Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Big W Powah!_sl said:

SO is coming back for the expansion and trying to play casually looking like it'll be worth while?

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The game is fairly casual friendly. There's a raid for more hardcore players which requires a ton of wipes and all that shit, or well unless you wait until the tier after is released to do it, and a raid that's very casual, but everything else is basically casual content although stuff like the zodiac weapon questline is casual in the sense that you can do it in small bits for 15-30mins at a time but takes a retarded amount of total time so it might not feel very fun if you're very casual. Luckily, it's optional as fuck since it's basically just a cool looking weapon that tends to be worse or as good as raiding weapons.

There's a lot of dungeons(about 12 4man lvl 50 dungeons plus all the dungeons while leveling, about 10 8man bosses fight with most of them having an extreme mode plus the 2 raid types I mentionned which have 2-3dungeons each), a lot of questing but most of it is boring quests though, the story is ok on some of them, has some cutscenes and in rare cases they have voice acting too, housing+gardening, crafting/gathering is actually a lot more relevant than other games and crafting is pretty fun even though it's pretty much a parallel progression and requires a fairly substantial time investment to catch up at this point. There's really a lot of stuff to do in the game and while you might not like everything, it still took me like an entire month playing hardcore to get up to date on most of the stuff, so even if you only did a small part at a casual pace, you'd still be looking at 1-2months worth of shit to do.

They'll probably run free weekends for 2.5 release or 2.55 release or some shit, so kinda just check when the thread is bumped to test the game out. That's in a couple of months though, expected 2.5 release should be around february, expansion is probably gonna hit right before summer, so there's quite a while until that.

AladainAF_sl said:

I hate that they completely fucked u pcrafting. I look at the fucking millions I spent on materia melding and then they turn around and make artisan armor pieces. I'll do that upgrade, because I feel they realize they "fucked up", but never again after that. Seriously. Fuck that.

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Well it's a mmo, shit getting outdated is common place. It sucks if you did your melds right before they patched it(I did mine like less than a month before so I can understand that), but at the same time while crafting takes several millions to get your correct shit done, it also generates more money than anything else, and that's especially true during a new patch. People had to recraft all their armor and farm more materias? Who do you think profit from that? Crafters obviously, who both craft the actual upgrades as well as the items you break down into materias. You don't even need high end gear to make a good profit out of crafting, since low end stuff still sells a lot due to the materia mechanics, or glamour or other stuff like that.

When I came back I had like 6millions, which when I quit was quite a large amount and most of it was made from crafting. I bought a house, bought a bunch of random shit, redid all my materias on alchemist and gatherers and a bunch more shit like that, and I quit again with iirc 18millions. And I don't have a single fully mastered crafting class nor did I bother with any of the new stuff. My alchemist was full melded before the patch but I hadn't bothered with the super expensive supra nonsense, and I still made like 5millions selling putty during the patch cause apparently everyone forgot how to craft them. That's more than what I'd need to get the new armor and meld it.

The values are all fucked when you delve into the crafting sphere, everything is expensive as shit sure, but it goes both ways, it means everything you sell makes a lot of money. And there's always people buying, especially with gold sellers around. Most of the prices don't even make any fucking sense unless you're playing solo without knowing any crafter, since most of the shit sells for 2-10times more than it costs to make. And I don't mean the hard stuff, even the most basic shit sells for stupid amounts compared to what it takes to craft, only the really really basic stuff you can autocombine like NQ ingots are cheap(in fact I often bought them directly instead of converting ores into ingots and such, to save time).

They've been slowly upgrading gear, and I'd be willing to bet 2.5 will have more artisan gear for the full set. Think it's missing like what, boots and gloves or something? If no armor, it'll be a new main hand for sure.

Oh and obviously in 3.0, all your shit will be worthless, other than getting changed into materias.

Malakriss_sl said:

I remember doing so many carries on extreme mode primals just to pay for the guild house. I never minded the fights, but screw doing the grinds and treadmills with every patch. I try to imagine other games with FFXIV's graphic engine and how much it would crush all competition, it's a real shame.

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What other games? It's a wow clone and a pretty solid one at that, and pretty much every mmo nowadays is also a wow clone, so not sure how that'd change. There isn't a whole lot of grinding either, though I guess every other patch there's the new tokens to collect and shit. That's every 6months however and you don't need to collect nearly as much/any at all if you're raiding, since you'll probably skip the entire thing with crafted gear pentamelds/actual raid drops rather than rely on a capped token system.


For what to check video wise, it kinda depends on what you want. For more technical fights, Titan Extreme or Turn 9(Nael) are the most interesting I'd say, with Turn 5(Twintania) and Turn 7(Melusine) also being pretty interesting, prenerf especially. Leviathan EX is visually very cool to watch but is the easiest primal too if you're into that. Dungeons aren't particularily hard but there's some cool fights in some of them like the last boss of the Lost City of Amdapor(not Amdapor Keep) or the Kraken fight in Hullbreakers Island but overall dungeons aren't hard, especially since it's easy to outgear them heavily.

Well if you play with friends on an alt job you get more xp from kills but if you're doing quests with them you don't get quest xp a second time so it evens out pretty decently. If you do dungeons and shit though you'll level faster, on the other hand since there's scaling it doesn't really matter too much and the xp from doing lower lvl dungeon runs is still pretty good unless the disparity is really large.

Every character can be all classes though, there's a job system similar to well, final fantasy games in general. Changing classes can be done at any time out of combat if not in a dungeon at no cost, other than inventory space(but there's a special inventory that has 24 slots for each inventory slot so you can generally have multiple sets easily and not run into any issue). So if a friend doesn't level very fast you can definitely play a lower level class. There's incentive to level other classes too due to cross class skills. In fact it's generally required for high end gaming, and if you're a warrior it's necesarry to have 22glad just overall(it's probably the most necessary cross class skill in the game). Oh and every job requires a main class to 30 and a sub class to 15, so you'll have to at least do that(but it only takes a few hours).

You can also powerlevel, in a similar fashion as wow. Ungroupped, you get your friend to tag mobs and then kill them. Works best on WHM who have the best spammable aoe and can also take aggro from everything easily by just putting regen on the lowbie(which also prevents them from dying, so it's perfect). It's very good to powerlevel the first 20-30levels or so, after that it gets kinda shit. You can also powerlevel 44-50 in a couple of hours by grinding a dungeon trash packs over and over, not very fun but very fast, you do need 4 people and probably want a tank and a healer and since you're killing large amounts of trash, the DPS need to have some decent aoe(aka monks suck at it).

Leveling time is fairly average, so expect like 3-4days played or so. Maybe it's less? Not sure as I haven't leveled a fresh account in forever. That said it can be way less if you play casually, since you get a level every day for doing the daily dungeon roulette(random dungeon) and that takes less than an hour, so just doing that you could be 50 in under 2days played if you just do that everyday for a month or so(plus whatever xp you get during the rest of the time and obviously 1-10 is a lot faster). As is typical with mmos, you'll probably reach cap faster on a tank or healer due to way shorter queues which lets you grind dungeons or just complete dungeon related quests a ton faster, while DPS sees 10-20mins queues a lot of the time. Luckily the Ninja craze should be over so I assume that's the normal queue times.