FFXIV: Stormblood - Launch TrailerFollow

My body is ready.

I've always thought gunblades were ridiculous, but the gatling umbrella stand sword sheathe might have topped it.

Next up, a gatling gun that shoots swords!

I hope this expansion renews my interest in this game. I'm really hoping for a massive overhaul of the battle system/fights. I doubt it'll be that drastic, but here's hoping!

Hopefully the "maintenance buffs" aren't too annoying.

I never cared for them, they felt like needless over-complication to me. Things like Cat Druid in WoW annoyed the crap out of me, with these short-term buffs that you have to keep re-applying just to make it complicated and if you don't, you lose upwards of 50% of your DPS if you don't do it right. I didn't like having to keep an eye on what bosses are doing, AND keep an eye on buffs, AND try to remember which one I'm supposed to do next.

Thankfully XIV doesn't have anything like that I've seen yet (but then I've yet to play MCH, MNK or DRG), other than maybe trying to keep RoH and Goring Blade up on an enemy full-time (which I simply don't do; the DPS from Goring Blade doesn't seem worth it even on solo mobs, let alone dungeon mobs or even less, bosses).

I've been curious though what PLD is going to be like, I'm sitting here hoping they didn't do something ridiculously stupid that makes the job not fun to play. I heard complaints in dungeons that they are "killing" WHM by making them cast Cure more often but I'm sitting here going "Uh, that's what a WHM should be doing anyways" ... and the healer goes "No, we do regens, medicas and the occasional Cure II" ... and I'm just rolling my eyes, it's that "Healer DPS" mentality we got going.

I really wish they would find a way to keep healing nice and smooth like it is, but also place incentives/reasons for healers *NOT* to DPS. I hate almost dying because a healer is not fast at stance-dancing or in the middle of spamming Stone, Holy, etc. I hate it when I'm healer, I just want to keep everybody alive or I'm lesser geared and I get chewed out for not DPSing enough.

Healers are supposed to be healing. Let the DPS to the actual DPS.

For many people, myself included, stance dancing and DPSing in between heals is half the fun. I'd be bored out of my mind if I spent an entire dungeon doing nothing but casting cure or waiting around. It's one thing to spend most of a boss fight curing. I'm fine with that because you're also dealing with mechanics and stuff. Dungeons aren't only bosses though. Does anyone really want to fight trash so hard that healer is forced to spam cures non-stop? That sounds way more annoying than fun.

Dungeon design is always going to be a matter of opinion. Personally I think dungeons are a good length right now. I'd like to see more interesting trash, but I don't feel like we need less of it.

That'd be nice, but mostly what you're getting out of trash is a break and a chance for your cooldowns to reset.

Agreed. It's really stupid that you have to sit around and wait for CDs to reset after a wipe.

I'd do it the other way around though, where CDs reset on releasing after death (or when a boss dies.) No need to worry about loosing pre-fight buffs, and it's not game breaking because people who release mid fight can't reenter it anyway.

Poor NIN... That's a pretty hard nerf right there.



Agreed, that's a much better way to handle it.

Guess I'll just wait it out and see how it's received. Either way, I'm so far behind on Heavensward that I wouldn't be able to step into this right away. It's good knowing there might be less RNG though, was annoying as hell on MCH.

That doesn't feel like a fair comparison. FFXI didn't have dungeons the way we think of them. FFXI's "dungeon" areas were just areas like any other. They didn't start to have anything that even sort of resembled a dungeon until things like Assault and Nyzul Isle (I know Nyzul was an Assault, but it's sufficiently different that I think it should be considered separately).

The purpose of trash in a dungeon is to give you a break between bosses and to help the dungeon environment feel more alive. Just sort of casually strolling from circular arena to circular arena would be really boring.

Also I'd like to point out that we DO have to think about how to handle trash until we outgear it to such a degree that it becomes trivial to just mindlessly pull a bunch of it and blow it up. It's important that players be able to advance in power and do that, but it's also important to remember that at the beginning, you can't do that. Btw that reality is about to smack people right in the mouth in a few days, because somehow no one ever remembers that you don't outgear things at the beginning of an expansion.

As for your remark about strategy and teamwork.... we have that now. Savage fights and EX primals require strategy and teamwork. PvP requires even more since you can't pre-learn what your opponents are going to do. So maybe I'm not understanding what you're asking for here?

Strangely enough, while you don't outgear it, the start of the expansion (SB) is actually geared around the 'casual' ilvl ending of HW, so if you actually took the time to gear up beyond "just the minimum" you'll be right at home. The gear they let us use was 70 gear scaled down but not the final stats, you weren't hit any harder than you would be hit in say SA Hard Mode's last pull. At E3's build though, it's hard to say considering main challenge was a modified primal fight.

It's similar to 2.5 > 3.0, if you had a relic, Final Coil gear fully melded, you handled Dusk Vigil like a pro. It was The Vault (so near the end of the leveling dungeons) is when reality slapped people lol. So you'll be fine the first 2 dungeons unless they made MASSIVE changes from the Media Tour build, but those tanks who don't wait for protect and ****, yeah, let them run off to die.

Edited, Jun 14th 2017 7:31pm by Theonehio