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Boten Anna posted:I can't wait to hang out with my pal Curious Gorge in about 8 hours, it's been a long time I was set to go WAR -> DRK for like 3 months up till now and then I actually took a look at the new WAR abilities and the notion evaporated really fast. I'll probably still give it a fair shake but good god I don't think it'll be easy to give up the axe.
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Jun 19, 2015 02:17
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I'm digging the party dynamic I'm getting from the MSQ cutscenes. (Up to about 2 hours in the Forelands) It's pretty great that Estinian and Ysayle totally hate each other and neither can resist lobbing jabs whenever we stop to talk about things. Maybe it'll get annoying later but I doubt it; I actually like that everyone I'm walking around with so far has an actual personality and viewpoint compared to the blank slates of literally every ally I had in the Scions in 2.0. Even Alphinaud has improved a bit in this regard. Also I saw that Cid also got an outfit upgrade and it's pretty boss. Now I leave off with what I believe is the true objective of Heavensward, finding the highest piece of landscape that you can land your flying mount on in every zone and then dancing on it. 
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Jun 20, 2015 14:07
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Jesus Christ but Ravana's theme is epic as gently caress. That is a hell of a fight.
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Jun 20, 2015 20:53
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Obscurity posted:Considering coming back..possibly..but holy moly. There was a lot of game info to take in from ARR just after taking a break between a few patches..this new expansion is adding/changing so much poo poo I have no idea how I'll ever learn it all. I love the fact that this game is adding so many new things, but what do I do if I don't have time to spend hours and hours learning everything. Someone please help I'm not used to being a responsible adult and playing video games If you've been through the original 2.0 you should know perfectly well this MMO is tailored towards you. You'll be told of a new mechanic and then you'll be led to explore that mechanic in your MSQ progression. Your favorite class will get new skills and you'll have a dungeon or two of content to use them in, getting comfortable with them right before you get more skills, and more dungeons to familiarize yourself with them. Deep breaths. Relax. Start playing, and pay attention, and you'll be caught up in no time.
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Jun 20, 2015 21:24
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Rei_ posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqv_LUStxDw Well I found it a more existential grim for the first "Act" (which ends at the Aery), where you have the plucky party trekking through the wilderness to find the one Good Dragon who wants peace to try and resolve this war without bloodshed, and there are trials and obstacles and character growth. And if this were a standard final fantasy you'd reach the Good Dragon and figure out how to resolve things happily but you get there and the Good Dragon is all "no, really, we loving hate you for legitimately understandable reasons and just because I'm not out there murdering as many of you as I can doesn't mean I'm interested in helping you. Piss off." and you're left with no good options but to continue a cycle of violence. And then more stuff happens but you haven't gotten to it yet.
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Jun 23, 2015 18:14
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TooManyUzukis posted:Send help If you want a laugh whenever it's prime time you can park yourself near this pack of mobs and watch new players zone in for the first time, wander around looking at everything, aggro all of them and get instantly murdered. It's the best glitch and I hope they never fix it.
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Jun 24, 2015 18:08
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cheetah7071 posted:I mean is playing drk from the getgo really any different from playing gla from the getgo? It's actually fairly different because DRK is markedly more complex then either of the other tank jobs. You spend a lot of time stance dancing in DRK even at low level. You don't have to, but then you lose out on a lot of efficiency and contribution that both PLD and WAR get to do by hitting 1 2 3. In a more general sense, all three jobs are a lot more complex to play than other options for their role; it almost seems that they were designed with the assumption that a player who was max level and had done a lot of XIV content would be taking the reins and certain levels of reaction time and forethought would be expected of them. This is actually a bad thing, though, because they cannot make these jobs more powerful then existing options because it would wreck balance. That leaves you, however, with a situation where you put in more time and more effort and generally have a more difficult time playing your job while other choices in your role are performing that role just as well (or better) with markedly less effort. That is going to cause some problems in the long-term.
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Jul 2, 2015 01:19
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ghostinmyshell posted:I poo poo my pants when I saw Korrigans in Sea of Clouds and turned around out of fear Glad I wasn't the only one. It was a fun time running around SoC babbling to my FC "oh my god DHALMELS" and before anyone could even type out "what the gently caress is a dhalmel" I started screaming incoherently about the Boyahda Tree as a bunch of repressed memories resurfaced when I saw who they were palling around with.
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Jul 2, 2015 01:31
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Sarrisan posted:What in the actual gently caress. That was a thing? I thought only roguelikes and such pulled that poo poo. In time, with a little luck, all things of FFXI will fade into lore and whispered legend like this has.
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Jul 2, 2015 02:32
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Ibram Gaunt posted:So how legitimate is the advice to go straight STR for tanking atm? Even as MT on Ravana Ex, on war, with full STR gear and point assignment I was never anywhere close to dying. War takes hits the worst of the three possible tank jobs too so right now, full STR is the way to go. Full law left side and slaying right side pushes you way over the Ravana accuracy cap, I might add, and probably will cap you out for at least the start of Alexander. That said, if you're planning on doing Alexander (especially Savage in 3 weeks) you are almost certainly going to have to throw more vit on for survivability, but no one knows how much. If you're doing Ex primals and your healers aren't as good at keeping you topped up, you might need more there too. My advice would be to get both sets of accessories, fending and slaying, now when you have a lot of time on your hands and 1000 law is easier to get. Default to max STR whenever you are doing something and sub in vit accessories as needed to increase survivability.
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Jul 2, 2015 14:37
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Blockhouse posted:FFXI fans are fundamentally broken inside Speaking from personal experience basically any long-term FFXI player eventually has to deal with the cognitive dissonance of realizing they put way too much of their precious, limited time on this Earth into a game that can charitably described as a dumpster fire. If you can't handle that notion you can end up replacing your memories of FFXI with an entirely imaginary game which only exists in your own mind, where everything was actually pretty cool and all the effort had commensurate rewards and the game design was exceptional and worthy of your attention. It has to be, don't you see? Because otherwise what the gently caress were they doing all that time? If you can move past that and accept the idea that you spent all that time playing a horrible bad no-good game you can appreciate the few good things that were in there, and realize that none of them justify giving any consideration to all the horrible things which eventually overshadowed the rest. Otherwise I guess you go to the official forums and talk about your imaginary MMO? At least they're quarantined.
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Jul 8, 2015 18:26
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cheetah7071 posted:I do wish there was a way to call out absolutely atrocious people without risking a ban, if only in content where it actually matters. I don't see how to do that without causing the harassment they want to avoid though. What's sort of ironic is that by taking a hard line against parsers this problem starts to get worse and worse as time goes on. The issue is that when good players don't have the option of naming or trying to correct bad players, they opt for plan B, which is to minimize the amount of "content that matters" they have to risk being with bad players for. Raid statics are a no-brainer and have existed forever, but over time people start eschewing party finder for extreme primals when they can, same for the 24 mans when it's possible to wrangle that many players into a premade. Hell, a lot of people in my FC don't even bother solo queuing for expert or high-level roulette anymore. Why bother, when it's pretty easy to find 3 people you know and run it quickly and reliably rather then risk getting a horror show going in blind? This is not the only reason why players can be bad, obviously, but I see it as contributing to why some of the late 2.x story trials and a lot of current Heavensward content have had pretty rough success rates when you're running with random players. The game is two years old, social circles and FCs are well established and both DF and PF are well on their ways to becoming a dumping ground for people who don't have a network of other players to tap when they want to do things. They're not there yet, but this is the start of how player groups calcify as an MMO gets older. Would having an offical DPS meter (or at least not dropping the hammer on ACT users) fix this? It might make it better, but like you said it could just as easily lead to harassment and witch hunting. From the perspective of the random player who wants to become better the easiest solution is always going to be to hook into a circle of like-minded players and go from there.
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Jul 14, 2015 23:14
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Tarranon posted:Bismarck ex frontloading a near fcob level dps check has torn our fragile Eco system apart I went 1/1 on Bis Ex and never went back once and apparently I dodged the biggest bullet in the game right now doing that.
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Jul 15, 2015 00:07
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Magil Zeal posted:I'm curious, I hear things like this a lot but I pretty much stopped 2.0 crafting at the 2-star level. What exactly is a "4 star rotation"? The biggest difference between a 4star synth and everything else was that difficulty got high enough to make using Rapid Synthesis viable to cut 1-2 progress actions off the craft. Because everything 51+ has a crapton of difficulty on it, it's still usually the best option for building progress. My current crafting rotation frontloads progress through Muscle Memory and RS until I am 1-2 uses of CSII away from finishing, then build IQ stacks using hasty touch and precise touch, hopefully until I have 9+ IQ stacks for the Byregot finisher. That's for 70dur, mind. A 35dur synth is basically just the RNG laughing at you while flipping both birds, at least until you have CP melds on the current best gear so that you can start replacing hasty touches, and that takes millions of gil.
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Jul 16, 2015 16:21
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Frog Act posted:I played this for awhile last summer and have a level 30 something white mage do I need to buy heavensward if I wanna jump back in, or is that pretty much for cap-level content? Not having Heavensward will keep you from being the new race, any of the three new jobs, going past level 50 on any job, and in a more abstract sense keeps you from the current "endgame" at max level. The previous 50 "endgame" will be almost entirely depopulated. All that said, at level 30 depending on how much you'll be playing you have anywhere from 2 weeks to maybe 2 months worth of stuff you'd be able to do before you run out of things and would want to move onto Heavensward anyway. Even accessing any of the expansion content requires going through the main story stuff from post-2.0 content updates which will take as long as running through the original game. Where you are right now I'd definitely not bother getting it and only worry about it when you have a job at 50 and are still wanting to play for awhile.
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Jul 18, 2015 23:32
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abraham linksys posted:Okay. Should I be getting STR or VIT accessories? Whiny healer babby seemed to imply the latter, but everything I pull up on Google implies the former What VIT accessories give while levelling is a high enough HP buffer to accommodate healers with sub-par reaction times, or tanks who may not know the right places to pop cooldowns or the right mob packs to pull together. VIT accessories are ultimately the safer, but slower choice. The thing is that when you know a dungeon/trial, or when your healer is good, then all those VIT accessories are giving you HP you don't need. If you never get close to dying in a fight because your healers are on the ball and you know when to hit your cooldowns, then you're effectively wasting all your right-side slots. When you are learning a tank job, learning to juggle hate and when to mitigate damage and how big to make pulls and all those things, then VIT is better because it gives you safety to play around with that stuff. When you're confident and know what you're doing, when you've been doing content for awhile and notice you're never really in danger of dying unless something really strange is happening, that's when you might want to switch over to STR. From that point and forever after, STR is the optimal choice. Then, in late endgame you approach each big fight differently finding the balance between damage and survivability. Most of the time it's still STR, but sometimes you will need the HP. tl;dr: use VIT until you're confident in your tanking and then STR once you are. Sub VIT back in based on the fight, once you're at max level and know what you're doing.
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Jul 19, 2015 03:28
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In fairness I haven't touched vit accessories yet in Heavensward, and levelling DRK up I was full str all the time as well. But I had 2 years of playing both other tank jobs by this point so I knew what I was doing. If I'd NEVER done a tank job before (I'm assuming this is abraham's situation based on what he said), and moreover been dumped into Brayflox and later dungeons as my first real tanking tests due to DRK starting at 30, then VIT accessories are fine. For awhile, at least.
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Jul 19, 2015 03:43
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I love How you can put all this time and effort and pain to get just a little bit further in A2S And there's always more And it's always terrible It just... never ends
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Jul 22, 2015 22:56
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abraham linksys posted:So what else is there to do until the next content patch comes out? Like what's going to keep y'all subscribed for the next few months? Basically everything you just listed. It's ok if none of this does it for you man, but you don't have to brood over it. Lots of games out there man, cancel your sub and pick one. Come back later, if it draws your interest again.
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Jul 25, 2015 03:45
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Elentor posted:Oh hell yeah. I'm guessing that was using Maker's Mark? How hard is it to build progress on a 2star craft? How many IQ stacks did you build for your byre bomb? I have the scrips and I'm going to start putting materials together for weaver body tomorrow.
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Jul 26, 2015 02:32
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sethimothy posted:Going to give this game a try, because my wife started playing it on the PS4 and she's enjoying running around hitting things. Might even be done patching some time this year! For crafting, it actually is best to level all the classes to 50 because each one gets a unique skill which can be used by any of the others, and quite a few of them are important. Additionally, there's a lot of crossover in crafting recipes where a craft for, say, blacksmith, will also use items from carpenter or leatherworker. It's less important to take them all to 60 right now, but if you like crafting you'll probably end up doing it anyway. In terms of priorities, Carpenter is the most important if you want the best results from crafting for it's critical level 50 skill. In practical terms, Culinarian will provide the biggest benefit to playing the game as you can make your own food. Alchemist to a lesser degree for if you want to use stat potions frequently. The general recommended path for everyone totally new to crafting is all crafts to 15 -> CUL to 37 -> CRP to 50 -> whatever you like.
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Jul 27, 2015 02:27
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nuru posted:Deep-Fried Okeanis is drat cheap. But ignoring that, it seems like you're saying that the answer to "Getting red scrip is massively expensive each week" is "Level all the classes, and then it will be still expensive but involve less self-mutilation". Even if you've got a 40k gil recipe with enough quality that each turn-in is getting you 26 red scrip it's still ~17 turn-ins for that particular week. That's a lot of gil for most people for a "cheap" week of scrip. The problem I have is that I can't figure out who they were catering any of the DoH changes to because everything seems flat out more insane than it was in ARR unless you're already rolling in money from being a 4 star omnicrafter (or being that guy supplying all the glamour prisms all the time). What's really funny is that Yoshida said several times that he wasn't happy with how the 2.0 crafting system pushed everyone into omnicrafting and that the crafting progression catered to people who could handle the incredible grind for improved tools, who had lots of money. And that he wanted to change crafting to make it more accessible to more casual crafters. What he ended up doing was creating a system where all the rich people who can max meld i150 can completely skip Keep gear and jump straight to Master, for a much lower scrip cost. Casual crafters who don't have the resources to perfect 150 gear have to use Keep as a stepping stone meaning they are weeks and weeks behind, forever, all the richer crafters. You are actively punished for not being an omnicrafter with a house made of solid gold and mastercraft demis. When 3.2 drops and they start incremental improvements to the crafting gear you better believe Master + Melds is going to be required to get them and everyone else can go get hosed. Really what I think they want is a system where all the crafters focus on a couple crafts, and make items for those crafts, and sell them to specialists in other crafts for the recipes they want to make. Do you know what that is? That's the loving 1.0 crafting system which was so bad that they couldn't wait for 2.0 to change it, they needed to rip the guts out of that system before the servers went down. Before they started charging people money to play the game again. Edit: For a development team which usually has their finger right on the pulse of player psychology I'm pretty surprised that when they were talking out crafting changes no one thought to mention that all these changes make being an omnicrafter much harder, but people both like and are used to being omnicrafters. Players never, ever like having their toys taken away very much. Meiteron fucked around with this message at 06:05 on Jul 27, 2015 |
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Jul 27, 2015 06:01
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Holyshoot posted:This just confirms the fact they are making savage ball crushing hard to stretch out the content. And the fact when you only have 4 bosses you can't have any semi hard ones they all have to be pretty hard to make it worthwhile. I'm not going to deny that it's hard (for reference, my group is on A3S progression) but what really strikes me about Alex Savage is that I strongly suspect it was tuned to expect esoteric weapons. There are a lot of mechanics in the first three floors which are difficult and cause wipes if not handled totally perfectly, but an awful lot of those would basically just go away if you had markedly more DPS then is currently possible for a raid group to throw out. Remove the direct and indirect DPS checks and A1/A2 are no harder than any other coil turn. Can't... really say that for A3S yet, but I think having a big chunk more raid DPS would change the dynamics of that fight pretty drastically as well. I suspect they basically just scaled the fights this way to ensure no one would WF a full clear on the first week again, let the keeners and hardcore groups bash their heads against it for the first couple weeks, and open the gates for the rest of the raid statics on week three. At some point these raids will transition to Farm and people will be hashing them out in 1-2 nights for gear farming like always, it'll just take maybe a month later then previous raids.
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Jul 31, 2015 17:13
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SwissArmyDruid posted:If you're trying for triple FC, it's SE combo, -> BB combo, one Heavy Swing to prep, Berserk + Internal Release, FC, Infuriate, FC, finish any combo while weaving in Raw Intuition and Vengeance, get one more stack of Abandon, FC. Cap with a Fracture while you've still got the boosted attack power, and you should crash right about then. It's a bit finicky but if you do IR -> Zerk instead of the other way around you will have about .5 seconds after the third fell cleave goes off to squeeze a buffed Fracture in before pacification is applied. This requires your ping to cooperate, obviously, but depending on the situation it's better then blowing both Intuition and Vengeance for a single zerk window. Also at the start of this rotation use your potion right after the first BB, before the heavy swing. As far as I've seen there's no way to get a potion to cover all 3 cleaves.
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Aug 1, 2015 01:33
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seorin posted:Read up on red scrip before you gently caress yourself by wasting time to level crafting. Once I stopped pacing in my apartment cussing at hypothetical members of the dev team who came up with this system, and sat down to really plan out what I was doing, it turns out red scrip really is just Ehcatl Sealants but Moreso, which is honestly not the worst thing in the world. If there's a criticism to make about it it's that Yoshida had said that HW was going to make crafting more accessible and user-friendly for the average player. That was a dirty, filthy lie, a lie told to all of us. When you accept that it was a lie, and look at the system as an extension of the 2.0 philosophy of "crafter progression is worse than relics and costs millions of gil" then it all clicks. If you're an Omnicrafter with more money than God you get to keep playing the crafter game and everyone else can get hosed, just like 2.0. There's two keys to it, which are that 1) max-melded i150 can meet 2-star requirements, letting you skip Keep gear and 2) crafting materials can be sold on the open market, speeding the process for the wealthy. So the Omnicrafter with all the money can meld his gear, gather his own red scrip materials, spend money to get even more materials, and make Master gear 3-4 times faster then someone saving up for the Keep stuff. That will let the Omnicrafter cover all crafting jobs while the casual crafter who opts for Keep will only have 2-3 crafts geared up in six months. I guarantee you that i150 is not going to be workable for 3.2 when we will likely get new recipes and you'll either need full Keep or melded Master to start them. It's exactly the same as 2.0 except the numbers are higher and the gear models are different. You're either fully into crafting or you're locked out. If you are fully into crafting then you'll be totally fine. If you're not that into it but want to be then now, and no other time but now, is when you want to make the effort. As hard as making Master stuff is now it's extremely unlikely it'll be any easier later on. They never nerfed crafter progression like they did relics.
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Aug 9, 2015 03:27
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kafziel posted:The big difference is that in 2.0 you only had to go through gearing once. In 3.0 you have to do it eight times. In 2.0 (and I'm being specific here, I mean launch) you needed to level your crafts to 50, put a halfway decent set together, and craft up 40-50 pieces total that to gear your crafts with the original crafter AF. There was a time, long ago, where 1-star crafts actually posed difficulty to a crafter and HQ wasn't guaranteed. Didn't last very long, but that time did happen. This is same situation but made harder to accommodate all the resources now at a crafter's disposal. You level your crafts to 60, you put a really good set together, and craft up 40-50 pieces total to gear your crafts with the second crafter AF. Same thing, slightly harder, takes longer.
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Aug 9, 2015 03:45
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seorin posted:Are you okay? I think you may have a severe case of Stockholm Syndrome. you know when I read that sentence by itself I do feel a bit unsettled Also I'm devoting a large portion of brainpower to actively repressing the staggering amount of time the average person who wants to gear everything will spend mindlessly hitting the same gather points burning favors, because if I ever admit that concept into my thoughts I'll probaaefbfdafkbls;fbfgbfvsdfbdk
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Aug 9, 2015 04:37
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Touchfuzzy posted:What does the game say the minimum iLevel requirement is for that trial? That's the iLevel you should be at. Others suggest an i170 weapon. The suggestion for an i170 weapon comes from the fact that BisEx has a non-trivial DPS check very early on and randomly assembled parties, even in party finder, have a lot of trouble with it. Never forget that people are bad. If you're a DPS with a certain level of quality (like, say, asking in advance what the actual recommended gear level is) then you're often in the position of carrying the worse DPS through that check, so you want to be as geared as you can. None of this applies if you go in with a premade from a FC or people you know, obviously.
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Aug 10, 2015 16:01
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Olesh posted:Crafting stuff A few things I felt were worth adding to this, which is a pretty good writeup of current crafting progression. Lets assume we are a 2.0 omnicrafter, someone who is crafting these pieces to improve raw crafting stats with an eye towards later recipes. The crafting priority for each job should go like this: Offhand -> Mainhand -> Body -> Left Side -> Right Side and Belt The tools will provide the biggest improvement in raw stats by themselves, assuming you didn't pentameld your existing tools (and if you were thinking about doing that, don't). Body will provide the next biggest benefit even without melds, not to mention looking really cool and letting everyone you run past know how great/rich you are (and do not kid yourself this is 95% of the reason to be doing this kind of crafting right now). Everything else in the left side will actually be a stat tradeoff until it's max melded; on the flip side, head/hands/legs/feet can all be max melded without resorting to tier V materia. The right side and belt all require tier V to reach stat caps and even then will not provide a benefit commensurate to the astonishing cost of melding them out. You can get a maximum of 9 crafting mats per week based on crafter scrips. If you're going to go for tools+body for every craft that will be 88 materials total, which can be collected over 10 weeks; assuming no NQs, or failed reclaims. Odds are good none of this gear will actually be necessary until 3.2, which could be anywhere from 4 to 6 months from now. So there's a lot of time to get this done. In terms of the actual craft in my experience I've found that 10 stacks tends to be enough. 10-stack byre will give about 4500 quality without good/excellent boost, meaning you want to shoot for 5000 quality before dropping the byre bomb. HQ materials are really important and I absolutely would not start a 2-star final piece unless I was sitting at 2000 quality or higher from HQ materials. RNG is RNG but I have tended to opt for Muscle Memory and Reclaim over Master's Mark. Both will craft you a 2 star piece if you put some thought into your rotation.
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Aug 12, 2015 21:39
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Olesh posted:Muscle Memory is awful and you should feel bad for recommending it over Maker's Mark. You make very good arguments for Mark, yeah. The only thing I'd mention is that if you're planning on gearing everything, half the crafting jobs you'll be making things on won't have specialist benefits; and if your three specialist jobs aren't bsm, wvr, and ltw, then that's a lot of crafts without Whistle and Heart to make things easier. That said Mark is probably the better call even then, there's just a slightly higher chance of everything going wrong. Higher then 10%? Probably not. Fister Roboto posted:So does that mean I can ignore melding for CP, at least for my specialist classes? Dr Pepper posted:Maybe it's just me, but I feel like Control's the only stat you really need to go out of the way for. If you aren't shooting for 2stars, then raw stats just do not matter. HQ your i150 set and you're done. If you are shooting for 2stars you have to max-meld. You can't cap stats on i150 with melds and either craft or control is going to get shortchanged. If you're shooting for 2star crafts you need to commit to one or the other, and eat the appropriate CP food (baked onion soup for +craft and seafood stew for +control) to cover the gap. Always meld for CP, though. It should be the very first thing you meld. If you never put any other melds on your stuff CP is still worth it (and melding CP first will not ruin your sets if you want to max-meld later).
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Aug 12, 2015 23:01
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Verranicus posted:Some people want SE to add bosses to the game like Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden from FFXI. One of which a raid fought for 18 straight hours and couldn't kill. More than one person in the thread says they wish SE would add "unkillable bosses". Why? Why?? Fun PW facts: That 18.5 hour failed attempt came about because PW had 20 forms and they were all of the same relative power as a coil boss but slowed way down because FFXI has a slow combat system. You weren't supposed to fight all 20; before this attempt forced them to make changes there had been a couple of attempts by other groups where forms were skipped, probably inadvertently. The mechanic had not been properly discovered and tested, and never would be. The fight itself lacked a fail state beyond a wipe (and wipes were very, very recoverable in FFXI) and there was no mechanism to tell players that they were doing something wrong, or failing to do something right. Hence the marathon, hence the press coverage, and hence the change to his mechanics. PW was a literal failure of game design. Note that this is something they have worked very hard to correct in XIV fights where you almost always know why you wiped to a mechanic. Even in A3S, for a current example, the names of Hand of Prayer (clasped together) and Parting (far apart) are supposed to be a hint to avoid instant death, and Hand of Pain will adjust it's damage if you don't quite make the DPS check to let you know you're on the right track. But that's just a fun digression. To understand why people advocate for FFXI features in XIV there is a very simple explanation: the game they're pining for is imaginary. It never existed. Even now, FFXI is unrecognizable from the halcyon days they think they remember. Because no one can go back in time and experience the old version of FFXI they have only memories to go off of - memories which have been stripped of a lot of the bad things leaving only the few good impressions. The only FFXI suggestion which has a semblance of merit is a bit more variation in substats on gear; beyond that, everything else can and should be ignored.
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Aug 18, 2015 18:30
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kafziel posted:What was the intended strategy for Pandemonium Warden? This is gonna be a bit spotty but here's what I remember from both reports of the era and speculation afterwards. Note that the time between him being spawned for the first time and the marathon run shutting everything down was only a couple of weeks. This blew up in SE's face pretty drat fast. Every form of PW would spawn with 8 Pandemonium Lamp adds; PW's main form would emulate one of the many major bosses of his expansion, and his lamps would be themed similarly. A beastman king form, for example, would have lesser beastmen as the lamps. If all 8 were killed they would respawn with the next PW form, and if they were left alive they would despawn and reappear in their new appearance whenever PW switched forms. The best guess people had was that something with either killing or not killing the lamps would let him skip forms. His forms were grouped into sets; 4 raid boss forms, 3 beastmen king forms, so on and so forth. He would choose forms within a set in a random order then move onto the next, although a couple groups making attempts reported instances where he'd only use one form from a set, then skip to the next set entirely when it was killed. That would mean you could reach his "final" form by killing only 5 forms before that instead of 20, if you did it right. Understand that each form was like a 20-60 minute fight, with repeated wipes and recoveries. So even if you stripped the fight down to one form per set it would have been 5 hours or longer. His "last" form, where he takes his unique appearance, not only spawned 8 normal lamps but every 25% health would summon eight more whose only purpose was to throw a ludicrous amount of raid damage around, basically instantly wiping the group. You were either supposed to have a controlled wipe and recovery, or some kind of positioning which would only kill half your group or something like that. We'll never know. The marathon attempt ended here, when he wiped the group in about 2 seconds at 75% of his health and the group making the attempt realized they'd have to deal with that three times to kill him. It all fell apart after that. Anyway the whole marathon attempt got a fair amount of play in MMO websites along the lines of "haha look how utterly hosed up FFXI is" and in response SE totally retooled the fight. They stripped half the forms out, dropped the total HP by like 80% on everything. In return he now has a 2 hour "timer" from the point that he's spawned and if his final form isn't killed in those 2 hours, he just despawns with a little message about how disappointed he is with you (because SE never passes up a chance to be a dick to FFXI players). It is a total DPS race from start to finish because you needed to go full burn for those 2 hours to make it in time.
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Aug 19, 2015 15:17
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Holyshoot posted:That's some poo poo loving drop off in savage. They should tune it better. Just because we wanted it to last longer doesn't mean months longer. A3S and A4S are very, very obviously tuned for max gear, or close to it (I'm pushing A3S, same as a few weeks ago when this last came up). They drew a line between A2S and A3S and said "you're either the best players in the game, or you're in i200 or higher, or you can gently caress off". I know very little about A4S because no one's talking until someone clears it; but some sources like BG's discussions about it imply that many groups are blowing nearly all the enrage timer just reaching the final phase. Those may be out of date, who knows. Still a big 0 on completions in week 5. I have said before that the high-difficulty raid system has two parts: it's progression, which is where we're still at, and there's farming, which is what actually keeps people running this stuff for the half-year between endgame raids. People make a lot of hay about Second Coil being cleared on week two and Final Coil being cleared on week one but in truth a lot of groups needed 1-2 months, or longer, before clearing those raids; Alex Savage is as hard or harder then those examples on top of having a gear requirement which is stretching this out considerably. It's pretty clear that the higher gear check is a direct counter to the WF progression groups who were clearing the raids so quickly; but WF progression is never representative of the greater body of raiders and really shouldn't affect raid design. The killer thing is basically that no one expected this level of gear restriction going in, based on 1.5 years of Coil raiding. A lot of those 15k clears probably got A2S down in the first week, and then ran smack into a fight that average groups had practically no chance of clearing in the first 2-3 weeks. Cue a lot of futility and people eventually starting to eat themselves over it. It doesn't help that every group putting in 30+ hours into A3S knows, every moment, that a harder fight that no one has cleared is waiting for them and that will probably translate into another month of progression starting from when they actually manage to kill the jelly man. That can be a very discouraging thought.
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Aug 22, 2015 15:11
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Fishious posted:Ignoring how backwards it is to have a raid require the same tier gear it drops to kill it, if you are not approaching amazing at your job forget even doing it in full AF2. Groups that cleared FCoB in full i130 but before echo will be waiting for echo with this one, assuming they don't go gently caress it and disband before that happens. Frankly, I don't think they will put Echo into Alex Savage. Why would they? Echo was there because there was actual plot and cutscenes of merit in Coil, so that people who couldn't put in Raid-level hours or weren't at Raid-level skill could at least see the content. Maybe pick up gear for glamours. Later they added some materials for desynth or crafting in the older content. There is nothing in that paragraph which is not already covered or could be covered by Alex Normal. You don't need to make Alex Savage Easy Mode because that already exists.
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Aug 22, 2015 16:24
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Klades posted:In other news, when Yoshida was answering chat questions after the live letter he apparently said that tanks stacking STR all the time is a "problem" but they haven't figured out how to 100% solve it yet. If that's a problem then the entire underlying structure of gameplay is a problem. In even-geared or over-geared situations players will gravitate towards the fastest clears possible, looking for opportunities to increase DPS. In those situations extra HP on tanks through VIT is pointless, because those tanks will never be in danger. If a tank has level appropriate gear and the healers aren't bad this is literally all content in the game short of progression raiding and maybe some Ex primals. In under-geared situations STR is still considered because Tanks are required to contribute more DPS to win fights. No one is going to sit around going "oh we can't meet this DPS check without Tanks contributing so I guess we wait three weeks for our real DPS to gear up". Every major fight in the entire game boils down to "achieve this level of Raid DPS to meet this arbitrary time limit" followed by "perform these actions to not wipe due to failing raid mechanics", and it's a natural progression of the former that STR becomes the main stat for tanks and VIT the fill-in to meet bare minimums of survival. poo poo, even now in A1S I spend the entire fight tanking an Oppressor in Deliverance except for a 15 second span for the second tank buster. My healers figured out how to keep me alive with that level of HP, what possible draw is there to add more? We have a time limit to meet. They would either need to give some additional effect to VIT like damage mitigation (shifting DPS responsibilities to healers with now-lighter loads) or reduce/remove hard enrage timers. Things like that could have a lot of unexpected side effects in other areas, which I guess is where not 100% solved comes from. Meiteron fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Aug 23, 2015 |
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Aug 23, 2015 00:22
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RC Cola posted:Good news everyone. I unburned out by playing on my ninja with my brother for a while. Now I'm working on getting lights for my relic weapon, is there a fastest or most fun way to do this?  The most fun way to do it is pvp, nothing but pvp. In no way whatsoever will this be the fastest option but it also won't destroy your soul. The fastest way is to follow the bonus light for HM primals and burn them down with overgeared parties in a couple minutes each. I have no idea if lights are still reliably tracked; or how many people farm HM; or how long it takes now that light has been cut in half. I do know you won't make it halfway before questioning why you even started, and I can say that confidently knowing nothing of your mindset or decision process for starting a relic. E: Actually considering that original flavour Frontline is now totally dead as the already-small PvP population moved to seal rock, which is too high a level for an effective use of a Novus, lights-via-PvP might not work anymore.
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Aug 24, 2015 17:31
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I didn't see it mentioned here so some tidbits from the XIV panel at PAX: -First it's worth mentioning Soken is a pretty funny guy just in general. -Soken saw a kind of dancing action to a lot of Ravana's actions along with the butterfly and flower aesthetic of a lot of the fight, and took inspiration from that to make the first half of the theme a waltz. -In original planning, the second themes for Ravana and Bismarck were going to be the existing A4 theme and the A1-3 themes, respectively. Koji Fox wrote lyrics for both themed for the primals (including just inventing a Gnathic language to use with A4 as the musical backing) before being informed that they were actually going to use totally different music for the primals. -He then wrote lyrics for Ravana's actual theme in draconic, because their singer was going to be Japanese and was worried about the accent. THEN they got a new singer and he wrote the english lyrics. The singer for Ravana is apparently the localization head for XV, as well. -A1-3 had actual lyrics revolving around Bismarck and flying and whatnot before it was changed to be an Alexander theme. Koji described his process of writing the new alex lyrics as feverishly thinking things up inside his head on packed commuter trains after work, while already putting in 80 hour weeks on the job. This is why the the A1-3 lyrics are a bit, uh, esoteric.
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Aug 30, 2015 03:24
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Mr. Nice! posted:Also it is telling of the state of crafting in this game that there has never been a piece of dragoon i180 gear sold on the marketboard on excal. The window has closed. Esoterics basically removed the need for crafted i180 now that it's been two months and everyone has enough tomes to buy i200, or books to get 210 stuff. Crafted gear was only ever for bleeding edge progression raiding, or glamours; and all the glamour gear can be acquired from the i150 versions much more cheaply. Except the tank head, which is sort of odd, but whatever. Crafting is basically parked right where it was when 2.05 came out. Not a lot of interest in gear, reasonable returns on consumables for all the raiders, and some interest in materials for the common red scrip crafts. This is very similar to how the market looked in 2.0 when there was a lot of crafted i70 with no one giving a poo poo about it. If they add new crafted pieces in 3.2 and it's all i210 it's then that you'll see a lot more interest in it. Right now nothing's going to change until 3.1, when they may start adding recipes that actually require the new red scrip crafter pieces.
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Sep 13, 2015 01:41
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Late response, but:Farg posted:they also seem to be big proponents of the whole "3.0 is a lazy 2.0 reskin" which best I can understand they mean that they wanted more new types of content? Understandable I guess, they're getting it with explorations and verminion The complaints (and I'm not talking specifically about BG here but more generally why some endgame people are getting pissed with 3.0) stem from the notion that Heavensward frontloaded all it's content as either things which were one-offs or, more critically, were rendered obsolete way before they should have been. Like, no one is going to claim that the Heavensward MSQ campaign wasn't loving incredible, but you really only go through that once. The only purpose to the utterly amazing Azys Lla, for example, now is a bunch of miners hitting the adaman ore node every 30 minutes. Lots and lots of that content is now mostly abandoned or used for leveling. More seriously the dev team did something really odd with the gear progression which basically self-sabotaged their expansion a little bit. You step into L60 endgame at about i145, and set about gearing up. And for awhile that was fine; there was Law stuff, at i170, and you can do hunts and whatnot to upgrade to i180. But the iLvl rewards just kept going up, really really fast, and it kept invalidating "old" gear, where "old" was like "I got this two weeks ago". Esoteric is the biggest offender here because it replaces a Law -> Primal -> Alex Normal progression path with "do dungeons until capped", and suddenly a bunch of stuff, from this very expansion, is obsolete and run a lot less, if at all. The argument "3.0 is a 2.0 reskin" shouldn't really mean that Heavensward is Realm Reborn But Moreso. The criticism that holds water is that after 1.5 years of releasing a broader swath of content and providing different options for players, all the systems in current endgame now devolve into naked tome/scrip grinds and a single set of (overtuned) raids, and that devolution happens really fast. It seems like a step backwards, all the way back to how 2.0 was just darklight grinding and a single set of Coil turns. You can say, "well a lot of new stuff is coming in 3.1", but why wasn't some of it already here in 3.0? They had to have a better sense of content release by the time they were planning out the Heavensward content, but all the mechanisms to retain subs before the next patch are pretty shoddy.
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Sep 22, 2015 01:30
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Vermain posted:It was almost assuredly development fatigue preventing them from piecing together how the gearing systems they had at 60 would play out and interact with eachother. It's not the sort of critical blunder that a design team who's been doing this thing for two years would make on full stomachs and well-rested heads. What I find sort of inexcusable is that they literally had a better model of the itemization from all the way back in 2.0 and 2.1. I mean, they're the same iLvl numbers plus 100, for gently caress's sake. i70 for the easy tome and i90 for the capped tome and the raid, and i80 for the mid-tier content in between was how that worked, and it translates perfectly: 1. Law can be i170, don't bother with Hunt upgrades. 2. Both Primals and Alex Normal all become i180. Primal weapons could have different substats to distinguish them, grab the earlier accessory models and give them both something rightside as well. 3. Esoteric and Alex Savage become i190. If you want some wiggle room here make Eso i185 before upgrading, or something. Boom, entry-level, mid-tier, raid-tier. Instead when the gear came out for Eso and Savage it dropped a guillotine on everything before it. This method probably wouldn't keep people happy until 3.1, but it would have smoothed things out a lot better.
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Sep 22, 2015 03:37
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