Final fantasy XIV any good?

[Trans-Financial-Man]

From what i have heard ARR questline is the one of the worst miserable experience that a mmo has to offer. A lot of meaningless fetch quests and very few skill to use until you reach high level. You will be bored to death

I heard the same thing, but apparently a recent patch (released this year) streamlined ARR into something more palatable. Let's see what the active players in this thread say...

It's still a boring grind. The "revamp" was just giving you more XP for completing the boring story quests. So now you don't have to do the equally dull side content as much. But in reality you'll still need to top up your XP with the occasional side quest. And they did nothing to the actual content of the quests. I still haven't completed ARR. I think I got to about level 25 after a solid week or two of playing and just gave up. I can't be fucked. I absolutely despise the "it gets good later" argument. MAKE YOUR GAME GOOD FROM THE START YOU AUTISTIC SLANT EYES!

 

[mogwaimon]

well, the streamlining was only for the intermediary content between ARR and the first expansion after all. They cut like 20 quests that were superfluous from the massive questline and teleported you direct to the next interaction point for some of the quests to cut down on the traveling. It still feels long as hell but it's worth it, the expansions are quite good. say what you will in response, but it's the truth. you've got to recall that this game had quite a troubled development to begin with and believe it or not, the ARR stuff is actually an improvement on what they had before IMO as someone who was in the beta for 1.0 waaayyyyy back in the day and hated it. Still, the shift in development teams and the low budget didn't do them any favors; after 2.0 actually found success they were able to put in more money and actually make good content; this is why there's also an abrupt change in voice acting between ARR and Heavensward; they actually had the money to hire better talent. Though I do miss the original VAs for Raubahn and Merlywyb, they weren't bad.

though as a point against the expansions, especially Stormblood and Shadowbringers, there's actually way too MANY samey sidequests and they get introduced at points that are terrible for the pacing of the main story. For someone who has no problem rushing a main story and the like I guess it's no big deal but for OCD fucks like me who like to do sidequests as they come up it's a complete pain in the ass.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

The side quests in FFXIV and expansions are awful. Only do the blue ones if you feel absolutely compelled to - at least they unlock dungeons, professions etc. Avoid the yellow coloured markers unless you are grinding a new job and want to break up dungeon running.

The main storyline is good though, especially in Heavensward and Stormblood.

I say good, with caveats. It’s good for an MMO.

 

[Blaine]

I heard the same thing, but apparently a recent patch (released this year) streamlined ARR into something more palatable. Let's see what the active players in this thread say...

You ain't gonna be healing shit. Ultimately, absolutely every class in this game is DPS—and the only "complexity" comes from the artificially convoluted button-mashing routine of your DPS rotation. "Healing," "buffs," and "debuffs" end up being virtually unnoticeable window-dressing for your DPS rotation. Crowd control, true support classes, and other subtleties of MMOs past don't exist, as you'll discover when you're required to show the results of a DPS test to get your "healing class" into endgame raids. As for the raids, their difficulty stems entirely from Simon Says-style gimmicks that must be memorized.

The quest grind is absolutely terrible even for people who have a fun Discord channel to chat with, let alone hermits. You'll be doing most of the grind solo regardless. If you actually read the hilariously bad quest text, you'll only prolong your suffering. Squeenix may claim that this has improved, but I promise you it hasn't, except maybe superficially. Get your wallet ready.

I did the grind, from beginning to end. It was unreal, fucking unbelievable, and I was so astonished that I just had to keep going. At the end, I was driven only by a sense of irony. I never thought that a post-WoW-era MMORPG could have so much solo grind, and I say that as a release-year FFXI player. Somehow, I finished it; I must have been ultra-bored that year. And by the way, I stole all the good people from a mega-guild on my server, founded a new guild and Discord server, camped with my new guild to nab some fancy player housing, and we all (eventually) played end-game content together for a while before I called it quits. I've seen what the game has to offer.

That said, I'm not an active player, so feel free to disregard this. I'm sure this eleven-year-old game has changed dramatically in the past two years—and for the better, as aging MMOs so often do.

 

[d1r]

I heard the same thing, but apparently a recent patch (released this year) streamlined ARR into something more palatable. Let's see what the active players in this thread say...

You ain't gonna be healing shit. Ultimately, absolutely every class in this game is DPS—and the only "complexity" comes from the artificially convoluted button-mashing routine of your DPS rotation. "Healing," "buffs," and "debuffs" end up being virtually unnoticeable window-dressing for your DPS rotation. Crowd control, true support classes, and other subtleties of MMOs past don't exist, as you'll discover when you're required to show the results of a DPS test to get your "healing class" into endgame raids. As for the raids, their difficulty stems entirely from Simon Says-style gimmicks that must be memorized.

The quest grind is absolutely terrible even for people who have a fun Discord channel to chat with, let alone hermits. You'll be doing most of the grind solo regardless. If you actually read the hilariously bad quest text, you'll only prolong your suffering. Squeenix may claim that this has improved, but I promise you it hasn't, except maybe superficially. Get your wallet ready.

I did the grind, from beginning to end. It was unreal, fucking unbelievable, and I was so astonished that I just had to keep going. At the end, I was driven only by a sense of irony. I never thought that a post-WoW-era MMORPG could have so much solo grind, and I say that as a release-year FFXI player. Somehow, I finished it; I must have been ultra-bored that year. And by the way, I stole all the good people from a mega-guild on my server, founded a new guild and Discord server, camped with my new guild to nab some fancy player housing, and we all (eventually) played end-game content together for a while before I called it quits. I've seen what the game has to offer.

That said, I'm not an active player, so feel free to disregard this. I'm sure this eleven-year-old game has changed dramatically in the past two years—and for the better, as aging MMOs so often do.

Nabbed a player house and did some endgame content together, huh? Was it by chance erotic roleplaying?

 

[mogwaimon]

I heard the same thing, but apparently a recent patch (released this year) streamlined ARR into something more palatable. Let's see what the active players in this thread say...

You ain't gonna be healing shit. Ultimately, absolutely every class in this game is DPS—and the only "complexity" comes from the artificially convoluted button-mashing routine of your DPS rotation. "Healing," "buffs," and "debuffs" end up being virtually unnoticeable window-dressing for your DPS rotation. Crowd control, true support classes, and other subtleties of MMOs past don't exist, as you'll discover when you're required to show the results of a DPS test to get your "healing class" into endgame raids. As for the raids, their difficulty stems entirely from Simon Says-style gimmicks that must be memorized.

The quest grind is absolutely terrible even for people who have a fun Discord channel to chat with, let alone hermits. You'll be doing most of the grind solo regardless. If you actually read the hilariously bad quest text, you'll only prolong your suffering. Squeenix may claim that this has improved, but I promise you it hasn't, except maybe superficially. Get your wallet ready.

I did the grind, from beginning to end. It was unreal, fucking unbelievable, and I was so astonished that I just had to keep going. At the end, I was driven only by a sense of irony. I never thought that a post-WoW-era MMORPG could have so much solo grind, and I say that as a release-year FFXI player. Somehow, I finished it; I must have been ultra-bored that year. And by the way, I stole all the good people from a mega-guild on my server, founded a new guild and Discord server, camped with my new guild to nab some fancy player housing, and we all (eventually) played end-game content together for a while before I called it quits. I've seen what the game has to offer.

That said, I'm not an active player, so feel free to disregard this. I'm sure this eleven-year-old game has changed dramatically in the past two years—and for the better, as aging MMOs so often do.

Nabbed a player house and did some endgame content together, huh? Was it by chance erotic roleplaying?

believe it or not there are some mechanical advantages to player housing, like certain items are only obtainable through sending your subs/airships out and you can get the standard EXP/crafting boosts and all that rot. then again many people consider housing to be the 'true' endgame and spend all their time doing ERP so I guess in this case it could go either way.

 

[Blaine]

In a purely practical sense, it is nice to have a quasi-private virtual space to call your own, homemaker-LARPing aside.

As for game bux, I earned my initial wad by saving the quest grind gear rewards and selling them on the auction house. Veteran players could afford to buy them en masse while leveling new accounts, so I just checked each potential reward against auction histories and selected the most profitable option (with decent throughput). This earned me a surprisingly large sum of game bux.

The rest I earned from treasure map hunts with my guild. Treasure maps lead to mini-dungeons and fights that can drop the rare materials needed for new vanity gear—and in modern MMOs, the newest vanity gear is where all the profit lies.

And yes... before you can meaningfully participate in treasure map hunts, you have to finish the entire quest grind, as well as unlock various fast-travel points and a few other requisites. Literally everything that's worth doing in FFXIV is at the endgame.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I have zero, and I mean zero give a fuck about the MMORPG part of this game.

But I saw it has Triple Triad. Can I play just Triple Triad and never bother doing anything else? I just want to log on and fleece some poor schmucks out of their Cactuars and Tonberry cards. Can I do that or am I forced to play this eye rape lightshow to get anywhere?

 

[kyosuke]

I have zero, and I mean zero give a fuck about the MMORPG part of this game.

But I saw it has Triple Triad. Can I play just Triple Triad and never bother doing anything else? I just want to log on and fleece some poor schmucks out of their Cactuars and Tonberry cards. Can I do that or am I forced to play this eye rape lightshow to get anywhere?

A lot of Triple Triad cards are drops from Raids and Trials. And all the cards are all non-tradable from what I recall.
You also have to play TT with NPCs to get cards from them (And from what I heard from a completionist friend, the rates of getting the cards are LOW and very luck dependant).

 

[Advent]

I've tried to get into this game a few times now as someone who grew up playing mostly MMOs. I still would love to get lost in one again. However, I feel like I'm missing something about FFXIV, or I just really don't think it's that fun. I leveled for a while as a Scholar/Summoner, mostly healing dungeons. I just came back to the game about a week ago and tried out Samurai, and it's a lot of fun honestly. I haven't done melee dps in years.

There just feels like something unbelievably slow and grindy. I was thinking the other day about how I am running the same dungeons over and over, for little to no reward other than experience, no money, anything. I'm in the middle of Might and Magic 6 now for the first time, and comparing the two directly, playing the solo game is so much more rewarding. Going through dungeons in MM6 gets me experience, gear, money, and I only have to go through it once.

It just felt like I was wasting my time. Maybe it's not fun enough to be worth it.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I finally tried this game the past few days because of the previously mentioned Triple Triad and I saw the free trial was fairly generous so decided to give it a real chance despite having no plans for such initially.

This is the worst "big name" MMO out there by far. Like, wow, it sucks. I can't think of why you'd play this outside of being a big FF fanatic.

The ARR questline is actual torture. I don't know who thought this was a good idea but everyone saying, "it's just 40-50 hours man" should be murdered in their sleep. If it takes you the length of a good RPG to get to the point you don't want to faceplant into your keyboard from severe boredom then something is really wrong. Here's the other thing, you hear people talk about how the game "really picks up" after the ARR portion ends and the first expansion begins but you never actually know why or how it picks up. Almost everything comes down to the story being really good but I don't see how it could possibly have this moment of clarity when after level 10 you are skipping every thrust upon cutscene just to make it go quicker. So what the FUCK actually makes this game fun? Is it really just the story that is going to somehow make the 50 hours of pain worth it?

Now I'm going to talk about the classes/jobs. I wanted to play a Rogue as I usually do in these sorts of games but I learned I had to "unlock" it by being level 10. Oh, okay, whatever, level 10, that should be like 2 hours at most. So I went with a Lancer instead just to take me there quicker. Oh whoops, I chose a LANCER. You know what that means? I can't get to the Rogues Guild until I'm now level 15 because the area of the world I'm in is outside of the city the Rogues Guild is. You don't unlock the capability to use an airship until you do a main story quest that grants you permission. So I get there at 15 and get the Rogue stuff underway.

Oh, you silly motherfucker, you now have to level that new class up. You don't have traditional player levels, so I literally restarted myself back to level 1 but this time as a Rogue which made the previous 3-4 hours as a Lancer irrelevant. Even if I had unlocked it at level 10 I'd still have had to waste time as some other class I don't care for just to get there. This is all to play a fucking Rogue, by the way. A class that in many RPGs is core and doesn't need any weird hoops to jump through. So yes, I looked up any ways to make this process faster and learned there are little to none. All the feasible methods of fast leveling were not UNLOCKED for me at that time so I had to do this combination of Korean grinding and trashy side quests that hardly awarded meaningful experience.

After I clawed my way out of Hell and got back on track with the main storyline I noticed that since like level 4 I've only been pressing two buttons. Occasionally I'll hit something else to regenerate my health but my attacks are a basic slash with fireworks and a follow up slash with more fireworks. Absolute cancer. You get Stealth and a stealth-only move that takes one minute to come back to use again. There's almost no reason to stealth. It just takes up time you could be spending running to the next cutscene.

There's also no real customization or choices to be made with a class. To say it's on rails would be an insult to trains because at least a fucking train will sometimes change tracks. A class in FFXIV is the most static, soulless and sorry excuse I've seen. But wait, there are jobs. Surely that will save it.

No, it doesn't. It makes things worse. In fact it's way worse. A class eventually develops into a job and while you could theoretically stay as the class, if you do then you're purposely fucking your performance because you're obviously meant to go for the corresponding jobs. First off, the job selection is straight up bizarre. A Rogue becomes a Ninja. What? What do they have in common besides both being seen as evasive? Shit, the Rogue storyline you get is you being some back alley vigilante that deals with all sorts of types from the underbelly and the NPCs you get introduced to are heavy on the thieves cant the whole way through that they sound like constantly enraged limeys swearing on me mum. Then your very own guild says, "nah you ain't really like us, be a ninja instead." So now you're with man of great honor and bow along with his KUNOICHI sista' and they're teaching you how to do shadow puppets with your hands or some gay shit so you can throw out lightning bolts and cause explosions.

This wouldn't be bad if, say, the core class you choose had a selection of jobs to pursue. What if I didn't want to be a loser standing on bamboo wood and meditating while holding his index and middle finger up to his nose? What if I wanted to be an Assassin or Thief or anything else that makes me think "Rogue?" Not happening. If you don't like Ninja, you're fucked outta luck. Even that trashcan game WoW lets you choose specializations that at least offer some sort of variation on the class you chose while a game like ESO gives you greater freedom to make your own version of a class.

I imagine this also makes things suck cock for players that want to be a job they find thematically appealing but their role is not something they care for. Like if you want to be a Paladin, well you're going to tank no matter what and there's no two ways about it.

So I'm struggling to see exactly how this game actually gets good. I'm not seeing any ideas here unless the expansions add tons of extra things I've yet to be introduced to. Can any fan or longtime player of this piece of shit tell me what I have to look forward to? There's only one challenge I impose: don't mention the storyline. I'm talking pure gameplay.

 

[Lone Wolf]

I had a similar issue:

Apparently, this becomes amazing after lvl 40 for combat and across the expansions for story, but in two tries (and I paid money) I haven't gotten there. It became boring.

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

I finally tried this game the past few days because of the previously mentioned Triple Triad and I saw the free trial was fairly generous so decided to give it a real chance despite having no plans for such initially.

This is the worst "big name" MMO out there by far. Like, wow, it sucks. I can't think of why you'd play this outside of being a big FF fanatic.

The ARR questline is actual torture. I don't know who thought this was a good idea but everyone saying, "it's just 40-50 hours man" should be murdered in their sleep. If it takes you the length of a good RPG to get to the point you don't want to faceplant into your keyboard from severe boredom then something is really wrong. Here's the other thing, you hear people talk about how the game "really picks up" after the ARR portion ends and the first expansion begins but you never actually know why or how it picks up. Almost everything comes down to the story being really good but I don't see how it could possibly have this moment of clarity when after level 10 you are skipping every thrust upon cutscene just to make it go quicker. So what the FUCK actually makes this game fun? Is it really just the story that is going to somehow make the 50 hours of pain worth it?

Now I'm going to talk about the classes/jobs. I wanted to play a Rogue as I usually do in these sorts of games but I learned I had to "unlock" it by being level 10. Oh, okay, whatever, level 10, that should be like 2 hours at most. So I went with a Lancer instead just to take me there quicker. Oh whoops, I chose a LANCER. You know what that means? I can't get to the Rogues Guild until I'm now level 15 because the area of the world I'm in is outside of the city the Rogues Guild is. You don't unlock the capability to use an airship until you do a main story quest that grants you permission. So I get there at 15 and get the Rogue stuff underway.

Oh, you silly motherfucker, you now have to level that new class up. You don't have traditional player levels, so I literally restarted myself back to level 1 but this time as a Rogue which made the previous 3-4 hours as a Lancer irrelevant. Even if I had unlocked it at level 10 I'd still have had to waste time as some other class I don't care for just to get there. This is all to play a fucking Rogue, by the way. A class that in many RPGs is core and doesn't need any weird hoops to jump through. So yes, I looked up any ways to make this process faster and learned there are little to none. All the feasible methods of fast leveling were not UNLOCKED for me at that time so I had to do this combination of Korean grinding and trashy side quests that hardly awarded meaningful experience.

After I clawed my way out of Hell and got back on track with the main storyline I noticed that since like level 4 I've only been pressing two buttons. Occasionally I'll hit something else to regenerate my health but my attacks are a basic slash with fireworks and a follow up slash with more fireworks. Absolute cancer. You get Stealth and a stealth-only move that takes one minute to come back to use again. There's almost no reason to stealth. It just takes up time you could be spending running to the next cutscene.

There's also no real customization or choices to be made with a class. To say it's on rails would be an insult to trains because at least a fucking train will sometimes change tracks. A class in FFXIV is the most static, soulless and sorry excuse I've seen. But wait, there are jobs. Surely that will save it.

No, it doesn't. It makes things worse. In fact it's way worse. A class eventually develops into a job and while you could theoretically stay as the class, if you do then you're purposely fucking your performance because you're obviously meant to go for the corresponding jobs. First off, the job selection is straight up bizarre. A Rogue becomes a Ninja. What? What do they have in common besides both being seen as evasive? Shit, the Rogue storyline you get is you being some back alley vigilante that deals with all sorts of types from the underbelly and the NPCs you get introduced to are heavy on the thieves cant the whole way through that they sound like constantly enraged limeys swearing on me mum. Then your very own guild says, "nah you ain't really like us, be a ninja instead." So now you're with man of great honor and bow along with his KUNOICHI sista' and they're teaching you how to do shadow puppets with your hands or some gay shit so you can throw out lightning bolts and cause explosions.

This wouldn't be bad if, say, the core class you choose had a selection of jobs to pursue. What if I didn't want to be a loser standing on bamboo wood and meditating while holding his index and middle finger up to his nose? What if I wanted to be an Assassin or Thief or anything else that makes me think "Rogue?" Not happening. If you don't like Ninja, you're fucked outta luck. Even that trashcan game WoW lets you choose specializations that at least offer some sort of variation on the class you chose while a game like ESO gives you greater freedom to make your own version of a class.

I imagine this also makes things suck cock for players that want to be a job they find thematically appealing but their role is not something they care for. Like if you want to be a Paladin, well you're going to tank no matter what and there's no two ways about it.

So I'm struggling to see exactly how this game actually gets good. I'm not seeing any ideas here unless the expansions add tons of extra things I've yet to be introduced to. Can any fan or longtime player of this piece of shit tell me what I have to look forward to? There's only one challenge I impose: don't mention the storyline. I'm talking pure gameplay.

I came to a realization earlier in the week. FFXIV isn't good. It doesn't "get good" every single time someone says a game "gets good later" they are lying and coping. This game has the same problem as Warframe. There is a diehard community of whales. They're all trannies in circle jerk discords. This game is just a dress up simulator to them. This small community prop the game up and shill it. Any new players are turned away. The only people left are the veterans and they don't notice how grindy and shit the early game is because it's a years past distant memory for them. So nothing changes.

 

[mogwaimon]

nah, pretty much the criticisms you leveled at it are spot-on, Giant Spider. The gameplay itself isn't anything great and I really only get into it myself because I am, as you've said, a sucker for Final Fantasy stuff. If you don't like it now, you won't like it later, it's pretty much the same thing except with a significantly better story and the dungeons...well, there's also a major design change in dungeons, like...the early dungeons do get dull but they at least try new gimmicks and shit out in the dungeon design whereas half of the dungeons post-expansion are just corridors filled with enemies for you to kill with hardly any sort of variation or gimmickry.

 

[Cromwell]

So I'm struggling to see exactly how this game actually gets good.

what you dont know is that they already changed the job shit and streamlined it somewhat. when I started I wanted to be a dark knight, which meant I couldnt be until level 50 or so? but when I reached that I also had to acess the expansiona nd finish everything, just to get set back to level 30. They also had crossclass skills which you had to have which meant you not only had to play one class until levelx you had to play another until a certain level to learn all the needed skills your main job will need (which for me was warrior), So i Leveld one class to 30 to get to the real job and then learned I needed crossclass skills and grinded another to I dont know what anymore to learn the skills.

I enjoyed the story so that kept me going but I think I burned out when they told me I had to level my preffered job from 30 again to 50 to continue so I stopped. When I came back for shadowbringers my DK was 50 for whatever reason but I already lost interest and wanted to play the guy with the gunsword, which you could only do at a certain level so I stayed as a warrior until getting my gunblade. I burned out again somewhere around the end of the shadowbringer expansion and didnt finish that.

The combat system is even worse than other themepark mmos since it relies on combos and plays like a rhytm game your press x then y then z and repeat and you will use your CD at a certain time. You dont react to the game other than moving out or into something. At the time I thought WoWs Combat system was slightly better or maybe I remembered wrong but I thought it was more reactive, but now it plays more or less the same.

 

[Blaine]

Very Long Post Indicating That This Man Has Known True Suffering

That is all 99% spot-on. Your assessment of the game is completely accurate. I could have told you all of that, but I pick my battles when choosing how to criticize the game.

As you've seen, I wasn't kidding about the quest grind—it's jaw-dropping, unreal, difficult to believe without firsthand experience. As you've also seen, no matter which class you play, you will end up in the role of DPS. As you discovered (this is doubly true at endgame), there will only be one build per job, one set of best-in-slot gear to accompany that build, and indeed, one skill rotation that will be identical to the rotation of everyone else who is using that job. There will be absolutely no customization whatsoever.

However, there is that 1% of incorrectness in your post....

This is the worst "big name" MMO out there by far.

I'm afraid it isn't. Incredible though it may seem, it's one of the best big-name MMOs out there today. The awful truth is that the rest of them are at least as bad as FFXIV, and most are far worse. The one and only living exception is EVE Online.

The genre is completely flatlined. The only reason I put up with FFXIV for as long as I did (other than finding a good group of voice chatters relatively quickly) was because I knew the genre was pretty much dead, and I wanted to dip my toes into it one last time.

 

[Cromwell]

one build per job

I think the idea is that the jobs, since you can have all of them on one character, play the role of the specc in other games. Which means you just switch the jobs if you want to mix it up. But since I played three tank jobs and all of them were pretty much the same I dont know why you would switch. I also remember that I had to target change when tanking while I levelled as warrior, when I played later that seemed redundant and normal isntances where just "run into mobgroup, spam your ae".

 

[Delterius]

the game is good because you play catpeople instead of comic book elves what more do you want

 

[Delterius]

I dont know why you would switch

you play the dark knight as an edgy anime elf and then you pay 10 dollars to turn into a good boy anime human for paladin, and you have to do that sort of thing every expansion otherwise why live. GOD do i have to explain everything to you people

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

The Ninja mudra system is the most obvious example of this "Dance Dance Revolution" shit, btw. Hitting a sequence of symbols just to do what is ultimately a fire spell, a lightning spell, an ice spell or self-buff doesn't make me feel immersed or connected to the character any more than if you just let me hit the fucking spell without going through this autistic piano lesson.

I don't believe I'm somehow level 50. I actually played this until 50. I could've played Solasta but I said, "oh no I wanna try this FF14 business." I've never felt greater shame in myself. Ridicule me for this if I ever pipe up.

 

[Blaine]

I don't believe I'm somehow level 50. I actually played this until 50. I could've played Solasta but I said, "oh no I wanna try this FF14 business." I've never felt greater shame in myself. Ridicule me for this if I ever pipe up.

A lot of the people reading this thread share your shame. It's somewhat mild in my case—I was armed with an ironic understanding of what I was getting into before I even installed the game, after all—but the shame is still there.

Delterius is such a slave to Final Fantasy and the job system that he simply lives with his shame, is shaped by it, molded by it—but he is still superior to 99% of the FFXIV player base, who don't even realize what the game is missing (compared to its elder counterparts) or how bad it actually is.

 

[Delterius]

I only lasted as long as I did in FFXIV because Astrologian used to be less of a Dance Dance class. Sure, even back in Stormblood its healing kit was 80% the same as everyone else because of course it was, but the little card system it had was kinda fun. As defanged as it was, people noticed when you gave them an empowered haste and empowered crits gelled especially well with Dragoons and Bards. But then they removed the card system so I just quit, despite having made some fairly amusing friends in game.

P.S.: i ran the ivalice raids like 20 times each so i extracted all value possible from this game
P.P.S.: and it was not worth it

 

[mogwaimon]

The Ninja mudra system is the most obvious example of this "Dance Dance Revolution" shit, btw. Hitting a sequence of symbols just to do what is ultimately a fire spell, a lightning spell, an ice spell or self-buff doesn't make me feel immersed or connected to the character any more than if you just let me hit the fucking spell without going through this autistic piano lesson.

I don't believe I'm somehow level 50. I actually played this until 50. I could've played Solasta but I said, "oh no I wanna try this FF14 business." I've never felt greater shame in myself. Ridicule me for this if I ever pipe up.

it will not comfort you to know that Ninja is considered one of the more complex DPS classes precisely because you have to memorize the combinations to activate each mudra, kek.

 

[Blaine]

Essentially these "DPS rotations" are closed, static loops. You begin reciting them when combat is initiated; you cease them when it concludes. They do not alter form or function to fit varying contexts, they cannot be adapted in situ to changing circumstances, they are inflexible.

They are a combination of rhythm and memorization, modulated by ability cooldowns (which, practically, is part of the "memorization" portion), and ultimately amount to complicated button-mashing. They do require some basic cues from external stimuli to execute properly, making them challenging—but nowhere near impossible—to automate using any readily available keystroke automation software.

It requires some practice and "skill" to execute these things optimally under pressure, but then the same is true of party tricks or any sort of physical fiddling-about time-wasting exercise you can think of.

"DDR" is a good shorthand for it, yet it's clear to me that playing a real rhythm game is actually brain-healthy in some way.

Because it does take time and practice to do them, it's difficult to put into words why these DPS rotations are useless, arbitrary, pointless, and stupid, but they are. Well, they aren't pointless: Without them, there would be no "challenge" whatsoever, other than responding to the gimmick of the instance/raid. This artificial fight with your keyboard, a very pale imitation of a rhythm game, is the only engagement you're getting and the primary mode of gameplay.

In a real and actual game, a skilled player's fingers might fly across the keyboard, but not for the purpose of completing an arbitrary knot of timed keypresses that's a closed loop unto itself. Each keystroke would be made dynamically in response to external stimuli, changing circumstances, reflex, "intuition," etc.

Dynamic and interactive vs. static and arbitrary. That's the ultimate takeaway, here.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

Beat Ultima Weapon dungeon/raid thing, I assumed I was done with "the shitty portion of XIV." And what kind of sadist makes a dungeon with unskippable mandatory cutscenes? What is wrong with these people? Why do they hate your time?

Then I saw myself still getting ARR quests, so I looked online to look at what was going on. I apparently still have a whole fuckload more to go before this Heavenward expansion is available. Imagine climbing a mountain only to discover you're just on a ledge.

Holy fucking Christ, this game feels like getting your asshole pounded by a most ample sized cock and after you're left crying but consoling to yourself it's over in comes Big Dick Black with hands on hips and a schlong pointed your direction. I have a newfound respect for Lacrymas.

I don't even know why I'm still playing, I know it won't get better, I know it's still going to suck. What am I doing? I haven't had a satisfying bowel movement in three weeks. Something is wrong. I'm calling the doctor tomorrow.