Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

The problem is unless they nerf shit heavily, they won't be able to both keep the quirks of Blue Mage skills affecting bosses(like how in the trailer he STUNS Shiva, which would be super broken in many encounters, imagine interupting long casts and shit, even if the boss starts recasting right after, you could add say 5-10secs to a burn phase before a phase switch which might trivialize encounters) and make it not absolutely necessary to run 4BLU(or more) in your raid.

That's why I think they'll go with a curated set of nerfed skills for general gameplay eventually, rather than try to make the class work as a whole. One version balanced for endgame content like other standard classes, and one version with completely broken shit to stomp old content with. New BLU players will also be able to only farm for the curated set of skills to get started with raiding on BLU, rather than have to collect EVERYTHING. In XI that's how people level new BLUs, you don't go and start farming all 120 spells sequentially, 3/4 of them are either complete garbage or super situational(only useful against a specific "primal" for example, or only for soloing hard content or whatever). Instead you get your basic spells for DPS build and solo farming build, and then you get the rest over time.

I do agree that the limited release is probably a way for them 1) to buy time so they can finish the class 2) to figure out what needs to be worked in and how 3) to see how much effort they should put into it versus how many people want it.

In XI iirc, a lot of classes also released unfinished(starting in Treasures of Aht Urghan), and would stay unfinished for like 6+months. I think in this case, they're basically saying "we can make side content for people who are bored playing their main class AND we can take 1.5/2years to finish this class, win win". At least that's what I think, and I'm super fine with it, but again I'm biased since I didn't care much about BLU to begin with. I'm actually very excited to play BLU even at 50cap and the patch can't come soon enough, I'm even thinking of resubbing already, even though I technically have nothing to do until it does release .Can't even farm tomes for caster gear since it's just garbo 50gear I'll need, I'll just need to get some poetics but shit's gonna be fast as fuck, and who knows is caster gear is even going to be better than their AF, they might make the AF1 actually same ilvl as Final Coil/Poetics gear.

Valderen said:

I personally think the Blue Mage will always be 10-20 levels below the cap, and not be able to join duties except as premade groups.

I mean why release it with 4.5 there's no rush. expansion is still 6-9 months away, plenty of time to do it right if they really wanted to have it do current content and be able join duties. Heck, if they are willing to release a class outside of an expansion and it's not ready by 5.0, release in 5.1 or 5.2 or whenever.

I'm not sure which would be more frustrating between these two options:

1. Total freedom in which abilities to use, at the cost of being 10-20 below cap and not be able to do duties.

2. Be able to do duties and level cap content but limited to a curated list of abilities.

Again, they mentioned Puppet Master and Beast Master as other potential "limited class", so it doesn't seem like it's something specific for the Blue Mage.

At the end of the day, why create a class that can learn of bunch of abilities if you're going to limit which abilities they can use. Just create a regular class with set abilities then.

Like Pyros though I am biased because I didn't care much for Blue Mage. My biggest interest for the Blue Mage really is The Masked Carnivale which sounds pretty cool. 25 stages of 3 rounds each which requires you to have specific spells learned to defeat them. That sounds more fun than the actual class.

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The expansion is far away, but they still have a lot of shit to work on most likely. They're releasing it now because they can start testing stuff and because that part was already finished. Also probably an easier pill to swallow if it's available early than if they waited for 5.0 to release a lvl 50 limited job(or 60 maybe if that's what it gets to by 5.0). Especially when Johnny retard who hasn't read shit about the expansion buys it, logs in, make a BLU and then figure out he can't actually play ShB shit with it and starts whining on the forums and everywhere else, which might hurt the sales of the new expansion. If Johnny retard starts whining in 4.5 6months ahead though, doesn't matter nearly as much and if he starts whining in 5.0 people will tell him to get fucked he could have read the damn shit it's been 6months it's that way already.

They could have held it until later too, but I think this way they let people use it and see how people react to the system. Also as I said before I'm thinking they won't release the playable "full" version until well into 5.x. Thinking 5.5 tbh, so that's 2 years off, so it makes sense to start having it in the game earlier for people to fuck around, than wait. I'd think they'd release the special nerfed version of BLU to do instances, and then instantly release the next limited job at the same time. That'd be quite the announcement too at the first Fanfest, "eh guys, BLU will be playable for real now and next expansion, and also since a lot of people liked the system, we're announcing Puppetmaster where you can build your own personalized puppet with dozens of parts, with its own storyline and content, will be limited for next expansion though but look forward to 6.5" kind of shit. I know I'd be excited(to make millions of selling crafted puppet parts). Or Beastmaster, whichever they feel like doing first. I'd rather get PUP though.

Fucking announcements though, I need to wait a whole month to resub cause there's nothing to do until 4.5 but I really want to play. Before the Fanfest I even thought about buying a new account to relevel through shit, now they announced New Game + so I'm not sure I want, but I figure maybe having 2 account so I can dual log some of the old content might not be so bad(like Eureka). Free transfers make it even better too, I could start on a preferred world to level a bunch of shit to 60 quick, and then transfer both my accounts to whatever server I pick. Which is another issue with the new datacenter shit. On one hand I want to get away from the French datacenter, but on the other I can at least group with french people and understand what they say while the other datacenter has the Germans, can't fucking tell what they're saying. I'll probably have to figure out where the swedes/danes are, that's where the good players are usually.

They definitely made a switch in terms of pacing with HW, and it gets a lot better, everyone says that really. The end of 2.x MSQs are pretty good, like the Nanamo stuff and shit, that was really hype before going into HW, but it's still kinda slow but HW cuts a lot of the bullshit.

Even once you hit the 3.1 to 3.5 content, it's still not too much filler quests, mostly simple stuff or run x content like dungeons/trials, but lots of cutscenes(which some people dislike) but the events progress at a fair pace and new shit's going on. It helps that the story in HW is like way better overall too. From the minor/major characters to the core of the story itself, it feels a lot more like a FF game. I also loved how Ishgard as a whole was presented, it was closed off for so many years and it's really its own thing, it has its own government, customs, nomenclatures and everything is about the HW events, you get thrown in the middle of it and your main priority is fixing all that shit, rather than constantly reporting to someone in Eorzea about what's going on or whatever.

I like this whole aspect of the story, it feels a lot more natural than the ARR questline which has you returning to your base every other small quest shit to tell bitchpants how you got some minor information, which could have been relayed by some random shmuck or via linkpearl or a letter or really didn't need to be reported.

Also the dungeons get a lot better. I mean by the end of 2.x, the dungeons were pretty solid, but the early ones are really boring(make for a good "tutorial" for entirely new players to mmos though, simple mechanics and shit). But once you enter HW, a lot of dungeons start throwing a lot more mechanics at you. Very first dungeon has a damage sharing mechanic, another with a lot of adds but not just the usual "grab them all and aoe" adds and the last boss has the whole "hide behind temporary things to cut line of sight" mechanic that's re-used in many fights.

Penance said:

Not to mention the instance within an instance every time you have to turn that shit in.

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Yeah if they had the wow tech with phased walls it'd be a lot better so you can just walk in that shit and it phases you so it's all good. Phasing could do a lot of good things for this game but who knows how spaghetti the code is. They're at least making some efforts every expansion, next one will have the free transfer shit within the same DC which is pretty nice I think, solves both overpopulation and playing with friends if you're on a crowded server at once.

Penance said:

So I've been trying to find an answer to this, and from I understand, mouse over macros are not the way to heal in this game? I'm playing scholar right now and the only MO macro they recommend is embrace (pet heal skill) and just to manually target everyone for healing. I'm guessing it's because of the clunkyness of the mouse over macro system?

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It's because of the clunkiness of macros, specifically the fact their archaic piece of shit system doesn't let you queue macros, so instead of having spells start casting earlier since the game lets you queue them if you send the order to the server .4secs before the cd is up or whatever it is, it doesn't and you potentially lose time if you have a fair ping and you also need to mash that key like a motherfucker.

Mouseover works fine otherwise as far as I could test, although you have to be careful if you mouse over BETWEEN the bars and there happens to be some target behind, you might target them instead. I think there's an option to turn it off, but I like targetting people directly rather than their bars sometimes. I use mouseover for buffs and shit, like Dragoon's chain thing, Goad for TP regen, Ninja's Shadewalker, PLD's Cover etc. But for most abilities you want to avoid using macros, which sucks because in some cases they'd make shit a lot easier.

I do hope they fix that at some point, not sure how hard it is though but it's annoying. If you make a macro with a single skill in it, it should behave as a normal cast, not as a text command or whatever they taped together from the dusty remains of 1.0. I get queuing fucking up when you stack several skills in your macro or wait timers and shit.

That said as someone who's healed a decent bit of raiding, this game doesn't have too much targetted emergency healing, at least once you're familiar with encounters. Since abilities aren't random and for the most part damage spikes are predictable, both for when they happen and on who, you can generally take your time targetting stuff and healing. I mean people heal the hardest raids with gamepads, so yeah.