FFXIV: Stormblood - Launch TrailerFollow

I didn't really like the beginning of HW, to be honest.

They seemingly tuned it assuming everybody was going to have full Poetics, but yet that is not always the case. Someone who is chewing through the MSQ might end up in, say, i90-100 and the first several quests in Western Highlands, each fight was a battle for your life.

Even after getting a full set of Lv51 HQ Craftables from HW, the mobs felt too hard. They hit too hard, and took too many hits to kill, and this continued through most of the expansion, even when I was doing my best to do every single quest I could find to keep my NIN geared up. Every battle saw me going down to 60% HP by the time it was dead (that was WITH a somewhat low ranked chocobo companion helping me), and pulling two was dangerous indeed.

But then, it seems like they did the same thing on the crafting and gathering side of things too -- HW started off assuming you had endgame gear from Vanilla which kinda screws over the players who are on the leveling path when they reach Level 50 for the first time. Face it, nobody's going to want to grind vanilla endgame to get to 51..... but even when they DO get Lv51, buying the Lv51 HW crafting/gathering stuff you are still pretty weak in crafting/gathering; it is way overtuned. You have pretty much 0% chance of HQing anything whatsoever, and just trying to craft NQs is difficult. Not to mention how they jacked up crafting, where a single piece of equipment requires 5-6 synths to gather up the ridiculous list of materials to make anything.

I hope they got some complaints about this and dialed it back for SB... because honestly... your average piece of white gear should not take an hour to gather and craft everything to make it, nor should it require endgame gear to have any chance of HQ. I shouldn't need Lv60 gear to have any chance of HQing a Lv51 piece.

And the Market Board prices reflect this; just about everything is 100, 200, 300k unless you get lucky and see an NQ or two, but then the NQs... you can just buy those off of NPCs.

It's all kinds of whack.

I can understand people wanting endgame content to be easier, but the leveling path shouldn't feel like a painful slog, either. That just makes it boring when you have to wait for several seconds every other fight to heal back up, especially for the plethora of jobs that have no healing abilities.

This is why I am always against the Dark Souls crowd... if they want challenge, they can find it in other places. They can try to solo FATEs, or go do their raids or something... but they don't have to ruin the open world areas for everybody.

And what's with the ridiculous crafting? I remember the days in Vanilla where you grabbed a leather, and a couple ingots and made a sword.... now you gotta make nuggets to make an ingot to make screws, make another ingot, and a nugget or two, get some leather, a gem, and an alchemy ingredient and FINALLY make the sword...

EDIT: And let's make no mistake -- there's still not all that much "challenge" in open-world combat in HW... sure, yes, you got to 60% but unless you ate a couple AoEs, you are not going to die, ever. You're not in any danger unless you got a 2nd mob on you or something... then you just Sprint to get rid of it. All they managed to do was make each fight take longer, and to make it feel like a slow boring grind, where each enemy takes nearly a minute to kill where you go through your rotations 4, 5 times a fight. It feels like you're beating on armor-plated mobs with a butter knife and it just isn't very fun. And then, of course, the complete lack of healing spells means you're sitting around with your fingers up your rear end waiting for your HP meter to tick back up, because it's forbidden that your chocobo should ever heal you until you are almost dead and even when it does, it heals you for 1-2 hits worth from a mob. lol. I get 100/tick regen at Lv60... I have 32,000 health. So ya. 0.003% of my health healed per tick.

Edited, Jun 14th 2017 8:30pm by Lyrailis

Well, my chocobo is only Rank 8...

Because it takes freaking forever to get any XP. At 540 a kill for 59s (I can't, for the life of me, find any open-world Lv60 mobs), one just doesn't get rankups anyday soon.

Even feeding it once an hour, you only get 1% of your TNL per training session and you can only do that once an hour.

There's the weekly Challenge Log, but that's only 15% of your TNL (the two of them combined, that is).

It's just......... slow.

But yet they made it so that your chocobo is an absolute wimp until you get it higher ranked.

Hopefully, there'll be another jump like there was in HW... where Lv50 mobs gave like 150 and Lv59 mobs give 540... let's hope Lv69 mobs give 1000+.