Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

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Cybsled

Avatar of War Slayer
16,294
11,935
Thanks...I'll have to look into that if I get super bored lol

Side note, looks like they are adding Cloud's motorcycle as a mount for attendees of their Fanfest in Vegas, but they will make it buyable off the store during the event for people who can't attend

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bytes

Molten Core Raider
957
638
Yeah Eureka is absolute ass. I poopsocked it and finished it in roughly under a week but man was it boring and tedious.

As for old primal fights blocking progress, it's worth a shot to just open a group in party finder and beg for somebody to come do it for you. A level 70 can just walk over these fights no problem and there's plenty of bored people out there.
 

Fyff

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
2,690
5,048
Yeah, I went back and soloed all the old primals on my warrior to see if I could do it. Ifrit was the hardest solo but all of them are doable for high levels with ease. That was at the start of the expansion so I am sure now that shit is easy.
 

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,017
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They don't scale you down for old titans?
If you queue via the DF matchmaking with randoms, it'll be scaled. But if you enter on your own, you can select an option to remove the downscaling. With current power levels you can easily solo all 2.0 EX primals(you could kill some of them at the end of HW, and all of them on some classes like RDM and PLD right after SB opened and now that it's a bunch of patches later everyone more or less can). I don't know about HW primals though, I don't think you can just yet, and a bunch of them have mechanics that'd prevent it I think(Bismuth will autowipe if you don't have 2 people to tank the snakes apart for example). They can be duoed though, generally with 2 tanks and one of them is a PLD for healing.

I farmed the Kirin mount in 3.0 with my PLD on my own, I had a few of the mounts already from back then but finished the rest. It was pretty quick even, droprate is good on these nowadays.
 

Needless

Toe Sucker
9,146
3,263
Damn, i guess i just need to deepthroat a fella on behemoth to carry me in titan hard mode so i can continue playing the game lol
 

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
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2,232
Damn, i guess i just need to deepthroat a fella on behemoth to carry me in titan hard mode so i can continue playing the game lol
Usually getting a party for story stuff is very fast other than the lvl 50 MSQ stuff that has its own roulette. Titan/Ifrit/Garuda story are part of the standard trials roulette iirc, which means it should pop within 15-20mins as a DPS, and like near instantly as a tank.
 

yamikazo

Trakanon Raider
1,361
546
That seems wrong. I never wait more than a minute for any queue as a tank at any hour of the day.

Primal problems. Aether is better.
 

Needless

Toe Sucker
9,146
3,263
Yoshi must know i'm a ninja main cheating his way into warrior-dom by purchasing an instant lvl 60 warrior potion
 

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
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That seems wrong. I never wait more than a minute for any queue as a tank at any hour of the day.

Primal problems. Aether is better.
The datacenter shouldn't be a factor for generic roulettes tbh. It seems definitely weird that it'd take a while considering it should be on the trial roulette, which never took very long since people use it for leveling and stuff.

Make sure your language options are properly setup and stuff like that. Does it take time to queue for leveling roulette/random dungeons too? Try queueing for Ifrit see if it's faster or what.
 

skylan

Trakanon Raider
84
96
I started playing this again after years of hiatus. I left way before heavensward. I'm like 2.5 months back with my highest level being a 66 ninja. Maybe halfway through storm msq and I'm having a blast. Its amazing how this game still stands up to, and probably above any of the mmorpg coming out recently. Well, amazing and depressing at the same time really. It's more my style because I don't have hours on end to marathon game anymore so being able to log in and pick a class or trade and mess around for a bit. I'm not a pvp guy so this is more geared towards me. I'd say if anyone is looking for a quality mmorpg for pve give this a shot .. its a great game. I don't speak from a hardcore raiders perspective however, can't comment on that.
 
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Harkon

Vyemm Raider
1,549
4,090
I have an on off relationship with this game, I play like at a new expansion launch for a month or 2 and do most of the content, then take a break till like patch x.4 Then come back play for a few months for the last 2 patch cycles then break again till a new expansion.


It's good enough that I always keep coming back though, the only mmo or hell even game that I've come back to so many times after I have quit playing.
 
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a_skeleton_02

<Banned>
8,130
14,248
Been playing this casually since Agnarr finished. It's pretty amazing lots of features and polish and every class seems interesting.

I love the roleplay/fashion/housing shit but haven't raided yet.

What would you say are the worst parts of this game?
 

Cybsled

Avatar of War Slayer
16,294
11,935
I'm assuming you just started or recently just started? I was going to say the worst part is the Main Story Quest grind between A Realm Reborn and the HW expansion. There are like a 100 you have to slog through before unlocking HW and 75% of them are "go here, come back, go here, come back". The finale to ARR is pretty awesome, though.

PVP is pretty crappy if you like PVP...typical MMO crap with you being stuck on a team that doesn't know wtf it is doing most of the time and healers being OP as fuck.

As an advanced housing user, I would also say the furniture item limit pisses me off. I have a mansion and you're capped at 400 items inside (200 for small house, 300 for medium). That sounds like a lot, and it is for many people, but if you use any advanced techniques/housing glitches and want stuff to look professional, that limit is way too low. My basement sucks because I ran out of budget and I'm trying to figure out a way to make use of the space in a way that doesn't look out of line with my other floors. Also you get soft capped at 40 interactive items. You can have more, but then they start phasing out of existence if you step like 10 feet away, which ruins the potential of the blank partitions. Most of that is the result of them needing to support the Playstation users and the shit RAM you have on a console (since PC and PS4 crossplay in the game).

Other than that, though, I love the game and haven't really touched WoW since last year. There is a lot of stuff you can do. They even cater to the Everquest/FFXI crowd with the new Eureka zone (ie, XP loss and takes forever to level grinding hard mobs....mind you the XP loss is a seperate level pool just for that zone, it doesn't impact your character outside that zone). Crafting/gathering in this game is pretty awesome and I've actually spent more time leveling those than combat classes (I've pretty much only done monk and samurai to 70, primarily because they share gear outside the weapon). You can make some serious bank with gathering/crafting, even at low levels. Plus it is pretty interactive and takes a lot of strategy for certain items if you want the item to be high quality. Raiding is good as well, although slightly different. Most of the hardcore raiding objectives are 8man ultimate/savage versions of the normal versions. I haven't done many of them, but the mechanics can be radically different than the normal versions and can be pretty heavy gear+skill checks. There are also 24 man raids, but those don't have any hard versions and are mostly a way to obtain some decent "catch up" gear depending on how recent they are.

There are also more casual pickup raids like the "mark" trains (people basically all group up and kill a bunch of world spawns in order to get special currency/materia) and you can do smaller groups for treasure runs as well. You can harvest treasure maps with a gathering class and for the HW+SB Dragonskin and Gazelleskin maps, they have chance of unlocking a 7 level dungeon where you can get some very valuable items and lots of gil. Plus for SB, you can also get a rarer treasure map inside which unlocks a harder 7 level dungeon and if you get to the final floor and beat it, everyone is guaranteed 1,000,000 gil each (not counting all the items/etc that drop along the way you can sell). The treasure dungeons have a lot of luck involved, though. After you beat a floor, you have to pick a door. If you pick the wrong door, it activates a trap and you get kicked out instead of going to the next floor.
 
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sleevedraw

Revolver Ocelot
<Bronze Donator>
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Been playing this casually since Agnarr finished. It's pretty amazing lots of features and polish and every class seems interesting.

I love the roleplay/fashion/housing shit but haven't raided yet.

What would you say are the worst parts of this game?

Since others already mentioned the horrendous post-ARR quest chain (it does get better post-2.3/Ramuh)...

Healing in the game is a different ball of wax from most MMOs because of the long GCD and because most fights are heavily scripted. You can literally look at a timetable script of the boss's moves and fill in which heals you are going to use mad-libs style (they are getting better and introducing some semi-random mechanics). The game generally has very low fault tolerance for cocking up mechanics, both because of the long cast for heals and because a mechanic fail often kills the offending member outright, so in most situations, you can't really clutch people like you can in, say, TOR or other MMOs with a shorter GCD. I like clutching and triage, so I do miss that as a healer because the game doesn't routinely feature either.

The amount of grind in certain gameplay mechanics (notably relic) can be pretty crazy, and it's not always well-designed grind (RNG-based grind instead of extremely slow but steady progress towards a goal).

The community can be pretty toxic, especially the RP community, because it's mostly teenagers through 30somethings without many chill older people to keep the drama in line. You're lucky to even get a "o/" in duty finder dungeons a lot of the time.
 

Valorath

Trakanon Raider
908
1,442
I dunno about the community being toxic. It’s been a while since I played (start of Stormblood), but in my experience ffxiv has the least toxic community of any game I’ve played. Not getting a “o/“ isn’t toxic in my mind.

In my experience people who play this game love to help others and share information, teach people. But if you join a farm group you better be ready and able to farm.
 

Cybsled

Avatar of War Slayer
16,294
11,935
Ya, compared to most MMOs, FFXIV is pretty non-toxic. Except Mark trains, people get SALTY as fuck if people pull early.
 

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,017
2,232
Everything related to hunts is a mess yeah but other than that it's been fine in my experience too. Some people don't say hi/bye in dungeons, but it's matchmaking mentality, plus some people are probably doing these runs sat in their couch with a gamepad and didnt bother setting up macros or whatever to do messages, so they don't talk at all(or read at all which can be annoying in some cases). I don't really pay much attention, I don't say hi unless someone says hi then I say hi back but it's kinda whatever if some guy doesn't say anything. I'm not really in expert dungeon #836 to chat random people up from other servers, I'm just there for my daily tomes.

I mean your experience might vary depending on server/world too and stuff but overall I find XIV to have a pretty decent community, all things considered. It's still an online game, so obviously it's not gonna be great experiences all the time, but it's alright.

I'd say the main issue with the game is while they release more content than every other mmo, they do recycle a bunch of assets a lot so sometimes new content doesn't feel very new, and they keep making content following the exact same formula as usual and rarely make new stuff. Like sure there's 4man dungeons, trials, 8man raids and 24man raids being added constantly, but it feels a bit repetitive? And then they add side content but most of it kinda flops due to poor design or lack of rewards. Eureka is like that kinda it's somewhat similar to Diadem and has poor pacing and poor mechanics where people just afk and shit(and not too sure how it's gonna hold up over time as people stop having to level their chars in there), new HoH is apparently too similar to PoD and doesn't deliver what they promised about harder 4man content. They keep making PvP stuff but the PvP is just not that great and people leave as soon as they're done farming whatever it is they were farming.

Like so far, Stormblood follows more or less exactly the same plan as HW in terms of content, there hasn't really been anything that's original.