I have several points to address and will do my best to respond to everything since I posted this yesterday.

First, allow me to clarify some of the apparent confusion regarding my issue with Dawntrail's exploratory missions versus my example with Shadowbringers and Bozja.

Yes, Bozja and the Southern Front had its own type of leveling system with ranks that granted specific buffs to your health, damage, and so forth. However, let me be very clear: You cannot level up a normal job in the current expansion using this content like you could in Shadowbringers. I thought I had made this clear in my original post, but I should have provided more clarity. The only ways to level jobs from 90 to 100 are dungeon grinding, FATEs, or the same routine we had during Endwalker.

Dawntrail has nothing like the Bozja system. The leveling system built into this exploratory mission is self-contained, and those levels/buffs do not carry outside of that instanced zone. You simply cannot level any jobs from 90 to 100 as you once could from 70 to 80 in Shadowbringers. This is a fact! That was my original point.

This expansion's exploratory mission is identical or very similar to the one we saw during Stormblood, and they did not need to bring it back again. You may disagree, but I can guarantee there are countless players who do agree that it would have been nice to have alternative leveling content, similar to what we had in Shadowbringers, as that content was massively popular, and the subscription numbers during that time prove it.

Now, let me address the comments I made regarding how FFXIV is emulating Dark Souls or Elden Ring. This article, from June 2024, shows Yoshi-P himself directly stating that the influence for Dawntrail was heavily inspired by his crew playing both Dark Souls and Elden Ring. Even if the game is not 100% as hard as those titles, they factually influenced many of the fight designs in this expansion, and to say they did not is disingenuous.

The article is here: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/mmo/ff...brutally-hard/

This is the intellectual dishonesty I've come to expect from many of the hardcore defenders of the game who dismiss any criticism of the current design. No, FFXIV is not an exact one-on-one copy of either of those games, but these defenders try to play it off as if this latest expansion was not designed with these influences, running counter to what we've previously seen with FFXIV over the past 12 years. Again, we have Yoshi-P's own words as evidence, but they seem to be ignored simply because the new content is not at the same extreme difficulty level as Elden Ring or Dark Souls. Every game has telegraphed attacks, yet to pretend that Dark Souls or Elden Ring isn't on a completely different level of telegraphed attacks is astonishing.

Let me also be blunt: on the very server where I currently reside, I would say almost 75% of the Free Companies (FCs) that once existed are no longer there. If you want to argue that this is due to people moving servers, or all these FCs just collapsing, or some other potential reason besides the state of the current game being a problem... again, I don't know what to tell you. I am reasonable enough to accept that a few of those indicators might play a small role, but when +/-75% of the FCs on my server disappear, and you can actually check the formation dates of many of these companies and see that they are post-2024... I'm sorry, all potential reasons should be considered, but I would argue they are not the primary reason for what I have experienced.