Board 8 > FFXIV Topic Part 2 - Yes, People Are Playing

(+) Yeah! (+)

OK...

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

I may be rembering wrong, but when Austin Walker was playing this on Waypoints I seem to recall everyone saying he would love it once he got to Stormblood, but I don't think that ended up panning out. Other than that, yeah that seems to be the vibe.

I don't think I remember Austin's specific takes but the absolute most brutal criticisms of Stormblood I've seen are from that sphere of games criticism twitter and journalists, lol

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so bozjan front is just a bad eureka, huh

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The Mana Sword posted...

so bozjan front is just a much better eureka, huh

Yep, in almost every way imo!

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Estinien,

"I really want to clean all this blood off my armor"

Also Estinien, days later, after being in Ishgard the whole time,

*casually walks up still covered in blood*

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Soap is a recent invention in Ishgard.

I'm not even joking - this is basically the lore.

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3.0 beated.

Now onto what really matters.

Hildibrand.

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Feel free to #Hildibrand it up, but just to note, the post-3.0, pre-Stormblood content is just as good if not better as the 3.0 Heavensward content. It's not like ARR where it's 85% filler.

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Ya the patch stuff is just as high quality as the rest of the MSQ from here on out.

I would definitely say better. It also feels like a part of the main Heavensward story, not just table-setting.

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I trust what you all say is true.

But I must have priorities.

I have been told the Hildy quests are a lot shorter in the expansions, too.

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They're still lengthy!
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The Mana Sword posted...

so bozjan front is just a bad eureka, huh

A lot of the systems are improved drastically. Lost Fragments are way more consistent and easier to get than logos actions (with no chance of failure). The actions holster provides more utility than rigid logos plates in Eureka, and the actions you don't use are still available the next time you enter the front. Essences no longer take an action slot. A lot of the least useful actions in Eureka are gone, and their replacements are much better.

Critical engagements happen regularly instead of a random chance to spawn as you kill specific monsters, and the fights themselves are way more complex and fun for the most part -- looking at you, mathbot. The FATEs are much easier to understand, and the NPCs in them are actually useful. Duels are awesome and a ton of fun even to spectate, even if the method to enter them is not great. The map is much easier to traverse with no stupid drop-downs nor choke points. Perhaps most of all, it's the best way to level alternative jobs from 71 to 80, given we have no Deep Dungeon this xpac. Delubrum Reginae is probably the best 24-man content they've made, not to mention how kick-ass the Savage mode of it is.

That being said... there's just no soul to it. It feels extremely design-by-committee. There's no feeling of community and striving together across an instance; it's much more transactional. You never get stronger, so there's no sense of progression; all mettle and rank do is allow you to access more content and appraise more fragments. Once you've seen it all, it wears out its welcome quickly, and there's no fun in helping your friends move forward either. Strangely, the weird jank and hidden systems in Eureka made it more frustrating at first and then way more fun later on as you learn the wacky-ass stuff, collaborate with other people, exploit it, and then teach other people how it works.

The reward structure is awful, too. It took them months to make Castrum Lacus Litore worth doing beyond your first couple of clears. The mettle system is a terrible design because losing it on every KO (not just failing to get raised) discourages people from experimenting and taking on risk. Delubrum rewards are pretty cool, but on the front, the fact that you get so few lockboxes from CEs and the vast majority of them contain 1-gil garbage items is outright insulting. The gear enhancements require so much unique currency that most people's eyes glaze over and they give up. There are no hyper-rare and valuable items that require specific strategies to farm aside from using Death on star mobs and reflect-farming sprites, unlike the Eurekan weather-and-time-dependent adaptation and mutation systems and the warped lockboxes from them. There is little reason to kill random overworld mobs unless you're cluster or fragment farming, which isn't as exciting as Eureka's stuff.

The lore is something I find a net negative, too. Eureka felt like a cool exploration of a hazardous land and had a genuine sense of discovery to unravel the mystery of a disaster that happened way back in ARR, building to some awesome world-building and a satisfying conclusion. Bozja, on the other hand, just feels like heavy-handed misery porn, especially after this latest patch. The best of the plot threads are left dangling. They try to portray the legion's commander as a morally grey person who might be a true visionary and who has loyal rank-and-file members who think they're the heroes of the story, but all his lieutenants save one are cartoonishly evil.

Finally, the relic system -- I think it was smart to allow people to do the relic grind outside of Bozja and only gate it in terms of advancing the story. I think it was a terrible idea to make the relic grind objectively worse to do in the content it was made for. The drop rates for relic items in Bozja are atrocious, whereas they're guaranteed in outside content. Eureka definitely had its own grind and no alternative method, but if you killed a NM in Eureka, you always made progress, whereas it's a crapshoot for a Bozjan CE or skirmish. Perhaps the overall expected time to get your relic stuff in Bozja equals that of Eureka back when Eureka was current content, but the lack of consistency in Bozja makes it more frustrating than the steady trickle of progress Eureka provides.

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trdl23 posted...

That being said... there's just no soul to it.

your entire post is spot on, but just highlighting this for emphasis.

I actually popped into pyros randomly last night, and had a random warm fuzzy feeling as i saw shout chat start lighting up asking people to prep skoll, and a discussion happened about if it was even possible (no one prepped skoll) (it would have been very possible) (i contributed to the problem by randomly spawning NMs really far away, and then didn't even stay to do them as i moved on to make the next one pop) (i'm both the problem and the solution)
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Bozja might fail as a persistent zone to grind in but as someone who only really was doing it for the story and skipped Eureka it's a success on that front. Like, I get the feeling that their goal with it was to make a Eureka less people ignore, and they did that at the expense of its longevity. I may pop back in here and there for relic or exp but it's not the type of thing I want to grind to have fun grinding.

Also from what I hear it's actually worth doing Bozja now for the latest relic steps after that hotfix

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yeah, its definitely worth doing castrum over a billion ARR raids, you only need to do it 3 times per weapon.

you can either instance hop to find castrum pops faster, or just afk in an instance with /hudlayout on. either way, it beats the snot out of ARR raids.
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I think it's actually a bit slower than a Syrcus PF group counting the waiting time between Castrums (pretty sure you can beat 18 minutes per Syrcus run + party refill), but it's definitely more fun (and is definitely more efficient if you're gonna be in Bozja anyway so the time between Castrums isn't wasted).

As for Bozja itself I much prefer Eureka, and yeah the reason probably does boil down to "soullessness"

(Also they really need to find a better way to do FATE scaling; if you miss Castrum and are left doing skirmishes scaled as if the zone was full it's absolutely miserable having everything take four times longer to die than it should)

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After the hotfix, I only did two Castrums, got 3 drops from CEs while waiting for Castrum, and so only did 2 Syrcus runs at the end. Much nicer than before.

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LordoftheMorons posted...

(and is definitely more efficient if you're gonna be in Bozja anyway so the time between Castrums isn't wasted).

yeah i forgot to mention the magic secret to this one - if you don't feel like instance hopping for castrum pops (and who can blame you!), you can just use /hudlayout and go afk for an hour between runs. Or, like yourself and others mentioned, get memories from CEs
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Did Puppet's Bunker today for the first time. Very meh. The 5.0 alliance raid tier has been pretty disappointing. Hopefully the 3rd wing will be better.

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i just ended up main tanking the final boss of DR as a monk for like 70% of the healthbar. I took three busters!

pure essences are bonkers
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The Mana Sword posted...

Did Puppet's Bunker today for the first time. Very meh. The 5.0 alliance raid tier has been pretty disappointing. Hopefully the 3rd wing will be better.

It was better at release, the Nier raids are pretty easy to farm since they're mostly dodging weird aoes that absolutely fuck you up, and also gear is so much better now.

I honestly don't know if I prefer that to the design of the Ivalice raids, which have better designed mechanics but are still cursed as hell because you can still get groups to this day that don't know what the fuck is going on.

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At least they're not Void Ark

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The Mana Sword posted...

Did Puppet's Bunker today for the first time. Very meh. The 5.0 alliance raid tier has been pretty disappointing. Hopefully the 3rd wing will be better.

Speaking of I wonder what they will do with the third wing given what happens. Will it actually be a Drakengard boss?

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Oh, if you want actually difficult/engaging but still normal mode alliance raids, you should give Delubrum Reginae a shot! I haven't been in since week 1 so it's likely improved as people farm for relic, but THAT was some clown fiesta shit.

How does "get hit once and you have damage down, get hit twice and you get instakilled" sound?

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Delubrum Reginae is pretty impressive. That said, most groups have it on autopilot due to the relic, the only question is whether or not people are using the damage essences to speed things along.

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Every single time I queue and Alliance raid, we have to reque at least one time due to 1 out of the 15 DPS not readying up.

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The Heavensward Alliance raids had the longest queues for me.
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That Ozma shit was rad as hell.

Fight right after felt so generic by comparison.

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Ozma is one of my favorite 24-man fights to this day.

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Diabolos definitely the fight with the most "no idea what's going on, but fuck it we'll manage" energy so far.

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There's a fun trick to Diabolos. At the very end of the fight he's actually killing himself slowly and boosting his damage while spamming all of his mechanics at once, but all you have to do there is survive and you will win.

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Oh, was I doing any damage then?

Also WOW do I want this Rapier of the Demon, and WOW is it ever only going for 500k, and WOW does it ever appear to not actually drop from anything and instead require high level Goldsmithing.

I know what my first Disciple of the Hand class is going to be!

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No, damage speeds it up, that's just how they are able to make such a chaotic fight that is more winnable than it looks at first.

BTW the weapon you're talking about is a crafted primal weapon. The drop you need to make it comes from an Extreme trial, and is likely making up the bulk of that cost. At higher levels it is relatively trivial to get a group together to farm lower level Extremes, and if you can manage to get the drop you might be able to find a crafter to make it for you for cheaper.

Or you know just buy it now because fashion is more important than gil

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it doesn't drop directly, but the rare material used to craft it comes from one of the extreme trials.

(edit: ninja'd)

This Rapier of the Round I already have is nothing to sneeze at, so I'm not TOO concerned with getting it right away.

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Well...that first Alexander fight was certainly the shortest Duty I've ever done in this game.

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Alexander is when they first properly implement Normal and Savage mode raids. Normal mode is effectively the story mode, while the endgame Savage modes are considered non-canon embellishments.

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Pretty sure Cape Westwind is faster!

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Even though there is level syncing, there isn't realy gear level syncing in the same way.

That Alexander fight (on normal) was meant to be done at level 60 but gear level around 170. So it syncs you to level 60, but to gear level 270. (because 270 was the gear cap for that whole expansion) So it's a breeze right now.

The second set of Alexander fights were meant to be done around 200 and the third set meant to be done around 230. So the third set will be *closer* to a challenge.

It's similar to how Labyrinth of the Ancients is a breeze, Syrcus Tower is still sort of easy, but World of Darkness poses a *bit* of a challenge. For the same reason.

Also, level syncing in general seems to scale the further down you go, so you still end more powerful than a lv60 would've been back then. Not sure why.

My gear level is like 249 now because I bought some side gear from the market board that wasn't gonna be covered by the Shire set. Instantly gained 5k HP and over 60 gear score just like that from accessories.

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Gear stat scaling is pretty bonkers.

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I got stuck in to Stormblood last night, and Im curious about when the story gets bad because it seems really interesting so far!

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Partially it was that Heavensward doesn't really give out much if any accessories during the 3.0 MSQ? Almost all that side gear was level 50-54 before I replaced it, and I was 63 at the time. Maybe the patches will have more.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

My gear level is like 249 now because I bought some side gear from the market board that wasn't gonna be covered by the Shire set. Instantly gained 5k HP and over 60 gear score just like that from accessories.

Well. Everything gets covered by the Shire set, are you sure you didn't just miss the tab selling accessories? You buy the weapon from a different menu too.

...I may have <_<

I'll investigate when I log back in tomorrow.

I made a promise to myself that I would only buy ONE item on Mog Station and nothing in the higher price tiers, and bought that Flying Nimbus.

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Lightning Strikes posted...

I got stuck in to Stormblood last night, and Im curious about when the story gets bad because it seems really interesting so far!

IMO Stormblood is actually pretty good!

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I will say that as far as I can tell, the thing that everybody agrees on is that there are/were a fleet of gameplay improvements and the content is great, its the story that people seem to be divided over. Stormblood actually reviewed slightly better than Heavensward when it came out.

One such gameplay improvement you dont see until starting the Stormblood content that I love (spoilered for LtM and others I suppose): Aether compass, so helpful after having trouble with the currents in parts of Heavensward.

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uhhhhh. pretty sure that item is in heavensward now. i guess it must not have been at launch?

There is a quest to get one at the start of Stormblood hence why I figured, but looking it up it seems that there is one in Heavensward too... ...did I just lose mine somehow?

Forget what I said me big dum

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