What's the point with that quite lackluster story in Endwalker?

[Caurcas]

Who would've thought a collectivist culture thought the collectivist ancient were rad. Wow.

[EmpyreanHelios]

There's always the next expansion. I have faith in SE to recover and start over. Maybe this time they can focus on Garlemald and the politics instead of primals dictating our future.
They could also ignore our complaints and move forward making the game more anime. In which case I would prefer a notice ahead so I can duly skip all cutscenes. The gameplay and community are still enough to keep me around.

yea, I'm greatly hoping the next expansion will be better. I can't believe i'm writing this when one just came out.
maybe covid just messed up endwalker entirely.
see you 2 years later, i suppose.

I think we all play FFXIV for a multitude of reasons, but we can probably assume the people in this thread care about the story and lore a great deal.

Personally, I’m a healer main that gave up on the possibility of SE ever really fixing our core issues (I won't bore you with the specifics). I came back mostly for the story and since they had a good track record with the previous expansions, I thought I was going to get at least a decent experience in Endwalker too. Well, that didn’t turn out as planned.

Saying that though, I truly do hope that they can clean it up in the patches? Maybe do a spectacular job in the next expansion? I will certainly be following the future story content of FFXIV. However, I’ll probably have to do it on someone's Youtube channel or Twitch stream first. It's unfortunate.

[Stachiko]

Personally, I’m a healer main that gave up on the possibility of SE ever really fixing our core issues (I won't bore you with the specifics).

I wouldn't mind the specifics if you have them written down somewhere.

Endwalker is the worst expansion so far in my opinion. Just had too little gameplay

I felt this way about ShB as well. I let it go though. The MSQ certainly needs more gameplay (outside of dungeons/trials) across the board. They also need to condense the MSQ into less walking around and talking to xyz.

[EmpyreanHelios]

I wouldn't mind the specifics if you have them written down somewhere.

Oh, the usual. The biggest issue I have is that there's not enough room to grow in the Healer Role. Once you get all the timing and know your abilities like the back of your hand, you get to the stage where you sit there like a duck casting glare/broil/malefic/dosis until someone graciously step in some bad as a form of petty for their healers.

Your activity stagnates the better your group is, the better geared they are because they take less damage, and the better you are. It's bad design, plain and simple. I should not get punished to wear out my 1 Key because I'm getting better at the game. I had to replace my keyboard once already and I only started at the tail end of Shadowbringers (so a year of gameplay). I can't even imagine those healers that have been playing longer than that. Honestly.



But to be on topic , I was disappointed on the portrayal of Sharlayan's The Forum. I feel like the writers totally forgot about the AST questline they wrote in Heavensward which I thought was pretty darn good (with the usual quirkiness they had going on back then). We find out that the isolationists were ruthless and actually orchestrated a murder of a prominent Sharlayan astrologian as well as hire bandits to kill off people who received training in Sharlayan astrology (People like, you, the WOL!). So Sharlayan almost killed off the WoL, basically. The Forum is shown to have some serious cloak-and-dagger stuff going on in the background, but we never see that part even after snooping around the place. Maybe you could say they had more pressing matters to attend to, which could be understandable. Maybe we will see some of that in the patches.

[Lauront]

Oh, the usual. The biggest issue I have is that there's not enough room to grow in the Healer Role. Once you get all the timing and know your abilities like the back of your hand, you get to the stage where you sit there like a duck casting glare/broil/malefic/dosis until someone graciously step in some bad as a form of petty for their healers.

Your activity stagnates the better your group is, the better geared they are because they take less damage, and the better you are. It's bad design, plain and simple. I should not get punished to wear out my 1 Key because I'm getting better at the game. I had to replace my keyboard once already and I only started at the tail end of Shadowbringers (so a year of gameplay). I can't even imagine those healers that have been playing longer than that. Honestly.



But to be on topic , I was disappointed on the portrayal of Sharlayan's The Forum. I feel like the writers totally forgot about the AST questline they wrote in Heavensward which I thought was pretty darn good (with the usual quirkiness they had going on back then). We find out that the isolationists were ruthless and actually orchestrated a murder of a prominent Sharlayan astrologian as well as hire bandits to kill off people who received training in Sharlayan astrology (People like, you, the WOL!). So Sharlayan almost killed off the WoL, basically. The Forum is shown to have some serious cloak-and-dagger stuff going on in the background, but we never see that part even after snooping around the place. Maybe you could say they had more pressing matters to attend to, which could be understandable. Maybe we will see some of that in the patches.

As an aside, but still relevant to healers, I was a bit disappointed that they went with Venat as yet another WHM. I'd have liked to see them utilise an ancient form of AST or SGE; the former would potentially be complicated by the fact that the constellations back then were associated with the Convocation seats, but in the end it is star power AST draws upon, so it's not an insoluble issue.

I honestly don't mind leisurely running around to get to new a location. I even liked escorting missions. It's the run to this person > then run to that person > then run back to the previous person > etc etc that aggravates me.

Just teleport me around or something. Streamline it all together into one quest. It's so moot to make us run to someone for them to have 2 seconds of dialog then run off.



I started as healer coming from WoW and this was my first complaint. Especially as AST.

The worst of it was I started zoning out. I was so bored pushing 2 > 1 > 1 > 1 > 1 > 1 that my mind would linger. I stopped paying attention to health bars, mechanics, everything. I became a worse player over time.

I genuinely don't understand how people enjoy it. I like healers (esp WHM) in PVP, but in PVE in anything that isn't one of the harder game modes, it seems utterly braindead. Not sure if it's any better in the harder content.

[Kozh]

Not to mention that there's no way she could know back when she started to make those plans that some fools would unshackle Zodiark early. The only way she could reasonably consider he would be free and the aether shield fell is if all the Rejoinings had happened, so the shards would no longer exist. I don't think she disregarded the shards as much as she didn't think they would be there anymore to worry about if her ultimate backup plan had to come into play.

But she knew what happened to Zodiark since the WoL told her in elpis. She clearly realized that in order for the WoL to reach her, 7 rejoining must happen. Same with the 8UC timeline. The WoL traveled back in time using modified crystal tower, which only exists in the current timeline. This means She "let" the calamity in another timeline to happen, and for the First to nearly be flooded with light in our timeline, as this would ensure us to reach her in Elpis. Basically she made 13 reflections with 7 of them to be sacrificed in mind.

[Kozh]

Indeed, but they were also already dying, and it seemed the end was near anyway. Regardless, just like I have no reason to be against the Ancients, I have no reason to be against them. My problem is with the Ascians, and regardless of what Venat did, she did not make them try to kill the WoL and the people we know.

Not everyone is dying. People outside of eorzea are still untouched by Black Rose. Even in Eorzea itself, there are still people living, only in bad conditions. People who doesn't know about the plan, doesn't know about the WoL, people who were just born into that world and tried their best just to survive, people who rightfully question the plan; all of them most likely doesn't want to be erased from existence.

Funny that even with midgarsomr waking up, with what EW revealed about meteion, that timeline is still doomed anyway.

[FoxyAreku]

Endwalker is the worst expansion so far in my opinion. Just had too little gameplay, I don't log into an MMO to watch cutscene after cutscene, especially when the plot wasn't even that good. Not to say I mind cutscenes, I loved shadowbringer's plot, but it also had actual gameplay happen. Endwalker is just too in love with its plot to let you play the game.

For the story itself, I enjoyed the parts with Meteion but everything else was pretty boring, hard to get into, or just didn't go anywhere.

[myahele]

I wouldn't mind the specifics if you have them written down somewhere.



I felt this way about ShB as well. I let it go though. The MSQ certainly needs more gameplay (outside of dungeons/trials) across the board. They also need to condense the MSQ into less walking around and talking to xyz.

EW made it worse because you *have* to talk to xyz people while an npc was accompanying you in some quests. You can't teleport or use mounts because the npc will lose track of you and then you'll have to start from the begining with them.

While I don't think they need to get rid of the feature since it's nice to see what some of the npcs have to say, I don't think it should be mandatory to complete a quest.