I am going to approach mystery odd patch content with, I guess, skeptical optimism. Could be fantastic, but the vagueness has me worried it'll slip and turn into the ego glamour of 4.0. New content is fantastic, I just figured third difficulty would be cheaper and less resource intensive.
Man, apparently they want to change the direct drop system to something where only items for jobs you have in the party will drop. I have mixed feelings about it: on the one hand, it means that we'll never do our first 8 clears with 6 useless weapons ever again, on the other hand I'm glad I could gear up my ninja with spare drops while playing a healer.
It's also rough for situations where people jobswap between floors--PLD for 9-11 and DRK for 12 was super common this tier, and the DRK sword from 12S is baaaaad, so that was a situation where we actively wanted the shield and sword despite not having the job in the party. It took 16 12S clears for our monk to be BiS, but he started trying the floor on DRG sooner because it was better for the group and didn't derail his shot at main loot. I was going to say just let people pick a loot spec and then have the pool pull from it, but that'd be incredibly open to manipulation (have everyone set loot spec to DRG for a given floor to force maiming drops.) Maybe make it an option when you queue in? So while everyone's still gearing up you get useful, and when you're ready for alt loot you risk the full pool.
In Heavensward, all gear guides seem to mention doing Alexander weekly. Did they make normal mode of the raids more accessible to the player base and savage for the Hardercore? Is Alexander something I can just duty finder into and get a clear easily? This is more for experiencing all the content and story as I'm not worried about gear this late in the expansions lifecycle. Just like how I would like to eventually do Bahamuts coil unsynced to see all the story.
Alex story is for everyone and easily DFable.
Despite the rose colored memories of Coil as super accessible to all, only like 15% of the active playerbase cleared Final Coil pre-echo, so they introduced an easier tier so the work put into the raid wasn't restricted to a minority of the playerbase.