this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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I can vouch for the payoff in Shadowbringers. I did not like all of it and I personally dislike the development of the story afterwards and into Endwalker, but Shadowbringers has some good moments.
Since you're done with HW now I'll also warn you, Stormblood can be slow at times and has more narrative problems than the other expansions. The post-Stormblood patch quests were excellent though, in my opinion, so try to stick with it. The far-east stuff is pretty good but the Ala Mhigo parts are probably the games absolutely low point for me.
Stormblood also has some of my favourite music in FFXIV.
I feel like every couple of years or so it changes, when the game supposedly gets good.
When I first played two years ago, everyone just said ARR is a slog, just get to Heavensward. Now I read occasionally that Heavensward still isn't when it starts to get good (and I've seen the extremely boring stuff for myself).
Soon people might say the same thing about Stormblood. "Just get to Shadowbringers."
I think a lot of it is Shadowbringers overtaking Heavensward as many people's favourite expansion during that time.
I still think the "just get through ARR" bit is true to some extent, and you can notice the increase in production value each expansion if nothing else. Stormblood is where the shackles of the PS3 were finally broken for example, so it does have that going for it.
I personally really enjoyed Heavensward, so if that doesn't hit the spot then I don't know. That's not to say it didn't have slow and/or boring parts, of course (they do tend to pad the runtime), but the overall Dragonsong War story and the Ysayle/Estinien bits were great to me.
I think people have kind of been saying that since Shadowbringers came out, honestly. Or at least "get through to the patch quests". Stormblood was overly ambitious and tried to tell two stories at once, which resulted in too little screentime for either to really develop and hit home. Also they had to split the writers, so the Heavensward writer only worked on the far-east stuff, and Ala Mhigo ended up being pretty boring and forgettable.
The base HW story and the first few patches to finish the Nidhogg stuff were good, except for a lot of those extremely tedious quests, that constantly send you to the other end of the world. It didn't take a lot of time, since you can just teleport everywhere, it's just super boring. As far as I've gathered from comments, that just the type of game this is though and I gotta accept that.
I like generally the combat and would like to do more (during normal quests), but instead I just often queue for duties, so I just get nothing done.
They do add a lot of tedious stuff to pad the length, and I agree about the lack of combat duties during the story. It does get a little better in Shadowbringers, if my memory serves.