequence wasn't interactive. We built turrets! Even if it was some kind of adaptation of Air Force One from the Gold Saucer...

[PaulusHamsteru]

Found Yoshi's alt :P.

[DynnDiablos]

Good for you. I despised it from the content to the MSQ and hate play it.

[Carin-Eri]

The train scene with Smile blasting in the background actually made me laugh out loud with how obviously it was trying to recreate Mt Gulg and failing miserably. I was already feeling like we had to be in some kind of fever dream going from finding the golden city, to ignoring it, to Wuk's Disney ascension party, to random wild west interlude picking up feces.

The silly thing is, I don't think the whole 'building the explody-train' thing was a bad sequence in itself - it was, in my opinion, the inappropriate use of 'Smile' that made it surreal.

[MitsukiKimura]

however, I think the majority of the player base didn't quite understand the concept of the overall story.

You mean the part where we felt like our entire existence felt meaningless throughout the entire story? Because I for sure did not enjoy it. Wuk lamat being captured then next area she single handly beat him and his minions made a ton of sense. I wanted to pray she wouldn't show up in our final battle but guess what? No explanation she's just there. I assure you nothing would of changed if we never came here.