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While I appreciate them in a certain sense, I've not been the biggest of fans of the JPs in season 3. I am not going to say anything that hasn't been said before, so I'll largely avoid commenting on them other than for comparison.
I am a big fan of the one in Siren's Landing, though, and for three reasons that I think make it really and truly great.
1) The scale of the puzzle is always visible, serving to taunt, to motivate, and to inspire. When looking at it from the ground, it's incredibly daunting, but at the same time it calls in challenge and makes you want to ascend all the way to the top. Some of the other puzzles this season and even back to the Silverwastes puzzle have also been grand in scale, but you only really come to appreciate just how big they are by going through them. This one is more like El Capitan
Even better, the scale continues to be daunting all the way up. As I climbed and looked up, I was over and over again left shaking my head at just how far I still had to go even for having been at it for so long. I remember the first moment when I thought, "wow, I might actually make it!" (This is what it looked like). This was a great experience.
2) The puzzle never felt cheap. I sincerely respect those players who really like the difficulty of puzzles like Chalice of Tears. However, while I don't mind difficulty, some of these puzzles just felt like the difficulty was cheap to me. This has all been said before, but they featured difficulty that came from the need to make incredibly precise jumps and glides, or to do a lot of guessing and retrying about which way to go.
I've always remembered my experience at launch of discovering on my own Sharkmaw Caverns and Tribulation Rift. Sharkmaw impressed me because, while there was definitely a measure of uncertainty and trying to figure out which way to go, it never felt like blind or random guessing but more like genuine exploration. Tribulation Rift impressed me because I found it difficult, but I didn't feel like the difficulty was from being off by a pixel here or there. In fact, I remember specifically saying to myself while doing it, "wow, the jumping/landing is much more forgiving than in other games," and yet it still felt challenging in a good way.
That's how this puzzle felt. It started off relatively easy, but definitely did get progressively more difficult as you progressed. The thing was that it never felt like I was just being asked to do something absolutely crazy, and it never felt like I was a misstep away from losing 90% of my progress and needing to start over. The way that gliding was integrated into it the JP in order to allow you to recover was very nice. While in some of the more recent JPs the checkpoint system felt like a lazy attempt to mitigate the negative impact of relying on finicky jumps and guessing, in this one the checkpoints felt like they were at worst just a timesaver for resetting on your own, and at best almost unnecessary.
3) This felt like a callback to more classic jumping puzzles like the two I mentioned above, but on a much grander scale and done to a much greater level of perfection. As I said, there are a lot of players who like the "new style" that we've seen recently, but there are also many who have been wishing for something that was more in the spirit of the puzzles that first made JPs famous in this game. This is that puzzle.
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