Initial impressions so far, I’m a huge fan of this patch. Gonna talk about it a lil without spoilers.
As a War main, I’m very happy with the WAR buffs. Holmgang was arguably the best invuln in the game, now it’s even better. Plus, AoE reprisal is absolutely bonkers, it’s actually useful in dungeons now.
I play SAM and DNC on the side, and I’m also pretty happy with those buffs. Especially the change to Samurai’s Shoha. It feels great to have an actually useful level 80 ability now, and it fits so naturally into the kit.
The new raid feels great, and I say this as someone who hasn’t played Automata and is a general hater of 24 man raids. The fights all require a lot of movement and have some interesting mechanics, especially the second boss.
Lastly the new dungeon is pretty great! It checks all my boxes I want out of a dungeon I’ll be seeing a lot of.
-Fun aesthetics
-Trash pulls aren’t annoying or heavily gated
-Boss mechanics are interesting, without being overly complex
This dungeon has replaced Akadaemia Anyder for “best option in expert roulette.”
Overall, I’m really happy. I’m excited to give Hades Extreme a go with my pals soon!
The NieR raid is a lot of fun. It seems very difficult for a first Alliance raid, though never feeling totally unmanageable. Also, the second boss has an attack called Marx Smash. I don’t have anything clever to say about it, I just think that’s hilarious.
I also enjoyed the 5.1 story a lot, particularly the second half. After being perpetually frustrated by everything to do with Uldah’s politics, it’s refreshing to see the rebuilding of Eulmore take a more (seemingly) left-leaning approach to political structure. I don’t know, it’s just nice to see that theme of collective action carry onward into the city’s post-Shadowbringers form in a way that feels hopeful and imaginative of a better world. And as someone who has yet to find any of the Hildebrand slapstick all that funny, the sequence where the Chais reunite (capped off with Alphinaud having to revive Chai-Nuzz) had me cackling.
I’m excited to see how Ninja feels now. I’m still only level 57 with that, but it sounds like a lot of people are happy with the changes made.
As for fellowships, I thought about starting a Waypoint one, but last I checked it didn’t seem like there’s that many people here who play on the Aether data center.
they nerfed my bard dots this game sucks
(I kid I kid)
I’ve finally reached heavensward how exciting! I’m doing the crystal tower stuff though I guess. I flit between things. I may soon try… tanking :o (which I never did any of the times I played WoW)
It’s a good game sorry I’m too low level to enthuse about most of the new stuff but ah
I did the Nier raid on Friday with my FC and it was a ton of fun! It was great having a full squad of FC mates to run it with. 24 folks (most of us running it for the first time) laughing it up in the discord every time we died. Thanks to the efforts of incredibly talented healers we got the clear.
I was super lucky and got one of the new gear pieces too! I never played Nier Automata but it’s something I’ll have to circle back around to. The music was excellent and I love me some stories about robits.
I’m glad @austin_walker is sticking with it, given that we all know and acknowledge that the 2.X story stuff is excruciatingly long. It’s a lot of table setting and politicking that happens to be extremely my shit, but it’s still very MMO fetch questy in this section. It doesn’t help that it was originally released over the course of a year and a half and was designed to be played spaced out over that time. Thankfully, they learned that lesson and the 3.X and 4.X main storylines are much brisker; the story content is spread out more laterally along parallel paths (e.g. the 8-man raid path, the 24-man raid path, the primal path, etc.).
As for Hildibrand, he’s definitely an Inspector Clouseau type and his quests are a barely canon comedy romp. Whether they come off as funny is a matter of taste, but they’re also a heaping source of fanservice for the whole series. On a related note, there’s a long series of side story quests called the Postmoogle Quests that exclusively consists of small character moments and world-building. They’re not required to progress and there are quite a lot of them but if you’re in need of some good writing as a break/pick-me-up from the main quest, you should check them out.
So the internet (and Austin on the pod) has finally convinced me to start playing, but I’ve never played an MMO, or a Final Fantasy game, so it’s all been a bit overwhelming.
Does anyone have any good recommendations of guides for complete beginners?
When getting started there’s are some things to keep in mind:
If you get the game on Steam, you can only buy future content off Steam. If you get it anywhere else, you can buy expansion content anywhere besides Steam. You cannot transfer your account once it’s marked as either “Steam” or “Not Steam”, so you’re stuck in one of two marketplaces from the outset. It’s a bad, completely unintuitive system, but do keep it in mind before starting. If you’re playing on console, don’t worry about any of that.
There’s also a free trial that’ll let you play most of the content up to level 35. I would absolutely recommend doing that so you can see if MMO gameplay might be something you enjoy.
The combat is going to feel less than great from the outset. You’re only going to have a couple of skills, and since they’re almost all going to be on the same global cooldown, the moment-to-moment gameplay will feel very slow and unsatisfying even if you like this sort of combat. This improves after you start unlocking more skills, but that’s going to take a while.
When you make your character, your race and sign don’t matter at all. Just make the character you want to make. If you end up liking the game enough to play the later expansions and want to play a bunny lady or a lion man, the game gives you an item at the end of A Realm Reborn that’ll let you do that provided you own Shadowbringers when using it.
Also when making your character, your starting class decides where you start the story out in addition to the sort of character you play for the first few hours. Don’t worry about being completely locked in to a class you might not like. By a certain point early in the story, you’ll be able to start playing as the other classes in your starting area, and then all of the others shortly after that. Where you start out also doesn’t matter too much, so don’t worry about being stuck in a desert/forest/fantasy Mediterranean for terribly long.
As for what class to pick, just pick whatever sounds fun to you. Want to tank (i.e. be the person whose job is getting hit so everyone else can live)? Go with Gladiator or Marauder. Want to Heal? Conjurer will let you do that right away, though Archanist can start doing that after level 30. Or maybe you just want to hit things, in which case you can pick any other class and do exactly that. All things considered, this game has historically been very well-balanced between its various classes, you rarely ever have to worry about something being out of meta. If you want an overview of what the endgame classes look like, this video, though outdated now, should give you a good idea of what their differences are. You also unlock a special tutorial around level 15 that trains you specifically in your role (i.e. Healer, Tank, DPS) for dungeons, so don’t worry about being thrown into the fire with that!
The game is actually pretty good about onboarding you to its numerous systems. It’s to the point that the first tutorials kind of assume this might be your first video game. So despite never playing an MMO before, you should be able to get acclimated easily enough.
The biggest thing that might not be obvious is that you should always do a “blue/plus” quest whenever one pops up. FFXIV’s content is fed to you as your character levels and progresses the main story, and one of the key ways new things are exposed to you is through these special quests. There’s a great rundown here that shows you when you can expect to find new things and where they are. (This is stuff like mounts, new dungeons, important systems, and even a whole casino.)
Also, always do your job/class quests every five levels. You start out getting decent armor/weapon boosts from them, but eventually they become a major way of getting new skills and eventually unlocking your “job” (i.e. your advanced class)
Finally, with regard to never playing a Final Fantasy, don’t worry about that. While FFXIV plays in a lot of the series’s tropes, the only way you’re going to miss out on anything is when there are specific fanservice callbacks, and those shouldn’t detract from folks who don’t get the reference. Like, I never played Final Fantasy IV or V, and yet the raid that’s full of references to those games was still a lot of fun for me. As for the story itself, you can sort of just let it wash over you as it happens. It doesn’t explain some things super well at first (e.g. Primals, global politics), but once you get to 2.X, the game goes to great lengths to make sure you have a better understanding of how everything works, so don’t get discouraged!
There’s a lot to take in with this game, and it can be very easy to overwhelm yourself. Just take things one step at a time, and you’ll get a handle on it all in due time. If everything feels like it’s too much, you can just shut it all out and simply focus on doing the Main Story Quest or trying out a new class. Everything in the game will wait around for you until you’re ready to do it, so there’s never any rush to to learn something right away!
Edit: @Jimbot reminded me: don’t worry about doing side quests! The Main Story Quest should reliably get you most of the way to level checks on its own, trying to keep up with side quests alongside it can be a huge slog. It’s easy to burn out on this game, so avoiding side quests until you start leveling your first alt jobs is usually recommended for new players.
Once they’re unlocked, do your dailies. You get massive amounts of exp from them and will get you your levels really quickly. After a certain point I stopped doing side missions altogether unless it had the visual indicator that it was part of a multi-mission storyline.
Also, always be sending your retainer out on ventures! You’ll know what that means when you get to it.
Its good to know the starting race/sign/class choice doesn’t really matter because I feel like they really dump a lot on you without explaining what the choices mean, especially where the races seem to change stats that I don’t really understand.
I final have a second monitor again so I’m really looking forward to having a non focus critical game to play (after sinking an embarrassing number of hours hauling cargo in Elite Dangerous a few years ago).
This weekend I wanted to get back into crafting since I knew they did a major update on it. Switching to a crafting class and seeing how many skills had disappeared was really overwhelming. I had a system!!! Now I feel like I’m learning things all over again.
All my crafting classes are around Lvl 40 and I’m just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on a lower level HQ crafting rotation. Maybe I’m overthinking it? I just want to make sure I’m being efficient.
Inner quiet and spam hasty touch probably, if you have it use waste not 2 to preserve durability else master’s mend, try and finish with great strides into a touch action if you can but before byregot’s blessing at 50 this will have less of an impact.
Inner Quiet > great strides > waste not 1 > Standard Touch 4 times is the most efficient use of GP early on as far as i can tell. just do the maths on how many times you’ll need to do basic synth & use the rest of your resources on basic touch & rapid touch. its what ive been doing anyway just from guessing and i generally get ~100 on firmament crafts
The number of removed and changed abilities is intimidating but the overall number of skills is decreased. I can’t remember exactly what’s available at lv 40 but it shouldn’t be overwhelming. Just read all your tooltips, re-set all your skills and it should be fairly obvious what to do. The redesign is meant to make crafting more straightforward.
Ishgard restoration is going to kill me, I’ve just been grinding it out after work nonstop and I’ve already gotten my culinarian 72 levels and made over 2 mil on the market.
