Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Been playing this again in preparation of Dawntrail, mostly doing the event stuff(that Fall Guys event was so much grinding ugh) and cleaning up things I hadn't done before, lots of random ass content I don't think I'm gonna end up using(Eureka Orthos seems kinda fucking useless the way it's designed for example but will probably work on solo 1-100 at some point) and those new Criterion shit are kinda ok but also pretty pointless(good way to make money if you run savage versions though, at least based on the amount of money I had to spend to buy the orchestrion rolls).

There seems to be way more advertisement for clubs/RP shit than last time I played though. My blacklist grows everyday, I remember it used to be a thing but nowadays it seems there's a lot more than before.

Since there was MGP bonus I ended up doing all the Triple Triad stuff, now only need the E12 card to get the ugly card mount but that shit isn't dropping.

Also today was the last day of the media tour, unclear if we're going to get some info soon or in 2 weeks, want to see the indepth videos to pick my class, for now been spending tomes on casting gear for picto but could change my mind still.

bolok said:

Patch note dump is the Friday before launch iirc.

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Na not the patch notes, the media tour info.

They do a media tour where they go around the world and basically provide a demo to various news outlets every expansion. Then the outlets write previews and stuff about the game. They also invite youtubers and other content creators, who in turn tend to make more detailed videos about what they've played(most of them will spend some time just screenshotting every skill to see potency/cd changes and so on, plus obviously new classes) and release videos on all classes, which gives you an outline of what the changes are. Later the patch notes are released and there are some differences since the build they show during the media tour is usually a bit old and still in balance phase but a good 80-90% of it is accurate(rest usually is potency/cooldown small changes so it fits better in 2mins windows and such).

For the media tour I'm only interested in class changes pretty much, but yeah they're super limited on content they don't actually play the story or anything, just a random dungeon without context and then can run around a zone with some dummies so they can test rotations. While I don't care much for the guy, Mr Happy coverage of the media tour is usually very complete showing every class being played in their own videos while he explains the changes and show screenshots of the abilities so it's great to see all you need to know. Also you get to see the new classes properly and all their skills, at that point people will also start theorycrafting the basic rotations and you can setup macros to do your bars automatically which I like.

As for the length of the expansion I don't really expect much change but honestly don't know how long all the expansions are to begin with. There's clearly going to be several arcs(discovery/exploration, hunt for the big snake bird, tournament stuff against the other team, then likely gold city shit and the big bad stuff mixed in) but they can easily fill that up with stuff to do so I'm not worried it'll be too short personally.

Also very sad news indeed, the character creation rework is delayed...by 3days. I like that they bother explaining why it's a whole three days late like people are going to be crazy about it. Also lots of changes compared to benchmark version which for the most part seems to make the chars look better.
A Final Follow-up Regarding the Dawntrail Official Benchmark | FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone

I do use my controller on PC but mostly for gathering and other stupid shit like alt tabbed fishing and island sanctuary grinding. There are a good amount of ressources about gamepad layouts though, some class specific and some generic so usually you can get your setup done pretty easily but the first step is looking up how the class plays and what skills are used a lot and what aren't to put them on the right keys, works the same for keyboard.

For crafting/gathering they removed a bunch of buttons so it's much easier imo, also for crafting in general you won't be using direct keys all that much, I find 90% of the crafting I do is on Teamcraft, then I plug in the macro ingame and just hit the button. Only time I do manual crafting is when I'm doing simple NQ crafts like orchestrion rolls or when doing beast tribes(which are also 1-2 buttons), rest it's all macros. Gathering I do press the buttons so you'd want a setup for that, can split it into 2 for normal gathering and collectables(fishing can also be split into 2 for normal fishing and spear fishing).

Rangoth said:

I just check on teamcraft but am a bit confused….provide a few bullet summary?

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Well teamcraft is just a simulator of the ingame crafting(also a lot of other tools for a bunch of stuff but the core part is that). The idea is you just tweak stuff around to find a macro that works with your stats for the item you're trying to craft, then you copy paste the macro ingame and just hit the macro buttons to craft your stuff. It's a lot more efficient than doing trial synthesis and doing random stuff and see if it works or not, especially since teamcraft lets you simulate buffs too for example so you can figure if using a different syrup or food might let you craft that thing, or if adding 1 HQ or 2 HQ is enough to 100% the craft and such.

One other thing is it lets you share macros and you can also find macros there, as well as the community guides for DoH/DoL which contain basic macros for leveling and for endgame and such(and are a great base to understand macro structure and adapt them to your own needs if you don't have the gear they require).

You can still do manual crafting to make use of the procs, and in fact for Expert recipes you kinda have to unless you're overgeared for them but for normal crafts the goal is to find a macro that will 100% with the least amount of steps(so it takes less time) and use that cause you can just hit it then alt tab or whatever instead of having to stay there repeating the same thing over and over. The efficiency loss from RNG procs is worth the time imo.

Teamcraft also has a ton of other tools as I mentionned, you can make lists for example which lets you put all the gear you wanna craft(like say a full set of combat gear or gathering gear and such), and it'll tell you where to get all the mats and how many you need and what crafts are needed to make the items and such. This is also a feature that's kinda in the game but way shittier.

For gathering it also lets you set alarms for temporary nodes(also a feature in the game but you don't have to copy paste the timers from a website to make the alarms) and the fishing portion is very useful for bite time/bait info and such(it's crowdsourced and some of it can be deceptive due to the nature of how fishing works but it's still really useful and replaces the ad-ridden Cat ate the fish website).

Overall Teamcraft is basically THE website for DoH/DoL stuff.