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Something to note about their comment of arboretum originally being a savage dungeon, the first adds in criterion includes belladonna, the final boss.
Ah yes. I started playing in 2.2 and I remember this time. It was around the same time that Fallout 4 came out, and I just let my sub lapse and played that game for, like, 5 months. It's the longest time I've ever been away from the game… I also remember users on Reddit actually arguing that this was one of the best patches that had come out to that point.
So, I missed most of the Heavensward patches upon release since I was away at college at the time, and didn't have a gaming laptop at the time. Definitely sounds major rough. I will say though, since this patch began the long haul of mounts being made able to fly, every time I saw which mounts were made able to fly pissed me off more and more and more. Why? CAUSE THEY WAITED UNTIL THE VERY LAST MOUNT UPDATE TO MAKE THE ARR EXTREME TRIAL MOUNTS ABLE TO FLY! Like, even looking back on it, it STILL pisses me off. You spend all this goddamn time going and grinding out to get all of the mounts from the ARR EX trials, and you can't freaking fly with them. But they made it so the behemoth mount and a stupid freaking CHRISTMAS BEAR could fly first?! Still mad. Still very tilted.
I love the schizophrenic nature of the final fantasy 14 player… we currently have a series of relic weapon that all you have to do is whatever you want to do earn it, and then an old series where you had to do this specific grind to get them (that was apparently hated)… and people want to go back to that, because what we have now isn't grindy enough for them?
I had forgotten how long ago all of these features, gpose, vermillion, Diadem, were made available. 😅 I focused on the story, as usual, and at that point it was all good for me lol. Until Heavensward ended…. Can’t wait to see the next video! Thank you MrHappy. 👍
Cool.
Interesting to hear how even though Heavensward is fondly remembered, it seems like it wasn't always the best experience from a day to day basis.
I remember the anima weapon quest and the thankfully skippable step… also I remember diadem and only went in once…. never again until SB.
We were so starved for content from 3.0 endgame that I remember being hyped for 3.1 from its trailer…then it came out and woof…. Looking back I can’t believe I stuck it out and kept my sub rolling
players at the end of 3.1: oh boy, that Thordan EX sure was hard! I hope the next one's a bit easier
fiend plays in the distanceAh this was around when I joined.
Love these videos happs, thanks for doing them as specially after 10 years all these falls and sucesses are to be remembered xD
There was a middle step in the Anima quests that was doing 10 dungeons. Very basic and not that bad. The thing about the third Anima step that was so egregious was you needed more than the 80 Unidentified items, those alone would have been fine. The straw the broke the dhalmel's back was you also needed 16 High Quality Crafted items that REQUIRED Specialists to craft and NEEDED materials from the Diadem. You needed 4 items of 4 types and each one required a material from a second Specialist Crafter. As a reminder a player could only have 3 Crafters registered as Specialists and while changing your Specialist Classes was possible it was not cheap or easy. This effectively forced everyone to buy these items from the Marketboard where they were stupidly expensive. It was this forcing in of high end crafting, which at the time was extremely hard to get into, that made everyone give up and wait for the nerfs in a few patches.
As someone that game back to the game in 3.2 and was caught up finally by 3.4ish, I saw a LOT of "throwing shit at the wall and seeing if it stuck" and lack of any non-raid endgame made people come up with their own fun (and with not that MASSIVE of a fanbase, I stuck to leveling and doing quests and paying attention to the lore), and maybe thats why I have such a unique perspective on the game now whenever it lacks content lol
It's actually wild to me that streamers talk about this expansion with love and good memories. Watching your last 2 retrospectives gave me the exact same anger and disappointment I had when they made me quit the game back then
I remember jumping into LoV and I wanted to like it soooo much it was so boring. I literally blocked out the Anima quests it was traumatizing. I made the most Gil at this time though I was selling low level accessories constantly with my husband we needed up with over 100 mil
Wasnt this anima step when we needed 4x of 4 specialist crafted items which each needed other specialist crafted items? And changing specializations was an ordeal and a half? You couldnt buy them with GC seals at this point.
At least personally, the grind gor anima wasnt the issue. It was the need of multiple crafters to get in on the action, at a time where interacting with the crafting system meant spending all the gil, unless you had 3 omnicrafters with different specs?
Being stonewalled by crafting was what frustrated me, not to he grind itself.
My first static disbanded because we got walled by both A3S and Thordan.
Oh baby. Nothing makes players happier than having to kill 20 giant-ass dinosaurs with one hit kills on the OFF CHANCE of getting a Best in Slot weapon (whose stats are randomly generated)
Still can't believe this was a decision they made. Diadem has to be in the top 3 most contentious content choices they've ever created
Ah, 3.1, the only patch cycle I've ever unsubbed for. I had been afflicted by the "what's the point" mindset after months of 3.0 as a new player to the game and not wanting to delve into hardcore raiding after having done so for years prior in WoW. 3.1 is the only time I've ever been unsubbed from XIV in all my time playing this game.
Btw the anima weapon first quest was originally 6 crystals/atmas from each zone; it was lowered to 3 per in a later patch (3.25 or 3.3 iirc). Second step was running a bunch of dungeons…not that bad. That third step to get 210 weapons tho with all the unidentified stuff plus crafting…awful as it was, it motivated me to start leveling DoH/L jobs when I returned in 3.2.
It feels like Happy, Arthars, and Xenos are the only ones who push back against the idea that HW is this flawless masterpiece when the reality is that it practically undid all the goodwill that ARR built and nearly destroyed the game.
This is back when I started playing. I specifically remember hitting 50 Ninja and entering "The Wanderer's Palace". The group was like: "Woah, a noob – I thought this game was dead."
Of course, as a noob, I had NO idea why they were saying this; I thought it was the best game ever. Probably because it was my first MMO.
Some notes you forgot about 3.1 Diadem
It was spammed by end game raiders and everyone else because the pink gear had a chance of getting good random substats. Back in 3.1 the substats weight were still pretty good and didnt get outscaled by main stat just yet so if you got lucky you could get pink gear with great substats for your job.
I managed to get pink pants that the stat weight was greater then the BiS pants for 3.0/3.1
The devs then nerfed those drops and immediately after that, Diadem died. People were in spamming for pink gear and once that was nerfed, dead content. Sometimes people would go in and gather but it was nothing special.
3.1’s Diadem actually didn’t even have objectives when you went in! It was just a free for all.
It wasn’t until 3.5 when they “reworked” the Diadem where they added the mission objectives and added the Aetheric Weapons for the Emergency Mission rewards.
I remember trying to do gathering in Diadem 1.0 and it was TERRIBLE. Trying to gather things and not die was nearly impossible. And a lot of crafts required stuff from there (you can buy them now with white scrips). They fixed things a bit in Diadem 2.0, but it still sucked.
I loved everything, the grind was the fun part for me. Especially the pink gear for pvp when stats mattered at the time.
To answer some comments in here. When talking about why this expansion is so popular in contrast to how this video series make it look you need to take into account that the wast majority of current players, didnt play heavensward and its patches when it was current. For most it was a good story with overall better content than ARR that they just slogged through . For most heavensward is/was a refreshing piece of major content on their way to either stormblood or shadowbringers end gane. This is fine, thats how MMOs work. One persons "grind and lack luster/bad balance patch" is someone elses "passing through and see the vistas" experience.
Peace and stay safe folks
This is when I started losing interest in the game. Have never came back at quite the same level since.
I think this was about the time that I first started figuring out how the endgame worked… fresh off of a long grind all the way through like part of 2.4 through HW to current because I got distracted with an ARR relic instead of doing my MSQ after starting years ago. I also started the trend of sacrificing a fully fledged out Zodiak Zeta for the anima weapon because the relic quest really did feel like a sequel… so while I have a collection of recreations, not a single ARR relic remains.
The worst part of the Anime Quest were the HQ crafting materials you needed, like 4x Kingcake etc. I started the game in 3.0 and knew no crafters at this point and the items were so incredible expensive that there was no point for a lot of people like me to actually get the items.
I quit after spending a few weeks with this patch, not gonna lie. I think I came back somewhere in Stormblood. Had the exact same feeling after doing 6.3 as well and immediately unsubbed. Haven't been back since, hopefully they give me a reason to play again.
I miss Diadem. I don't care if I'm the only one.
Listening to you is wild. I raided in HW, but like 2-4hrs once a week. We were SLOOOOOOOOOW and took weeks off and it took us forever to get thru the content. Me & my friend group loved HW and didn't experience ANY of the discontent that you're talking about. We loved 3.1 and everything that came with it and honestly other than knowing about how stupid Gordias was, I didn't know that any of this was your chunk of the community's PoV. Everyone I interacted with enjoyed the patches and our biggest point of concern even thru 3.1 was the stupid tornadoes from the 3.0 dungeon ahah
Not that Stormblood was the best expansion, but it's always funny to me when folks talk about how bad SB was when they weren't around for the dumpster fire that was the near entirely of the 3.x patch series, and don't have the context or experience of waiting 3 months between content drops.
3.1 is arguably the point where the game was at its most difficult, with both the raid, trial and general job design at that stage making it the hardest we've ever seen (and probably will see). I think this is the reason why vets look back on it fondly
I never bothered to even watch these before this one and i was surprised by how intresting this was, since Mr Happy had so many stories to tell us about the ups and downs
This kinda makes me laugh going through the HW stuff. I was on a break during some of this. MY static was slain by A3S like many others. i was losing interest, and the static thing left a bad taste in my mouth. I even think this was round the time I did my first break from FFXIV to do the Everquest TLP server for my first time.
I sit an laughed when you mentioned Gpose because if memory servers, its reception at the time wasnt the best. People were like, oh neat, whatever about it. Unlike today where people do it professionally. I think this really was the expac, until near the end, I pretty much patch logged.