I mean, you started by telling me the game's not for me and that I should unsub, so I'm not super surprised we're not on the same wavelength?
This is the tricky point, because on some level I want to just point to Legion and go 'that', because WoW is the only other MMO I've played recently enough to cite recent specifics with, but WoW comparisons are traditionally a touchy point for XIV fans because reasons. Legion did the combat revamp thing, too. It was a feature, too. But they also took a bunch of wacky swings for the fences in changing how people engage with the game itself. The World Quest System, Mythic+, the questionably wise decision to take the relic weapon concept and make it the only weapon everyone gets for the expansion, the entire Suramar zone which had a shitty rep grind component tied into a zone that was deeply integrated with the overall story, etc. It's not just Draenor In Another Setting. It tries to change how people engage with the game, it tries to scale difficulty with the players. It tries in ways that address the base game itself, above and beyond diversions. XIV has made a couple of moves I've praised, but I think I waded into this whole thing saying I felt like SB did less 'expanding' of the core loop than HW because HW wrote in the normal mode/crafted gear step; it's not even a step that overall was super relevant to me, but it was a fundamental change in how they approached the core gearing cycle which I appreciated. You didn't go grind tomes for everything you wanted for every job, you'd run specific fights, or you'd craft up, etc, for gear good enough to go start raiding in. It's a small change, but I appreciated it. SB is just repeating it, while leaving the ARR era segments largely untouched (they've added new ways to get tomes, which is awesome, but at some point it's still the expectation that you do your MMO chores to cap each week, etc.) And yeah, yeah, go play WoW, I know. But I genuinely found a lot I prefer in the flow of combat in XIV (RIP 3.x MCH), and the smaller raid groups for Savage, and the feel of some of the boss fights. And given that they've mentioned a few times being aware of a call for more challenging content, or literally citing the jump potions as trying to make overtures to more traditional MMO players, I don't think it's out of line to discuss XIV-as-MMO as something they're trying to do alongside XIV-as-FF.
I don't expect XIV to do everything WoW does, or change things on the scale that WoW does, and to some extent it can't because of the rigid treadmill it adheres to, but it is disappointing to know we'd never see something like mythic+ because the game itself can't support it. We'll likely never see anything that ties progress to difficulty outside of the 4 fights every 6 months that constitute the raid tier (and even then--Savage fights don't reward lore and so aren't sufficient for engaging with a lot of the content treadmills. I will never finish Umbrite because I stopped making myself EXDR a long-ass time ago and running Savage doesn't count), because the game hasn't meaningfully committed to helping players improve. They're revamping the combat system, but still haven't implemented a Hall of the Intermediate to actually try to teach anyone which is still pretty insane. They've added some good content on the periphery--Aqua and PotD are good things to do just for the sake of doing, although PotD is shacked with 100 floors of tedium before 30 OK floors and 20 good floors--but it being good and successful isn't enough to make it foundational. The backbone of Stormblood is the backbone of Heavensward is the backbone of ARR and the heart of it is 'go grind a thing for tomes'. And for all that they emphasize the story, they don't even meaningfully improve their ability to tell it. I'm sort of shocked we've made it to a second expansion (and dropping PS3!) with no meaningful focus on overworld phasing.
Also I'm basically preemptively mourning whatever the 4.1 optional hard content is because seriously it was not worth sacking a dungeon for; just give me a third tier based on a pre-tuned version of the raid. Less flashy but less overhead and more likely to be sustainable; I worry that 4.1's hard content will end up like Savage SCoB as the weird thing we all side-eye.
_/¯
