Post-Honeymoon SHB thoughts?

[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).

[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.

[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.

[StarRosie]

Overall? It was pretty good. Some rehashes here and there but hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. The story was overall great, the presentation, the dungeons, all of it was great. The trust system was invaluable to me as I job swapped mid story due to reasons. So it allowed me to safely grind up and get gear to finish out the story. I won't go into my full thoughts on the story, as it contains an apparently...very unpopular opinion. But, overall I loved it, even with the grating parts.

[Makeda]

Solid story.
Jobs that improved improved a lot. Jobs that got hurt, got smacked way too hard...

New tank is like finally adding chocolate to peanut butter.

New DPS is like... well it’s a lot of fun, maybe the funnest DPS in the lost, but I fear it’s undertuned. Yet I disagree with consensus. I like the low DPS, I want the buffs to get a buff.

New Bunny race has the best “human model” in the game and the most detailed face so win.

New cat race... all I can say is that I wish it had a female option because playing a grizzled mangy cat is a thing for me since I made a Charr Warrior in Guild Wars 2 in memory of a one-eyed cat my mother had when I was a teenager. So... as a male locked race I haven’t even looked and that makes me sympathize with players who wanted bunny-dudes.

New dungeons, trials, and raids are great.

*************************
Concern: I though SB was pretty solid and cohesive at this point. I also thought that about ARR at this point.

Imagine if the patch cycle from here sends us to a half developed version of Garlemald or Damascia (of whatever the name of Fran’s home was)... or both... then we’re right back to the flaws of SB... and all the Zenos cutscenes hint that this is what we will get...

[Nedkel]

Dissapointed on glamour and pvp.
Hoped for more hairstyles, some more unique stuff to glamour on, races are limited like blue mage is. Gunbreaker even tho i like the gameplay, they completely messed its looks, weapon sizes and sounds... On the glamour side, they reused a ton of models and just recolored it, i dont mind it, but at least change them a little.
PVP is same thing again, i hoped for more skills to use, not LESS, at least balance is a bit better, but again they gave us no reason to play it anyway.

I like what they did with tanks in this expansion, and like new GNB too, but nothing really "wow" that i would call it.
I cant understand what were they thinking by nerfing healers so much.
No idea what they did to DPS so i wont say anything about it.

I dont like some music in this expansion, i dont get a sense behind using "artificial language" to "sign" these songs, one song is about ebola, another is about tiny balls or something, a lot of tracks are good tho.

Story was cool, long and exciting, but emotions and communication between npcs was bland and flavourless, just like it was in stormblood, there is something i was not liking in it, sometimes they gave us so much unnecessary text to read/listen to. Give it more life, less talking about "technical stuff", it may be good for lore reasons but honestly why talk about magic interractions that nobody know what it is all about without knowing a whole ff lore?

I like they made fates a little more valuable and worth to do, but it wasnt for too long.

While the graphics were fine for the most part, there are really terrible and ultra low resolution textures, i was able to see individual pixels on some of these textures, are we in 2010 year still or what?
Maps design is nice, it have a nice atmosphere in them, but however not everywhere, in kholusia when you look at the lower half of the map from high ground it looks like a wasteland.
Overall some parts are really well done, and other seems like SE didnt wanted to put more money into. It had a chance to be a really polished expansion in every bit, "we will fix it later" mentality is what broke it for me. Definitely not a "wow killer" expansion, they played it safe and tried to save money in places where they should not cut at all.

Thats oll