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**OFFICIAL** FFXIV:ARR Thread

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2.28 patch today, mostly neat/convenient stuff though the "Sightseeing" log should be a cool 'side-quest' of sorts. "Repair All", improved GC 'Expert Turn-in" UI and armory sets remembering main-hand and head appearance settings are all nice improvements.

And lol at weapons (rather, myth and alex) grind, I think I'll probably just keep my i80/i90 relics forever. I just can't see the value of doing otherwise.
 
This patch is much better than I expected even. I expected several good quality-of-life improvements (especially looking forward to the repair changes), but there's a lot of stuff in this patch.

I really hope the mysterious maps (purchased with 800 myth) allow you to do parties of 8 and give 1 to everyone. 800 myth for 8 alexandrite (everyone contributing a map) would be a somewhat tolerable grind, I think. No predictions though, just hope lol. The customizable secondary stats on novus weapons make that an incredible upgrade for every class--but obviously a longer-term goal for most people.
 
i110 makes it on par with weapon + oil from turn 7/8. It's not an incredible upgrade for the amount of effort, its a sidegrade at best. Secondary stats are not the biggest concern, damage + primary stats + accuracy is the only thing of note for upgrades.
 
Well, darklight gear is an incredible upgrade for fresh 50's. Most people don't have lv100 weapons yet, so lv110 weapons of any sort are an incredible upgrade for most everyone, much less ones that allow you to to pick your secondary stats--which you are selling short. BUT...

I expected there to be a grind more akin to the Animus. Holy shit, SE. In addition to the alexandrite grind, there's an associated materia grind. There's a lot of conjecture still about the full process (how much materia is needed of what tiers and if meld % chances decrease etc), but it's very easy to see it will be pretty damn expensive on top of taking a lot of time devoted purely to the upgrade process. At least with Animus, you can do it in parallel with the normal soldiery grind, unless you want it ASAP. Doesn't look like a quest I care to even start. Definitely not worth the effort, as you say.
 
I've actually been considering restarting my account lately. I usually try and keep one pay to play going all the time, and I currently don't have one.

I did love the game from 1-50. It's just I hate anything endgame, on ANY mmo. I hate farming the same dungeons, or the same raids, over and over again, and I've never been interested in pvp.

So I had a level 50 pug, and I'd farmed a full set of darklight (even though I normally don't like that kind of thing). I was just about to start working on upgrading my crap weapon when I decided to close the account.

So, my questions to those that still play - if I played my pug again, is there enough people still doing the content that would allow me to do the stuff needed to upgrade my weapon? Or should I save up enough to just buy whatever is up on the auction house, and deal with that?

Have they added any 1-50 content, as to make it easier to level up your secondary classes, or is it still fate and dungeon grinding to level your secondaries? Is the xp for dungeons better than it used to be? I always did the dungeons 1 time only, just to do them, or advance the plot. Never saw a real point to grind them, the xp and gear just wasn't good enough to justify any more.

Heck, is there still people doing low level dungeons? If I just decided to start over with a new class, you literally have to do most dungeons 1 time to advance the plot? It was great early on during launch, to make sure everyone did them, got used to them, and so on.

But, I kind of worry now that it might be hard to advance the storyline, if noone else is doing those dungeons
 
With the Duty Roulettes available, you're able to get people for content of almost any level pretty easily. In levelling WHM (34-50) and PLD (31-45) over the last few weeks I've probably done almost every normal dungeon and trial simply by random chance.

I think you might still hit a little bit of a bottleneck on the level 50 story scenarios (Westwind/Castrum/Praesidium) but those are pretty niche. Otherwise I think all the content should be quite accessible.

Fate parties are still active by virtue of level 50 characters completing them for ATMA but have fewer low level characters XPing in them, dungeon XP was always good IMO but was buffed through the roof in 2.1 I think. Doing a dungeon while XP chaining is ridiculous XP, it usually works out to 2/3 to 3/4 of a level depending on the level and length of the dungeon. Plus the duty roulettes grant daily bonus XP (significant amount) for completing them once, completing weekly 'challenges' in your log (eg: complete 3 dungeons, grant 5 commendations, etc) will all grant bonus XP, and guildhest one-time completion XP is now available for each job. It's very easy imo, I've been working on levelling my alt jobs almost strictly through duty roulette and it's very effective and not particularly time consuming.
 
Thanks for the info

darkewaffle said:
dungeon XP was always good IMO but was buffed through the roof in 2.1 I think. Doing a dungeon while XP chaining is ridiculous XP, it usually works out to 2/3 to 3/4 of a level depending on the level and length of the dungeon.
Click to expand...

I never thought the dungeon xp was that good, honestly. But, I almost never got to them at the recommended level. Xp was generally fast enough in the rest of the game, for me to be 1-3 levels higher than the recommended, by the time I got to the dungeon. So, I'd only earn a small amount, and not want to go through it again.

I'd heard that you got better xp, if you went while you were still on the recommended level though.

Hrm, come to think of it, I never did finish the optional level 50 dungeon either, AK, or whatever it was. I had a, guild quest, I guess it was called? to go in there. But, never did while my account was active. I did go in there later, when they offered the 2 free days of play, but our dps sucked, the tank got pissed and logged. The dps sucked because 1 - I was relearning how to play as I went along 2 my weapon is crap, and 3, and this is the biggie, the archer/bard was trying to kite the adds on a certain boss encounter....and I was basically chasing the mob the whole time, instead of actually dps'ing.

Oh, that brings back bad memories. Why did every archer/bard I run into, in game, suck so bad? Maybe I don't want to reup the account 😀
 
soooo... ninjas.

we all saw that coming (along with dual wielding), and my guess is yubari is going to be teaching you the ninja arts.
 
Well rogue is basically thief I just think it won't have that "criminal" (mug/steal abilities) flavor to it - plus all the class guilds are basically subsidiaries of their respective cities but a "Thieves Guild" has a pretty set image in most fantasy genres as a "rogue" (for lack of a better word) organization without allegiance and operates more for profit than for good.

I'd love to see them bring back SATA for the class, but that seems pretty unlikely. I'm glad Ninja hasn't lost it's ninjutsu however, I hope it's got some of the panache and unique effects to it like XI ninjutsu does somewhat.
 
Of course, it doesn't take much more than ninjas to get me excited, but that was quickly stymied last night. I haven't played in a while... pretty much stopped a bit after release. Unfortunately, my authenticator appears to have reset. I read about some emergency reset code, but I don't recall ever seeing one. It's not my first authenticator, so I'm sure I would write it down if presented. I did see an email sent out last December about making sure you have it available, but as mentioned, I wasn't playing at that point.

Oh, well.. I'll get to have fun with phone support I guess! 😛
 
So how long does it take for the game to get "fun".

I'm just kinda grinding through story missions and FATES. The story missions are decently fun, but aside from that its kinda boring. There is no real reason to interact with anyone, which was a big draw with FFXI. You just run up to a enemy and mash buttons for a bit and then it dies. Very little difficulty at level 18.

How long does level 50 take?
 
The game's not difficult. If you're looking for a FF11 experience you won't find it here.

I personally found the story drawn out and ridiculously boring at times. But the dungeons are always fun, and the guildhests are fun the first few times through (as long as you don't get same shit in the roulette over and over).

At lvl 18 your character barely has any abilities, and if you're playing DPS it's the most god awful boring shit ever. You don't get jobs until 30, and then you should get some good cross-class skills to supplement your main.

You can get to 50 in less than a week if you really wanted to. But without good cross-class skills you'll suck.
 
Additionally now that you're 18 I'd recommend making sure you do your Duty Roulettes (they unlock at 15... I think?) daily for substantial bonus XP. FATE grinding is a pretty tiresome (and arguably outmoded) way to level so I'd keep that to a minimum when possible. The first time through the game though you'll be getting bonus XP from side quests, story quest, map exploration, first time guildhest completion, hunting logs, etc. I'd definitely advise branching out and doing some of the alternatives.

Additionally keep an eye on your challenge log for some decent boosts as well. You end up 'falling into' a number of them simply by playing but if you're at "complete fates in five regions: 4/5" it's probably worth going out of your way for a minute to finish it off at some point.

And make sure you keep up with the quests at your class' guild. They'll be required for unlocking your job eventually and will at least give you another ability at level 15 iirc. They've got some interesting characters sometimes as well.
 
Wait, so basically is there anything else but the grind?

No cool things like subjob quests or forced low level partying or story quests that require parties or anything like that?
 
There's no "elite" quests like in wow. Everything you kill in the world, you can take down by yourself. The only required grouping is to do the dungeons and "primal" fights (ifrit, garuda, etc), which is required to progress through the story.

Job quests are all easy and soloable. It's possible to screw up and die in them, but they're designed to be soloable. If you fail enough times, you get echo buffs to help you out (dmg + hp buff). You can't do these in groups even if you wanted to.

The only grouping required is for endgame content, where you'll be doing coil, and extreme primals for the most part. The only thing I can think of that requires a group and isn't dungeon involved is the "uber" world boss fates like behemoth, cyclops, gorgimera, etc and peisteskin maps.

You have to understand the days of the "hardcore" mmorpg is over. I loved FF11 and it is my favorite mmorpg to date, but the MMORPG where you can't progress with leveling unless you find 6 other people to play with is dead, and I'm sort of glad that's the case as I don't have hours and hours to put into video games anymore.

edit: I suppose there are some holiday events which require you to form parties, but there's nothing in the main storyline that requires you to make a world party.
 
Damn, I had pretty high expectations for this game too. I was wondering why the world felt so dead compared to FFXI. No one has to party and everyone is just going off doing their own thing...

I guess I don't understand the point of an MMO if you can just play through the entire thing single player mode. What kind of content is there that isn't trying to figure out how to grind to level 50 faster?

I wonder if I can recover my FFXI character..
 
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Well, the levelling areas were quite lively for a long time but then as methods of gaining XP were expanded, people finished all their XP quests and dungeon XP was increased FATEs fell out of favor which were the primary "open world" XP income. On one hand, great, less of a grind but it also takes more people out of the world as they do more instanced content.

As far as "being with other players in the world" goes XI has been pretty devoid of that for a long time with the exception of levelling parties in Abyssea and maybe some of the "naakuuls" or whatever they're called in Adoulin. Traditional XP partying is long since dead and you could easily (albeit slowly) solo to 99 if you felt so inclined at this point. It's still got good map and world design going for it which imbues some amount of life no matter what, but all in all XI has seen a lot of 'modern MMO' retrofitting onto it over the last few years, both for better and for worse.
 
FF14 is designed to "start" at lvl 50. That's where all the content is. Getting to 50 is a slow way of introducing abilities and job skills and whatnot to you as well as building up the lore a little.

Also dungeon XP is a lot better than world fates, which is probably why you don't see many people running around outside. They're all in dungeons. This is a very casual friendly MMORPG, so don't expect hardcore mechanics like forced grouping to level and such.

Also FF11 XP parties are dead and have been dead for years. Not too sure what you're hoping for but giving you a heads up.
 
casual MMO's are where the money is.

I like playing MMO's because I enjoy socializing with my guildmates and running dungeons with friends, but if I can't do anything with a spare hour of gametime just because none of my guildmates/friends are available, that's a deal-breaker for me.
 
hardcore mmos are a dying breed. You can look at korean mmorpgs if you want a grind though. Most of them are still extremely grindy but you'll be hard pressed to find anything modern that requires a group to level.
 
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