Post-Honeymoon SHB thoughts?

[Nicodemus_Mercy]

I'm quite happy with ShB right now... even if I'm overly eager to see more MSQ. I am still leveling jobs, doing side quests I left unfinished, and leveling my trust npcs.

While there's always going to be little things to nitpick about, it's really a novel feeling not having much, if anything, of consequence to complain about in an MMO...

[Raldo]

As far as looking back on the story, I liked the characters, but I was not pleased with the direction that they took the story (I expected to "harness darkness" or something). However, I fully concede that my opinion on that front is in the minority.

What am I doing in game? Back to the ol' grind your weeklies. Level other jobs. Yawn. Oh, what a surprise, it seems that I'm playing Fire Emblem more than this right now.

[MajinSoul]

Pretty solid expansion but certainly feels rushed in some parts (Viera and Ronso, ground collision: you can't land in most of the places above the ground).

[FunkYeahDragons]

I loved the shift in the story's tone and content. I think it feels a lot more like an old school Final Fantasy game with more interesting villains.

That said, I've run the dungeons, leveled a few jobs, first few floors of Savage, done some gathering, and I'm going on break for a few patches to try out a certain other MMO. I'm bored.

[ToniRomo]

Great until 80. After that it's stale.

[Alleluia]

Favorite expansion so far. Glad I've stuck with the game all these years and will definitely continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

[Connor]

Best things about Shadowbringers:
The storyline
The music
The characters / Trusts
The amazingly designed new areas
New glamours (I love the tomestone armour for ranged lol)
The expert dungeons were fun initially
Eden has lots of really interesting ways to draw upon old content to make new content
LA-HEE! Need I say more?

Worst things about Shadowbringers:

How utility jobs got the shaft - and then some (Bard/Astrologian/Ninja/etc)
Endgame gets real boring real fast, and there still isn’t much point in doing any of it once you’ve reached your weekly caps
Same applies to Eden, it’s fun to begin with but can become boring quite quick, especially as a healer
Healers have an obscene amount of healing downtime but the developers flat out refuse to add anything other than pure DPS to fill it. They then removed a variety of pure DPS skills. So healers have less to heal, but also less to do when not healing
They deleted a ton of Bard support abilities but didn’t put any other support stuff in to compensate.


Overall I’d give Shadowbringers a 9/10. I absolutely loved the actual game, but then when it comes to actual combat mechanics, i find myself disappointed in how heavy handed they were with the way they removed a ton of abilities and effects from utility classes but didn’t try and replaced with more properly balanced ones.


Edit: gotta give a shout out to my main man Great Serpent of Ronka. Scree!

[Hazama999]

I liked it more than HW, which I liked more than SB. Found dancer to be really fun and it's pretty much what I main now. As for the story? It was good, as was the main antagonist. I'm a bit lukewarm on the 8-man raid... it's ok.

I'm looking forward to 5.1 for one reason and one reason only: the Nier-themed raid. Up until now, the raids have at least tangentially related to FF, so I'm reaaaaally curious as to how they fit this outlandish raid into FFXIV. It's quite likely that they'll just have us hop across dimensions or something but who knows.

[MonteCristo]

Overall feels like a rehash of past expansions with different colored monsters and tomes. Same formula. Story is better, but the gameplay seems to be just another endless cycle of grinding.

Been saying this for awhile now /cosign

[Fynlar]

The final story dungeon is IMO the best one they've ever done (I'm stacking this up against 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, and 4.5) and I'm gonna be pretty bummed once it's removed from the expert roulette. I say this as someone that doesn't particularly care that much about 5.0's main villain.

Uhh. I'll come back with more thoughts as/if I think them up.