[Megathread] Final Fantasy XIV

[Granyala]

I've done thousands of dungeons but on a normal average run, your healer isn't going to be spamming dps abilities.

We should run dungeons together.

- - - Updated - - -

During the Live Letter it was the same when the Female Aura next to Yoshi-P's Lala equipped it.

Cool. That is good to know.

[Faroth]

Also, here's a link my friend sent me of Benchmark weapons

[Granyala]

compared to the AF2 set BLM had.

What is AF referring to and which gear do you mean by that? The initial I200 HW gear or the "working girl-set (i100?)" from ARR?

[Faroth]

BLM AF2 on the left, I think.

[Resiak]

That's because WoW became a phenomenon and drew in a deluge of non-MMORPG players. That's what I mean when I say you don't necessarily want more players for the sake of more players. You get the XBox Live competitive shooter crowd, the hyper casual crowd, you start catering to all of them and you dilute the product you were originally creating to your vision if all you care about are numbers and the money that comes with it.

And that's a very real concern people should have for FFXIV because Yoshida may be a rock star that saved the company and somewhat a franchise, but corporate Square Enix can still overrule him if they see something is generating money even if contrary to his vision of the direction he's guiding the ship towards.

Luckily, for now, Square seems happy to let him do what he wants while they cash in on $150-$200 action figures.... *twitches and resists pre-ordering Cloud... heaven help me when Tifa is put up for pre-order.... Fran is on wait list already (she's cheaper though)* >_o

Yet they have a Vincent statue that's on pre-order wait list and it's only a mere $50.... give me the whole case in that quality and I'll buy them one after another, but nooooooo $150 action figures...

And thats exactly my fear. I've seen this path before. You think it's no big deal. Ok, we'll make the MSQ optional. Except now people are blowing to 60/70 even faster, clearing the raids, and complaining their bored. Next thing you know, execs are pushing on yoshi to push more raid content. The story starts getting cut up, other areas start taking hits. And now we're back to wow 2.0 raid or die. People don't think about the big picture and how these things can effect the game negatively, they just care about what they want, right now.

I left wow for a reason. Many of us left wow for a reason. Let us have our game.

[Rawrajishxc]

We should run dungeons together.

I wouldn't be opposed to that. What DC/server you on?

[Granyala]

BLM AF2 on the left, I think.

Ah yes, that one. Quite ugly. Preferred void ark robes.
Still wear the AF2 robe on my WHM though, love it. It looks so regal and dignified. (I paired it with white Garlond pants and simple white boots).

- - - Updated - - -

I wouldn't be opposed to that. What DC/server you on?

Uuuh Cerberus, me thinks. EU datacenter, mostly German server.

[Kaelwryn]

What is AF referring to and which gear do you mean by that? The initial I200 HW gear or the "working girl-set (i100?)" from ARR?

AF2 BLM set would be the Geotia set (HW ilvl 200)

[Rawrajishxc]

Uuuh Cerberus, me thinks. EU datacenter, mostly German server.

Dang I'm on NA, Gilgamesh :[

[StrawberryZebra]

Only in this analogy, SE (McD's) sees the MSQ as being the bread and bun of the burger. Hardly arrogant so much as it's player entitlement syndrome, but that's my opinion on the matter.

Fun fact, you can order McD's burgers without the bun. I had a friend who was celiac who'd ask for it and they were only too happy to oblige :P.

I really don't understand why people give the MSQ a pass. If Squenix set the game up so that you had to win 250 PvP matches to continue on to level 60, there would be a massive backlash from the community about it. If players were forced into raiding there would be uproar from people who had no interest in raiding. You don't have to craft if you don't want to, nor play games at the Gold Saucer.

So why force players to do the MSQ? It's literally the only exception.

So you think it's arrogant for the creator to design their game to be played a certain way, but demanding the game change to suit your desires isn't arrogant at all?

Where I take exception with it is that the MSQ isn't gameplay. It's game content but not gameplay. It very specifically stops the game play to deliver narrative. Squenix have made a fantastic game, they should get the damn story out of the way and let people play it however they choose. As I've pointed out above, Squenix are happy to let you do that too, as long as you do the MSQ first.

I do think it's arrogant in the extreme for developers to dictate what you can and cannot do within their game. They're saying they know how you should have fun better than you do. I simply cannot support that line of thought. You should be free to do whatever you wish within the rules the game has laid out, barring situations where it infringes on the play of others of course. Some of the most fun I've had has come from playing games in a way that was completely unintended.

I was playing Forza with a friend over the weekend and, instead of racing him, I decided to be a dick and go round the track the wrong way in the hopes of smashing him off the track and into the barrier. The game was also happy to let me turn races into a demolition derby if I wanted. When I played Rift, I spent most of my time messing around with the AH. Not a way the game was designed to be played, but one that I found far entertaining.

Just because a game is designed with one playstyle in mind, doesn't mean it should be the only way to play. Especially not in games with huge open worlds and a vast number of interlocking systems. FF 14 has a lot more to offer than just the MSQ, and opening that content up to players when they hit the right level is much more preferable than sending them through fetch-quest hell for a couple if weeks so they can move on.

So like I said above, I'll reserve my right to enrage if/when I start seeing people saying MSQ needs to be removed from each patch because it's "wasting resources" that could go to raiding.

You're only looking at this from your own point of view. If you were a PvPer, you'd consider the resources spent on raiding wasted. I know a guy who plays FF 14 just for Triple Triad, to him anything that isn't more cards is a waste of resources. Raiders consider more MSQ a waste of resources. FF14 has a diverse range of players who all want different things from the game, so no matter what resources are actually used on, they're going to be "wasted" for at least some of the playerbase. It's just the reality of the situation unfortunately.

Why did it push them away?

Mostly because of people saying, and I quote, "Go back to WoW!" everytime they asked if there was any way not to have to deal with the MSQ. So they did. That's 5 players I know personally that the MSQ has driven away. There's probably countless more too.

Then there was the hassle of trying to organise group activites. We couldn't all queue up for the same dungeons at the same time, even if we were the same level, due to being at different points in the MSQ. So we'd have to pick a lower level one that we'd all done before. Then someone would point out that out time would be better spent all doing the MSQ rather than retreading an old dungeon, so we went and did that instead.

It's a very obvious artificial barrier to player progress. If you want people to bring their friends to Eorzea then you need to make it easy for that to happen.

[Wrecktangle]

You could be the best healer in the world but you're never going to do 80% of a dps's dmg, idk where you came up with that. I said it IS faster, just not by much unless you're doing big pulls in a regular dungeon in which it doesn't matter anyways.

I used 80% as a metric of your average DPS player not an elite one. Your average healer DPS will do on average 80% of the DPS that an average DPS does. This number obviously fluctuates based on differing skill levels.

That is most definitely the mentality I've felt is argued. Anything that brings in more players is better. A sense of community and demographic is irrelevant so long as more players are brought in. I've even seen it directly stated that targeting a certain demographic of player type is asinine and should not be desired, that a community of like minded players is, in fact, inherently negative.

So like I said above, I'll reserve my right to enrage if/when I start seeing people saying MSQ needs to be removed from each patch because it's "wasting resources" that could go to raiding.

Faroth, I'll be there right beside you enraged and protesting if they ever feel that the MSQ needs to be removed because its wasting resources.

Now, your comment about a community of like minded players is a bit misleading. Do I want to play with people who have the same values? Yes I do. That said, I also recognize the short-comings of an echo chamber. IMHO FF14 is DANGEROUSLY close to being an echo chamber, which aligns with my desire to broaden the playerbase and gameplay systems a bit.

I guess you never ran ACT.
Typically I do around half of what a good DPS does. So instead of 2 DPS you would have 2.5DPS, which is an improvement of 25%. More so if the DPS are undergeared / doing it wrong.

Both, you and KrayZee back in the day.

Excellent!

So let's say 50% of a high end DPS player. What about your average joe blow DF player? Is my 80% really that far off? In my experience it wasn't.

Fact: as long as we steamroll through the content because of [reward] and not because of [hey, I feel like running the vault right now!] efficiency is king, because ultimately: farming is not fun.

This exactly. I wish it wasn't so, but that's the design paradigm we live in.

Guess we simply shouldn't use defensive cooldowns, and sit in every single AoE. You know, so healer has something to do.

You know I've done this very thing. I tanked leveling HW dungeons with 5000 HP. often less than the DPS. I put everything I could into offense, I used Sword Oath to make aggro important, and cooldown usage important. Healers had to heal. There was no AFK healing in my groups. I regularly was top DPS... which is embarassing, but our dungeons were nail-bitingly fun and engaging. I didn't sit in AOE's or not use cooldowns though.

I actually do think it's ok and so do a majority of players. If they rolled a healer they want to heal, not dps. Don't get me wrong, I get that dpsing is good but as I've said but the community of this game and the mindset of healers having dps comes off as a bunch of elitist dicks that are enforcing it and even Yoshi P said he didn't like it, especially when new players see people talk about it.

Gamer to gamer real quick. I would have 0 issue with healers doing 0 dps if the content actually required a healer to heal and IMO wish the game had followed that paradigm, but it doesn't sadly. Any healer sitting idle for 50%+ of the dungeon is a bad player.

And thats exactly my fear. I've seen this path before. You think it's no big deal. Ok, we'll make the MSQ optional. Except now people are blowing to 60/70 even faster, clearing the raids, and complaining their bored. Next thing you know, execs are pushing on yoshi to push more raid content. The story starts getting cut up, other areas start taking hits. And now we're back to wow 2.0 raid or die. People don't think about the big picture and how these things can effect the game negatively, they just care about what they want, right now.

I left wow for a reason. Many of us left wow for a reason. Let us have our game.

Your analysis is heavily flawed. You make the assumption that your "enemies" have enough clout to change your game, but you and your like minded players have no ability to fight back for your game/content? That's incorrect. You also assume that with all these 'new' players (aka enemies to FF14 players) that existing budgets would be cut rather than further investment made to improve content delivery. Unless you have personal knowledge of SQEX's financial budget structure you're letting emotional paranoia dictate your posts, which is very disheartening to the discussion.

[Granyala]

So let's say 50% of a high end DPS player. What about your average joe blow DF player? Is my 80% really that far off? In my experience it wasn't.

Umm well ... lets just say that while I am often lazy in running ACT for myself, my parsing buddies often chuckled in TS when I was #1 or #2 (sustained) in a dungeon group. Whether that is due to my adorable looks or whether I just had the "fortune" of getting a crappily geared DPS I cannot say.

All I can say is that the stance dance is damn fun if all goes well and I am sorta sad to see it go away.

[Faroth]

Fun fact, you can order McD's burgers without the bun. I had a friend who was celiac who'd ask for it and they were only too happy to oblige :P.

I really don't understand why people give the MSQ a pass. If Squenix set the game up so that you had to win 250 PvP matches to continue on to level 60, there would be a massive backlash from the community about it. If players were forced into raiding there would be uproar from people who had no interest in raiding. You don't have to craft if you don't want to, nor play games at the Gold Saucer.

So why force players to do the MSQ? It's literally the only exception.

IDENTITY.

You can raid in a dozen MMOs. You can play side games in a dozen MMOs. You can PvP in a dozen MMOs.

You cannot play an MMO that cares this deeply about lore and story in a dozen other MMOs. You simply can't. That is part of Final Fantasy, and part of Final Fantasy XIV's, identity. Is it a real shock that fans of Final Fantasy as a whole, and Final Fantasy XIV, who literally saved this game from the pits of oblivion by good faith support of Yoshida & team, want the game to maintain the identity that they loved? They saved it for a reason. They don't want it turned into WoW Imitation #38 Online or Guild Wars 2.5 or any other MMO.

They already share a hell of a lot in common. The one thing that FFXIV does that stands out, the thing it has won accolades from press and players alike is the devotedness of storytelling.

You're only looking at this from your own point of view. If you were a PvPer, you'd consider the resources spent on raiding wasted. I know a guy who plays FF 14 just for Triple Triad, to him anything that isn't more cards is a waste of resources. Raiders consider more MSQ a waste of resources. FF14 has a diverse range of players who all want different things from the game, so no matter what resources are actually used on, they're going to be "wasted" for at least some of the playerbase. It's just the reality of the situation unfortunately.

I've never seen someone say the developers should not make crafting updates and should focus on Triple Triad instead.
I've never seen crafters say the game needs less raid content so more time can be spent on crafting design.
I've never seen PvPers say the MSQ takes time away from PvP development.

Yet I have often seen raiders claim anything not raiding "isn't real content." And it's typically the hardcore raiders who insist skipping MSQ to instantly access endgame as soon as possible is an absolute necessity. Forgive me if I expect those people to develop the same attitude I've seen time and time again where all content is a waste but theirs while not applying the same expectation to people I've never seen make the same claims.

Mostly because of people saying, and I quote, "Go back to WoW!" everytime they asked if there was any way not to have to deal with the MSQ. So they did. That's 5 players I know personally that the MSQ has driven away. There's probably countless more too.

WoW clearly hasn't been too concerned with their story. FFXIV has. Two different communities, two very different games. Try asking the WoW community if the game needs to focus more on story. They rage at the suggestion of a one time attunement quest to access a raid now. If you suggested there should be more story tied to the content, they'd tell you "go back to FFXIV" I'd wager. Would you tell the WoW community they're wrong for not wanting more story tied to content?

It's a very obvious artificial barrier to player progress. If you want people to bring their friends to Eorzea then you need to make it easy for that to happen.

We've done this with half a dozen people and it's not the monumental challenge people make it out to be. Hell, we had the additional challenge of being on f'ing Gilgamesh and still managed to get people on the server and up and through the MSQ (which they all enjoyed save certain points we can all agree are pretty sloggish). We undersized the 24 mans so they could watch all the cut scenes. Some of them hit max level and lost all momentum as they went to dabbling in other jobs but two or three outgeared some of our main raiders in a matter of weeks.

My experience has simply been the MSQ isn't the impossible barrier people make it out to be. Mount Everest out of an unusually large molehill.

And thats exactly my fear. I've seen this path before. You think it's no big deal. Ok, we'll make the MSQ optional. Except now people are blowing to 60/70 even faster, clearing the raids, and complaining their bored. Next thing you know, execs are pushing on yoshi to push more raid content. The story starts getting cut up, other areas start taking hits. And now we're back to wow 2.0 raid or die. People don't think about the big picture and how these things can effect the game negatively, they just care about what they want, right now.

I left wow for a reason. Many of us left wow for a reason. Let us have our game.

And when you voice these concerns as past experience, it's hand waved as "I never saw that, so you're exaggerating." I've played EQ, FFXI, LotRO, WoW, EQ2 (briefly though), Vanguard, Secret World, and probably some I'm forgetting before FFXIV.

I'm just going to have to keep faith that Yoshida has enough "golden" credit with Square that they're happy to keep profiting on merchandise and let him guide the ship (even though he's already being spread into other projects away from FFXIV) and that between him and our past experience with FFXI maintaining a solid story for its entire life that we'll get the same here rather than turning this more into WoW's design philosophy.

I'm a little leery, though. We've already seen a bit of the "more people raiding" with the two difficulty raid split and it did have an impact. EX dungeons are more faceroll and people are saying they're too boring on day 1 already... and they're not entirely wrong. And it's largely because the majority of people are overgeared from raids being accessible rather than 8 man being hardcore and 24 man being accessible split. Basically, adding in more raid content has already thrown off the balance they had in 2.x cycle of raid gear vs catch up content.

Nothing much one can do but trust Yoshida to keep the course and Square to leave him alone to do it, I guess.

I mean, I can talk all I want about why some of us, by my view, aren't in favor of skipping MSQ, but obviously I'm just talking philosophy at this point because that notion is already done and buried. To be honest, I argued why I didn't like it in the past, but even then I said I knew I was stating my opinion for no reason and the MSQ skip/level jump potions were going to happen no matter what we thought. And now, both can be skipped for a price.

Yet immediately that's not enough since Strawberry's first note was thinking it should be free....

Once it's free, what's the next demand? No MSQ required for current content either?

[Granyala]

You know I've done this very thing. I tanked leveling HW dungeons with 5000 HP. often less than the DPS. I put everything I could into offense, I used Sword Oath to make aggro important, and cooldown usage important. Healers had to heal. There was no AFK healing in my groups. I regularly was top DPS... which is embarassing, but our dungeons were nail-bitingly fun and engaging. I didn't sit in AOE's or not use cooldowns though.

I still remember offense geared WARs in the beginning of HW. Holy crap what damage. :O
Wasn't sad that they forced me to fulltime heal at all (with nearly oom + all CDs blown after big pulls). Sometimes it all went into the crapper but generally we were fine and had a lot of fun.

[Resiak]

Mostly because of people saying, and I quote, "Go back to WoW!" everytime they asked if there was any way not to have to deal with the MSQ. So they did. That's 5 players I know personally that the MSQ has driven away. There's probably countless more too.

Then there was the hassle of trying to organise group activites. We couldn't all queue up for the same dungeons at the same time, even if we were the same level, due to being at different points in the MSQ. So we'd have to pick a lower level one that we'd all done before. Then someone would point out that out time would be better spent all doing the MSQ rather than retreading an old dungeon, so we went and did that instead.

It's a very obvious artificial barrier to player progress. If you want people to bring their friends to Eorzea then you need to make it easy for that to happen.

But why did they have to skip the MSQ. Why couldn't you just do the lowest dungeon one of your friends need, split up to let people do what they need to do, then regroup for the next dungeon? I mean, thats what this game is. I don't pick up other games, then expect the developers to change the game for me. I just move on.

You know one of my biggest complains of legion? That mythic normal was in the dungeon finder. I didnt care about mythic+. But I had a number of quests sitting in my log that needed to be done in mythic normal. I would come home from work, sit in the party finder signing up for groups, seeing the message that i wasnt picked, and signing up for other groups. And since you had to actually sit in the window looking for groups and trying to join, you couldnt be running wqs or doing other things. I hated it. I didn't understand why mythic normal needed to only be in the party finder. It kept me from playing the game. That, among a couple other reasons, lead me to moving on. I came back to FF14. Not every game can cater to everyone.

[Kazgrel]

What is AF referring to and which gear do you mean by that? The initial I200 HW gear or the "working girl-set (i100?)" from ARR?

AF is (from what I've gathered) an abbreviation within the NA/English client for Artifact gear, which stems from FF11.

Any FF11 vets seeing this, feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

[CandyCotton Marshmallows]

Even with these changes I bet you shit healers still wont dps

Well, when you have dumb dps getting raped by avoidable damage and tanks who wear wet paper bags for armor, mana limits even with two mana cool downs dictates the run goes quicker making sure the morons don't die. Some of these tanks go from stone shield to 20% in 3 seconds of a trash pull, some dps don't notice the tank is slow on threat and pull off, some of both stand in just about anything or drop stuff on top of the group.

Yeah, it's just lazy heals, our fault if you die, our problem if things don't die fast enough, and if we are oom, we are just bad at managing mana.

I'm aware of those... issue doesnt particularly concern me with my ps4 license is up to Heavensward although the pc (on same account) is just ARR cause figured $9 for additional 30 days

Still doesnt address the issue of just ARR only buying these things that find out they have to buy something else for it to work... as dumb that sounds

Imagine if buying WoW (just the base edition) only gave classic to MoP so doesnt included WoD and they sell level 100 boost only... thats the problem FFXIV will have

Umm, until quite recently, you had to buy vanilla, bc, wrath, cata separately, maybe mists too. It was insane, pretty sure it was like that when the 90 boosts went live.

If you are even considering a boost, you should probably know enough to know what you are wanting to skip, and what you are skipping to. If the description of the boosts isn't enough for you to figure out, try reading them again.

Hopefully it's not too bad, beginning of xpac is probably a better time; the 90 boosts were I think ToT? The group finders were filled with people trying to tank for instant queues with the terrible start gear and no idea on abilities, threat, cooldowns. It was a joke, a very bad one. Monday lfr done in 10-15 mins, Tuesday you can barely Zerg the first trash pack.

There are just bad players, even those who've been playing a long time, but be wary of the initial influx of wiping unless you have a pocket healer/tank/both until people realize how this game works. Not all will be terrible, but realistically, a larger portion initially will be. If I was optimistic, then only vet players will buy them and we won't even notice

[Wrecktangle]

I still remember offense geared WARs in the beginning of HW. Holy crap what damage. :O
Wasn't sad that they forced me to fulltime heal at all (with nearly oom + all CDs blown after big pulls). Sometimes it all went into the crapper but generally we were fine and had a lot of fun.

Yep - you get it Too bad so many of you are on EU.

You cannot play an MMO that cares this deeply about lore and story in a dozen other MMOs. You simply can't. That is part of Final Fantasy, and part of Final Fantasy XIV's, identity. Is it a real shock that fans of Final Fantasy as a whole, and Final Fantasy XIV, who literally saved this game from the pits of oblivion by good faith support of Yoshida & team, want the game to maintain the identity that they loved? They saved it for a reason. They don't want it turned into WoW Imitation #38 Online or Guild Wars 2.5 or any other MMO.

To be fair here I am a huge fan of the FF14 story. However, it is not the only MMO that cares deeply about lore or story. Blade and Soul has a story that can rival FF14. It's filled with loads of interesting characters and locations and you're the center of the story. In fact, BNS starts off so strong that it keeps you hooked. One thing that BNS does better than FF14 in the story is the concept of failure. There are consequences to your failures. Friends lost, sacrificed to empower you, mentors killed putting you into a quest for revenge that threatens the very core of your character. How far down the dark do you go before you're no longer yourself? The struggles of running your own dojo and the little brats getting into trouble, thinking they're tougher than they are, or the new pupil you're tasked with caring for. The game story handles themes like sacrifice, betrayal, redemption, and conviction in very admirable ways.

Now that's not to say its perfect, it has its issues (character might be a little bit too goody goody sometimes).

WoW clearly hasn't been too concerned with their story. FFXIV has. Two different communities, two very different games. Try asking the WoW community if the game needs to focus more on story. They rage at the suggestion of a one time attunement quest to access a raid now. If you suggested there should be more story tied to the content, they'd tell you "go back to FFXIV" I'd wager. Would you tell the WoW community they're wrong for not wanting more story tied to content?

I found Legions story very good. Not quite as good as FF14's, but the whole Suramar piece was done exceptionally well.

- - - Updated - - -

You know one of my biggest complains of legion? That mythic normal was in the dungeon finder. I didnt care about mythic+. But I had a number of quests sitting in my log that needed to be done in mythic normal. I would come home from work, sit in the party finder signing up for groups, seeing the message that i wasnt picked, and signing up for other groups. And since you had to actually sit in the window looking for groups and trying to join, you couldnt be running wqs or doing other things. I hated it. I didn't understand why mythic normal needed to only be in the party finder. It kept me from playing the game. That, among a couple other reasons, lead me to moving on. I came back to FF14. Not every game can cater to everyone.

To be fair, this is an issue that you should want to remedy in WoW instead of giving up.

[Resiak]

Your analysis is heavily flawed. You make the assumption that your "enemies" have enough clout to change your game, but you and your like minded players have no ability to fight back for your game/content? That's incorrect. You also assume that with all these 'new' players (aka enemies to FF14 players) that existing budgets would be cut rather than further investment made to improve content delivery. Unless you have personal knowledge of SQEX's financial budget structure you're letting emotional paranoia dictate your posts, which is very disheartening to the discussion.

I don't have enemies. I welcome everyone to play the game. I hope they enjoy it. But why come play a game that doesn't fit what your looking for and try to change it when there are other options. I have a ton of respect for the crew that created this game. They put a lot of love into their game. They take the time to give us live letters, go on promotion tours, meet the fans. I don't see that from many devs these days. I think it's utterly disrespectful to see them called arrogant, or to bash them because their design vision is different then theirs.

And no, but I do know it's been said elsewhere revenue from the renewed success of 14, plus their mobile ventures, was able to help restart the 15 project, and kick off the 7 remake project, among other things. Stormblood has been reported to have gotten an increased budget, so heres hoping they start reinvesting more of their profits from 14 back into the game.

[Scufflegrit]

But why come play a game that doesn't fit what your looking for and try to change it when there are other options.

This right here.

Man, this sushi place is good and all... but they don't have pizza. Why would they NOT have pizza?!?! And who wants to eat raw fish anyway? I tried to get some of my friends to come here with me, but none of them like raw fish either...