[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Kaelwryn]

To be fair though in Japan they treat the Duty Finder/Raid Finder differently. They actually use it from what I've heard and they expect you to come knowing what you are doing.

JP also have a strat/guide that everyone follows, and typically the groups will use macros to explain said strat.

[StrawberryZebra]

Just done Singularity Reactor as SCH and it turns out that Selene heals more with Embrace there than at level 70. It's also very apparent that despite having decent enough gear, that Aetherflow restores just 150 MP more at 70 than at 60, Physick gains a mere 300 healing and Succor just 250 in a 10 level span.

Either the down-level scaling is just totally broken, or they've really borked up SCH scalings at 70.

[Faroth]

That's both a detriment and a positive in the same sentence though. There are numerous times I wish I could rather than sitting in queues TBH. I've seen others echo this sentiment as well. That said, it's still not a good idea lol.

In WoW if you're leveling from 1, you have quite a few zones you can go through to differ your experience. As you get into the expac content you're filtered into a lot of the same zones though. They'd do well to utilize their world level sync tech a bit more, but I almost suspect it's too late to use it in the context it'd be best used for IMO of course.

Either way I'm not sure you picked up the point of my post. It wasn't that WoW's is good. It's that they're both bad.

Dozens of dungeons/trials in a randomized roulette, Palace of the Dead, FATEs, hunt bills, leves (til 60), side quests not done in MSQ, beast tribe dailies, challenge log, you have a fairly vast variety of options to mix up the grind of leveling. But that's bad.

People shouldn't be forced to do the MSQ, it's stupid to make them do so, which is also bad.

Not having the MSQ available 15 times for every job to replay is bad.

Making players play through the same zones on alts is bad.

I struggle to understand why you even play MMOs.

And for the record? I lose a hell of a lot of respect when people say "that's not content" because what they're REALLY saying is "anything I don't like doesn't count, the game should cater exclusively to my tastes for it to count." It's the pinnacle of arrogance.

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I would honestly rather that than spam potd endlessly TBH.

So don't? Do hunt bills, FATEs for challenge log, roulettes, beast tribe dailies to a point (even in Stormblood, you get a LOT of xp from Vanu/Gnaath until new ones are added). Queue for PvP, it's short and gives a lot of xp, even if you lose.

Mix it up instead of grinding the same thing ad nauseum. They put a lot of options in there for a reason. Stop ignoring them... stop treating a game like a job where you have to maximum every moment of gameplay for efficiency. :/

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It's the fastest route by far if you're a DPS.
Yeah you can get there incredibly slowly, but that's kinda pointless.

If you're over 60, seriously, try some PvP. You might find it more different from match to match and it gives a lot of xp. I've seen some claim it's the better option over PotD. Realize I hate PvP and I've had a lot of fun with XIV's equivalent of battlegrounds.

[Granyala]

Yeah you can get there incredibly slowly, but that's kinda pointless.

Why?
I have active jobs (WHM main and DRK second) both are leveled quickly (already 70).
BLM is my backup DPS for group versatility that is leveled slowly now, mostly by doing side quests and the occasional dungeon.

The rest is there to be played when I am in the mood to play with kitty but my active jobs are done for the day/week.

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To be fair though in Japan they treat the Duty Finder/Raid Finder differently. They actually use it from what I've heard and they expect you to come knowing what you are doing.

Ex and savage? Absolutely.
Dungeons and normal modes?
Come on, most encounters are so simple and tuned so lax that you don't need strats or can sum up the important bits in one sentence.
Personally, I find it fun to react and figure out strats on the fly. My days of thorough raid prep are long past.

[Ragnarocket]

I think BQ's are only relevant XP wise if you're at the level they're around. You're not leveling solo on ARR BQ's at level 67. Not appreciably at least. Same thing with FATEs, unless you enjoy doing the same 6-7 zone FATEs over and over and over.... and over.../snore. Oh sorry I'm awake.

YOu can only get appreciable XP from old dungeons via daily roulette. Once you exhaust that you're forced to grind the highest dungeon you can queue for to level). Again, not saying other games do this well, just saying it's not something FF14 does super well either. Being faster than an overweight slow kid doesn't mean you're fast.

FATEs as you probably know by now are not content to me.

Beast Quests are actually decent content for leveling through 50-60 if you are tired of other things. They scale and allow you to increase your rep with the Vath or the Vanu-Vanu at the same time. The EXP is pretty good too considering how fast they go. It's at least an option during the HW grind other than PotD. While FATE grinding can sometimes be monotonous I've never done it long enough to really have it annoy me. I'll go do something else after I feel I've done a few or I only do them while queued up for a roulette or dungeon (usually only DPS queues allow for this). I'm not saying they don't get tiresome after doing them for AGES but it's a good way to break up dungeon spamming, POTD spamming, quest grinding, hunts, PvP, etc etc...it's just a nice other thing you can do to break up the monotony.

While true that the roulettes are the only efficient way of doing those old dungeons at least we have the system in place. As I mentioned with WoW you have a VERY limited set of dungeons that you can level with at all. I think it would be nice in the future if the EXP we got for dungeons was a bit more percent based rather than level based so that if I want to run Sastasha with a friend as a level 34 to help them get some beginning gear it doesn't feel like a waste for me as well. Obviously this would only worked while sync'd.

FATEs may not be content to you but they are content to quite a few other people and shouldn't be discounted simply because you do not like them. I didn't like dailies in WoW but that didn't mean they weren't content.

[Katchii]

I've died I think 3 times since playing, I am currently lvl 64, all 3 times It has fucked me off.

Seems like you're really making a mountain out of a mole hill.

FYI, you have the option of going and getting the aetherytes in the zone when you get there. Some zones have multiple, like the ones in Stormblood areas where you can only reach one until you progress the story enough. But there is always at least one you can just run and get, you don't need to wait for the story to take you there and the aetheryte in Ruby Sea next to the Confederate establishment is available as soon as you zone in.

That said, NOT having the available aetheryte in a zone is your fault. And again, dying in an MMO is SUPPOSED to have a penalty/ be annoying, in this one it's a combo of a very small repair cost and travel time to get back to where you were which would takes a few minutes at worst.

I'm not trying to make light of it, it does suck, but there are plenty of options available that can fix that for you...like changing your home point to an aetheryte closer to where you are questing or simply NOT dying, which is usually really easy but there are admittedly times when things just spiral out of control.

But if this is one of the larger gripes you have with this game, I'd say that's pretty amazing as there are a LOT more mechanics and things within an MMO that could be wrong.

[lawow74]

I think of the term grind, and how I believe the real definition to be 'something I force myself to do because it gets me something I want'. It's easy to forget many players don't have the ability to play games more than a handful of hours in a given week, if that much, and they want to spend it doing the things they love most. But often those things are gated behind some form of grind, and it becomes discouraging to try and get to it, so like an unpleasant chore, the sooner done the better.

For all that people will wail and gnash their teeth, things like skip potions need to exist, because some people really do have more money than time and TBH those who will play well after using them are about as numerous as those who will after grinding out the same level. If you're motivated to learn your role and how it works in a given encounter, doesn't matter if you spent dozens of hours running content or if you paid to fastpass your way to cap. Work at it and you improve.

If you can't or won't improve, doesn't matter how long it took you to get there. It is what it is.

[Katchii]

Yeah, this game really does need some form of repeatable XP that isn't a chore to grind out. PvP was, briefly, this until they nerfed the XP for it. GW2 had the right idea imo, award ample XP for everything. That way players can level by doing the content that appeals to them the most, be that combat and the story, or picking flowers and baking cakes.

Let's be honest here, by the time you've done the MSQ and all the side quests, what leveling content remains quickly loses its appeal when you consider how many POTD runs you're going to have to do in order to hit 70 with all jobs.

I really don't see why it needs to take so long at all. I know some people think of leveling as a form of extended tutorial, but when you get your class defining mechanics at levels 60+, the bulk of the time spent "learning to play" is completely obsolete. If learning begins at 60, it's less to go back and unlearn when you just rush players there in the first place.

After the maybe second job to max, you've exhausted all the side quests. After which, the ONLY methods of leveling the rest of the jobs are the super grindy methods like FATEs (which nobody does), PotD (which is the worst option from 60-70), PvP (which was nerfed so is usually not worth it unless you really like PvP, which I don't), Dungeon grinding (which is really only viable on tanks and healers with low queue times) and Roulettes (which are only worthwhile once a day). Therefore, unless you're just a masochist, leaves roulettes as the only viable option for most folks. Doing the Trial, Leveling, and 50/60 Roulette gives ~50% of a level depending on what level you are (more if you're lower, less if you're higher) so at best it takes two days of roulettes to gain a single level or ~20 days to go from 60-70 using just rouletes. Which is pretty insane...and that's with the armory bonus.

I now have 3 jobs at 70; Red Mage, Dark Knight and Paladin. Red Mage was leveled first as I went through the story and was an absolute joy because I didn't have to do ANY grinding and I love the job. Dark knight was done primarily through dungeon grinding, as was Paladin with some roulettes thrown in here and there and I enjoyed both jobs, but the prospect of having nothing else to do besides roulettes and running the same dungeons.....it's disheartening. Sirensong Sea, Shisui of the Violet Tides, Bardam's Mettle, Doma Castle and Castrum Abania were all fun and great when going through the story. Now...I have literally every single drop available from all of them and find them mundane and boring.

[Super Kami Dende]

Seems like you're really making a mountain out of a mole hill.

FYI, you have the option of going and getting the aetherytes in the zone when you get there. Some zones have multiple, like the ones in Stormblood areas where you can only reach one until you progress the story enough. But there is always at least one you can just run and get, you don't need to wait for the story to take you there and the aetheryte in Ruby Sea next to the Confederate establishment is available as soon as you zone in.

That said, NOT having the available aetheryte in a zone is your fault. And again, dying in an MMO is SUPPOSED to have a penalty/ be annoying, in this one it's a combo of a very small repair cost and travel time to get back to where you were which would takes a few minutes at worst.

I'm not trying to make light of it, it does suck, but there are plenty of options available that can fix that for you...like changing your home point to an aetheryte closer to where you are questing or simply NOT dying, which is usually really easy but there are admittedly times when things just spiral out of control.

But if this is one of the larger gripes you have with this game, I'd say that's pretty amazing as there are a LOT more mechanics and things within an MMO that could be wrong.

AS I said earlier in the thread "It happened when I was doing the stretch between Kugane and Othard when you go like 40mins between leaving Kugane and getting to the Confederacy Village to get the new aetheryte of the zone and my home point was New Gridania. That's how long it had been since I died that it was still set to my Home Town.

So teleport to Kugane then having to run and swim all the way back over to Othard was annoying as all hell."

[Wrecktangle]

I don't think FATEs themselves are bad, they're just not organized. I feel something like the Diadem, an organized instance of FATEs, would be far preferable for leveling using the FATE model as content. You queue up, join a group quickly, do your FATEs and either stick around to keep grinding or leave and do it again.

BNS had a feature I wasn't terribly happy with, but it was passable. It was the Celestial Basin. It gave you 5 random quests with and by completing 3 of the 5 you got 5 new ones. The point was to accrue a currency that you could farm as much as your brain could handle. It was viable to use when sitting around waiting for something to do. The currency was incredibly rewarding and the combat system lends itself better to monotonous content a bit better as well. Compare that system to FATE's and you can see the obvious similarities, but where FATE's fall apart is that doing them solo is fucking awful, even your bo barely helps. The rewards they give are downright irrelevant, then lastly couple it with the fact that if you ever got a single relic weapon you probably never want to see another FATE again.

I struggle to understand why you even play MMOs.

1) Because I like playing with other players.
2) Because I like to watch my character grow.
3) Because I enjoy RPGs.

And for the record? I lose a hell of a lot of respect when people say "that's not content" because what they're REALLY saying is "anything I don't like doesn't count, the game should cater exclusively to my tastes for it to count." It's the pinnacle of arrogance.

No it's not. It's you taking things personally and not looking at it objectively.

Can you name a single fun/good thing about FATEs that no other content offers or does better?They're not rewarding. They're not challenging/engaging. They're very repetitive. They are tedious to solo. They are obnoxious when there are too many people. The optimal way to do them is to get gold credit and leave and let someone else finish it for you while you start the next one. They don't impact or change the world in any meaningful fashion.

That's not even counting the fact that 2 previous relic weapon questlines basically forced us into spamming them HUNDREDs of times.

That is not content. That is torture.

Beast Quests are actually decent content for leveling through 50-60 if you are tired of other things. They scale and allow you to increase your rep with the Vath or the Vanu-Vanu at the same time. The EXP is pretty good too considering how fast they go. It's at least an option during the HW grind other than PotD.

FATEs may not be content to you but they are content to quite a few other people and shouldn't be discounted simply because you do not like them. I didn't like dailies in WoW but that didn't mean they weren't content.

I didn't know that about the HW beast dailies. Appreciate the info. I only ever did the ARR ones and I don't recall that being the case.

See above for my statement regarding FATEs. A good analogy would be someone liking going to get a root canal. I fail to see in what world that is an enjoyable endeavor.

WoW dailies generally had a point so while you may not have enjoyed them, it's pretty obvious they count (just like I don't discount beast tribe dailies as viable content).

[Katchii]

AS I said earlier in the thread "It happened when I was doing the stretch between Kugane and Othard when you go like 40mins between leaving Kugane and getting to the Confederacy Village to get the new aetheryte of the zone and my home point was New Gridania. That's how long it had been since I died that it was still set to my Home Town.

So teleport to Kugane then having to run and swim all the way back over to Othard was annoying as all hell."

And as I said, the Confederate Village aetheryte is available as soon as you zone in to Ruby Sea, it's not gated behind the story. I also agreed that dying is annoying. But it took you what....5 minutes? to get back to where you were? When you're literally half a world away from where you died? Many games have had it MUCH worse. Dying is supposed to have a penalty.

[lawow74]

BNS had a feature I wasn't terribly happy with, but it was passable. It was the Celestial Basin. It gave you 5 random quests with and by completing 3 of the 5 you got 5 new ones. The point was to accrue a currency that you could farm as much as your brain could handle. It was viable to use when sitting around waiting for something to do. The currency was incredibly rewarding and the combat system lends itself better to monotonous content a bit better as well. Compare that system to FATE's and you can see the obvious similarities, but where FATE's fall apart is that doing them solo is fucking awful, even your bo barely helps. The rewards they give are downright irrelevant, then lastly couple it with the fact that if you ever got a single relic weapon you probably never want to see another FATE again.

I don't know if you ever did the Diadem, but it's essentially a Full Party FATE mission. What mission is random, but it requires you to go do certain FATEs in the area to complete the mission goals, at the end of which you get your reward. I think something similar, intended to award XP instead of shinies, would be a preferable method to doing the open world FATEs, cos as you say, solo they're tedious and in a large group they're annoying if you can't exploit them via spamming some AoE.

[Katchii]

BNS had a feature I wasn't terribly happy with, but it was passable. It was the Celestial Basin. It gave you 5 random quests with and by completing 3 of the 5 you got 5 new ones. The point was to accrue a currency that you could farm as much as your brain could handle. It was viable to use when sitting around waiting for something to do. The currency was incredibly rewarding and the combat system lends itself better to monotonous content a bit better as well. Compare that system to FATE's and you can see the obvious similarities, but where FATE's fall apart is that doing them solo is fucking awful, even your bo barely helps. The rewards they give are downright irrelevant, then lastly couple it with the fact that if you ever got a single relic weapon you probably never want to see another FATE again.



1) Because I like playing with other players.
2) Because I like to watch my character grow.
3) Because I enjoy RPGs.



No it's not. It's you taking things personally and not looking at it objectively.

Can you name a single fun/good thing about FATEs that no other content offers or does better?They're not rewarding. They're not challenging/engaging. They're very repetitive. They are tedious to solo. They are obnoxious when there are too many people. The optimal way to do them is to get gold credit and leave and let someone else finish it for you while you start the next one. They don't impact or change the world in any meaningful fashion.

That's not even counting the fact that 2 previous relic weapon questlines basically forced us into spamming them HUNDREDs of times.

That is not content. That is torture.



I didn't know that about the HW beast dailies. Appreciate the info. I only ever did the ARR ones and I don't recall that being the case.

See above for my statement regarding FATEs. A good analogy would be someone liking going to get a root canal. I fail to see in what world that is an enjoyable endeavor.

WoW dailies generally had a point so while you may not have enjoyed them, it's pretty obvious they count (just like I don't discount beast tribe dailies as viable content).

The point is you don't like it so you say it's not content. You have specific, objective reasons for not liking it....but it still boils down to you disregarding it as content simply because you don't like it. And many of the reason you stated in why you don't like them also apply to things YOU call content. Dungeons, after a certain point are not rewarding, they're not challenging or engaging, they're very repetitive, tedious to solo and don't impact or change the world in any meaningful fashion. The same can be said of Extreme Primals and Raids after a certain point. But I'd like to focus on the word "rewarding" here, because that's usually what you focus on in addition to engaging. You find challenge and engagement rewarding and meaningful. Depending on the person and the objective, challenge and engagement are not required to have the reward be meaningful. When leveling, XP is the bottom line, with folks having different levels of engagement required for them to do it and honestly FATE's require you to be engaged...not necessarily in combat, but you need to be present and aware of where they are, how to get there, what the objective, etc... so you can get the xp you need.

Just because you fail to understand how or why people find FATEs to be enjoyable.....and no one really ever argued that FATEs are enjoyable.... doesn't mean FATEs are not content. Regardless of your feelings on it, it is something a player can participate in that provides rewards that the development team spent time designing and implementing. That is, by definition, content.

[Graeham]

Well, the flavour text for FATEs serves to flesh out the game's lore further. So that's certainly of a lot of benefit!

As for them being tedious? Well, most of the content that involves doing them for hours on end is completely optional. I spent hours grinding FATEs back during the Yo-Kai crossover event. Do I regret it? Not at all! I'm one of the 2500~ players on the census to have all the items and mounts from that particular event. I chose to do it.

Just like I chose to get a relic weapon which also involved FATEs. Occasionally I choose to join a FATE party to break up things a little in between PvP and POTD when leveling different jobs.

[StrawberryZebra]

Dying is supposed to have a penalty.

It already has one - You're dead! You're no longer participating in content and have to sit it out, it's the in game equivelent of being sin binned in Hockey, Rugby etc. If you're leveling, you're no longer completing quests or gaining XP, effectively putting a temporary halt on your progress.

Having an additional penalty, in the form of having to travel across half the world and go through two loading screens and a Chocobo ride just to get back to where you were is overkill. Having the option to spawn at the nearest unlocked Aetherite or at the Zone entry point for example wouldn't be a bad idea. Saying that other games have it worse doesn't make the current system good. Dying in open world content doesn't need to be Dark Souls level punishing.

Compare that system to FATE's and you can see the obvious similarities, but where FATE's fall apart is that doing them solo is fucking awful, even your bo barely helps. The rewards they give are downright irrelevant, then lastly couple it with the fact that if you ever got a single relic weapon you probably never want to see another FATE again.

Rift had a pretty good solution to this problem with it's Instant Adventures. Queueing up for it would automatically put you in a raid group, teleport you to the correct zone and if appropriate adjust your level. The Adventures themselves were essentially just larger scale versions of quests, involving killing mobs, looting items etc, but you could barrel through lots more of them in the same time frame due to being grouped up. They even reused a lot of their old raids, including watered down versions of some of their bosses, opening up that content for players who may have missed it the first time around.

They were still just as grindy as FATEs, but you were automatically grouped up for them and a lot of the travel time was cut out in the process too. It made them an ideal way to level, while also offering the simple switch-off abnegation RPG's are great at. You could get a couple of levels in an evening on autopilot.

[Faroth]

No it's not. It's you taking things personally and not looking at it objectively.

Can you name a single fun/good thing about FATEs that no other content offers or does better?They're not rewarding. They're not challenging/engaging. They're very repetitive. They are tedious to solo. They are obnoxious when there are too many people. The optimal way to do them is to get gold credit and leave and let someone else finish it for you while you start the next one. They don't impact or change the world in any meaningful fashion.

That's not even counting the fact that 2 previous relic weapon questlines basically forced us into spamming them HUNDREDs of times.

That is not content. That is torture.

Sidequests (They're not rewarding just xp, challenging/engaging, repetitive in tasks, tedious to solo and obnoxious when too many are doing them)
Daily quests (They're not rewarding just xp, challenging/engaging, repetitive in tasks, tedious to solo and obnoxious when too many are doing them)
Palace of the Dead (It's not rewarding just xp, challenging/engaging, repetitive, tedious to solo)
Dungeons (They're not rewarding just xp, challenging/engaging, repetitive)
24 mans (They're not rewarding, challenging/engaging, repetitive)
Trials (They're not rewarding, challenging/engaging, repetitive)
Guildhests (They're not rewarding, challenging/engaging, repetitive)
Leves (They're not rewarding, challenging/engaging, repetitive)
Crafting (It's not rewarding, challenging/engaging, repetitive)
And some would argue Main Scenario quest chain fits those requirements.

Conveniently leaving only one thing: Raiding.

So yeah, it's the same tired argument I've seen dozens upon dozens of times. "Raiding is the only real content, everything else is a waste of resources." And you've made it pretty clear you find anything other than Mythic/Savage content to be pretty much trash.

You know in WoW, getting transmog was a 2 year active debate? Practically an all out tooth and nail fight to claw for it, across 6 capped threads (every thread maxed out the number of replies) that was constantly argued against because it "wasn't content" and would detract from getting content, i.e., more raids and was a waste of time nobody wanted or would use.

Primarily because raiders didn't see the point and thus dismissed it with the simple phrase "that's not content."

But what do FATEs do that other content doesn't do better? Keeps the world alive and active. It keeps people out there doing things rather than every zone being a complete ghost town since everyone is sitting in a city or their Order Hall queueing for their next mini-game attraction run.


So yeah, I like doing FATEs sometimes. I wish they were more active for longer through the life of each expansion rather than just the first week. I do wish there were more FATEs like Foxy Lady and Ixion. Foxy Lady was pretty fun, even if the mechanics aren't hard once you know the three main things she'll do. Could they be better? Absolutely, they could have more impact on the world, especially for failing them. But they're still a form of content.

I'd love to see zones with 3-4 FATEs that spawn simultaneously with Ixion/Foxy Lady/Odin/Bahamut scale FATEs that can't be "down 1, move to the next" but need to be downed within a time of each other, spreading groups out and making you have to legit deal with them rather than swarming one at a time. Or dealing with them in different orders has different effects, makes them harder/easier, etc. Zone wide events utilizing FATEs would be great, especially if they had negative impacts on players as a whole for failing them.

But sadly, if such a thing happened? Players would be furious their precious time was impacted by something they weren't a part of. How dare the world have consquences? How dare the game not be entirely for them the moment they log in! And this is why we can't have nicer, more exciting, things.

I think of Log Horizon again, where players ignored the Goblin King events and resulted in a massive Sahagin army attacking simultaneously as more goblins than they'd ever seen attacking from another direction, leading to a long campaign to deal with the goblin king himself taking many characters out of the story for a while because they were on the front. But an actual game doing such a thing? Disrupting all players because FATEs were ignored? Would never fly because we're so obsessed with maximum efficiency xp/tomestones per minute rather than actually having fun.

Another improvement I wouldn't mind seeing that actually could be implemented? Merge Legion's World Quest system concept with FATEs and have some that last longer, despite players completing their requirements, and grant a variety of rewards. Maybe a FATE is up for 30 minutes in Yanxia that gives 10 tomestones of Creation. Maybe another in Azim Steppe gives 5,000 gil. One thing I did like a lot about the World Quest system was being able to target my goals (do I want resources, gold, crafting item, gear, etc) and I could go after the ones that granted what I needed at the time. The same with FATEs in XIV offering: Bonus XP, Tomestones (and it could be some give verity, some creation), gil, GC seals, allied hunt marks, etc.) would be a cool update on the system.

Heck, go back and look at some of the systems in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes with how Diplomacy, Combat, and Crafting interacted and work that into things. Adventurers do FATEs in a zone, once enough are done, the area is safer and guards can better protect the outpost. Crafters in the zone get a buff to crafting, so it might be favorable to head there to work on crafting for a while (or even tie in some turn ins in the area for crafters/gatherers that open up after FATEs are done). We don't have diplomacy (but MMOs need to revisit the concept), so that doesn't really tie in. I think in Vanguard it was Diplomacy players yielded buffs for Crafters who yielded buffs for Adventurers, but I could have those swapped around.

But anyway, yeah, they're still content. They're just content you don't like. But then, again, you've voiced you don't particularly like dungeons and 24 mans either, for largely the same basic reasons - you don't find them engaging and find them repetetive. That's an opinion. It's not somehow non-content.

[Graeham]

The penalty for dying in FFXIV is minimal - and there's ways to mitigate travel time in advance if you know you're going to be spending a decent amount of time in a particular area. If you fail to account for that then the 'punishment' will be harsher...but even then you're looking at a tiny inconvenience at best. The game even reminds you repeatedly to attune to aetherytes as soon as you see them and you can zoom across the map in a matter of seconds to reach any of them that are unlocked. For no price higher than 999 gil - which is pretty minimal given how easy gil is to make in FFXIV.

[Deleted]

Can you name a single fun/good thing about FATEs that no other content offers or does better?They're not rewarding. They're not challenging/engaging. They're very repetitive. They are tedious to solo. They are obnoxious when there are too many people. The optimal way to do them is to get gold credit and leave and let someone else finish it for you while you start the next one. They don't impact or change the world in any meaningful fashion.

That's not even counting the fact that 2 previous relic weapon questlines basically forced us into spamming them HUNDREDs of times.

That is not content. That is torture.

I can: it's open world content that has storylines and lore attached to it/them.
Fates are only bad when you have to do them for something completely unrelated to them. (Relic weapons for example)
They are supposed to make the world lively - just like in GW2 etc. and that's something they do really well.

I wouldn't mind it if they'd redesign them to be easier/faster to solo though (at least the minor ones)

[Faroth]

It already has one - You're dead! You're no longer participating in content and have to sit it out, it's the in game equivelent of being sin binned in Hockey, Rugby etc. If you're leveling, you're no longer completing quests or gaining XP, effectively putting a temporary halt on your progress.

Having an additional penalty, in the form of having to travel across half the world and go through two loading screens and a Chocobo ride just to get back to where you were is overkill. Having the option to spawn at the nearest unlocked Aetherite or at the Zone entry point for example wouldn't be a bad idea. Saying that other games have it worse doesn't make the current system good. Dying in open world content doesn't need to be Dark Souls level punishing.

I kind of liked Vanguard's approach (though not suggesting it's perfect). They went with EQ's model of you die and your body/stuff is left where you died.
But you then could use an altar where you respawned to get everything back for a penalty (I think it was an xp debuff, so you gained less xp for 30 minutes or something) or you could run back and get your stuff for no penalty. Again, not saying that's perfect, but I did like the idea of there being more danger in death, but a choice of which method you were comfortable with taking for recovery.

Thing is, though, Vanguard was an open world MMO, it wasn't instanced. I think that's a huge difference and a requirement for death to have that sense of danger and an impact. You can't really do it in a majority instanced MMO and have the same thrill.

I've kind of thought Diadem-like content would be interesting to go back to old school EQ & FFXI ideas where enemies don't leash and trains can be a real threat. I'm not 100% sure how it could be translated to modern state, though. Farming for a chance at strong items, etc.

But honestly? If you think having a dreaded port and flight is a death penalty? Good grief, that's... just, lol, no, that's not "Dark Souls punishing" in any remote conceivable notion. WoW and FFXIV have essentially no death penalty whastoever.

[Katchii]

It already has one - You're dead! You're no longer participating in content and have to sit it out, it's the in game equivelent of being sin binned in Hockey, Rugby etc. If you're leveling, you're no longer completing quests or gaining XP, effectively putting a temporary halt on your progress.

Having an additional penalty, in the form of having to travel across half the world and go through two loading screens and a Chocobo ride just to get back to where you were is overkill. Having the option to spawn at the nearest unlocked Aetherite or at the Zone entry point for example wouldn't be a bad idea. Saying that other games have it worse doesn't make the current system good. Dying in open world content doesn't need to be Dark Souls level punishing.



Rift had a pretty good solution to this problem with it's Instant Adventures. Queueing up for it would automatically put you in a raid group, teleport you to the correct zone and if appropriate adjust your level. The Adventures themselves were essentially just larger scale versions of quests, involving killing mobs, looting items etc, but you could barrel through lots more of them in the same time frame due to being grouped up. They even reused a lot of their old raids, including watered down versions of some of their bosses, opening up that content for players who may have missed it the first time around.

They were still just as grindy as FATEs, but you were automatically grouped up for them and a lot of the travel time was cut out in the process too. It made them an ideal way to level, while also offering the simple switch-off abnegation RPG's are great at. You could get a couple of levels in an evening on autopilot.

I'll get on board with spawning at the nearest unlocked aetheryte...but that's a REALLY minimal difference between respawning at your home point and just selecting to teleport back there anyway. If it's unlocked, you can teleport there from anywhere in the world so you'd only be saving a few hundred gil and the time it takes to teleport which is like...15 seconds at worst.

I would also be extremely excited if FFXIV implemented something like Rifts Instant Adventures, I loved those because it was a solid, efficient, viable but most importantly reliable method of leveling regardless of what level you were or where you were. It's still a grind though, but I don't think leveling is ever NOT a grind of some sort.