Sorry, Yoshi-P, but I ain’t doing that. This game is the only game I’ll face a 2 hour queue for. ;)
My daughter and I played off the same account for a time, but it was always really ‘her’ account - I did it just to check out the game. I played a little ways in, but didn’t even get as far as Heavensward (hit 34 or so, if I recall). The hype around Endwalker (and her desire to play with me rather than just talk about it) is causing my resistance to jump back into an MMO to crumble.
Alas, game isn’t for sale currently and free trial members can’t queue. Phew, bullet dodged. But I’ll go sign up on MogStation anyway. Hmm… Bitwarden already has credentials saved!? I have no memory of this place…
I’ll just go over to services and … Whaaa? I ALREADY OWN THE STARTER GAME (ARR/Heavensward). Never logged in, never even touched it. I don’t even know when/why I got it (twitch/humble/something giveaway?). Pretty sure that 30days free sub bit expired long long ago, but whatever.
And that, my friends, is how the Grinch stole saved confused Christmas.
I wrapped Endwalker this week. My non-spoiler thoughts, likely on FFXIV as a hole:
- What is refreshing is all of the expansions tied together into one, long, cohesive story. Unlike WoW, where each expansion is like an over-active squirrel on caffeine losing their focus each expansion.
- I felt an emotional investment in my WoL, and the other NPCs. One thing I like is you can tell the WoL and the Scions have paid a price for their success.
- The roughly middle act, Epsis, was really amazing.
- You can do almost all the duties with Trusts. I think there are two trials you can’t do in a Trust, but the middle trial you can trust.
- For the first time since I started playing, I don’t have expansion content I have to do to progress. I am enjoying not being on the MSQ treadmill.
- The community never ceases to amaze me. I have not once encountered a bad pug. My social anxiety for running group content is gone. I haven’t tried the higher-end stuff, where it matters more how well you do. But on the normal levels no one really gives a crap if you die.
Right now, I only have Endwalker on my Mac. It’s runs fine on my Air. I have the base game on my PC, but I am thinking of getting the PS4 version when sales commence. I don’t have even the base version on PS4. Some of this is thinking that eventually the Mac won’t be viable, but I’d also like to play on the couch.
I agree with this. After a big stint in WoW as a healer, I eventually drifted to pretty much DPS-only because the risk of failure became just too high outside of guild/friend groups. I’m actually for the first time considering starting up a tank because I won’t immediately be run out of the game. Well, maybe.
Yeah, my friend when he was new to the game played a tank and it was really cool to see just how nice everyone was to him when he didn’t know where to go, didn’t know a boss mechanic, or just wasn’t great at tank mechanics yet. After he made a mistake that led to a wipe it was met with “No worries, that’s how you learn!”.
Meanwhile, I still remember running a dungeon with a different friend in the Cataclysm expansion for WoW. My friend was a healer and while his gear was overall pretty good, his gloves were still green/crappy. Of course, one of the reasons for running this dungeon was he could get gloves. Anyway, we got a group via the dungeon finder and the tank spent 45 minutes berating him for his shit gear, how he’d never be able to heal the dungeon, etc. 45 minutes! My friend and I are stubborn so we decided we weren’t going to get the debuff for abandoning a group, we’d make the asshole leave.
After spending nearly an hour abusing my friend, the tank finally gave up on trying to bully us out of the group and proceeded to over-pull everything he could to try to demonstrate how my friend just wasn’t up to the task. We ended up making it through the entire dungeon with no wipes and only one death despite the guy just being an asshole and trying to cause problems. At the end of the dungeon I was wondering how the guy would react. Would he leave quietly? Maybe a short apology and “you were right, you did fine”? Nope. Ended with “You #&$ing piece of trash, my health got way too low on that boss fight. #$& you for joining the queue, you #&*ing suck” and then left.
Really is just shockingly night and day between the communities. After my various stints with WoW and other games, I swore off PUGs entirely. I cautiously dipped my toe in the water when I first started playing FFXIV because it was required to progress the main quest and I was pleasantly surprised when my flesh wasn’t immediately devoured by a swarm of angry piranhas.
The live letter was yesterday. It is refreshing to hear “this is our roadmap for the next two years” instead of the whack a mole that is WoW.
The big thing is 6.1 (due in April) will have AAR duties trust-enabled. The raids (Prae, etc.) will be revamped as 4-person. This means it is possible for someone to get all the way through AAR solo.
I haven’t actually finished Endwalker, so I didn’t watch the Live Letter for fear of spoilers… Was there any indication how they’re enabling trusts for lower level dungeons storywise? I guess I mean, will it just be random NPCs, your Grand Company squadron, or Scions?
As for why I’m not done, I paused for a month to let the launch crowds die down. (They have!) Now I’ve been distracted by leveling WHM to make queue times faster for a friend who decided he needed a magic DPS (SMN) for the role quests this time.
I have to say, holy cow is WHM easier than SCH in the 50-70 range. It’s dismayingly regular for my SCH to just run out of healing capacity on big pulls and not do much more than watch the tank die as Adlo fails to be enough. WHM has so much more raw healing available that even when I’m out of OGC heals I can pull through with Cure 2. The stuns from Holy are also tremendously OP from a damage mitigation standpoint. SCH really doesn’t have anything to compare to that.
It’s also possible that I’ve just been a crappy SCH for years and haven’t fully been utilizing the kit. Playing at 80+ recently, I’ve been able to pull through situations that I wouldn’t have expected to although it takes basically everything in the kit to do so.
SCH is pretty rough at lower levels as you don’t have a lot of your oGCDs as you’ve noted - and WHM being the iconic pure healer is very good at heals all the way through. At endgame it’s very strong though (as in, shields that are more than a player’s health bar with buff stacking). Starting with the upper-50s you can take advantage of Emergency Tactics to convert your shields into raw healing every 15 seconds and Dissipation for some more stacks and extra potency. You can also throw an Adlo on yourself or someone who isn’t getting hit for a quick backup shield that can be shared via Deployment Tactics.
For big pulls I’ll throw an Excog and Recitation-buffed Adlo prepull, then drop Sacred Soil, Fey Illuminaton, and Whispering Dawn once the tank has reached the end of the pull. As you get closer to 90 start working in the new skills you get as needed - though this is generally overkill for a dungeon pull.
It’s also possible the tank is undergeared and not using their mitigations. Not much you can do about that if they insist on pulling wall to wall. The Vault, Bardam’s Mettle and Doma Castle tend to be the worst for this in my experience.
I’ve been a SCH main since ARR and it’s always been rough to heal if you get “behind” - extra frustrating when it’s because of someone failing mechanics/gathering vuln stacks.
I mained SCH for Stormblood, but I was never very good. Recitation and Fey Illumination are two that I rarely use. I’m not sure I even know what Fey Illumination does besides buff healing a bit…
Undergeared tanks are hard, but I almost think bad DPS are worse. As you say, there is a lot of prepull setup I can do to make the first part easier. After a bit, though, I’m out of Aetherstacks and it gets rough. If the DPS are on the ball, the fight ends before I’ve depleted everything. If not…
I both like and dislike this change. Being able to do ARR solo is great. Missing out on how to learn to work in a (real) party is not so great.
Great to see some of the graphical changes coming in 7.0. They are subtle, but effective.
EDIT: Don’t sleep and type, kids.
I have found running the trusts really forces you to pay attention to mechanics. You die during a boss fight the fight resets. You don’t get raised. You can’t cheese it or eat a mechanic.
And as plenty of others have pointed out, trusts didn’t have any dire impact on dungeon content/participation in whatever expansion introduced it, so really this is an “all good” change. I need to get past ARR/HW to actually give it a try - I went down my usual altoholic spiral so my MSQ is a touch behind.
It’s weird, I’ve been on a burnout break from FFXIV, but in playing Lost Ark, it made me miss FFXIV for some reason, so now I’ve just resubbed. :)
They are such wildly different games, despite both being “MMOs”. I find them a great counter-balance to each other (though that is easy to say because I’m not at the daily grind point in LA yet). I do get a little annoyed when I can’t hit ‘g’ to accept/complete/do-everything in FF though.
Yeah I know they’re different but for some reason they both scratch a similar itch in my brain.
I just started playing FF14 because Lost Ark made me want to try ianother MMO too.
The last time I tried FF14 I had a hard time getting around my starting city that was on huge cyclic staircase as I recall. Combined that with my grabbing way to many sidequests made my brain explode.
This time I started in Gridinia which is a lovely flat. And I am only doing the MSQ and Blue quests. So much better.
I have to say that I keep trying to hit the G key too. Lost Ark has ingrained that in me.
I am thinking of trying the controller as my wrist is a bit sore from LA. I am not a console player and only ever use a controller in jrpgs. Not sure if I can make the switch but worth the attempt if it will ease up my wrist a bit. Though the Controller guides are a bit mind numbing (but so are the UI guides too). I thought LA was hard remembering all the currencies etc. FF14 seems to have a wee bit complexity too.
Ha, everytime I’ve gottten back into this I start in Gridina or Ul’dah. Never Limsa because even after playing for years off and on I still can’t find a damn thing in that place. Gridina is the easiest, but Uldah isn’t too bad either. It some different levels, but they are 100 times easier then the hell that is Limsa.
Last time I started up again, back when @BrianRubin was going full throttle in this, I switched to the controller. In very short time it was super easy and pretty intuitive. And much more comfortable.
Dammit, now I’m going to resub aren’t I?
I’m also mostly a PC player and not a console player, but the controller is awesome for FF14. It take take a minute or two to figure out how to lay out so many hotbar buttons on a gamepad, but just watch a video on it. Once you see it and it clicks, it’s awesome. Controller is my preferred way to play the game for sure.
Most of my friends play that race.
I tried this about 5-6 years ago with friends, had fun, but the MMO grind stopped being fun after about 6 months.