Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward |OT2| RIP Bowmage 2015-2017.

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Also: Holding L1 or R1 and tapping up/down on Dpad will select enemies from the enmity list. It literally made tanking feasible for me and led me to decide to sub! Wish they featured this stuff more.
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Foxxsoxx said:
WAT.
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No joke! It's amazing; I use it roughly 95 percent of the time when tanking, and it's gotten me to lv49 WAR with virtually no problems.

I'd tried FFXIV maybe a year or two ago on PC and liked it quite a bit, but mostly played healer and felt like I couldn't live without mouseover macros, but now that I've given controller play some time and learned these Secret Trixx, it's amazingly comfortable and intuitive. With the double-tap options and the L2+R2 options, people can have 40 buttons instantly available. I like it more than a lot of offline RPG controls, honestly!
 
In my quest to find a healer I liked to play when my Dragoon is on a break I tried Astrologian...and found it really fun. Only did the opening few quests and some other bits and pieces but it felt good, not too complicated and I liked drawing the cards and having these buffs I could apply.

Do we know if it will change significantly in SB though, because I don't want to grind Brayflox and other dungeons etc to level up only to have the playstyle change significantly.
 
I got my Bard to ilvl 270 and slowly working on Miner. Safe to say I'm ready for Stormblood. I could gear up other jobs but nah, I'll just buy the fresh stuff during 4.0. Only gonna focus on three jobs during Stormblood, 2 dps and one healer. BRD is main and I'm gonna finish leveling AST during 4.0. Lastly, I hope RDM plays well because I want that to be my 2nd dps job, otherwise rolling with BLM.

I'm starting to feel that new content hype now!
 
BossDarkseid said:
In my quest to find a healer I liked to play when my Dragoon is on a break I tried Astrologian...and found it really fun. Only did the opening few quests and some other bits and pieces but it felt good, not too complicated and I liked drawing the cards and having these buffs I could apply.

Do we know if it will change significantly in SB though, because I don't want to grind Brayflox and other dungeons etc to level up only to have the playstyle change significantly.
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Assume most things are going to change. Definitely not drastically (AST will still draw cards and have aspected heals) but I think it's safer to say that shit is going to be different on the 16th as opposed to hoping it won't be.
 
Squishy3 said:
stormblood marketing is out of control
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Jumbo Buns - something our characters can never have.

I haven't played in like 2 months I think, I got really burned out so I've been working through Witcher 3 instead. Gonna log in tomorrow for the Make It Rain event and then ease myself back into things before Stormblood. I'm looking forward to returning.
 
I'm ready for the sidequest where one of the NPCs splurges about how great honey buns are and how we have to hunt something for an ingredient to make the ultimate set of honey buns ever.
 
Welp, the Software Square-Enix Token app on my phone reset for some reason and I didn't save a copy of my Emergency Removal Password. Gotta wait til tomorrow to login and continue playing, since Square-Enix support isn't open right now.

:(

EDIT: I literally de-linked my old FFXIV 1.0 physical security token and changed to the phone-based app 3 days ago. Was not expecting this to be an issue so soon. :/
 
To the earlier conversation about the game's plot... I'm enjoying it, but it definitely leaves a lot to be desired. A lot of the characters come and go, and I can't tell you anything meaningful or memorable about any of them, other than Raubahn. Characters I want to bond with and get to know, like Momodi or the Sultaness, are quickly tossed away for a new set of characters in another land. Instead of feeling like a major piece in the political puzzle of Ezorea, I just feel like a pawn, moving from person to person, place to place - doing whatever they ask of me to get the gil & the EXP. I feel like a mercenary... or worse, an errand boy. I'm supposed to be an adventurer, but the only adventure in the plot basically amounts to "solve our political issues on the way to your next dungeon, pls." The only time I felt a real emotion at any point in the plot was when the Walking Sands were raided by the Garlean Empire, killing Norexia & imprisoning Minfilia.

The game has a lot of interesting themes that the writers never took anywhere. Like Ul'dah's immigration issues. You hear a lot of NPC's say "IMMIGRANTS SUCK HURR DURR", but the story never actually does anything with the subject outside of the NPC's complaining about it a few times, saying shit like "I cannot bear to see the less fortunate suffer", all before they tell you to go to that isolated location northeast of here and do a thing. The worst part is, the actual game itself actually mechanically allowed for better exploration of the subject, due to things like adventuring immigrants being given their own plots of land to buy housing, cutting off the use of that land from anyone else. This subject alone could've went MANY places, but the writers dropped the ball on doing anything with it.

And the side missions suck. They really, really suck. Not a single one of the sidequests are worth the amount of time one could spend doing them... but you have to do them to speed up the leveling process, especially if you're leveling multiple classes. These sidequests give you some dialog that they expect you to pay attention to, only for the actual gameplay to amount to picking up five or so things five feet away from the NPC who requested for you to do it. The game feels long-winded because of this. These pointless quests could've been more meaningful, and they could've made way less of them in favor for more meaningful and memorable main quest content.

EDIT: Also, the game needs WAY, WAY more voice acting. 95% of the game's plot is told through text, it's annoying.
 
FFXIV has better lore than actual story.

I really enjoyed the 3.0 story, but even that's more down to the tone than the actual storytelling. Heavensward had this nice melancholy mood to it that I really loved - you and your small crew of outcasts, banished from your home with your allies
presumed dead
, wandering alone through a harsh ever-winter wasteland, trying to stop a centuries-old conflict based on a tragic love story, set to somber piano melodies and dramatic string sections. That shit is my jam.

The 2.0 story, though, is just as generic and predictable as could be. Go here, stop a primal. Oh no, go there and stop another one. Uh-oh, the Garleans are doing shit, and there's some creepy dudes in cloaks being evil. Go stop them.
 
Guess Who said:
FFXIV has better lore than actual story.

I really enjoyed the 3.0 story, but even that's more down to the tone than the actual storytelling. Heavensward had this nice melancholy mood to it that I really loved - you and your small crew of outcasts, banished from your home with your allies
presumed dead
, wandering alone through a harsh ever-winter wasteland, trying to stop a centuries-old conflict based on a tragic love story, set to somber piano melodies and dramatic string sections. That shit is my jam.

The 2.0 story, though, is just as generic and predictable as could be. Go here, stop a primal. Oh no, go there and stop another one. Uh-oh, the Garleans are doing shit, and there's some creepy dudes in cloaks being evil. Go stop them.
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I can't wait until I can access HW content. About ten more levels to go for my Ninja.

The Garleans are cool. They are definitely a callback to the judges from Final Fantasy XII, which was my favorite thing from that game. Part of me wishes I could join their ranks, if it weren't for the fact that they are dastardly evillllllllllllllllllllllllll.
 
Edzi said:
I just finished The Vault.

;_;7
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Ooooh you're catching up to me again. Hurry up and do the Sea of Clouds stuff. It has a really cool Trial at the end. :D

Guess Who said:
FFXIV has better lore than actual story.
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I don't really agree because I don't think the "lore" is the biggest appeal for me so much as the setting and the world itself. I mean, the history and the background stuff are cool, no doubt, but what makes it for me is that the world itself is rich and worth exploring. The people are worth talking to, and there's a very lived in feeling everywhere. There is thought put into why the countries and factions are in the situations they are, and how they co-exist is adds a lot of flavor to everything. And honestly, I consider that part of the story. It's all a piece of the scenario, especially the main piece the player actually interacts with all the time, not just in the MSQ but in all the side quests as well.

The main story is alright. There are high points and there's an interesting ongoing thing, but it's definitely not the best part of the writing in the game.
 
Guess Who said:
FFXIV has better lore than actual story.
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As someone who's working through ARR for the second time (brand new character I started early last week) and paying more attention to the story this time around, I completely agree. The conflicts that the people of the world are going through and some of the responses to those conflicts are compelling, but the actual actions your character is taking part in and doing feels boring, save perhaps for the various climactic moments that occur. It is indeed a bunch of dumb busywork. I straight up skip dialogue in every non-MSQ side quest that I pick up... Been paying attention to only quests that carry the meteor icon and my class/job quests.

I never played Heavensward before and I'm gonna be doing it for the first time ever on this character, so I look forward to it, and that feeling is especially reinforced with your description combined with me recently rewatching the trailer. I hear it's far more brisk in terms of quest count as well.
 
If we're going to go down this route, I'll just agree then, even if I don't consider a lot of that to be "lore", because I don't want to start an argument about what lore actually means. Hahahahahaha.
 
duckroll said:
If we're going to go down this route, I'll just agree then, even if I don't consider a lot of that to be "lore", because I don't want to start an argument about what lore actually means. Hahahahahaha.
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I get where you come from duckroll, I definitely appreciate FFXIV as one of the best FF worlds I've personally ever inhabited as a player. :p

But I do think the actual part that has me playing is generally pretty uninteresting, particularly the vast majority of solo activities. I'm motivated af to experience HW for the first time and maybe hang with the GAF FC in terms of progression in SB, though, so I'm playing like a madman anyway. I'm genuinely enjoying myself when I get the opportunity to team up with other players, whether they're a part of the Ultros FC or not, when it comes to a pure gameplay perspective... but the solo content kind of lacks compelling contextual info a lot of the time, and the actual gameplay part can feel pretty tedious -- I rarely feel like I can even play my job optimally (MNK) because it requires positioning that isn't generally possible when the enemy is focused on me, and my Chocobo is kind of a bad tank. :p
 
iammeiam said:
For me it's mostly the raids at this point. I like the current system of a slower GCD + lots of oGCD stuff, because it always ended up feeling pretty active. Which is part of why the combat revamp has me worried. I like the smaller raid size--Eight people seems manageable to me in a way 20-man fixed size wouldn't be--and part of the tradeoff in having very few challenging bosses means the ones we do get are generally decent spectacle and when they deliver a solid fight, it's incredibly satisfying (I will continue dying on the A3S hill long after everyone has forgotten what it even means.) Undersizing old stuff, later PotD, troll pulling Arges while there's still a bunch of stuff up in Aquapolis and I have no MP to see if we can somehow survive, stupid glamour stuff. Joining groups trying to prog something I know to see if we can make progress and if I can actually explain things better than just "don't die and kill the thing and make sure it dies before we do." There's a bunch of dumb edge stuff I find fun.
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OK, that makes sense. Basically exploring the limits of the system to see what's possible. I can understand the appeal of that.

The confusion at it has always confused me because the actual story stuff is such a small minority of playtime; if the stuff surrounding it isn't compelling on its own, I'd expect to see a lot more people who only surface for a week or two around patches.
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It's true that, if you're playing on a regular basis, you're only going to be spending a small portion of that time doing story quests (once you're more or less up to date with the main story). But I simply enjoy being in the world. I enjoy looking at it, listening to it, being around its denizens. The construction of the world aesthetically, both as portrayed through the main and some of the side/job stories and as portrayed through the environment, is fundamentally what keeps me playing XIV and keeps me invested in doing some of the more grindy content. If I can't get somewhat invested in the world it's difficult for me to keep playing an extensive RPG. That's why I haven't been able to play much of, say, Witcher 3, because despite all the praise that game gets for its story I simply don't enjoy being in its world the way I do being in XIV's.

Guess Who said:
FFXIV has better lore than actual story.

I really enjoyed the 3.0 story, but even that's more down to the tone than the actual storytelling. Heavensward had this nice melancholy mood to it that I really loved - you and your small crew of outcasts, banished from your home with your allies
presumed dead
, wandering alone through a harsh ever-winter wasteland, trying to stop a centuries-old conflict based on a tragic love story, set to somber piano melodies and dramatic string sections. That shit is my jam.

The 2.0 story, though, is just as generic and predictable as could be. Go here, stop a primal. Oh no, go there and stop another one. Uh-oh, the Garleans are doing shit, and there's some creepy dudes in cloaks being evil. Go stop them.
Click to expand...

Oh yeah, the 2.0 story is totally generic. I was not really invested at all in it until the 2.x quests slowly started actually fleshing out characters, and then Heavensward kicked it up to a level where I was fully invested in what was going on and remain so to this day. My sense playing through the game is that with 2.0/ARR the developers, knowing they needed to rescue the game as soon as possible, concentrated on simply reaching a baseline level of competence, and that is what they achieved. A competent, if not particularly interesting, MMO. With 3.0/HW it felt like the developers could actually take the time to get more ambitious and creative with the storytelling and world building. If 3.0 did not exist, I don't think I could call XIV a good game.
 
Edit: I actually started this before the post above me existed, I swear I'm not responding to "I like the world" with "no the world is bad" I just have super awesome timing

It's weird because I felt like HW's zone design was actually pretty bad at making the zones feel like 'real' places. I'm not sure how much of it is due to them trying to design primarily for flight vs the ARR zones being designed entirely for foot traffic, and how much is just the commitment to bigger zones in HW, but HW zones always feel super theme park and, for the most part, like the theme part hasn't opened for the day yet so all the people who are supposed to populate it aren't there. And it's not just the Sea of Clouds or Hinterlands that has this problem--I'd say it extends to Ishgard itself which has spent everything barring the first couple weeks of the expansion feeling like a ghost town.

Maybe the best way I can put it: If you go up to the Aftcastle in Limsa, and go out on the balcony thing, you can look down on the Aetheryte plaza. Only it's not really the aetheryte plaza, it's a copy of it that's totally unpopulated because #ps3limitations.

The world in HW felt a lot like that to me--there'd be little spots of liveliness, but for the most part it feels vacant and waiting for life to come in and animate it.

I'm hoping this is something dropping the PS3 lets them get a better handle on for SB.

hosannainexcelsis said:
It's true that, if you're playing on a regular basis, you're only going to be spending a small portion of that time doing story quests (once you're more or less up to date with the main story). But I simply enjoy being in the world. I enjoy looking at it, listening to it, being around its denizens. The construction of the world aesthetically, both as portrayed through the main and some of the side/job stories and as portrayed through the environment, is fundamentally what keeps me playing XIV and keeps me invested in doing some of the more grindy content. If I can't get somewhat invested in the world it's difficult for me to keep playing an extensive RPG. That's why I haven't been able to play much of, say, Witcher 3, because despite all the praise that game gets for its story I simply don't enjoy being in its world the way I do being in XIV's.
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This I think is totally fair. Playing for the setting as a whole, ties within the game, etc totally makes sense to me. It's less that I'm protesting anybody playing for the story, and more that all of us have to have some kind of motivation above and beyond the next batch of MSQ stuff. For the most part it all works together--I don't care about the story but I appreciate that people who do contribute to what makes the parts I enjoy possible. People don't have to care about raids and whatever, but the parts of the game I care about usually end up seen by everybody at some point or another over time. It all works out.
 
To be fair, Isghardian lands feeling like expensive theme parks which no one wants to stay in would fit right in with the snobbish extravagant but isolationist nature of these fuckers. :P
 
I wonder if Square will ever do a Cataclysm and revamp the 2.0 main quests.

Lessen the amount of quests, give some more variety and change the horrible troll quests, add some more voice acting, and increase the XP given a *little* bit while increasing the rate at which you get some of your main skills, since playing the first 40 levels are very, very boring for most classes which really makes people think the game is slower than it really is.

It really wouldn't take that much, there is so much fat on there it isn't even funny.
 
Foxxsoxx said:
I wonder if Square will ever do a Cataclysm and revamp the 2.0 main quests.

Lessen the amount of quests, give some more variety, add some more voice acting, and increase the XP given a *little* bit while increasing the rate at which you get some of your main skills, since playing the first 40 levels are very, very boring for most classes which really makes people think the game is slower than it really is.

It really wouldn't take that much, there is so much fat on there it isn't even funny.
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They could likely fix the "having too few skills for too long" problem in 4.0 as part of the combat reworks (we already know PLDs get shield oath at 30 now, for instance).
 
Guess Who said:
They could likely fix the "having too few skills for too long" problem in 4.0 as part of the combat reworks (we already know PLDs get shield oath at 30 now, for instance).
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Yeah I'm hoping that is the case.

Thinking of my bard. The first 50 levels were absolutely awful. I don't know how I stuck with it.
 
Guys let me pretend for like five minutes they're going to actually try to use their new capabilities on the SB zones instead of just leaping to the next excuse after everyone let them know soulless dioramas were a-ok
 
Everyone is gonna be using it buuuut I don't even care. The hairstyle is so cool!

bSMxyYt.jpg
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iammeiam said:
Guys let me pretend for like five minutes they're going to actually try to use their new capabilities on the SB zones instead of just leaping to the next excuse after everyone let them know soulless dioramas were a-ok
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I'm pretty sure Yoshi-P or someone specifically said that, while they won't be making zones much bigger after dropping the PS3, they do want to make them more dense and varied in Stormblood. I think they're aware the HW zones are kind of empty.
 
Kugane alone being seamless is a huge step in the right direction. Even if whatever ends up as our endgame hub you know a lot of people are going to be hanging out in Kugane to be weeblords.
 
kugane is not going to be the new hub, the hub has never been a city, it was mor dhona then, now idyllshire, and i have a feeling it's going to be the place where the player character and "yda" sparred in the trailer for SB
 
Qvoth said:
kugane is not going to be the new hub, the hub has never been a city, it was mor dhona then, now idyllshire, and i have a feeling it's going to be the place where the player character and "yda" sparred in the trailer for SB
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No I know that, but people are probably going to be more liable to hang out and idle in Kugane than they are Ishgard. :P
 
Also: Holding L1 or R1 and tapping up/down on Dpad will select enemies from the enmity list. It literally made tanking feasible for me and led me to decide to sub! Wish they featured this stuff more.
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WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

This is GAME CHANGING for me. How did I never notice it before?
 
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