What era of design was your favorite?

[Milea]

More and more I think about it, Stormblood seems to have been peak of design for me. Heavensward probably comes 2nd. Shadowbringers was good but you started to see the things like taking out world mobs and their drops, design choices of oversimplification.
Endwalker and Danwtrail probably would be last.
I came in mid Heavensward so I won't put ARR here but I will say I really liked many of the Coils fights for instance though my experience was when people could hit level 60.

[Kaurhz]

I am inclined to say Stormblood, generally speaking, I think this is where they had the healthiest balance overall..

There are things I loved about ARR/HW, which was the gear progression, specifically for gatherers and crafters..

[Ath192]

Stormblood obviously. It was all downhill from there. The MSQ got better but everything else got worse.

[Kisshu]

Gonna go with Stormblood. It did have issues such as the meta party comps, but over all I really liked it. It dialed back some of the more punishing parts of HW's job design without going too overboard, it introduced some interesting job gauges (not you WHM), and it kept a lot of party interaction between enmity management, TP management, MP sharing from casters, etc.

[keichirou]

stormblood...i never got why it was so hated back when it was released but for me ....was the best

[Moomba33]

ARR has a special place in my heart, jank and all. It was a more experimental time for the game. And I actually liked leveling other classes for cross class actions.
I have a bit of saltiness over Stormblood removing a lot of class actions to make role actions. Sure we don't really need every healer to learn their own Esuna.....but I liked the flavour of Scholar having Leeches instead.

[Espon]

I know most people don't care about FATEs beyond having to farm bicolored gemstones, but I really miss having powerful FATE bosses in each zone that weren't tied to lengthy timers and currency but simply just gave you a minion or orchestrion roll for getting a gold ranking.

I miss how ack in ARR they didn't really care as much about the shape of the arena so everything wasn't just a circle or rectangle and looked more like it fit in its natural setting. We haven't seen anything similar to like Caduceus' boss room in Coils Turn 1, or a fight like in Turn 2 made up of rooms where choices and DPS can greatly determine how the final fight plays out (ignoring the enrage cheese strat).

Also, can we bring back having multiple dungeons added each patch? Even if they simply brought back old dungeons as an "Unreal" would be fine just so that we can get a bit of variety in expert roulette.

[JohnConstantine]

Jobs

Tanks
Paladin - Endwalker
Warrior - Stormblood
Dark Knight - Heavensward
Gunbreaker - Endwalker

Healers
White Mage - Heavensward
Scholar - Heavensward
Astrologian - Stormblood
Sage - Has never been good

Casters
Black Mage - Shadowbringers
Summoner - Heavensward
Red Mage - Shadowbringers/Endwalker
Pictomancer - Overrated

Melee
Monk - Stormblood
Samurai - Shadowbringers
Dragoon - Stormblood/Shadowbringers
Ninja - Stormblood
Reaper - no opinion
Viper - lol

Phys Ranged
Bard - Heavensward/Stormblood
Machinist - Heavensward
Dancer - Shadowbringers

Encounter design
Ultimates - Stormblood
Savage - Stormblood/Heavensward
Dungeons - ARR
Trials - Stormblood
Alliance Raid - Stormblood/Shadowbringers

Story
Worldbuilding - ARR
Characters - Shadowbringers
Theme - Stormblood/Endwalker

Community
Heavensward

Crafting/Gathering
Heavensward/Stormblood

Relic
Shadowbringers

ERP Scene
Dawntrail

Ease of cheating
Dawntrail

RMT
Dawntrail

Ease of stalking
Dawntrail

Obsession with FFLogs
Dawntrail

Ease of playing other games
Endwalker/Dawntrail

[Milea]

I know most people don't care about FATEs beyond having to farm bicolored gemstones, but I really miss having powerful FATE bosses in each zone that weren't tied to lengthy timers and currency but simply just gave you a minion or orchestrion roll for getting a gold ranking.

I miss how ack in ARR they didn't really care as much about the shape of the arena so everything wasn't just a circle or rectangle and looked more like it fit in its natural setting. We haven't seen anything similar to like Caduceus' boss room in Coils Turn 1, or a fight like in Turn 2 made up of rooms where choices and DPS can greatly determine how the final fight plays out (ignoring the enrage cheese strat).

Also, can we bring back having multiple dungeons added each patch? Even if they simply brought back old dungeons as an "Unreal" would be fine just so that we can get a bit of variety in expert roulette.

Actually I think the bicolor system is why people don't care about fates.

In Heavensward you would always find fate parties and go to Coerthas and go from fate to fate farming for multiple reasons. They slowly gutted their purpose beyond bicolor gems and maybe some leveling. Shadowbringer was an amazing story but it pretty much killed the overworld. You used to find people farming mobs for mats. One memory from HW was gathering all the sheep and blasting them dead.

[TheDustyOne]

Stormblood overall outside of MSQ.

Job design, while unbalanced, at least offered more variety in playstyle and job utility. Healers actually had more to heal while also having more DPS tools attached to their kits (or at least, more going for them than nuke + DoT). Tanks had some level of risk-reward when it came to stance dancing, even if people more or less relied on circle-shirking for enmity generation to stay in DPS for as long as possible, tanks at least had to watch their aggro generation to make sure some poor BLM didn't accidently become the new primary threat to the boss. The natural defences of tanks were also lower in damage stance, so there was more of a threat to incoming damage that healers actually had to pay attention to. The worst someone could point to in SB were the resistance debuffs; piercing and slashing were meta and only monk could make use of blunt. Personally, I liked those resistance debuffs, more weapon variety and extra synergy options I think would've eventually balanced it out with extra party compositions, but I don't mind if we want to avoid those, they aren't the thing I'd consider to be core to the battle system.

For content, Ivalice is still the best that alliances have to offer, even post-nerf of Cid. For dungeons, while they're nothing special, they mostly just continued with what worked in HW, it was at least nice that there was an extra dungeon every second patch rather than only 1 per patch. Raids felt more creative overall, Phantom Train would be a very different fight if it was made today I feel.

Also I like the feel of Eureka more than Bozja, but that largely has to do with aesthetics rather than mechanics. I will admit to Eureka being a weak point, but the lack of something like it in EW was a massive disappointment and I'd rather have content that provides the "MMO" part of the genre.

The game felt streamlined enough for someone to get their feet wet, but deep enough for vets to still enjoy their time regardless of what content they went into.