When you’re dead, there should be a… maroon? popup in the lower right with the option to return to the start or wait. That should get you back without typing /return
Haukke Manor, uniquely among dungeons as far as I remember, also makes use of the skill Return to get back to the start for the final boss. (You can climb back out, but returning is much faster.)
Pre level 50 dungeons are much more confusing than more recent dungeons. Halitali has that weird aetherflow teleport that you have to take but isn’t obvious, Dazmael Darkhold requires you to be next to crystals to damage a boss, etc. Thankfully, they stopped doing things like that pretty quickly.
I see your confusion on chests. Boss chests should always drop gear. Other chests in dungeons may drop gear but sometimes drop things like potions or crafting supplies. Gear and some crafting loot will go to be Need/Greed/Passed on. Potions will just get dropped into a random player’s inventory, though. There is a message in the chat window about it, but it’s easily missed.
Yep, for me it was brown and right in the middle of my screen. I tried clicking the return button but nothing happened so I just had to wait. After about 10 minutes I left the party to get out.
And that’s how I learned about /return. The (much nicer) group I got after the above experience told me about it. That run went very smoothly.
Thanks for the explanation. That clears a lot of it up.
On controller you have to hold down the confirmation as the button fills with yellow to prevent accidental release/returns on death. It’s probably the same with KBM so a simple click would do nothing.
As mentioned Haukke Manor is unique in its (confusing) layout and is the only dungeon in the game that wants you to uses return after a boss. Glad you were able to find a better group the second time through.
Any bards here? Why can I only cast Windbite on some targets? I went through Toto-Rak last night and pretty much could not cast it at anything and some MSQ mini-boss fights on the overworld don’t seem to let me cast it either. Am, I missing some requirement or are some mobs immune to wind damage? When I can’t cast it the icon is slightly faded/dull, lke the target is invalid. No issue with range.
Level syncing can really screw over some classes imo.
Not that gating how you class actually works to level 50 is much different really.
Like I’m playing some Scholar and I figure I’ll hit up a primer on how Scholars work.
Said guide basically says to use class features I don’t even have. At level 48. Just use those, using anything but those things is playing poorly. Sorry we never gave you the tools to play your class correctly for 70 hours, better pick it up quick or something.
Like I use Cure from the second my class unlocked from Arcanist. Then the guide tells me that using Cure is stupid and you should basically never do it. Only, I literally had no other options until level 45 (except another spell that they say is even worse to use regularly).
Dragoon meanwhile has been “well now you have this new ability and you instantly see how it fits into what you were doing before”.
I’m starting to see why Healers get instant queues and even tanks have to wait 5 minutes.
Higher level skills are usually higher potency, as you’ve probably noticed. Due to how HP scaling works, you need that higher potency to fully heal people at high level. For example, Excog will heal >30% of a tank’s HP at level 80. That amount of healing would take several Physic or Adlo casts, so you’d be wasting casts using them unless things are really going sideways. Use that time for Broil instead! Likewise, you’d be really overhealing if Excog were available at low levels.
That’s not to say that I particularly like low level SCH. The class lost most of its DPS kit for 5.0 and feels much slower and more repetitive now.
I mean, I get the numbers at the end of the day, but when you’re trying to learn a class teaching you worthless crap is counterproductive.
“Here are your tools. Oh by the way, you wont actually use them because they’re all garbage.”
It’s like trying to teach a Formula 1 driver using a horse-drawn carriage. Sure the basics are similar, but when you get thrown into the F1 car and don’t even understand the concept of gears, it’s not gonna end well for anyone.
Meanwhile with Dragoon I’m basically in “here is skill X. Here is skill Y, it combos with X. Here is skill Z, it combos with skill Y. Here is Skill D, it combos with Skill X and gives a damage boost. Here are other skills that don’t care about XYZ and are oGCD.” It all makes sense. It’s slowly building to something internally consistent based on what came before it.
Scholar is “Here is skill X, it’s all you have. Here is skill Y, it’s like X but costs more, also some buff or something. Here is skill B, it uses a whole different resource from what you’ve been using. Also this resource we gave you at level 45 is the only thing that matters now, forget everything you’ve been doing this whole time and start from scratch. Only things are also harder now, so good luck with that.”
That’s just asinine.
Edit: It’s to where I might just go with Astrologian since if I have to start over completely anyway, I might as well start fresh instead of with all this baggage that I’ve gathered over 30+ hours of playing my class wrong because I had no other options.
Edit2: And it wouldn’t bother me so much, but for the fact that every other class I’ve played seemed to follow closer to the Dragoon system. It builds on what you have. You had this, now you also have this. Maybe Dragoon goes sideways at 50 and suddenly my combos go away, but from what little I saw it was more adding extra stuff to what I was already doing.
I think all of this highlights a general bad reaction (in my case) to how the MSQ works. If they did not force dungeons on you as part of the MSQ, these issues wouldn’t be as bad. In WoW I can level completely to the highest point without ever touching a dungeon OR I can completely level with dungeons up to a point (or if I buy gear or craft it on an alt, I can completely level in dungeons).
My black Mage is currently level 38 and I’ve put in quite a few hours so far. Enough to form an initial opinion, anyway. My initial opinion is that that game certainly is not bad by any means and there are many nice things about it mechanically. Overall, however, I’m finding it generally bland and unexciting.
The MSQ are all pretty much the same few types of quests repackaged over and over (and over). None of them allow you to have enough experience with combat to really hone in your skills. Instead, the rare combat quest typically requires you to kill 1 to 5 of some sort of mob and that’s about it.
There are some MMOs I’ve played where it was really hard to tear myself away from the game. WoW, LOTRO, ESO, EVE, Mythos, Neverwinter, Secret World, Warhammer Online are ones I played obsessively, especially initially. FF14 has not been like that for me. I have a hard time playing it for more than a few hours at a time. I just get very tired of the repetitive nature of the quests. Plus, the new skills I’m getting are not very exciting and not really part of my normal rotation. There’s no great piece of gear to be had that might randomly drop from some mob as in some other MMOs. So, nothing much really to look forward to as a goal or get excited about.
Black Mage is okay but I know I’m switching jobs at 50 and I just need to get there so it’s hard to stay invested in it. A near endless number of MSQ quests stretch ahead of me to get there and the story that’s being told is pretty cliché so far and not really grabbing my attention much.
The dungeons have all been extremely forgettable and a general PITA to be forced to do. I agree with @Chris_Johnson that they should not be forced on you as part of the MSQ. Or at least a far fewer number of them should be.
I’ve read that that the good parts of this MMO show up after level 50 when you get to the expansions. I’m not sure if I’ll make it that far or not. I have about 2 weeks left on my initial 30 day sub. I’ll see how I feel when that’s up. So far I don’t feel like the game is worth $15 a month but that could (hopefully) change.
SCH has changed a lot over the years and some of your frustrations are a result of that. I’m hoping that it will get reworked in 6.0 due to the new focus of SCH and AST on shield healing, but I haven’t actually heard much of what’s changing.
I play SCH with as much DPSing as I can (although that got much less interesting to do in 5.0), so I guess I’ve never thought about how much healing changes as you level. I’ve always viewed it more as “cool, more time for Broils” and less “that skill is worthless now”. For what it’s worth, I find I rotate between Excog and Adlo prepull, as Excog is often still on cooldown if the tank is pulling small.
A couple of other uninteresting points:
I mained SCH for the whole Stormblood expansion cycle, but went back to DRG for Shadowbringers. I don’t like what they did to SCH DPS skills this time.
With the caveat that I’m BAD at this game, I don’t know that I would pay too much attention to endgame healer guides. Unlike DPS guides, they assume a competence in parties that mostly isn’t there. In theory, or with tons of practice in a static raid group, you can proactively shield damage. In practice, I don’t know the fights enough and everyone else seems to be trying to stand in the bad. My point is, I’ve been reduced to casting Physic at endgame because I’m out of Aetherstacks, low on MP, and Lucid Dreaming is on cooldown more than I like to admit. (Also, Physic casts faster than Adlo, so there are SHTF situations where you need it…)
My brother has all three healers at 80 and basically refuses to play SCH. One man’s opinion and all, but he likes the others better.
I hear you. They really do a disservice to the game by making it take so long to ramp up, narratively and especially mechanically. I don’t play Black Mage, but I really loved seeing how they kept layering mechanics on Summoner as I progressed past 50.
I felt like at L50 I finally had my basic kit, but then more and more things kept getting layered on top. It didn’t deprecate my kit, just kept expanding on it and there was added context to my abilities, all building up to dropping Bahamut and Phoenix at a critical moment. Very very satisfying, but there was barely a hint of any of that in the earlier levels!
To this day I honestly don’t know how I got through the MSQ. I think the only thing that made it possible was I had a chunk of vacation time I needed to use by the end of the year and the winter weather was crappy, so I was stuck indoors anyway. My friend just ended up buying the story skip in the shop so he could get to the current expansion and avoid the MSQ grind.
One of the more frustrating parts of the MSQ is needless running around.
Quest Giver: now that this threat is over, go talk to Bob in this city.
Me: Go, talk to Bob.
Quest Giver calls me on the cell phone thing: OMG EMERGENCY! Come back to where I am STAT.
Me: goes back
Quest Giver: Good, now the you are here, we need you to go to Gridania.
Me: You had me on the phone. Couldn’t you just say “yo, go to Gridania.”
They ARR stuff was incredibly bad with that. I’m sure they trimmed that down but I bet it’s still bad now. I get that they were just buying time, but the blatant wasting of my time was grinding my gears in a major way. :)
The one other thing that got me through that early MSQ slog: the fact that I only ever do it ONCE. On a game like WoW, every single character I make has to replay the same quest grind. That made it way more tolerable for me.
I’m actually enjoying the MSQ in bits and pieces. I basically do a quest or two for it, then go off and find shit to unlock for a while, like Beastman quests and shit. Then I go back to the MSQ and do that shit for a bit. It’s a nice mix.
That’s the way to do it. Sucks when the part you’re interested in (like if you’re bored with your class mechanics but know it gets better later) is gated behind it, though, which sounds like a situation @Coldsteel might be in.
The narrative in games is never the draw for me. I don’t play games that are heavy on the story focus and what story is there I typically skip through as quickly as I can. That said, by the time I hit Heavensward and beyond, I was actually enjoying it quite a bit. Which really is something, coming from someone like me. I really enjoyed Shadowbringers and am looking forward to the expansion this year.
Yeah, apparently I can’t unlock the next Monk skill until I get to Heavensward, but I’m not too upset about it, I’ve got plenty of toys for the world right now.
