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I wrote up my thoughts on the Lost Canals over on Reddit: Over the last 10 days, I've run a -lot- of the Lost Canals. I've been in there well over 100 times at this point. My free company mates know that as soon as I've logged on, it's map time. I'm pretty sure I'm single-handedly driving the map economy of Excalibur (I jest). That being said, I felt the need to write up my thoughts on the good and bad of Lost Canals. But to look at Lost Canals, we first must talk about Aquapolis. The Aquapolis was introduced in patch 3.3 and has easily been my most favorite content added to the game. An advantage of coming in mid-expansion was that there was a mass variety of loot that could drop within Aquapolis. We had multiple tiers of crafting we could drop mats from. Aquapolis further dropped rare pets that were usually acquired from dungeons and other sources. One of the most important things was that loot dropped -frequently-. At every major patch, the loot in Aquapolis was adjusted. Loot that used to drop in room 7 only was shifted to rooms 4-6, rooms 4-6 loot was shifted down as well. There has always been Aquapolis exclusive loot (some orchestrion rolls, trees, dwarf rabbit), but there was also a mass amount of non-Aquapolis exclusive loot. Lost Canals has come out at the start of this expansion. As such, there is far less loot that drops. The -only- rollable loot in Lost Canals is the matanga lamp, namazu minion, 3 city theme orchestion rolls, ratanhia leaves, nagxian silk. Room 7 will also drop up to 2 verity crafting mats. That's not a lot of loot to choose from. Furthermore, the loot does not drop frequently. On average, I would estimate that about 1 in 10 rooms actually drops any rollable loot to begin with. Every room will drop crafting mats/materia/cracked clusters, but I don't find that nearly as exciting as loot ton roll on. But even with the rollable loot, the lack of variety makes everything less exciting. I don't want to make it seem like I'm completely down on the Lost Canals. The aesthetic is incredible and the whole place is beautiful. I absolutely love the water slides and new door animations. I also love that room 7 has a boss (even though it wiped my party once) as it adds a bit more challenge to the dungeon. Overall, I just wish there as more loot dropping and more variety of loot. The place is still great fun and looks way better than Aquapolis, but the lack of loot variety and the infrequency of loot drops is just overall disappointing. Don't get me wrong, with all the materia and crafting materials and cracked clusters, I walk out with a massive profit daily, but it still isn't nearly as exciting as rolling on loot every other room. By 4.3, I'm sure that these complaints will be gone as we will have multiple patches worth of loot added to the Lost Canals. Just with releasing it at the start of the expansion, I feel like there is not nearly as much loot as should be appropriate. Did the devs say that there was a new feature coming to Lost Canals in 4.1? I could have sworn I had seen that prior, but now I can't find any mention of it. I would be curious to see what they add beyond just more loot/loot adjustments.
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Jul 28, 2017 20:10
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Die Sexmonster! posted:Gotta admit, I love how the writing in the Omega quests feels like it's straight out of Portal. We now know how the WoL will reach the moon.
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Jul 28, 2017 20:12
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Ghost of Starman posted:Wait, do you mean Blindsight as in, the novel? I love that book! I obviously don't have any context for Omega beyond what I've gleaned from discussion in this thread, but are people speculating it's a gigantic Chinese Room situation? At the risk of making the next pages look like a Top Secret document, what's a Chinese Room?
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Jul 28, 2017 20:14
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Mordiceius posted:I wrote up my thoughts on the Lost Canals over on Reddit: How often would you say you've hit the final room? Enough for the title?
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Jul 28, 2017 20:16
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SirPhoebos posted:At the risk of making the next pages look like a Top Secret document, what's a Chinese Room? A bunch of devs that are doing that "every day until you like it" meme, but with that Dear Esther game they made. Less jokingly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room SwissArmyDruid fucked around with this message at 20:26 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 20:20
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SettingSun posted:How often would you say you've hit the final room? Enough for the title? I've been there 3 times. Wiped once on the boss. Been to room 6 about 10 times. Just bad luck on that door.
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Jul 28, 2017 20:26
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SirPhoebos posted:At the risk of making the next pages look like a Top Secret document, what's a Chinese Room? It's a thought experiment about artificial intelligence, basically asking whether a sufficiently complex computer can actually understand what it's being told to do. http://www.iep.utm.edu/chineser/
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Jul 28, 2017 20:33
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I did a number of Canals last weekend and we only got a couple drops we could roll on (aside from the ash stuff that's basically worthless). That paired with instancing not dropping groups in the same zone made me decide it's not worth my time and I'd be better off doing things to get money and buying the only thing I wanted from the Canals, which was the silk. Fairly happy with the outcome of my efforts. Not really happy with Canals. Then again, I wasn't huge on Aquapolis either. 
ruta fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 20:39
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I kinda wonder if the Au Ra were originally supposed to have been planned for this expansion, considering how involved they are in this story as opposed to HW where they were just...there. Then again, maybe that is exactly why they they released them when they did, to make the Au Ra a known quantity by the time we get to here. EDIT: P.S. Red Mage owns Unlucky7 fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 20:53
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KoB posted:Sorry, I meant Ive got the quest and if I can run the dungeons as any class as long as the weapon's in my inventory. The weapon needs to be equipped when you leave the dungeon for it to count.
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Jul 28, 2017 20:58
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Fister Roboto posted:I guarantee you that it wasn't, didn't, and didn't. There was nothing interesting about it. Basically every job had 3-5 CC abilities that were marginally useful and the rest weren't even worth considering. Some jobs had mandatory or nearly mandatory CC abilities, like provoke or swiftcast. All this did was make it so that to spend time on a different job instead, which meant zero progress towards leveling your main class and the MSQ. Ask all the monks and bards who had to grind out LNC 34 to get Blood for Blood how rewarding it was. It was pretty rewarding  But that's because I got to learn LNC/DRG and pick up a perk along the way. For people who aren't at all jazzed at leveling multiple classes it was a rather annoying gate to full power. Also when you run out of quests in the low and high 40's range in Coerthas and start getting blocked by MSQ's that's intentional. In keeping with the 'we're giving you an extended tutorial on Themepark MMO's' those sections are pretty much forcing you to learn to get XP from a non-quest source so you know what to do for alt classes and such.
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Jul 28, 2017 21:01
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Jimbot posted:Are there any fixes to the game crashing to a DirectX 11 error? I keep getting it during certain points during cutscenes. Googling the issue it seems to happen to a lot of people but I can't find any solutions to go with it. Anyone have this problem and successfully fix it? Rolling back drivers didn't do anything (on top of being a pain in the butt) and playing the game in DirectX 9 still gets me the problem. SwissArmyDruid posted:I had this problem, but my case was SO INCREDIBLY NICHE I AM CERTAIN IT HAS NO BEARING ON YOUR SITUATION. I had this error from bad RAM. I've also triggered this and all sorts of other weird in game errors (like stuttering sounds) from unstable overclocks. I've even set off a similar looking error but in Japanese, somehow. I don't know why, but Final Fantasy XIV seems to be better at triggering hardware and driver problems on a PC than anything else I've run, including things like benchmarking programs, encoders, and compilers.
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Jul 28, 2017 21:02
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) And the most recent AMD OEM workstation graphics drivers have a problem that makes me eyebrows disappear. In order to not get this error, I am now running the game in a VM that has only the game and the gaming drivers installed.
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Gearhead posted:Omega cannot distinguish history from fantasy. And seems to treat interactions with others as a flowchart. Omega ITSELF may be a Chinese Room, or a creature which is intelligent but not truly self aware. Something that I've thought about is that when Omega threatens to murder everyone if you don't go along with its plans, it really seems like it's trying to play the role of the villain that it itself extracted from its history/fantasy readings.
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Jul 28, 2017 21:59
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It's really loving cool how Frontlines was fun for a couple weeks and then it got overrun by bots.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:03
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The grey tide of bots only serves to fuel my battle fever. Grab some friends and tear them to pieces.  Still mourning the death of DRK in pvp though. Vacuum-shot on a 30 second cooldown is just no fun.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:07
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I really wish I could, but none of my murderball friends want to pvp anymore because of the bots. It's kind of frustrating!
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Jul 28, 2017 22:10
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Bard really is insanely stupid in PVP. I'm trying to level it next and in PVP it's just like 'mash button okay I got 20 kills and died maybe once, welp."
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Jul 28, 2017 22:16
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PUG is definitely really good as being someone's first class. You get a lot of buttons very early and doing them properly lets you hit buttons faster. It's the exact opposite of LNC. I'm surprised to hear the flak for ROG though. I don't remember finding it this tedious by the time I hit Sastasha. Granted, I only really lament the dearth of oGCDs NIN has whenever I'm sync'd to 50. oGCDs are fun. I can't decide what exactly they could do to bridge ROG and NIN better though. You can't give Rogues mudras. But the difference between having them and not really is like night and day. Even if it's just the Fuuma Shuriken.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:33
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Fister Roboto posted:I really wish I could, but none of my murderball friends want to pvp anymore because of the bots. It's kind of frustrating! literally 3-4 players in your own static play pvp on a literal nightly basis
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Jul 28, 2017 22:37
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we were running an 8-stack last night
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Jul 28, 2017 22:37
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Rainuwastaken posted:Still mourning the death of DRK in pvp though. Vacuum-shot on a 30 second cooldown is just no fun. They're still by far the strongest tank (and honestly better than most melee dps) 1. Their main combo applies infirmary (-20% healing), which afaik they're the only class that can do it except for ranged limit breaks??? 2. 60s cd 10% damage taken debuff ogcd with 25y range with bonus self heal, warrior has to finish combo to apply this and NIN has to be in melee to apply it 3. Ogcd charge that resets constantly from kills/assists 4. Silence with bonus 2k damage (!!) 5. Ogcd pull effect, as you mentioned. 6. ogcd shield for 3150 (!!) on a 10 second cooldown they can apply to themselves or others all that with the standard ogcd stun that all the tanks have. they have good damage, sustain, everything's ogcd, and they have just about every debuff except for a slow while also having the strongest healing of any non healing class. if you just focus down healers between infirmary and your triple interrupt (pull, silence, stun) you can easily roll games with them compared to other tanks and melee dps. they are kinda insane!!
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Jul 28, 2017 22:41
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Reiterpallasch posted:literally 3-4 players in your own static play pvp on a literal nightly basis That's funny to me because whenever I propose doing pvp I get a bunch of moaning about how bad it is now.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:43
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Fister Roboto posted:That's funny to me because whenever I propose doing pvp I get a bunch of moaning about how bad it is now. i'm pretty sure that's just ntan doing enough moaning for 8 people
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Jul 28, 2017 22:45
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Late to the 2.0 bad opinion party but I don't think much would be missed if they deleted the MSQ before 2.4 and made the intro video longer.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:45
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Minrad posted:They're still by far the strongest tank (and honestly better than most melee dps) Oh yeah, I was being totally hyperbolic when I said they were dead. It's just hard to adjust to when I got used to yanking a guy into a moshpit of instant death every ten seconds.
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Jul 28, 2017 22:52
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Well, if we are going on about 2.0, then I would have them cull out the more obvious filler quests (Most everything having to do with the Company of Heroes, at least). I would also like if they took the two story raids and redesigned them as 4 mans. They are really fun dungeons and the fact that unless you are lucky with the Duty Finder you will not have a good chance to really enjoy them as they originally were, and will likely play catch up to the people who just want to stomp through it. Considering how integrated some of those mid level cutscenes are though, I am not sure how to solve a problem like that. The biggest problem I see is that the writing team loves their references and playing the long game with certain characters. We even see that as recently as Stormblood, really. Unlucky7 fucked around with this message at 23:12 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 22:57
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I remember when people liked ARR's story a reasonable bit. I was the same. HW and SB definitely made them look a lot worse retroactively, and I'm not sure if I'd miss them very much either. At the very least, it'd be nice to trim a lot of that excess filler. I actually really like the payoff from the characters established in some of ARRs arcs. SB in general seems to be about bringing a lot of people back, and it's something I've noticed in the job quests too.
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Jul 28, 2017 23:02
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Turn Castrum/Prae into solo duties, applying whatever level of rebalancing is necessary to make them soloable, and keep Ultima as its own 8-person trial.
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Jul 28, 2017 23:03
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vOv posted:Turn Castrum/Prae into solo duties, applying whatever level of rebalancing is necessary to make them soloable, and keep Ultima as its own 8-person trial. Only do that after allowing us to replay solo instances
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Jul 28, 2017 23:04
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melees have a really important role in a shatter ball. raw destruction makes them the only people really capable of putting down a (sentient) healer without it being a drawn-out production, and the best way to break a zerg is to wipe their healers. that said, it's hard to rack up really high killstreaks as a melee.
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Jul 28, 2017 23:06
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EponymousMrYar posted:Also when you run out of quests in the low and high 40's range in Coerthas and start getting blocked by MSQ's that's intentional. In keeping with the 'we're giving you an extended tutorial on Themepark MMO's' those sections are pretty much forcing you to learn to get XP from a non-quest source so you know what to do for alt classes and such. I've been thinking about where I am (I've calmed down a little since my big overcaffeinated effortpost), which is where the MSQ has dropped you off at the beginning of level 47 and says "you must be level 49 to start wrapping this poo poo up." And it's pretty obviously to force you to do some of the sidequests that you can pick up right outside of whatsername's office, the "go around and recruit people to our cause (by doing the same poo poo you've been doing for 45 levels)". And I don't think that's bad, necessarily! This is the rising action for what is (I hope!) the climax to the story, and there's enough XP-giving options floating around that I have a lot of choices in how to get over this (I hope!) final hump. The problem is that this is no longer actually the climax. This might be the climax to Act 1, except Act 1 has been stretching on for... god, just way too long. "The end of ARR's story" is no longer a goal unto itself; it is an (extremely arbitrary-feeling) threshold that must be passed before a lot of things I would rather be doing. The fact that glamours are gated behind level 50 is a perfect crystallization of the issue. The MSQ is tolerable exactly as long as it serves as a way to feed me gobs of XP in order to speed up to and through level 50; when it comes to a screeching halt is when it switches from "relatively inoffensive powerlevelling" to "obnoxiously obtrusive narrative."
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Jul 28, 2017 23:10
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Here is the other thing...Once you complete the final quest you also have all the MSQ from the major 2.0 patches (Which make up their own story, don't get me wrong), and to be quite honest I do not know how well those have aged, save for its ending. That being said, once you get past the 2.0 ARR story, find a quest called "The Rise and Fall of Gentlemen" in Ul'dah. It starts up one of the best quest lines in the game, and it is something you can pepper in while working through the 2.x story content. EDIT: There is also a bunch of other stuff that unlocks like level 50 dungeons, two raids, and several other quest lines. And Samurai and Red Mage unlock at 50 regardless of story progress (Provided you also have Stormblood). However, if you want to get at HW content, you still got a bit to do I am afraid to say. Unlucky7 fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Jul 28, 2017 |
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Jul 28, 2017 23:28
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Thundarr posted:He was actually really good (ended up as top dps, I fell behind because I derped and got hit by the first transform during Farmville). He said he had recently quit his static because he was tired of them being bad and was pugging it to beat them to the O3S clear. Turns out he succeeded! Uh, what was his name. Theres a guy in a sister group to the one I run in, we're all one loosely affiliated pile of mutual friends on Lamia. My group suspects that this guy might be getting really fed up with his choice to run with them because he's legit a really good player. They just got in to 3 last night or the night before. And having seen us enter 3 on the first night probably did not do his confidence in that group any good.
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Jul 28, 2017 23:37
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Fortuitous Bumble posted:I had this error from bad RAM. I've also triggered this and all sorts of other weird in game errors (like stuttering sounds) from unstable overclocks. I've even set off a similar looking error but in Japanese, somehow. I don't know why, but Final Fantasy XIV seems to be better at triggering hardware and driver problems on a PC than anything else I've run, including things like benchmarking programs, encoders, and compilers. Those crashes are the only problems I've ever had and they didn't happen until I got to Heavensward. Even then, it wasn't until the post-HW pre-SB storyline cutscenes that it kept happening. If I skipped the cutscenes the game runs perfectly fine. No other game has this problem either. It's very weird.
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Jul 28, 2017 23:54
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Reiterpallasch posted:melees have a really important role in a shatter ball. raw destruction makes them the only people really capable of putting down a (sentient) healer without it being a drawn-out production, and the best way to break a zerg is to wipe their healers. that said, it's hard to rack up really high killstreaks as a melee. nin has a pretty good time of being a melee dps, but they're the only melee dps that has access to cc (slow, bind and silence at that) as well as multiple ranged attack options and arguably the best engage/escape combo with ninjutsu resetting shukuchi. I really don't get the design behind giving literally all of the melee dps minus ninja zero disables. like not even snares or silences. they don't really have the damage to make up for the lack of cc because they can never apply that damage reliably
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Jul 28, 2017 23:57
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Reiterpallasch posted:we were running an 8-stack last night I was in it too, and I sucked but still had fun! Gokai and I even teamed up at one point to get a kill, and that's going on my dream board.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:04
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you did fine, the reason you died a lot was that you weren't in mumble with us, so you didn't realize a lot of the time when we had hosed off to go somewhere else and didn't have any backup. that's not really your fault though.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:07
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Reiterpallasch posted:you did fine, the reason you died a lot was that you weren't in mumble with us, so you didn't realize a lot of the time when we had hosed off to go somewhere else and didn't have any backup. that's not really your fault though. I envy your good PvP experiences. Out of curiosity, how much Feast do you do? I'm curious how many other flying segway of shame owners there are kicking around.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:24
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Last I checked, I was pretty close to Walk the Line V. I only started playing PvP after Stormblood, because the experience was kind of just bad before they simplified hotbars. edit: oh, Feast. Can't say I've done too much of that--I intend to give it a fairer shake once you're allowed to queue in as a group, though. Haven't done it at all since the Scholar nerf.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:45
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Reiterpallasch posted:Last I checked, I was pretty close to Walk the Line V. I only started playing PvP after Stormblood, because the experience was kind of just bad before they simplified hotbars. I wouldn't suggest trying to solo queue it like I did for my 200 wins. It's soul crushing. Would be wise to practice a bit before you try ranked though, Feast is its own weird beast with the way the mechanics work. Particularly now that everyone is way squishier, the medal stacks are an even bigger death sentence much earlier. Frankly, it feels harder to actually make headway now because of that, the game just swings rapidly in both directions until the timer runs out. Unless you don't have any healers, in which case you die shamefully unless the other team is REALLY bad. The old tactic of getting a huge medal stack and then hiding in a corner and praying still seems to work sometimes against pubbies. I dunno, I haven't had much motivation to do Feast post-SB since I got my dumb segway in HW so I only tried it a few times.
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Jul 29, 2017 00:50
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