ARR was better

[sindriiisgaming]

okay, to prefix. the CONCEPTS were better the QOL was horrid but most of those bad QOL have been addressed

• Jobs had identity
• Jobs had a reason to level multiple (cross class system)
• Hunting log and the Hunt kept the overworld alive
• Things weren't handed to you (you had to work a lot harder to clear content and save allowances)
• The raids were harder and had more complex tank/healer mechanics
• The dungeons were harder (lost city of amdapor anyone?)
• The relic was harder, involved the over world and HAD a gil sink, AND dungeons even contained some of the pieces, AND crafters could make money selling the weapon needed
• levequests had meaning
• Grand company was useful
• Glamour system was more robust
• Elemental attributes on gear
• Tradeable raid glamour meant raids had value in clearing them weekly (the dreadwyrm attire)

I recently went back and played this game on free trial. and maaaan i was amazed how much arr felt like a real MMO. even yesterday when farming for atma. somebody was killing the fates before i could get to it.. and it felt GREAT. because that is what an MMO should feel like.. arr had all the best ideas, all the harshest concepts and was willing to do things theyde never get away with now. Bring some of this back. please

[Galvuu]

It wasn't. I played in ARR, and it really wasn't. It's not just the QoL- as cute as lining in Limsa to queue for coils, the lack of DF or proper roulettes, or something as simple as the teleporters being properly labeled (I still now where the Quarrymill or Camp Drybone are because there was no indication that they were in the South Shroud or the Eastern Thanalan before) all amounted to a very tedious and grating gaming experience. Also, losing your Heavy Thrust buff because you missed a positional (or, worse, because it was a cinematic during which the boss became untargetable, messing up your rotation) was not fun. DRG magic def memes, horrid netcode with a NA server for EU players...
You can defend HW and SB to a degree, but ARR really didn't age well.
I understand the current negative sentiment towards DT, but let's not be revisionist and pretend ARR was perfect.

[sindriiisgaming]

It wasn't. I played in ARR, and it really wasn't. It's not just the QoL- as cute as lining in Limsa to queue for coils, the lack of DF or proper roulettes, or something as simple as the teleporters being properly labeled (I still now where the Quarrymill or Camp Drybone are because there was no indication that they were in the South Shroud or the Eastern Thanalan before) all amounted to a very tedious and grating gaming experience. Also, losing your Heavy Thrust buff because you missed a positional (or, worse, because it was a cinematic during which the boss became untargetable, messing up your rotation) was not fun. DRG magic def memes, horrid netcode with a NA server for EU players...
You can defend HW and SB to a degree, but ARR really didn't age well.
I understand the current negative sentiment towards DT, but let's not be revisionist and pretend ARR was perfect.

the systems i mentioned WERE and ARE objectively better. shb ruined all of the overworld complexity.

[KageTokage]

In terms of the dungeon/encounter/world design, I'm inclined to agree.

The level cap bosses were much more reliant on "soft" mechanics like add spawns, debuff management, and other things that didn't just force you into rigid "stand where the telegraphs tell you to not die" gameplay.

The zones were smaller, but denser with more points of interest to see and considerably less empty space.

[Calysto]

Sightseeing Log was better too.

[ryouma17]

2.0 was a step above 1.0 but it wasnt much of a step 2.0 was just 1.0 in a playable state, the current state of the game is far superior

• Glamour system was more robust

yea it was fun having stacks of glamour prisms ranging from lvl 1-5 from each crafting class taking up half our inventory

[MikkoAkure]

Relic wasn’t harder, it was just more tedious. Anyone can sit there and farm atma for weeks (they’ve buffed the drop rate since then), it was just a slog to get through and wasn’t really fun for the majority of people. The crafting aspect was a nice idea, but unless you or your friends could craft, you’d be left at the mercy of the market board and during ARR, costs for those items could vary from being reasonable to being exorbitant.

Hunting log wasn’t actual engaging content and it was over after killing just a handful of mobs. Even during ARR I knew a lot of people who didn’t bother with it. I only did it for exp or because I didn’t like leaving anything undone. The overworld was alive because at the time FATEs were considered better exp than dungeons and finding a FATE party in Coerthas was much more appealing than spamming Aurum Vale over and over, which was hated more then than it is now.

Elemental attributes never amounted to anything at all, even in 1.0. I don’t understand why you included this unless you weren’t actually playing during ARR and just found a page somewhere that had a list of expired ARR content. You could’ve had a leg to stand on if you mentioned stat allocation but even back then it was a chore because there wasn’t really any incentive to not take the same stat increases everyone else was doing and if you switched between SCH and SMN you’d need to redo it all.


ARR threw a lot of concepts at the wall to see what sticks but SE isn’t going to keep on with certain things if the playerbase as a whole reacts strongly against it or doesn’t consider it fun. A lot can be said about the current state of things, but I don’t think a rose-tinted glasses approach to the past is the right choice to fix things when those things had their own problems back then too.

[Galvuu]

the systems i mentioned WERE and ARE objectively better. shb ruined all of the overworld complexity.

I will not deny that ARR was not afraid of fail-states in most combat, segregating responsibilities based on role and had better dungeon design. But you're simplifying (or being nostalgic) about a lot of things.
As another poster commented, the old glamour prism system was incredibly cumbersome (and ate inventory space). Raid design in ARR had moments of unscripted brilliance (T2S, T7S and T8S immediately come to mind as some of the best designs), but it also had awful fights. Even if you were to do the mechanics by going min ilv+no echo, the Crystal Tower raids are not very good. A lot of extreme primals are very simple, and some Coil turns (like T4...) are simply not very good. I actually think that HW and SB raids are much better (HW had as many creative fights, like A3, A5, A6, A8, A10...), especially the 24-man.
Elemental materia was never really a thing (as was the case with most of the cc-reducing ones, beyond some pvp memes)- if you stacked a ton of it, you'd do well in a primal fight, and that was it. It didn't offer much meaningful choice.
The relic was also just busywork. Running the same dungeon a ton of times wasn't very interesting- you can lengthen any content this way. I will concede that ARR had relic-specific trials (the Hydra) and I'd hope this would become a thing again. But HW offered the best relic item (you could fully customize the stats) and, while divisive, I still think Eureka and Bozja offer a better, unique gameplay experience compared to dungeon spam.

I'm not saying ARR was a total wash, but a lot of these things are just grating, artificial lengthening of content. Even if the content is truly superb (it wasn't, most of the time), I'll never think that you can justify running the same 4/5 dungeons 10 times each per relic. I also think Midas, Creator, Aphascape and UCoB, on patch, were much better fights than almost anything else the game has ever offered (notable exception being, as mentioned, T2, T7, T8 and even T9).
If we were to go back in time, I'd much rather have HW or SB than ARR. The game was almost a prototype back then, and the amount of missing QoL or just basic content was staggering.

[Sunako]

I loved healers and summoner in 2.0

was pretty awesome to have a lot of different type of dots

[Avidria]

Curious as to what made the glamour system "more robust"
Surely not the meaningless inventory clutter of requiring a frankly silly number of different kinds of prisms