Let me again emphasize: There are plenty of real criticisms to be had. This wasn't a video to showcase the real places the game is lacking, but to dunk on the claim it is the worst.
I quit before Heavensward came out and stayed away until endwalker. The game is way better than it was. That said, the Coils of Bahamut is so incredibly janky even today. If someone wants to experience the terrible news of ffxiv, they should do Coils and then farm ARR relics and not do anything else for 6 months to go through what I went through.
@@rociosilverroot2261I’m doing exactly that - I mean doing Coils (done them min iLvl on my main early this year and am doing them again casually synced on my alt) and I’m planning to do all the relics (have three ongoing rn)….and I love every minute of it 😅 I guess at the end of the day it’s all a matter of personal taste, though I have good hope I’ll enjoy HW and later expansions as well even if I’m weird enough to love ARR content 😉
I am a person trying to do everything in FFXIV. I have been getting relics in three classes because I want to, and also by Endwalker the Endwalker relics are important, and rely on the ARR relics. I conveniently happen to be a Goldsmith, and the Goldsmith makes the Black Mage ARR relic weapon precursor. But because the only convenient way to get materia-imbued weapons is by mining, I also had to mine. Now I have to mine enough stuff to affix Materia on a thing such that eventually later on I can grind for the weapons. Even as a person who is both a Goldsmith and a Black Mage, it is a grind.
That’s actually my biggest issue with the whole discourse right there: from the moment you point out that some of the criticism is exaggerated, you are labeled as a white knight of the game- because it’s apparently unthinkable that anyone might enjoy something while simultaneously admitting it can be improved upon 🤷🏻♀️ I was caught in that same discourse around FFXVI, and every time it makes me want to bang my head against the proverbial wall tbh
No, i hate that people clarify when they're already being the ratinal ones, the ones that are making the baseless accusations and stating them as fact have went as far as to say we dont have or want ANY criticism of FF14. This could merely ignorance on their part, but more so its purposefully done.
There's a reason I added my friendly jab at him. It's not impossible he'll add his own context because he's asked to. And even if you hate him, he knows what he's talking about. Just remember, I also said to analyze what he says too. WHY does he know what he's talking about? HOW? And then his word is lent even more weight.
My only real Criticism is that The Materia system feels outdated, even more so with the removal of most types. Even though it was for the best, I do wish there was some unique Materia like adding to specific types of damage like making Fire or Ice Spells do more damage bypass a bit of elemental resistance. I don't know, maybe something interesting will come out about a Materia change in 7.x
ikr? when Xeno is he voice of reason something is really wrong lol. i always thought the guy was mostly a drama queen and right now, all of a sudden, i can watch his videos...because, at least, the guy is not a parrot
My guess is that content creators have discovered “FFXIV is crap/dead/dying“ get lots more clicks than “FFXIV is chugging along like normal. Just waiting for 7.0 so I can go back to publishing new content.” One thing I appreciate about your content is that you don’t go down the Clickbait route. Thanks Wesk.
@@threenotesoddity The fact I didn't even title it "good" let alone "very good." Thanks again for proving the lack of nuance, in a video where I say Endwalker is "mid"
27:47 I realized after doing that part where Matoya mentions this on NG+ that the "Life force" talked about here literally just means her personal usable pool of aether(basically, she has less MP than before to use for her Spells because that amount taken out is dedicated to sensing aether around her through her eyes), because of the simple fact that Aether basically _is_ Life force, since everything is made around it. The localisation team were dumbasses to use this specific word tbh.
I personally attribute the danger of Y'shtola doing it to be an equivalent to smoking. Sure, it can affect your health and overall lifespan, but it doesn't mean that you're gonna die in such a short time span that it'd be covered during the story we players experience.
Misunderstandings like that happen every so often and because of that, there's quite a few plot points the English playerbase ended up taking the wrong way. The aether sight 'draining her life force', midgardsormr comes off as much more antagonistic when taking away your blessing like he wants to see you die whereas the JP version has him making it more clear that it's a personal trial for growth. Hell, the Y'shtola x Runar shippers are probably going to be disappointed when they finally understand that despite how 'romantic' the EN scenes between them seemed, JP Runar uses 'anego' when referring to her, which is an informal way of addressing an older sister or a female superior in a gang, the scene comes off as less romantic and more familial/respect-based. But that's also how shippers _always_ act, especially in anime-esque content: every interaction between two characters with them is romantic/sensual in their eyes, and every same-sex duo that interacts is head-canoned to be gay in some way.
@@TheIvoryDingo Of all of them she has smoked on that a lot look at how many times she has been near or in that stream. We really are given scant facts about ether. also She has been in it more than the others her magic may allow her to use it it and balance her forces with it. she can see the ether . She saw when the WOL had taken in too much light. and wanted to tell him/her the truth.
@@rugalbernstein5913OH YES MOST DEFINITELY! I played through the game in jp as i am also learning japanese, and the amount of people shipping runar and yshtola is just so surprising to me. Yeah sure the english localization did a good job in a lot of things but there are also a lot of times that a characters attitude or personality changes a bit cuz of how they decided to translate it.
Fan bases are so self-defeating. They will always either go blind, deaf and dumb about the flaws of a project to a point of treating any criticism with knee jerk hostility. Or become cannibals who turn on the project for the smallest infraction. It’s so weird.
part of that is because it is all on the internet and people will lie on the internet part of it is because no matter what happens, there will be people who defend what it is popular to hate, and people who will hate what is popular to enjoy purely on the basis of them thinking it is funny and there will be people hellbent on going against the grain because they think it makes them look "cool" and a small handful of people who genuinely believe the stuff they say (I wonder if their ass is jealous of their mouths from all the shit they spew) no matter what happens, people will find reasons to create discourse on the internet. eventually, you realize that the loudest voices are rarely reflective of the popular sentiment especially on any platform where creating drama=money
this is why i dont like talking to other fans of things i like unless the vibe is shitposty/chill. ppl get so aggro and sanctimonious about opinions and its a huge turnoff
@@thekaxmax You know you can make this point all you want, but when the dev team actually makes changes based off different groups saying the exact opposite things from each other, it feels like whiplash, it feels like no one's actually thinking, it feels like we're throwing our opinions away to side with one voice that isn't our opinion. We should be voicing our opinions individually, coming to a consensus, finding compromise, and bringing it to the devs.
Personally one of the main things I enjoyed about the video was the perspective of what HW was like when it was “current content.” It’s difficult to find well scripted videos going over those periods of the games history. These perspectives are important to record and they get lost with time since nobody wants to document them. It’s why I like a lot of what you create on this channel it shows a window to what FFXIV used to be.
I think Mr Happy did some retrospective videos on the patches (and Job history), and he also did a State of the Realm where he had Zepla on (after her big complaint video) and in several cases talked about what HW was like at the time. He said to Zepla in that video straight up that HW was the worst expansion in the game (possibly worse than ARR) in that it almost killed the game again. He said that in another video (I think the patch retrospective, maybe?), but he's said several times now that Gordias, he believes, nearly killed the game a second time (after 1.X), it was that devastating to the raid community and, at that time, there was very little content for casual (e.g. non-raider) players to even do. So I'd say check out some of Happy's stuff in that vein (the retrospectives and that one State of the Realm) since he's talked about it and has been around since ARR or possibly even 1.X.
Remember when people thought the warriors of darkness bits in HW patches were useless filler? Ofc it's praised now bc ppl didnt have to wait 4 years before that stray plot point is picked back up in shb, but it was heavily criticized back then for barely having anything to do with the dragonsong war arc nor the leadup to stormblood.
This is just the downside of how far FFXIV plans its story in advance. The Doman refugees in post-ARR were "filler" until Stormblood. The Warriors of Darkness were "filler" until Shadowbringers.
I do remember a lot of people complaining about the Alex story being really lame compared to Coils at the time, but now it's fondly remembered, because it turns out that closed-loop paradox stories can only be fully appreciated once the loop is closed (which took until the final raid tier to do) People complain in the moment quite a lot, working off of incomplete understandings, but what can you do, it's human nature to a degree. Even now I see people complaining about what little we know of Viper, and because we don't know 95% of the info about it, they complain about the 5% we do know, to the point where I've seen people complaining about the NAME of all things
This is why I relish not being part of many major communities outside the game cause I hear this and think People Don’t Like Endwalker? Couldn’t be me.
I used to be part of many Fandom groups of the game, NSFW/RP/Raids/Story etc and i left all of them shortly after endwalker cause they were unbearable. So many lies, misunderstandings, criticisms at the wrong places etc. You're better off staying in your own cycle of friends and ignore everything else outside of it ngl
Adventure plates for me count as content too, just thinking about how much time I spent creating a unique portrait for each job, collecting new frames, improving portraits from time to time, love they added this.
Portraits are fun, I just wish they worked a little more fluidly. Can't tell ya how many times I thought I was good to go with a portrait just to load up with a picture of me standing straight at camera.
Love this feature too, just wish it worked a bit better. Maybe instead of reverting to the default portrait if you change gear, they could use the "last updated" one so at least you have something to show off in duties.
To be quite honest the casuals who are complaining just want a place to waste time like Bozja, the midcore want a little more challenge, and the hard core want more gearing options to use multiple jobs during progression.
People play this game for as many reasons as there are players, Before any one reading this gets the wrong idea You get your gear by doing dung.there are no "levels" of players
Definitely would have preferred a relic zone over chore island. Haven't done a whole lot outside of my weekly allotted raid times these past few months.
I'm never quite sure what the goal is of these people. Ostensibly they are fans (or used to be) but they are ghoulishly excited to announce the game as trash and want everyone to quit. Thanks for showcasing how deeply rose colored are their glasses. I also think if people got what they say they want they would complain about that too. Bad actors desperate for clicks infecting the entire discourse.
it’s because they want their opinions to be validated, hence the numerous comments and video essays that they’ve supposedly “quit” so they can find people on RUclips or Reddit who agree with them
Yeah, this is the weird part. My best guess at this point is they're people who are burnt out and want to quit the game, but they want to feel validated when they do so, and thus need other people to quit to make them feel confident they're making the right call. Sprinkle that in with some people that want the game to be different (more to their liking) and feel like they need to convince the Devs the game is dying to get it changed into what they want.
I have a sneaking suspicion that certain portions of the MMO player subculture, when starting to feel burnt out or bored with a game, start panicking as thought there is _problem._ If I'm bored with the game I've played for 8 years straight with very few breaks, it _must_ be a sign that something has gone terribly awry! At that point, you're just two skips away from finding the legitimate criticisms you can point to in a game and blow them out of proportion. People can't quit, because of all the sunk cost, and they can't enjoy the game in peace, so all that's left is to either complain or suffer in silence.
Because they are streamers who make money off the game. There is currently a lull in interest, because *shock horror* it is a monster year for video games, and we have seen banger after banger released taking attention away from their content. So those streamers who can’t or won’t flex to the game of the week for views have found bashing final fantasy gets them consistent views from the same crowd who lives off bashing WoW. It’s a money making scheme.
IIRC (could be completely wrong) the 'life force' thing with the Aether sight is I think some 'weirdness' with translating things. What they meant was something along the lines of 'don't burn up all your Aether' but it got turned to 'life force' to sound more... I dunno, important or flowery, I guess?
I am noticing that the same people who complained about how grindy Eureka and Bozja where are now begging for a similar type of content to be added to this expansion too. I bet these people use cheats in savage raids too.
Eureka before all the nerfs/buffs and bozja cant even be compared lmao. Leveling in anemos or pagos was just way to slow and painful...and if you wanted fast exp you hardly get to play the game either because you deal no damage to nms.. Meanwhile bozja was piss easy to keep up with.
I like EW fine. Neither best nor worst. I have had this "there's nothing to do" or "no/less content" discussion with others several times. I list X, Y, & Z in EW, and get "well, yeah, but...". I think a major problem EW has is lack of content with long legs. They tried a number of new things, like V&C and Islands, but those features aren't set up to encourage repetition, which leaves some people feeling like there's nothing to do. Grindy content, whether that's a relic grind or something else, scratches a certain itch for a segment of the population, and this time there wasn't such a thing.
Personaly, my hot take is old relic weapon grinds are some of the worst content in the game. Having to do 60 fates in HW areas for a single step, and 36 alliance raids for another for shadowbringers relic was just... not fun. Sure you can get the EW relics quick but when i can do so while actually doing content that's fun at max level and not purposfully gimping myself, its no contest.
I just hate how any opinion that actually expresses enjoyment of the game is called "toxic positivity." For some reason a large portion of these influencers think that unrelenting criticism is the only way to show you "care" which to me, is the true toxic attitude. And I hate to say it, but for a large portion of people coming from other games, this is the way they know how to act when it comes to gaming. This kind of hostile criticism is extremely common in the gaming space and I think it incredibly self defeating as a technique to try to improve games because it becomes very difficult for devs to find or anyone to talk about reasonable feedback about the game. Personally I love endwalker and the direction they are going so of course when someone starts attacking the game, that I enjoy, I am going to defend it. That's me expressing my opinion and is equally valid.
Also the assumption that everyone should just agree with XIV being in a horrible state in Endwalker. You're free to think that, but I've enjoyed myself immensely. Yet if I say that, that isn't allowed. They are allowed to tear it apart and call it the worst thing ever, and if I don't agree or at least give it lip service, then I'm "a cultist" or "braindead" and "have no standards." I stopped trying to play ball with those people.
This. I've posted on anti-Endwalker videos about how I adore the game right now because I'm a casual player and I think the story content - which is what I'm here for - in Endwalker is phenomenal, and I think it's a little unfair to dismiss players like me when the game literally markets itself as a classic story-based FF RPG that happens to be online. Played that way, the game is brilliant right now, and I think that deserves praise. In all those comments, I've made it clear that if hardcore players have issues it's FINE, I BELIEVE them, they're ALLOWED to be mad at not having enough content, I just think it's stupidly dismissive of a large chunk of the fanbase to pretend that the game's bad now when it sells itself on story and the story's still fantastic. I've been called toxically positive, a Yoshi-P worshipper, and a Square Enix shill. It's frustrating, because "toxic positivity" is a real, harmful thing in a lot of online communities - FFXIV included - but it's NOT when you just say "hey, chill, don't declare the game dead, a lot of us think it's still really good". It's like people who use therapy-talk to argue against people they don't like on Twitter - no, just because someone is claiming something is true that you don't think is true doesn't make them a "gaslighter".
@@masterplusmargarita From the people have seen criticizing the current state of the game its for the most part not about story content at all. But about the inability to actively/semi actively play a new patch and do worthwhile new content for the duration of a sub. If you just(mostly) play for the story thats great and legit! I am genuinly curious though how long you stay subbed once you had finished EW MSQ and how long you engage with new story and gameplay options for the duration of your subs.
@@hansjurgen4567 I've been playing since a few months before EW dropped, with a few months worth of a break at some point in the middle. I'm about 1.6k hours in, and I'm not planning to stop any time soon, because there's plenty of story in content other than MSQ - job/class/role quests, DoH/DoL quests and Crystarium/Studium Deliveries, alliance raid stories, normal raid stories, trial storylines, daily quest storylines, deep dungeon storylines, adventuring forays, custom delivery storylines, Hildibrand and a million other things. I know a lot of that is legacy content and I will run out eventually, but I think Endwalker has had some of the absolute best storylines in that arena - Pandaemonium is one of my favorite stories in the game, and the Studium quests are phenomenal. Do I think I'll have content forever? No, I'm probably in my last couple hundred hours before running out of stuff and having to wait for Dawntrail, and after that I'll probably have to drop the game for quite some time before there's enough new content for me to play the game intensely again... And I think that's fine. I play RPGs, which don't last forever, so I'm fine taking breaks to let content build up.
I didn't forget Lord of Verminion existed, I suffered through that shit to get my Twintania minion, closest I'll ever get to a Bahamut minion because I started this game in shb. Loving your content dood, keep being you :3
I am so sorry. I got through like, 8 missions and just couldn't. Fall Guys has already surpassed LoV's life cycle I'm pretty sure. And that says a lot.
The patch story was pretty much about what I expected: A more fleshed out side adventure like Sky Pirates and Four Lords that would set up things for a future expansion.
Thank you for this, I wish I could sit down and put this into words like you have. As someone who also played HW live it’s been increasingly frustrating trying to explain to people blanket stating they “want hw relics.” No they don’t, they want what hw relics look like now, and even then I don’t truly believe that’s what they want. (Some will of course) Been a long time fan of your guides, general way of getting info across, so if there’s ever a way I can help back, I’d love to try.
I definitely want Anima relics again. Make me go farm P9S 80 times per relic like with Anima. Would make me learn how to play each job. I'm not kidding. But I'm sure some people, when presented with that requirement, would say no.
@@WeskAlber maybe a good meet in the middle? you get the stat version for tomes, and the shiny version from grind? you keep it as a catch up weapon, while also giving an incentive to grind?
I think the middle ground is a good idea, my preferred solution would be something like the final Bozja step, for the Blade's X weapons. A onetime step of 'collect 180 total thingys from raids or Zadnor', and then a repeatable easy step of 'collect 15 rocks from DR or Dalriada'. In current terms, that means I'm fine with the 1500 tomes to complete a relic step, as we currently have. I just think there needs to be a onetime grind step before that handin, to make the relic have some feeling of 'I worked hard to earn this'. The onetime step can even provide the mats for the first relic free, if SE wants
The sensationalist clickbait of “endwalker bad” aside, I think a lot of the criticism boils down to people not being able to distinguish between “there is nothing to do” and “there is a lot I don’t want to do”. Like I don’t want to get into fishing, I just don’t enjoy it - but others do. I’m also not interested in blu mage stuff or deep dungeons, but again - lots of people live for that content. Not every content has to be tailored to me. I do think it’s fair to ask for content that’s tailored to you - you’re paying a subscription after all - but it’s not like the game is wildly abandoning its previous trajectory and player base to court someone new. Very little of the new content is actually bad (I’d argue island sanctuary isn’t good), it’s just not that every feature is for everyone, which… yeah…
As someone who did all BLU content in ShB, I was quite disappointed by BLU update in EW. The significant lack of rewards makes getting a group together a lot difficult. Locking BLU weapon behind Criterion savage was adding salt on wound. Not to mention that Seat of Sacrifice and Memoria Merisa are both locked on BLU, and Diamond Weapon normal was most likely not even tested on BLU. The only positive things were visual effects on spells like Titannia, and having a person assigned to be dot mage (breath of magic) in a coordinated setting. And speaking of spells, BLU rotation has also become rigid (fitting as many big hit oGCD as possible), and no unique aspects were brought (like no reliable utility spells). As someone who did all BLU content (all spells + all logs done + all achievement + morbol), this update gave me the impression of lack of effort and inspiration. Who is this content even for? When Yoshi-P announced new limited job coming in late DT, I immediately got concerned
Actionable feedback is the important thing. Not just anger, not just "Oh X/Y/Z sucks," But WHY it's bad, WHY it makes you upset. You don't necessarily need to figure out a solution - often I've heard that player solutions are doubly dangerous because of legal issues around using someone else's content when they aren't part of the team creating a commercial work, but even just for the sake that the old mantra "Players are great at finding what the problem is and horrible at designing reasonable fixes for that problem." Thanks for providing a voice of reason into this community discourse, a voice I have wanted to put forward but lack both the platform and the history of investment to be taken seriously. I saw the video through Xenos's reaction, but you've earned my sub and my attention with your very reasonable attitude. I wish more content creators could be capable of seeing both good and bad in fair balance like you were here.
tbh I'm just happy to be playing the game, whereas it seems like everyone else in the community NEEDS to find something to shit on that they can argue about to someone else solely for the sake of having something to shit on and meme on later. Hating for the shits and giggles. It's annoying, frankly.
This is the best take on this topic. I think people don't actually know what they actually want and are making the devs job really difficult by giving so much mixed signals, unnecessary negativity, and personal attacks. This doesn't make it easy nor safe for the devs to "take risks". It also doesn't help when there are influencers and ex-influencers in the community who are capitalizing on these dramatic views. They are just reinforcing the negativity but doesn't actually move things forward. In the mean time, there are loads of players (who don't get influencer privileges like free fanfest passes) who continue to stay subscribed and play the game because we love the game and appreciate the positive changes in the game. We might not be vocal about it, but sometimes that is all the feedback that devs need.
Thanks for this! EW is my first XIV expansion as I started playing just a few months before it came out and while it isn’t perfect I’ve loved it and appreciate that it doesn’t force me to play a way I don’t want to. There’s just enough content to keep me busy but not make me get tired of logging in. With that being said, I just started Eureka a few weeks ago snd I can see why ppl are missing similar content. After the BlizzCon hype I played a lot of WoW this past weekend and when I would log back in to XIV it made me appreciate it all the more. I think it’s important to understand that EW wrapped up a long story arc and the devs seem to be using the patch cycle to prep the game for the next 10 years with QoL and graphic improvements. I think Dawntrail is going to benefit from that.
There are a variety of reasons to dislike parts of the game or ever the game overall for varying reasons, not least of which preference. To some extent I feel like many people have "Endgame is the only true worthwhile thing" brainrot and don't take the time to enjoy things, just "get through this content to get to that content" and ignore various parts of the game or just generally don't let themselves enjoy the parts they engage in. And even some people who come in late like myself who come into a massive backlog of content just waiting to go. Fast forward months, maybe a couple of years, you might still have stuff you can do, but also a lot of that expanse of content you've done at least once. But if there isn't a massive backlog, is it still a massive game? Yes. But y'know, I guess it's easy to slot in and wait for new things now instead of exploring what's already there. And admittedly not everything may cater to you. Life, eh
It would be nice if there was more incentive to do Variant dungeons once you've done all the paths... Like say... A Variant Dungeon Roulette (Or having the VC dungeons a bit closer tied to the relic to encourage that content more, doesn't even have to be that much, could be like, 3 variant runs or 1 criterion run if they don't want a big grind)
A Variant roulette could even not have the 1/1/2 requirement of Tank, Healer, DPS x2 so the queue could be ultra fast most of the time too. Which would be awesome. I'd add it to my rotation of roulettes every day.
The variant dungeons would have to be reworked to do this because they contain a lot of obsolete mechanisms and scripts which make replayability unattractive once the 12 paths are finished, such as the fact that the NPCs are much too slow, that the mobs/bosses sometimes take too long to be targetable and the puzzles are far too minimalist for it to be attractive to do them again. they also need to add alternatives like gear, items to upgrade the gear, many more rewards, etc,...
@@LightSummoner84 I don't know they would need much reworking. Certainly on the reward front they'd already be comparable to any other dungeon roulette, or more rewarding since a lot of dungeons have one rare minion and gear that's not relevant to most players, while variants have several minions and housing items, plus being a roulette they'd presumably get increased tomes. They're probably slower but I'd trade longer roulette queue for pauses in the dungeon.
Even Mr happy talks about how he thought heavensward was another 1.0 back in the day, he was trying to keep our hopes up back then, but once shadowbringers came around he spoke in his streams about how worried he was durring heavensward
This is all because Zepla ran out of ideas for content and then decided that hating on FFXIV was an easier and more lucrative grift than actually making FFXIV content.
I find it extremely funny that you resorted to name calling a content creator that made constructive criticism rather than giving an actual opinion on the matter
This is how I have been feeling about the whole "Endwalker is bad" people. Some other things Endwalker brought that people forgot not mentioned : 32 dungeon remakes / restructures for duty support (I remember when I was a DPS main waiting in those damn queues to find out what happens next this would have been useful) a option to not have to bother with tab target as much as you can now just hit a hotkey and it will go straight to the nearest target (having come from the likes of Guild Wars 2 and BDO this made things so much more snappy for me) finally being able to tell what is dealing magic or physical damage as well as job tags above players heads I started during Shadowbringers and I just do not see Bozja as more than just MSQ for another area with some custom duty actions. The people calling it midcore content forget one thing : nothing can be midcore for the average person when you have danger dorito dude jumping constantly in the safe spot and people watching guides for everything day 1. As for the relic grind I am more on the side of the Endwalker method. I did Stormblood and Shadowbringers relic and I can say for sure what Shadowbringers did was make me hate the Antitower because the playerbase found out it was the shortest dungeon so every roulette was that dungeon for the relic. Heavensward fates were also overplayed that expansion. Event? HW fate. Relic? HW fate! Just give me the catch up weapon for tomes. Eureka in the form that I played it in Shadowbringers felt mostly a solo thing with a few times you get help when a NM is up. and I liked it for that. It felt sort of like playing FFXIV with Xenoblade map design with some penalties for death.
The remade dungeons don't get anywhere enough credit when talking about content. This isn't just a remade dungeon experience, this is a far better, targeted onboarding experience for NEW players. You know, those little cute sprouts without whom game won't ever grow? Key story points have also been spruced up, and the whole thing feels more in-line to current day quality. I'm sure there are dozens of people that miss the old Totorak and might prefer the 8man Praetorium (after all it was so beloved that the devs had to make the cutscenes unskippable so that new players could see anything), but these are very needed improvements that ensure the longevity of the game far beyond any Bozja-like map would've done.
@@lunaticmode638wasting time is standing in queue for 30 minutes as a DPS to find out what happens next in a story to actually get to the mmo part. New players cannot switch to a healer or tank for fast queue. Also the players ruin some of the experience themselves for a new player by throwing spoilers in chat, pulling bosses while they are in cutscenes, ruining the cutscene by ready checking immediately upon them getting in the cutscene and more. Even being a tank or healer can sometimes not get you a result at certain times of the day.
@@lunaticmode638 Trusts have been in the game since Shadowbringers, and Duty Support is explicitly aimed at fans of single-player Final Fantasy games that are hesitant to try the MMO because of the MMO parts. There is exactly nothing wrong with easing such players in and teaching them how to play at a lower stakes environment. A player group will nearly always be twice as fast as a duty support group, so they are not competing for the same players at all.
I feel like people on the “Endwalker is bad” side forget just the amount of QoL improvements we got throughout Endwalker. Larger cooldown timers, better tab targeting, displaying job icons on nameplates and coloring nameplates based on role, the ability to see job names and colors in chat, and some others that I’m probably forgetting. That, and making the game more single-player friendly with all the duty support changes (especially those MSQ roulette changes, love those). That all being said, I cannot imagine what it was like to actually experience all this shit when it was current. I consider myself a midcore raider and shudder at the thought of having to gear for potentially a month or two just to clear one fight. This game’s always had ups and downs, and the community’s always taken it way outta proportion I think. I’ve noticed a trend with games in general how people will call them “dead” just because it’s going in a direction they don’t particularly like, or they’re just hopping on the hate train for the sake of it. Also Bozja is bad and we don’t need another one. At least, not in the same way Bozja did it.
Slight aside, but with the real world state at the time of Endwalker's release, combined with some major uncertainty in my life AND my dad nearly dying from a freak medical complication, I was in an extremely bad place, and Endwalker was my sole source of escape. When Ultima Thule came around, I started cracking with each major "moment" there, until the "walk to the end" which completely broke me emotionally. But then, trite as it sounds, that emotional release, coupled with the last sequences of cutscenes really eased the pain. Everything is good now in my real life, and I don't play as religiously as I did then, but this particular expansion is very special for me, and when I do sit down 2-3 times a week to play, it's time I always cherish.
@@SubduedRadical I'm not hating and I don't care if their story and views are "valid", I'm just pointing out that it has fuckall to do with this video.
Remember when in ShB people complained about Bozja and Eureka. Now they want Exploration Zones back. I feel like the Midcore audience was left hanging this expac. Content like Bozja and Eureka was great IMO and suited for this same Midcore audience. But they dropped it altogether for lifestyle content like Island Sanctuary and there’s Deep Dungeon which is not particularly engaging content to me. Criterion/Variant dungeons, are fine but they need better and more tangible rewards to be worth it.
People need to take their nostalgia goggles off and realize that Heavensward was the worst expansion. And that's okay because it was the first one. I'm not counting plot because the plot has always been good every expansion, with some ebbs and flows in quality, but the writing's always been on point. So let's set that to the side. The Diadem was absolutely panned. Class balance was, from my research and understanding, absolutely nonexistent. The raid scene was almost destroyed by some criminally brutal savages that would give early Ultimates a run for their money. There was no extra stuff to do outside of Diadem (which was no Eureka or Bozjan not in the least). Relics were still mostly a tomestone grind as they are now, only a few steps actually had meaningful content to it. Expansion quality is SB>ShB>EW>HW. You could make a case for EW being higher than ShB, but Bozja was so loaded that you could spend ages there between the duels, the relics, the mount grinds, DRS, that I think it cruises past EW. It also had the Firmament Restoration for crafters on top of removing cross-class skills. Stormblood, everything was firing on all cylinders and there was no pandemic slowing their stride. We got two Ultimates, four separate updates to Eureka along with Baldesion Arsenal, Blue Mage was introduced, and it was the last major update to job quests before Shadowbringers consolidated it all to Role Quests. The quantity and quality were both in such a harmonious balance that everyone who says Stormblood was the worst expansion before Endwalker is an MSQ Andy who never dipped their toes into anything else.
I think a lot of people need this reminder. The speed at which discorse broke down from "relic weapons and criterion dungeons have issues" to "0/10 expansion, as bad as 1.0" is insane.
The thing about Y'shtola's blindness 'draining her lifeforce' is actually a MASSIVE mistranslation. In literally every other language except English, that part is worded more like 'Y'shtola's need to use her aether to see will leave her exhausted more quickly than normal'. Not that this matters because it literally DOESN'T HAPPEN. I've only just got to the 89 quests in EW, but so far Shtola has NEVER grown tired from constantly using her aether to see.
I always took it to mean Y'shtola gets stupidly reckless at times, with the aethersight thing being an example of her unwillingness to admit her own limitations.
I think I'd say the 2 minute burst is the opposite of taking a risk. It was already a thing, they just shifted everyone to fit into it better to make jobs way easier to design and balance at the cost of homogenization. A risk would be getting rid of raid buff windows. A risk I wish they would take for the sake of job design having more freedom.
I believe the homogenization is what people are taking about when they are talking about losing the job identity and why I personally don't like the 2 minute meta. Some jobs feel drastically different to play but still have the same overall impact like with ranged DPS, others just feel like different flavors like tanks where they do almost exactly the same thing with slightly different nuance and colored abilities. I understand why they have the 2 minute meta, it makes jobs easier to make as well as encounters if they have a singular core mechanic to revolve around, but it gets stale very quickly and predictable when you start looking at how encounters run with the 2 minute meta in mind.
@@epyon542 Yeah, I'm really not a fan of it. I'm sure it plays a big part in why they're able to make 2 new jobs every expansion, but I'd personally much rather they drastically slow down the new job releases and work on making the existing jobs more fun and unique. Viper looks super cool and I'm excited to play it, but that excitement is hampered by the fact that I already know it's going to have a 1 minute and 2 minute burst window with very little if any flexibility. They gotta get rid of raid throughput buffs. As long as there are raid buff windows, every job is going to be pigeon-holed into fitting their burst into those windows.
When should the meta be? 30 second? 3 minute? 30/120 90/270? no matter how you slice it you are just creating arbitrary bullshit that will be either tedious to manage, or fundamnetally simple and reduced to a formula by the community, fact of the matter is 2 minutes is completely fine if not enjoyable.
@@undercoverspy123 How about each job is unique and there is no shared burst window? They had it at one point and slowly worked towards the 2 minute burst window, I don't see why they couldn't do the opposite.
@@undercoverspy123 That's why I said to get rid of group burst windows entirely. Let each job do its own thing instead of having to conform to an arbitrary window where everyone else's buffs line up.
Currently still experiencing the game and getting caught up for Dawntrail but was tiring seeing various content creators say EW is the worse as recommended videos whenever I browsed YT so ty Wesk for speaking up, I hope you're doing well and look forward to seeing your lvl 100 skill guides especially for Viper and whatever the other new job is in the future 😄❤
Don't let it get you down. I was also catching up to current patch until recently, and the complaints are really almost all about players fully caught up wanting new things that aren't on the update plans, not things that detract from playing through for the first time. I really think the EW content plan from the devs was based around making it a great expansion for those who play after it's live so it's still a good conclusion to the 10 year arc 10 years later.
Typing this as I watch, but the whole outrage in the community is WILD to me. I played the game since 2017, got to HW and started on a new, ''proper'' account in 2018. I played this game alone, dead fc, everything on party finder, so apart from in-game communication and some memes here and there I never interacted with anyone besides 2 or 3 friends about the game. Guess what? I loved it. I love the fuck out of this game. Sure it is a bruised apple, but still a damn delicious one. I should note that as an artist I will enjoy a game with lesser perfect gameplay (like if a job gets nerfed too hard or a new duty came out kinda wonky on release) if it keeps up its enjoyability through its quality of graphics, music, story, pacing etc. I finished endwalker with an emotional rush on how much this game has meant to me the last few years. ...and then i go online and see people say the game is trash and is dead. the fuck. so ever since i started interacting with people more. I feel like the community loves to get swept up in the drama. From what i encounter in-game, most people REALLY LIKE this game (otherwise you wouldnt pay monthly for it...) with small complaints like ''not ifrit again'' or ''does zenos ever fuckin die'' or ''this seasonal event had a meh item''. From my experience, people who like the game will be patient for something to get fixed. Theyre not gonna go online and yell at everyone to unsub to... their fav game? I recently saw a post of ffxiv on insta about their dawntrail announcement and the comments were filled with nothing but hate. I genuinely just dont understand people who will waste money and time to shit on a game they like and also hate. Its weird. The weirdest part was when i told someone i loved the ending of endwalker and i got a very agressive essay on why i shouldve hated it and im stupid for even liking it. tldr: if you liked the game in the moments you played it alone, you liked the game.
Honestly, if i've learned anything from my time with FFXIV, apart from reading the tool tips (thank you WeskAlber) it is to ignore the community. While most of it is fine, so many struggle to live without drama that they'll start making shit up just to have something to complain about. And unfortunately, negative things tend to get more people invested, so they'll always get to the top of reddit.
Expressing your disappointment in an expansion is not “drama” grow up and learn new words. And no you should never “ignore the community” even if they are saying something you don’t like, you should read and consider all perspectives , because what if square just “ignored the community” .
@@christopherbailey3547 or i could just, you know, ignore them... That way i don't get my experience tainted by those who are so full of themselves that they get offended by the very notion that people have better things to do than pay attention to them. Also, square is the company managing the game. I don't know how the hell you think that putting me and the creators of the game in the same category would help your argument make sense...
@@christopherbailey3547 Hyperbole and doomsaying is not the same as "expressing your disappointment." Constant "game ded bcuz no bozja weh maintenance mode" or something of that caliber is not a perspective I care to consider. Just as the people spouting that stuff don't care to consider my perspective that I enjoyed Endwalker immensely because I expect and desire different things from FFXIV than they do.
Really feels like all this comes from like one or two of the huge content creators making sensationalized videos about this and everyone just starts regurgitating it all over the place. And it doesn't help that a lot of these content creators are big WoW players that switched to ffxiv mainly during or after Shb, so they don't have the perspective of how HW was when it was current. I started actually playing ffxiv close to the end of Shb, so I know I don't have that perspective, so I don't really complain. I've been happy with the release of content, even if it is all just once you finish it, you're done, but that's kinda true for any kind of content I can imagine.
My personal theory is that a major group of the players complaining about the supposed dearth of content in Endwalker are people who joined in that massive player growth that happened in late ShB. Which, funnily enough, was a major content drought of it's own, considering the covid delays. But now that they've worked through the majority of readily accessible content, they're having to either find something to grind their faces against (like raiding, fishing, mahjong, or whatever else) or find something else to do that isn't ff14. This is the first """drought""" they're experiencing, and they're not used to it, and so lash out. For what it's worth, I understand where they're coming from, having started in 5.3 and devouring content in this game. But now that I've done most of the content in the game I find fun, I just do what Yoshi-P suggests and play something else. I hop on for a few hours a week to raid with my static, do roulettes, hang out with my friends, then go play other games. Maybe those people should too.
I have started around 5.4, I finished the story, went for a break for two months, returned for endwalker release, went away again at the start of 6.1, went back around the end of 6.3, went away for winter holidays, played again till summer, made 1 month break, then returned. Every time I see cool game to play, I go and play it. Because I am absolutely sure that my WoL will wait for me. This game is not designed to be your only game. I find most criticism comes from the fact that people want to play the game 24/7. But you can't. Expand your horizons, for Emet's sake.
"Best" and "worst" are really hard to pin, I think Endwalker is about as middling as it gets and can be summed up quite easily - what we've had is pretty great but ultimately lacking. I chose not to continue raiding into Endwalker to focus on life stuff, so for the first time in a while I've gone back to being a "casual" only player (most I've been doing is extremes). I've done pretty much everything Endwalker has offered and enjoyed the very short time it's lasted each patch. No grindy relic/open zone has really sucked. I spent a shitload of time in Bozja for my Al-iklil mount and enjoyed the shit out of it. I honestly wouldn't even consider the EW relic content at all considering I've insta-completed every step on day 1. Variant dungeons are fucking awesome, glad we've finally got another dungeon to do each patch and such a detailed unique take on it. Sadly, they've pushed this off into its own corner for some reason and when you've done all the routes you basically have no need to ever touch it again. Meanwhile, expert roulette continues to have a dungeon that stays in rotation for 8 fucking months. If they ever make variant dungeons part of the roulette/a roulette of their own, I'll start actually doing roulettes again. Island Sanctuary has been something I've enjoyed quite a lot, though again it's something that you go back to when a patch launches, complete in a week or two and then leave until the next patch rolls around. It also feels real damn lonely, which isn't exactly what I want from an MMO but it's a minor gripe since they've already mentioned the next iteration will be focused on more players. Outside of those major content drops; treasure maps have been cool as always, the PvP overhauls have been solid (literally the only thing I've been doing to grind tomes), and Orthos I forget even exists.
What you're saying is in line with the sentiments of many long-time players. There were a lot of choices made that weren't very wise, and a fair amount of forgettable content in the expansion.
I am reminded... "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." I guess there's a lot of stuff that happened in the past that few of the newer gamers (like myself) know about. I must say that I appreciated this video. It felt very level and not at all clickbaity ragebait material. Thank you for sharing your perspective! Side note: I heard from someone that people asked for the 2 minute meta and then now we got complaints about it. Seems like a trend... 2nd Side note: The slow nature of the post-EW patches is really misunderstood by people. I don't know what they were expecting. I find it to be just fine and really great since they are doing necessary wrap up and build up. Instant gratification and poor literary taste is the problem here among the base.
I am fully a casual but I have played on and off since launch because I have always been a Final Fantasy nerd so I play mainly for the story experience. Personally I loved Endwalker! I thoroughly enjoyed the story and I think it has some of the coolest environs of any of the expansions. I don't keep up with the discourse so I didn't have my opinion soured by naysayers. I understand people may dislike the expansion for hardcore player reasons but as a casual, Endwalker was a blast!
@@lecrab8090 Thank you for replying to a 13 day old comment in way that is not actually a response to said comment. Thank you for proving the discourse around the game is dumb by putting words in my mouth.
@@lecrab8090 Why are you arguing with me? You don't know my opinion on any of this other than I believe that the discourse of the game has gotten dumb, not how or why. Its dumb because Lynx made a video critiquing Endwalker based purely on hearsay. And people took it seriously despite just flat factual errors.
One of my biggest annoyances is the allegation that the dev team is 'lazy' with EW. Anyone who says that legitimately has no idea what they're talking about.
Wow, a content creator finally brought up the past that was this mess when it first came out. I love Heavensward for its story, but its raids, job direction changes, and couple other things they later fixed was massive. My whole raid group fell apart during the first raid tier and time it took to release the next raid tier, not to mention the absolute rage it caused with how bad gear gating was. So many forgot about Bow mage, stance dancing (both tanks and healers) among other issues. Sometimes I think it is because the story really built it up on a pedestal for many they just forgot a lot of the problems it had. Endwalker doesn't have this, it has its own issues, but I wouldn't say it is anywhere near as bad as how Heavensward was during that period of time. Again, they did eventually fix a lot of it...but there was big issues far surpassing anything in endwalker. I just think a lot of these people are doing swan songs and jumping to something new to garner views/subscribers because it fell off after they finished the endwalker story.
As someone who started Savage back at Alexander Midas, I remember how many of the groups would just straight out opt to not have certain jobs in their parties because they were not "optimal." Heck I still remember getting my ass chewed out by my friend for running out of TP as a MONK during the savage fight - and this was already with proper TP restoration timings AND help from the our dragoon party member.
Just…thank you. I have my own criticisms of this expansion, but the current “dump on FFXIV” meta amongst content creators is exhausting. And to not put all of this on content creators, we in the community need to stop feeding into negativity.
Even if we take the MSQ completely out of the equation, Endwalker had objectively the best normal raid, alliance raid, and ultimates by a goddamn landslide, not to mention the trials and their extremes. That alone should be all that matters to 99.9% of the playerbase. Also I have to mention the beast tribes as well, which were so fucking STELLAR that they have legit brought me to tears.
That's your opinion, but please be aware that DSR was originally planned for Shadowbringers and was 80% completed by patch 5.55. It was delayed to patch 6.1 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Personally, besides Barbaricia, Hydaelyn, and Zodiark, I found the Extreme Trials to be rather lackluster, especially Rubicante, which felt quite uninspiring. As for the 24-man raids, the first one was enjoyable, but Euphrosyne and Thalia lacked substance and were primarily focused on visuals. All of this to say that everyone has different opinions, and even though I'm not typically picky about FFXIV content, I found Endwalker to be rather unbalanced in many aspects.
Starting in 5.5 and experiencing bits of casual side of Shadowbringers endgame, there are things I miss and wish would make comebacks. For one GCD to GCD optimization on the jobs i got to experience it (dragoon/monk) is one that I miss dearly. Executing positionals to get that extra 40 potency from Raiden Thrust or guaranteed crit from rear Bootshine. Minor things that even simple things like story dungeons makes them fun to strive for, especially with varied boss positioning from duty finder tanks. Varied buff timings, even though with downtime can fuck you over a lot or a little, is still better than eating burger in one hand and pressing 123 with the other roughly 40 seconds each minute. Also would make jobs not feel too same-y, even though they have different niches (resource management, cd tracker, rigid, fluid, etc.) Endwalker isn't bad, more like mid with bursts of fun rather than long lasting fun. When I contemplated taking a break due to boredom, and found no game to subsidize it with, I went to diversify my pool of content. Got into PvP a bit, casual RP with friends. And most recently managed to find a group for criterion and had an absolute blast progging and clearing it. It's not like the content is not there, it's just the pool of content people stick themselves to either didn't exist or died quicker this time around. Prompting some to declare the game dead and the expansion the worst it has been. I wish I could have my hopes for Dawntrail, but game's direction in job design/content (with exception of Pandaemonium, 6.2 and 6.4 EX, Criterion and Ultimates) made me more apathetic to content releases, so I'll expect nothing and be hopefully surprised by something.
The Asura trial is coming out in the 6.55 patch and it’s most likely tied to the Hildabrand questline. On another note I LOVED The Shadow of Mhach raid series special shout outs to Ozma and Deathgaze Hollow.
If wesk is adding his take about this drama, we've gone past the boiling point and dragoon back flipped into molten lava. His channel tends to usually stay away from this stuff, but it's gotten this bad, so that should tell you something.
"We know entirely how Viper plays based on 6 skill animations." One guy even said we got "a lot of info on Sage" in these comments.... the Sage reveal was 4 skills total. Yeah, I'm tired.
"Viper not having animations as a snake doesn't make sense, wtf devs" is also one I've seen going around. Some people take the naming schemes way too seriously. @@WeskAlber
My question to the FF community is this. Has ff community been dealing with false promise after false promise and controversy after controversy and had multiple objectively bad expansions with tons of cut content, underwhelming, rushed or stupid story elements and plots that go nowhere since 2014? Have you dealth with a content drought of over a year, with no fun events or anything? Are the Devs making decisions that make their bottom line look nicer at the expense of player trust and community perception? No? Didn't think so... take a deep breath FFs problems are not that serious. Yes there are issues, but they are not even close to being that serious.
I feel this post in my bones and I know full well what you're talking about. FFXIV-onlies need some perspective on what a dying MMO looks like, and even with missteps on every corner and squeezing the players dry with microtransactions, MMOs STILL tend to shamble on for a goo while yet until the plug is finally pulled. This really ain't it, not even close. Hell, FFXI is STILL up and running, and they're STILL charging a subscription fee for it!
with regards to GC airships, we can now fly to Kugane (from Radz-at-Han)! The Kugane airship landing has a use!!! assuming you specifically want to travel between Kugane and Radz for 300 gil!! It's not a HW thing, but it's all I got. As a sprout I got into the habit of mostly using airships to travel between cities and going into StB and seeing a new airship landing in the aetheryte menu and not being able to use it at all was annoying to me in a very specific and personal way. So even if I never use airships on my main character it's still a fun, weird little addition they made.
You know, something that irritates me about the whole "Endwalker patch content is filler/doesn't lead to Dawntrail" is that... Heavensward's patch content could be considered the same, as it doesn't really connect to Stormblood and only serves as setup for Shadowbringers.
Anybody that genuinely believes that everything that just happened in the 6.x series is somehow meaningless 'filler' and not *obvious* set up for 8.x or 9.x has not been paying attention to how this game sets up stories in advance.
@@DisastraIt may be but at the end of the day i cant say something is good because an expansion or 2 from now it becomes good and Endwalkers post patch msq was just a bad version of ff4.
Thank you so much for actually THINKING for YOURSELF and providing a level headed well thought out criticism of the current expansion's quality compared to the old Expansions as well as the history on the topic. As a Shadowbringers baby, I walked away much more informed and validated in my own opinion that Endwalker is a perfectly fine expansion. Sure, it can be better but it's just fine when compared to the others.
I feel your ending piint is very much in line with YoshiP in that Brazilian interview where he said he's getting a bit tired of people making damands then complaining when they're met but not exactly like they wanted and how if we want change, we need to actually have a consensus. He's basically making a point that rn the vocal minority are the only ones actually being well... Vocal. They're the only ones making an input with any direction so the result is they'll be the ones that get listened to. Same with Xenos or Dalamud, like or hate them and what they represent, they're actually giving tangible examples pf how things can be improved which are almost always right to a significant degree.
10:55 Did that mean that if you were a BLM back in Heavensward, you had to be a lala to be optimal? Did groups tell non-lala BLMs they would need to fantasia if they wanted to do savage as a BLM? That's absolutely wild if so. Makes me thankful for how far FF14 has come in terms of QoL.
As a player who only started playing after endwalker released, and was caught up to current content roughly around 6.3, what really struck me when I started watching updates and current content releases was that a lot of endwalker feels like it's designed very consciously to be nice to do after 6.x. Like island sanctuary really didn't have that much to do on release, but by now with it's official conclusion to major updates it'll be a really enjoyable thing for some people to work away at as they progress through EW patches and Dawntrail in the future. Variant dungeons doesn't have the long lifespan of exploration zones, but they will also not be a huge hurdle for new players to try go through, especially on lower population data centers. It's kind of like they're trying to recreate the post expansion love people have for Heavensward, only through a strategy of evergreen content rather than the luck of hitting good enough high points that people eventually forget the negatives. Which I think is a really solid strategy - as a game you want the conclusion to your decade long arc to be a good expansion a decade from now as much or more than you need it to be the most innovative and risky 'must play while it's current' expansion.
"There is nothing you want to do“ - Finally somebody is saying it. For years now I hear all kind of different people saying the game has nothing to do in. This was during SB, SHB and EW of course. Then there is me with over 1000 days of in game play time, still overwhelmed by all the things to do and I haven't done. Flabbergasted at those people I enjoy the game like it is day 1 and throw myself against something new I haven't tried yet in the game.
HW is one of those expansions where some people like it for fairly selfish reasons, but these reasons oft' didn't and don't translate very well into the game itself and the broader community. Like, I loved the sense of accomplishment that everything gave due to how demanding facets of the game were... Like crafting and gathering I personally did like, A LOT. But I don't let that blind me to how bad it was for the broader community, especially when you needed to spend *weeks* (Arguably even accurately a month) just getting the required red scrip tokens to get scrip gear for a *single* job, just to then upgrade it to augmented... just so that you could self-sufficiently work towards Ironworks upon reaching Level 60. It was rewarding, but it was a very drab experience and completely unfriendly to fresh level 60 players. -- There was A LOT that Heavensward did completely wrong, and it only kept you so busy because a lot of it was badly designed many systems were.
Comment before watching video: I think my main issue with the complaints of big ff14 content creators is the outright lie of EW having a lack of content. There's plenty to do, just nothing that they WANT to do. And that's perfectly fine and you can feel that way but to say there's nothing to do is just not true. Edit: Seems like he agreed with me 😂
I joined the game in 5.3 so i'm one of the newer players and even i know it's not the worst expansion/patch life from what i read. About the patch story i do agree that it's most of a filler, but i'm not sure what people were expecting? The 6.1 title is litterally Newfound Adventure. We ended a ~10 year old saga. It was time to have a very specific filler type story, can't every story needs its periods of downtime etc. And actually the idea of the story arc was something really fun to me, i loved Zero, exploring the Void more properly is something i always wanted (btw troia is maybe my favorite EW patch dungeon, and one of the best in general visually.) Do i think they could have executed it better? Well yes tbh, some of the plot beats especially mid 6.3 to 6.4 were very meh imo, but i guess it's somewhat the nature of the patch formula too. I do think they could have ended the void.. "arc" in 6.4 somehow and 6.5 was entirely in prep for dawntrail. But i'm also happy with what we got so.. take that as you will I also agree with you that i really wanted exploration content like bozja but better. Somewhere like corvus/ilsabard/north of othard would be good options.. i hope they took this time to just like think about ways to improve it and bring it back and strong for 7.X (tho with what they said in the fanfest i have little faith... we'll see). And as someone who doesn't really do or like hildibrand, them putting the relica tied to that... wasn't a point for me let's just say that. Some stuff i also think could have been done better was the alliance raid, but because i was SUPER excited for Myths, which ended up probably being a 8/10 for me influding everything. The story was fine, visuals were amazing (please bring explorer mode for alliance raids i beg) and i'm happy we got to see the heavens, and aglaia music being some of my favoritr in the game (they were all pretty great). Battle wise tho... i'm pretty disappointed (esp 2nd and 3rd wings). Trying to keep it quick but just wish the bosses skipped their tutorial phases and cycled mechanics faster/more happening at the same time. Just dislike the style they went with these last few bosses even if there were some cool ideas.
Also about jobs i have i guess unusual feelings since i don't really do extreme and savage content/play mostly casually. But i guess i feel like we are aproaching job bloat scenario? And skills too i guess? I also wish i actually got to use more of my healing kit in normal content but idk... it really is a hard balance to reach with the style they go for in the game battle content
@@petrus9067 I agree and take it a step further think that the job design they are moving to is clashing with their boss design philosophy. They want jobs to be simpler and easier to synergize, but none of that really applies to remembering the choreography of endgame raids. I think they could allow more player to boss interactivity - things like more Interrupts and Stuns, Esuna, Sleep actually could do something, with simplicity to job design comes rooms to make fights more interactive. But I still feel like we’re stuck in this “So You Think You Can Dance” boss design that I think makes EX/Savage raiding in EW less appealing. No shade, Pandaemonium was just really annoying and frustrating dance choreography than truly a challenge imho. I think the job design works well as a skeleton, but the boss, level and enemy design needs to change for that skeleton to feel more worthwhile. Big ask, but that’s what I’ve thought about a lot of the true symptoms of the current EW zeitgeist. Das just me tho.
what i really don't like about the whole "game is dead" take is that it's only toxic high-end/no life players pinballing it back and forth to each other. it's this weird circlejerk-y echo chamber thing going on disguised as constructive criticism. really they just want the game to be an immaculate god. look no further than the lynx kameli video, that freaking cornball. everybody that plays even somewhat modestly, or players trying to get into 14, are left with a community tortured by awkward opinions that don't apply to their VERY LARGE majority of the playerbase. this take can never get enough exposure as being ridiculous and your video is great wesk.
Everyone who does not share my opinion is a toxic elitist and no-lifer Like cmon crickejerking is a thing with everyone, doomposters and the opposite in this comment sections
@@RealElSteino it was just hyperbolic/dramatic insults and blurbs, bro, i said no real opinion on the state of the game because i'm content with everything in it. the point stands regardless. this shitty take is nurtured by jaded hardcore players that are upset they played a game with 100s of hours of content to death. it's an unhealthy mindset for damn sure
Seen a few of these criticisms myself which I haven't paid much attention too because a lot of them are "I am a content creator and have Grinded out everything in 24 hours and now got nothing to do." problem of doing it too quickly. I have seen some criticism of the patch MSQ which I understand not liking the Void storyline but as this is the first time I have been current with MSQ since starting I can't reallysee much problems with it. I did what I did at this point during Shadowbringer patch cycle and started a new character hoping to get this one up to date before Dawntrial release.
@@WeskAlber Yeah but a lot of these problems are related to it being the first expansion. Of course more modern and polished ones will look better. I started playing mid to late HW and most of these issues weren't that big. I'd take them over having nothing to do in Endwalker.
@@sct77 People weren't saying Gordias killed raiding because one or two people quit. People said it because A LOT of people quit. Casual players also felt they had "nothing to do." A lot can be forgiven to HW for being first. But when you look at something like PotD - also HW - it's not so simple. They weren't incapable of good ideas, and they actually had some. It's not like the first expansion was doomed to fail. Acting like it didn't nearly fail won't make DT or other expansions better. And pretending everything EW has done was wrong will actively make DT and beyond worse.
I'm a Paladin main and I can talk about how the Paladin changes did disappoint me slightly, however I can also accept that my job is better now with the rework than it was before it. The old Paladin had a very comfortable flow for me, Melee to Magic to Filler to Melee to Magic. It had no burst because it was constantly rotating with no explosive moment. That was fun for me, I liked that for around 20 seconds of my rotation? I could be anywhere no matter the mechanic and do what other tanks couldn't do... but I understand that the design now is better in line with the mechanica design of the fights. That having a proper burst phase followed by filler. It's a different feel but even if I don't like it as much I conceptually grasp the concept behind it. That said, I've loved Endwalker, great expansion, has problems, but uh so did every expansion.
I find it hilarious that as “hardcore” (lol) FF players are destroying the community with their ridiculous claims that this casual-ass house and glam sim needs to cater to them, we’re seeing WoW have a LITERAL “throw wide the gates” moment in their newest trailer. How did this game go from “the best MMO evar” to horrible in less than one expansion that really didn’t alter the formula all that much? Simple, people play too much and are bored after 10000 hours of gameplay. I’m looking at you whiny streamers.
I get what you mean. Having started in ARR just before HW released I've seen a lot of newer people parroting bs like "bring back the attribute system" or "tanks were so much more fun having to work for emnity (cough, blm were not having fun needing to stifle their rotation to include the threat reduction skill just so they dont rip aggro from the tank) suddenly there is all this talk about how "AST was so much better in HW" when every player under the sun complained to the devs about that job and how cards worked, they listened and changed it and now everyone is angry again and wants the old system back. That is honestly what annoys me the most, most of the features that got taken away were direct consequences of players asking for those features to be removed. And instead of looking into the past the devs and players should look to the future in order to innovate and not bring back redundant old features. That being said I still absolutely love HW, great story, has one of my alltime favorite trials (nidhogg), one of my alltime favorite alliance raids (mhach) and dark knight came with the release of HW which I love too. That being said, dungeon design was really lacking and stormblood is basically what elevated the experience for me. EW in terms of story was great, I enoyed the dungeons, I enjoyed the raid designs, I enjoyed the newest deep dungeon (not as much as the Stormblood one though), I enjoy Sage and Reaper and I'm happy we finally got the Firmanent as a housing district. I don't enjoy how they butchered by boy monk that I've been maining since HW, I don't enjoy how easy the content has become where even the newest Alliance raid didn't have 1 wipe in the first week of its release with pugs. Everything has gotten so goddamn easy and there is no slight challenge to be found besides savage/ultimate. Xeno is right in the sense that midcore content is virtually nonexistent nowadays, you either get mindnumbingly easy dungeons/trials/extremes/alliance or savage/ultimate. There also being no bozja equivalent annoyed me as I really enjoyed that content and the relic grind tied to it.
I think EW is fine, but I haven't played in months. For me it's just that I haven't really liked the patch MSQ much (Zero is an extremely predictable and boring character) and I'm a tank main, and I feel like I haven't really been able to find a tank I really want to main. I was using Dark Knight last time, mostly because they still have the best animations of the tanks, but I haven't enjoyed how most of the classes I've tried play in EW. The other thing for me is, my favorite DPS in ShB was either Samurai or Machinist, and the way they gutted Iajutsu in 6.1, that made me hate playing it. Machinist had DPS problems early in the expansion according to the hardcores, but I think I just burned myself out on it in ShB. I did REALLY enjoy Crystalline Conflict when they added that, and the PVP revamp in general is fantastic, but just playing it casually I kept running into people cheating with addons that let them do stuff like auto target their LB and switch targets for every move inhumanly fast, and that meant my fun was over. I still think most classes I've played, I just like them, but don't love them, and part of it is they feel extremely clunky on KB/M controls. Feels like there are a few too many buttons when some new abilities could be reworked into traits, and the game's targeting has always felt a bit too slow for me compared to WOW. These comments probably all seem negative about the game, but like, I still plan to come back a month or two before Dawntrail to get caught up/prepared, and I'm hopeful that 7.0 is going to rework tanks so they feel more distinct from each other and I can get back to playing my favorite role. I definitely don't think the game is dead... Even if I haven't liked patch MSQ, the worst of it still completely annihilates the big Acti-Blizz competitor's attempts at telling an "epic story." The music is still top class in the entire industry. It's still the best MMO to subscribe to.
i think we peaked at that one super bitter guy forgot his channel name at this point and i cant find the video ethier. maybe they deleted it. Stand and let thing resolve is gonna be a new meme for awhile.
The biggest problem with Endwalker is that there just isn't a casual, community engaging, long-form grind to chase. In the past when you finished or burned out on raiding, we always had something else to do. Instead we got isolationist content in the form of Island Sanctuary, and a relic grind that boils down to *run your roulettes every day*. Fall Guys is the closest thing to a community event we've gotten this expac and I honestly think that's why so many people are disappointed with Endwalker.
Yeah I can see that. For every person who is glad "all they have to do is run roulettes," there's someone who wants to sink their teeth into it. Running out of content isn't from no content, but it's not just outright "lol take a break." If this is your one game, you love this game and love playing it day in and day out, there's no problem with that.
As someone that's been trying to get several older relics for a long time now, fuck the grind lmao, maybe it was fun at the time, but holy shit I am so tired of it all.
@@NeroNyte Nah, nothing to do with "at the time". Plenty of people hated it then, too. Just that without such a grind, the group that liked them is more vocal now.
@@NeroNyte It's not so much about the grind as it is having a goal shared by the entire community to engage in. Raiders and casuals go after relics. It's a bummer to not have it be a focused event.
I’m a late shadowbringers baby and I’ve got a lot of content to catch up on. Just started island sanctuary for glam, shadowbringers relic and four more weeks of p12s reclears. I haven’t even touched the deep dungeons or criterion yet. Might do UCOB before dawntrail. I’m full.
"it could be so much worse" is not "ew is good because it could be so much worse" i started in 3.1 and i partially agree with how hw was, but the worst issues the game has seen don't magically elevate endwalker to being good, they're both bad in different ways; hw was failed risk taking and ew is the stale formula reaching its limit. one point towards hw instead of just demonizing it to everyone, hw had merit in regards to party interaction, as annoying as some of those utilities and cross class were, players don't interact with each other the same way anymore at all. stormblood refined it to a point that was pretty good, and it's been completely gone outside of things like addle or reprisal since 5.0. i unironically and genuinely preferred when fflogs melee whined about not having a drg or nin, but i could apoc my tanks or mana shift a healer and have my "moment" in a raid. there's a world where all of the things added to the game still exist but in a refined state instead of just being flat out removed and contributing to the staleness that has become the MO of endwalker, and that's just one example.
Nor did I say it is good because it could be worse. You pulled that out of your mind because you don't want to listen to someone disagreeing on how bad it really is.
Really nice watch. I am a in the game since ARR (and a little bit of 1.0) and got so many friends into the game, and i've never really seen an expansion as "the best" or "the worst", every expansion has positives and negatives. Even though liveletters became "predictable" the most fun I've always had was looking to UI/system improvements because I always knew I'll likely enjoy the story, and do the content one way or another. Sometimes people sound like leaves in the wind, flipping between 0 and 10/10 depending on the weather when so often it's about personal preference and all the different aspects - there is too much to break it down to an "overall" rating i think. I personally also liked bozja for all the trial and error with the broken skills etc. though i can also see why it was bothersome for some people that didn't want to engage with the systems, but it's the often the same people that feel like the current relic in EW is "boring", when having it tied to a progression and level opportunity for alts was too "specific" even though besides some steps you could choose your way of doing it.
I have no horse in this race. I quit when i'm bored. I come back when there's something fun. If the game stopped tomorrow. I think i would be "damn that sucks i had fun" and move on.
This video was amazing. Alot of points given, justified while also open to debate/criticism. Also..."Do you remember the numbers mason?". Your a real one for the callback!!
Honestly I can't take anyone seriously who claims that they have "nothing to do" in this game. I've been playing for 1600 hours and have only barely started Shadowbringers, because I'm actually DOING shit instead of just bum-rushing the MSQ and then complaining that I'm out of content. Have you gotten every job to max level? Including crafters and gatherers? How about Blue Mage? Have you completed its spell list? Have you finished Eureka and Bozja? Have you ever run Baldesion? How many Big Fish have you caught? How many Chocobo Racing challenges have you finished? How about the Verminion challenges? How close is your Triple Triad collection to completion? Have you solo'd all the Deep Dungeons? Do you have all the relics? Have you beaten all the high-end raids and trials? Have you maxed out all your Shared FATE ranks? How good is your FC's airship and submersible? Do you have all the Ishgardian Restoration mounts and emotes and stuff? How about all the ones from the Gold Saucer? How about from PvP? If you want shit to work towards, the game has a virtually endless amount. The game isn't lacking content, you've just decided you don't feel like doing a lot of the content that exists. That's fine, not everything is going to appeal to everyone, but be honest and admit that you are CHOOSING to not do that content; don't pretend it isn't there. And if you really don't want to do anything else until the next expansion comes out, then just unsub and come back later. Instead of sitting around being bored and bitching about how bored you are, you could just go play another game.
Honestly I feel like the reason why this sentiment seems so strong now is because of the large influx of new players that came into the game in 2020 during the SHB patch drought. They had a base game + 3 expansions of content and stuff to do when they joined and now that they've caught up on everything they suddenly feel like theres nothing to do when the content cycle of FFXIV has been ostensibly the same since STB. I've been playing since around 3.2-ish and I've already settled into just coming and going from the game and doing what interests me and leaving what doesn't for years. There's def some fair criticism, but I defintiely feel a lot of it is just people now being caught up and not having nearly 7 years of backlogged content to do. People have said the same thing abt FFXIV for years, people said this about SHB, STB etc. its just louder because of this demographic (doesn't help that the 2020 influx attracted a lot of kinda toxic people who are very online and vocal on social media). Thank you for succinctly showing how wrong the position of everything "being better in HVW" is and how the people parrotiung it are detached from the reality of HVW and now just think of it based on what it is in retrospect and not at the time. The game was still good in HVW, but it had way more problems than any expansion that came after it. As you said, at the very worst ENW is just fine as an expansion, not some affront to god.
I was waiting for an actual comparison, factual evidence, not just feelings. Although I wouldve liked if you did a comparison of all the expansions, not just HW in details. (I know you talked about SB and ShB, but it was more surface level) If you have time and want to do this, I would watch that. Overall, great video! :)
Another important thing that EW did is to revamp the old dungeons to be in more line with the current ones and allow players to do it with NPC's. This is also important. Old dungeon bosses with unintuitive or boring mechanics (I'm looking at you slime) has been revamped. Not to mention changes done to Castrum, Praetorium and Ultima fight. EW not only tried to introduce new types of content (C&V dungeons, Island Sanctuary) but it also changed the old to have a more consistent gameplay across the expansions. There are people who forgets this. Do I think that EW's story could be better if it was 2 expansions? Yes. Do I think that EW raid bosses have giant hitboxes? Yes. Do I think that the SE failed to put meaningful rewards to its non-raiding content? Yes! But even with that I think EW is a great expansion in the long term, even though it might not look like it is in the short term.
The only things I disliked about Endwalker was the lack of new armor and the post-MSQ being too reliant on FF4 fanservice. But coming from Destiny 2, it could be WAY worse, those who know the current discussion about Bungie and their past controversies will know what I'm talking about. While I dislike the Manderville relic grind, it has given me a reason to play the game more (I've completed them all until 6.55 drops). Everything else I've loved, especially the music. Scream was the highlight for me since I grew up with rock music in the early 2000s, making it a truly fun experience for me. Also, your right about ARR's post-MSQ before 5.3, it was so abysmally long that my friend had to bribe me with the Rebel Coat so I wouldn't quit. Once I reached HW, I enjoyed the game significantly more
Thanks for that video ! I may have a different perspective since i've started ffxiv back then in ARR times mainly for the crafting system it had, and actually was fine with what it was, never fun to have the jobs you main dumbed down especially if you're very fine with it yourself, i understand the argument about it being very intricate but you would prolly not like to have your dragoon going that same route because other felt it was too complex, at least that was my perspective back then, about mid / end of stormblood era i actually fell in love with the story, kept at it since then. I would however agree people tends to forget about the low and nostalgia acting up, i find that somehow funny as a bystander that some of current content creator complaining about the absence of said exploratory area, were back then very critical about the grinding. i also hear often about the problem being the community, have to say maybe im reading it wrong, but having an opinion that nobody agree with isnt really a community issue... I'm outside of it, and i basically retired from any form of harder content, when i left wow back then, but i have to say i heard a lot in shb era about people wanting for more "harder" dungeon content, and since i don't participate in it probably, i have hard time to understand how EW is a low point, it felt to me that everything that is happening right now in the form of variant dungeon, criterion dungeon, ultimate happened as a result from this demand from back then, yet people still look unhappy what more do they need, i don't understand, i'm afraid !
As a Bard main who wasn't a fan of the aesthetic of Coerthas, I *hated* Heavensward. Bowmage was an interesting concept, but it ruined the identity of the Bard class: Mediocre DPS, but the ability to keep your rotation going constantly while doing mechanics. I never got the hang of using the cast mode, but I also noticed it never seemed to make that much of a difference for my DPS. Maybe top tier bards got the boost from going into bowmage mode, but I was outperforming other bards without it because I could keep the ARR rotation going much more quickly than with cast times. All that said, I'm just incredibly glad they rolled that back.
Curious how you feel about Bard right now, I mained it in ARR never mained it again. I tried using it again recently and I genuinely have never had more of an unfun experience with a class in an MMO.
@@AOffensiveJokeI like how Bard plays in Endwalker. They didn’t change much from Shadowbringers. I will admit, I sometimes forget to use my songs in my rotation, so my DPS isn’t the best, but the core rotation isn’t really that different from where it was in ARR. There are a few more Off GCD skills to weave during rotation, and now there’s the DOT refresh skill so you don’t have to recast both DOTs. That said, it’s fun for me. I know not everyone will like it. I’ve heard Dancer is both more fun and higher DPS, if you want to play ranged DPS. If not, there’s enough jobs to fit anyone’s preferences at this point.
@@zeriah @zeriah Nah I don't like dancer, I play black mage because I don't like burst jobs and every class in game is kinda one right now. I think the breaking point for me for bard is song rotation and songs started only by an attack instead of just an ability. I did like dancer in theory as a low personal damage but high buffer but I just think the buffing in the game is boring, except for bard as it changes the bard rotation slightly with mage ballad and wanderer minuet.
I recall first hand most of these issues. Been playing since the ARR beta. WAR was itself so terrible a tank on 2.0 launch and going into Coil that no one took it - people went double PLD, or single-tanked where that was possible. A good WAR player could potentially out-damage a dedicated DPS...provided they took off their job stone and slapped on cross-class skills like Raging Strikes, Internal Release, Blood for Blood, and other damage-boosting skills available to MRD but not to WAR. Path, Eye, and BB combos were all fully available on MRD - the only things you were missing out on were your stance, Thrill, Unchained, and IB/SC. Imagine telling the playerbase now that was what was required if you wanted to hit things with an axe. And when it comes to tank damage output, all jobs regardless of role once used the same damage calculation formula: 500 potency on HW Fell Cleave meant it hit like a 500 potency skill on a DPS. That changed when the first of the Warring Triad fights were patched in: tank damage calculations were altered to scale less than before on the stated potency, and rather than STR alone informing damage, a divisor of a tank's combined STR/VIT scores served as the basis. But before that, you were using STR accessories and allocating all of your level-up bonus stats to STR - and probably playing a Highlander (and later, a Xaela) for good measure. This got changed again at SB launch when the VIT component to damage was removed and returned to STR alone, but tanks were newly hard-locked to Fending accessories starting from level 61 gear...that had no STR on them. The result was tank mains continuing to use level 60 Alexandrian/Shire accessories up to level 70, because aggro multipliers were still low in SB, and the newly-added jobs SAM & RDM had absurdly high-potency skills available below level 30, which mean tanks could not hold threat against these jobs in leveling dungeons until Brayflox at the earliest for WAR/DRK, and Cutter's Cry for PLD, since aggro stances were still not accessible until levels 30/40 for these jobs, respectively. The Favors system you speak of required spending uncapped blue scrips on favor tokens to spawn favor nodes for a set duration in specific areas of HW zone maps, and they were very leve-like in a way. You had to gather quantities of HQ items from these nodes to trade in with a vendor in Idyllshire for crafting materials that were used in the first tier of crafted raid progression gear in Gordias, which saw a lot of demand because of both the high likelihood of failing a craft and the number of people trying to beat their way past a1s and a2s with little success. Steady Hand I and II couldn't guarantee 100% success on certain touch and progress actions, and if you didn't want to consign yourself to 40+ step crafts using the MaMa rotation you could opt for a riskier but quicker rotation predicated on using Manip. II with touch actions that had, at best, a 70% success rate when buffed. And of course, there's accuracy, and its bastard twin, parry. Don't get me started on these stats: I played SMN, PLD, and WAR while raiding through ARR/HW and I cannot begin to tell you how many Alexandrian Visors of Fending we tossed through the grating of Lamebrix' arena floor because the thing had parry/accuracy on it. That people nowadays suggest bringing these stats back tells me advocates for it either did not play the game when those stats were present, or have forgotten why they were so reviled at the time. The granddaddy of all issues I like to remind people of, though, is that ARR launched without an inventory sort function - or a way to split stacks or reduce item quality. Stack sizes were capped at 99, too, not 999 like today. I am honestly quite satisfied with the current state of XIV myself. A lot of what's been removed & adjusted was on account of negative player reaction - vociferously negative player reaction, at that. The complaints that are lodged today do have merit (I am very much in the camp that alternative gearing progression needs to be a thing in criterion dungeons) but I do not think it is remotely fair to say that EW is somehow the worst expansion or the worst place the game's ever been in, not by a long shot.
As a newbie who brgan this game 5 months ago, the criticism of the jobs is wild. I couldnt play dragoon because of how weird and rigid it was, but i discovered reaper and felt instantly in love with it. They are night and day different, same goes for othrr jobs. Also the 2 min window is fine to me, burst when you can, continue your rotation when you cant. Encounters are difficult because of mechanics, and not gated by jobs. I prefer that and having all jobs be viable in ultra late game content than having people be denied to play the class they love because of "the meta". Also, before you say i dont know what im talking about, I cleared UWU, Ucob, TEA and im gearing up right now to do DSR, so even I can have an opinion because I can play the game at a high level.
Triple Legend sprout, now that's what I like to see. And you are correct - people can criticize the FFXIV class design, sure, but the alternative is far worse, because it is merely an illusion of choice. You either play meta classes or you clear nothing, that's how most MMOs work. FFXIV went their own way and chose to eschew wild fluctuations in flavor to instead have all classes be viable - and I rather prefer that to all the alternatives. And it's not like the classes are even the same, lmao. There's plenty of difference to them even if you technically can keybind them all much the same (and if you wish to play all jobs, you MUST). They have different cadences, different rotations. Ninja is unlike any other job, Samurai is very different from Dragoon, and even Sage has a very different feel to its healing as White Mage. I think it's really just that the fake choices of other MMOs like pointless talent trees and gear abilities have rotted some people's brains to the point they miss the fact that they've always been nothing more than a math problem for players to solve and an endless headache for developers to deal with.
This was by far the best deconstruction of the current problem with XIV's community and I heavily resonate with all your sentiments. As someone who has played since 6.1, I don't necessary feel entitled to loud criticism of the current expac gameplay, but having experienced past content such as Bozja (which I consider very fun, personally), made me wish there was a similar piece of content in Endwalker, including a more interesting relic that isn't straight up from a vendor - do I dislike and hate the game? Absolutely not, even at the pace I'm churning through content, I find it greatly satisfying in a sense that no other MMORPG has and XIV is completely irreplaceable to me, despite its flaws. The said, thank you Wesk for being absolutely critical in the most constructive way possible, it gives me hopes for the community.
I started seriously playing after Endwalker launched. I only completed the full story in early August this year, and the mass influx of "Endwalker bad, dead game" totally blindsided me. Never knew about any of the Heavensward issues, but I've remained in love with Endwalker and frustrated that this is blowing up because people are being silly for clicks. "Good" is subjective to each person, anyway. Thanks for making this video! Very informative and detailed.
I don't know if you realize how very frustrating it is that someone that started playing less than a year ago is now telling people who have invested a decade of their lives on a game because of how much they love it that their opinions are "just clickbait ragebait video topics." It's okay to simply accept that you are a latecomer overwhelmed by the massive backlog of content this game has to offer, but that doesn't make the criticisms of the game invalid just because you are in the honeymoon period, as we all were at some point.
@@AzuraiFrostwing Literally every single content creator with the exception of one deeply disgruntled individual has said it's wonderful if you're enjoying Endwalker, but that they personally don't like the expansion and listed their gripes with the game. Complaints that have been circling around in groups of veteran players, people who have been SERIOUSLY playing for 10 years. Maybe you should re-read your initial comment and see how dismissive it is towards differing opinions before you attack me for dismissing yours. I'm happy you're enjoying Endwalker, but I never attacked your opinion. Just annoyed by your, and many people like yours, dismissiveness on very fair criticism of the game they love too. EDIT: Oh and you certainly did call the opinions clickbait. What else would "people are being silly for clicks" mean? God forbid they actually are voicing their grievances with the direction of the game in a community that often silences dissenting opinions.
"The story is over, so people are getting worried about where it goes from here. Now you're looking around and all these problems seem to be showing up" (I think it was Jessie Cox, and this is definitely paraphrased.) It feels like nobody has anything to talk about and launch was so hype that this post patch content FEELS weak. There's also just more people now current, and with less stuff they "have to do". I wasn't here for long myself. I hopped in at the tail end of Shadowbringers, especially since some of the things I heard about it from older patches was a lil eh for me. But like, even after spoilering myself, I felt like this post patch series was about the same as all the others. At least in terms of overall plot and side content. But it definitely sounds like if anything the game isn't HORRENDOUSLY janky still. I actually just got my crafters to 90. I couldn't imagine having to do it previously, but yeah, it does sometimes feels a lil bland. Even so, I don't think they're going entirely in a wrong direction.
Yup, I remember the raider's tantrum about the 280 weapon, despite it being layers of RNG. They were more concerned about gatekeeping the "dirty casuals" from having a good weapon. My only complaint with EW is the relic quest, but it is what it is. As for horizontal gear progression, they did experiment in the final patch of HW with the alt accessories via 24 man raid. I think even some PVP gear was level 60 before they stopped doing that. Also Bozja during 5.5 where you get gear that's 5 item levels below max item level for the left side. Wish they'd take a more Destiny approach where the gear you can gear up regardless of content.
Just dropping here a like. As someone who was there (I was there Gandalf) in the worst expansion this game has ever seen, the critically acclaimed Heavensward, this video is needed for the noobs that just arrived
Okay, honestly, having started mid-Endwalker, having not been there during "The Dark Days," I still feel like Heavensward is at the bottom of the figurative tier list. While it's when the game starts really picking and following through on dormant plot threads - in other words, it's where it feels like the game's plot starts picking up - it also has the single worst zone in the game (Coerthas Western Highlands), three jobs that STILL haven't completely shaken off the jank from their release, and some truly horrible progression for crafters. It's still considerably above average when compared to games at large, but I do think it's showing its age.
@@Zanador Okay, I realize I worded that very, very badly. It's not the Jobs themselves, its more the acquisition method. Namely, you have to actually start Heavensward before you're allowed to pick them up, and by then, they are 20 levels behind. Compare the Stormblood Jobs. You acquire them within one of the three starting cities, and the only requirement is that you meet the base level of the Job. For example, you can pick up Samurai as soon as you hit 50, then pivot to it for the rest of the game. If you want to pivot to MCH, you have to grind it up to 50 before you can start doing MSQ with it. This is especially bad if you, heavens forfend, got into the game specifically BECAUSE you wanted to play one of the HW Jobs.
@@scironex5055 Ah okay, that makes a lot more sense. I see your point, although I don't 100% agree. I might be biased since I play every job and intended to do so from the start, so I was never at risk of having one specific job dangled out of reach. I like that the jobs are picked up in Ishgard itself, it makes them feel more directly tied to the culture and people of that city. All three HW job quest series are some of my favorite job quests, and it would be a huge loss (and a huge time sink on CBU3's part) to rewrite them such that they can begin in one of the starting cities. I totally get why they started putting all the job unlocks in the ARR cities especially for the later expansions which would take even longer to unlock, but I also think that the way the HW jobs are done is neat. As far as the starting level, they start 20 levels below the starting level of their expansion, which is 10 more than the other jobs which start 10 below, but we're also talking 30-50 which is not the same as 50-60 or 60-70 etc. If you want to start playing Samurai for Stormblood or Gunbreaker for Shadowbringers you still have to grind them up 10 levels, which is about the same as getting the HW jobs from 30 to 50. And for people who got into the game to play a specific job, the HW jobs are some of the LEAST egregious offenders. If you really want to play one of the ShB or EW jobs you need to get all the way to 60 or 70 just to start them, at which point you're almost definitely in Heavensward at least. I have a friend who specifically wanted to play Dancer more than anything else and she was super annoyed that she needed to get to such a high level before starting. So that's not really an issue exclusive to these jobs at all. Sorry for the wall of text, lol. TL;DR I see your point and I think a lot of people would agree with you but I'm personally fine with the way they are.
@@Zanador I fully agree; There's definitely a tradeoff with the way the Stormblood and onward classes are handled; The DRK questline is my favorite, specifically because of how it ties into not only Ishgard, but Ishgard's relation to the player character. You could, in theory, have a compromise, wherein the Job Tutor is stationed in a starting city, then moves back to the actual city, where the real Job Quests start, but the only time they've tried that is Samurai, and that may well be my least favorite Job questline. It's true that the "If you got into the game to play the job..." issue isn't exclusive to the HW Jobs. That honestly didn't occur to me. The one thing I'd like to clarify is that the issue isn't just them being underlevelled for their expansion. It's that they're underlevelled even if you get them as early as possible. In other words, if you want to pivot to Samurai for Heavensward, you can do so with no grinding whatsoever. If you want to pivot to Machinist, it is ALWAYS going to be 20 levels below you, because you literally can't access the job until you're level 50. This is definitely something that only became an issue retroactively, and which is only going to affect someone who got started after HW was already old news. But this is also, to be completely clear, jank, and jank alone is not a critical issue. I grinded MCH from 30-70 because I decided to pivot at *Shadowbringers,* and I'd do it again.
@@scironex5055 True, I guess it is weird that the HW jobs are inaccessible until 50 but then start at 30. I hadn't thought about it like that. My friend group likes to change jobs each expansion so grinding something up between expacs is nothing new - recently my wife grinded Warrior from *1* to 70 just to play it for ShB. I guess it would make sense in theory to start the HW jobs at 50 instead, but then you'd need somewhere to put the 30-50 stories lol. You're right that it could be improved, but they're probably just gonna leave it as-is since like you said it's not really a huge glaring issue.
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
Let me again emphasize: There are plenty of real criticisms to be had. This wasn't a video to showcase the real places the game is lacking, but to dunk on the claim it is the worst.
I quit before Heavensward came out and stayed away until endwalker. The game is way better than it was. That said, the Coils of Bahamut is so incredibly janky even today. If someone wants to experience the terrible news of ffxiv, they should do Coils and then farm ARR relics and not do anything else for 6 months to go through what I went through.
@@rociosilverroot2261I’m doing exactly that - I mean doing Coils (done them min iLvl on my main early this year and am doing them again casually synced on my alt) and I’m planning to do all the relics (have three ongoing rn)….and I love every minute of it 😅 I guess at the end of the day it’s all a matter of personal taste, though I have good hope I’ll enjoy HW and later expansions as well even if I’m weird enough to love ARR content 😉
I am a person trying to do everything in FFXIV. I have been getting relics in three classes because I want to, and also by Endwalker the Endwalker relics are important, and rely on the ARR relics. I conveniently happen to be a Goldsmith, and the Goldsmith makes the Black Mage ARR relic weapon precursor. But because the only convenient way to get materia-imbued weapons is by mining, I also had to mine. Now I have to mine enough stuff to affix Materia on a thing such that eventually later on I can grind for the weapons. Even as a person who is both a Goldsmith and a Black Mage, it is a grind.
That’s actually my biggest issue with the whole discourse right there: from the moment you point out that some of the criticism is exaggerated, you are labeled as a white knight of the game- because it’s apparently unthinkable that anyone might enjoy something while simultaneously admitting it can be improved upon 🤷🏻♀️ I was caught in that same discourse around FFXVI, and every time it makes me want to bang my head against the proverbial wall tbh
No, i hate that people clarify when they're already being the ratinal ones, the ones that are making the baseless accusations and stating them as fact have went as far as to say we dont have or want ANY criticism of FF14.
This could merely ignorance on their part, but more so its purposefully done.
If Xeno starts sounding like the voice of reason and telling people to calm down, you know something weird is afoot in the discourse.
THIS. I really don't like watching his content, but his response to the BS had me nodding in agreement.
There's a reason I added my friendly jab at him. It's not impossible he'll add his own context because he's asked to. And even if you hate him, he knows what he's talking about. Just remember, I also said to analyze what he says too. WHY does he know what he's talking about? HOW?
And then his word is lent even more weight.
My only real Criticism is that The Materia system feels outdated, even more so with the removal of most types. Even though it was for the best, I do wish there was some unique Materia like adding to specific types of damage like making Fire or Ice Spells do more damage bypass a bit of elemental resistance. I don't know, maybe something interesting will come out about a Materia change in 7.x
ikr? when Xeno is he voice of reason something is really wrong lol. i always thought the guy was mostly a drama queen and right now, all of a sudden, i can watch his videos...because, at least, the guy is not a parrot
@@sophiastorm8616He's also made a conscious effort to diversify his content from just drama and I've enjoyed his content more since
My guess is that content creators have discovered “FFXIV is crap/dead/dying“ get lots more clicks than “FFXIV is chugging along like normal. Just waiting for 7.0 so I can go back to publishing new content.”
One thing I appreciate about your content is that you don’t go down the Clickbait route. Thanks Wesk.
@@threenotesoddity The fact I didn't even title it "good" let alone "very good."
Thanks again for proving the lack of nuance, in a video where I say Endwalker is "mid"
Continent Creators are the worst Thing that has ever happened in the History of Everything
27:47
I realized after doing that part where Matoya mentions this on NG+ that the "Life force" talked about here literally just means her personal usable pool of aether(basically, she has less MP than before to use for her Spells because that amount taken out is dedicated to sensing aether around her through her eyes), because of the simple fact that Aether basically _is_ Life force, since everything is made around it.
The localisation team were dumbasses to use this specific word tbh.
I personally attribute the danger of Y'shtola doing it to be an equivalent to smoking. Sure, it can affect your health and overall lifespan, but it doesn't mean that you're gonna die in such a short time span that it'd be covered during the story we players experience.
Misunderstandings like that happen every so often and because of that, there's quite a few plot points the English playerbase ended up taking the wrong way. The aether sight 'draining her life force', midgardsormr comes off as much more antagonistic when taking away your blessing like he wants to see you die whereas the JP version has him making it more clear that it's a personal trial for growth. Hell, the Y'shtola x Runar shippers are probably going to be disappointed when they finally understand that despite how 'romantic' the EN scenes between them seemed, JP Runar uses 'anego' when referring to her, which is an informal way of addressing an older sister or a female superior in a gang, the scene comes off as less romantic and more familial/respect-based. But that's also how shippers _always_ act, especially in anime-esque content: every interaction between two characters with them is romantic/sensual in their eyes, and every same-sex duo that interacts is head-canoned to be gay in some way.
@@TheIvoryDingo Of all of them she has smoked on that a lot look at how many times she has been near or in that stream. We really are given scant facts about ether. also She has been in it more than the others her magic may allow her to use it it and balance her forces with it. she can see the ether . She saw when the WOL had taken in too much light. and wanted to tell him/her the truth.
@@rugalbernstein5913 i felt like i was the only one that didn't see them as romantic. i never got the romance perspective people had. at all.
@@rugalbernstein5913OH YES MOST DEFINITELY! I played through the game in jp as i am also learning japanese, and the amount of people shipping runar and yshtola is just so surprising to me. Yeah sure the english localization did a good job in a lot of things but there are also a lot of times that a characters attitude or personality changes a bit cuz of how they decided to translate it.
Fan bases are so self-defeating. They will always either go blind, deaf and dumb about the flaws of a project to a point of treating any criticism with knee jerk hostility. Or become cannibals who turn on the project for the smallest infraction.
It’s so weird.
different people on each reaction. The antis start that way just get more vocal. The pros are the same.
part of that is because it is all on the internet
and people will lie on the internet
part of it is because no matter what happens, there will be people who defend what it is popular to hate, and people who will hate what is popular to enjoy purely on the basis of them thinking it is funny
and there will be people hellbent on going against the grain because they think it makes them look "cool"
and a small handful of people who genuinely believe the stuff they say (I wonder if their ass is jealous of their mouths from all the shit they spew)
no matter what happens, people will find reasons to create discourse on the internet.
eventually, you realize that the loudest voices are rarely reflective of the popular sentiment
especially on any platform where creating drama=money
this is why i dont like talking to other fans of things i like unless the vibe is shitposty/chill. ppl get so aggro and sanctimonious about opinions and its a huge turnoff
@@thekaxmax You know you can make this point all you want, but when the dev team actually makes changes based off different groups saying the exact opposite things from each other, it feels like whiplash, it feels like no one's actually thinking, it feels like we're throwing our opinions away to side with one voice that isn't our opinion.
We should be voicing our opinions individually, coming to a consensus, finding compromise, and bringing it to the devs.
@@biggrayalien4791funny, that’s how most of the changes people asked for, that they now complain about, happened in the first place
Personally one of the main things I enjoyed about the video was the perspective of what HW was like when it was “current content.” It’s difficult to find well scripted videos going over those periods of the games history. These perspectives are important to record and they get lost with time since nobody wants to document them. It’s why I like a lot of what you create on this channel it shows a window to what FFXIV used to be.
I like those Larryzaur vids when he did vids on HW
I think Mr Happy did some retrospective videos on the patches (and Job history), and he also did a State of the Realm where he had Zepla on (after her big complaint video) and in several cases talked about what HW was like at the time. He said to Zepla in that video straight up that HW was the worst expansion in the game (possibly worse than ARR) in that it almost killed the game again. He said that in another video (I think the patch retrospective, maybe?), but he's said several times now that Gordias, he believes, nearly killed the game a second time (after 1.X), it was that devastating to the raid community and, at that time, there was very little content for casual (e.g. non-raider) players to even do.
So I'd say check out some of Happy's stuff in that vein (the retrospectives and that one State of the Realm) since he's talked about it and has been around since ARR or possibly even 1.X.
Remember when people thought the warriors of darkness bits in HW patches were useless filler? Ofc it's praised now bc ppl didnt have to wait 4 years before that stray plot point is picked back up in shb, but it was heavily criticized back then for barely having anything to do with the dragonsong war arc nor the leadup to stormblood.
This is just the downside of how far FFXIV plans its story in advance. The Doman refugees in post-ARR were "filler" until Stormblood. The Warriors of Darkness were "filler" until Shadowbringers.
Guarantee you its gonna be a repeat with Post-EW story stuff a couple expansions down the line.@@Zanador
I do remember a lot of people complaining about the Alex story being really lame compared to Coils at the time, but now it's fondly remembered, because it turns out that closed-loop paradox stories can only be fully appreciated once the loop is closed (which took until the final raid tier to do)
People complain in the moment quite a lot, working off of incomplete understandings, but what can you do, it's human nature to a degree. Even now I see people complaining about what little we know of Viper, and because we don't know 95% of the info about it, they complain about the 5% we do know, to the point where I've seen people complaining about the NAME of all things
Doesn’t make it good though. There’s seems to be a lot of excuses for why they starts stories and then drop them but pick them back up years later.
This is why I relish not being part of many major communities outside the game cause I hear this and think People Don’t Like Endwalker? Couldn’t be me.
Yeah, it's usually best to kinda stay away. Fandoms are weirdly the worst part about just about everything.
I used to be part of many Fandom groups of the game, NSFW/RP/Raids/Story etc and i left all of them shortly after endwalker cause they were unbearable.
So many lies, misunderstandings, criticisms at the wrong places etc. You're better off staying in your own cycle of friends and ignore everything else outside of it ngl
Adventure plates for me count as content too, just thinking about how much time I spent creating a unique portrait for each job, collecting new frames, improving portraits from time to time, love they added this.
Portraits are fun, I just wish they worked a little more fluidly. Can't tell ya how many times I thought I was good to go with a portrait just to load up with a picture of me standing straight at camera.
Love this feature too, just wish it worked a bit better. Maybe instead of reverting to the default portrait if you change gear, they could use the "last updated" one so at least you have something to show off in duties.
To be quite honest the casuals who are complaining just want a place to waste time like Bozja, the midcore want a little more challenge, and the hard core want more gearing options to use multiple jobs during progression.
It’s not the casuals that are really complaining if at all honestly.
People play this game for as many reasons as there are players, Before any one reading this gets the wrong idea You get your gear by doing dung.there are no "levels" of players
It's not casuals complaining, most are parroting what their favorite streamer said.
I really don’t see any casuals complaining
Definitely would have preferred a relic zone over chore island. Haven't done a whole lot outside of my weekly allotted raid times these past few months.
I'm never quite sure what the goal is of these people. Ostensibly they are fans (or used to be) but they are ghoulishly excited to announce the game as trash and want everyone to quit. Thanks for showcasing how deeply rose colored are their glasses. I also think if people got what they say they want they would complain about that too. Bad actors desperate for clicks infecting the entire discourse.
it’s because they want their opinions to be validated, hence the numerous comments and video essays that they’ve supposedly “quit” so they can find people on RUclips or Reddit who agree with them
Yeah, this is the weird part.
My best guess at this point is they're people who are burnt out and want to quit the game, but they want to feel validated when they do so, and thus need other people to quit to make them feel confident they're making the right call. Sprinkle that in with some people that want the game to be different (more to their liking) and feel like they need to convince the Devs the game is dying to get it changed into what they want.
I have a sneaking suspicion that certain portions of the MMO player subculture, when starting to feel burnt out or bored with a game, start panicking as thought there is _problem._ If I'm bored with the game I've played for 8 years straight with very few breaks, it _must_ be a sign that something has gone terribly awry!
At that point, you're just two skips away from finding the legitimate criticisms you can point to in a game and blow them out of proportion. People can't quit, because of all the sunk cost, and they can't enjoy the game in peace, so all that's left is to either complain or suffer in silence.
Because they are streamers who make money off the game. There is currently a lull in interest, because *shock horror* it is a monster year for video games, and we have seen banger after banger released taking attention away from their content. So those streamers who can’t or won’t flex to the game of the week for views have found bashing final fantasy gets them consistent views from the same crowd who lives off bashing WoW. It’s a money making scheme.
People do complain about what they said they wanted when they got it. People like to complain.
IIRC (could be completely wrong) the 'life force' thing with the Aether sight is I think some 'weirdness' with translating things. What they meant was something along the lines of 'don't burn up all your Aether' but it got turned to 'life force' to sound more... I dunno, important or flowery, I guess?
I am noticing that the same people who complained about how grindy Eureka and Bozja where are now begging for a similar type of content to be added to this expansion too. I bet these people use cheats in savage raids too.
Eureka before all the nerfs/buffs and bozja cant even be compared lmao.
Leveling in anemos or pagos was just way to slow and painful...and if you wanted fast exp you hardly get to play the game either because you deal no damage to nms..
Meanwhile bozja was piss easy to keep up with.
I like EW fine. Neither best nor worst. I have had this "there's nothing to do" or "no/less content" discussion with others several times. I list X, Y, & Z in EW, and get "well, yeah, but...". I think a major problem EW has is lack of content with long legs. They tried a number of new things, like V&C and Islands, but those features aren't set up to encourage repetition, which leaves some people feeling like there's nothing to do. Grindy content, whether that's a relic grind or something else, scratches a certain itch for a segment of the population, and this time there wasn't such a thing.
There's "content" but it's as deep as a puddle lol.
Personaly, my hot take is old relic weapon grinds are some of the worst content in the game. Having to do 60 fates in HW areas for a single step, and 36 alliance raids for another for shadowbringers relic was just... not fun. Sure you can get the EW relics quick but when i can do so while actually doing content that's fun at max level and not purposfully gimping myself, its no contest.
I just hate how any opinion that actually expresses enjoyment of the game is called "toxic positivity." For some reason a large portion of these influencers think that unrelenting criticism is the only way to show you "care" which to me, is the true toxic attitude. And I hate to say it, but for a large portion of people coming from other games, this is the way they know how to act when it comes to gaming. This kind of hostile criticism is extremely common in the gaming space and I think it incredibly self defeating as a technique to try to improve games because it becomes very difficult for devs to find or anyone to talk about reasonable feedback about the game.
Personally I love endwalker and the direction they are going so of course when someone starts attacking the game, that I enjoy, I am going to defend it. That's me expressing my opinion and is equally valid.
I'm right there with you. Well said!
Also the assumption that everyone should just agree with XIV being in a horrible state in Endwalker. You're free to think that, but I've enjoyed myself immensely. Yet if I say that, that isn't allowed. They are allowed to tear it apart and call it the worst thing ever, and if I don't agree or at least give it lip service, then I'm "a cultist" or "braindead" and "have no standards."
I stopped trying to play ball with those people.
This. I've posted on anti-Endwalker videos about how I adore the game right now because I'm a casual player and I think the story content - which is what I'm here for - in Endwalker is phenomenal, and I think it's a little unfair to dismiss players like me when the game literally markets itself as a classic story-based FF RPG that happens to be online. Played that way, the game is brilliant right now, and I think that deserves praise. In all those comments, I've made it clear that if hardcore players have issues it's FINE, I BELIEVE them, they're ALLOWED to be mad at not having enough content, I just think it's stupidly dismissive of a large chunk of the fanbase to pretend that the game's bad now when it sells itself on story and the story's still fantastic. I've been called toxically positive, a Yoshi-P worshipper, and a Square Enix shill. It's frustrating, because "toxic positivity" is a real, harmful thing in a lot of online communities - FFXIV included - but it's NOT when you just say "hey, chill, don't declare the game dead, a lot of us think it's still really good". It's like people who use therapy-talk to argue against people they don't like on Twitter - no, just because someone is claiming something is true that you don't think is true doesn't make them a "gaslighter".
@@masterplusmargarita From the people have seen criticizing the current state of the game its for the most part not about story content at all. But about the inability to actively/semi actively play a new patch and do worthwhile new content for the duration of a sub. If you just(mostly) play for the story thats great and legit! I am genuinly curious though how long you stay subbed once you had finished EW MSQ and how long you engage with new story and gameplay options for the duration of your subs.
@@hansjurgen4567 I've been playing since a few months before EW dropped, with a few months worth of a break at some point in the middle. I'm about 1.6k hours in, and I'm not planning to stop any time soon, because there's plenty of story in content other than MSQ - job/class/role quests, DoH/DoL quests and Crystarium/Studium Deliveries, alliance raid stories, normal raid stories, trial storylines, daily quest storylines, deep dungeon storylines, adventuring forays, custom delivery storylines, Hildibrand and a million other things. I know a lot of that is legacy content and I will run out eventually, but I think Endwalker has had some of the absolute best storylines in that arena - Pandaemonium is one of my favorite stories in the game, and the Studium quests are phenomenal. Do I think I'll have content forever? No, I'm probably in my last couple hundred hours before running out of stuff and having to wait for Dawntrail, and after that I'll probably have to drop the game for quite some time before there's enough new content for me to play the game intensely again... And I think that's fine. I play RPGs, which don't last forever, so I'm fine taking breaks to let content build up.
I didn't forget Lord of Verminion existed, I suffered through that shit to get my Twintania minion, closest I'll ever get to a Bahamut minion because I started this game in shb. Loving your content dood, keep being you :3
I am so sorry. I got through like, 8 missions and just couldn't.
Fall Guys has already surpassed LoV's life cycle I'm pretty sure. And that says a lot.
I’m definitely in the minority as I quite like it but it was definitely a missed opportunity…. Maybe in 7.x they will give us….. minion blitzball 😹😹
@@WeskAlberjust use the clockwork Hildebrand. It gives zerg rush strats ;p
The patch story was pretty much about what I expected: A more fleshed out side adventure like Sky Pirates and Four Lords that would set up things for a future expansion.
Thank you for this, I wish I could sit down and put this into words like you have. As someone who also played HW live it’s been increasingly frustrating trying to explain to people blanket stating they “want hw relics.” No they don’t, they want what hw relics look like now, and even then I don’t truly believe that’s what they want. (Some will of course)
Been a long time fan of your guides, general way of getting info across, so if there’s ever a way I can help back, I’d love to try.
I definitely want Anima relics again. Make me go farm P9S 80 times per relic like with Anima. Would make me learn how to play each job.
I'm not kidding. But I'm sure some people, when presented with that requirement, would say no.
@@WeskAlber its more the sheer tome requirement that killed it for me at the time.
for just the 1 step.
@@GooeyEngineer Oh I understand. I just really, genuinely would do anima again for 19 weapons lol
@@WeskAlber maybe a good meet in the middle? you get the stat version for tomes, and the shiny version from grind? you keep it as a catch up weapon, while also giving an incentive to grind?
I think the middle ground is a good idea, my preferred solution would be something like the final Bozja step, for the Blade's X weapons. A onetime step of 'collect 180 total thingys from raids or Zadnor', and then a repeatable easy step of 'collect 15 rocks from DR or Dalriada'.
In current terms, that means I'm fine with the 1500 tomes to complete a relic step, as we currently have. I just think there needs to be a onetime grind step before that handin, to make the relic have some feeling of 'I worked hard to earn this'. The onetime step can even provide the mats for the first relic free, if SE wants
The sensationalist clickbait of “endwalker bad” aside, I think a lot of the criticism boils down to people not being able to distinguish between “there is nothing to do” and “there is a lot I don’t want to do”. Like I don’t want to get into fishing, I just don’t enjoy it - but others do. I’m also not interested in blu mage stuff or deep dungeons, but again - lots of people live for that content. Not every content has to be tailored to me.
I do think it’s fair to ask for content that’s tailored to you - you’re paying a subscription after all - but it’s not like the game is wildly abandoning its previous trajectory and player base to court someone new. Very little of the new content is actually bad (I’d argue island sanctuary isn’t good), it’s just not that every feature is for everyone, which… yeah…
As someone who did all BLU content in ShB, I was quite disappointed by BLU update in EW.
The significant lack of rewards makes getting a group together a lot difficult. Locking BLU weapon behind Criterion savage was adding salt on wound. Not to mention that Seat of Sacrifice and Memoria Merisa are both locked on BLU, and Diamond Weapon normal was most likely not even tested on BLU. The only positive things were visual effects on spells like Titannia, and having a person assigned to be dot mage (breath of magic) in a coordinated setting.
And speaking of spells, BLU rotation has also become rigid (fitting as many big hit oGCD as possible), and no unique aspects were brought (like no reliable utility spells).
As someone who did all BLU content (all spells + all logs done + all achievement + morbol), this update gave me the impression of lack of effort and inspiration. Who is this content even for? When Yoshi-P announced new limited job coming in late DT, I immediately got concerned
Someone who actually remembers and actually made a video showcasing it all properly? FINALLY!
Honestly your video is a breath of fresh air man.
Actionable feedback is the important thing. Not just anger, not just "Oh X/Y/Z sucks," But WHY it's bad, WHY it makes you upset. You don't necessarily need to figure out a solution - often I've heard that player solutions are doubly dangerous because of legal issues around using someone else's content when they aren't part of the team creating a commercial work, but even just for the sake that the old mantra "Players are great at finding what the problem is and horrible at designing reasonable fixes for that problem."
Thanks for providing a voice of reason into this community discourse, a voice I have wanted to put forward but lack both the platform and the history of investment to be taken seriously. I saw the video through Xenos's reaction, but you've earned my sub and my attention with your very reasonable attitude. I wish more content creators could be capable of seeing both good and bad in fair balance like you were here.
tbh I'm just happy to be playing the game, whereas it seems like everyone else in the community NEEDS to find something to shit on that they can argue about to someone else solely for the sake of having something to shit on and meme on later. Hating for the shits and giggles. It's annoying, frankly.
Some people cannot survive without some form of drama in their life. They can't just.. chill.
This is the best take on this topic. I think people don't actually know what they actually want and are making the devs job really difficult by giving so much mixed signals, unnecessary negativity, and personal attacks. This doesn't make it easy nor safe for the devs to "take risks". It also doesn't help when there are influencers and ex-influencers in the community who are capitalizing on these dramatic views. They are just reinforcing the negativity but doesn't actually move things forward.
In the mean time, there are loads of players (who don't get influencer privileges like free fanfest passes) who continue to stay subscribed and play the game because we love the game and appreciate the positive changes in the game. We might not be vocal about it, but sometimes that is all the feedback that devs need.
Thanks for this! EW is my first XIV expansion as I started playing just a few months before it came out and while it isn’t perfect I’ve loved it and appreciate that it doesn’t force me to play a way I don’t want to. There’s just enough content to keep me busy but not make me get tired of logging in. With that being said, I just started Eureka a few weeks ago snd I can see why ppl are missing similar content.
After the BlizzCon hype I played a lot of WoW this past weekend and when I would log back in to XIV it made me appreciate it all the more. I think it’s important to understand that EW wrapped up a long story arc and the devs seem to be using the patch cycle to prep the game for the next 10 years with QoL and graphic improvements. I think Dawntrail is going to benefit from that.
There are a variety of reasons to dislike parts of the game or ever the game overall for varying reasons, not least of which preference. To some extent I feel like many people have "Endgame is the only true worthwhile thing" brainrot and don't take the time to enjoy things, just "get through this content to get to that content" and ignore various parts of the game or just generally don't let themselves enjoy the parts they engage in. And even some people who come in late like myself who come into a massive backlog of content just waiting to go. Fast forward months, maybe a couple of years, you might still have stuff you can do, but also a lot of that expanse of content you've done at least once. But if there isn't a massive backlog, is it still a massive game? Yes. But y'know, I guess it's easy to slot in and wait for new things now instead of exploring what's already there. And admittedly not everything may cater to you. Life, eh
It's like the variant dungeon, people look up the guide blast through and then say "No reason to repeat this content" they rob themselves of novelty.
The thing with endwalker is it feels like a very experimental expansion content wise. They didn’t hit marks but it’s because they are trying stuff
It would be nice if there was more incentive to do Variant dungeons once you've done all the paths... Like say... A Variant Dungeon Roulette (Or having the VC dungeons a bit closer tied to the relic to encourage that content more, doesn't even have to be that much, could be like, 3 variant runs or 1 criterion run if they don't want a big grind)
That would be a good idea even just as a base feature. Would actually make the choosing at the beginning matter.
I would thoroughly love a Variant roulette, and I think that would keep it nice and lively!
A Variant roulette could even not have the 1/1/2 requirement of Tank, Healer, DPS x2 so the queue could be ultra fast most of the time too. Which would be awesome. I'd add it to my rotation of roulettes every day.
The variant dungeons would have to be reworked to do this because they contain a lot of obsolete mechanisms and scripts which make replayability unattractive once the 12 paths are finished, such as the fact that the NPCs are much too slow, that the mobs/bosses sometimes take too long to be targetable and the puzzles are far too minimalist for it to be attractive to do them again. they also need to add alternatives like gear, items to upgrade the gear, many more rewards, etc,...
@@LightSummoner84 I don't know they would need much reworking. Certainly on the reward front they'd already be comparable to any other dungeon roulette, or more rewarding since a lot of dungeons have one rare minion and gear that's not relevant to most players, while variants have several minions and housing items, plus being a roulette they'd presumably get increased tomes. They're probably slower but I'd trade longer roulette queue for pauses in the dungeon.
Even Mr happy talks about how he thought heavensward was another 1.0 back in the day, he was trying to keep our hopes up back then, but once shadowbringers came around he spoke in his streams about how worried he was durring heavensward
This is all because Zepla ran out of ideas for content and then decided that hating on FFXIV was an easier and more lucrative grift than actually making FFXIV content.
definitely an easier grift than when she was hating on trans people. I'm embarrassed I used to watch her content.
Proof? Hm wierd. Because I watched her videos about it and it constructive criticism. Unlike you.
@@lucalycan bro go outside and calm down
@@sweet_xylitol7814 they don't. Social leeches to the rest of us.
I find it extremely funny that you resorted to name calling a content creator that made constructive criticism rather than giving an actual opinion on the matter
This is how I have been feeling about the whole "Endwalker is bad" people. Some other things Endwalker brought that people forgot not mentioned : 32 dungeon remakes / restructures for duty support (I remember when I was a DPS main waiting in those damn queues to find out what happens next this would have been useful) a option to not have to bother with tab target as much as you can now just hit a hotkey and it will go straight to the nearest target (having come from the likes of Guild Wars 2 and BDO this made things so much more snappy for me) finally being able to tell what is dealing magic or physical damage as well as job tags above players heads
I started during Shadowbringers and I just do not see Bozja as more than just MSQ for another area with some custom duty actions. The people calling it midcore content forget one thing : nothing can be midcore for the average person when you have danger dorito dude jumping constantly in the safe spot and people watching guides for everything day 1.
As for the relic grind I am more on the side of the Endwalker method. I did Stormblood and Shadowbringers relic and I can say for sure what Shadowbringers did was make me hate the Antitower because the playerbase found out it was the shortest dungeon so every roulette was that dungeon for the relic. Heavensward fates were also overplayed that expansion. Event? HW fate. Relic? HW fate! Just give me the catch up weapon for tomes.
Eureka in the form that I played it in Shadowbringers felt mostly a solo thing with a few times you get help when a NM is up. and I liked it for that. It felt sort of like playing FFXIV with Xenoblade map design with some penalties for death.
The remade dungeons don't get anywhere enough credit when talking about content. This isn't just a remade dungeon experience, this is a far better, targeted onboarding experience for NEW players. You know, those little cute sprouts without whom game won't ever grow? Key story points have also been spruced up, and the whole thing feels more in-line to current day quality.
I'm sure there are dozens of people that miss the old Totorak and might prefer the 8man Praetorium (after all it was so beloved that the devs had to make the cutscenes unskippable so that new players could see anything), but these are very needed improvements that ensure the longevity of the game far beyond any Bozja-like map would've done.
Maybe you forgot, but you are playing an MMORPG, noone should give them praise for wasting their time turning it into a singleplayer game
@@lunaticmode638wasting time is standing in queue for 30 minutes as a DPS to find out what happens next in a story to actually get to the mmo part. New players cannot switch to a healer or tank for fast queue. Also the players ruin some of the experience themselves for a new player by throwing spoilers in chat, pulling bosses while they are in cutscenes, ruining the cutscene by ready checking immediately upon them getting in the cutscene and more. Even being a tank or healer can sometimes not get you a result at certain times of the day.
@@lunaticmode638 Trusts have been in the game since Shadowbringers, and Duty Support is explicitly aimed at fans of single-player Final Fantasy games that are hesitant to try the MMO because of the MMO parts. There is exactly nothing wrong with easing such players in and teaching them how to play at a lower stakes environment.
A player group will nearly always be twice as fast as a duty support group, so they are not competing for the same players at all.
I feel like people on the “Endwalker is bad” side forget just the amount of QoL improvements we got throughout Endwalker. Larger cooldown timers, better tab targeting, displaying job icons on nameplates and coloring nameplates based on role, the ability to see job names and colors in chat, and some others that I’m probably forgetting. That, and making the game more single-player friendly with all the duty support changes (especially those MSQ roulette changes, love those).
That all being said, I cannot imagine what it was like to actually experience all this shit when it was current. I consider myself a midcore raider and shudder at the thought of having to gear for potentially a month or two just to clear one fight. This game’s always had ups and downs, and the community’s always taken it way outta proportion I think. I’ve noticed a trend with games in general how people will call them “dead” just because it’s going in a direction they don’t particularly like, or they’re just hopping on the hate train for the sake of it.
Also Bozja is bad and we don’t need another one. At least, not in the same way Bozja did it.
Slight aside, but with the real world state at the time of Endwalker's release, combined with some major uncertainty in my life AND my dad nearly dying from a freak medical complication, I was in an extremely bad place, and Endwalker was my sole source of escape.
When Ultima Thule came around, I started cracking with each major "moment" there, until the "walk to the end" which completely broke me emotionally. But then, trite as it sounds, that emotional release, coupled with the last sequences of cutscenes really eased the pain.
Everything is good now in my real life, and I don't play as religiously as I did then, but this particular expansion is very special for me, and when I do sit down 2-3 times a week to play, it's time I always cherish.
Cool blog post, but that has absolutely nothing to do with anything here.
@@Chaoskoch What a shit comment to make. Yours has nothing to do with anything either.
@@Chaoskoch Don't be a hater, the person's story and views are valid.
@@SubduedRadical I'm not hating and I don't care if their story and views are "valid", I'm just pointing out that it has fuckall to do with this video.
If anyone misses accuracy is just because theirs is too low.
Remember when in ShB people complained about Bozja and Eureka. Now they want Exploration Zones back.
I feel like the Midcore audience was left hanging this expac. Content like Bozja and Eureka was great IMO and suited for this same Midcore audience. But they dropped it altogether for lifestyle content like Island Sanctuary and there’s Deep Dungeon which is not particularly engaging content to me. Criterion/Variant dungeons, are fine but they need better and more tangible rewards to be worth it.
Don't forget the people who hated bozja were the same people who wanted deep dungeon back. Then it comes back and people call it samey.
Yep! People shat on Eureka and Bojza and now wonder why there's not another one 😂
I am one of them, glad its not back eureka/bozja are awful. Bozja alittle better than eureka though.
@@undercoverspy123 Facts, people like to forget that the first two zones of eureka were probably some of the worst content the game has ever made.
People need to take their nostalgia goggles off and realize that Heavensward was the worst expansion. And that's okay because it was the first one.
I'm not counting plot because the plot has always been good every expansion, with some ebbs and flows in quality, but the writing's always been on point. So let's set that to the side.
The Diadem was absolutely panned. Class balance was, from my research and understanding, absolutely nonexistent. The raid scene was almost destroyed by some criminally brutal savages that would give early Ultimates a run for their money.
There was no extra stuff to do outside of Diadem (which was no Eureka or Bozjan not in the least). Relics were still mostly a tomestone grind as they are now, only a few steps actually had meaningful content to it.
Expansion quality is SB>ShB>EW>HW. You could make a case for EW being higher than ShB, but Bozja was so loaded that you could spend ages there between the duels, the relics, the mount grinds, DRS, that I think it cruises past EW. It also had the Firmament Restoration for crafters on top of removing cross-class skills.
Stormblood, everything was firing on all cylinders and there was no pandemic slowing their stride. We got two Ultimates, four separate updates to Eureka along with Baldesion Arsenal, Blue Mage was introduced, and it was the last major update to job quests before Shadowbringers consolidated it all to Role Quests. The quantity and quality were both in such a harmonious balance that everyone who says Stormblood was the worst expansion before Endwalker is an MSQ Andy who never dipped their toes into anything else.
I think a lot of people need this reminder. The speed at which discorse broke down from "relic weapons and criterion dungeons have issues" to "0/10 expansion, as bad as 1.0" is insane.
The thing about Y'shtola's blindness 'draining her lifeforce' is actually a MASSIVE mistranslation. In literally every other language except English, that part is worded more like 'Y'shtola's need to use her aether to see will leave her exhausted more quickly than normal'.
Not that this matters because it literally DOESN'T HAPPEN. I've only just got to the 89 quests in EW, but so far Shtola has NEVER grown tired from constantly using her aether to see.
I always took it to mean Y'shtola gets stupidly reckless at times, with the aethersight thing being an example of her unwillingness to admit her own limitations.
I think I'd say the 2 minute burst is the opposite of taking a risk. It was already a thing, they just shifted everyone to fit into it better to make jobs way easier to design and balance at the cost of homogenization. A risk would be getting rid of raid buff windows. A risk I wish they would take for the sake of job design having more freedom.
I believe the homogenization is what people are taking about when they are talking about losing the job identity and why I personally don't like the 2 minute meta. Some jobs feel drastically different to play but still have the same overall impact like with ranged DPS, others just feel like different flavors like tanks where they do almost exactly the same thing with slightly different nuance and colored abilities. I understand why they have the 2 minute meta, it makes jobs easier to make as well as encounters if they have a singular core mechanic to revolve around, but it gets stale very quickly and predictable when you start looking at how encounters run with the 2 minute meta in mind.
@@epyon542 Yeah, I'm really not a fan of it. I'm sure it plays a big part in why they're able to make 2 new jobs every expansion, but I'd personally much rather they drastically slow down the new job releases and work on making the existing jobs more fun and unique. Viper looks super cool and I'm excited to play it, but that excitement is hampered by the fact that I already know it's going to have a 1 minute and 2 minute burst window with very little if any flexibility. They gotta get rid of raid throughput buffs. As long as there are raid buff windows, every job is going to be pigeon-holed into fitting their burst into those windows.
When should the meta be? 30 second? 3 minute? 30/120 90/270? no matter how you slice it you are just creating arbitrary bullshit that will be either tedious to manage, or fundamnetally simple and reduced to a formula by the community, fact of the matter is 2 minutes is completely fine if not enjoyable.
@@undercoverspy123 How about each job is unique and there is no shared burst window? They had it at one point and slowly worked towards the 2 minute burst window, I don't see why they couldn't do the opposite.
@@undercoverspy123 That's why I said to get rid of group burst windows entirely. Let each job do its own thing instead of having to conform to an arbitrary window where everyone else's buffs line up.
Currently still experiencing the game and getting caught up for Dawntrail but was tiring seeing various content creators say EW is the worse as recommended videos whenever I browsed YT so ty Wesk for speaking up, I hope you're doing well and look forward to seeing your lvl 100 skill guides especially for Viper and whatever the other new job is in the future 😄❤
Don't let it get you down. I was also catching up to current patch until recently, and the complaints are really almost all about players fully caught up wanting new things that aren't on the update plans, not things that detract from playing through for the first time. I really think the EW content plan from the devs was based around making it a great expansion for those who play after it's live so it's still a good conclusion to the 10 year arc 10 years later.
Typing this as I watch, but the whole outrage in the community is WILD to me. I played the game since 2017, got to HW and started on a new, ''proper'' account in 2018. I played this game alone, dead fc, everything on party finder, so apart from in-game communication and some memes here and there I never interacted with anyone besides 2 or 3 friends about the game.
Guess what? I loved it. I love the fuck out of this game. Sure it is a bruised apple, but still a damn delicious one.
I should note that as an artist I will enjoy a game with lesser perfect gameplay (like if a job gets nerfed too hard or a new duty came out kinda wonky on release) if it keeps up its enjoyability through its quality of graphics, music, story, pacing etc. I finished endwalker with an emotional rush on how much this game has meant to me the last few years.
...and then i go online and see people say the game is trash and is dead. the fuck. so ever since i started interacting with people more.
I feel like the community loves to get swept up in the drama. From what i encounter in-game, most people REALLY LIKE this game (otherwise you wouldnt pay monthly for it...) with small complaints like ''not ifrit again'' or ''does zenos ever fuckin die'' or ''this seasonal event had a meh item''. From my experience, people who like the game will be patient for something to get fixed. Theyre not gonna go online and yell at everyone to unsub to... their fav game? I recently saw a post of ffxiv on insta about their dawntrail announcement and the comments were filled with nothing but hate. I genuinely just dont understand people who will waste money and time to shit on a game they like and also hate. Its weird.
The weirdest part was when i told someone i loved the ending of endwalker and i got a very agressive essay on why i shouldve hated it and im stupid for even liking it.
tldr: if you liked the game in the moments you played it alone, you liked the game.
Honestly, if i've learned anything from my time with FFXIV, apart from reading the tool tips (thank you WeskAlber) it is to ignore the community. While most of it is fine, so many struggle to live without drama that they'll start making shit up just to have something to complain about. And unfortunately, negative things tend to get more people invested, so they'll always get to the top of reddit.
Expressing your disappointment in an expansion is not “drama” grow up and learn new words. And no you should never “ignore the community” even if they are saying something you don’t like, you should read and consider all perspectives , because what if square just “ignored the community” .
@@christopherbailey3547There's a difference between expressing disappointment and causing unwarranted drama.
@@christopherbailey3547 or i could just, you know, ignore them... That way i don't get my experience tainted by those who are so full of themselves that they get offended by the very notion that people have better things to do than pay attention to them.
Also, square is the company managing the game. I don't know how the hell you think that putting me and the creators of the game in the same category would help your argument make sense...
@@christopherbailey3547 Hyperbole and doomsaying is not the same as "expressing your disappointment." Constant "game ded bcuz no bozja weh maintenance mode" or something of that caliber is not a perspective I care to consider.
Just as the people spouting that stuff don't care to consider my perspective that I enjoyed Endwalker immensely because I expect and desire different things from FFXIV than they do.
Me, who just completed Endwalker, am so confused about all this discourse
the complain is usually after the main story content of EW.(which personally i feelits exaggerated)
Really feels like all this comes from like one or two of the huge content creators making sensationalized videos about this and everyone just starts regurgitating it all over the place. And it doesn't help that a lot of these content creators are big WoW players that switched to ffxiv mainly during or after Shb, so they don't have the perspective of how HW was when it was current. I started actually playing ffxiv close to the end of Shb, so I know I don't have that perspective, so I don't really complain. I've been happy with the release of content, even if it is all just once you finish it, you're done, but that's kinda true for any kind of content I can imagine.
Pretty much, yeah. It started out fine, but then spiraled out of control very quickly.
My personal theory is that a major group of the players complaining about the supposed dearth of content in Endwalker are people who joined in that massive player growth that happened in late ShB. Which, funnily enough, was a major content drought of it's own, considering the covid delays. But now that they've worked through the majority of readily accessible content, they're having to either find something to grind their faces against (like raiding, fishing, mahjong, or whatever else) or find something else to do that isn't ff14. This is the first """drought""" they're experiencing, and they're not used to it, and so lash out.
For what it's worth, I understand where they're coming from, having started in 5.3 and devouring content in this game. But now that I've done most of the content in the game I find fun, I just do what Yoshi-P suggests and play something else. I hop on for a few hours a week to raid with my static, do roulettes, hang out with my friends, then go play other games. Maybe those people should too.
I have started around 5.4, I finished the story, went for a break for two months, returned for endwalker release, went away again at the start of 6.1, went back around the end of 6.3, went away for winter holidays, played again till summer, made 1 month break, then returned. Every time I see cool game to play, I go and play it. Because I am absolutely sure that my WoL will wait for me. This game is not designed to be your only game. I find most criticism comes from the fact that people want to play the game 24/7. But you can't. Expand your horizons, for Emet's sake.
"Best" and "worst" are really hard to pin, I think Endwalker is about as middling as it gets and can be summed up quite easily - what we've had is pretty great but ultimately lacking.
I chose not to continue raiding into Endwalker to focus on life stuff, so for the first time in a while I've gone back to being a "casual" only player (most I've been doing is extremes). I've done pretty much everything Endwalker has offered and enjoyed the very short time it's lasted each patch.
No grindy relic/open zone has really sucked. I spent a shitload of time in Bozja for my Al-iklil mount and enjoyed the shit out of it. I honestly wouldn't even consider the EW relic content at all considering I've insta-completed every step on day 1.
Variant dungeons are fucking awesome, glad we've finally got another dungeon to do each patch and such a detailed unique take on it. Sadly, they've pushed this off into its own corner for some reason and when you've done all the routes you basically have no need to ever touch it again. Meanwhile, expert roulette continues to have a dungeon that stays in rotation for 8 fucking months. If they ever make variant dungeons part of the roulette/a roulette of their own, I'll start actually doing roulettes again.
Island Sanctuary has been something I've enjoyed quite a lot, though again it's something that you go back to when a patch launches, complete in a week or two and then leave until the next patch rolls around. It also feels real damn lonely, which isn't exactly what I want from an MMO but it's a minor gripe since they've already mentioned the next iteration will be focused on more players.
Outside of those major content drops; treasure maps have been cool as always, the PvP overhauls have been solid (literally the only thing I've been doing to grind tomes), and Orthos I forget even exists.
What you're saying is in line with the sentiments of many long-time players. There were a lot of choices made that weren't very wise, and a fair amount of forgettable content in the expansion.
I am reminded... "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it." I guess there's a lot of stuff that happened in the past that few of the newer gamers (like myself) know about. I must say that I appreciated this video. It felt very level and not at all clickbaity ragebait material. Thank you for sharing your perspective!
Side note: I heard from someone that people asked for the 2 minute meta and then now we got complaints about it. Seems like a trend...
2nd Side note: The slow nature of the post-EW patches is really misunderstood by people. I don't know what they were expecting. I find it to be just fine and really great since they are doing necessary wrap up and build up. Instant gratification and poor literary taste is the problem here among the base.
I am fully a casual but I have played on and off since launch because I have always been a Final Fantasy nerd so I play mainly for the story experience. Personally I loved Endwalker! I thoroughly enjoyed the story and I think it has some of the coolest environs of any of the expansions. I don't keep up with the discourse so I didn't have my opinion soured by naysayers. I understand people may dislike the expansion for hardcore player reasons but as a casual, Endwalker was a blast!
the chance CHANCE in a row killed me
this was so interesting to learn
Thank you so much for combatting how stupid the discourse around the game has gotten.
An absolute masterclass. "This expansion can't be bad because the one from 8 years ago was worse!"
@@lecrab8090 Thank you for replying to a 13 day old comment in way that is not actually a response to said comment. Thank you for proving the discourse around the game is dumb by putting words in my mouth.
@@TheFlu-54 the only stupid discourse is the people that are still gatekeeping what complaints about the game are valid or not.
@@lecrab8090 Why are you arguing with me? You don't know my opinion on any of this other than I believe that the discourse of the game has gotten dumb, not how or why. Its dumb because Lynx made a video critiquing Endwalker based purely on hearsay. And people took it seriously despite just flat factual errors.
@@TheFlu-54 Yeah ok his video was truly awful
One of my biggest annoyances is the allegation that the dev team is 'lazy' with EW. Anyone who says that legitimately has no idea what they're talking about.
Wow, a content creator finally brought up the past that was this mess when it first came out. I love Heavensward for its story, but its raids, job direction changes, and couple other things they later fixed was massive. My whole raid group fell apart during the first raid tier and time it took to release the next raid tier, not to mention the absolute rage it caused with how bad gear gating was. So many forgot about Bow mage, stance dancing (both tanks and healers) among other issues. Sometimes I think it is because the story really built it up on a pedestal for many they just forgot a lot of the problems it had.
Endwalker doesn't have this, it has its own issues, but I wouldn't say it is anywhere near as bad as how Heavensward was during that period of time. Again, they did eventually fix a lot of it...but there was big issues far surpassing anything in endwalker. I just think a lot of these people are doing swan songs and jumping to something new to garner views/subscribers because it fell off after they finished the endwalker story.
As someone who started Savage back at Alexander Midas, I remember how many of the groups would just straight out opt to not have certain jobs in their parties because they were not "optimal." Heck I still remember getting my ass chewed out by my friend for running out of TP as a MONK during the savage fight - and this was already with proper TP restoration timings AND help from the our dragoon party member.
Just…thank you. I have my own criticisms of this expansion, but the current “dump on FFXIV” meta amongst content creators is exhausting. And to not put all of this on content creators, we in the community need to stop feeding into negativity.
Even if we take the MSQ completely out of the equation, Endwalker had objectively the best normal raid, alliance raid, and ultimates by a goddamn landslide, not to mention the trials and their extremes. That alone should be all that matters to 99.9% of the playerbase. Also I have to mention the beast tribes as well, which were so fucking STELLAR that they have legit brought me to tears.
That's your opinion, but please be aware that DSR was originally planned for Shadowbringers and was 80% completed by patch 5.55. It was delayed to patch 6.1 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Personally, besides Barbaricia, Hydaelyn, and Zodiark, I found the Extreme Trials to be rather lackluster, especially Rubicante, which felt quite uninspiring. As for the 24-man raids, the first one was enjoyable, but Euphrosyne and Thalia lacked substance and were primarily focused on visuals.
All of this to say that everyone has different opinions, and even though I'm not typically picky about FFXIV content, I found Endwalker to be rather unbalanced in many aspects.
Starting in 5.5 and experiencing bits of casual side of Shadowbringers endgame, there are things I miss and wish would make comebacks.
For one GCD to GCD optimization on the jobs i got to experience it (dragoon/monk) is one that I miss dearly. Executing positionals to get that extra 40 potency from Raiden Thrust or guaranteed crit from rear Bootshine. Minor things that even simple things like story dungeons makes them fun to strive for, especially with varied boss positioning from duty finder tanks.
Varied buff timings, even though with downtime can fuck you over a lot or a little, is still better than eating burger in one hand and pressing 123 with the other roughly 40 seconds each minute. Also would make jobs not feel too same-y, even though they have different niches (resource management, cd tracker, rigid, fluid, etc.)
Endwalker isn't bad, more like mid with bursts of fun rather than long lasting fun. When I contemplated taking a break due to boredom, and found no game to subsidize it with, I went to diversify my pool of content. Got into PvP a bit, casual RP with friends. And most recently managed to find a group for criterion and had an absolute blast progging and clearing it.
It's not like the content is not there, it's just the pool of content people stick themselves to either didn't exist or died quicker this time around. Prompting some to declare the game dead and the expansion the worst it has been.
I wish I could have my hopes for Dawntrail, but game's direction in job design/content (with exception of Pandaemonium, 6.2 and 6.4 EX, Criterion and Ultimates) made me more apathetic to content releases, so I'll expect nothing and be hopefully surprised by something.
The Asura trial is coming out in the 6.55 patch and it’s most likely tied to the Hildabrand questline. On another note I LOVED The Shadow of Mhach raid series special shout outs to Ozma and Deathgaze Hollow.
If wesk is adding his take about this drama, we've gone past the boiling point and dragoon back flipped into molten lava. His channel tends to usually stay away from this stuff, but it's gotten this bad, so that should tell you something.
"We know entirely how Viper plays based on 6 skill animations."
One guy even said we got "a lot of info on Sage" in these comments.... the Sage reveal was 4 skills total.
Yeah, I'm tired.
"Viper not having animations as a snake doesn't make sense, wtf devs" is also one I've seen going around. Some people take the naming schemes way too seriously. @@WeskAlber
My question to the FF community is this. Has ff community been dealing with false promise after false promise and controversy after controversy and had multiple objectively bad expansions with tons of cut content, underwhelming, rushed or stupid story elements and plots that go nowhere since 2014? Have you dealth with a content drought of over a year, with no fun events or anything? Are the Devs making decisions that make their bottom line look nicer at the expense of player trust and community perception? No? Didn't think so... take a deep breath FFs problems are not that serious. Yes there are issues, but they are not even close to being that serious.
I feel this post in my bones and I know full well what you're talking about. FFXIV-onlies need some perspective on what a dying MMO looks like, and even with missteps on every corner and squeezing the players dry with microtransactions, MMOs STILL tend to shamble on for a goo while yet until the plug is finally pulled. This really ain't it, not even close. Hell, FFXI is STILL up and running, and they're STILL charging a subscription fee for it!
with regards to GC airships, we can now fly to Kugane (from Radz-at-Han)! The Kugane airship landing has a use!!! assuming you specifically want to travel between Kugane and Radz for 300 gil!! It's not a HW thing, but it's all I got.
As a sprout I got into the habit of mostly using airships to travel between cities and going into StB and seeing a new airship landing in the aetheryte menu and not being able to use it at all was annoying to me in a very specific and personal way. So even if I never use airships on my main character it's still a fun, weird little addition they made.
You know, something that irritates me about the whole "Endwalker patch content is filler/doesn't lead to Dawntrail" is that... Heavensward's patch content could be considered the same, as it doesn't really connect to Stormblood and only serves as setup for Shadowbringers.
Anybody that genuinely believes that everything that just happened in the 6.x series is somehow meaningless 'filler' and not *obvious* set up for 8.x or 9.x has not been paying attention to how this game sets up stories in advance.
@@DisastraIt may be but at the end of the day i cant say something is good because an expansion or 2 from now it becomes good and Endwalkers post patch msq was just a bad version of ff4.
Thank you so much for actually THINKING for YOURSELF and providing a level headed well thought out criticism of the current expansion's quality compared to the old Expansions as well as the history on the topic. As a Shadowbringers baby, I walked away much more informed and validated in my own opinion that Endwalker is a perfectly fine expansion. Sure, it can be better but it's just fine when compared to the others.
I feel your ending piint is very much in line with YoshiP in that Brazilian interview where he said he's getting a bit tired of people making damands then complaining when they're met but not exactly like they wanted and how if we want change, we need to actually have a consensus. He's basically making a point that rn the vocal minority are the only ones actually being well... Vocal. They're the only ones making an input with any direction so the result is they'll be the ones that get listened to. Same with Xenos or Dalamud, like or hate them and what they represent, they're actually giving tangible examples pf how things can be improved which are almost always right to a significant degree.
10:55 Did that mean that if you were a BLM back in Heavensward, you had to be a lala to be optimal? Did groups tell non-lala BLMs they would need to fantasia if they wanted to do savage as a BLM? That's absolutely wild if so. Makes me thankful for how far FF14 has come in terms of QoL.
No, thank god. It wasn't THAT bad. But BLM without that piety meld kinda was annoying to play.
@@WeskAlber That's good at least, it'd be terrible to be forced to take a lala pill.
As a player who only started playing after endwalker released, and was caught up to current content roughly around 6.3, what really struck me when I started watching updates and current content releases was that a lot of endwalker feels like it's designed very consciously to be nice to do after 6.x. Like island sanctuary really didn't have that much to do on release, but by now with it's official conclusion to major updates it'll be a really enjoyable thing for some people to work away at as they progress through EW patches and Dawntrail in the future. Variant dungeons doesn't have the long lifespan of exploration zones, but they will also not be a huge hurdle for new players to try go through, especially on lower population data centers.
It's kind of like they're trying to recreate the post expansion love people have for Heavensward, only through a strategy of evergreen content rather than the luck of hitting good enough high points that people eventually forget the negatives. Which I think is a really solid strategy - as a game you want the conclusion to your decade long arc to be a good expansion a decade from now as much or more than you need it to be the most innovative and risky 'must play while it's current' expansion.
"There is nothing you want to do“ - Finally somebody is saying it. For years now I hear all kind of different people saying the game has nothing to do in. This was during SB, SHB and EW of course. Then there is me with over 1000 days of in game play time, still overwhelmed by all the things to do and I haven't done. Flabbergasted at those people I enjoy the game like it is day 1 and throw myself against something new I haven't tried yet in the game.
HW is one of those expansions where some people like it for fairly selfish reasons, but these reasons oft' didn't and don't translate very well into the game itself and the broader community. Like, I loved the sense of accomplishment that everything gave due to how demanding facets of the game were... Like crafting and gathering I personally did like, A LOT. But I don't let that blind me to how bad it was for the broader community, especially when you needed to spend *weeks* (Arguably even accurately a month) just getting the required red scrip tokens to get scrip gear for a *single* job, just to then upgrade it to augmented... just so that you could self-sufficiently work towards Ironworks upon reaching Level 60. It was rewarding, but it was a very drab experience and completely unfriendly to fresh level 60 players. -- There was A LOT that Heavensward did completely wrong, and it only kept you so busy because a lot of it was badly designed many systems were.
Comment before watching video:
I think my main issue with the complaints of big ff14 content creators is the outright lie of EW having a lack of content. There's plenty to do, just nothing that they WANT to do. And that's perfectly fine and you can feel that way but to say there's nothing to do is just not true.
Edit:
Seems like he agreed with me 😂
I joined the game in 5.3 so i'm one of the newer players and even i know it's not the worst expansion/patch life from what i read. About the patch story i do agree that it's most of a filler, but i'm not sure what people were expecting? The 6.1 title is litterally Newfound Adventure. We ended a ~10 year old saga. It was time to have a very specific filler type story, can't every story needs its periods of downtime etc. And actually the idea of the story arc was something really fun to me, i loved Zero, exploring the Void more properly is something i always wanted (btw troia is maybe my favorite EW patch dungeon, and one of the best in general visually.) Do i think they could have executed it better? Well yes tbh, some of the plot beats especially mid 6.3 to 6.4 were very meh imo, but i guess it's somewhat the nature of the patch formula too. I do think they could have ended the void.. "arc" in 6.4 somehow and 6.5 was entirely in prep for dawntrail. But i'm also happy with what we got so.. take that as you will
I also agree with you that i really wanted exploration content like bozja but better. Somewhere like corvus/ilsabard/north of othard would be good options.. i hope they took this time to just like think about ways to improve it and bring it back and strong for 7.X (tho with what they said in the fanfest i have little faith... we'll see). And as someone who doesn't really do or like hildibrand, them putting the relica tied to that... wasn't a point for me let's just say that.
Some stuff i also think could have been done better was the alliance raid, but because i was SUPER excited for Myths, which ended up probably being a 8/10 for me influding everything. The story was fine, visuals were amazing (please bring explorer mode for alliance raids i beg) and i'm happy we got to see the heavens, and aglaia music being some of my favoritr in the game (they were all pretty great). Battle wise tho... i'm pretty disappointed (esp 2nd and 3rd wings). Trying to keep it quick but just wish the bosses skipped their tutorial phases and cycled mechanics faster/more happening at the same time. Just dislike the style they went with these last few bosses even if there were some cool ideas.
Also about jobs i have i guess unusual feelings since i don't really do extreme and savage content/play mostly casually. But i guess i feel like we are aproaching job bloat scenario? And skills too i guess? I also wish i actually got to use more of my healing kit in normal content but idk... it really is a hard balance to reach with the style they go for in the game battle content
@@petrus9067 I agree and take it a step further think that the job design they are moving to is clashing with their boss design philosophy. They want jobs to be simpler and easier to synergize, but none of that really applies to remembering the choreography of endgame raids. I think they could allow more player to boss interactivity - things like more Interrupts and Stuns, Esuna, Sleep actually could do something, with simplicity to job design comes rooms to make fights more interactive. But I still feel like we’re stuck in this “So You Think You Can Dance” boss design that I think makes EX/Savage raiding in EW less appealing.
No shade, Pandaemonium was just really annoying and frustrating dance choreography than truly a challenge imho. I think the job design works well as a skeleton, but the boss, level and enemy design needs to change for that skeleton to feel more worthwhile. Big ask, but that’s what I’ve thought about a lot of the true symptoms of the current EW zeitgeist.
Das just me tho.
what i really don't like about the whole "game is dead" take is that it's only toxic high-end/no life players pinballing it back and forth to each other. it's this weird circlejerk-y echo chamber thing going on disguised as constructive criticism. really they just want the game to be an immaculate god. look no further than the lynx kameli video, that freaking cornball.
everybody that plays even somewhat modestly, or players trying to get into 14, are left with a community tortured by awkward opinions that don't apply to their VERY LARGE majority of the playerbase. this take can never get enough exposure as being ridiculous and your video is great wesk.
Everyone who does not share my opinion is a toxic elitist and no-lifer
Like cmon crickejerking is a thing with everyone, doomposters and the opposite in this comment sections
@@RealElSteino it was just hyperbolic/dramatic insults and blurbs, bro, i said no real opinion on the state of the game because i'm content with everything in it. the point stands regardless. this shitty take is nurtured by jaded hardcore players that are upset they played a game with 100s of hours of content to death. it's an unhealthy mindset for damn sure
Seen a few of these criticisms myself which I haven't paid much attention too because a lot of them are "I am a content creator and have Grinded out everything in 24 hours and now got nothing to do." problem of doing it too quickly. I have seen some criticism of the patch MSQ which I understand not liking the Void storyline but as this is the first time I have been current with MSQ since starting I can't reallysee much problems with it.
I did what I did at this point during Shadowbringer patch cycle and started a new character hoping to get this one up to date before Dawntrial release.
We can't judge an ancient expansion by today's standards and tons of hindsight. Endwalker is still way worse than Hw was.
I've been saying HW is the worst for 8 years. That's not hindsight, that's just sight.
@@WeskAlber Yeah but a lot of these problems are related to it being the first expansion. Of course more modern and polished ones will look better. I started playing mid to late HW and most of these issues weren't that big. I'd take them over having nothing to do in Endwalker.
@@sct77 People weren't saying Gordias killed raiding because one or two people quit. People said it because A LOT of people quit. Casual players also felt they had "nothing to do."
A lot can be forgiven to HW for being first. But when you look at something like PotD - also HW - it's not so simple. They weren't incapable of good ideas, and they actually had some. It's not like the first expansion was doomed to fail.
Acting like it didn't nearly fail won't make DT or other expansions better. And pretending everything EW has done was wrong will actively make DT and beyond worse.
I'm a Paladin main and I can talk about how the Paladin changes did disappoint me slightly, however I can also accept that my job is better now with the rework than it was before it. The old Paladin had a very comfortable flow for me, Melee to Magic to Filler to Melee to Magic. It had no burst because it was constantly rotating with no explosive moment. That was fun for me, I liked that for around 20 seconds of my rotation? I could be anywhere no matter the mechanic and do what other tanks couldn't do... but I understand that the design now is better in line with the mechanica design of the fights. That having a proper burst phase followed by filler. It's a different feel but even if I don't like it as much I conceptually grasp the concept behind it.
That said, I've loved Endwalker, great expansion, has problems, but uh so did every expansion.
the doomposting fetishists is annoying af, and they refuse to stop.
I find it hilarious that as “hardcore” (lol) FF players are destroying the community with their ridiculous claims that this casual-ass house and glam sim needs to cater to them, we’re seeing WoW have a LITERAL “throw wide the gates” moment in their newest trailer. How did this game go from “the best MMO evar” to horrible in less than one expansion that really didn’t alter the formula all that much? Simple, people play too much and are bored after 10000 hours of gameplay. I’m looking at you whiny streamers.
I get what you mean. Having started in ARR just before HW released I've seen a lot of newer people parroting bs like "bring back the attribute system" or "tanks were so much more fun having to work for emnity (cough, blm were not having fun needing to stifle their rotation to include the threat reduction skill just so they dont rip aggro from the tank) suddenly there is all this talk about how "AST was so much better in HW" when every player under the sun complained to the devs about that job and how cards worked, they listened and changed it and now everyone is angry again and wants the old system back. That is honestly what annoys me the most, most of the features that got taken away were direct consequences of players asking for those features to be removed. And instead of looking into the past the devs and players should look to the future in order to innovate and not bring back redundant old features. That being said I still absolutely love HW, great story, has one of my alltime favorite trials (nidhogg), one of my alltime favorite alliance raids (mhach) and dark knight came with the release of HW which I love too. That being said, dungeon design was really lacking and stormblood is basically what elevated the experience for me.
EW in terms of story was great, I enoyed the dungeons, I enjoyed the raid designs, I enjoyed the newest deep dungeon (not as much as the Stormblood one though), I enjoy Sage and Reaper and I'm happy we finally got the Firmanent as a housing district. I don't enjoy how they butchered by boy monk that I've been maining since HW, I don't enjoy how easy the content has become where even the newest Alliance raid didn't have 1 wipe in the first week of its release with pugs. Everything has gotten so goddamn easy and there is no slight challenge to be found besides savage/ultimate. Xeno is right in the sense that midcore content is virtually nonexistent nowadays, you either get mindnumbingly easy dungeons/trials/extremes/alliance or savage/ultimate. There also being no bozja equivalent annoyed me as I really enjoyed that content and the relic grind tied to it.
I think EW is fine, but I haven't played in months. For me it's just that I haven't really liked the patch MSQ much (Zero is an extremely predictable and boring character) and I'm a tank main, and I feel like I haven't really been able to find a tank I really want to main. I was using Dark Knight last time, mostly because they still have the best animations of the tanks, but I haven't enjoyed how most of the classes I've tried play in EW. The other thing for me is, my favorite DPS in ShB was either Samurai or Machinist, and the way they gutted Iajutsu in 6.1, that made me hate playing it. Machinist had DPS problems early in the expansion according to the hardcores, but I think I just burned myself out on it in ShB.
I did REALLY enjoy Crystalline Conflict when they added that, and the PVP revamp in general is fantastic, but just playing it casually I kept running into people cheating with addons that let them do stuff like auto target their LB and switch targets for every move inhumanly fast, and that meant my fun was over. I still think most classes I've played, I just like them, but don't love them, and part of it is they feel extremely clunky on KB/M controls. Feels like there are a few too many buttons when some new abilities could be reworked into traits, and the game's targeting has always felt a bit too slow for me compared to WOW.
These comments probably all seem negative about the game, but like, I still plan to come back a month or two before Dawntrail to get caught up/prepared, and I'm hopeful that 7.0 is going to rework tanks so they feel more distinct from each other and I can get back to playing my favorite role. I definitely don't think the game is dead... Even if I haven't liked patch MSQ, the worst of it still completely annihilates the big Acti-Blizz competitor's attempts at telling an "epic story." The music is still top class in the entire industry. It's still the best MMO to subscribe to.
i think we peaked at that one super bitter guy forgot his channel name at this point and i cant find the video ethier. maybe they deleted it. Stand and let thing resolve is gonna be a new meme for awhile.
I think you're talking about lynx
The biggest problem with Endwalker is that there just isn't a casual, community engaging, long-form grind to chase. In the past when you finished or burned out on raiding, we always had something else to do. Instead we got isolationist content in the form of Island Sanctuary, and a relic grind that boils down to *run your roulettes every day*. Fall Guys is the closest thing to a community event we've gotten this expac and I honestly think that's why so many people are disappointed with Endwalker.
Yeah I can see that. For every person who is glad "all they have to do is run roulettes," there's someone who wants to sink their teeth into it. Running out of content isn't from no content, but it's not just outright "lol take a break." If this is your one game, you love this game and love playing it day in and day out, there's no problem with that.
As someone that's been trying to get several older relics for a long time now, fuck the grind lmao, maybe it was fun at the time, but holy shit I am so tired of it all.
@@NeroNyte Nah, nothing to do with "at the time". Plenty of people hated it then, too. Just that without such a grind, the group that liked them is more vocal now.
@@NeroNyte It's not so much about the grind as it is having a goal shared by the entire community to engage in. Raiders and casuals go after relics. It's a bummer to not have it be a focused event.
@@oshaapproved7612 You could also argue the current relics are the only things keeping people doing 90 roulettes, so it gives a reason to do those
I’m a late shadowbringers baby and I’ve got a lot of content to catch up on. Just started island sanctuary for glam, shadowbringers relic and four more weeks of p12s reclears. I haven’t even touched the deep dungeons or criterion yet. Might do UCOB before dawntrail. I’m full.
"it could be so much worse" is not "ew is good because it could be so much worse"
i started in 3.1 and i partially agree with how hw was, but the worst issues the game has seen don't magically elevate endwalker to being good, they're both bad in different ways; hw was failed risk taking and ew is the stale formula reaching its limit.
one point towards hw instead of just demonizing it to everyone, hw had merit in regards to party interaction, as annoying as some of those utilities and cross class were, players don't interact with each other the same way anymore at all. stormblood refined it to a point that was pretty good, and it's been completely gone outside of things like addle or reprisal since 5.0. i unironically and genuinely preferred when fflogs melee whined about not having a drg or nin, but i could apoc my tanks or mana shift a healer and have my "moment" in a raid. there's a world where all of the things added to the game still exist but in a refined state instead of just being flat out removed and contributing to the staleness that has become the MO of endwalker, and that's just one example.
Nor did I say it is good because it could be worse. You pulled that out of your mind because you don't want to listen to someone disagreeing on how bad it really is.
Really nice watch. I am a in the game since ARR (and a little bit of 1.0) and got so many friends into the game, and i've never really seen an expansion as "the best" or "the worst", every expansion has positives and negatives. Even though liveletters became "predictable" the most fun I've always had was looking to UI/system improvements because I always knew I'll likely enjoy the story, and do the content one way or another. Sometimes people sound like leaves in the wind, flipping between 0 and 10/10 depending on the weather when so often it's about personal preference and all the different aspects - there is too much to break it down to an "overall" rating i think. I personally also liked bozja for all the trial and error with the broken skills etc. though i can also see why it was bothersome for some people that didn't want to engage with the systems, but it's the often the same people that feel like the current relic in EW is "boring", when having it tied to a progression and level opportunity for alts was too "specific" even though besides some steps you could choose your way of doing it.
I have no horse in this race. I quit when i'm bored. I come back when there's something fun.
If the game stopped tomorrow. I think i would be "damn that sucks i had fun" and move on.
This video was amazing. Alot of points given, justified while also open to debate/criticism. Also..."Do you remember the numbers mason?". Your a real one for the callback!!
Honestly I can't take anyone seriously who claims that they have "nothing to do" in this game. I've been playing for 1600 hours and have only barely started Shadowbringers, because I'm actually DOING shit instead of just bum-rushing the MSQ and then complaining that I'm out of content.
Have you gotten every job to max level? Including crafters and gatherers? How about Blue Mage? Have you completed its spell list? Have you finished Eureka and Bozja? Have you ever run Baldesion? How many Big Fish have you caught? How many Chocobo Racing challenges have you finished? How about the Verminion challenges? How close is your Triple Triad collection to completion? Have you solo'd all the Deep Dungeons? Do you have all the relics? Have you beaten all the high-end raids and trials? Have you maxed out all your Shared FATE ranks? How good is your FC's airship and submersible? Do you have all the Ishgardian Restoration mounts and emotes and stuff? How about all the ones from the Gold Saucer? How about from PvP?
If you want shit to work towards, the game has a virtually endless amount. The game isn't lacking content, you've just decided you don't feel like doing a lot of the content that exists. That's fine, not everything is going to appeal to everyone, but be honest and admit that you are CHOOSING to not do that content; don't pretend it isn't there. And if you really don't want to do anything else until the next expansion comes out, then just unsub and come back later. Instead of sitting around being bored and bitching about how bored you are, you could just go play another game.
Honestly I feel like the reason why this sentiment seems so strong now is because of the large influx of new players that came into the game in 2020 during the SHB patch drought. They had a base game + 3 expansions of content and stuff to do when they joined and now that they've caught up on everything they suddenly feel like theres nothing to do when the content cycle of FFXIV has been ostensibly the same since STB. I've been playing since around 3.2-ish and I've already settled into just coming and going from the game and doing what interests me and leaving what doesn't for years. There's def some fair criticism, but I defintiely feel a lot of it is just people now being caught up and not having nearly 7 years of backlogged content to do. People have said the same thing abt FFXIV for years, people said this about SHB, STB etc. its just louder because of this demographic (doesn't help that the 2020 influx attracted a lot of kinda toxic people who are very online and vocal on social media). Thank you for succinctly showing how wrong the position of everything "being better in HVW" is and how the people parrotiung it are detached from the reality of HVW and now just think of it based on what it is in retrospect and not at the time. The game was still good in HVW, but it had way more problems than any expansion that came after it. As you said, at the very worst ENW is just fine as an expansion, not some affront to god.
I was waiting for an actual comparison, factual evidence, not just feelings. Although I wouldve liked if you did a comparison of all the expansions, not just HW in details. (I know you talked about SB and ShB, but it was more surface level) If you have time and want to do this, I would watch that. Overall, great video! :)
Another important thing that EW did is to revamp the old dungeons to be in more line with the current ones and allow players to do it with NPC's. This is also important. Old dungeon bosses with unintuitive or boring mechanics (I'm looking at you slime) has been revamped. Not to mention changes done to Castrum, Praetorium and Ultima fight.
EW not only tried to introduce new types of content (C&V dungeons, Island Sanctuary) but it also changed the old to have a more consistent gameplay across the expansions. There are people who forgets this.
Do I think that EW's story could be better if it was 2 expansions? Yes. Do I think that EW raid bosses have giant hitboxes? Yes. Do I think that the SE failed to put meaningful rewards to its non-raiding content? Yes! But even with that I think EW is a great expansion in the long term, even though it might not look like it is in the short term.
Though they did also do some bad changes. Floaty boi in Skalla is gone :(
@@WeskAlber I didn't realize it when I run the dungeon for a friend. Nooooooo!!! EW is the worst expansion because of this!!!!
See, now THAT is a good reason to call EW the worst expansion.
@@WeskAlber It's over, FFXIV can never recover without the floaty boi
The only things I disliked about Endwalker was the lack of new armor and the post-MSQ being too reliant on FF4 fanservice. But coming from Destiny 2, it could be WAY worse, those who know the current discussion about Bungie and their past controversies will know what I'm talking about.
While I dislike the Manderville relic grind, it has given me a reason to play the game more (I've completed them all until 6.55 drops). Everything else I've loved, especially the music. Scream was the highlight for me since I grew up with rock music in the early 2000s, making it a truly fun experience for me.
Also, your right about ARR's post-MSQ before 5.3, it was so abysmally long that my friend had to bribe me with the Rebel Coat so I wouldn't quit. Once I reached HW, I enjoyed the game significantly more
Thanks for that video ! I may have a different perspective since i've started ffxiv back then in ARR times mainly for the crafting system it had, and actually was fine with what it was, never fun to have the jobs you main dumbed down especially if you're very fine with it yourself, i understand the argument about it being very intricate but you would prolly not like to have your dragoon going that same route because other felt it was too complex, at least that was my perspective back then, about mid / end of stormblood era i actually fell in love with the story, kept at it since then.
I would however agree people tends to forget about the low and nostalgia acting up, i find that somehow funny as a bystander that some of current content creator complaining about the absence of said exploratory area, were back then very critical about the grinding. i also hear often about the problem being the community, have to say maybe im reading it wrong, but having an opinion that nobody agree with isnt really a community issue...
I'm outside of it, and i basically retired from any form of harder content, when i left wow back then, but i have to say i heard a lot in shb era about people wanting for more "harder" dungeon content, and since i don't participate in it probably, i have hard time to understand how EW is a low point, it felt to me that everything that is happening right now in the form of variant dungeon, criterion dungeon, ultimate happened as a result from this demand from back then, yet people still look unhappy what more do they need, i don't understand, i'm afraid !
As a Bard main who wasn't a fan of the aesthetic of Coerthas, I *hated* Heavensward. Bowmage was an interesting concept, but it ruined the identity of the Bard class: Mediocre DPS, but the ability to keep your rotation going constantly while doing mechanics. I never got the hang of using the cast mode, but I also noticed it never seemed to make that much of a difference for my DPS. Maybe top tier bards got the boost from going into bowmage mode, but I was outperforming other bards without it because I could keep the ARR rotation going much more quickly than with cast times.
All that said, I'm just incredibly glad they rolled that back.
Curious how you feel about Bard right now, I mained it in ARR never mained it again. I tried using it again recently and I genuinely have never had more of an unfun experience with a class in an MMO.
@@AOffensiveJokeI like how Bard plays in Endwalker. They didn’t change much from Shadowbringers. I will admit, I sometimes forget to use my songs in my rotation, so my DPS isn’t the best, but the core rotation isn’t really that different from where it was in ARR. There are a few more Off GCD skills to weave during rotation, and now there’s the DOT refresh skill so you don’t have to recast both DOTs.
That said, it’s fun for me. I know not everyone will like it. I’ve heard Dancer is both more fun and higher DPS, if you want to play ranged DPS. If not, there’s enough jobs to fit anyone’s preferences at this point.
@@zeriah @zeriah Nah I don't like dancer, I play black mage because I don't like burst jobs and every class in game is kinda one right now. I think the breaking point for me for bard is song rotation and songs started only by an attack instead of just an ability. I did like dancer in theory as a low personal damage but high buffer but I just think the buffing in the game is boring, except for bard as it changes the bard rotation slightly with mage ballad and wanderer minuet.
I recall first hand most of these issues. Been playing since the ARR beta. WAR was itself so terrible a tank on 2.0 launch and going into Coil that no one took it - people went double PLD, or single-tanked where that was possible. A good WAR player could potentially out-damage a dedicated DPS...provided they took off their job stone and slapped on cross-class skills like Raging Strikes, Internal Release, Blood for Blood, and other damage-boosting skills available to MRD but not to WAR. Path, Eye, and BB combos were all fully available on MRD - the only things you were missing out on were your stance, Thrill, Unchained, and IB/SC.
Imagine telling the playerbase now that was what was required if you wanted to hit things with an axe.
And when it comes to tank damage output, all jobs regardless of role once used the same damage calculation formula: 500 potency on HW Fell Cleave meant it hit like a 500 potency skill on a DPS. That changed when the first of the Warring Triad fights were patched in: tank damage calculations were altered to scale less than before on the stated potency, and rather than STR alone informing damage, a divisor of a tank's combined STR/VIT scores served as the basis. But before that, you were using STR accessories and allocating all of your level-up bonus stats to STR - and probably playing a Highlander (and later, a Xaela) for good measure.
This got changed again at SB launch when the VIT component to damage was removed and returned to STR alone, but tanks were newly hard-locked to Fending accessories starting from level 61 gear...that had no STR on them. The result was tank mains continuing to use level 60 Alexandrian/Shire accessories up to level 70, because aggro multipliers were still low in SB, and the newly-added jobs SAM & RDM had absurdly high-potency skills available below level 30, which mean tanks could not hold threat against these jobs in leveling dungeons until Brayflox at the earliest for WAR/DRK, and Cutter's Cry for PLD, since aggro stances were still not accessible until levels 30/40 for these jobs, respectively.
The Favors system you speak of required spending uncapped blue scrips on favor tokens to spawn favor nodes for a set duration in specific areas of HW zone maps, and they were very leve-like in a way. You had to gather quantities of HQ items from these nodes to trade in with a vendor in Idyllshire for crafting materials that were used in the first tier of crafted raid progression gear in Gordias, which saw a lot of demand because of both the high likelihood of failing a craft and the number of people trying to beat their way past a1s and a2s with little success. Steady Hand I and II couldn't guarantee 100% success on certain touch and progress actions, and if you didn't want to consign yourself to 40+ step crafts using the MaMa rotation you could opt for a riskier but quicker rotation predicated on using Manip. II with touch actions that had, at best, a 70% success rate when buffed.
And of course, there's accuracy, and its bastard twin, parry. Don't get me started on these stats: I played SMN, PLD, and WAR while raiding through ARR/HW and I cannot begin to tell you how many Alexandrian Visors of Fending we tossed through the grating of Lamebrix' arena floor because the thing had parry/accuracy on it. That people nowadays suggest bringing these stats back tells me advocates for it either did not play the game when those stats were present, or have forgotten why they were so reviled at the time.
The granddaddy of all issues I like to remind people of, though, is that ARR launched without an inventory sort function - or a way to split stacks or reduce item quality. Stack sizes were capped at 99, too, not 999 like today.
I am honestly quite satisfied with the current state of XIV myself. A lot of what's been removed & adjusted was on account of negative player reaction - vociferously negative player reaction, at that. The complaints that are lodged today do have merit (I am very much in the camp that alternative gearing progression needs to be a thing in criterion dungeons) but I do not think it is remotely fair to say that EW is somehow the worst expansion or the worst place the game's ever been in, not by a long shot.
Endwalker was the End for me. Not because it was a bad expansion, but because the main story ended and to me the main story WAS the game.
As a newbie who brgan this game 5 months ago, the criticism of the jobs is wild. I couldnt play dragoon because of how weird and rigid it was, but i discovered reaper and felt instantly in love with it. They are night and day different, same goes for othrr jobs. Also the 2 min window is fine to me, burst when you can, continue your rotation when you cant. Encounters are difficult because of mechanics, and not gated by jobs. I prefer that and having all jobs be viable in ultra late game content than having people be denied to play the class they love because of "the meta". Also, before you say i dont know what im talking about, I cleared UWU, Ucob, TEA and im gearing up right now to do DSR, so even I can have an opinion because I can play the game at a high level.
Triple Legend sprout, now that's what I like to see. And you are correct - people can criticize the FFXIV class design, sure, but the alternative is far worse, because it is merely an illusion of choice. You either play meta classes or you clear nothing, that's how most MMOs work. FFXIV went their own way and chose to eschew wild fluctuations in flavor to instead have all classes be viable - and I rather prefer that to all the alternatives.
And it's not like the classes are even the same, lmao. There's plenty of difference to them even if you technically can keybind them all much the same (and if you wish to play all jobs, you MUST). They have different cadences, different rotations. Ninja is unlike any other job, Samurai is very different from Dragoon, and even Sage has a very different feel to its healing as White Mage. I think it's really just that the fake choices of other MMOs like pointless talent trees and gear abilities have rotted some people's brains to the point they miss the fact that they've always been nothing more than a math problem for players to solve and an endless headache for developers to deal with.
This was by far the best deconstruction of the current problem with XIV's community and I heavily resonate with all your sentiments.
As someone who has played since 6.1, I don't necessary feel entitled to loud criticism of the current expac gameplay, but having experienced past content such as Bozja (which I consider very fun, personally), made me wish there was a similar piece of content in Endwalker, including a more interesting relic that isn't straight up from a vendor - do I dislike and hate the game? Absolutely not, even at the pace I'm churning through content, I find it greatly satisfying in a sense that no other MMORPG has and XIV is completely irreplaceable to me, despite its flaws.
The said, thank you Wesk for being absolutely critical in the most constructive way possible, it gives me hopes for the community.
I started seriously playing after Endwalker launched. I only completed the full story in early August this year, and the mass influx of "Endwalker bad, dead game" totally blindsided me. Never knew about any of the Heavensward issues, but I've remained in love with Endwalker and frustrated that this is blowing up because people are being silly for clicks. "Good" is subjective to each person, anyway. Thanks for making this video! Very informative and detailed.
I don't know if you realize how very frustrating it is that someone that started playing less than a year ago is now telling people who have invested a decade of their lives on a game because of how much they love it that their opinions are "just clickbait ragebait video topics." It's okay to simply accept that you are a latecomer overwhelmed by the massive backlog of content this game has to offer, but that doesn't make the criticisms of the game invalid just because you are in the honeymoon period, as we all were at some point.
@@AzuraiFrostwing Literally every single content creator with the exception of one deeply disgruntled individual has said it's wonderful if you're enjoying Endwalker, but that they personally don't like the expansion and listed their gripes with the game. Complaints that have been circling around in groups of veteran players, people who have been SERIOUSLY playing for 10 years. Maybe you should re-read your initial comment and see how dismissive it is towards differing opinions before you attack me for dismissing yours.
I'm happy you're enjoying Endwalker, but I never attacked your opinion. Just annoyed by your, and many people like yours, dismissiveness on very fair criticism of the game they love too.
EDIT: Oh and you certainly did call the opinions clickbait. What else would "people are being silly for clicks" mean? God forbid they actually are voicing their grievances with the direction of the game in a community that often silences dissenting opinions.
"The story is over, so people are getting worried about where it goes from here. Now you're looking around and all these problems seem to be showing up" (I think it was Jessie Cox, and this is definitely paraphrased.) It feels like nobody has anything to talk about and launch was so hype that this post patch content FEELS weak. There's also just more people now current, and with less stuff they "have to do". I wasn't here for long myself. I hopped in at the tail end of Shadowbringers, especially since some of the things I heard about it from older patches was a lil eh for me. But like, even after spoilering myself, I felt like this post patch series was about the same as all the others. At least in terms of overall plot and side content. But it definitely sounds like if anything the game isn't HORRENDOUSLY janky still. I actually just got my crafters to 90. I couldn't imagine having to do it previously, but yeah, it does sometimes feels a lil bland. Even so, I don't think they're going entirely in a wrong direction.
Yup, I remember the raider's tantrum about the 280 weapon, despite it being layers of RNG. They were more concerned about gatekeeping the "dirty casuals" from having a good weapon.
My only complaint with EW is the relic quest, but it is what it is.
As for horizontal gear progression, they did experiment in the final patch of HW with the alt accessories via 24 man raid. I think even some PVP gear was level 60 before they stopped doing that.
Also Bozja during 5.5 where you get gear that's 5 item levels below max item level for the left side. Wish they'd take a more Destiny approach where the gear you can gear up regardless of content.
Just dropping here a like. As someone who was there (I was there Gandalf) in the worst expansion this game has ever seen, the critically acclaimed Heavensward, this video is needed for the noobs that just arrived
Okay, honestly, having started mid-Endwalker, having not been there during "The Dark Days," I still feel like Heavensward is at the bottom of the figurative tier list.
While it's when the game starts really picking and following through on dormant plot threads - in other words, it's where it feels like the game's plot starts picking up - it also has the single worst zone in the game (Coerthas Western Highlands), three jobs that STILL haven't completely shaken off the jank from their release, and some truly horrible progression for crafters. It's still considerably above average when compared to games at large, but I do think it's showing its age.
What do you think is still janky about MCH/AST/DRK? I don't play much DRK but MCH and AST are two of my favorite jobs.
@@Zanador Okay, I realize I worded that very, very badly. It's not the Jobs themselves, its more the acquisition method. Namely, you have to actually start Heavensward before you're allowed to pick them up, and by then, they are 20 levels behind. Compare the Stormblood Jobs. You acquire them within one of the three starting cities, and the only requirement is that you meet the base level of the Job. For example, you can pick up Samurai as soon as you hit 50, then pivot to it for the rest of the game. If you want to pivot to MCH, you have to grind it up to 50 before you can start doing MSQ with it. This is especially bad if you, heavens forfend, got into the game specifically BECAUSE you wanted to play one of the HW Jobs.
@@scironex5055 Ah okay, that makes a lot more sense. I see your point, although I don't 100% agree. I might be biased since I play every job and intended to do so from the start, so I was never at risk of having one specific job dangled out of reach.
I like that the jobs are picked up in Ishgard itself, it makes them feel more directly tied to the culture and people of that city. All three HW job quest series are some of my favorite job quests, and it would be a huge loss (and a huge time sink on CBU3's part) to rewrite them such that they can begin in one of the starting cities. I totally get why they started putting all the job unlocks in the ARR cities especially for the later expansions which would take even longer to unlock, but I also think that the way the HW jobs are done is neat.
As far as the starting level, they start 20 levels below the starting level of their expansion, which is 10 more than the other jobs which start 10 below, but we're also talking 30-50 which is not the same as 50-60 or 60-70 etc. If you want to start playing Samurai for Stormblood or Gunbreaker for Shadowbringers you still have to grind them up 10 levels, which is about the same as getting the HW jobs from 30 to 50.
And for people who got into the game to play a specific job, the HW jobs are some of the LEAST egregious offenders. If you really want to play one of the ShB or EW jobs you need to get all the way to 60 or 70 just to start them, at which point you're almost definitely in Heavensward at least. I have a friend who specifically wanted to play Dancer more than anything else and she was super annoyed that she needed to get to such a high level before starting. So that's not really an issue exclusive to these jobs at all.
Sorry for the wall of text, lol. TL;DR I see your point and I think a lot of people would agree with you but I'm personally fine with the way they are.
@@Zanador I fully agree; There's definitely a tradeoff with the way the Stormblood and onward classes are handled; The DRK questline is my favorite, specifically because of how it ties into not only Ishgard, but Ishgard's relation to the player character. You could, in theory, have a compromise, wherein the Job Tutor is stationed in a starting city, then moves back to the actual city, where the real Job Quests start, but the only time they've tried that is Samurai, and that may well be my least favorite Job questline.
It's true that the "If you got into the game to play the job..." issue isn't exclusive to the HW Jobs. That honestly didn't occur to me.
The one thing I'd like to clarify is that the issue isn't just them being underlevelled for their expansion. It's that they're underlevelled even if you get them as early as possible. In other words, if you want to pivot to Samurai for Heavensward, you can do so with no grinding whatsoever. If you want to pivot to Machinist, it is ALWAYS going to be 20 levels below you, because you literally can't access the job until you're level 50. This is definitely something that only became an issue retroactively, and which is only going to affect someone who got started after HW was already old news.
But this is also, to be completely clear, jank, and jank alone is not a critical issue. I grinded MCH from 30-70 because I decided to pivot at *Shadowbringers,* and I'd do it again.
@@scironex5055 True, I guess it is weird that the HW jobs are inaccessible until 50 but then start at 30. I hadn't thought about it like that. My friend group likes to change jobs each expansion so grinding something up between expacs is nothing new - recently my wife grinded Warrior from *1* to 70 just to play it for ShB. I guess it would make sense in theory to start the HW jobs at 50 instead, but then you'd need somewhere to put the 30-50 stories lol. You're right that it could be improved, but they're probably just gonna leave it as-is since like you said it's not really a huge glaring issue.