Combat system is beyond saving.

[Jeeqbit]

Pardon me as I only start played FFXIV at the start of Shb, but judging from everyone review about HW's both job and raid design, it seems that HW is like reverse EW. EW has bad job design with okayish encounter, while HW has okayish job design with bad encounter.

HW encounter design was fine for the most part, except certain encounters like A4S. They were still figuring out good raid design back then, moving from a WoW-like concept to scripted fights that involve brain-training. By the final tier of Alexander (Creator), it was pretty good tbh and I loved all of the fights.

I for one is willing to learn more about job design in pre-Shb era.

I could try to explain it, but it would honestly be easier to just watch youtube videos from MrHappy's retro series or Heavensward generally. You could scroll to the bottom and watch all these videos from 8 years ago: Lost City, Antitower, Thordan, Sephirot, Sohm Al, Final Steps, Baelsar's Wall, Zurvan

Not really, Havensward had great encounters and the most complex, if often unnecessarily clunky and punishing, job design.

This is a good way to put it. Heavensward job design had you tracking lots of stuff, status effects, keeping stuff up, managing cooldowns, but there were no job gauges and it was full of jank, abilities that could be merged or designed better, useless abilities that nobody used, bloat (you think DRG has a lot of damage buffs now?), being careful not to interrupt combos, aiming to auto-attack, aiming to block, combos expiring if you didn't continue them within a few seconds, tiny healer bubbles and effect ranges, less off-GCDs (especially for healers), a cleric stance that meant healers couldn't heal while in DPS mode, odd design decisions like physical mitigation in fights that deal magic damage, RNG mitigation which is useless etc. Little things like this made it way harder and have more depth, but it seemed like it was all a shot in the dark from ARR release so a lot of it was janky or useless and got tinkered with or removed over time.

I don't think HW had bad encounters at all. If anything it suffers from the stigma of A1 and A2 and their savage versions that were extremely underwhelming

Actually, I took some sprouts through A1-A12 MINE once and the only one they wiped to was A1, which took like an hour or so to clear. The rest were one-shots. I've also always found the savage version of A1 fun. I think A2 is what I don't like, not because it doesn't have depth with the whole getting in a robot thing, but because being loads of adds just doesn't make me excited.

It does however still suffer from the stigma of it's first raid tier which was such a ramp up in difficulty from ARR's raids that it almost killed the raid scene.

Everyone says this but I think there were other factors as well. We didn't have cross-world Party Finder, so you had to be on a "raid server" to see anything in PF or somewhere active enough to find 7 people to raid with and often this would be a raid FC on a busy world. Your ability to get things done dramatically shifts when the number of people and parties available to you octuples. It was able to become less FC-centric.

Because I look at all this now and when we get hard fights that make people quit now we just endure because there is this massive pool of players that can mix from across worlds and now data centers, so the people who want to get it done, find other people who want to get it done, and do it.

Oh and we didn't have discord then! Having these big PUG raid discords and static finders is a factor too. Discord came about during Heavensward and it took a lot of time before we really had these sort of large discord servers we have now.

If you even just look at the Alexander normal raids they are so varied in environment and fight design that it's almost depressing compared to nowadays where everything is just a circle in the void that makes you do some variation of exaflares, limit cut, dynamo, chariot, stack and spread.

A1, A2, A5, A8 and A9 are a square; A3, A4, A11 and A12 are a circle, A6 is a series of squares/circles, A7 is a square or circle depending on if you want to consider the spikes and A10 is unique. So out of all of them only A10 is unique. If we compare that to now, P10 is unique as well.

Can we entirely argue that P1S-P7S and P10S didn't use their environments with mechanics such as Pinax, sectioned off areas for certain mechanics in P3S and P5S, the 3 platforms in P7S, the unique platform in P10S and so on.

You mentioned about us just doing exaflares, limit cut, dynamo, chariot, stack or spread, so how about the element mechanic in P1S that also involved flexing, < shaped AoEs with pizza slice safe spots, hot/cold floor areas that sometimes a player decides which one explodes, snakes and HC in P8S, ruby's in P5S which involve narrow safe spots or watching what explodes, Devour?, I could honestly go on at this point.