Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)

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Cybsled

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This patch will wrap up a lot of the storylines apparently, including the Omegascape.

There are also very strong indications recently from data mining/leaks that suggest that the next classes added to the game will be Blue Mage, Dancer (from Tactics), and Gunblade. The first FFXIV Fanfest is in November in Las Vegas, so people suspect that this will be confirmed at that time along with the next expansion.
 

Kriptini

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I don't think the new raid tier is going to be anything too different from Delta/Sigmascape, devs seem to be pretty comfortable with how they are and I think they're in a good place, anyways.

New extreme primal and new dungeons are pretty meaningless as they will be cleared in a day, maybe spend a couple days farming the primal and then forget about it.

New Eureka section about five weeks after the patch drops which will be terrible like the other two.

Unless you like raiding there is nothing in this patch for you.
 

Pyros

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Story I guess is going to have a bunch of important stuff that you'll get spoiled if you don't play it before the fanfest and expansion announcement. Which is mostly why I'm going to play it sometimes next week or the one after, mostly do the story, clear the normal mode fights and gtfo until the end of 4.5 right before 5.0 to do some light catchup and gear whichever class I feel like playing first in 5.0(or whichever class uses the same gear as one of the 5.0 classes I'll think looks cool, like say, Dancer if that's a thing).
 

a_skeleton_02

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Almost done the base stormblood MSQ trying to hustle before the patch, Spider-Man took a wrench to that plan though.

Can't wait to start seriously raiding
 

Cybsled

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Dancer wouldn't surprise me if they use same gear as MNK/SAM. Blue Mage could be literally anything, though. Might be cool if they go the tank route.

If they do the expansion reveal at the Las Vegas fanfest and reveal the Blue Mage in the expansion movie, crowd will go nuts. Most logical way to show it would be guy fighting some monster, monster uses some skill against the guy, guy gives some "lol you dun fucked up" smile to the monster, then uses the same skill on the monster. Crowd would shit themselves. Especially if they were using a gunblade as the weapon, because it would be a bigger surprise (some people think gunblade might be a dif class, but it is just as likely they'll give it to blue mage since that class has never had a consistent weapon in any FF games and it would tie in nicely with the Empire).
 
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Pyros

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Dancer wouldn't surprise me if they use same gear as MNK/SAM. Blue Mage could be literally anything, though. Might be cool if they go the tank route.

If they do the expansion reveal at the Las Vegas fanfest and reveal the Blue Mage in the expansion movie, crowd will go nuts. Most logical way to show it would be guy fighting some monster, monster uses some skill against the guy, guy gives some "lol you dun fucked up" smile to the monster, then uses the same skill on the monster. Crowd would shit themselves. Especially if they were using a gunblade as the weapon, because it would be a bigger surprise (some people think gunblade might be a dif class, but it is just as likely they'll give it to blue mage since that class has never had a consistent weapon in any FF games and it would tie in nicely with the Empire).
The unconfirmed and probably fake leak said there'd be 3 classes, Blue Mage, Dancer and a Gunblade class, which would split well into tank/healer/DPS. That said it looked a lot like wishful thinking list, just the fact there's 3 classes seems unlikely, and the leak also said shit about adding Vierra and what not so meh.

Also I don't really see them NOT doing the expansion reveal at the fanfest, that's basically the entire point of the things I'd say. Unless they're not planning on doing an expansion after 4.5 this time and going like 4.7 or whatever and adding one cycle, but that seems unlikely the way they designed omega and shit, they seem to be on track for the usual 2year expansion cycle.
 

Cybsled

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True, although Blue Mage would fit well with the Empire since they can't use magic normally. So you have some copy-cat skill that uses magitek or w/e for lore reasons. Gunblade as it's own class wouldn't make too much sense, though. I think doing some type of tank/dps class that is Blue Mage, but their weapon is a gunblade and has some gunblade filler abilities, would work. Kinda like Red Mage rapier usage, but maybe more frequently used.
 

Asmadai

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I feel like they really need to shift this method of offering new jobs as the carrot on the stick for new expansions to something different. I love a new job to level as much as the next person, but it just seems like as a long-term solution it's gonna get shitty real quick after the next expansion or so if they keep this up. We're sort of working with a finite amount of possible jobs here before we start seeing some serious overlap.

Not saying they should stop entirely, just maybe make it more of an every OTHER expansion sort of carrot. Assuming we get 2-3 new jobs in 5.0, by that rate in 6.0 we'll have close to if not 20 different jobs to pick from? That sounds like madness.
 

Pyros

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I guess at some point they'll run into issues, but having a lot of classes is "content" that probably doesn't take as long to make and last longer than most other stuff, with the downside of having to be maintained(balancing and such).

Realistically though it's not that many, unlike wow which has 3 "subclasses" per class, leading to a total of 36(or 35 I think DH only has 2 specs right?). Yes there is "some" overlap, but for a lot of stuff your class skills are actually specifically tailored for your role and the others are basically garbage you don't want on your bar or situational stuff, which is similar to role actions to an extent.

Meanwhile XIV classes are just their own.

If we compared to XI too it's obviously a lot less classes. 12 base, 3 in Zilart, 3 in Aht Urghan, 2 in Wings of the Goddess and 2 in Andoulin.

XIV has 15, so they have some room to grow still to reach these numbers.

I'm sure at some point they'll stop, but I don't think we're there yet. And classes definitely sell boxes I'd say, especially iconic ones like Samurai or Blue Mage.

With the current system though if they didn't add classes, they'd need to add a lot more stuff to existing classes and content to make it worth the expansion price.
 
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Cybsled

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That is a good way of framing it. The specs for WoW classes make them play like completely different classes in a manner of speaking.
 

Pyros

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That is a good way of framing it. The specs for WoW classes make them play like completely different classes in a manner of speaking.
Yeah one thing is the spec do share some animations, so they reduce the amount of work needed for "classes", and they also don't have to make one set of gear every patch for every sub spec(at least I don't think they do? Or like just recolors of the same set depending on the spec it's for). So classes in XIV do involve more work still than just wow specs do, but they're less than half of them so in terms of balancing for example it's still probably easier.

They could probably add some gathering and/or crafting classes at some point too though.
 

Cybsled

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They mentioned crafting additions in terms of new classes would be hard because you would have to also adjust all the existing crafting classes because of how intertwined their recipes and skills are
 

dvoraen

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I don't know about anyone else, but I think they definitely have upped the ante and the writing quality in terms of plotlines this expansion. The end of 4.4's MSQ made my head explode.
 

Lodi

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So is this worth playing? How was this latest expansion? I am super burned out on WoW at the moment and need some alternative in my free-time(my game library is also boring me).
 

Kriptini

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I don't know about anyone else, but I think they definitely have upped the ante and the writing quality in terms of plotlines this expansion. The end of 4.4's MSQ made my head explode.

I wasn't nearly as thrilled. Same shit, different patch cycle.
 

Kriptini

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When are you thrilled about anything that doesn't involve ERP? =p

The Alphascape bosses are cool, but aside from that there is basically nothing in this patch for non-raiders.

So is this worth playing? How was this latest expansion? I am super burned out on WoW at the moment and need some alternative in my free-time(my game library is also boring me).

Well... do you like single player games? Because at this point, FFXIV is a single player game with a chat lobby. While it has endgame raids that are very good (and a new tier of raids were just released today), everything else is pretty brainless and is completed either solo or with dungeon finder randoms that might as well be robots. If you were to start the game now, at level 1, you have hundreds of hours of single-player content to slog through (and most of it is a slog) before you can get to endgame, which is the only place where the multiplayer aspect of this game really comes into play. You can buy a level skip and story skip potion (both of which I'd highly recommend, because while the story has some good points it is overall nothing special) and that will lessen the amount of single-player you have to do to maybe 20-30 hours, if you're like me and prefer to play MMOs for the multiplayer aspect.

I guess if I were to throw out some random other bullet points:
  • Everything pre-level cap sucks. Pretty much everything post-level cap is high-quality, at least for MMORPG standards. At level cap, combat for all the classes is very fluid and engaging, and the higher difficulty fights are challenging without being bullshit. I have enjoyed combat in this MMORPG immensely.
  • Devs spend a lot of time working on terrible shit that nobody cares about. Even though we get a patch with new things to do every three months, very little of it will actually last you three months. This is the kind of game where once you are in endgame, you are subbed for maybe 1/3 of the year and the other 2/3rds you are playing something else.
  • Crafting can be difficult to get into late in an expansion cycle. It's also very time-consuming, as it requires leveling all crafting classes for important cross-class skills. It's really cool if you like crafting in MMOs, but unless you plan on buying a bunch of Gil from PlayerAuctions or something, you probably wouldn't be able to hit "endgame" level until the start of the next expansion.
  • Housing system is cool.
 
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yamikazo

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FFXIV is on cruise control. It's a really good WoW clone set in the Final Fantasy universe. Like any MMO, it has its problems, but it's very well polished.

For better or worse, the dev team is content to follow the same formula from 4 years ago. It's successful and fun, but it's static with a very predictable cycle and rhythm.

I enjoyed the game, but the routine become rote was tedium to my taste.
 
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Cybsled

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God, Omega was harder than the actual final boss. Fuck the Starboard/Larboard shit. The icon for that should be "Jebaited" from Twitch when it spins around.

Finished the new MSQ also.

Soul stealing mystery person = wtf? The lore drop about the Ascians being the ones who formed the empire and gave them Allag tech was interesting. Also, if it isn't already clear, this patch really provided a lot more evidence that "Shadowhunter" is Gauis von Baltar. He was the one that oversaw the Black Rose bio-weapons project and shut it down because he wanted subjects to rule, not kill millions wholesale. I also laughed hard at Yshtola's massive burn against Magnai the Insel lol