Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Pyros

Pyros

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Looking at the detailed tooltips, man Pictomancer is going to be awful garbage in leveling roulettes/low level content. Definitely good I'm gonna do MSQ with it.

The issue is it actually doesn't have many skills at all, it has a bunch of buttons but that's largely because the first 2 palettes come with 3 buttons each. You get the main 1 button combo at 1 obviously but you get nothing else besides AoE 1 button combo at 25 until 30. 1-29 is literally one button(the button changes for trash and bosses although for sastasha and co it is literally one button). Only other buttons you get are shield at 10(useless for low lvl stuff anyway) and dash at 20(pretty useless when your main combo is a 1.5s cast anyway). At 30 you get creature so that's one different button every 40seconds that gives an oGCD but well it's something and then nothing all the way to 50 where you get hammer and can start playing the class a bit more, but it's only the first hit of hammer not the whole combo(pretty sure it's not even worth recasting after the fight started with only one step to the combo cause casting 2 basic nukes looks like it does more damage in less time).

After that you get a bit more every 10 levels only(60 palette swap, 70 party buff, 80 white holy gauge, 90 black comet) until 86 that adds the additional hammer hits(not sure why that's not baseline).

It's pretty crazy that they designed the levels like that although I kinda get it due to how the class has so few skills but the result is likely to be the most boring class at low level, and possible absolute garbage in a bunch of the pre 60 content due to lacking basic mechanics. In 50 content(like CT raids) it's 1 button spam with 2 oGCDs every minute(on average) and one button you can use during downtime/prepull for a single instant cast that does a bit more dmg, and that's it. It's basically healer gameplay, but without any heals(or rez).
 
Aazrael

Aazrael

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Seems BLM got a few quality of life improvements. Not having cast time on the Paradox to refresh Fire Countdown is nice, it also proc sharpcast.

Did they simplify the buttons for the ice phase as well? I think I heard someone in media tour mention something about it.
 
Folanlron

Folanlron

Trakanon Raider
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Aazrael said:
Seems BLM got a few quality of life improvements. Not having cast time on the Paradox to refresh Fire Countdown is nice, it also proc sharpcast.

Did they simplify the buttons for the ice phase as well? I think I heard someone in media tour mention something about it.
Click to expand...


Ice is becoming "Hit it with a Ice spell, to regen mana" Phase instead of Server tick based... Having to wait for the server tick to regen mana naturally was kind of lame, and probably inefficient as hell on the servers, this is fixing that problem.

holy fuck that new Manafont.
 
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Malakriss

Malakriss

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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The important part that streamers noted from the prior live letter is Umbral Soul counts as an ice spell. Number of Umbral Ice stacks determines amount of MP regen as 2.5k/5k/10k.

So finish the fire cycle, Blizzard 3 into ice and the Blizzard 4 cast will regen 10k (full mana).
 
Khalan

Khalan

Trakanon Raider
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Fired up my 4 days to catch up for Dawntrail, was pretty HC into EW doing savages and clearing 3 ultimates but not sure if Ill do more than play the msq this time.
 
Cybsled

Cybsled

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Storywise, I did pick up one thing from one of the media tour videos. I think maybe Jesse's? YoshiP recommended finishing the current raid series about The Twelve and also the "we don't really know a lot about the rest of the convocation"


Theory Crafting ahead...



People had theorycrafted this before, but that makes me even more strongly believe that the Solution 9 civilization had some direct ties to the ancients. Or Ascians, more specifically.

Emet clearly knew Solution Nine existed. And we know The Twelve had a pretty strict non-interventionist policy (or at least they did when we met them). There may also still be 2 living Ascians. The only Ascians we don't know the fate of or current whereabouts are Pashtarot (discipline and order), Altima (arts), Halmarut (plants and fungus), and Duedalaphon (arcitecture and invention).

We know Gaius killed at least 2 convocation members/ascians, we just don't know which. And with no unsundered ascians left, their souls/memories wouldn't be able to be reconstituted into new ascians.

Given the advanced technological state of Solution Nine, the most obvious influence would be Duedalaphon since his role centered around invention. And since we saw him with all the other Ascians during that one cutscene, we can assume he was onboard with the ascian plan to rejoin the worlds. Maybe. Fandaniel didn't seem to give a shit since he was suicidal, so it is possible other ascians were less zealous about the main plan.

We know from some screenshots that some signs in Solution Nine were labeled as 'soul delivery'. My theory is that Solution Nine is literal in terms of its name and it was intended to serve as a possible solution to the ascian plan. The biggest flaw in the ascian plan was that the 13th shard was fucked up seemingly beyond repair - their rejoining plan would be incomplete. So what if the alternate solution was if they could not fully rejoin the world, what if they could rejoin just souls? Basically using hyper advanced technology, look for a way to basically gather up the sundered souls from all the shards and reconstitute them?
 
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Pyros

Pyros

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Yeah I've used that but I don't know about "nice" the way it's organized, a lot of shit is just "here's a bunch of random skills" because it follows the ingame classifications when it would be a lot easier to use if they were organized properly. But it'd be a lot more work too. The Pictomancer part is especially a big fucking mess and it's hard to keep track of anything in there, but at least it has all the tooltips(not the combat version for the canvas skills though so you can't see their real cast time but minor nitpick).
 
Cybsled

Cybsled

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Seeing the skill images helped for Samurai. Most of those Youtube videos are like (insert long ass Japanese word here) is changing to this and I'm like "I have no fucking clue what they're talking about". Then you see the skill button and you're like, "oh, that is the mini slash AOE thingy!"
 
Grizzlebeard

Grizzlebeard

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Been a while since I played. Logged in yesterday and sitting at 580 gear. Max at AH seems to be 640.

Do I part with a mil and catch up or just wait out the DLC for gray starting gear. I have a boatload of MSQ to catch up on though (Friends for the Road) so gearing up could speed that along.
 
Chysamere

Chysamere

FF14 Free Company Master
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Grizzlebeard said:
Been a while since I played. Logged in yesterday and sitting at 580 gear. Max at AH seems to be 640.

Do I part with a mil and catch up or just wait out the DLC for gray starting gear. I have a boatload of MSQ to catch up on though (Friends for the Road) so gearing up could speed that along.
Click to expand...

Either wait for Dawntrail and get the new gear when you hit level 100 or buy 620 gear off the AH if you don't have any tomestones saved up, should be cheap.
 
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Rangoth

Rangoth

Blackwing Lair Raider
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Grizzlebeard said:
Been a while since I played. Logged in yesterday and sitting at 580 gear. Max at AH seems to be 640.

Do I part with a mil and catch up or just wait out the DLC for gray starting gear. I have a boatload of MSQ to catch up on though (Friends for the Road) so gearing up could speed that along.
Click to expand...

do not buy gear right now. Leveling gear in dawn trail will probably be better or they sell the previous xpac top gear with the easy to get tombstones when new expansion rolls out. There is no reason to buff up right now
 
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Cybsled

Cybsled

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The tome gear (fully upgraded) will usually get you to the midway point in any given expansion and at the start of Dawntrail, it will all cost poetics instead of the current comedy/etc tomes. I wouldn't spend actual gil on any gear this close to release
 
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Malakriss

Malakriss

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Once old gear converts into poetics on the vendor rings will stop being unique. You buy straight to the augmented version and skip the nuts grind too. EW relic should immediately swap to 1500 poetics per level as well.
 
Pyros

Pyros

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Grizzlebeard said:
Been a while since I played. Logged in yesterday and sitting at 580 gear. Max at AH seems to be 640.

Do I part with a mil and catch up or just wait out the DLC for gray starting gear. I have a boatload of MSQ to catch up on though (Friends for the Road) so gearing up could speed that along.
Click to expand...
I will add, since you probably want to get the EW MSQ done though, it could be worth spending a bit. I wouldn't buy the whole set, make sure you check other servers, grab accessories for cheap(over here you can get them for 20-25k on some servers, same for boots/gloves/helm for some classes). Like spend say 100k at most. Then start doing the MSQ, you'll get dungeons that drop gear you can use as you go and tomes to buy some gear too. Can also start the relic for your weapon, this expansion's relic is only paying 1500 causality tomes(the uncapped ones) per stage, x4 for the whole thing, so it's overall pretty cheap to get a couple of steps at least but if you haven't done Hildibrand questline it's A LOT of quests.

Do hunt trains for weekly capped tomes. Unlock the normal raids and farm these for gear, the queues aren't very long and you can get a bunch of the loot since most people pass on a lot and that gets you all the way. You can get full 640 off the last normal raid tier and for me it only took like a handful of runs to get all the pieces cause ppl didn't bother rolling on most of it(the 2nd raid is ironically a lot harder to get for gear cause a lot of ppl still go there for glamours). After that you're basically done, farm capped tomes every week if you want or just wait for the expansion up to you, but should be able to get 640 accs/armor from raid and 640+ weap from relic pretty smoothly without spending much money at all.
 
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xaivius

xaivius

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Grizzlebeard said:
Been a while since I played. Logged in yesterday and sitting at 580 gear. Max at AH seems to be 640.


Do I part with a mil and catch up or just wait out the DLC for gray starting gear. I have a boatload of MSQ to catch up on though (Friends for the Road) so gearing up could speed that along.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...


Pyros said:
I will add, since you probably want to get the EW MSQ done though, it could be worth spending a bit. I wouldn't buy the whole set, make sure you check other servers, grab accessories for cheap(over here you can get them for 20-25k on some servers, same for boots/gloves/helm for some classes). Like spend say 100k at most. Then start doing the MSQ, you'll get dungeons that drop gear you can use as you go and tomes to buy some gear too. Can also start the relic for your weapon, this expansion's relic is only paying 1500 causality tomes(the uncapped ones) per stage, x4 for the whole thing, so it's overall pretty cheap to get a couple of steps at least but if you haven't done Hildibrand questline it's A LOT of quests.

Do hunt trains for weekly capped tomes. Unlock the normal raids and farm these for gear, the queues aren't very long and you can get a bunch of the loot since most people pass on a lot and that gets you all the way. You can get full 640 off the last normal raid tier and for me it only took like a handful of runs to get all the pieces cause ppl didn't bother rolling on most of it(the 2nd raid is ironically a lot harder to get for gear cause a lot of ppl still go there for glamours). After that you're basically done, farm capped tomes every week if you want or just wait for the expansion up to you, but should be able to get 640 accs/armor from raid and 640+ weap from relic pretty smoothly without spending much money at all.
Click to expand...
Also, the final Alliance raid for EW drops 650 left-side gear ("Theogonic") with no lockout now and still has decent queues on Primal. For MSQ, the only thing I would Marketboard is a 640 Diadochos weapon due to the prominence of weapon damage as a stat. If you want to get really froggy, you can get a 660 weapon via 4 runs of P12, 500 comedy, and a full run of the EW alliance raids. Also seconding the raids for gear, shouldn't take more than a few days to have several full gearsets worth of tokens farmed up for 640 gear.
 
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Pyros

Pyros

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Problem of 24man is it takes a while to clear and only a few pieces drop(not guaranteed for your class), and then a lot of people roll cause they drop directly so they don't mind rolling to desynth/throw at the GC, while for normal raids you have to trade the pieces in and a lot of people just can't be assed having half a dozen of tokens in their bags, turning them in(but only if they have enough), then going to the GC. In my experience getting a full set(or close to) in a 24man is a massive pain in the ass which is why glamour hunting in there is always fucking horrible. On the flipside you can usually do like 2-3 normal raid runs in the time it takes to do one 24man, and you'll likely get 2pieces of gear in that time, that are also guaranteed for your class.

The 24man gear is better but imo not worth grinding at all for gear unless you enjoy it, the shitty 640 gear is enough to do the early expansion stuff until the point where you replace things and you can just grab an upgraded poetics weap on release day(if you haven't finished the relic).
 
Chris

Chris

Potato del Grande
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Levelling Black Mage and loving it, just done 60 to 71. May main it for the MSQ and level my usual mains Paladin/White Mage with some dungeon spam.

It's my 3rd DPS class behind Summoner and Red Mage and it's amazing how much more interactive it feels. I guess that's the benefit of it being Yoshu-P's job.

Summoner is fairly braindead but I barely played it as really I was levelling Scholar. Red Mage felt like I was totally on rails with the illusion of choice.

Black Mage I feel clever using the instant cast spells at the right time to do burst DPS or enable movement.

What physical DPS job is closest to this? Ninja?
 
Pyros

Pyros

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Ninja is a fairly static rotation, it has braindead filler then a massive burst of dmg+buttons, it feels nice to get the burst done right but once you get the order memorized there's not much to it. I think SAM has some more optimization but not much, all the melees are kinda straightforward in rotation, just having the positionals/melee requirement being added on top. I'd say generally speaking they're more interesting that other classes as a result and you can just pick whichever. Ninja has an added layer of memorizing the Ninjutsu, once you get it it's muscle memory and even taking a 2year break from it I remember how to cast the Ninjutsus every expansion but early on it can be interesting.
 
Aazrael

Aazrael

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Skipped through the last Hildebrand quest, cant be bothered to follow that storyline.

The Trial at the end was really hard, granted Im rusty as hell but I died like 20 times lol. The delayed floor nukes felt impossible to remember the order of.

Will buy the last thing for the relic today when I have done a few Roulettes. I hope they make the Dawntrail Relics a bit more Epic than buy 3 stones for Tomestones.

The BLM changes in Dawntrail feels like they should make the Job feel a lot better. Always get stressed casting the fire spell to get more Astral Fire. That one going instacast will be real nice.
 
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