Why shadowbringers is truely the best expansion in all of FFXIV

[Basteala]

ShB is widely viewed among players as the "best" expansion. The thing is - it was only able to be a real 10/10 because of the expansions that came before it. Two out of those three books of lore you could write were written in ARR, HW, and SB. The villains that became multi-faceted were introduced as one-dimensional back in ARR.

There's not really much "thought to evoke" in SE. It's already there. You just can't realistically expect the new equivalent of ARR (starting a new narrative) to reach as high as an expansion that had 3 prior installments to build on. Years from now, FFXIV will probably put out another 10/10 expansion - the only question will be whether those "hating" on DT will be willing to acknowledge that the new top-tier installment was able to reach those heights because of the foundation DT laid.

Me? I'm still having a ton of fun with the new stories and lore in DT. *shrugs*

This is only partly true. SHB is the beneficiary of years upon years of build up--since HW post at *minimum*--that's absolutely correct. But all that build up still required a good performance for the payoff to be worth it. It required a sense of pacing, subtlety, and well crafted moments between deep characters to make the most of the phenomenal buildup SHB was given. Fortunately when set up for its grand slam, SHB knocked it out of the park.

DT's writing team in the same situation don't manage to do that, because DT suffers heavily from a shallowness to its characters and some of the worst sense of pacing in all of FF14's narrative.

To be fair, in a vacuum, Post was an improvement, so far. I'm hoping to continue to see improvement, but to say "DT isn't as good just because it's a new beginning" is laughably erroneous. It's in these smaller side stories or beginnings that it's imperative the characters are well fleshed out because you can't rely on the hype of a 10 year story to cover up your flaws. DT doesn't deliver there.

ShB is the most well made expansion but, for me, story wise and emotion wise, HW is the best.
On the emotion side i found ShB flat and generic.... the story wasn't bad, but not amazing either.

I don't know if I agree with that per se, but I will say that HW is somehow criminally underrated. It's probably the only "low power" FF14 story that had a clear direction for its narrative and written to a more modern standard of quality.