Impressions after long absence

Tymoris

This is more for people that were looking into coming back into FF14 because of the new expansion. (In my case the capital controls also helped in the decision since I can play the game with prepaid cards).

So in no particular order after a couple months of playing in Phoenix as a paladin and archer

1. Game is much less grindy than the last time I've played (about 1 1/2 year ago). They have put some distance from the whole "Let's copy GW2 system of levelling" and now dungeons, quests etc give good experience to actually bother doing.
2. Doing the main quests to get into the expansion can be a pain since a lot of them are just fluff (not even interesting fluff). Doing the group content seemed fast whether as tank or dd using duty finder. Most of them never required more than 5 minutes and only a few towards the end were annoying time wise (Titan hard for example or the final fight with the dragon before getting into the new area). Even then it was about 30 minutes.
3. Another good thing is that even as a dd (archer in this scenario) finding groups in duty finder wasn't problematic. 
4. What I didn't like was the fact that to get the new jobs, access to the new area was required. Totally unneeded and even their backstory for doing so was so boringly generic that the only justification seemed to be "We couldn't think of  anything else".
5. Getting items to get into the expansion was easy. Pretty much I was handed a 115 - 120 set.

Anyway to sum it up, I'd recommend it to anyone looking into playing again. It's a fun game overall and they improved on it a lot, most of the content can be enjoyed by most players. It still has some annoying moments like lots of fluff and the prereqs for the jobs but they have managed to streamline a lot the experience so one can reach them fast. (It took me about 1 1/2 months on average 2-3 hours per day). Population seems fine for the moment and boss fights are more forgiving for those that have latency issues.

 

 

PS. Also it's a good idea to read the wiki for the fights. Seemed most of the delays were from people that didn't even bother to do that so it took longer than needed.