So Close I Can Taste It

Inching a bit closer!  The start of patch 2.55 is all cinematics and rinky dink walk over here, and talk to someone.  6 of them too!  And the subtlety is pretty much gone, time for the big moves.  I got far enough in (popcorn and all) to unlock the last MSQ raid, Steps of Faith.

This one sets you against a dragon, Vishap, who’s walking across a bridge to knock down a door – essentially a DPS race, with a few cannons to help out.  I don’t mind a DPS race but an entire raid focused on one makes you wonder why it exists?  I mean, it looks neat and it’s the first time you’re actively fighting something that much larger than you.  Cripes, we fit the entire raid under the dragon’s belly.

Compared to the previous raid and the dozen or so wipes, I think I cast Cure about 5 times, and just used regen here and there.  95% of the rest of the time, I was in Cleric stance and just DPS.  Clerics aren’t super DPS either, I think I do about 200ish.  I’d guess a pure class would be double?

Have I mentioned how healers have it awesome?  Instant queue for this one again.

Anyhoot, unless I’m mistaken I have 2-3 fetch quests left, then about 30 minutes of cutscenes before Heavensward.  The downside is that the intro cinematic of Heavensward spoils a fair chunk of what’s coming.  The upside is that the MSQ is filling in the blanks and it’s pretty well done.  At least by FF standards.

Final Fantasy Lore

Let’s face it, Final Fantasy is one of the largest IPs on the planet for gamers.  Aside from Warcraft and Star Wars, it’d be pretty hard to find the next in line.  And I don’t mean character, that’s clearly Mario.  I mean the entire world/lore/history.

The neat thing about the FF series is how all the games are set in their own world but share common elements.  There’s always some sort of crystal, summons are always going to be present, character classes are nearly always there, and you’re always going to find Cid, Biggs, and Wedge.  The art style is almost always buckles and zippers and layers, with a side of crazy hair.  Moogles and Chocobos.  It’s not really a FF game without those pieces, though some took a while to make it into the series.

Even the combat basics have been pretty common across.  Sure, the Active Time Battle (ATB) has come and gone but the concept of slow, methodical thinking before actions has been there since the beginning.  Even FF13’s “just press A” mechanics were stalled by a bar that needed to fill up to execute moves.

That’s certainly one of the draws with FF14, how the archetypes and tropes of the series are used throughout.  The story pacing, the maniacal/plot hole enemies, the constant exposition, the humour, the stupid fetch quests, and the cuteness.  At any time where it thought the content felt “off”, the next moment it was back on track.  It’s rare enough to find a game with this much content that’s able to maintain pace/cohesiveness for such a long period.  I’m certainly more and more impressed as I move along.

Finished Patch 2.5 content, so only 2.55 left to do.  I will say that as the game progresses, the content gets better.  The story is more engaging and the dungeons/raids are a heck of a lot more crazy.  Each Patch seems to unlock 1 dungeon and 1 raid, plus some neat story bits.

Patch 2.4

Patch 2.4 gave me Snowcloak and Shiva to run through.  Snowcloak was a pretty neat dungeons, especially the bigfoot fight where you hit him with snowballs.  The entire group was new to the dungeon and we decided not to read up on it.  After about level 40, there are no more tank and spank fights.  If you don’t catch the mechanics, eventually you’re going to die.  But the ramp up time to learn is fairly lenient.  Learning on the fly is fun, even more so when the mechanics are intuitive enough to grasp – at least in dungeons.

Shiva was a quick run, though there was a wipe due to not killing the adds.  As a general rule in raiding, it’s “don’t step in the bad stuff, stay close to get an AE heal and kill the adds”.  At least of the majority.  I will say that that fight was incredibly neat to watch, and her ultimate is amazeballs.

Patch 2.5

To start 2.5 I needed to clear Ifrit, Titan and Garuda on Hard Mode.  I guess these guys were hard at some time, because they were each twice as easy as when on normal mode.  More skills available makes a heck of a difference, and item level too I guess.  Once that was done, I gained access to Keeper of the Lake and Crysalis.

KotL was pretty neat for the first 2 bosses.  The last one, holy kidney beans, AE city.  A massive dragon head, the floor nearly permanently on fire and then 2 smaller (still large) dragons to take out.  It was the best fight I’ve had in an MMO in a long time.  Superb.

Crysalis though, that thing is a pain and extremely dependent on player awareness.  Massive hits on the tank that I needed to pre-cast for.  Then about 30 floating balls everyone needs to tag, in a specific order to avoid taking too much damage.  If not enough are flagged, then the boss does a massive AE (again, need to pre-cast).  Then more AE from the boss, so everyone needs to be fairly close to take the AE heal (which most ranged classes don’t get and stay super far away).  Finally, he teleports you into some odd version of the moon, where meteors hit the ground for ~75% of my hit points, so the 2 tanks needs to run under them and take the blow.  Miss 2 and it’s a wipe. It took a long time for the tanks to coordinate this properly.  Nearly 10 runs.  People were chipper throughout and very happy when it was cleared.  (Can I say how rare that is?  8 anonymous people and no one was a jerk?)

It was a sad ending to this chapter though, story-wise.  There are clearly some set-up elements in place for 2.55 and I am super hyped to go through that part.

Content Stays Relevant

I think one of the highlights of FF14 design is the duty roulette system.  Every piece of group content shows up in this LFG/LFR system after you’ve completed it once (and 90% of it has to be completed in the story).  It’s split up across low level, high level, elite, trials, story and guildhests (learn-to-dungeon), with each giving a significant exp bonus every day, and some currency for gear to boot.  This means that all the content remains relevant to everyone.  You might have a level 59 in a level 20 dungeon (scaled down of course) because he wanted the EXP bonus for doing it.  This also means that the queue times are fairly steady, depending on the role you run.  Tanks are instant, Healers are near instant for dungeons, ~4m for a raid.  DPS, well I feel sorry for you guys.

And there’s no dev resources to re-jig something to stay relevant.  I don’t get served some sort of warp-of-time dungeon like it was new content I should be happy about.  Instead, they make a new dungeon.

I hit 51 in the process and with Ramuh down I’m just past the half way mark of the pre-Heavensward quests since launch.  Yay?

While the majority of these quests are fetch/talk quests, the story behind it is pretty neat.  There’s a consistent B-story in it all as well, which is sort of like a season-long storyline with each patch being an episode.  That’s pretty neat.  Plus so far, each patch has had a “raid” of 8 people.

King Moogle was the first, nothing too complex really.  I like moogles though, so there’s a certain flair here.  Leviathan was next and that one had a fair amount of moving around the map to avoid the big hits.  Nothing too crazy mind you, and the tank was pretty good (or at least “tanky”).  Ramuh though, he’s a friggin’ box of fun.  I think there was 1 person there who had done it before, which didn’t help much.  Plus I’m pretty sure I was the only one who read up on it before hand.  There’s a single mechanic where if you share this lightning link with another player, you take damage if you attack.  So you need to walk over these lightning balls to get rid of it.  I’m sure we lost 4 players on the first run and more than 2 on the last one.

I get that particular mechanics can be tricky and that’s the flavor of each fight.  There’s always the whole “don’t stand in the fire, take down the adds” of every fight but each one has a twist or 2 to keep you on your toes.

Healing

I used to play DPS a lot, back when I was actively grouping and you needed DPS more than you needed healers.  When LFD/LFR came around, I swapped to healing to avoid the queues.  That’s stuck in FF14.  DPS-wise I can solo without really issues.  Duty-finder is pretty much instant too.  And healing itself, well that’s a bit different and for 2 main reasons.

First is the global cooldown.  At 2.5second, you need to pre-emptively heal the big hits and it’s a rare occasion that everyone is above 90%.  In the larger fights, this has a rather interesting mechanic of actual triage of targets, making DPS responsible for their own actions.  It’s a neat swap of the traditional HEAL EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME of other games.  It’s still hectic but it’s rare that you feel cheated.

Second is the group size.  At 4 people in a regular group, it makes healing a lot easier.  It’s one of my favorite parts of SWTOR to be honest.  And raids set at 8 people is even better.  Healing a dozen+ people is like having ADD and you can rarely pay attention to what else is going on.  Smaller groups means more focus and that’s fun.  I’m rather enjoying healing.

Gold Spam

I guess this is due to the expansion – sure do see a lot of new players in the game. I’m not sure Square Enix does anything about this actually.  Here’s a picture of my current Blacklist, all goldspammers.

When an account gets banned, it gets listed as “deleted”.  Maybe gold spam is a sign of a healthy game?

Next Up

Continue on with patch 2.4 content.  There’s a good chance I’ll hit 52 before stepping into the expansion.  All of these through quests and the odd challenge log that coincides with my questing actions (duty-roulette and the odd fate).

And find a Free Company.  I’ve met a lot of neat folks mind you, and at a lot of odd hours.  Just need to find one that fits my playstyle.

I will say that the trek from 43-50 was longer than I expected.  That being because my expectations are leveling speeds found in pretty much every other game.  Then I realized I hadn’t even unlocked my Challenge Log and in 1 day I made 2 levels.

I actually hit 50 just after the first “raid”, or at least 8 man party. It was a 1 boss battle and the LFR-ish tool (Duty Finder) took under 10 minutes to find a group with me as a healer.  Wasn’t too hard either.  Following Rohan’s advice, I bought the expansion ahead of time, so you can see that I’m a bit into level 50.  Seeing as how I can’t unlock ANY level 51 content for about 50 quests, this seems like it should be a nice head start on the other content.

Looking forward to getting my own!

Clearly I’m not very far content-wise and I’m rather ok with that.  There are plenty of other people playing at this level, most of them Machinists or Dark Knights, so the queues are pretty much instant.  And I am absolutely blown away at how those dungeon runs give you massive chunks of experience.  One a day (each takes about 20-30 minutes) gives a huge boost.  You get another boost at 3 and 5 in a week.  It’s such a drastic swap out from other games leveling pattern.

On to the next set of quests.

The crux of the “games as art” argument is that both are subjective to interpretation.  And as much as there is shitty art, there are shitty games…so let’s no belabour the point too much.

Jewel over at Healing the Masses has a neat post about her qualms with the forced narrative in FF14.  While I understand the complaint, I think it’s one of FF14’s main benefits.  Here’s the logic.

Let’s say you’re a new player and you want to play with your friends who have been there for some time.  In nearly every other MMOs, you jump in, level up what needs to be done (or get carried, or buy a character) and in a week or so, you’re in the expansion territory.  FF14 takes a completely different approach.  From 1-50, you must complete the following quests to progress.  It’s not optional, you simply won’t gain other skills, jobs or be able to access other dungeons/content.  These are major gates.  And that’s just what launched with 2.0.  Once you hit level 50, you need to complete the majority of these quests in order to access Heavensward.  Jewel’s point that many of these quests have you running around the world is accurate – some of these quests can take 5 minutes or require you to clear an entire dungeon.

There are two options here. Either you look at that mountain of quests and say screw it, or you climb that mountain and meet the other folk who did the same.  This is a massive content wall, something that pushes away every 3-monther from giving it a shot.

WoW decided to open the floodgates to everyone.  Within 2 weeks of the WoD expansion, if you had never played you could have seen all the mandatory content from start to finish.  And when LFR came out, you could have cleared each wing out in a day.  A month or 2 in, and everything is done.  And then you lose 3m subscribers.   What was the record for hitting level 100?  Under 4 hours I think?

Wildstar took the crazy* approach of attunement but only at max level.  The original skill level required to attune was quite high but you could reach 50 by mostly face rolling, with some exceptions.  They’ve modified it since, but it’s such a massive departure from the rest of the game it throws people for a loop.  If there were more people playing this would be less of an issue but at current server pops, it’s a real challenge to complete.

FF14’s optimal leveling path is dungeon runs and group content.  The LFD system actually works pretty well since every single dungeon you have unlocked is available.  At 49 I was running a level 15 dungeon, and I scaled to its level.  That means that nearly all the content, in nearly all the zones, is relevant at nearly all levels.   Plus, forced grouping makes your social presence important.   This also means that people are going to quit at various parts of the leveling game, rather than reach the end and go away.  It’s a very interesting approach to “gaming glue”.

Which sort of begs the question, are you playing an MMO for the game for the people, for the mechanics, or for the game as a whole?  The 3 examples above fit into those categories.

As a final remark, I’m at 49.5 now on my White Mage.  I’m looking at that list of quests left to do and it seems like quite a task.  But the content is fun, the people are fun and it scratches a heck of an itch.