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Just thought I'd re-iterate this in this version of the thread but if you are done with the MSQ and wondering what to do, I have one recommendation for you if you haven't tried them already: Do Extremes! At first Extremes can seem a little bit daunting to tackle at first: they are certainly harder than anything within the MSQ/Normal content, and they do require a bit of time to actually clear, since it's usually not possible to do a 1 or 2 pull clear like for most of the Normal trials. On the other hand, their difficulty isn't as high as you'd think: most of them are doable within a 2 or 3 hour session if you know the strategies for them. If you go to them blind, it will take a little bit longer, but they are still doable in two sessions or so. How do I join a group to do an Extreme? The main ways to join a party trying to do Extremes is as follows: - Duty Finder: although it is certainly possible to use DF to find groups, and there are people that queue for them no matter the region, if you are in NA or EU, it is unlikely that you will be able to find a group in a reasonable amount of time, and the group compositions for DF tend to be rather mixed. You will also potentially pull Mentors from Mentor roulette as well: some Mentors stay and try to actually help, but there's a subset that just want easy content and will leave if they see an Extreme. DF can work in some circumstances but I would not recommend this as a method for getting into Extremes. - Party Finder: For NA and EU, Party Finder is usually the main way to get into Extremes, and it also allows you to see what kind of experience the party is expecting from you when you join it. Although farm parties can end up a bit salty, PF for Practice parties is usually pretty chill: people know that they are going to wipe, and expect it to happen, so the ocassional salty person or someone that leaves after 2 wipes is usually pretty rare. If you don't have a better option, I would recommend PF for attempting Extremes, although you might need to make your own party since, depending on the Data Centre, PF will tend to just feature the latest available Extremes and little else. - Your FC/Friends: This is the route that I took in order to get started! You might be surprised to find how many people in your FC are interested in doing Extremes/other hard content, but are a bit too put off by PF to try them. A lot of people think that Extremes are much harder than they are, so telling them that they aren't really all that hard is something that has worked for me in the past, and got people hooked into the harder content the game has to offer. - Planning Discords: Too numerous to list, there are some discords out there specifically created to create statics for various content, although these usually tend to be either for Savage content or Ultimates. These will vary from DC to DC. How do I prepare to do Extremes? The main way is to watch some guides! There are many channels out there that provide guides for all sort of FFXIV content. These are the main ones I tend to use: - MTQcapture - I generally use this to see what the actual mechanisms look like within the fight. Some of the solutions tend to be Day 1 solutions, however. - Hector guides - I like Hector guides because they provide top-down diagrams of all the mechanisms and I find that extremely useful when I'm progging through content. The only issue is that they don't show what the actual mechanism looks like in real life: it's all just diagrams. I prefer that, but some people might not. Some of the strategies that hector uses are somewhat dubious as well. - Joonbob - Joonbob has a mixture of slick diagrams and actual fight videos, and generally I find them to be the gold standard for actually nailing down the way that actual mechanisms are performed. The only issue with Joonbob is that it somewhat expects you to already know how the mechanism unfolds, and it is laser focused on explaining singular mechanisms and specific strategies. One thing to keep in mind is that most fights will have several different strategies possible, and it is sometimes hard to know which strat a specific PF is using. Most PFs will put the strats they are using in the description, but if you are unfamiliar with the fight, it can be hard to know exactly what they mean. Some DCs have repositories of standard PF strats (for example, Aether), but usually if you are joining a "Practice from start" PF, they will just expect you to have watched a guide if they aren't doing it blind, and you work out strats from there. Which Extremes should I do? As mentioned before, most PFs will concetrate on doing the latest Extremes (currently, there are 4 extremes within Endwalker), with most other extremes being relegated to farm parties. However, there are people out there that are interested in older extremes, and sometimes even attempt them MINE (ie Minimum Ilevel, No Echo), although it will be harder to find people for older Extremes, unfortunately. Okay, I'm in an Extreme party, what now? If you are in a PF party, at the start there will usually be assignment of roles, and also splitting into Light Parties (basically, 1 tank, 1 healer and 2 dps). Light Parties are usually necessary because Extreme (and other content) like to place stack markers on both healers, and this is a natural easy way to split the party for them. You might also be assigned spread positions, which are usually just clock positions around the boss, but these can vary from fight to fight. Other assingments are handled differently based on which region you are in. if you are in JP/EU, these tend to be handled by macros, which you can see an example of below (spoilered since it's latest content):  Some of the nomeclature will only be clear if you are familiar with the fight, so watching a video will help a lot with understanding what the macro means. On the other hand, NA tends to put markers on the ground and assign positions by shuffling around them until you are in the correct position. I think both systems have merits, although I am more used to the Macro system myself. After that, just pull and see what happens: wipes are expected, so don't get too disheartened if you wipe even 10+ times: it's all part of the experience. Even if you haven't managed to clear, progging through the fight and managing to reach new stages in it is what is usually expected by practice parties, so just keep trying until you get the clear! But why should I do Extremes? For the challenge, that's why I do them! And it's interesting content that can give a real endorphin rush once you actually clear it. You can also get some glams and mounts for them. Extremes are also an extremely good gateway into harder content: I started playing FFXIV in June 2021 and thanks to me joining a weekly Extremes group in my FC, I have now my very own Savage Static and I'm even on the cusp of completing an Ultimate as well! You might find that you really enjoy the harder content, in which case the next step is probably Savage fights, or you might find that harder content is not for you, but at least you will have given it a try. From my own experiences, Extreme fights have allowed me to find my own community within FFXIV and I'm really glad that I gave them a shot last year.
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Sep 26, 2022 09:56
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 06:35 |
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Eureka on EU/Chaos was full of people the month prior to EW, but that was mostly due to people checking off prior content that they hadn't completed yet (me included). It's pretty much a ghost town now. I mostly did Eureka so that I could do Baldesion Arsenal (which I managed to complete eventually), and I would recommend trying to do BA: there are specific discords in the various data centres that used to regularly schedule runs of it. It's a raid unlike anything else out there (apart from Delubrum Reginae Savage), and although unforgiving, not as hard as it's made out to be. Going to max rank in Eureka is a slog, but IMO doing BA is well worth it.
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Sep 27, 2022 09:25
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I begin every duty by desperately begging for comms and at the end send angry DMs to the people that didn’t comm me. That mount isn’t gonna farm itself.
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Sep 28, 2022 21:16
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2.x is the bit of FFXIV that I found the most boring and almost made me drop the game because there were a lot of boring quests to do. It does eventually get a lot better on the gearup to Heavensward, and late 2.x stuff is really good (and potentially some of the best in the game), so I would recommend pushing through.
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Oct 10, 2022 14:30
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Generally if you aren't going for Week 1 clears of an entire Savage tier, composition does not matter that much since by the time it becomes relevant (for example, the DPS check in P8S), you'll have gear that offsets the DPS issue and makes the DPS check much less of a chore. In week 1, however, having meta comps gives you a much bigger cushion for making mistakes. As an example, this is currently the composition for our static: Tanks: Warrior and Paladin (currently the two lowest dps tanks in the meta) Healers: White Mage and Sage (healer balance isn't that big of an issue as far as I know) Ranged DPS: Machinist (currently the worst DPS job in the game) Casters: Black Mage and Summoner (Black Mage is doing well, but dual Caster comps aren't meta) Melee: Reaper (currently the worst melee DPS job in the game) We have still been able to clear up to P7S so far on a fairly casual schedule (just two sessions per week).
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Oct 11, 2022 09:57
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Also in terms of practicing for your main job/alt jobs, the only thing that really worked for me has been to actually use the job in raids: I kinda sucked at using Monk (which is more or less my second main) until I had a few goes in P7S and actually managed to work the rotation into an actual fight (although playing a 1.93 GCD job after being used to the fairly sedate 2.50 GCD of Warrior meant that my fingers felt like hell by the end). If you are a little bit apprehensive about doing Savages though, the best recommendation is doing Alliance Raids, especially ones that are at level cap (currently just one). They are perfect for practicing rotations in fight conditions and I feel that they are much more useful than just hitting the target dummy. Target dummy can be useful for practicing openers, but you are still concentrating too much on your button presses, since there is nothing else to focus on. In Alliance raids, it's much easier to enter that flow state where you aren't really thinking about your rotation anymore, and just pressing buttons instinctively, while paying full attention to how to resolve mechanisms.
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Oct 11, 2022 13:18
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Yeah, do not get disheartened by this talk of high/low tier: pressing your buttons good is MUCH more important and being comfortable in your job and having the muscle memory for it is a much bigger contributor to your DPS than any theoretical highest/lowest potential DPS. And, as mentioned by me and others, every job comp can clear every type of content in the game.
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Oct 11, 2022 16:43
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One fun highlight of that graph is the huge range present for BLM, which makes sense considering that positioning and knowing the fights and tiny optimisations of DPS are key for that job. BLM is incredibly fun but you basically have to work out what to do in every single fight. In other words, play Black Mage, it's an extremely fun job, and the leveling experience is pretty good now compared to pre-EW!
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Oct 11, 2022 16:59
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Monk is great although I’m biased. At 60 you have basically unlocked the class as it is meant to be played, and the rotation won’t change from now to 90 apart from extra buffs and higher potencies/different animations. The basis of the job at 60 is that your normal rotation, as you might have noticed, has pairs of buttons that need the same form to have a bonus, and that give you the form for next set when you press them, so you are constantly changing between the three forms. Perfect balance allows you to free combo, disregarding the combo chain. Below 60 you usually just want to Dragon Kick -> Bootshine -> Dragon Kick, but at 60, the forms you press matter. If you press three buttons with the same form, you get a lunar charge. If you press 3 different forms, you get a solar charge. You end the Perfect Balance by using a blitz, which has different power depending if you did a solar or lunar blitz (technically there is a two form blitz you can do but you never want to use this): once you have both a lunar and solar charge, your next blitz will be a special attack, which happens automatically regardless of if you did a solar or lunar combo. Then rinse and repeat. The animations get a lot better later on so at level 90 the job feels awesome, and you’ll be scaring other players when you appear to be out of position due to Phantom Rush.
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Oct 11, 2022 18:12
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Form shift you only use before the fight or during intermissions, and that's pretty much it. You can ignore it for the rest of the rotation. A simple opener (without considering buffs or oGCDs you get later) is: Pre-pull Form Shift On pull, you do Dragon Kick -> Twin Snakes -> Demolish -> Bootshine (to get your personal damage buff and start the DoT on the boss) Press Perfect Balance and do Dragon Kick -> Bootshine -> Dragon Kick -> Blitz -> Bootshine Press Perfect Balance again and do Twin Snakes -> Demolish -> Dragon Kick -> Blitz -> Bootshine (to refersh your personal damage buff and the DoT) Then start your rotation from there.
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Oct 11, 2022 18:28
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Also, once you start getting your damage buffs (Riddle of Fire and Brotherhood), you will notice that the Perfect Balance charge refreshes far earlier than either of those buffs, so you usually want to delay using PB until you are under one or both buffs. Eventually you get into a rhythm of having windows where you use 1 damage buff (Riddle of Fire, since it has half the cooldown period of Brotherhood) with 1 PB use, and 2 damage buffs with 2 PB uses. So, like most other jobs, the rule of thumb with Perfect Balance is hold your burst until your buff window is up. Now, why should you play Monk? Well, the combo system is the most freeform one for any melee, and flows nicely together once you get used to it. Phantom Rush is one of the best feeling buttons in the game for me. You get the most personal mitigation of any melee with the use of Riddle of Earth, which you can pretty much use freely on every single raidwide since you get 3 charges and they refresh fast. You also get Mantra, which helps your healers to heal and they will LOVE YOU for it. The only issue with Monk is that you have no real ranged options like the other melee, but that's made up by the fact that your gap-closer is awesome and you can actually macro it to run up to your friends and hug them! Monk is loving awesome. EDIT: Everyone should try to sell their own favourite jobs, because every job has a reason to be awesome in this game. Tekopo fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Oct 11, 2022 |
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Oct 11, 2022 18:35
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CodfishCartographer posted:Seconding Black Mage being fuckin' awesome.
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Oct 11, 2022 19:11
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The worst I've ever seen someone say in a PF for Savages has been "I don't think this party will clear today" and immediately leave.
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Oct 12, 2022 09:33
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I can understand the frustration though, especially if you join a PF for a specific prog point and you have multiple wipes before you reach that prog point. I've done it myself, although I usually give a "I'm leaving after 2 pulls if we don't reach the prog point" warning before leaving.
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Oct 12, 2022 10:34
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The only time I reported someone was, in all places, Arum Vale. Tank pulls part of the first room, one of the DPS pulls an extra mob by mistake (it’s easy to do in AV first room because the mobs move around a lot), and instead of adjusting the tank decides to stand still, not draw aggro and types “DPS don’t pull”. We wipe and everyone including me is like “chill, it was a mistake” but the tank decides to stop tanking altogether and just stands there while others drop. We kick him from the instance. As a tank main, nothing gets to me more than lovely prima donna tanks.
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Oct 12, 2022 22:24
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Yeah it's just incredible how much storytelling they managed to pack into that fight, and the solo duty after Porta is really good as well. I'm really glad that I went back to do them, although it's a bit of a slog to get to them since you have to go through quite a big chunk of ARR to get to them.
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Oct 25, 2022 07:59
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The only skips I did was WHM because they were just so boring.
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Jan 17, 2023 17:12
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I would strongly recommend not to start bad habits even if you aren't doing Savage-tier content because if you get used to bad practices early and then it does turn out that you do want to do harder content, you will make it a lot harder on yourself than necessary. It will be much simpler to get into the proper rotation if you just attempted to do it and hosed it up slightly/were not optimising very well instead of deliberately doing it wrong and then attempting to fix it later.
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Feb 9, 2023 12:30
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There's also some job-specific combat macros that are useful but you still have to be careful with them, since you usually have to spam the key in order for it to work. For Warrior, for example, I use a Shirk macro (allows me to dump the emnity on OT without changing targets), a Holmsgang macro (gets rid of range/target dying issues) and Nascent Flash macro (allows me to use it on OT without targeting them), although for Nascent Flash I have both that button and the standard one just in case. But most of those are not meant to be weaved as an oGCD often, or they allow you to use an ability without being forced to untarget the boss.
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Feb 9, 2023 16:26
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Smileton really isn't all that punitive, even if you make mistakes. Even when it was current content the damage it dealt wasn't that bad. The second boss especially telegraphs ages in advance.
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Feb 15, 2023 00:30
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And like, everyone fucks up, and it's kind of expected and accounted for in this game. I went into the latest MSQ dungeon with full savage BIS and royally hosed up the last boss, causing a wipe, and it wasn't a big deal. It's kind of a meme at this point that you will see players with "Legend" titles that die during mechanisms in Alliance/Dungeon raids.
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Feb 15, 2023 00:44
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They are guaranteed if you synch and have an all BLU party IIRC
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May 16, 2023 17:39
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For 2), you will notice that the dungeons that specify that they scale to a particular ilvl are dungeons that are either 50, 60, 70, 80 or 90. Every single piece of content in the game scales down ilvl/level if you are above it, but the ones at 50/60/70/80/90 have to specify that ilvl because of how ilvl increases in the post-expansion patches. So one dungeon at level 80 might have been originally released at around 500 ilvl, and another one at 530, etc. Ultimately you don't need to worry about it, whatever dungeon you join will scale you appropriately.
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May 28, 2023 10:16
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Szarrukin posted:Why so many cool jobs must be tanks? I would love to embrace angst of being Dark Knight, but tanxiety is too strong.
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Jun 16, 2023 13:36
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If a DPS pulls for you, even if you don't like it, I would be very, very careful about descending into any sort of "you pull, you tank" mentality. Letting people die is reportable, so I would be very careful about getting into slapfights with people that pull extra, even if they are assholes. Personally I don't mind DPS pulling for me (DPS taking non-lethal damage is extra mitigation!), but I have quite a bit of experience tanking, and I never pull extra for tanks even if they are slow/single pulling.
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Jun 16, 2023 16:37
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It's one of the sections of the TOS. I have reported tanks for just sitting still and not doing anything. I don't know if any action is taking beyond a warning (and I imagine a warning is enough), but you can find the specific sections in the TOS that talk about :
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Jun 16, 2023 17:17
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It’s unfortunate but if you want to improve as a tank, you have to double pull. It’s the only way you are going to get a feel for the CDs and when to use them. It’s also unfortunate that in terms of tanking complexity the latest dungeons are much better for learning than earlier dungeons, since the jank in ARR dungeons is gonna make the life of a prospective new tank kinda difficult if they don’t know the pulls.
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Jun 18, 2023 20:53
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I honestly think the best way to get around tankanxiety is find a group of friends and run dungeons with them, especially with voice comms available, and try to do the standard 2 pulls per segment thing. Especially in any level 90 dungeons, where you are going to have most of your tools available. I started playing during 5.55, I had a lot of tank anxiety at the start (and still, to some extent, have healer anxiety), and it really helped me that the first dungeons I ever did, I did with people I knew that told me what to do and weren't judgemental when I hosed up, forgot my stance, and got people killed. My first experience with tanking was in WoW, back in Vanilla: I played a warrior for about a month and my first experience tanking was running through some monastery where everyone loving flamed me because I didn't know what I was doing, and I was specced all wrong, and that completely put me off the game and got me kinda scared to tank in most other games. I was similarly apprehensive when I started playing FFXIV, but I do think now that the anxiety was born out of a misapprehension of how relatively easy it is to tank in FFXIV. I do all new content as a tank now, and I can't really remember any time when I got a bad group in duty finder.
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Jun 19, 2023 07:42
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Saying that pulling 2 packs is "speedrunning" is some true hyperbole. People get annoyed at single pulling not because they want to get through their dailies as fast as possible, but mostly because single pulling is kinda boring for everyone involved. It's the norm because both the kits and the dungeons themselves are designed so that two-pulling is pretty easy to do, although still requiring some use of your CDs. Comparing people that are kinda expecting the two pack pulls to people that deliberately remove kit in order to get CT is some really weird, projecting poo poo.
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Jun 19, 2023 08:46
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What about the third option, burger king crowns dying to mechanics?
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Jul 19, 2023 08:45
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Qwertycoatl posted:This is why I don't have my crown out unless it's forced by mentor roulette, you'll think I died because I'm a newish player
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Jul 19, 2023 09:13
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There are people that genuinely believe that freecure is really good
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Jul 23, 2023 23:18
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At least the Scions start appearing in Duty Support more and more as you progress through, as well.
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Aug 16, 2023 21:29
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There’s a lot of baggage in terms of how the game was patched post-arr. There were actually more quests during that period that were cut, but it’s still a struggle. My personal journey having started playing when Endwalker was about to come out was that I really struggled through the pre HW patches and almost quit because the story was extremely generic, the characters were grating and the quests were boring. I struggled on because of what I heard of the later expansions and I’m glad I did, personally. ShB especially really resonated with me, and made me appreciate how the scions had developed.
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Aug 16, 2023 23:43
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Sunday Morning posted:Five pages of top tier content
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Aug 17, 2023 10:03
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New game+ is just a way to be able to redo past MSQ quests. There's nothing really additional to it. I think the only time I used it was when the changed the duties before and after Prae.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:04
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Do you mean Crystal Tower? Or did you do Coils synched? Cause coils synched you need to find a group usually, so curious to know if you found one to do it.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:09
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I think when I went through ARR it really helped that I had people that I knew that were playing along with me because doing the dungeons and trials with people more than willing to help in order to get Poetics did make at least those parts interesting. I even fully got baited into the "Cape Westwind" joke as well (RIP), which in retrospect was kind of funny. I went through ARR during the pandemic and didn't have much to do so wasting time and talking to friends while doing the MSQ wasn't so bad. I finished ARR and I didn't wholy get the hype, because the story for ARR seemed extremely generic and by the numbers, and there weren't any real strong characters present to carry it, as well as some annoying characters with really bad voice directing. I went back to try to do the new Cape Westwind and post-prae solo duties and the amount of uninteresting busy work wasn't great, even with skipping texts which I wasn't doing on my first run-through. After getting past the ARR credits and getting on the 2.x stuff, the grind through them was incredibly tedious and unfun. I literally pulled up a wiki to start counting the number of quests that I needed to do because I was getting really bored that it was all set up and busy work with very little pay off. I was very close to just ending it, but kept hearing that at a certain point, things did improve. I kept trucking on and, at least for me, the story does take a more interesting turn just before HW and I was invested enough to keep going through HW, which I enjoyed. I thought the story was alright up and improving (although there are a few bad spots in Stormblood), but I think it was Shadowbringers where I really started to see all the pieces fit together, and appreciated at least a little bit more what they were trying to do in ARR and then further along. I think it's a hard sell though to tell someone to go through 100 hours of a mediocre RPG in order to get to the "good stuff".
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Aug 19, 2023 00:22
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That Little Demon posted:I did wait a longer time than dungeons but I was doing other things and got lucky I guess?
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Aug 19, 2023 00:24
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 06:35 |
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Yeah that seems really lucky. I think I waited an hour and didn't get the first floor to pop when I originally tried it and didn't know what it was like.
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Aug 19, 2023 00:42
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