Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

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Pasteton

Pasteton

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I really think the speedy content cycles is what's keeping the population going for so long for this game. It'd be really impressive if they keep this up long term. Especially at this point, the next coil is what, 4-5 weeks away if they keep the same patch cycle? And there are still a looooot of people who haven't cleared t5 . That's quite a bit of content ahead of them to look forward to (t6-t13, presumably after next patch) .

This in addition to what will soon be a ridiculous number of lvl 50 dungeons (barely remember first amdapor bosses at this point), the 24 man raid (this one they did screw the pooch, cuz who actually does crystal tower 1 anymore??) , and all the primal exteme fights ( i *still* see people working on Titan ex, it amazes me, and increasing numbers of Moogle ex pf's all the time). Then finally all the hunts. And the never ending relic grind. It's really a lot in one years time and yoshi p 's crew really should be proud of themselves. Other mmo's need to really learn and observe from ffxiv when coming up with their own pve systems
 
Pyros

Pyros

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Well 2.38 should be next week and 2.4 with coil 3+Shiva(I think that's the content) should be about a month after that so like 5-6weeks yeah. Though I see a lot of people also complaining how the reward isn't worth it or how they have nothing to do cause they cleared coil 2 months ago so eh, ymmv I guess. As someone who just came back I have so much shit to do I'm fine with it. CT1 definitely should get something like cosmetics or whatever, but at the same time it's not a big deal, people don't run coil1 anymore either unless they want specific loot for glamour and obviously T5. Same way people only run CT1 to unlock CT2. CT2 I find is pretty nice too, it's a very quick run, you can run it as many times as you want until you get the loot you want, granted it's only one loot per week but that's a pretty cool system imo.

Yesterday I cleared Turn5 in a DF pug, actually only my 2nd DF in the dungeon ever, only took about a dozen wipes total to get the encounter done between the 2, 2nd group was pretty solid besides one derpy DPS who left when people told him he should avoid shit, who was replaced by another derpy DPS who also left when told to git gud replaced by a DPS who was actually just fine and we got it on 2nd try after that. Leviathan and Ultima I got pretty close but not killed yet, have yet to try Mog but looks fairly easy, I want to get Leviathan done before Shiva though so I can get carried/pay for Ramuh and have access to Shiva EX right as it releases, but plenty of time for that. Have 0 interest in Coil 2 for now, will do it once they release Coil 3.

Been mostly working on getting all classes to 50+relic, only have Paladin and Bard to go and well need to do the SMN relic at some point too since I've only done Scholar. That's my other goal of stuff to do before 2.4, but that's gonna be easy I'll probably hit PLD 50 sometimes next week even though I hate the fucking class.
 
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misery_sl

shitlord
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I never realized how awesome seamless worlds were until I played this game. Every zone feels like a disjointed instance. No zone feels like it has any connection to the others, and I am confused about where exactly the pieces fit in the puzzle that is the world map.
 
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mixtilplix

Lord Nagafen Raider
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misery_sl said:
I never realized how awesome seamless worlds were until I played this game. Every zone feels like a disjointed instance. No zone feels like it has any connection to the others, and I am confused about where exactly the pieces fit in the puzzle that is the world map.
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It's called suspension of disbelief but yeah I feel yeah. On the other hand though it results in some really nice looking backdrops with cities that don't lag, in this manner it is very similar to everquest with zones and locations that are out of reach. There are zones where it's really obvious like east thanalan where you kinda wanna just climb over all hills but in places like the shroud it seems less obvious.
 
Pyros

Pyros

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misery_sl said:
I never realized how awesome seamless worlds were until I played this game. Every zone feels like a disjointed instance. No zone feels like it has any connection to the others, and I am confused about where exactly the pieces fit in the puzzle that is the world map.
Click to expand...
Hmm, all shroud zones are forests, all thanalan zones are deserts, all la noscea zones are islands/seaside stuff, they all connect to each other at the zone line by showing where you're going. There's a fair distance between them on the world map though, which implies you travel when you cross zone lines, when you go from North Shroud to Coerthas for example, the zone lines shows a road going up in the mountains, which Coerthas is, you don't actually see Coerthas on the other side of the zone line. Not sure how that's any worse than wow's zone "lines" which are seamless but make jarring differences over a few steps especially with the lightning, vegetation, climate and such changing entirely for example.
 
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Frenzic

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misery_sl said:
I never realized how awesome seamless worlds were until I played this game. Every zone feels like a disjointed instance. No zone feels like it has any connection to the others, and I am confused about where exactly the pieces fit in the puzzle that is the world map.
Click to expand...
I agree with this mostly. I've been playing off and on for a while now and still have little idea of how the world fits together. I don't know if it has to do with the instancing or not though. For an example, I played Everquest for 15? years, I knew the world layout extremely well almost right from the get go. For those that don't know, EQ is completely instanced as well and has much smaller zones than FFxiv. I don't know if it's the instancing or lack of interest, but there is definitely something wrong with the world cohesiveness in ffxiv. Or maybe something wrong with me
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Edit- Also Wow is uninstanced and when I tried it for a few months, I had no fucking clue about where shit was in the world. I would hop from hub to hub and didn't learn it. Maybe the world has more to do with your interest and need to explore it, than instancing.
 
Pyros

Pyros

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Frenzic_sl said:
I agree with this mostly. I've been playing off and on for a while now and still have little idea of how the world fits together. I don't know if it has to do with the instancing or not though. For an example, I played Everquest for 15? years, I knew the world layout extremely well almost right from the get go. For those that don't know, EQ is completely instanced as well and has much smaller zones than FFxiv. I don't know if it's the instancing or lack of interest, but there is definitely something wrong with the world cohesiveness in ffxiv. Or maybe something wrong with me
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I'd say it has more to do with fast travel. You only travel to new zones once on foot, after that you always TP there. You don't memorize zone positions compared to each other or how they connect because you don't need to walk for 30minutes to get somewhere. There's also as I pointed out the difference that FFXIV zones aren't directly connected to each other, geographically. The zone line takes you from one to the other, but they're not like right next to each other, so they don't create a larger block, they're small parts of the map that you get to explore. If you zoom out on the map you can see how it's laid out, and the "roads" you travel when you cross a zone line.
 
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Frenzic

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Pyros_sl said:
I'd say it has more to do with fast travel. You only travel to new zones once on foot, after that you always TP there. You don't memorize zone positions compared to each other or how they connect because you don't need to walk for 30minutes to get somewhere. There's also as I pointed out the difference that FFXIV zones aren't directly connected to each other, geographically. The zone line takes you from one to the other, but they're not like right next to each other, so they don't create a larger block, they're small parts of the map that you get to explore. If you zoom out on the map you can see how it's laid out, and the "roads" you travel when you cross a zone line.
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All great points +1
 
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mixtilplix

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Pyros_sl said:
I'd say it has more to do with fast travel. You only travel to new zones once on foot, after that you always TP there. You don't memorize zone positions compared to each other or how they connect because you don't need to walk for 30minutes to get somewhere. There's also as I pointed out the difference that FFXIV zones aren't directly connected to each other, geographically. The zone line takes you from one to the other, but they're not like right next to each other, so they don't create a larger block, they're small parts of the map that you get to explore. If you zoom out on the map you can see how it's laid out, and the "roads" you travel when you cross a zone line.
Click to expand...
I was just thinking about how this and how it was with Dragon Age origins. The zones were connected but they were in reality supposed to be great distances apart. You just had to fill in the journey part in your mind..
 
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misery_sl

shitlord
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Pyros_sl said:
Hmm, all shroud zones are forests, all thanalan zones are deserts, all la noscea zones are islands/seaside stuff, they all connect to each other at the zone line by showing where you're going. There's a fair distance between them on the world map though, which implies you travel when you cross zone lines, when you go from North Shroud to Coerthas for example, the zone lines shows a road going up in the mountains, which Coerthas is, you don't actually see Coerthas on the other side of the zone line. Not sure how that's any worse than wow's zone "lines" which are seamless but make jarring differences over a few steps especially with the lightning, vegetation, climate and such changing entirely for example.
Click to expand...
I wasn't talking about terrain similarities. Maybe I should have elaborated more.
 
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misery_sl

shitlord
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Pyros_sl said:
I'd say it has more to do with fast travel. You only travel to new zones once on foot, after that you always TP there. You don't memorize zone positions compared to each other or how they connect because you don't need to walk for 30minutes to get somewhere. There's also as I pointed out the difference that FFXIV zones aren't directly connected to each other, geographically. The zone line takes you from one to the other, but they're not like right next to each other, so they don't create a larger block, they're small parts of the map that you get to explore. If you zoom out on the map you can see how it's laid out, and the "roads" you travel when you cross a zone line.
Click to expand...
Yeah, a lot of the feeling does come from being able to insta travel.
 
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Nehrak_sl

shitlord
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They must be adding more Housing servers and/or Wards if they're doing an 8(+?) hour maintenance for 2.38 Monday night. I can't imagine what else besides personal housing would require that long of a downtime to patch in. Would be kind of funny if they also patched in Coil 1 Savage at the same time, as a kind of "surprise!" like with Ixal dailies for 2.35 (I had them pegged at 2.4 when they weren't in 2.3).

Plus you can upgrade beyond Novus! (yaaaay......I'm not done with Novus yet)
 
Pyros

Pyros

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"At the following time, in order to accompany patch 2.38, we will be performing maintenance on all Worlds. During this period, FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn will be unavailable."

So yeah, not really a secret. Though they've been more than silent about what will actually be in the patch. We know relic upgrade and housing are supposed to be in this patch, but that's all we know, it might be all of it, but there's no details on these either.
 
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Vilgan_sl

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Am mildly considering getting back into this, albeit with the ps4 version instead of PC because playing on a big TV sounds fun. Is it pretty playable on console, as a healer especially? Wouldn't want to be the baddie in the group that makes everyone fail.
 
Pyros

Pyros

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Vilgan_sl said:
Am mildly considering getting back into this, albeit with the ps4 version instead of PC because playing on a big TV sounds fun. Is it pretty playable on console, as a healer especially? Wouldn't want to be the baddie in the group that makes everyone fail.
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Healing with a pad is kinda rough in 8man. It's doable for sure but like, it's not easy. Selecting players and shit is kinda slow since you can't really just click the player you want, you need to rotate through the roster with the up/down D pad. In many fights though all you do is target the main tank, cast direct heals on him, and use aoe heals for everything else. If you need to heal someone, going down to them on the list and casting a heal without locking them will bring you back directly to the tank after so that's nice if they only need a single heal. Especially true as a Scholar, since your pet will generally take care of healing up people getting hit by random shit but true with WHM too once you get medica II since people just get healed by the HoT. In 4man dungeons it's fine since there aren't many people so rotating is quick.

If your goal is high end raiding, playing on PS4 is quite a bit of a challenge, at least as a healer. If you just want to do stuff and don't care as much about doing the current tier of raiding but instead just do the previous tier which is easier to do, then you'd be fine I'd say.

Overall the control scheme is pretty solid but targetting is where it tends to be a bit meh, and if your class has a lot of usable abilities, you'll need a lot of combinations of pad keys. By default you get 16 easy ones(hold R1+ Dpad or square/O/X/triangle, hold L1 and the same) then you can either swap to another tab or use R1 > L1 to change bar or L1 > R1 to change bars to something else, adding 16 more. 32 is more than enough, in general you'll need 24 to 30 slots to use everything you have. As a healer you can remove DPS stuff and not hurt that much, though it's less efficient, so 16 might even be enough.
 
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Grizzlebeard_sl

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Frenzic_sl said:
EQ is completely instanced as well and has much smaller zones than FFxiv.
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While I agree with the rest of your post I have to pull you up on this. EQ's zones are massive, they make FFXIV's look tiny by comparison. FFXI on the other hand would give EQ a run for its money but that's only because you had to travel across the whole zone to reach a ledge you could walk up in order to run all the way back across the zone to gain access to somewhere else.
 
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Frenzic

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Grizzlebeard_sl said:
While I agree with the rest of your post I have to pull you up on this. EQ's zones are massive, they make FFXIV's look tiny by comparison. FFXI on the other hand would give EQ a run for its money but that's only because you had to travel across the whole zone to reach a ledge you could walk up in order to run all the way back across the zone to gain access to somewhere else.
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I don't know new eq, but the old game zones were tiny with a few exemptions. Karana, commons basically big flat zones with nothing in them. Just look at eq cities for example. Rivervale was absolutely massive!
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The average zone in eq, I feel is very small with little of relevance in there. All of the cities are small with the larger ones being several zones. The biggest zones are just empty plains of nothingness. You may be right if you count how many steps it takes to cross the average zone, who knows. Ffxiv zones just feel bigger with more life. Just do a circle around the dragonhead zone, shit is big lol.
 
Pyros

Pyros

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Yeah Coerthas is probably the biggest zone in FFXIV and it's fucking ridiculously large. Don't know about EQ, but it takes about 10mins on mount to run from one point around the map and back, and all of it is heavily populated, has points of interests, cool looking stuff, caves that add a decent bit of stuff in them and various building as well as 3 little cities. On foot, even with the bard speed song which is kinda like SoW, it'd take like 20mins to do the whole thing(maybe less due to sprint). And even doing a circle around he zone you don't explore most of it, if you were to check every points of interest in the zone you'd easily take like 30minutes, especially with the cave systems in there. Other zones are generally smaller, but most are still fairly large. On mount and going from point A to point B might not make it seem like it, but when you're for example looking for hunts, it generally takes you 5-8mins to do a round of the zone to check.

Mounts here are a big factor, since they're given early and move noticeably faster than normal running speed. Makes the zone smaller, this and TPing as usual, and most quests are split into quest hubs and stuff so you rarely get to do full zone runs, you generally go from the hub to the surrounding areas then when you're done you're sent to another hub. It's the design that makes them look smaller than they really are and looking for hunts makes that pretty apparent.
 
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mixtilplix

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EQ had some extremely flat topography too while FFIV uses a more modern compressed potato landscape pattern. Running across the same unchanging topography can make it seem like things take forever. Not to mention running was slow as hell in eq.
 
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