Dawntrail currently has the best group combat content I've seen in any MMO

[Krainz]

Dawntrail currently has the best group combat content I've seen in any MMO, with no competition (EX1, EX2, Arcadion)

I started playing MMOs all the way back during the early 2000s fever of Korean MMOs. Played multiple ones afterwards, both eastern and western and eventually obviously played, raided and parsed a famous MMO in the industry for many years, sometimes even went in blind. Dawntrail currently sits at the top of all those experiences for group content, with no competition.

Progged and cleared EX1 and EX2 fully blind

After doing EX1 and EX2, I felt like it's been many years since I had *last* been incentivized by some mechanic structure to want to perfect the fight by not being hit by anything.

Likewise, another mechanic structure makes me want to min-max my DPS a lot and really want to not die. It felt very satisfying to be able to grow over the fight, solving mechanic after mechanic (went in blind on both extremes) even if it took a while on some, but when I felt like I was in the flow it felt very satisfying to feel myself in that state.

I walked out of those fights looking forward to farming them and improving my performance so I can get a clean clear and start parsing properly, I finished Extreme 2 wanting to do it again and wanting to talk about it with people, wanting to see others doing it on videos.

That's not something I easily felt before. The content must be in a really good spot to trigger that, with good readability, consistency and a rewarding sensation when you surpass them.

The mechanics are honest

Very few "gotchas". The mechanics are honest, with clear tells. I might not understand them on first pass, and might even take a while to be able to solve them on my own, but when I finally get there it feels immensely satisfying.

Previous FFXIV expansions had mechanics where the tells were hard to read, or there was a "gotcha" in them that you could only learn through repetition because nothing indicated there was a twist on the mechanic. There are some such cases in Dawntrail, like the Barreltender's aoe that increases in size in a way that you can't expect, but they are very rare, and less present than in the past.

Boss body tells were also something that felt harder for me to read in previous expansions, and that seems to be way better executed in Dawntrail.

[Krainz]

You are able to identify on your own what went wrong

While this was true in the past, I feel like Dawntrail is the best one when doing this job, and even when the difficulty bar is higher on some of the current mechanics, taking screenshots or video analysis to solve them on your own works out really well, not to mention devising a plan for you to have a workflow to quickly solve puzzles on your own instead of relying on the movement of other players (like the mirror platforms + arena cleave puzzle).

Even in normal dungeons and in the normal raid this is true, whereas in the past there were too many mechanical effects (knockbacks, stuns, splash damage) that were not informed at any point and the only way to know them was by seeing the mechanic over and over and over.

Visuals and music

And it looks good. It looks damn good. There is room for improvement, especially with the excessive lightshows in some bosses of the last few dungeons (those excessive light effects are dangerous for epilepsy triggers) but other than that, the spectacle usually doesn't get in the way of the readability of boss body tells and arena tells. That was a problem in previous expansions especially during bosses that relied a lot on boss body tells, and Dawntrail strikes a beautiful balance.

Of course, if I was still playing Black Mage I would've been having a miserable time, but that's a separate discussion. That one is simply a job design that is not made with the hectic and active movement of current fight design, and several changes are needed in that field, but again, separate discussion.

[TDawnstar]

Okay, legit question: have you recently played retail WoW and how would you compare the 2 designs?