I miss HW

[Ivtrix]

The fact that this sounds no different than wow players is hilarious and depressing

[Atelier-Bagur]

Objectively false; I actually really enjoyed ARR and SHB as well. SB wasn't nearly as bad as EW, but not as good as ARR, HR or SHB. SHB proves your theory wrong. EW is the lowest point this game has ever had post 1.0, and the direction is only going lower.

Which is why I said the average MMO player. Ofcourse there are the exceptional few.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Also Shb's content was better than Stormbloods?

Thats just factually wrong. Wrong forever my friend. We cant forget the infamous nickname it garnered during its run "Shallowbringers" for nothing.

Shb only really got its stride during the final patches when more people started to come into the game and favor started to it being generally good.

[Jojoya]

We cant forget the infamous nickname it garnered during its run "Shallowbringers" for nothing.

Who was calling it that and where?

I did a forum search and the word has appeared in 8 posts - and 7 of those posts were either you or someone else quoting you when you used the word.

[Syln]

ff14 meta : pay a subscription for half a patch, be entertain for 2 days and stop playing after 1 or 2 weeks, dwell in the forum, go inside your house before the subscription is over, wait for the next "major" patch, continue to dwell in the forum for 2 weeks after your sub is over. Rinse and repeat.

[Jeeqbit]

There are some things I miss.

1. Needing to pay attention to healer bubbles instead of them covering the whole arena.
2. Needing to position the boss (I can still find moments where it's useful). More often than not though, I'm fighting against the re-center system, which forces boss movement against my will and disrupts melee DPS, or randomly faces the boss south regularly which forces me to aim the boss at the DPS and kinda imply to them they should attack from the north, so that the boss doesn't keep spinning.
3. Tank mitigation not having a large range was always annoying but I got into the habit of running close and like all the other habits, I can't break the habit of running close to the party yet now efforts like this are pointless so even a novice tank can mit the party.
4. Cone AoEs (on WAR and SAM). Which was part of what you signed up for when playing WAR, and on SAM it allowed you to avoid AoEs by doing the cone attack instead.
5. Stances (although I understand why this had to change, half of people believed in using tank stance 100% of the time and the other half believed in using DPS stance 100% of the time).
6. Unique animations and icons for role abilities.
7. Interactions between attacks (such as keeping DoTs up on Bard enhancing Sidewinder).

There are a lot of things I don't miss though, such as old Machinist, Paladin doing entirely physical attacks, all the janky or useless abilities, parry and its associated abilities and things it procced, reprisal being a proc, all the quality of life we wanted back then that was slowly added over the last 10 years and there is a lot of it, excessive abilities that need combining for DPS (like DRG) or all the annoying GCDs on DRG that were improved in Shadowbringers.

For quality of life think our combos not being interrupted by things such as ranged attacks, combos taking longer to expire, TP, sprint using TP, lack of dungeon shortcuts and not being able to teleport into battles or to the end, no cooldown reset if a pull goes wrong, no cross-world PF, no world visit, no DC travel, snail mount speed, cone targeting, buff timers and flying or diving in ARR.

And really, I don't think there was more to do in Heavensward. There were more dungeons made, there were deep dungeons, there was extreme and savage... but there were no ultimates, there were no variant/criterion dungeons.

The eureka/bozja (Diadem) involved flying a FC ship there or being in a party and the weapons you could get from it had RNG stats so I didn't bother and I found it boring when I finally went there. It was also largely advertised as a place for gatherers which is part of what made it boring to me.

What honestly made Heavensward have more to do was probably just the game being newer so there was still leveling alt jobs more than just 10 levels, wondrous tails was actually putting you in fights with a party instead of just being something that you solo, and maybe server communities had to pull together more because of lack of cross-world PF. Things such as deep dungeons were a new concept instead of just being a copy and paste of the previous ones. And maybe the dungeons felt better to do because the jobs weren't as braindead to play and trying to handhold new players.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Who was calling it that and where?

I did a forum search and the word has appeared in 8 posts - and 7 of those posts were either you or someone else quoting you when you used the word.

It was outside the forum community, like in twitter, reddit and some discord servers. Back when the expansion was being compared to Stormblood. Everybody agreed Shb had the better story but in terms of content and job design Stormblood had it beat.

[TheMightyMollusk]

Every expansion is the worst one until the next one comes out, then that's the worst one and the previous one was better.

[Destati]

SB was the best content wise because we still had HM dungeons, and we got Eureka (Yes I had my complaints at the time but I still did it and it at the very least gave me something to do). The extra Rathalos trial. I never felt like I was at a loss for what to do then. But I had started playing right before 3.4 dropped so maybe SB being my first expansion launch added to the magic.
Of course I am not taking the battle system into account because I do not feel like my understanding of it back then was good enough for me to know if I'd want to go back to it or not (I was also bouncing between different classes to main) so I don't have any nostalgia for it.

[Atelier-Bagur]

Google wasnt being very helpful with its search where it kept correcting the term on me when I advance pages but this here is a notable example of what I was talking about. It happened 2 years ago.