Tanking in FF14

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I’ve got a healer (WHM) to 80, and there’s a reason they call it green DPS. The goal of the game, at a high level of skill, is to spend as little energy as possible on healing, everything should instead be focused on DPS. It’s a strange balance… and had I not played a Monk in WoW with Fistweaving, I’m sure it would have been much more jarring.

Tanking is a different boat though. It’s often seen as the hardest role in an MMO, the default leader since you’re the vanguard for any given run. M+ tanks in WoW certainly suffer from that… and DPS love to complain about not skipping certain trash packs, or things taking too long, or a dozen other things. They never step up to tanking though!

FF14 tanks are all pretty much the same. Getting aggro (enmity) is extremely easy here, and near impossible to lose. There’s the odd tank swap in a raid, but in so much of the content, it’s just not a consideration.

That leaves the idea of giving and receiving damage.

Tanks as DPS

Each tank has an optimal DPS rotation, and that often depends a lot on the target. There are breakpoints for AE attacks, and then staggering buffs to optimize damage over long cycles. Blah, blah, blah… what you need to know is that some skills trigger other skills and you should continue to press buttons until there are no more blinking icons – then start it over again. And in all honesty, you could just press the same button all the time (AE attack for trash, single target for bosses) and most would not see the difference.

Tanks as Sponges

This is different, where tanks share a common set of cooldowns that reduce incoming damage. All damage mitigation is multiplicative, so you want to avoid stacking any particular cooldowns. When pulling groups of enemies, you want to use the better cooldowns at the start, when there are more things attacking you. The idea of “wall to wall” pulls, meaning pulling all the trash up to the next hard door requires not only great understanding of cooldowns, but a healer that can pump out a decent rate, and more importantly, DPS that can clear out parts of that pack before your cooldowns expire. I like to take on the first group in a dungeon, and then time how long it takes for the enemies to die and see if the healer does DPS or not. Quick kills and green DPS = good to try a large pull.

For single target enemies (bosses mostly), they usually have 1 big attack called a “tankbuster”. Understanding which attacks are tankbusters and not is important more for progression, less for leveling. For a LOT of fights, you should be able to soak the damage on the first pass, if you’re at full HP. Eventually you’ll use your big cooldown, then 2nd cooldown, and the first one would be back for the next big attack.

Tanks have stuns and interrupts. I wouldn’t stress too much about those. Put them on the bar, learn when to use them. Your healers will thank you for it, but it also won’t break a run.

Each tank also has a “oh crap” button. Gunbreakers should not use this skill.

Tanks as Herders

This is really where tanks shine. An ok tank will run into a pile enemies and then be surrounded. A good tank will run through the enemies and group them together for AE attacks, having them face away from a group. A great tank will do all that and then “shuffle” the AE attacks, meaning that they will move out of the AE attacks, and then return to their original spot, reducing the amount of movement enemies take.

This is very obvious for trash pulls, especially wall-to-wall ones. It matters a lot for bosses too.. especially those that have rear attacks. There are a few DPS classes that really want an enemy to stay in one spot.

Tanks as Peelers

To get an enemy to attack you, you need to hit it. Enemies that spawn while you’re already in battle need to be attacked and sometimes it can be really hard to target them. In most cases they will show up on the target list on the left side of the screen, which you can manually select and then attack at range. In the odd cases where there are spawns and they don’t show up, you need only walk a tad an perform an AE attack. You will be peeling enemies off your teammates.

What if We Wipe?

The joy of FF14 is that there are very few timers and you can take your time to get through most content. There’s no big push to go faster… at least until you reach the max level content and have some comfort on the role. If you die, then there’s usually a really good reason for it (90% of the time it’s the DPS).

Tanking itself seems to be a stressful position and you do have some additional responsibilities, but it’s also the easiest roles in the FF14 party structure because of all the various things you’ll be doing. If the enemy is hitting you and not your group, and you’re not dying, then you’re doing fine.

Access to Flight in FF14 + WoW

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There’s a lot of stuff I need to unlock in FF14… months of stuff that has nothing to do with Endwalker (Nov 23). So that means I’m working through a list of sorts, with the odd distraction along the way. Unlocking flight per expansion is one of them. I already had it for Heavensward (which retroactively applied to ARR), so it was more about Stormblood and Shadowbringers.

The neat part here is that the process is zone specific, rather than expansion wide. Boon and bane because each zone requires:

  • Finding all the nodes on the map (8 or so) that attune you to the wind. Some of these are really simple, but there’s always one that’s a milk run to find.
  • Completing 5 quests. One of them is on the MSQ chain. The other 4 are (with only 1 exception) simple quests.

The end result is a somewhat tedious process of unlocking it, with what effectively is an achievement system. I can take tedious.

Because the alternative is to not have any flying, like WoW insists upon every expansion. Or when they do, to put so much time gating that it takes weeks to get it done. They are either very complex faction quests that only open over days of effort, or are reputation grinds that take weeks to sort out.

But why does this even matter, what benefit does flight actually give?

Faster Access to Places

There are 2-3 places you can instantly teleport within FF14. I’m in the starting (level 1) city, I can easily reach the level 80 town with 2 clicks. Getting to anywhere is already pretty smooth. Moving around in the local map is certainly faster, and a huge benefit to gathering classes or FATE hunting. Since gathering is a sort of minigame, it’s not something that is easy to automate.

WoW has flight paths, boats, and portals. Getting to Shattrah is a crazy complex exercise. Northrend? Let’s say you want to do Bastion of Twilight, you’re looking at 15 minutes of travel. It takes forever to get anywhere, and flight gives you the ability to set your compass and just do something else. It also helps gathering bots, as the act of harvesting is only 1 click.

Access to Unreachable Places

There really aren’t any of these in FF14, at least that I can see. There are however places where it is difficult to reach, or time consuming. Stormblood has quite a few locations that are a vertical challenge to reach – and the final zone in Shadowbringers is really weird in that regard.

WoW had this at the start – TBC really went all in with this idea. Since then, it has instead relied on teleporters / flight paths to get people around. Navigation is relatively easy now, at least in terms of landscapes.

A Safe Place to Rest

There are only a few spots in any given map that are dangerous for players to AFK in FF14. Maybe you really luck out and a FATE spawns on you. Otherwise, you’re pretty much always in a safe space.

In WoW, almost any area is a death trap full of stuns and knockdowns. BfA was really bad for this – good golly was this bad. It makes the world feel more threatening and meaningful. For a couple weeks at least, then it’s just more hurdles to get where you want to go. The weekly raid bosses are a good example of this, when the game is fresh it’s actually hard to get to them. Once you have a few ilvls, then it’s just mosquitoes. Flying bypasses that annoyance.

A Sense of Pride and Accomplishment

Hah! No it doesn’t. You had it before the expansion launched, lost it because you are “discovering” a new world. The definition of explored is the debateable one.

FF14 doesn’t put a ton of focus on world exploration, at least in the context of the maps, outside the MSQ. So by the time you’ve completed the entire MSQ, there really aren’t many corners left to see.

WoW on the other hand has a LOT of exploration and optional content. I do buy the argument that if you bypassed it all, then there is still a lot of content left to do without flying. I can almost see why factions are a gate, since they are the prime mechanic to explore the map outside of the main quest. Now… does doing the same quest every day for 6 months a valid measure of explored? Ehh.

Forward

I think the fundamental bit where time management feels like it’s more respected in one game vs the other is they key differentiator. As much as this has been about flying, the real thing is how the developers view the players and what they are trying to do with their time. It’s an interesting design paradigm that applies to so much more than this singular issue – but is most certainly highlighted.

FF14 – Gathering Leveling

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Not that I need to write a guide, but the information out there isn’t the clearest out there. Mainly because there are options depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. I mean, obviously you want to hit level 80, but what else are you doing?

  • Are you trying to maximize money?
  • Are you trying to go as fast as possible?
  • Do you already have a level 80 job (e.g. MSQ complete)?
  • Are you leveling crafting at the same time?
  • Do you have a PILE of levequests available (3 come automatically per 12 hours, caps at 100)?
  • Do you have a few ranks in the GC to purchase consumables?

Get Flying

Don’t bother with any gathering profession until you’ve unlocked flying for that expansion. Seriously, unlock that stuff. It’s faster than you think and a HUGE time saver in the long run.

Consumables / Gear

  • Anything with 3% experience should be active at all times, you can find cheap food almost anywhere.
  • Your GC sells books that doubles exp, last for 18 hours, and work up to level 50, for up to 1m exp. You’ll need a dozen or so per job.
  • Your FC buff will give 10% bonus exp.
  • The pre-order earring (20% bonus exp) doesn’t work for gathering.
  • From 50-80, job quests reward books that double xp. You will get more than you need.
  • You can buy gear in all capital cities. Not worth buying tools, and marginally for armor (not at all if you level 2 at a time).
  • I do not recommend any jewellery purchases, or materia.

From 1-50 the job quests give more than ample rewards. You won’t get any jewellery, which is fine for the early levels. After 50, you will upgrade you gear at 53, 63, and 73. Why these levels? Because that allows you to equip everything but a belt with very good stats to get you to the next 10 levels. You can buy from the market board, which can be a bit pricey, or just complete the job quests at x3, x5, x8 and x0 to get basic versions.

This stuff mainly applies to Miner/Botanist – Fisher is all about Ocean Fishing and way more zen.

Class Quests

Every 5 levels you can access a Class quest. For normal quality items, buy them from the market. For high quality items, you need to farm them. Use the 100GP skill that increases HQ chance. I suggest that you “bank” 2 of them and get half way to the 3rd. So complete the level 20 quest, gather up until lvl 33, complete 2 quests and that should be enough to unlock the 3rd.

Levequests

These come in 2 flavors – a simple delivery and then a timed event. Early quests are more delivery focused, and once you hit 50 all quests are the later one. The ones prior to level 50 are also split across towns based on level ranges. Avoid those early ones like the plague.

You really want decent stats for these. There’s nothing worse than having a 40% chance to collect the base item… things drag on.

I would STRONGLY recommend having flight available for any levequest.

tldr; don’t do levequests before level 50.

Beast Quests

Not worth it for levelling.

Job Quests

From 1-60, you can buy all the material from the Market Board – and you really should. From 61+, you won’t be able to buy the material, you’ll need to actually gather it. This part can be tedious, as even with good stats, you’re going to have a 5% chance to collect a HQ item. Do them as they become available, they give great experience and odds are you can sell the gear for 20k per piece.

Starting (1 to 10)

This is simple enough, you just harvest for your given class, needing a level 5 node to pick from. North Shroud for Botanist, Central Thanalan for Miner. Get to 10 and head back to complete the class quest.

Choice A – Levequests or Diadem (11 to 50)

If you have TONS of Levequests, you can just pound through levels with relative ease, assuming you are just teleporting around or playing the market board for items. It is not braindead though, and it can cost you some gil.

Alternatively, you can head to Foundation and then Firmament (take The Brume exit). This will give access to some minor quests and unlock the Diadem. This is an instanced location where you start off heading to the left, take an air current, and land on an island with tons of nodes. If you have flying, this is ultra easy mode. This is brain dead and you will end up with Ishguard materials by the truckload. You can use these to level a crafting class, or sell them on the market for some rather easy gil. This is super brain dead and easy leveling up to 50.

You’ll unlock job quests every 5 levels. You can technically skip them all, as they have no impact on the ability to collect material from the Diadem and you buy the quest items on the MB.

Choice B – Levequests or Diadem (50 to 60)

Experience slows dramatically at 50 because your dbl exp consumable won’t work anymore. If you don’t have a pile of Levequests, then stay in Diadem. Diadem becomes extremely brain dead at this point – you can turn on a movie and just get to it.

I would strongly suggest Levequests instead from 50 to 80. They are much easier to locate (capital cities), come in batches, and should be giving a couple levels per turn in.

50 to 80

Levequests are the way to go, and you should pump up the difficulty for better rewards. You WILL need to use skills to maximize the harvesting, so that means some decent investment in jewellery to have enough GP. Pick up 2 of them, they should be in the same zone, and then go to work. This part goes relatively quickly as it’s much more streamlined than the 1-50 portion, and the maps are generally better designed.

Remember, it is always better to collect a base material than to miss a HQ one. Hit the base one for a chain of #4, and you can get a 100% chance on the final swing.

The only Gil you will receive is from the quest rewards. You won’t be able to sell any material gathered. If you want to recoup that money, then you should use this time to keep Retainers leveled up and once at 80, consider how market rates work on your server.

Metroid Dread

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It’s a weird thing to play another actual 2D Metroid game again, nearly 10 years since the last one. Sure, there was a bunch of Metroid Prime games, but I was not a fan of the FPS view point. Plus, in that time there was a surge of Metroidvania games that hit the market, each one taking a slightly different approach but maintaining the 2D controls.

And that’s the kicker right. Look at all the amazing games we have had:

  • Hollow Knight
  • Ori and the Blind Forest
  • Axiom Verge
  • Dead Cells
  • Dust
  • Blasphemous
  • Guacamelee
  • Bloodstained

Some focus on the controls, some on rogue-like elements, others in the story or quests. Each one has a particular element that just plain shines.

So where does that leave Metroid? Being a Switch exclusive doesn’t help. Anything looks good on a tiny screen, and this game does look good, but in the dock it certainly doesn’t scale. One of those weird things were a Switch emulator is a better deal… welcome to 2021 Nintendo! (*insert thoughts on a 4K Switch being delayed*) It also has a sort of diorama experience, where Samus feels superimposed on the world, which I think works quite well. There are plenty of loading screens (15+ seconds), which is just plain dumb. No, dumb would mean that it wasn’t purposeful. Someone thought this was acceptable and designed around it.

It looks clean.

The moment to moment gameplay is good, with decent controls. They are smooth nut not responsive, with better examples in the list above. This gets more challenging the more abilities you unlock… the dash and spin attacks lack precise controls and you’ll have a lot of trail and error to get it down. The skills you do get are more about opening new parts of the map, rather than changing the particular playstyle. Your beam attack gets more powerful over time, but it’s the same point and shoot from start to end. The solution to every problem seems to be to just put more bullets into it.

The enemies are diverse and certainly require you to take different approaches as the game progresses. The difficulty is relatively low, with only a few exceptions, such as bosses. Bosses here are more akin to perfect runs. You either ace the fight or die. There’s very little wiggle room, so you’ll die repeatedly until you learn the move set of the enemy, then feel like a gaming god when you clear it with no hits taken. It never feels overly painful and does increase the sense of progress. Kraid is here for some unknown reason. I will say the last boss is a right mess to learn all the patterns. It felt extremely good to take him down.

The EMMI droids are an interesting experiment. They are restricted to specific areas and if they detect you will kill you 99% of the time. So again, this is about perfecting a run, with some randomization where the EMMI will patrol. Sometimes it just isn’t fair, and other times you wonder where the EMMI is in the zone. You can never improve your ability to survive them, so there’s no sense of progress. If they were not present, and instead replaced with mini-bosses, this would be a better experience. Or more tools to avoid capture/delay them. It doesn’t work and you’ll just brute force your way through those sections.

The metroidvania part of the game is simplified compared to pretty much all competition. Every collectible is shown on the map, so reaching 100% is quite easy. There are no side quests, no currency, no hidden bits. Backtracking is required, and not terribly intuitive – I got lost a few times on the proper next steps. Teleporting around the map is quite painful (see loading screen item above), so the sense of scale/freedom isn’t there. I will say that there are a half dozen ‘puzzles’ in the game that relate to storing a speedboost (spark) and then quickly going somewhere else to use it. Figuring out how to solve those puzzles is a LOT of fun… if only the controls were consistent enough to let you do it.

This is a quite negative review of the game, but it’s only when compared to the rest of the genre. I can sum this up in one sentence – if Metroid Dread was released 10 years ago, then it would be an extremely high bar. But it didn’t. Every game in the list above is better – better controls, better story, better exploration. This feels more like a new coat of paint on Super Metroid than an actual fresh take. It’s not a bad game, far from it. It’s good and will keep you going. But in this case, the students have far surpassed the master.

Diablo 2 Woes

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Over 9 years ago, Blizzard launched Diablo 3. I was there at launch, and for over a month there was the dreaded Error 37, preventing all play. A few months after that, SimCity launched with a similar model and collapsed almost entirely under it’s own weight with the same issue. 9 years ago the interwebs were dealing with the inability to scale their servers.

This is 2021 and Diablo2 servers have been up and down for a month since launch. No skin off my back, I’m done with Blizzard for the foreseeable future, but I also don’t live in a cave to ignore a behemoth like Blizzard not figuring this stuff out. And to be clear, it’s not like Blizzard wants to disappoint players.

I did post a while back about cloud architecture, and how Blizzard runs a hybrid model to manage peak load, for non-sensitive components. Authentication is one of the sensitive bits, for a billion reasons, and not something a AAA company would want to put in a “public” cloud. There are “private” cloud offerings, which are an interesting conversation on their own. I am not a Blizzard network engineer, so this is all speculation here based on prior experience. I am not at all saying this is easy, even less so when you are trying to re-jig (*checks notes*) 21 year old-code.

And yet, this reads like more bad news on a company that can’t really seem to find much positive to report. In some alternate world I’d feel bad for kicking a company while it’s down… but this is really all self-inflicted.

FF14 – Now What?

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I hit 80 on my WHM the other day. 13 days played to get through the entire MSQ – I did start in 2013 and stalled out at the end of 3.0. In terms of cost vs time spent, it’s a crazy value. Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to say all that time was well spent as there is a limit to one’s sanity when it comes to cutscenes. I can’t see how anyone would ever consider picking up FF14 when Endwalker comes out, and start from scratch. Nor should a new player just plop down at 70 and understand all the interconnected systems with a boost. A problem with no good (or perhaps simple) answers.

But I’m not here to talk about them! I hit 80! All the world is my oyster! It’s also a very big oyster. There are a lot of things I can do now, with close to 5 weeks before Endwalker comes about.

  • Learn the systems
    • There are maps, airships, savage runs, desynced battles and a pile of other terms that make no sense to me right now. In those 13 days played, I’ve never had to intersect with those systems.
  • Level more classes
    • Battle classes will be a slow process. Gunbreaker is my main target for now for instant queues and they have a decent look
    • Harvesting classes are the first one. Diadem + GC books mean a relatively quick run up to 50 for Mining and Botany. Having these at 80 for the expansion release will probably be the largest generation of Gil for a foreseeable time.
    • Crafting classes will come later. The guides I’ve read peg this at about 3m cost to get there quickly.
    • Blue Mage. Maybe?
  • Unlock more stuff
    • Beast tribes haven’t been touched. I don’t see a huge involvement here though…
    • Extra dungeons/raids/trials need to be unlocked. There are a few dozens to go. I do have Alphascape done though! (12 raids in a row, throwbacks to FF5, FF6, and FF1. Ghost Train baby!)
    • Flight paths in Stormblood and Shadowbringers will be required. I’ve got most of the ones on the map done, but there are quests to do.
  • Relics
    • This seems like a MASSIVE timesink for what is a glowing weapon skin. So count me in!
  • Housing
    • I have a room. It’s pretty much empty. I should do something about this.
  • Make some Gil
    • I would argue that this really isn’t needed, for a large set of reasons. However, there is something to be said about not having to worry about money. I figure if I can keep a float of 10m, that should be more than enough for a long time (I’m at 3m now).

For now, I think I’ll focus on a couple daily roulettes for the Gunbreaker then the rest of the time leveling the harvesting classes (and unlocking flight). That should keep me busy for the next few weeks. It still feels daunting to have finished climbing the MSQ mountain, only to find a mountain range lurking beyond.

Oh yeah, and find some time for Metroid Dread while I’m at it.

Dyson Sphere Update

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In the last couple weeks there have been a couple big updates to Dyson Sphere Program, and then a larger comment on the alien combat content.

Achievement System

For the most part, these are meta goals to change the way you play. Completing the game without using rare materials is certainly doable. Doing it at 0.5x production rate is a scalability challenge. It adds some replayability to the game that isn’t solely focused on SPM at high levels. It will likely generate challenge runs through specific seeds. That would be pretty cool!

Icarus Customization

Less a big deal, but the Icarus (your mech) can now be customized to a decent degree. You can change the color and the art looks better. It is much smoother and doesn’t feel like you’re pasted onto the world. The big gain here though is what this means to the modding community. There are now more hooks to customize your character’s look. It will be quite interesting to see how that plays out!

Combat Engine

I consider this the largest gap with Factorio. The idea that you would encounter hostile aliens during play is both interesting and confusing. Factorio has some sprawl, but it’s dramatically limited as compared to the sprawl in DSP. You’re going to cross solar systems, so whatever defense you do develop has to be highly automated, you need to know what’s going on (imagine fighting on like 12 fronts), and then the ability to impact that context.

Given the complexity of this, the devs are stating at least 6 months of dev work – which makes complete sense. Been lucky so far that DSP has been relatively bug free, the massive blueprint update underwent nearly 2 months of tweaking to get to a really solid spot.

The devs also said there’s more content on the way in the meantime, but I’d be hardpressed to see them as major developments and more focused on QOL items.

tldr; DSP is still in EA, will be for a while, but unless you’re looking for Alien battles in a factory game, it’s pretty much feature-complete.

Site Updates

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Figured it was time for some house cleaning. I’ve updated the blogroll to clean out the deprecated blogs (except Isey, I hold out hope!!!) and some other bits and bobs that were no longer working. I should change my blog image header at some point, but it’s also bee the same for something like 12 years now. Like an old sweatshirt… it just feels comfortable.

I followed the Blaugust and read a pile of blogs there too. That’s the next logical step to update those. I’ve got a bunch in Feedly now, just need to take the time to curate it a bit more. The discord channel is super useful as a way to keep up to date as well.

RL has been ultra busy lately. I’m a head coach for one of my girls, helper for another, and it feels like I’m also a sort of guidance counsellor for new coaches/managers in the association. September has always (except last year) been a rock and roll month, and I am looking forward a bit to have a bit more wiggle room with my time. A week or so and things should be good.

Take care!

FF14 Quirks

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I’m on a dozen “positive” posts for FF14 of late. They are not effusive in praise, just that they tend to finish on a rather positive note. Looking back on my WoW post history, I don’t think I’ve gone more than 5 in a row without a gripe post, or armchair design item. Heck, my Anthem series has 1 positive post total (to which my brother kindly asked why I was playing it at all). Hindsight here is that I was playing WoW out of habit and small bits of fun – I was clearly not enjoying it as I once did. It was somewhat cathartic to hit the uninstall button a few months ago.

I do need to find the balance in some constructive (?) comments with regards to FF14. It’s not perfect… nothing ever is, but it’s leaps and bounds the best themepark MMO out there, across pretty much every meaningful system. Now, there are some bits that are a bit harder to swallow…

  • New player experience. I am somewhat convinced that FF14 has given up on this as for almost any practical purpose, you’re better off buying the MSQ skip + level boost. By doing so, you actually lose out on all the tutorials (there are many) and the rather solid on-ramp experience from 1-20. That player counts are growing is astounding to me.
  • MSQ time spent. I enjoy the MSQ, I think it’s well written and consistent. You can’t actually see any of the Scions outside of the MSQ, so there’s no weird time travel issues here. (Compare to Khadgar being everywhere and nowhere in WoW). That said, you’re looking at 40 hrs per expansion, with a good 75% of that stuck in cut-scenes. Relevant for the current expansion, but good golly, anyone trying Endwalker for the first time has nearly 200hrs of content to get through. A more obvious way of getting to NG+ would help here.
  • Glamor & Customized looks. Given the small inventory size and multiple jobs, it’s a right mess to have a set of customized looks at the top end. Which is kind of odd, since FF14 really is a glamor competition.
  • Gil costs. Ok, this is not really an issue for top-end players, but it is for anyone going through the MSQ and doesn’t understand the Aetheryte system. Teleport costs don’t scale with level, and the sources for Gil are not readily apparent for anyone who is leveling. Plus, the process of gearing for any MSQ post-campaign quest is stupidly expensive. I don’t think it makes any sense to force an ilvl for a dungeon that you can faceroll through.
  • The default UI. Clearly designed to be console friendly, the base UI is a mess to look at. You don’t really understand how bad this is until you’re in group content and half the real-estate goes away. You can (and should) manually change a bunch of settings/layouts, but if ever there was a place to mod, this is it.
  • Job variety. I guess this depends on your perspective. There are really only 5 classes (tank, melee, physical ranged, magic ranged, and healer). There is not objective difference in playstyle between two warriors. Jobs are akin to WoW-specs which change the buttons, and order of button presses, to execute the same goal. That means there are currently 17 (19 with Endwalker) variations in play. This DRAMATICALLY helps with balancing. Look at WoW and the 36 specs, 4 covenants, half dozen ‘valid’ talent choices, and the nightmare that results (36*4*6 = 864!). I didn’t add Shards or Legendaries either (note: covenants, shards, legendaries will all be wiped in next expansion too, making this a borderline dumb approach to design). tldr; if you like min/maxing, FF14 ain’t really the game for you. Is that a negative? Maybe?
  • Player housing. I personally think that there shouldn’t be any, only guild (free company) housing, where you get a room (and perhaps a fee for a slightly larger room). You’re just not going to find any (problem A) and the design interface is really rough (problem B). I am continuously amazed at how creative players are in regards to decorating – just wow.
  • Inconsistent mechanics. This is a personal one. FF14 does a great job at using a set base of UI elements to train responses. Red = bad, blue = good. Rotating arrows show direction. Icons above your head indicate stacking or spreading. There are however times where there are either no indicators (meaning you need to look at a boss, with particle effects going all over) or the indicators do not correspond to the learned behavior (e.g. the stack icon but you should not stack). These feel like anecdotes that players need to memorize.

That feels like nitpicking. There aren’t any systems that are inherently bad. Everything in the game has a purpose and even stuff from 8 years ago is relevant in some fashion today. When’s the last time you tended your garden in Pandaria, or even visited your class hall in Legion?

What would be interesting to see is FF14’s ‘quit wall’. The point where players generally decide to stop playing due to the effort no longer being a match for the rewards. I’d be super curious to see how many people make it all the way through the MSQ, how many folks have a 2nd job, and the type of content consumed on a daily basis. Even with New World launched, I still have a daily queue on Cactuar, so anecdotally there are still a LOT of players logging on. How long will this increase go post-Endwalker?

Shadowbringers Complete (5.0)

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When I rejoined FF14, I was in the middle of 3.1, the first content piece after Heavensward. It’s been about 5 weeks now and I just completed the 5.0 MSQ, with just over 50 quests left to do in order to be prepared for Endwalker. Well… prepared isn’t the right word, perhaps ‘able to take on the first quest’. There is plenty of stuff to do once at 80. This post is instead going to reflect on the MSQ proper, less the stuff around it – so some spoilers here (not the 5.x stuff yet).

The biggest benefit for Shadowbringers (ShB) is that it follows Stormblood (StB), as the former took a tangent to the main story villains and meandered for a long time. ShB goes right back to start of ARR, with the Source and the 13 split shards from the initial sundering. You end up on the First, after it has been swept by the light (this makes sense once you complete Heavensward’s extra MSQ). In short, it focuses on the Scions (good guys), Ascians (bad guys), why the world is the way it is, and what’s at stake.

FF14 has a habit of applying nuance to the world and less the characters. Bad guys are just bad, but the people on their team may be good. There are a few characters that have some backstory to try and explain their actions (Yotsuyu is a really good example), yet most just undergo a heel/hero swap (Fandaniel, Nero, Gaius). ShB does the same thing here for nearly everyone – except the Ascian villain. Emet-Selch provides a ton of backstory to the Ascians, how Zodiark came to be, and the loss of his world. It’s extremely similar to Zanarkand in FFX. You know from the start he’s a bad guy, but you’re also hanging on his every word. When you finally reach Amaurot, there’s a lot of sympathy for what came before.

Tangent. Remember Man of Steel? Where Zod is convinced that to restore Krypton he has to kill everyone on Earth? That was dumb, because there was no empathy for Krypton that was – all we ever saw was war. It had as much weight as if he wanted to put a shopping mall. The good news is that ShB learned that lesson well, and you can have some appreciation for what was lost way back when. Now, why stuff went wrong is certainly something Endwalker is going to address.

The general pacing of the story is an improvement as well, where you start in the main hub, and then branch out to restore areas in line with the larger story arc. You gradually restore the Scions, uncover more of the history of the First, and get access to some rather interesting locales. The pyramid zone and work with the Talos are memorable enough. The Tempest seems a bit of a bolt-on near the end (though the ride to get there is damn cool). It feels like they forgot that they needed an underwater level and just plopped it here (which makes sense, since the Light doesn’t reach the sea floor)

Eulmore is the heart of this expansion, not because of it’s location, but because of what it represents. If the end of the world is guaranteed, you’re going to have people simply accept it and try to go out with a bang (see Snowpiercer for a great example). The apathy and desperation of this city is really something to see… it bleeds into everything. Ran’jit is the perfect example of this… someone who spent years fighting only to suffer loss after loss, and he’s just plain broken. When that larger arc ends, it feels like the expansion is capped.

But it’s not, and then you reach Amaurot. I won’t spoil this part too much, but it has a dungeon that feels like a WoW raid in terms of visuals. If this is where Endwalker goes in terms of storyline/visuals, that would make me very happy.

The final boss of Amaurot… the beauty of the scene offsets the chaos of the fight.

Another tangent, when it comes to villains. The best FF villains are those you interact with, not just speeches but actual action and consequence. Kefka is memorable because he’s just always around the corner (plus he actually wins if you think about it). Sephiroth the same. Who’s the villain in FF12 again? I’m picking on FF here, but it applies to all video games (and most movies). You need that interaction to see more than a 2 dimensional character. ARR had Gaius, Heavensward didn’t really do this part well, Stormblood’s main villain you saw twice, and finally in Shadowbringers, Emet-Selch is practically in your party.

While it’s not the best FF story, it certainly feels the strongest of all the FF14 stories told so far, or perhaps the one that returns most to the series roots.