[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[SodiumChloride]

Ah... I see.. well then I don't really agree with the removal then. I think removing things just because it might be seen as a nuisance is eh. The little things all add to the games fantasy.

If FFXIV is following in WoW footsteps, in lockstep into the abyss, professions will soon be "a solution looking for a problem" - all because a certain group of players can't stand that their favorite activity is somehow interconnected to other activities.

[Aruhen]

Rofl... that level 58 DRK quest... I swear those little bastards.

If FFXIV is following in WoW footsteps, in lockstep into the abyss, professions will soon be "a solution looking for a problem" - all because a certain group of players can't stand that their favorite activity is somehow interconnected to other activities.

And to be frank I don't think that would be too much of an issue. The crafting professions shouldn't be connected in a way were you have to get the other ones to whatever level to even do something. The connectivity can remain from having to use items crafted by other professions as part of your recipe which is perfectly fine and I doubt many are complaining about this aspect compared to the previous one.

Basically how it used to be in the older days of WoW. You want to craft X but you need item A, B and C. You can craft item A and B but item C is from a different profession. Now your options are to either buy it on the auction house or level it yourself. Not well fuck...I don't have THAT skill so I can't even make the damn thing even if I had the items.

[SodiumChloride]

And to be frank I don't think that would be too much of an issue. The crafting professions shouldn't be connected in a way were you have to get the other ones to whatever level to even do something. The connectivity can remain from having to use items crafted by other professions as part of your recipe which is perfectly fine and I doubt many are complaining about this aspect compared to the previous one.

The connectivity I'm talking about is between professions and other activities in the game.

The worst case scenario is the game ends up like WoW, where everything is pretty close to it's own mini-game.

[Graeham]

I'm not too worried. FFXIV feels very different to WoW. There's some similarities, sure, but I doubt they're going to make it a complete clone - especially when WoW itself is gradually fading into obscurity for various reasons. I do hope 4.0 completely blows people away though, it needs some new core ideas and to not shy away from experimentation.

[SodiumChloride]

I'm not too worried. FFXIV feels very different to WoW. There's some similarities, sure, but I doubt they're going to make it a complete clone - especially when WoW itself is gradually fading into obscurity for various reasons. I do hope 4.0 completely blows people away though, it needs some new core ideas and to not shy away from experimentation.

"Some" is an understatement.

The tomes system is a near exact clone of heroic/valour and serve the exact same purpose, catch up gear.

Beast tribe dailies ... are dailies.

Professions are slowly losing their purpose ... or you can argue they never had one to begin with - that people only crafted shit because they came from FFXI and thought that crafting meant something. Raid drops >>> everything else. Can't have crafted stuff outshine them or raiders will bitch. Crafting and it's products can pretty much ignored.

Playing FFXIV I get a sense of deja vu.

YoshiP honestly thinks these are standard MMO features ...

The holdovers from FFXI (and other FFs) that people keep bugging the development team over are probably the only things differentiating FFXIV from WoW - Hunts, Triple Triad, Chocobo Racing ... etc.

[Graeham]

WoW didn't create those sort of systems though...

Honestly I get the impression that you may simply be weary of the game or even the genre itself. It happens.

[Aruhen]

I don't understand you at all. Your making wild leaps of logic. Its ridiculous... the crafting in this game is very healthy (minus the whole cross ability business) as a lot of things are related to crafting. Housing items? Crafting. Materia? Crafting. Glamour prisms? Crafting. Best gear outside of savage raiding if you don't want to farm weeks for lore? Crafting.

There is no reason to remove any of this. They might simplify some of it like removing the five ranks of prisms but that is a good thing. Heck there's a lot of players out there who just play the game mostly through their crafting professions. Its a legitimate playstyle that is actually acknowledged by the developers words.

[Usagi Senshi]

Woot? Tera looked amazing and would even run on my toaster back then. Gameplay wise it was way above anything else when it came to responsiveness too.

I never complained about its controls but I do disagree about responsiveness as BnS, GW2, WoW, and FFXIV are all smooth in that regard as well. No, TERA runs like complete shit on my i5 2500k/i7 2600 390/560ti/7870/780ti combos. I get constant 20-80fps wildly swinging around where ever it wants and lots of lag. Some parts of the world are completely shitty looking and the shortcuts are extremely obvious as well.

And it was most certainly not my connection that's for sure:


I stand by my words.

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"Some" is an understatement.

The tomes system is a near exact clone of heroic/valour and serve the exact same purpose, catch up gear.

Beast tribe dailies ... are dailies.

Professions are slowly losing their purpose ... or you can argue they never had one to begin with - that people only crafted shit because they came from FFXI and thought that crafting meant something. Raid drops >>> everything else. Can't have crafted stuff outshine them or raiders will bitch. Crafting and it's products can pretty much ignored.

Playing FFXIV I get a sense of deja vu.

YoshiP honestly thinks these are standard MMO features ...

The holdovers from FFXI (and other FFs) that people keep bugging the development team over are probably the only things differentiating FFXIV from WoW - Hunts, Triple Triad, Chocobo Racing ... etc.

I have a feeling YoshiP would lean more towards the casual players and crafters before they fully succumb to the hardcore like Blizzard did for years (which is finally starting to crumble). The way the reward structures are and the closely tied ilvls (5-10 ilvls compared to the massive 30+ ilvl difference in gear in WoW) already confirms that is the case.

[Granyala]

Professions are slowly losing their purpose ... or you can argue they never had one to begin with - that people only crafted shit because they came from FFXI and thought that crafting meant something. Raid drops >>> everything else. Can't have crafted stuff outshine them or raiders will bitch. Crafting and it's products can pretty much ignored.

The 220 crafting items are actually quite strong. As a tank I had people in full crafting gear almost rip threat off my hands.
Why? because you can craft and overmeld them on day 1 in order to jumpstart progression.

I'm not sure how they measure up to the 230 tome stuff though.

No, TERA runs like complete shit on my i5 2500k/i7 2600 390/560ti/7870/780ti combos.

*chuckles* I played TERA on my C2D E6600 / 8800GTX.
No clue how it would run on my system today.

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Best gear outside of savage raiding if you don't want to farm weeks for lore? Crafting.

This one is hilarious, given the fact that you will have to grind intensely for MONTHS and overmeld your crafting gear to even stand a chance at HQing the 220 combat gear.

[Aruhen]

This one is hilarious, given the fact that you will have to grind intensely for MONTHS and overmeld your crafting gear to even stand a chance at HQing the 220 combat gear.

But at least you can! ...the same cant be said with the three item level limit in Warlords... why the heck is that even a thing? To me it seems Blizzard is afraid to give players a choice in how they gear up and just wants to funnel them all into a single path.

[Granyala]

But at least you can! ...the same cant be said with the three item level limit in Warlords... why the heck is that even a thing? To me it seems Blizzard is afraid to give players a choice in how they gear up and just wants to funnel them all into a single path.

Agreed.
Blizzard is absolutely frigging TERRIFIED of giving out decent gear for ... anything NOT raiding.
So in WoW we're not only stuck with crap stats compared to any raider, we're also stuck looking like beggars. Because good looking stuff can only be found in raids. Well... sorta.

Okay who am I kidding. T18 speaks for itself. >.<

One reason why I love F-XIV so much is that I get get complete sets, look awesome and have great player power to boot, w/o ever having to step foot into raiding.

[Aruhen]

Yeah if I didn't have my challenge mode set from MoP then I'd look like complete horse dung. Sure you can go run old raids and whatever but that isn't an excuse to release half assed sets for the masses.

As far as Blizzard goes, they might be terrified of the outcry from the raiders like the kind that happened during MoP. I remember everyone and their mother crying about how they were "forced" to do dailies and LFR to get gear. Weirdly enough there's more options to get gear in FFXIV and yet I personally haven't seen an outcry about this.

Either way Legion to me doesn't seem to solve the issue... while the affixes and stuff seem nice I'm not really fond of running the same 10 dungeons for two years. I really don't seem them adding more as time passes. They say "maybe" but that usually means "we really meant no but we were afraid to say that originally" from what I've observed.

[Deleted]

Got my ALC to 60 a while back.

Noticed there are no new Poison/Paralyzing/Sleeping potions ...

WoW-style (raider induced) streamlining is beginning to infect this game. :/

oh "the fun" of gulping down/using consumables..... who wouldn't miss something like that!
Such interaction, much design. /s

Consumables are the blight of every single game ever created, whether it's MP, SP or MMO.

It's the same shit even in games like The Division, but at least you don't have to grind mats and you can refill them somewhere, doesn't help the fact if you are out of them, you need to go somewhere specifically just so you can have them, still alot better than actually having to grind for it or even design a whole profession around them.

As far as Blizzard goes, they might be terrified of the outcry from the raiders like the kind that happened during MoP. I remember everyone and their mother crying about how they were "forced" to do dailies and LFR to get gear. Weirdly enough there's more options to get gear in FFXIV and yet I personally haven't seen an outcry about this.

Either way Legion to me doesn't seem to solve the issue... while the affixes and stuff seem nice I'm not really fond of running the same 10 dungeons for two years. I really don't seem them adding more as time passes. They say "maybe" but that usually means "we really meant no but we were afraid to say that originally" from what I've observed.

To be fair, 10 dungeons would be much, much more than what FFXIV currently has to offer. And since you can adjust the difficulty, they should be much more fun too.
By the LOOKS of it, legion is going to be much more fun for players that don't want to raid 24/7.

I don't see how FFXIV is doing any better than WoW btw... please explain that to me. (not talking about sub numbers or anything, but rather what exactly they are doing)

The only difference between FFXIV and WoW I can see in terms of character progression:
You can get good gear outsides of raids due to grinding Lore/Law /whatever new name they come up with-stone.
The bad thing about this, you need to run the very boring 4mans which become old very easily because of the sheer amount of trash in them and how long it takes to kill them.... on top of that, there are only 2 which are worth running at any point in time.

This is something to be adressed in Legion with the CM-dungeons (greater rift style), which seems to be a much better idea than just giving out this stuff "for free" behind a very huge wall of boring trash.

[Granyala]

As far as Blizzard goes, they might be terrified of the outcry from the raiders like the kind that happened during MoP.

Imho Blizzard needs to "man up" and ignore this kind of whining.

[Aruhen]

Its not about the quantity, its about choice. Legion will from the looks of it either be do these dungeons for two whole years or get on the raid thread mill. Like me and others have said previously, you can gear up many ways in FFXIV. Do you want to go dungeons (and no you don't only have to do the two newest ones... wtf?) and get some good gear? You can do that. Do you just want to craft and never step foot into a dungeon? You can probably do that too. Heck you can just go party with people in the WORLD and get gear.

Boring? Maybe for you but some of us do enjoy content like this. Big fucking surprise eh? You go ahead and enjoy your 10 dungeons doing the same thing over and over and over for probably... two years? Sounds about right with Blizzards track record. Oh and those affixes? Like the ones that double the trash (which you hate) or the ones that make mobs hit harder? Sounds like a fun two years of doing the same dungeons with the same bosses that do the same exact mechanics. Oh yeah one last thing. I bet you the gear will also be same but the item level will just scale up. Fun!

Imho Blizzard needs to "man up" and ignore this kind of whining.

Yeah and to be frank they do seem to be at least trying to go in that direction. The whole World Quest feature looks interesting, at least for me.

[SodiumChloride]

WoW didn't create those sort of systems though...

Honestly I get the impression that you may simply be weary of the game or even the genre itself. It happens.

I'm OK with the game as a whole to be frank. I'm still playing after all. Just concern about the erosion of specific mechanics.

Unlike WoW, FFXIV has a decent story/lore pushing it - without said story/lore it just becomes a grind; Blizzard really shot themselves in the foot with their "gameplay >>>> lore" strategy, oblivious to the fact that you need both for the formula to work.

I don't understand you at all. Your making wild leaps of logic. Its ridiculous... the crafting in this game is very healthy (minus the whole cross ability business) as a lot of things are related to crafting. Housing items? Crafting. Materia? Crafting. Glamour prisms? Crafting. Best gear outside of savage raiding if you don't want to farm weeks for lore? Crafting.

There is no reason to remove any of this. They might simplify some of it like removing the five ranks of prisms but that is a good thing. Heck there's a lot of players out there who just play the game mostly through their crafting professions. Its a legitimate playstyle that is actually acknowledged by the developers words.

The similarities with WoW, with regards to how it's changed from ARR to HW, just have me a tad nervous.

I have a feeling YoshiP would lean more towards the casual players and crafters before they fully succumb to the hardcore like Blizzard did for years (which is finally starting to crumble). The way the reward structures are and the closely tied ilvls (5-10 ilvls compared to the massive 30+ ilvl difference in gear in WoW) already confirms that is the case.

Hopefully they will go with a more balance approach than Blizzard.

oh "the fun" of gulping down/using consumables..... who wouldn't miss something like that!
Such interaction, much design. /s

Consumables are the blight of every single game ever created, whether it's MP, SP or MMO.

It's the same shit even in games like The Division, but at least you don't have to grind mats and you can refill them somewhere, doesn't help the fact if you are out of them, you need to go somewhere specifically just so you can have them, still alot better than actually having to grind for it or even design a whole profession around them.

Dude, it's called strategy. How much resources to spend (, what resources and when to spend it) vs. your goal.

It's the spice that adds variety to gameplay.

You should really play other games than MMOs. Games like Dark Souls/Monster Hunter have consumables and things work fine.

The only downside is the prep work required to create them. There are ways around this. In DS, your primary consumables just refill at bonfires. In MMOs, that's what the Market Board is for - I never really understood why game developers don't exploit the fact that they have a diverse base of players that can fill different roles (outside of raiding) in the game.

[Deleted]

Its not about the quantity, its about choice. Legion will from the looks of it either be do these dungeons for two whole years or get on the raid thread mill. Like me and others have said previously, you can gear up many ways in FFXIV. Do you want to go dungeons (and no you don't only have to do the two newest ones... wtf?) and get some good gear? You can do that. Do you just want to craft and never step foot into a dungeon? You can probably do that too. Heck you can just go party with people in the WORLD and get gear.

Well this is not fair, yes there are only 2 dungeons because they are they only ones capping you out in a reasonable amount of time.
Old dungeons become rather useless as soon as new content hits. It's the same in WoW currently.. Otherwise we could count in all the old dungeons too thanks to timewalking.
Crafting works in WoW too, much better than FFXIV even because in FFXIV you craft crafting and gathering gear most of the time and it's a huuuuuge pain in the ass, no matter how you look at it, but yeah, you can get gear from it but realistically speaking, you can not... and it's not BiS either 95% of the time.

Don't make it look like FFXIV has alot of dungeons, it has not... you got 2 endgame dungeons in the beginning (the leveling dungeons became useless), people were freaking *STARVED* and lots of players already stopped playing soon after they went there 30 times. This has been discussed in this very thread for more than just 1 page.
After a while 2 new dungeons came up, which offered nothing in terms of item progression to anyone already playing the game.
Same with the 2 new ones which were added recently.

6 dungeons, only 2 were useful, the rest was nothing but farming Stones

edit: and how exactly are you able to get gear in the "world" in FFXIV? Hunts?...

like the ones that double the trash (which you hate) or the ones that make mobs hit harder?

I didn't say I hate trash, I hate FFXIV trash because it's the worst kind of trash, high HP, low damage, circles everywhere, you can't force bigger pulls because of said circles or because the game doesn't allow you too. Not to mention that AoE rotations with 2,5s GCD are horrible.

Boring? Maybe for you but some of us do enjoy content like this. Big fucking surprise eh? You go ahead and enjoy your 10 dungeons doing the same thing over and over and over for probably... two years? Sounds about right with Blizzards track record. Oh and those affixes? Like the ones that double the trash (which you hate) or the ones that make mobs hit harder? Sounds like a fun two years of doing the same dungeons with the same bosses that do the same exact mechanics. Oh yeah one last thing. I bet you the gear will also be same but the item level will just scale up. Fun!

10 dungeons in 2 years is equal to what you get from heavensward, HW is about to be 1year old and you have 6 in total... all of them, aside from the very first, were useless in terms of what they drop. You'd only farm them because you needed the tomestones, not because you want a challenge/a drop that isn't transmog related.

Dude, it's called strategy. How much resources to spend (, what resources and when to spend it) vs. your goal.

It's the spice that adds variety to gameplay.

You should really play other games than MMOs. Games like Dark Souls/Monster Hunter have consumables and things work fine.

The only downside is the prep work required to create them. There are ways around this. In DS, your primary consumables just refill at bonfires. In MMOs, that's what the Market Board is for - I never really understood why game developers don't exploit the fact that they have a diverse base of players that can fill different roles (outside of raiding) in the game.

I guess you are right, I didn't think about it that way.
Instead of removing the consumables, they could just make the whole thing less tedious. But then again.. why not make them skills altogether. I don't think this has anything to do with strategy. Just like gulping down Flasks in WoW has nothing to do with strategy.
If you have to use them, you'll use them - and you only use them, because you have to use them.
So what about it is strategy or variety. Consumables are worthless to a game as soon as you make them mandatory - they should be used in "I fucked up" situations, not to boost your DPS, honestly.

It is annoying if I have to use consumables just so that I can get my rotation going (WoW-BC) or to add even more damage to my cooldowns - why not add another cooldown without the use of a consumable then?

[SodiumChloride]

I guess you are right, I didn't think about it that way.
Instead of removing the consumables, they could just make the whole thing less tedious. But then again.. why not make them skills alltogether.

"Cost". Resource management (selection of what, when, where to use them) is the name of the game. Skills are practically free and you can't off-load the generation of resources to others with the "competitive advantage" (economics term), so players of all sorts can interact.

PS: Might seem blasphemous but Black Desert's price-controlled market board might not be a bad idea - the game sets the price, doing uncutting for you; it ensures "fair trade" based on supply and demand, eliminating possibility of market manipulation.

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I don't think this has anything to do with strategy. Just like gulping down Flasks in WoW has nothing to do with strategy.
If you have to use them, you'll use them - and you only use them, because you have to use them.
So what about it is strategy or variety. Consumables are worthless to a game as soon as you make them mandatory - they should be used in "I fucked up" situations, not to boost your DPS, honestly.

It is annoying if I have to use consumables just so that I can get my rotation going (WoW-BC) or to add even more damage to my cooldowns - why not add another cooldown without the use of a consumable then?

WoW is doing it wrong. They have done it wrong since vanilla.

They designed it incorrectly. It has to be a choice. Can you cope with X? No? Perhaps a little aid in the form of consumables would help. Yes? Go on ahead and save the gil.

[Deleted]

WoW is doing it wrong. They have done it wrong since vanilla.

They designed it incorrectly. It has to be a choice. Can you cope with X? No? Perhaps a little aid in the form of consumables would help. Yes? Go on ahead and save the gil.

Isn't that pretty much the same though? If I can't cope with X, I have to use a consumable so that I can. As I said, it should be better if I use it like: "damn, I forgot to sleep/CC that target, the potion will do it quicker than casting -> I'll use the sleeping potion" etc. etc.

I didn't like the potions in The Witcher/DA:I either, while it's fun for the first time using them, it becomes tedious if you actually require them. (to see in the dark, to defeat bosses, whatever..). Because if you are in a situation where you don't have them on you - you can't deal with situation X properly and you can't even blame yourself, because it's not you that did somethng wrong beforehand (other than not farming/grinding something).

It's one of the reasons why I like D3 new potion system.
1 potion, but on a cooldown.

So in a way, I could get behind an ALC crafting each potion once (per player), just like other crafting professions would.

[Granyala]

Dude, it's called strategy. How much resources to spend (, what resources and when to spend it) vs. your goal.

It's the spice that adds variety to gameplay.

You should really play other games than MMOs. Games like Dark Souls/Monster Hunter have consumables and things work fine.

Bleh. The whole potion / crafting / gathering crap is one of the reasons why Witcher II never really clicked with me.
I get doing that in MMOs but I do not want to waste time "farming" shit in a frigging SINGLE PLAYER game that should all about presenting an awesome story and not about artificial grinds to extend playtime.