Yeah I’ve been going through the “Scions are Moving and oh look another Titan” quests while also unlocking stuff and doing the Golden Saucer stuff. Having a great time. I sadly can’t seem to unlock my next Monk ability until I get to Heavensward, so I gotta keep trundling forward I suppose.
Seriously! I think “Just hang on for the good part” is used way too often in MMOs but it really really really is the case here, haha. That quest slog is the unfortunate legacy of their disastrous launch where they had to spend years retooling a live game. I appreciate they trickled out story content during that time, but hoo boy is it work to get through for all of us coming later. :)
So worth it, though.
Holy shit this is awesome. Was running Syrcus Tower for my first time. Last boss, a bunch of people told the tank who was rushing through to wait until the sprouts finish the cutscene.
He didn’t.
The rest of the raid just gave him shit through the entire fight about what a horrible person he is.
Talk about a difference from WoW.
The only part of the patch stuff I minded was the two side questlines for the 3 hard trials and the raid. Mostly because I was using a MSQ list to track my progress that didn’t specify I needed to to them.
Wait what? Is there stuff you need to do to progress the MSQ that the tracker thingy doesn’t tell you about?
Yeah.
A Recurring Problem Milfilia gives for the quest line to do 3 hard mode trials
The Crystal Tower series that requires 3 raids.
Uggghhhhh
It’s really a one-off problem.
The later MSQ is heavily dependent on lore from those raids, so they brought them into the post-ARR MSQ requirements. Unfortunately, they didn’t revise the MSQ tracker to include them. Understandably annoying, but not something you’ll have to worry about again. (To my dismay, as I’d really like to see a continuation of the characters from some of the newer raids sequences…)
Everything I’ve been reading seems to indicate that it’s not possible to complete the main quests without doing a bunch of dungeons and raids with strangers, which I have no interest in doing. Based on that, my interest in playing the game has been waning considerably.
If playing with anyone ever is a dealbreaker than ff14 isn’t going to work for you. But as far as pugs go, like many others have said, it’s pretty much cream of the crop in terms of good and helpful players. And I learn something new frequently during my minimal pug dungeons.
I’m usually not keen on playing with randos either but in this case everyone has been so nice and focused on fun that it’s been a great experience.
I’ve had a similar experience. Out of the two dozen+ instances I ran, I only had one bad experience which as you know is not the norm in most MMOs. Most people are friendly and helpful. Also it is FFXI etiquette to let players watch their cutscenes! Amazing =) Finally, I would add that with the recent bump in players I only ever had to wait at most like 5 minutes for a queue. You have to do 3 24 man raids as well later in life, and those I only had to wait on like 2 minutes each, funny enough. I thought the raids were not down-tuned as badly as LFR raids, and players were very helpful in explainig what we had to do.
That all being said, if you are dead set against playing with other people then yeah, prolly not your jam.
There are loads of mandatory dungeons and raids, they are mostly pretty easy and friction-free in Duty Finder runs. If you don’t want to play with other people ever, then yeah, you’re not going to want to play FFXIV. I’d suggest ESO, you can play that for hundreds of hours of solo questing and never interact with another human being if you don’t want. I mostly haven’t.
Also, on a separate note, I was irritated that the game never tells you you’re going to need to do those hard-mode Primal trials (or even how to unlock them) or the Crystal Tower stuff…but the Crystal Tower raids + associated storyline are awesome and I’d have recommended doing them anyway.
Also, pro tip that I wish I knew going into Heavensward: Doing all of those raids and dungeons will net you some tomestone thingies. And these are basically gear tokens that you can use to buy awesome sauce gear from in town vendors! You are able to buy ilvl 130 gear, and you come out of ARR with 110 gear, so there’s one I didn’t know until I got to level 54 =)
Tomestones of Poetics are useful for gear for the rest of the game. Whenever you reach level 50, 60, or 70 with a class, you get an enormous power bump by buying the Poetics gear. Removes the fun of gearing up yourself, but makes things much easier.
I don’t mind playing with people. Until recently I did mythic WoW dungeons with my guild every week. I like playing with my friends but I don’t like PUGs. Way too many bad experiences and general overall stress.
I don’t even mind having to suffer through a few PUGs but two dozen+ sounds like an awful lot just to get through the story.
I played ESO to death and eventually just got sick of it. I’ve played just about every MMO there is until I got sick of it. I don’t know, maybe I’m just sick of traditional MMOs by now.
The FF14 community is eons ahead of the WoW community. There will always be a few bad apples but even when I was actively playing, people were very good about explaining anything you wanted to ask.
I even found a FC from a mandatory dungeon run. They’re gone now but that was 2016. :)
But yeah, you have to do a lot of 5-mans and a handful of raids to get through the story. They were pretty fun, really. If you know not to stand in bad you’ve already got 90% of the dungeons beaten.
I’m not here to talk you into anything, I mean, I quit five years ago, but mostly because everyone I played with vanished and it was kind of weird to log into no chatter. And then I promptly forgot my login and then traded away my phone with my authenticator on it. Good times.
I finished all of AAR. Holy shit, that was an ending.
I assume it’s worth it to do the side quest for repeating AAR raids?
I’ve never had any problems PUGging in FFXIV. Absolute worst case scenario was just having to wait like ten minutes to do one as DPS, and it’s not usually that long at the moment. One of the Crystal Tower raids popped in about 40 seconds.
Well, okay, and a couple of the late-late ARR dungeons are super story cutscene heavy and the PUG didn’t wait for me to watch the cutscenes so I didn’t really see any of the boss fights for the most part, just the cutscenes. but I don’t think they even let people skip those cutscenes anymore. And even then, I was there for the story and not the fights so. :shrug:
You’ll have incentives to rerun them for relic weapons later in the game. The Alliance Raid roulette is also a great daily source of XP and Poetics, so chances are you’ll be back anyway.