FFXIV: Realm Reborn

[TheFeniX]

So, WoW got boring (probably should have let raid lead know I was quitting, but he's a big boy, he'll get over it) and Kyle decided that FFXIV being on sale was totally what we needed to play, because it's just what we need: another MMO. We got it for ~$13 off Steam.

Supposedly, this is a sequel to FFXI (duh) which was so bad, Squeenix had to nix the whole thing and rebuild from scratch. So, I created a Male Highlander Gladiator because Paladin class is best class (when it isn't in D&D). The character creator is pretty in-depth, but the game itself suffers from a lot of "same-face." Thank God for Highlanders (which you have to select after the race selection) because the default "human" male doesn't have a lot of options for body build.

The cutscenes and music are fantastic, which is par for the course for Squeenix. The in-game visuals aren't anything to write home about, but it manages to look and flow decently. Some issue with shadows and dynamic lighting are there, but when aren't those an issue?

The experience system is handled pretty straight forward. The "Main" story is pretty much required. You will be unlocking many dungeons through advancing the main quest. You also unlock new areas and new factions by doing so, making it not an optional endeavor if you want any kind of considerable progress. A big beef I have with this is how many mini-instances must be done solo, forcing me to drop group from Kyle while we do them: this is extremely annoying when even SWTOR had a much better system. Fuck balance and all that shit: let me game with my friends. Side quests are also pretty standard, but at least there's no looting in this game. Dropped items are immediately deposited in your inventory.

There's also group content like FATEs which are like Rifts from... Rift. People just run in, kill shit, and/or do objectives. You have the option to level sync, so even a 50 can do level 10 FATEs. They also give marks for your grand faction (basically the guys who sell you all the cool shit). There's also Levemettes to pound out XP in a given level range: just short quests that function as mini-instanced content as only people in your party can attack your mobs.

Class experience is also straight forward, with a few variances. Every 5 levels there will be a class quest to give you new gear or abilities. Even gathering and crafting professions are leveled like a combat class, up to 50. Switching between classes only takes a weapon switch and the armory system makes swapping gear sets easy. At level 30 or so, many combat classes get a "Job" that has other requirements. I'm a Gladiator who can swap to Paladin at level 30 (after doing a short quest) because I also leveled Conjurer to 15. You really only need one character per server because 1 character can be all the classes.

Combat is visually appealing and void zones are clearly marked. However, as melee, the Global Cooldown is atrociously long (like 2.5 seconds default) and requires copious amount of "Skill Speed" to lower it any noticeable amount. This can cause issues with "proc" abilities like shield swipe. You can find yourself losing it because it procs right before you used another ability, by the time you're off the GCD, the proc is gone. Not enough abilities, especially for tanks, exist off the GCD. If you prefer slower-paced combat, this is your game. But it's taking a lot of getting used to coming from playing a Paladin in WoW that was stacking over ten thousand haste and had many useful abilities off the GCD. Also, you end up spamming "Flash" a lot, a 0-damage AOe threat generator that's on the GCD and uses a ton of your limited mana.

The game isn't a cake-walk though. Many of the solo-quests require planning ahead, if not lightning reflexes. The dungeons are what I would call challenging, at least for the average player. We do well for ourselves because we queue as tank and heals, so we only require 2 DPS to get the job done. But they are not the cake-walk WoW dungeons are in early game. Stupid people will wipe you. I find, for me, at least, a lot of issues come because the slow-paced GCD cannot keep pace with the fast-paced fights. Mobs are quick to drop aggro and eat the face of your healer, and they tend to move just as fast as you. Combining the two makes recovering from mistakes much harder than in Wow, or even Rift.

We're now about level 40 on and the game is still pretty interesting. It's also funny to immediately spot the PS3 players based on their movement.

Just a side-note: this is the first game since a Beth game I've probably spent more time interacting with female character in charge than anything. There's still a fair amount of their story-arcs being centered around the actions of men, but it's a good change from the likes of WoW with the one main female protagonist (two, if you count Tyrande) being either whiney or bitchy. Although it's funny to listen to so many Voice actors and actresses butcher an English accent.

[TheFeniX]

I have to wonder how Garuda made it past Q&A considering it's part of the Main Scenario. It's a straight up "queue for this boss" and roll hard. It took us three wipes and requires a pretty big reliance on actual mechanics (that the game has done everything to teach you as you leveled). But the fight allows for very few mistakes, and in fact, has multiple "one-shot" mechanics. Our main issue was our melee DPS was using a controller, but even the ranged DPS (who had been at the fight for 5 hours with different groups) got popped a few times. It's not that hard of a fight, but it's nice to see a game make you work a bit for those cutscenes.

If the pillars get knocked down too fast because the DPS didn't kill adds or the tank (hey, I can't always be awesome) has poor positioning, you can end up in an unwinnable situation at the 50% mark. I can pop CDs and take the 3000 damage to the face. If I pop everything, I can take that and cover the healer and get us both out of it with 25% of our HP left, but the fight becomes a DPS race after that and I just don't hit that hard.

[Broken]

What server did you end up rolling on? I play FFXIV a bit (been too busy this summer to play) and ended up on Excalibur with some folks I know.

FFXIV is not a sequel to FFXI except so much as they are both MMO's. All the final fantasy games share some common themes, enemies/npc's names/traits, and easter eggs, but they are not direct sequels, they each have their own worlds and histories.

The GCD does make for somewhat slower combat, however at max level it makes up for that with lots and lots of movement fights and one-shot mechanics are fairly common, especially in raids. Look up some videos of Titan Hard or Extreme for an example of that. As for your paladin, aoe threat is a real issue and always has been. Warrior tanks have better aoe threat and bigger hp pools, but lack all the block and parry of paladins and many defensive cooldowns. Dungeons are much harder while leveling then they were in WoW (stopped playing early Cata expansion), but the gear rewards are decent. Knowing a good crafter really helps leveling as well, since gear is quite important. Keep doing the main questline, as that unlocks raids as well as dungeons, so you don't force a group to wait while you finish a quest you put off to do a raid.

[TheFeniX]

What server did you end up rolling on? I play FFXIV a bit (been too busy this summer to play) and ended up on Excalibur with some folks I know.

We're on Marlboro.

FFXIV is not a sequel to FFXI except so much as they are both MMO's. All the final fantasy games share some common themes, enemies/npc's names/traits, and easter eggs, but they are not direct sequels, they each have their own worlds and histories.

Yea, I was wrong in that FFXIV was so atrociously bad they re-released it as ARR and turned the clock forward 5 years. But there have been more than a few sequels in FF games over the years, usually fanservice.

The GCD does make for somewhat slower combat, however at max level it makes up for that with lots and lots of movement fights and one-shot mechanics are fairly common, especially in raids. Look up some videos of Titan Hard or Extreme for an example of that. As for your paladin, aoe threat is a real issue and always has been. Warrior tanks have better aoe threat and bigger hp pools, but lack all the block and parry of paladins and many defensive cooldowns. Dungeons are much harder while leveling then they were in WoW (stopped playing early Cata expansion), but the gear rewards are decent. Knowing a good crafter really helps leveling as well, since gear is quite important. Keep doing the main questline, as that unlocks raids as well as dungeons, so you don't force a group to wait while you finish a quest you put off to do a raid.

I've done Titan HM. Was pretty brutal with pugs. Some normal FFXIV dungeons are in the vein of early cata heroics: they aren't cakewalks. We've just unlocked King Mog as we've been taking it slow, but we've got our Relic weapons and I'm rolling at about 92 ilvl. I just don't care to get insane right now farming Turns for gear. I'd rather level Lancer.

[TheFeniX]

So the guild we got into ended up merging with another guild they were running end-game with in order to form Voltron or some shit. Anyways, this created a small group of extremely knowledgeable and geared players who really didn't want to waste time with content they had already done. So, anytime I'd ask to run Levi EX or basically anything that wasn't a Coil Turn (which is the endgame raid right now), I was ignored or told they'd do it later because (you guessed it) they were doing Turns that night. They even managed to form their own exclusive hunt group that no one else in guild was even really informed of.

Anyways, I got drunk one night and asked if all this guild did was farm Turns because there was literally no help offered by the guild leaders except in this area and my comment was met with the "nah dood, nah. We do other stuff." And this started up some bullshit with the GM and other guys trying to convince me they gave two shits about other players in the guild aside from using them to farm rep for the new guild. Anyways, this came to a head by the guild lead offering me a raid spot on the second raid team... who was also farming Turns. So... they've run jack-shit with me and want to base my spot as Tank on a raid team based off what the one guy in guild who would run shit with us said about me, said guy had quit the game due to personal issues.

This came to a head after some other bullshit and we parted ways on fairly amicable terms because I get they were tired of "older" content, but they kept trying to play it up that they'd help with stuff, even though they wouldn't. Why can't people be upfront about shit like this? We found another guild that is much less established and will actually run content. And holy shit, we're having fun.

Paladin is rolling pretty hard. Just tanked my first Levi Ex kill, took more than a few wipes. This game really needs to dial-back on the one-shot mechanics that require precision movement when the netcode doesn't support it. I guarantee if they add even .5 seconds to the cast times of a lot of boss abilities, the clear-rates would drastically increase: that's poor design even if the fights are mostly fun.

Since tanks are everywhere in this game because it's pretty damn easy, I've found myself running Dragoon more often and am loving it. There's a few hiccups with abilities not firing when they should, even when they're off the GCD, but all in all it's an extremely fun and rewarding class to play.

Tonight we're hitting Turn 5 again after we give King Mog EX a shot. This group is really fun to run and fail with. No one throws hissy fits. No one talks shit to other raid members for not knowing every little thing or making an honest mistake. Thankfully, we got in with the right group.

[TheFeniX]

It's funny. A main complaint I had with WoW was sitting around town all day waiting for queues to pop because Blizzard's content releases are for the most part: 3 big patches and hot-fixes. Something I've found myself actually complaining about in FFXIV is the amount of content released in their mini-patches.

Just got used to having everything unlocked, and starting to farm the 3 new expert dungeons? Those are gone, here's 3 more. Oh, and new Odin trial... and Shiva. Final coil now up. People aren't doing hunts, let's upgrade the gear you can buy with marks. People aren't running dungeons, up/upgrade the token drops. We need people past older content to get them into newer content, give them echo buffs from the start and buff drops on mounts etc. Even still, many primals aren't able to be zerged. Titan of course be the ultimate in casual player filtering technology. Mog EX isn't far behind.

Golden Saucer just dropped. Triple Triad card game, Chocobo Racing and Breeding, gambling out the ass. Relic weapons upgraded and the grind for lower levels dropped again. A new place to just hang out. This is all gearing up for the expansion. Only issue is people are gambling instead of queuing, but I can't call that a terrible thing. Also, some tank, who had never done Mog (I was running it again for a friend), thought we could zerg it because all he wanted was to farm the Triad card Primals can now drop. He left me to solo tank King, PLD, and WAR. I'm so overgeared and got wreck in less than 30 seconds. OT said "This fight is dumb, not worth my time."

This game has so many grinds and time-dumps and most of them manage to actually be fun. Crafting is pretty much it's own game. My only real complaint is the cross-classing required for max level crafts. It's basically a requirement at this point to have every crafting class (except Armorer) at 50 to accomplish anything without risking wasting huge quantities of expensive mats. Everything, literally, feeds into everything else with crafting.

The game is already moving in a direction I like when it comes to instanced content. The fights are moving from incredibly annoying and multiple one-shot mechanics the game engine has issues dealing with to fights that are difficult and rewarding without being soul destroying. PS3 support will be dropped soon, so there's already work being done on graphics upgrades, which is weird because this shit should be client side anyways.

We've been meaning to finish up Gat out of Hell, but we can't even be bothered to take the 2 hours to do so because I want to keep grinding stuff in FFXIV, as opposed to WoW where at endgame I felt like I just had to due to guild "responsibilities" or the treadmill I didn't want to get behind on.

I want the Shiva sword so bad for my PLD spec. Up to 18 clears. Still a fun fight... when people aren't busy dieing to stupid shit.