i thought heavensward was about to try out something new?

[raela]

3) there is still no big incentive to do anything with friends (unless you want a smooth dungeon run lol) but basicly everything is duable solo or with PUGS.
i was hoping for more things to bond the community or ARR. Not come and go "please inv" Hunts content.

Not really incentive, but quests now work better in a party - one person spawns the mobs and they now count for both. Duoing quests used to feel silly, but now it syncs a bit better.

(though this is me doing it with my bonding partner, so I can also hop on his chocobo to run off to the next location..)

[HexWeaver]

I know what you mean, story was great, flying is fun, but right now I'm levelling up the new jobs on the side every now and then, and playing Elder Scrolls Online.
Don't really want to grind for equipment right now.

[AsakuraVN]

The new 50+ dungeons give a lot more exp along with new gears, there's no point zerging FATES in the new zones, unless if the map is crowded enough then you can tag some mobs & rush to the next fate. I do prefer this method, making FATEs into something you would only join if they appear on the way, while exploring/doing quests in the open world, not just a zerg fest. And if you do dungeons more often on your main job, along with main story quests, you can leave a bunch of sidequests for leveling sub-jobs later.

The only thing I'm disappointed with is A/S hunting. There're a lot of ways to make world bosses fun, just take a look at Korean MMOs, their world bosses are a lot harder, but they aren't just big meat bags. They summon adds, do 1-hit instant kill AoE (with shapes & patterns, not just a round circle), some bosses come in pairs, & have real mechanics like actual instanced raids. That will require people to communicate with each others, joining guilds on teamspeak, & become part of guild's daily activities, keeping the community together.

I have joined a guild that can gather 2-300 people on teamspeak at the same time to raid those world bosses, & it usually takes 2-3 complete wipes before we successfully did it. That's how hard world bosses should be, extremely fun to do, even if the actual reward isn't worth it (Korean MMOs tend to give 1 single item drop to world bosses).

I never played WoW before so I'm not sure what model is SE following right now, but I hope they can learn a thing or two from Korean, their MMOs just keep getting better & better gameplay-wise.

[Nague]

you dont need the ilvl 180 gear from hunts, pls stop crying about huints, you can just not do them.

[Reissa]

Apart from the new mechanics we're sure to see in Alexander and the new Frontlines mode coming soon, there's quite a few significant changes coming in the 3.x series.

Patch Structure

Future patches will be structured a bit differently. They'll contain only 2 dungeons each, for example:

What is your content plan after the release of Heavensward? Once it's released, will you still be publishing patches about once every three months?

Yoshida: I'm going to try to maintain that pace as much as possible. However, each major patch will be on an even larger scale than today, so it might increase a bit. We'll continue to consider how to optimize by dividing up content into different updates to make sure we're keeping the pace up. There are many elements we're working on with development such as Gold Saucer, battle content, crafting, gathering, PvP, and main scenario, so I'd like to continue updating each of those categories evenly. However, since we'll be adding two new instanced dungeons in each patch, for example, in addition to all the other content, I think it's going to take more man-hours on the whole.

Source

24-man Raid

The new Crystal Tower-equivalent seems like it will have more open maps rather than linear corridors:

Though Crystal Tower's story is complete, we will see a new 24-player raid, and its story, begin in patch 3.1. Similar to A Realm Reborn, the plan is to alternate between adding more to the Alexander raid in certain patches, and adding more to this 24-player raid in between.

As for its difficulty, it will be on par with that of Crystal Tower's raids, as they were accessible by players of all types. And this time, alliances will utilize more of the map rather than simply running along a path.

Source

FC Airship Content

FC Airships are going to be semi-open world raid content that is different from anything we've seen up until now. Here are some quotes from Yoshi-P about it. He's said a lot more about it, but this should give a pretty good idea of how major FC Airship content should be:

"With the 3.X patch series, we're trying to figure out how to bolster the community," he says. "We want to get them involved in something more public and open."

Source

Q8: Currently, there are a lot of content for the hardcore users and the casual users, but not many for the mid-tier users. Are there any plans to implement additional content for the mid-tier users that are able to beat Crystal Tower, but not the Coil of Bahamut?

A8: In the upcoming expansion, we will be introducing a new content for the mid-tier users which is currently referred to as “free company craft” (final name TBD).

Source - Live Letter XVIII Q8

Yoshida: ...taking your airship to the skies and the activities there is a major theme throughout the patch 3.X series.
Yoshida: So over the course of about a year or so, this content will continue to evolve and expand.
Yoshida: So, this whole idea of Free Company and Free Company crafting as well as the airship, or building an airship is one of the major end game content that the development team is putting a lot of love and effort into.

At the start of Heavensward you’re not only able to have just one ship but you can actually build up to four ships. And those airships will be ranked. And depending on what your rank level is there will be different parts you can and cannot equip. At the start of Heavensward once you build your airship you’ll be able to send it out to scout, no passengers, just the ship goes out to try and scout. And then in a following patch you’ll then be able to board that ship and explore and find uncharted areas. And even beyond there’ll be capabilities to add combat capability so you can have sort of a battleship. So it’s going to be very major content that will become available throughout the 3.x patch series. Once you’re able to go out and explore and travel and find those different areas in the sky you may find that some of these areas may have Notorious hardcore monsters that you can’t beat and just end up defeated and having to have to come back. Or you may find that other Free Company have already visited and trashed it and made a mess of it. Or you may end up finding a land where you can find really rare gathering items, materials that you can harvest. So there will be a lot of very interesting things you can look forward to in the 3.x series.

Source

Yoshi-P has also mentioned things like the fact that the new relic-equivalent will feature a more structured story (I can't find the quote right now).