Any HW 3.0-3.55 players? Tell us your experience during those times.

[kevin_satron]

Can be any, like something fun/weird/annoying/stressfull/boring/etc experience and transition from ARR to HW.

Also something that you missed during those times, like systems/job skill/etc

(2.0-2.55 post) https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...ng-those-times.

[Sotaris]

Bard had casting time.... it was not fun

[rainichan]

Bard had casting time.... it was not fun

Ah yeah, Wanderer's Minuet changed you into a caster. No one liked that lol.

Watching Idyllshire (then affectionately called Lagshire) get built up like Mor Dhona did was pretty cool, but some people would log in stuck in the environment because of where they logged out before a patch! I do wish they would go back and phase those areas so new players could see how they got built up over time, much like Doman Restoration is done, because it was really neat to see places like Mor Dhona and Idyllshire go from nothing to what they are now.

Also, Idyllshire was supposed to be part of the Hinterlands zone itself, but it was changed to its own zone because they didn't want people to not be able to get in to do the final HW story quests out there from lagging out or too much congestion as it was an endgame zone.

Thordan had actual mechanics it's too bad he's a joke now, the fight was super epic when everyone was in crappy gear and it was a true threat, but seeing his special attack is always really cool, even if he melts now.

Dusk Vigil was the worst dungeon, it hit hard and if you got sucked into the whirlwind from the boss you were likely just dead. It's survivable now, but I hated getting that dungeon in roulette.

I loved the gearsets out of most of the dungeons. The Sohm Al sets were incredibly popular for glamour, and the sets out of Aery were really nice too. I believe HW was the first xpac to have minions drop from the final chests instead of the random chests everyone always ran past in ARR (Amdapor Keep, Aurum Vale, Wanderer's Palace) and boy did I run Aery a lot for the red panda haha. Eventually one of my friends got the drop and gave it to me still one of my fave minions, so cute!

edit:

Transitioning to ARR gathering to timed-nodes was a huge adjustment and at the time I hated it. The idea of having to be in the right place at the right time, and hope my skill was enough to extract the resource, was a massive pain in the butt. These days we have things like Garlond Tools to tell us when and what, and the collectible menu that's dramatically improved the process made it a lot less painful. Being one of the people who love(d) crafting and being a self-sufficient omnicrafter/gatherer capable of making all but the highest-end items, this change really pissed me off and I stopped engaging at the levels which required items from those timed nodes, never to look back. I'm still an omnicrafter/gatherer out of habit and enjoyment of the "slow life" game play, but I've never engaged in higher end stuff to make money with since.

GOD. I didn't craft much in HW, but I did the sprint during Ishgard Restoration and leveled all my crafters/gatherers then, and the HW crafting stuff was THE WORST. The 60 quests were annoying and I wanted to pull my hair out most of the time because I also didn't want to pay money for timed node items for the craft, or even more money for the item already crafted for the quests. It's less irritating in the newer xpacs, but HW was so bad.

[Lihtleita]

lonely blunt damage job, easily replaced by drk
sadge

[NotReallyMistral]

Cross class skills were very interesting but I ended up looking up what's a good job to start off with since I wanted to make a mnk that can tank. TP was the resource everyone begrudgingly accept as part of the game and it made things feel slower in retrospect. I never knew it was possible to play an mmo with a controller until I played it initially on one. And finding out that crafting is its own thing all together got me really excited before it dawned on me that there must be a lot of crafting jobs in the game. I didn't really last that long at the time - can't really afford consistent sub and steam had no regional pricing for australia at the time. I was a poor uni student. But those had been essentially my impressions of when I started. Cross class was still one of the most interesting thing I've seen in the game. Kinda sad we've got a set role skills but eh, I understand why it is what it is.

I know it's more of arr to hw experience and it really was so much of a drag going from arr to hw that it's one of the reasons I stopped for years. I do not miss it all. And I hated that I forgot how bad it was until I remade a new character much later on.

[Illmaeran]

Transitioning from ARR gathering to timed-nodes was a huge adjustment and at the time I hated it. The idea of having to be in the right place at the right time, and hope my skill was enough to extract the resource, was a massive pain in the butt. These days we have things like Garlond Tools to tell us when and what, and the collectible menu that's dramatically improved the process made it a lot less painful. Being one of the people who love(d) crafting and being a self-sufficient omnicrafter/gatherer capable of making all but the highest-end items, this change really pissed me off and I stopped engaging at the levels which required items from those timed nodes, never to look back. I'm still an omnicrafter/gatherer out of habit and enjoyment of the "slow life" game play, but I've never engaged in higher end stuff to make money with since.

The advent of positionals being a significant thing was another major adjustment. Having to get behind or to the side of a boss based on skill procs increased complexity quite a bit. Coming from ARR where things were a bit more static and mostly revolved around hitting your rotation and avoiding what we would consider today to be easy mechanics and moving to a more location and proc-based game play took a while to adjust to. The increased difficulty of dungeons and raids only compounded that. Some felt this was a major improvement due to increased engagement with a fight but others saw it as a too-steep increase and railed against it. Ultimately, SE chose to decrease difficulty to a relative sweet spot.

My happiest memories of HW are character story based. When I made my guy, an Elezen Dragoon with the Fury Matron, HW wasn't even in the public eye. Going into Ishgard where all of those major aspects of my character were front-and-center was MASSIVE for his story development and increasing my attachment to him. The only way I could have made the situation better was to have rolled him as a light-skinned, rather than grey-skinned guy so he looked like the rest of the characters.

Then there was the music...aside from Unchanging, Ever-changing in ShB, the music from HW is my favorite, way above all the others. Night in the Brume, Painted Skies, and Contention are on all of my Orchestrion play lists.

[Johaandr]

I had aero III and stone III.
But forced to go ast for the balance card

Also HW had unqiue feel to it. there was war, dragons, «holy people», goblins and some steam punk vibe of enviroment. A very fun mix! Also to see Idyllshire to see it build, grow and expand! HW ofc had this dumb «era» of meta cuse some jobs werent viable… (pld, whm, mnk and sometimes blm).

Sohm Al imo got the best dungeon enviroment + the music as u begin to move forward. Truly an epic moment!
Weeping city too had the best enviroment for 24 man raid.
Alexander raids were fun and that steam punk vibe really added «something» into the game!

We got infact 2 diadems. 1st one was kind of broken(those damn pink gear) 2nd one was just fate farming xD i got a feeling that it was a beta for eureka.

I dont know what i hate about HW.. i feel like i only experienced it with open mind and sin idk lol.

I say it again: HW had a very unique «feel».

[MikkoAkure]

The Steps of Faith and Chrysalis at the time were very hard instances and skill-gated a lot of people from doing further content. Typically at least one person would know what to do in the Steps of Faith and order people around to specific weapons but they often went off at the wrong time and there were a lot of abandons.

Flying completely changed the game since up to that point we were stuck on the ground.

Most importantly for me was actually being able to go to Ishgard because I had been stuck outside its gates since 1.0 and always wondered what is was like inside and they just kept teasing us with it with hamlets and camps in 1.0 (RIP Owlnest) and the forts in 2.0.

[Jeeqbit]

We didn't have cross-world party finder until nearly the end of the expansion, so we had to be on an active "raid server" to find any parties in Party Finder.

We didn't have [Duty Complete], so we had to put "2 chests, no bonus" to scare away people who hadn't cleared. It looked toxic and put significant amounts of people off raiding. [Practice] parties just put "learning party".

Raid free companies that put statics together were more of a thing then, but now these aren't needed as much because we can form cross-world or cross-data center statics using discord servers and cross-world linkshells.

Paladins couldn't block magic, so many of their abilities were useless against the magic bosses we were facing. We had to face targets to block their attacks or auto-attack them. Parry was a stat that provided RNG mitigation, which means the mitigation would probably not be there when we needed it (against tank busters) and it didn't work against magic either. There were attacks on tanks that relied on parry to proc which made it even worse. We cried out for % damage reduction stat to replace it and we got it (Tenacity) in the next expansion, but people still don't care for the extra mitigation it provides.

Warriors' Raw Intuition would parry from the front and crit them from behind. To nullify crits, Awareness was always cross-classed and combined with Raw Intuition. But parry is parry which also only worked against physical attacks. A lot of the changes since have homogenized the mitigation because we would criticize it when they had significant differences like this.

We still had to reach an Accuracy cap so our attacks wouldn't miss. The developers were aware it added an extra annoying step to do raids, so it changed to Direct Hit in the next expansion.

We had to level other classes for basic abilities we wanted to cross-class, such as Provoke or Second Wind. We cried out for this to be changed somehow and we got Role Actions in the next expansion.

Everyone will tell you this, but Machinist and Bards had cast times causing a lot of Bards to quit the game. Nobody played them anymore, so the cast times were removed in the next expansion where the number of Bards exploded again.

The hardest Alliance Raid I ever remember was Weeping City, which everyone dubbed "Wiping City". The first boss had gazes, sticky web placement and DPS checks that became irrelevant the next time our item level increased. Although rare I did see wipes to it. The second boss was very difficult for people because they didn't kill adds or stood in their death aoes. They didn't prioritize the correct add in the transition phase (which is an easy dps check now) and they didn't understand the mechanics after it either. The healer check would wipe sometimes as well.

If they got through that, they had to fight Ozma. Ozma would frequently cause parties to abandon or people to leave in frustration (but their replacements allowed us to clear, so they were in fact the problem). Now, we skip to the transition phase too fast and if the second phase starts wiping, we kill it too quickly or survive easier because of item level.

I've seen people say that alliance raids after that were hard, but that hasn't been my experience. There were people who would abandon the first boss of Dun Scaith, but they were just impatient and the boss would usually be defeated. The last boss would wipe sometimes but it had a checkpoint. The last part with the orb mechanic would wipe parties but the boss began to kill itself as well, so we just had to survive. These mechanics are mostly intact today because we sync to the final tier item level.

The Steps of Faith and Chrysalis at the time were very hard instances and skill-gated a lot of people from doing further content. Typically at least one person would know what to do in the Steps of Faith and order people around to specific weapons but they often went off at the wrong time and there were a lot of abandons.

I did Steps of Faith shortly after Heavensward released and it was easy. While someone would try to order people to certain tasks, I (and most other people) saw this as irrelevant and just killed the boss. Killing the boss worked as long as the tank mitigated and picked up the adds and the DPS threw some aoes on them. Healers needed to be ontop of the healing, but if not, we could release and sprint back.

[Infindox]

The hardest Alliance Raid I ever remember was Weeping City, which everyone dubbed "Wiping City". The first boss had gazes, sticky web placement and DPS checks that became irrelevant the next time our item level increased. Although rare I did see wipes to it. The second boss was very difficult for people because they didn't kill adds or stood in their death aoes. They didn't prioritize the correct add in the transition phase (which is an easy dps check now) and they didn't understand the mechanics after it either. The healer check would wipe sometimes as well.

If they got through that, they had to fight Ozma. Ozma would frequently cause parties to abandon or people to leave in frustration (but their replacements allowed us to clear, so they were in fact the problem). Now, we skip to the transition phase too fast and if the second phase starts wiping, we kill it too quickly or survive easier because of item level.

I've seen people say that alliance raids after that were hard, but that hasn't been my experience. There were people who would abandon the first boss of Dun Scaith, but they were just impatient and the boss would usually be defeated. The last boss would wipe sometimes but it had a checkpoint. The last part with the orb mechanic would wipe parties but the boss began to kill itself as well, so we just had to survive. These mechanics are mostly intact today because we sync to the final tier item level.

Weeping City was so rough on content, and even when Dun Scaith was the "hot new thing" it was still frustrating. If you got to Calofisteri you already won, because she was way easier then the other stuff before.
(On that subject I remember thinking that Wind-Up Calofisteri was a myth because for awhile the minion was not a 100% drop every time and I never saw it even though I ran it quite a few times!)