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 had actually never made the connection that Hermes was the weirdo Ascian that hung out in Garlemald with Zenos in the Shadoebringers cutscenes, and that now makes more sense to me.
I really liked Elpis as a zone, but I think the game explicitly saying that Hermes wasn’t Fandaniel yet during that zone made me mostly disregard it as a possibility for the future, so I was mostly just following around a guy and a bird lady I’d never met before. I honestly couldn’t even tell you if he took the job after we kicked his teeth in, I was so done with that guy.
I appreciate you mentioning this, though, and I wish that I could see the zone for the first time again with that understanding. =/