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Goonsquad Officer
- 5,708
- 13,682
No just get the generic roulette tomes and buy whatever 50 60 or 70 gear you want. They all cost basic type of tomes now. Also those mats will sell for more than what they produce with rare exceptions.
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Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)
- Thread starter Guzrog
- Start date
Folanlron
Trakanon Raider
- 2,220
- 639
Other then trying to lvl up de-synth skill, and GC seals is about all old gear is good for..
And believe me sell all the crafting stuff, you'll make a shitload of gill(it's how I make most of my gill, just from botanist and miner.)
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Merrith
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 18,105
- 6,921
Can't be said enough that the ARR part is the hardest part of the slog...although towards the very end of it right before the transition to Heavensward it actually gets really good. I didn't know they forced players to do the Crystal Tower raids now, although there is some related lore from those that is very good to know.
Grizzlebeard
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 2,177
- 2,311
There were some pretty awesome items in FFXI that allowed you to try differing playstyles.
Weapons with Stun/Blind/Poison/Paralyze procs, Kraken Club that used to trigger multiple attacks allowing the build up of fast TP on boss fights, armour with differing bonuses (Damage Reduction/Evasion/Damage Bonus) that you could macro-swap in for Limit Breaks, Tanking, etc.
Unfortunately, none of that is seen as a good thing now as it gives decent players an unfair advantage over the mouth-breathing retards who are too lazy/stupid/scared to try anything other than playing whack-a-mole every 2.5 seconds. So, you end up with FFXIV which, while relatively nice to look at, is more on the rails than Thomas the Tank Engine.
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
- 16,442
- 12,090
FFXI was basically the EQ1 style of MMO, though. WoW, post Vanilla, started to stray away from that model. And they did so for some legitimate reasons
1) While resistance gear/specialized armor sounds cool on paper (Onyxia cloaks, NR gear for AQ40), it is just another time sink and forced itemization. With the NR gear, it felt especially bad because the only source of high level NR gear were the green dragons, which had limited spawns and were always in the middle of fucking nowhere. Consequently, everyone was forced to use NR gear 10+ levels below their current level just so they didn't insta-die on some of the AQ40 bosses. Combined with limited bag space and it isn't surprising the player base began to grumble about it
2) Weapons with unique combat effects, while cool, also severely limit your game design in the long term. If you choose to continue to offer them, then you are forced to design all encounters with the understanding that someone will have the weapon, which means you either nerf its effectiveness (which makes the weapon useless) or you make it mandatory (which adds another gear check gate bottleneck to the encounter, or forces you to use old gear).
FFXIV has shown you can have challenging raids without using specific niche gear as a work around. Yes, the regular content isn't very hard, but the Ultimate or Unreal content is very hard and have a very low threshhold for fuck ups that wont ultimately torpedo the attempt.
1) While resistance gear/specialized armor sounds cool on paper (Onyxia cloaks, NR gear for AQ40), it is just another time sink and forced itemization. With the NR gear, it felt especially bad because the only source of high level NR gear were the green dragons, which had limited spawns and were always in the middle of fucking nowhere. Consequently, everyone was forced to use NR gear 10+ levels below their current level just so they didn't insta-die on some of the AQ40 bosses. Combined with limited bag space and it isn't surprising the player base began to grumble about it
2) Weapons with unique combat effects, while cool, also severely limit your game design in the long term. If you choose to continue to offer them, then you are forced to design all encounters with the understanding that someone will have the weapon, which means you either nerf its effectiveness (which makes the weapon useless) or you make it mandatory (which adds another gear check gate bottleneck to the encounter, or forces you to use old gear).
FFXIV has shown you can have challenging raids without using specific niche gear as a work around. Yes, the regular content isn't very hard, but the Ultimate or Unreal content is very hard and have a very low threshhold for fuck ups that wont ultimately torpedo the attempt.
Grizzlebeard
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 2,177
- 2,311
I get all that but from an MMO perspective I truly miss the actual camaraderie I had with guildmates and server inhabitants back in the day. I don't know any of the folks I group with on FFXIV and likely will never see any of them again after a DF/RF. Beyond the fact hardly anyone talks, well can't generally, there's no player reputation or kudos for having done a decent job. I used to get tells from parties asking me to tank for them in EQ/FFXI who I'd tanked for previously or friends would let me know when they were dropping from a party and I'd rep them. I moved to my FFXIV server to team up with my old NA Fenrir buds from FFXI, hell, I still visit them every other year in Kansas and I'm a Brit. Maybe a shift to another server might change something but I struggle to see myself ever catching up with folks on FFXIV in remotely the same way. I still have friends from EQ I catch up with regularly and I haven't played that properly since OoW.
And, yeah, I appreciate that at the very pinnacle of FFXIV content there's a requirement for co-ordination on a level with endgame raiding in EQ, WoW, and FFXI which I'm maybe just not seeing anymore but there's little to no interaction outside of that especially when you can one-man the other 90% content.
Asmadai
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- 3,024
- 8,504
It's called the difference between playing a game with a few thousand people on a server vs playing a game with 11 million people on a cross-server queuing system.
We all wish for the days of EQ comraderie and our own personal reputations again, etc but those days have been dead and gone for decades now.
I feel you.
We all wish for the days of EQ comraderie and our own personal reputations again, etc but those days have been dead and gone for decades now.
I feel you.
Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 9,198
- 9,305
Multiple reasons, but I pretty much just base friendships that spark up randomly in those games based off the camp length. When you're sitting with the same people for hours on end, its hard not to have a conversation or two. Especially if it was a smooth experience with no multiple death scenarios. Add in the fact that you arent playing DDR in .. at least EQ, and even raids - you might make a friend or two. I still have a couple friends from original EQ, and I made probably a dozen more on P99 back in 2011 that I still have contact with. In WoW.. if I exclude those people, I barely know anyone. Classic WoW is only slightly in the same regard it was - it took several hours back in original WoW to clear Molten Core in the beginning. Go back to Classic Launch and Molten Core was a speed run.
Some would argue its devs purposefully wasting peoples time, but most encounters.. I just didnt see it that way.
Some would argue its devs purposefully wasting peoples time, but most encounters.. I just didnt see it that way.
I am currently doing a FFX playthrough and this caught my attention. I tried shadowlands and didn't last a month there. I've tried current EQ (Aradune server) with a friend, but he hardly ever plays and I needed to 2 box to do anything. I played on eq emu servers for a few years, prior to trying all the above.
Will this be worth checking out? How hard is it to start out fresh? I love the FF games and played a majority of them. FF tactics is my favorite with FFX pretty close.
Will this be worth checking out? How hard is it to start out fresh? I love the FF games and played a majority of them. FF tactics is my favorite with FFX pretty close.
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
- 16,442
- 12,090
Maybe random groups not, but every FC I have joined in FFXIV has had some type of discord and you see a lot of people move their conversations there vs doing them inside the game itself.
Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 9,198
- 9,305
Grouping is nice in FFXIV simply because high lvls can delevel to get stones for doing low lvl dungeons. Shadowlands was trash after the initial rush. TLP servers suck to level up on unless its within the week after an expansion unlocks.
Daidraco
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 9,198
- 9,305
I havent try harded in a ffxiv raid in years and I play this every patch or two and every expansion launch. Its a solid, if not top, casual MMO for sure.
Chris
Potato del Grande
- 18,201
- -342
As someone who did the AQ40 low level gear NR thing, that's not an argument against alternate gear sets, it's an argument about bad design.
If fights required NR, there should have been an accessible lv60 source of it. They had that chance with the Cenarion Circle crafting recipies and AQ20 raid, but from what I remember those only gave a few hard to get pieces.
Alternate progression like that can definitely work, you just need a reasonable supply of appropriate level resistence gear, a good UI for gear swapping (or limit it to cloak/boots/gloves) and a reward for doing it (farming areas in the world you can only be in with that gear).
Imagine in vanilla if BRD and BRS dropped lv60 blue fire res gear, which was needed for all MC bosses who dropped purple fire res gear, which all visually looked fireproof and gave access to exclusive subs zones of Searing Gorge/Burning Steppes.
In those zones you'd have a fatigue bar without a minimum of fire res and there would be gathering nodes to drop valuble mats including some you could use to make more fire res gear to sell to the plebs.
When you move on to AQ40, the gear doesn't need to drop at such a high item level to be an upgrade as some MC pieces will be swapped out for nature res, which helps non raiders not get annihilated as much in PvP and casuals can focus on just one resist type.
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
- 16,442
- 12,090
It's just an artificial way to extend content life cycle in the end, though. Bane weapons, resist gear, etc. It is just a mechanism to force players to farm something that has a very limited usage in the game.
Is being forced to sit in the basement of the Shissar temple, killing skeletons to get ore, so you can gear dozens of players with a weapon that does shitty damage but is still the only thing that lets you damage the Emperor, engaging gameplay?
Is being forced to sit in the basement of the Shissar temple, killing skeletons to get ore, so you can gear dozens of players with a weapon that does shitty damage but is still the only thing that lets you damage the Emperor, engaging gameplay?
Merrith
Golden Baronet of the Realm
- 18,105
- 6,921
I assume you at least farmed Maraudon for blue NR gear. The Green Dragon world spawns weren't THAT inaccessible either, most guilds farmed them for nature resist gear.