Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

Yeah I've been just greeding every dungeon drop and I win them ALL. Occasionally some new dude will Need something but otherwise it always goes to me.

Still enjoying it, just this week has been busy so I only got to 43 and had to take a break for a few days.

Also my rested exp is about gone now and I'm curious how much slower my levelling will be. Dungeons are fast so far.. 20 minutes usually, 0 queue.

Pyros said:

Yeah those tend to be pretty good for AU/NZ play but also in general when playing mmos because you never know when some fuckers will decide to not repair lines or route everyone in the evening through the same shit and basically make it unplayable. I'd say in modern times, having a VPN available is almost a requirement to play mmos. Don't need it all the time, so my solution was to use one that sells bandwith rather than have a monthly payment and it works great since gaming takes so little bandwith. Obviously in your case it's a more permanent thing so makes more sense to go with a montly plan, I only use mine when I'm getting packet loss/lags, especially when it's during the evening since I know it's just routing garbage. Can also use it for downloading torrents "safely" although in this case you want to use more specific VPNs, most of the gaming ones save info on traffic and shit so it wouldn't really help.

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I just bought a chunk of bandwidth, didn't need a plan. It was only AU.$5 for a 30GB block of data, that will last me for several months easily just gaming. I could turn on the full VPN as well, but I've got no use for that functionality. I'm just blown away by the amazing value really, for my specific use case.

Pyros said:

Dungeons actually get faster when you level up, vanilla dungeons I think are the slowest overall. They won't get crazy faster, but 15mins or so is more typical of a post vanilla dungeon(even in vanilla, once you start hitting the 50 stuff it starts going faster too). Obviously once in a while you'll run into some really bad players or someone who's wearing 3pieces of armor and a weapon 30levels lower so it'll be slow as all fuck.

And yeah it's worth greeding everything a lot of people don't bother with lower lvl loot. It still gives badges, but I know back when I played a bunch, I didn't bother with anything pre HW because it's just not worth the inventory slot for the amount of seals it gives and I didn't want to have to go turn them in too often either. Seals had no real use for me back then either so there wasn't much point but for a new char you want the seals to upgrade your rank and buy various shit like mount speed in old zones and whatever the fuck is on that vendor now.


Ah I thought all of the "ping booster" services worked per month, didn't know they had bandwith too. That's much better for FF only imo, since you use so little bandwith playing.

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After ARR I'll be levelling through HW 'the real way', so I won't be too worried about how slow/fast dungeons are as they'll mostly just be for MSQ/quests.

At least, that's my plan. Just need to bang out these 7 levels.

I've been mostly dicking around trying to relearn the game from scratch. (4 years later) The UI is so much better than I remember, and so configurable I don't really miss mods.

Unlocked Samurai, Red Mage, Machinist, Astrologian, and Dark Knight; basically all the jobs that weren't in the game last time I played. Since they all start at either 30 or 50 that's a nice bonus. Really liking the SAM for DPS and apparently it is one of the most forgiving of poor latency. Will probably level all the tanks eventually, and maybe a WHM.

I boosted the story right up to Stormblood. Watched a bunch of ARR and HW videos to catch up. Glad I did now; I still have one full expansion to work through, and there is so much other stuff to do I'm going to be busy for a long time. Jumped into PotD solo to have a look. Didn't realise I needed 10 lvls to get the xp and rewards, got cocky and died on lvl 8, heh. Should be pretty fast with a group, so I'm sure I'll make use of it occasionally.

With just a touch of Reshade (Adaptive + Luma) sharpening to offset the native FXAA, the game looks damned gorgeous, especially in Ultrawide, and runs as smooth as silk.

a_skeleton_02 said:

Progging Suzaku EX has been fun, Raiding differs from WoW where it's a very tightly controlled encounter you know you will get exactly X mechanics before enrage so it lets you work on avoiding those mechanics while focusing on DPS.

The first time I saw Enrage on Suzaku she was at 40% lol.

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Been watching some Xenosysvex raid streams. He streams his statics and pugs too, pretty entertaining.

Seems like on much of the high end stuff, just picking your nose at the wrong moment = party wipe. heh.

Just finished the 4.4 raid tier (alphascape savage), thought it was good. Harder than delta/sigma but still pretty easy relative to UWU. You have to play carefully with starting gear but by the time everyone is bis you're gonna be able to absorb a few deaths and still hit all the DPS checks.

Glad I didn't get too far into this, cancelled my sub. Just don't think it's the game to me.

Coming from WoW I had a hard time adjusting to the GCD.

Like I said, combat pre max-level is absolute garbage, you have to get to 70 before the combat becomes amazing. Don't blame you for canceling but it's so much better at the end.

The GCD is really slow, but when you hit 70 you're often using GCD oGCD GCD, sometimes GCD oGCD oGCD GCD and it's much more fun. (Depends a bit on class, the lowest cpm are healers at 24-30~, highest ninjas and bards at 50~).

The MSQ is also mega fucking slow, especially the 100~ garbage quests just after you hit 50, so I have no idea how they get new players into the game at all really.

Yup. The early game sucks. Coming from end-game WoW, the adjustment period is being patient while everyone tells you to just level the fuck up. Then you hit max level and combat's not much different from BfA WoW.

That said, the game (content and playstyle) is a lot more repetitious than WoW – for better or worse, it's a game predicated on predictability. You map out all your cooldowns for each boss and play the same DDR song every time. Dungeons are the same: you learn the steps, and then you dance. There is no M+ and there are very, very few variables in what order you'll push your buttons from one week to your next merry go round of specific encounter x.

yamikazo said:

Yup. The early game sucks. Coming from end-game WoW, the adjustment period is being patient while everyone tells you to just level the fuck up. Then you hit max level and combat's not much different from BfA WoW.

That said, the game (content and playstyle) is a lot more repetitious than WoW – for better or worse, it's a game predicated on predictability. You map out all your cooldowns for each boss and play the same DDR song every time. Dungeons are the same: you learn the steps, and then you dance. There is no M+ and there are very, very few variables in what order you'll push your buttons from one week to your next merry go round of specific encounter x.

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Yeah, there's no equivalent content to M+. Even the Ultimate fights have a degree of dance moves to them.

If you really want more difficult content similar to M+, you'll be saying hello to the F150+ and F70+ of Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High respectively. For bonus points, solo clear them Start->Finish!

dvoraen said:

Yeah, there's no equivalent content to M+. Even the Ultimate fights have a degree of dance moves to them.

If you really want more difficult content similar to M+, you'll be saying hello to the F150+ and F70+ of Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High respectively. For bonus points, solo clear them Start->Finish!

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How does the gear from this compare to raiding?

How hard is it to find a raid guild?

How much of a time investment is raiding?

These are questions that need answering. As much fun as M+ is in WoW, I find a distinct disconnect in WoW. There really isn't a class that feels right to me.

Big_w_powah said:

How does the gear from this compare to raiding?

How hard is it to find a raid guild?

How much of a time investment is raiding?

These are questions that need answering. As much fun as M+ is in WoW, I find a distinct disconnect in WoW. There really isn't a class that feels right to me.

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First, I want to say I made a very bad comparison: Palace of the Dead and Heaven-on-High are more Challenge Modes than M+. >.> What they give are basically bragging rights items and titles, except you can sell 90% of the items (like the mount drop in Palace of the Dead...). So that kind of kills question #1 because I screwed the pooch from the start. That said, going in order:

a) Gear (weapons/shields only) from Ultimate fights are equal to the final raid boss weapons, but they look a hell of a lot sexier. They're effectively status symbols, but depending on the secondary stats they won't hurt your dps because they're the same ilvl and primary stats (str/dex/int/mind) as the actual raid-dropped ones. In fact, you have to clear the Savage mode raids in order to do Ultimate.

b) Can't answer how hard it is to find a raid guild when I've been in the same FC for about 4 years. I'm backseat raiding mostly because of work schedule and other issues interfering.

c) Time investment depends on a lot of factors, as you can probably guess, but the raids themselves are not as large (in terms of number of bosses) compared to WoW, but you get a new tier roughly every six months.

The FF14 crew have been very formulaic about content releases, in general:

Base Patch (X.0)
- Level to cap.
- Lore encounters (primals/auspices), at least one of which drops weapons.
- First raid tier opens a little bit after launch. With the exception of A Realm Reborn/2.0, that was approximately 2-3 weeks after servers went live. 2.0 was just a time gate for everyone to get far enough to even go in to them. First raid content wasn't cleared until about 3? months after the game relaunch.

Odd Patch (X.1, X.3, X.5)
- Lore boss with weapon drop in between best (raid) weapons and previous lore bosses in terms of ilvl. For example, 4.1 was Shinryu with i235 weapons. BiS was i245 weapons with i240 armor.
- 24-man "catchup"/alt/LFR raid releases which is its own thing and setting and not simply a rehash of existing raid bosses. Drops armor (not accessories) and currency that allows you to upgrade vendor gear.

Event Patch (X.2, X.4)
- New raid tier with 4.5 bosses. Savage mode final bosses have had a final phase/transition with exclusive mechanics and shenanigans this expansion cycle. (They did it once during Heavensward with Brute Justice and I'm guessing everyone was like "more of this please", because they've done it for every hardcore-level raid boss, even Ultimate fights.)

Big_w_powah said:

How does the gear from this compare to raiding?

How hard is it to find a raid guild?

How much of a time investment is raiding?

These are questions that need answering. As much fun as M+ is in WoW, I find a distinct disconnect in WoW. There really isn't a class that feels right to me.

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All relevant gear is either crafted or from raids (currently crafted/nms are i380, savage raids 400).

Raids are 8 people, so it's not difficult to find a group. Later in tier as gear builds up, it's not difficult to clear (week 1-2 clears are quite challenging, but there's a big gear infusion on week 4-6, and another on week 8-10 (from weekly pages that you can buy gear with if the boss hasn't dropped it yet)).

We cleared this tier first day week 4 (with gear infusion), and probably spent 18h a week raiding weeks 1/2/3. Now we're doing a 2-3h reclear night and 2 2h speedrun nights. Most raids seem to do 9-12h/week.

Ultimate raids drop a prestige weapon that does 0.25%~ more than bis at the time they were made, and are nails hard to clear (they're also ilvl locked / don't get substantially easier). They're completely different fights from the current raid tier. There are 2 right now - I cleared one and it took us 2 months playing 12-16h/week.

Finally cleared Weapons Refrain(Ultimate) 2 months worth of work, worth it heh what a rush at the end..

Ehrgeix said:

All relevant gear is either crafted or from raids (currently crafted/nms are i380, savage raids 400).

Raids are 8 people, so it's not difficult to find a group. Later in tier as gear builds up, it's not difficult to clear (week 1-2 clears are quite challenging, but there's a big gear infusion on week 4-6, and another on week 8-10 (from weekly pages that you can buy gear with if the boss hasn't dropped it yet)).

We cleared this tier first day week 4 (with gear infusion), and probably spent 18h a week raiding weeks 1/2/3. Now we're doing a 2-3h reclear night and 2 2h speedrun nights. Most raids seem to do 9-12h/week.

Ultimate raids drop a prestige weapon that does 0.25%~ more than bis at the time they were made, and are nails hard to clear (they're also ilvl locked / don't get substantially easier). They're completely different fights from the current raid tier. There are 2 right now - I cleared one and it took us 2 months playing 12-16h/week.

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So..I guess it boils down to jobs/classes/whatthefuckevertheycallthem..

I guess I need to read up on them.

Do you have any standouts that I must take a look at?