Played some FFXIV for the free login campaign.

It was torturous.

I was working my way through Stormblood, the normal hours of traveling around talking to NPCs for absolutely no reason other than skipping a bunch of cliche trash cutscenes. I gave up pretending it might get good after Heavensward. Then running a dungeon identical to every other one, but reskinned.

It was nice relearning what I was doing in the rare moments of actual game play.The button play is still great. I main an Astrologist, one of the (I think it is the most) most action intensive classes. Found out that they dumbed down the card play a ton, and removed all of the generalized healer buffs from them. No big deal, I still had two full palettes of skills to manage, and the card changes made it play way more smoothly.

Found out they actually destroyed the class though. There's six cards, they used to be a damage reduction, a mana regen boost, a cooldown reduction, a crit rate boost, and two damage boosts, one for ranged and one for melee. You had to quickly manage these cards with a bunch of different skills and use them tactically between the clusterfuck of regular healer stuff. It was awesome.

Now literally every single one is a 6% damage boost for melee DPS or tank and 3% for everything else. The two side cards that you could choose as a replacement (I don't remember their old effects) are now an 8% damage boost for melee DPS or tank and 4% for everything else. They replaced all the card effects and tons of card related skills with one skill, Divination. You gain seals whenever you use one of the main 6 cards, once you have three you can cast Divination... it's a damage boost. There's a crazy interaction with the seals though... you get 1% more of a damage boost per different seal.

But wait, there's more. The biggest defining part of your character when playing an Astrologist was the stance you chose, Diurnal or Nocturnal. Diurnal gave some of your skills regen effects, Nocturnal gave them damage reductions. Now once you're high enough level you can get the neutral one, it just gives you both stances.

I can only imagine they destroyed other classes just as bad.

TLDR: You have to buy the game, buy the expansions, they try as hard as they possibly can to make you want to buy your way through those things, then you can buy infinite gil, and every event item and rare drop in the game, then you have to consistently pay to continue playing, which that playing consists of mindlessly mashing buttons and occasionally moving away from the red areas.

The game is a completely garbage cash grab with absolutely no substance or reason to ever play. Everything is a time sink made to keep you from finishing and keep your subscription going. This isn't opinion, it's literally a bad game in every way, it's basically become a subscription based social media.

wrong, I play as black mage and its best class ever

I also main WHM healer and its best condition over years, paladin is good too

dragoon is in good spot too ...

this game is not about money farm, its about dungeon farm

also this game is heavy focus on story which is great, ff 14 is best mmo ever now