Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Fucker said:

On those raids, do mirrored balls drop out of the ceiling and everyone gets transformed into John Travolta while a Bee Gees song plays?

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........... sometimes.

The Math Boss in the Ivalice raids weeds out people who can't do simple addition and subtraction, or know what a prime number is lol

I don't blame the haters, really. I've seen their type hundreds of times in FFXIV over the years.

I can't figure out the point of it all, but every now and then it's like some bored rabid WoW-fanboi comes along, and after hearing about how superior FFXIV is to their precious WoW, they begrudgingly try it out. They always inevitably rip it apart, piece by piece - ignore every good aspect of the game and completely focus on the very few downsides, and then blow the downsides out of proportion to make it seem like completely game-breaking unable-to-handle-with bullshit. Any type of discussion to maybe talk them down or convince them to keep going is usually moot, as their intent was never to actually play and enjoy this game in the first place.

It's nothing more than some sort of weird angsty attempt at getting "back" at the game that beat up their dying Warcraft. You know how if your child wants pizza, and you decline to give it to them, they throw a little tantrum and literally EVERY other food you try to give them is given a response of "NO THAT GROSS I WANT PIZZAAAAAAAAAAAAAA". It's this kind of mentality.

We've had a few pop up in this thread alone over the years, and they'll always be around. Let them cry - their type doesn't deserve this game anyway. I'm not trying to say FFXIV never did anything wrong, but honestly once you learn to properly appreciate all that they've done RIGHT in comparison, the wrong things tend to blend in and not make that much of a difference.

I think their change in the msq pacing is quickly turning from a good thing to a bad one. pacing that may have been fine if you had to do other stuff between them now is just constant in your face stuff you pretty much have to do to progress. I do like some of the stuff like the crystal towers but the amount of time of actually doing anything to cinematic is really off.

The MSQ pacing was them trimming out a lot of the "go here, talk to dude, pray return to the waking sands, talk, go here, repeat" crap that made the post-Ultima->Heavensward MSQ grind even more of a chore. I don't see how removing that is "bad".

I've always used the analogy that FFXIV is like ST:TNG or DS9: The first season is dogshit, but you still need to watch it to really enjoy the rest of it because it establishes a lot of core characters and themes that will crop up for the rest of the life of the show, which really rewards a loyal viewer. The first seasons of those shows also had to pay a lot of homage to the previous shows (much like ARR still had to pay homage to FFXIV 1.0 and those storylines which they continued), which in some ways hamstrung their own identity.

Like take TNG: Encounter at Farpoint was poop, but would the finale of TNG had the same impact to a viewer who never watched that?

End of the day, people will like what they like.

Also, to Fucker, one thing that FFXIV does pretty well is over the course of the game, they teach the player the boss fight tell language. This symbol means stack, this symbol means AOE, etc. It creates a system where the player over time learns core game mechanics, then once they have mastered that, they throw new stuff at you. You can crap on many parts of FFXIV, but boss fights are hardly one of them. I'll take a FFXIV boss fight over most of the WoW stuff any day.

Cybsled said:

Also, to Fucker, one thing that FFXIV does pretty well is over the course of the game, they teach the player the boss fight tell language. This symbol means stack, this symbol means AOE, etc. It creates a system where the player over time learns core game mechanics, then once they have mastered that, they throw new stuff at you. You can crap on many parts of FFXIV, but boss fights are hardly one of them. I'll take a FFXIV boss fight over most of the WoW stuff any day.

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Boss fights are absolutely a feature of this game that is worth taking a massive shit on. Playing dance dance revolution and hopscotch is preposterous. I thought the boss fights in WoW were dogshit, but FFXIV takes all the bad parts of WoW's fights and amplifies them 1000000000x.

Cybsled said:

The MSQ pacing was them trimming out a lot of the "go here, talk to dude, pray return to the waking sands, talk, go here, repeat" crap that made the post-Ultima->Heavensward MSQ grind even more of a chore. I don't see how removing that is "bad".

I've always used the analogy that FFXIV is like ST:TNG or DS9: The first season is dogshit, but you still need to watch it to really enjoy the rest of it because it establishes a lot of core characters and themes that will crop up for the rest of the life of the show, which really rewards a loyal viewer. The first seasons of those shows also had to pay a lot of homage to the previous shows (much like ARR still had to pay homage to FFXIV 1.0 and those storylines which they continued), which in some ways hamstrung their own identity.

Like take TNG: Encounter at Farpoint was poop, but would the finale of TNG had the same impact to a viewer who never watched that?

End of the day, people will like what they like.

Also, to Fucker, one thing that FFXIV does pretty well is over the course of the game, they teach the player the boss fight tell language. This symbol means stack, this symbol means AOE, etc. It creates a system where the player over time learns core game mechanics, then once they have mastered that, they throw new stuff at you. You can crap on many parts of FFXIV, but boss fights are hardly one of them. I'll take a FFXIV boss fight over most of the WoW stuff any day.

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The msg between arr and the first expansion is still pretty much non stop go here talk to a dude they just made it so just doing msg keeps you above level for it so you basically are ONLY doing those go to npc quests. They could have trimmed another 10 to 20 of these without impacting the story.

kaid said:

The msg between arr and the first expansion is still pretty much non stop go here talk to a dude they just made it so just doing msg keeps you above level for it so you basically are ONLY doing those go to npc quests. They could have trimmed another 10 to 20 of these without impacting the story.

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I agree they could have. One thing that stood out when I watched a brand new player stream their first time playing ARR is that there were still a lot of "let's recap what we literally just discussed 5 minutes ago" that existed because of the original gaps in MSQ story patches. I'm honestly surprised why they didn't do more to trim those down, although I suspect in part they were hamstrung by having different VA in ARR. Unless they were willing to redub all those cutscenes, they were kind of limited on options. You'll notice most of the cut content wasn't voiced.

Cybsled said:

I agree they could have. One thing that stood out when I watched a brand new player stream their first time playing ARR is that there were still a lot of "let's recap what we literally just discussed 5 minutes ago" that existed because of the original gaps in MSQ story patches. I'm honestly surprised why they didn't do more to trim those down, although I suspect in part they were hamstrung by having different VA in ARR. Unless they were willing to redub all those cutscenes, they were kind of limited on options. You'll notice most of the cut content wasn't voiced.

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Gah yes the three let’s recap this spirit nonsense we just recapped. There were I think three of those.

I don’t think I will ever understand the random use of voice. In the same sequence it can shift between voiced and non voiced and back.

kaid said:

I don’t think I will ever understand the random use of voice. In the same sequence it can shift between voiced and non voiced and back.

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PlayStation limitations.

Doubt it's hardware limits. ESO is king of VO content -- chicks love being talked to.

Grizzlebeard said:

PlayStation limitations.

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That doesn’t seem like what is going on or they would have a segment all voiced or all not. The shifting back and forth in the same sequence is both jarring and weird.

Thank god. This took way longer than HoH (HoH was 40h, this was like 120h?) and really wrecked my brain near the end of it. Good way to spend the coronavirus content break though. Really recommend it if anyone is looking for challenging/interesting solo content (but do HoH first).

Damn, congrats!

It's basically a Rogue-Like dungeon crawl. You progress up the floors until you hit the top. It is mostly for leveling alts, but there are other rewards locked behind them.

The biggest thing is your progress is saved on a per-party basis, so it makes it nearly impossible to PUG (ie, if someone doesnt show up, you can't just fit another person into it). As such, lots of people try to use it as solo content. It is pretty challenging if you try to do it solo, so lots of people like to use it for pinnacle solo achievement content.

Koushirou said:

I still haven't even touched PotD or HoH at all. Is it pretty much just for leveling alts or is there other content to do with it? I'm not really sure how it works.

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Pyros's response is good, but for avoidance of doubt:

PotD is a 200 floor dungeon, HoH a 100 floor dungeon. You can take a break between every set of 10 floors but your save file persists. After clearing floor 50 (PotD) or 20 (HoH), you can start from that floor.

People spam 50-60 (PotD) and 20-30 (HoH) to level alts. This is very boring grind content but great exp. Trying to climb to the high floor sets is interesting / every 3~ or so floors things are changed up and get more challenging, and there's a boss at the end of each set of 10. This is very fun small group or solo content and at the high floors (150+/70+) it can also be quite lucrative -- I made my first 50m~ gil doing PotD in groups and selling the mount/other stuff that drops from the 150+ treasure hoard. (We ran it a lot in sb, 6~ clears and maybe 4~ failed runs we still got a bunch of loot from. That said, everything you get is worth less gil now).

edit: Pretty sure this is also the inspiration for Torghast