Heavensward outstanding expansion....

[Silverquick]

I have not completed the full HW campaign yet....

But.... I have to say this is one of the best expansions I've seen in any game.

The ARR campaign while good, was in reality kind of juvenilish at times. And I don't mean in terms of "not adult" but quite literally there are portions of the story that look more like it was designed for little kids... and doesn't even make Teen level.

Characters dying that I was supposedly going to feel something for even though I knew them all of 2 seconds, no emotional attachment to anything really. Silly and obvious plot twists etc, the whole 9 yards.

But wow the story for Heavensward is deep and meaningful, and very exploratory. Its also much more intense...

The content has truly absorbed me. I'm only about half way through but I was so sucked into the story in this one that I'm actually addicted to it. I seriously want to know what comes next.

And the quests improved a great deal. ARR was mostly meaningless fetch quests... and not even many kill quests at that, just a bunch of running around for the most part... Heavensward still has them... but they have a lot more to them than just bring this here or there.

I could get into the general game improvements and character design decisions which again are really spectacular...

But I have to say after going through the ARR campaign... and then through Heavensward... there is such a massive difference its like night and day.

[ffchampion]

The only thing i didn't like about Heavensward was as part of MSQ where you did quests for moogles. it was awful! luckily Yoshi-P has promised no more quests like those awful hide and seek quests with the moogles

[Silverquick]

The only thing i didn't like about Heavensward was as part of MSQ where you did quests for moogles. it was awful! luckily Yoshi-P has promised no more quests like those awful hide and seek quests with the moogles

Lol I have run into a few of the hide and seek quests like that,

The latest one I found in the Cloud, the bird men from one of the tribes are fleeing, and so you help them find one of these sky islands to flee to. But once they get there there's these bugs they're allergic to... and you have to fly up there on a flying snake and blow them out of the trees... those are some tricky buggers to find... heheh.

I thought it was unique though and different so I did like it.

[Alash]

You haven't completed it so you don't you know the pain of

A) The wAit between 3.0 and 3.1

B) Being around for diadem's launch

C) the raid being so hard and pointless that it kills off any drive for most of the raiding sCene to complete it

D) Diadem BiS for a few weeks, and then a quick nerf immediately killing it

E) rEd scrips

F) Blue scrips F

G) Crafters are no longer required for melding - YAY, the only thing that crafters could do is now gone! Awesome! Gathering still tied timed nodes, except for a good while all of their time was dedicated to a weekly currency! COOL!

H) a wHole bunch of other disappointing things.

This has been a dreadful expansion.

[DamianFatale]

You haven't completed it so you don't you know the pain of

A) The wAit between 3.0 and 3.1

B) Being around for diadem's launch

C) the raid being so hard and pointless that it kills off any drive for most of the raiding sCene to complete it

D) Diadem BiS for a few weeks, and then a quick nerf immediately killing it

E) rEd scrips

F) Blue scrips F

G) Crafters are no longer required for melding - YAY, the only thing that crafters could do is now gone! Awesome! Gathering still tied timed nodes, except for a good while all of their time was dedicated to a weekly currency! COOL!

H) a wHole bunch of other disappointing things.

This has been a dreadful expansion.

Cry me a river, if you don't like it, quit. It's like you're staring at the face of all of the positives, and outright ignoring them.

[Cadmar]

Cry me a river, if you don't like it, quit. It's like you're staring at the face of all of the positives, and outright ignoring them.

These are exactly the things that DID make me quit. I'm jumping back in now in hopes that SB can revitalize my experience in what once was my gaming passion. The story really is great in HW but some of the other decision were, at the best questionable, and at the worst, incompetent.

The raiding system in HW really killed it for me. My entire static group basically quit due to the way it was implemented. I don't expect it to change in SB, but I'm going into more eyes open now as opposed to the gut punch that HW was.

Are there some good things, sure. But I would argue that most of the good things have some negative impact as well. Look at PotD. It is a new, fun, and unique experience. That said, I can definitely tell that it is the preferred way to level these days. I have noticed a significant decrease in player ability since I last played and I would bet that much of it has to do with the lack of the real, tactical experience achieved from dungeon leveling. Don't get me wring, I know FATEs were an issue before but it seems much more pronounced now.

I remain hopeful for the future, but I think it is a fair argument that HW was poorly implemented in many ways and potentially a step backward on everything non-story wise.

Side note: Your post comes across as very hostile which seem unnecessary in what has been a pretty fair discussion so far.

[Silverquick]

Look at PotD. It is a new, fun, and unique experience. That said, I can definitely tell that it is the preferred way to level these days. I have noticed a significant decrease in player ability since I last played and I would bet that much of it has to do with the lack of the real, tactical experience achieved from dungeon leveling..

Honestly I have no idea why one would even do POTD unless you're leveling a secondary Job.

Heck the Main Story Quest alone levels you faster than the content for them.

I was consistently about 2-3 levels above the content for the quest level with only doing the MSQ and one Dungeon Roulette on occasion, and FATEs whenever I ran across them.

When I got to Heavensward, I was level 54 doing the level 50 content. And just opening up the level 50 Dungeon Roulette unlock has me already at level 59 along with the MSQ. And at this point anything level 50 is a tad below my level.

I can only assume this is for Secondary Jobs you might want to work up... because outside of that, POTD is kinda pointless.

You'll level a Main Character much faster just doing the MSQ and an occasional extra dungeon here and there.

Plus you'll never unlock any extra content for the game in POTD.

EDIT: Don't get me wrong here... I get that some people do like POTD... but that's only like maybe 2-5% of the game... and if that's all you're doing then you missed playing the other 95% of the game. AND in all fairness, its the same way with the people who are ONLY interested in jumping to the top levels so you can RAID... you brush by the majority of the game only to play this little tiny 10%... and just ignore the rest or feel its just something to skip over... and somehow think this is like... the ENTIRE FFXIV experience for you... well its not...

Step out and enjoy all the content... you might be surprised there's a lot more to the game than you thought.

[Tanathya]

Cry me a river, if you don't like it, quit. It's like you're staring at the face of all of the positives, and outright ignoring them.

He's just pointing out why this expansion wasn't a great one. You may agree or you may disagree, but the general consensus agrees to every single point mentioned, or should one look back and recall the numerous threads about them back in the day? You just gotta remember the "Diadem revamp" fiasco a couple of weeks ago.

In my opinion, Heavensward's story and music was absolutely amazing, a 10/10, but gameplay wise? It was really, really poor. Made me quit 11 months ago, and I just got back to finish the story up and to see what changes to the formula SB brings. Not that I'm expecting one, mind you, but it's my choice to at least wait and see.

[Atlaworks]

Snip

So what you're saying is it's been a terrible expansion for crafters and gatherers. I mean, you're not wrong, don't worry. I still contest that Heavensward's story was really good, PotD is a welcome change to the formula, and they tried new things with Diadem and exploratory missions. Also in Heavensward they finally let me ride other mounts and queue with my chocobo out. Finally, Teioh doesn't need to sit at home gathering dust!

As for crafting and gathering? It's just an utter mess. Scrips are awful, I hate them and want them out my my house. It also introduced the dumbest specialization system ever- they really wanted single crafters to be able to keep up with omnicrafters, so they released a specialization system that did a series of things.

- Limited crafting items to certain specializations, meaning omnicrafting is dead until that equipment set is obselete
- Introduced specialist commands to specialized crafters, which are all an incomprehensible mess(Hey, Whistle), cost scrips to use(Hey, Heart), and are all overall crap
- Actually limited specialized crafters further, due to the actions that weren't pure trash from specs be watered down versions of existing cross-class skills
+ Give +20 craftsmanship/control!
- Frankly made everything worse for all crafters across the board.

Of course, I will say they went through steps to fix a lot of it. Zhloe has gone a great length towards making the red scrip grind bearable enough for me to actually consider it on any given week, and delineations for Heart of the X cost way less blue scrips than they used to- and with Zhloe giving you tons of blue scrips and blue scrips being relatively useless once you buy the seven million recipe books, using them is eventually not a horrible pain.

That's not going into gathering, though I don't gather enough to know other than it combined scrips with that hidden node system, and I didn't like collectable gathering at all.