A decent MMO plagued by some serious problems that make it unplayable in the long run

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Apparently squadrons are just as good, if not better, than PotD and HoH. Or at least, an alternative. I never did them so can't comment, but have heard several others speak about them.

Squadron dungeons are way better than PotD. Squadrons are the absolute most efficient way to level up a DPS job through the ARR level bracket. The only reason to do PotD is if you want the title from doing it solo, or if you want the glowing weapons for transmog.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The main thing that makes Squadrons so efficient isn't the damage the AI party members do, but the fact that I can pull a pack or a boss and just alt tab out or walk away from my computer and do something else. So I spend on maybe a couple minutes actually playing a 15-20 minute dungeon run. That is 13-18 minutes saved that I can spend doing something else, and that time adds up quick when you're running dungeons over and over again. I've saved dozens of hours of time by doing squadron dungeons. There are only a handful of bosses in the game that I actually need to be present for when doing squadron dungeons (namely the Stone Vigil and Dzmael Darkhold bosses).

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Sadly, trust dungeons aren't anywhere near as efficient as squadron dungeons. Level synced trust members do only a small fraction that a fresh faced squadron party does. You can AFK the adds in a Trust dungeon, but you have to be present for practically every boss fight, and the boss fights take twice to thrice as long with Trust members than it does if you had just queued with other players. If a duty finder ShB dungeon run takes 15 minutes, but a squadron dungeon run takes 40 minutes (AFKing on the adds) but I have to actually be there for 15 minutes of boss fights, then I didn't save any time at all.

[Katchii]

A lot of that depends on your definition of "saving time" I suppose. If I want to get something done, I just want to get it done as fast as possible. And I'm not even sure what value I would get out of the couple minutes at a time where I can AFK after telling the squadron to go to the next thing to fight.

This is my take as well. It's not about how much time I'm spending playing the game it's how much time, period, I spend accomplishing the goal. If I can spend 15 minutes getting something done and have to stay engaged that whole time but it gets done in those 15 minutes, that's better than spending 5 minutes actually playing with 13-18+ more minutes added on...I didn't save ANY time, I actually wasted that 13-18 minutes.

This is why I prefer PotD and HoH. "Actual time spent playing the game" is not how I measure it, it's total amount of time spent accomplishing the goal. And based on these comments, Squadrons don't seem like they have much of an advantage. they're certainly a viable option though.

[Frostfred]

The main thing that makes Squadrons so efficient isn't the damage the AI party members do, but the fact that I can pull a pack or a boss and just alt tab out or walk away from my computer and do something else. So I spend on maybe a couple minutes actually playing a 15-20 minute dungeon run. That is 13-18 minutes saved that I can spend doing something else, and that time adds up quick when you're running dungeons over and over again. I've saved dozens of hours of time by doing squadron dungeons. There are only a handful of bosses in the game that I actually need to be present for when doing squadron dungeons (namely the Stone Vigil and Dzmael Darkhold bosses).

How do you set up stuff like this? I'm currently leveling my ninja job, and did a few squadron dungeons. But their efficiency in general seemed quite low. Even adding 30/40% damage for the higher traits (like offensive, balanced etc) wouldn't change that much. And controlling them especially on bosses with ground effects was a bit annoying. Or is the scaling off, so if they're all around 50 or so, and I do a lvl 20 dungeon, they're OP?

That being said, I still prefer leveling over lots of different stuff combined, whatever the mood in the moment. I also really like questing. It's slower, and only doable once per quest area. But there are enough around to level 2-3 jobs (if combined with some dungeon, leve or fate), and you get to also see some small side-stories.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

How do you set up stuff like this? I'm currently leveling my ninja job, and did a few squadron dungeons. But their efficiency in general seemed quite low. Even adding 30/40% damage for the higher traits (like offensive, balanced etc) wouldn't change that much. And controlling them especially on bosses with ground effects was a bit annoying. Or is the scaling off, so if they're all around 50 or so, and I do a lvl 20 dungeon, they're OP?

Level up your squadron by having them do the command missions (facebook game/mission table). Then for actually levelling up your jobs by doing the squadron dungeons, I have them set up like this:

• DPS - Archer (Offensive)

• DPS - Archer (Offensive)

• Tank - Marauder (Defensive)

• Healer - Conjurer (Balanced)

You don't even need the chemistry's to be high ranked; I've run like a billion squadron missions and both of my Archers still only have their offensive chemistry at rank 2. The higher level chemistries do help a lot (such as my tank having defensive 4, which increases HP by 24% and reduces damages taken by 24%, giving them much higher survivability). My archers only have offensive rank 2 but it already gives them 24% damage boost, which is pretty good. I think the real advantage is that since my Healer is Balanced, they actually help deal damage (and deal quite a lot of damage since their balance chemistry is rank 5), whereas if they were set to offensive they wouldn't have as much HP to survive unavoidable room wide AoEs during boss fights.

[RealRevChris]

I have finished the MSQ & got my relic weapon to iLev 500 & now there is a problem. Castrum Lacus Litore! I waited in the Bozjan Southern Front for almost an hour with an entire group of other people who were waiting around when I got there. I went to bed. The next day I tried again & there was a group in the queue, but it had already started, so no dice. With the sheer amount of people standing around I wondered how long this would take. I looked online & it seemed to be quite a long time. How could SE create something like this? I decided to be happy with a non glowing weapon & do something else. This needs to be fixed.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I have finished the MSQ & got my relic weapon to iLev 500 & now there is a problem. Castrum Lacus Litore! I waited in the Bozjan Southern Front for almost an hour with an entire group of other people who were waiting around when I got there. I went to bed. The next day I tried again & there was a group in the queue, but it had already started, so no dice. With the sheer amount of people standing around I wondered how long this would take. I looked online & it seemed to be quite a long time. How could SE create something like this? I decided to be happy with a non glowing weapon & do something else. This needs to be fixed.

Join your data center's Castrum Discord and join an organized raid. You will need to set aside like 2-3 hours (1 hr for the group to form, 30 minutes spent zoning and out of Bozja until everyone is in the right instance, and then another hour cluster farming until Castrum pops, and then the 30-40 minutes it takes to do Castrum). The groups fill up the fastest on the weekends. Here is the link to the Crystal DC's Castrum discord.

We complained about this when it came out last year but the only thing Square did was nerf Castrum's difficulty a little bit, make it so that doing CEs lowers reduces the timer until the next Castrum starts, and buffed the number of memories that Castrum drops. Evidently the devs think it's fine and they're not going to change it.

[Frostfred]

Level up your squadron by having them do the command missions (facebook game/mission table). Then for actually levelling up your jobs by doing the squadron dungeons, I have them set up like this:

• DPS - Archer (Offensive)

• DPS - Archer (Offensive)

• Tank - Marauder (Defensive)

• Healer - Conjurer (Balanced)

You don't even need the chemistry's to be high ranked; I've run like a billion squadron missions and both of my Archers still only have their offensive chemistry at rank 2. The higher level chemistries do help a lot (such as my tank having defensive 4, which increases HP by 24% and reduces damages taken by 24%, giving them much higher survivability). My archers only have offensive rank 2 but it already gives them 24% damage boost, which is pretty good. I think the real advantage is that since my Healer is Balanced, they actually help deal damage (and deal quite a lot of damage since their balance chemistry is rank 5), whereas if they were set to offensive they wouldn't have as much HP to survive unavoidable room wide AoEs during boss fights.

Thanks a lot! I did use the archer / marauder / conjurer combo anyway. Then I think the issue really depends on the level for me. My ninja is around 40-45 now, whereas my followers are just around 25-30. So they just don't seem to be as effective as when I'm in the right level range and they're much higher and downscaled. Maybe it will be much better if I decide to level another job sometime in the future.

On another note, I did PotD yesterday the first time in a matched group, and it's also super fast - much faster than going in alone. The only annoying thing about the matched group is, though, that you can't just go on in the same group and are limited to run only the first 10 levels. Maybe I'll try to oranize a premade group one of these days, there it should be possible to run longer runs.

Super annoying is also the failure rate on aetherpool gear upgrades. I'm not sure if it's generally like that due to diminishing returns on the upgrades, or if it's due to a combination of aetherpool gear getting higher while staying in these low levels, but I'm rarely getting an upgrade in these first few levels. Only around one out of 10 silver chests gives one, the rest is "your aetherpool gear doesn't change" or sth along these lines. Quite annoying, as my gear is only around 20, and 10 floors give (when I'm lucky) 1-2 upgrades, when I'm unlucky none. If the chance at level 40 is reduced by a factor of 10 again, etc, it would take several million runs to max out the gear.

[dlld]

Thanks a lot! I did use the archer / marauder / conjurer combo anyway. Then I think the issue really depends on the level for me. My ninja is around 40-45 now, whereas my followers are just around 25-30. So they just don't seem to be as effective as when I'm in the right level range and they're much higher and downscaled. Maybe it will be much better if I decide to level another job sometime in the future.

On another note, I did PotD yesterday the first time in a matched group, and it's also super fast - much faster than going in alone. The only annoying thing about the matched group is, though, that you can't just go on in the same group and are limited to run only the first 10 levels. Maybe I'll try to oranize a premade group one of these days, there it should be possible to run longer runs.

Super annoying is also the failure rate on aetherpool gear upgrades. I'm not sure if it's generally like that due to diminishing returns on the upgrades, or if it's due to a combination of aetherpool gear getting higher while staying in these low levels, but I'm rarely getting an upgrade in these first few levels. Only around one out of 10 silver chests gives one, the rest is "your aetherpool gear doesn't change" or sth along these lines. Quite annoying, as my gear is only around 20, and 10 floors give (when I'm lucky) 1-2 upgrades, when I'm unlucky none. If the chance at level 40 is reduced by a factor of 10 again, etc, it would take several million runs to max out the gear.

You aren't limited to run the first 10 levels with a matched group, but you do 10 levels per run with one, when you finish the first 10 you can instantly jump into 11-20 being matched with a new group then 21-30 and so on. Each level seems to have a cap on how high your gear upgrades go, I think I stopped getting anything from 1-10 past +20 so I assume to get +99 you need to be doing 81-90 floors atleast.

[Frostfred]

You aren't limited to run the first 10 levels with a matched group, but you do 10 levels per run with one, when you finish the first 10 you can instantly jump into 11-20 being matched with a new group then 21-30 and so on. Each level seems to have a cap on how high your gear upgrades go, I think I stopped getting anything from 1-10 past +20 so I assume to get +99 you need to be doing 81-90 floors atleast.

Ah, that's good to know. So I won't have to look for a group myself or do solo till 50. Thanks!

[Poppincaps]

Ah, that's good to know. So I won't have to look for a group myself or do solo till 50. Thanks!

Just to correct what dlld said, you can get +99 in 51-60. I know this because I'm +99 and haven't done anything past floors 51-60.

[Katchii]

Thanks a lot! I did use the archer / marauder / conjurer combo anyway. Then I think the issue really depends on the level for me. My ninja is around 40-45 now, whereas my followers are just around 25-30. So they just don't seem to be as effective as when I'm in the right level range and they're much higher and downscaled. Maybe it will be much better if I decide to level another job sometime in the future.

On another note, I did PotD yesterday the first time in a matched group, and it's also super fast - much faster than going in alone. The only annoying thing about the matched group is, though, that you can't just go on in the same group and are limited to run only the first 10 levels. Maybe I'll try to oranize a premade group one of these days, there it should be possible to run longer runs.

Super annoying is also the failure rate on aetherpool gear upgrades. I'm not sure if it's generally like that due to diminishing returns on the upgrades, or if it's due to a combination of aetherpool gear getting higher while staying in these low levels, but I'm rarely getting an upgrade in these first few levels. Only around one out of 10 silver chests gives one, the rest is "your aetherpool gear doesn't change" or sth along these lines. Quite annoying, as my gear is only around 20, and 10 floors give (when I'm lucky) 1-2 upgrades, when I'm unlucky none. If the chance at level 40 is reduced by a factor of 10 again, etc, it would take several million runs to max out the gear.

You aren't limited to run the first 10 levels with a matched group, but you do 10 levels per run with one, when you finish the first 10 you can instantly jump into 11-20 being matched with a new group then 21-30 and so on. Each level seems to have a cap on how high your gear upgrades go, I think I stopped getting anything from 1-10 past +20 so I assume to get +99 you need to be doing 81-90 floors atleast.

Ah, that's good to know. So I won't have to look for a group myself or do solo till 50. Thanks!

The floors you should be spamming for leveling are 51-60. The lower levels suck for xp. Once you've completed floor 50 once, you can start at Floor 51 every time the same way you can start at level 1.

Getting into groups for floors 11-20, 21-30, 31-40 and 41-50 can sometimes take a while because they're just not run very often once someone unlocks floors 51-60.

Also as @Poppincaps already stated, it's possible to get to +99 in floors 51-60, but you'll get quite a few failed upgrades when you open the chests, but you'll get there eventually.

[Malix Farwin]

Why is 2028 the earliest estimate?

i just said why?

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FF14 will probably still be going then. MMOs are a huge investment and sometimes can be a huge money sink, just look at ffxiv 1.0, and right now mmos aren’t all the craze and are dropping in popularity, and companies that try to saturate the market have “action” style gameplay. If they could be created and the companies could safely migrate all players then we’d have a WoW 2 by now, so far the only games successful that im aware of are everquest 2, runescape and final fantasy, but mind you those old games are still going to this day.

11 was still going on when 14 released. in fact 11's final xpac was released March 27, 2013. for context that was the same year of 2.0.

[Poppincaps]

i just said why?

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11 was still going on when 14 released. in fact 11's final xpac was released March 27, 2013. for context that was the same year of 2.0.

11 is still going on now. They started a new storyline at the end of 2020.

[Katchii]

i just said why?

You really didn't. You just kind of said, "because I said so" after what Val put as valid reasons NOT to expect super long lead times.

[Frostfred]

The floors you should be spamming for leveling are 51-60. The lower levels suck for xp. Once you've completed floor 50 once, you can start at Floor 51 every time the same way you can start at level 1.

Getting into groups for floors 11-20, 21-30, 31-40 and 41-50 can sometimes take a while because they're just not run very often once someone unlocks floors 51-60.

Also as @Poppincaps already stated, it's possible to get to +99 in floors 51-60, but you'll get quite a few failed upgrades when you open the chests, but you'll get there eventually.

At least these days, there seem to be quite a few people also doing the 11-50 floors. At least for 11-40 I had queue times in the range of 2-3 minutes.

About the 51-60 being better: Thanks for the input. I'll see when I'm as far. Another advantage of 51-60 would definitely be, that you can level the aetherpool gear up, and you're not limited to only low level gameplay of the class (which can be terrible on some).

[Dartz1979]

All i now is y'shtola is best waifu in the game and shes my favorite.

[Katchii]

At least these days, there seem to be quite a few people also doing the 11-50 floors. At least for 11-40 I had queue times in the range of 2-3 minutes.

About the 51-60 being better: Thanks for the input. I'll see when I'm as far. Another advantage of 51-60 would definitely be, that you can level the aetherpool gear up, and you're not limited to only low level gameplay of the class (which can be terrible on some).

Yeah.

Here's a google doc with the the breakdown per level.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2137694813

The reason 51-60 is picked is because it simply gives FAR better xp than floors 1-10 and can be spammed, unlike floors 11-50 and floors 61-100.

[Advent]

All i now is y'shtola is best waifu in the game and shes my favorite.

She's everyone's favorite. Except those weirdoes. But nobody talks about them.

[Cthulhu 2020]

Depending on what level you are, FATE's are not as efficient at leveling as PotD.

PotD floor 51-60 xp scales based on what level you are. For example, at character level 49, each completion of floors 51-60 gives 255780 xp. Compared to Northern Thanalan FATEs which provide between 14,210 and 53,287 for the Gorgimaera FATE, with most giving ~21,315 xp. That means it takes ~12-14 FATEs to equal one run through PotD. A good run through PotD takes ~15 minutes or less. Most FATEs take longer than 1 minute.

And the higher level you go, the better the xp gets from PotD. At Level 52, xp per 51-60 run is 475,200. FATEs in Coerthas Western Highlands average ~15-16,000 xp. That's close to 30 FATE's per level. Dravanian Forelands FATE's average ~24-25,000 xp making it ~19 FATEs per level.

Coupled with the frenzy and focus you have to have in a FATE group to ensure you get to the FATE in time to tag mobs and get credit, and assuming the zone even has a mob of people doing the FATEs to make them take such a short time, PotD easily out paces FATEs as far as efficient leveling is concerned. It's not even a contest IMO given how much "harder" you have to work in a FATE group vs a PotD run. Neither is hard, but one takes more focus and effort than the other for maybe the same efficiency, if not slightly less.

Sources for the information I was using to make these comparisons:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...gid=2137694813

https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/List_of_FATEs

With a good zone with 10-15 people, FATEs can easily take 30-60 seconds. Time flying between them is just about as long, so if you're doing 10 floors in 10-15 minutes then yeah, FATEs will be close but not beat potd.

But in my experience, most players, especially newer ones, cannot do potd 10 floors in 10 minutes. It tends to be closer to 20-30. So yeah, while a player who knows what they're doing can get more, pretty much everyone who's in the queue for a random party makes it take far longer. You need a group of dedicated speed runners to go that fast.