Thanks folks. As much as I want to open those 3 classes, I’ll probably just keep on til my sub ends and then decide. Usually I sort of peter out after a couple of months, but the renewed interest in this thread from @BrianRubin and everyone else helps keep me interested. FOMO is real.
I’ve been doing a little research and a whole lot of WoW players have left it to play FF14 and have very good things to say about it. Definitely going to try this out. Now to just find a sale somewhere.
FFXIV has its hooks in me in a way that the early days of WoW did. The game is far from perfect, and really likes sending you across the world to talk to someone and then come back. Thankfully, moving about the world is very easy. You can port to all the different zones.
Legion was my favorite expansion because I loved doing all the class hall stuff. That experience is ramped up in XIV. You can swap jobs, and there is bonus to leveling up your alt job. You don’t need to do all the main story parts over with the new job. In my case, I waffled between bard and mage, but I could just keep leveling them without loosing my overall progress through the story.
And, everyone is super friendly. New tanks get some helpful advice from other players other than “git gud.” In XIV, I was admonished FOR skipping a cut scene with a general comment that “the story is good. You should pay attention to it.”
I just find it funny that it took so long for most of us to “discover” a game that has been around for years. Though so many of us were probably already heavily invested in WoW that the only options were going for a f2p MMO if we needed a break - I know that was true for me, cause heck if I was going to pay for multiple subs, or try to balance “a few months here, a few months there”.
Well I’ve never really played a FF game before so I was like whatever, then I read that Twitter thread I linked and was immediately intrigued because I really like the dev who was gushing about it.
For me, there were a few factors:
- On the WoW forums “FFXIV rules” was such a common thread, I had a hard time believing it.
- My relationship with WoW had declined since Legion, BfA was barely tolerable, and Shadowlands fell completely flat on me. I then decided maybe it was just MMOs and the time sink colliding with some hobbies and I just didn’t have the time for an MMO.
- For reasons I don’t fully know, this thread, some of Belluar’s FFXIV videos, and Zepla’s videos all collided in my timeline. Most of these were decent “Ok, if you like alts and outfit farming, well, hell FFXIV is the game for you!” threads.
- Even then, going through the trial it was bouncing off me a little. This is entirely just learning a new MMO and by the time I had started shaking off WoW habits (travel being different, etc.) the game started to stick.
- What sold me was the first forced duty I did, the tank was new and the vet who was just doing a roulette took the time to explain the stances etc.
As I’m sure you’ve heard, if it feels slow at the start that’s not unexpected. The game does take a bit to get going but the payoff is there.
Me too. I loved Legion and the class hall stuff. It was my favorite too. If XIV is like that, then I’ll very likely love it. Good to hear people are friendly. The people in WoW Classic were amazing when I played it. But regular WoW? Not so much.
Slow is not a problem for me. Black Desert was so insanely fast at the start that I actually wished it was a lot slower.
I think the slow start is great. It’s a great story so you should take the time to enjoy it. Plus the side quests are so well-written it’s nutty.
Yeah. One character being able to be all jobs is amazing. My character is working on like 3 classes while progressing on the main story.
Actually, funny enough, I have a level 50 bard that I played with some friends back in 2014 and I even did a bit of raiding with, but as with all games, my interest eventually waned and I went on to other stuff. I created a new account to try the free version so I could remember how the game played. Now I need to decide whether I want to go back to my original account or not.
If my WoW guild was still raiding, I wouldn’t be playing FFXIV (or looking at any other game). Right now, I don’t even have WoW installed on my PC. I am playing FFXIV and probably will start playing ESO as well. Will definitely take a look at New World in the beta, but if tomorrow my WoW guild says let’s raid some more, I’d probably get back on the treadmill.
Maybe I just need to find a similar group of a mature guildies in a different game. I am old enough now that I don’t really want to play with kiddies and while I am probably the oldest person in my guild, everyone has real jobs and are older with responsibilities.
This is me in every one of these games. I really struggle with finding a guild that matches what I’m looking for. I’m a serious gamer in the sense that I want to do the game content, want to try to beat hard content, but at the same time this is just entertainment to me. If I go a week or two and don’t even feel like logging in let alone raid, I won’t.
I feel like I’m always looking for the goldilocks guild that isn’t just casual/social but also doesn’t treat the game like a second (or first, for that matter) job. I have enough scheduling in my life, I don’t need to have my leisure time scheduled out for me by a bunch of catasses in their basement. :)
Two small details of the game that give me outsized enjoyment:
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You can talk to named characters who aren’t questgivers and their dialog changes based on what quest and quest step you’re on. E.g. if Yda, Papalymo, and Thancred are standing at a quest location, the two who don’t advance the quest will still have unique dialog. None of it’s necessary to complete the quest, but I love the added characterization that you get from the hundreds and hundreds of extra interactions.
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The names of quests and FATES in the English version are often puns or clever references. (I don’t know that the other languages have the same approach to naming.) E.g. my two newish free company members just did “Ifrit bleeds, we can kill it” and “In for Gaurda awakening” last night. Puns may be the lowest form of wit, but I really enjoy these.
The quest name puns are an absolute delight.
Does anyone on the PC version play using a controller? I finally grabbed a Xbox controller and adapter because next to the Switch Pro, the Xbox controller has always felt the best to me. And my knockoff controller while ok, drops signal and just isn’t as comfortable. It just seems like there are too many buttons in the HUD to map them all to a single controller.
I play with a… 360? controller on the PC. I find it way more comfortable than using numbers for my skills. Targeting can get a bit tricky in big raids or large pulls, but overall I find it much easier.
On my controller, I pull the L or R trigger to select the left or right portion of the hotbar and then use an arrow or letter button to use the skill. That gives me 16 skills on one hotbar. For the rest, I use the cross-hotbars. There are two flavors, although I never remember the names. One is a double-pull on the L or R trigger. The other is to pull and hold L then pull R or vice versa. In total, I can get to 48 skills through the controller without having to manually select another hotbar (which is pretty easy too, just unnecessary).
You may have found it already, but you can set hotbars to be unique to a job or common to all. You can also set it to autoswitch bars when you draw or sheathe your weapon. For example, for me, Hotbar 1 is my common out of combat bar with things like Mount Roulette, Teleport, and the Emote menu on it. Hotbars 2 and 3 are unique to each job. #2 comes up automatically when I enter combat and has my most used combat skills on it. #3 is things like tank mitigations, limit break, and AOE skills that I use less often, accessed through the cross-hotbar. Hotbar 4 is common for all jobs again and has things like Sprint, teleport, and mount that I sometimes need in combat, accessed through the other type of cross-hotbar.
One other thing that I picked up from someone more clever than me, is to configure two hotbars vertically and hidden to the left and right of your main controller hotbar and put the cross-hotbar skills with cooldowns on them too. That way you have a quick indication when things come off cooldown. For example, I have the Warrior skill Rampage on the right side of my #3 bar, because it has a 90-sec cooldown. I also have it on the hidden vertical bar to the right of my main hotbar so I can see the cooldown tick down without checking bar #3. I can’t access it on that hidden bar without using a mouse, but I don’t need to.
I use the controller and I knew none of that. Thank you!
Oh man! This feels so good. Much easier than a keyboard I think, once I get the hang of it anyway. Rather than try to jump in with my main and learn all the controller commands for a character with a ton of skills and whatnot, I created a new character to sort of relearn the game using a controller. Don’t think I’ll play this character forever but it feels easier to relearn this way with all the tooltips and tutorials aimed at the controller.
You’re welcome!
FFXIV is surprisingly configurable, but it does NOT do a good job making that apparent to players. Most of the features like the cross hotbars have accreted over the years and Square hasn’t revamped the early level experience to point them out to you. I don’t really know how they’d do so, but there must be a way. I had the advantage of reading about them in the patch notes as they were introduced.