I’m late to this discussion, but I’ve been watching a few videos about this from content creators and I find this argument impossible to defend.
Taking ARR out (it’s not really an expansion), you can’t actually think EW is worse than HW. HW had much worse and less content and while the story, including the patches, was better, that era didn’t have what people are complaining about now. Maybe less job homogenization, but also absolute dumpster tier jobs that people didn’t play.
So yeah, things are a bit rough (specially now that a lot of new players are caught up), but the worst one? I can’t agree with that.
I mean, Hildibrand is just the unlock. What you actually do for the relic is… whatever. It’s just tomestones.
This makes me wonder something though: We did get a new “grind place”, it’s not a Bozja or Eureka, but it’s a PotD/HoH. It gives tomestones. You can perfectly state that you can grind that to grind your relics. It’ll give you the relics eventually. Or you could even go to lvl80 Bozja to grind them. Or do dungeons. Or savage raids. Or whatnot.
The fact that now without the reward forcing you to go into a grind place, very few players do, makes me wonder why people remember these places fondly. They clearly don’t want to do them, or they would as their preferred way of obtaining their rewards now that they have multiple ways of getting them. But yet even though people went in there out of necessity not desire, they have fond memories of it. Shared hardships of utterly boring grind content, maybe?