How has the new xpack shaped up? Better than Stormblood?
It's the best expansion by a fair margin imo, the story is just really great, music and locations are awesome, fights are awesome. When I cleared it I said it was probably one of the better Final Fantasy they've made in the past decade. Which doesn't say much since they haven't done very good FFs lately but I really liked it, although being a mmo pacing is different than if it was purely a single player game and it could have been better designed like that.
In terms of current endgame content, I like the first raid tier, it has some interesting ideas and the fights are pretty fun, trials are ok so far(since it's x.1 there's only the 2 starting ones which are very easy but have cool design and the MSQ trial as extreme which is a pretty fun fight). Nier raid is great and unless they fuck it up entirely will probably be the best 24man too. Dungeons are so so, a couple of the leveling ones are nice though(75 and 80 notably).
They haven't added too many new things yet otherwise, Trusts(which are mostly evolved squadrons) are nice but situational and fairly casual, New Game + is even more situational.
Class reworks there's some hit and misses but I wanna say mostly hits, a lot of classes feel pretty nice to play(MCH for example is really cool now imo), although balance right now is a bit fucked due to them tweaking shit too hard(not like completely fucked, but SMN is top DPS again when it really shouldn't for example).
Crafting rework is nice enough imo, it doesn't change that much compared to before but I don't need 3.5bars of abilities anymore so that's great and there's a ton of QoL(quicksynth is actually good and quick now, desynth is a lot more useable, can 100% HQ previous expansion gear instantly), gathering saw similar QoL with autocollect, higher base gathering rate(so no more struggling at 75% when lvling in garbage gear), perma stealth/unspoiled detection and no more remembering the slots for speical nodes, and both are a lot faster to level too for new players and such.
Overall it's great but as usual if you're not in a hurry you can always wait for free sub/sub later and see even more content at once. There's not THAT much to do atm since it's still the first tier, assuming you don't want to level a ton of jobs and don't necessarily do all side activities, but there's a fair amount, but imo and I said that at release too, the game is worth full price just for the 70-80 MSQ alone.
Pasteton
was saying.. Having everything just come to what seems like a stop seems alienating.
