Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker - Conquering Despair Itself

When they were going over the system update announcements during the keynote, and they said they were getting a lot of requests for the next one (after announcing you will be able to use two dyes), I was like: vierra hats! No, it’s eyeglasses.

(Also, an Xbox version is coming.)

I would kind of liked something like the D&D 4e Avenger as a new job, holy 2h melee DPS (with a hammer), but I suspect I'm the only one, and they literally just did RPR.

What is amusing is .

A hammer-based job would be neat. There’s not much in the way of bludgeoning weapons so far. It’s pretty much guaranteed we’re getting some sort of pirate/corsair class given how Derplander looked in the video they showed.

So overall it's pretty much what I thought it'd be. Less obvious world ending stakes. Maybe it means the WoL could actually lose on occasion?

I'd be surprised if they add more tanks/healers at all. Fight design requires certain tools and they're at their limit for a lot of things. They could add more tanks, but it'd be same kit, different flavor like all the others.

Today’s maintenance day for the 6.5 patch.


I managed to farm nearly all the moogle tomestones I needed before the maintenance. I ended up buying the orchestrion rolls and some of the mounts and emotes from the market board. I have a couple of hundred tomestones left over I plan to monetize in the future once the supply of stuff goes back down after the event (and the prices go back up).

6.5 also marks the end of support for the old launcher. The new one was made the default in 6.4, but you were able to revert to the old one. The old one is purportedly gone. I ended up having to use jscript and mshtml from Proton to keep playing with Wine. Fortunately, using Nix makes that pretty easy. My derivation sparse clones the Proton wine repo for those directories and replaces replaces the ones in the Wine source tree with the ones from Proton. People are trying to isolate which patches fix the issue, but this works and let me play.

I’m curious what the other viera hairstyles are. I’ve been on the fence lately about whether to switch to miqo’te or stay viera another patch cycle. The two issues are hats and hair. I used the moogle tomestone event this time to level BRD via Frontline. BRD is a lot of fun to play in PvP (way better than DNC or RDM). Now I have an augmented AF2 set (thanks to all gathering and crafting jobs at 80+), and it might be nice to wear the hat sometimes. On the other hand, some nice hairstyles might keep me viera.

The latest moogle tomestone event has opened a door I'd long resisted approaching. My history in this game is a tale of slowly, begrudgingly coming around to experiencing chunks of content I'd skipped, and this damned ultimog challenge has sunk its hooks into me. While I just recently finished leveling all the combat jobs to 90, I had never touched DoH/DoL stuff, because it seemed like such an alien headache. Well, now that I don't have that daily level grind on my plate, I figured I could commit to dipping my toes in the world of FSH for the ultimog challenge clear. I had no real idea what I was doing, but a few quick levels grinded out sent me on my first ocean fishing voyage, which was way more involved than I had previously believed. There's a billion kinds of bait and skills and functionally raid events and it was an ordeal I wasn't ready for, but a double-spectral voyage not only cleared the challenge but got me a nice minion to boot.

But now I had an inventory full of fish. A quick google search demonstrated that the most recommended thing to do with them was Desynthesis. That meant leveling a crafting job, specifically CUL. So I hauled my ass off to Limsa and started grinding out CUL levels until I could destroy my fish. I could have stopped there, but by that point I'd been dragged down a chain of quest unlocks, clearing all the old red + markers on my maps (Desynthesis dragged me to Thanalan where I also finally unlocked advanced melding) and figuring out what all these weird scrips vendors were about.

And then I landed in Firmament, and compulsively I started clearing those quests, which unlocked Diadem, which made FSH easy, which gave me materials for some easy CUL levels, which introduced me to collectables, which I started unlocking around the world, and that whole time I'd get so much XP with various turn-ins and FSH job quests that it was an unending chain of levels pouring in. And then I discovered Custom Deliveries! In just a couple of not-super-sweaty days I went from total zero to FSH 77/CUL 47/BOT 20/CRP 20 and I now realize I've been missing half the game. I still can't really wrap my head around how many different systems are involved in this stuff. However, now that I'm this far in, and I have five or six months or however long until Dawntrail to occupy myself (or unsub again), I guess I might as well see how close I can get to omni-90 before my patience runs out.

You've run into one of the many rabbitholes that I find great about the FFXIV. The game appears a mile wide and an inch deep, but then you stumble and suddenly you're falling down a mile deep hole. If you're a perfectionist and want to fully complete a job, it's got plenty of challenges. Getting all the fish, for example, has some very time/weather specific fish that will take time to complete.

The same thing can happen with Bozja/Eureka. They're whole new games of their own in a way, even if completely optional. Best part is they have some true challenges - one on one duels in Bozja are no joke when it comes to difficulty.

That said, I was mostly raidlogging for the past few years because between ultimates and normal Savage raid content, that satisfied my FFXIV time.

If only the main 'game' wasn't essentially a visual novel. That's what wore me down - I haven't logged in for 6 months or more and should unsub until the desire hits again. I liked the story up through the great culmination of Endwalker (even though the melodrama got a bit thick), but hated the presentation. There's no real 'game' in the hundreds and hundreds of hours of story, just a click adventure. The dungeons are great, and the reason I played for so long, but in any 10-20 hour patch expansion you get one or two bits of new group content that takes 20-30 minutes to complete, or occasionally a new Raid that takes an hour or so.

The engine for main storytelling is just so incredibly dated. It works fine for the dungeon/raid/boss group action content, but for telling a 'click and watch' story it's like watching paint dry.

Since we're less than a month out from Dawntrail early access, figured it was time to dust off this thread.

Anyone looking forward to Viper or Pictomancer? As a healer main I'm not really qualified to speak on any aspect of a DPS class other than their general squishiness, so I'm not likely to spend much time with either.

I'm Omni-90 now, so I have a pretty decent sense of the kinds of things I do and don't enjoy in my DPS jobs, and so far nothing I've seen from leaked materials and skimmed from the far-too-long videos and Live Letter presentations has sold me on either job. I haven't seen anything that establishes Viper's identity or mechanically separates it from the other melee DPS (and as a general rule I'm not a fan of typical melee DPS mechanics like positionals or spammy burst windows). Pictomancer is at least aesthetically interesting but I'm not super into the obfuscation of abilities translated from (randomized?) pictures. I admittedly don't understand that mechanic yet and maybe it isn't totally awful, but it looks like a pain to internalize.

I will of course level them anyway at some point, but I'm not jumping ship as a PCT main or whatever while charging through the MSQ.

What I am excited for is having no sense of where the MSQ is going. This is the first time I can recall there being no unresolved long term or short term plot threads between expansions. All the old foes are vanquished or turned to allies. Previously it was always obvious that we were heading towards showdowns with the surviving Ascians and Zodiark and Zenos, but it's kind of refreshing having zero picture of Dawntrail's major conflict or villains, or what the next long-term arc even vaguely looks like.

I’m excited about the Fantasia changes, especially if they don’t fix viera. The benchmark fucks up Veena pretty badly, but maybe it’s just bugs. An updated benchmark is due Real Soon Now™, but they haven’t followed up like they said they would with an actual date.

I think I’m a patch and a half behind the MSQ. Wuk Lamat sucks as a character, and I hate the Scions. Dawntrail should have been an expansion where we actually got to exercise some agency, but we’re just going to be dragged around as the muscle again. That the new raid is a fighting tournament is also some lame anime crap.

I wish we hadn’t killed the only one who actually believed in us at the end of Endwalker.

kenada said:

I wish we hadn’t killed the only one who actually believed in us at the end of Endwalker.

Click to expand...

Or off'd Emet-Selch. I've played FF games since the PS2 era, and in terms of writing and VA charisma he tops all antagonists. No one else even really comes close.

NervousEnergy said:

Or off'd Emet-Selch. I've played FF games since the PS2 era, and in terms of writing and VA charisma he tops all antagonists. No one else even really comes close.

Click to expand...

I find it particularly frustrating that the other shards of Azem are shown inspiring people around them, but look at what happens with the Ancients. They all continue towards their stupid fates. Venat dies. Hades dies. Hythlodaeus dies. The Ancients who became the Twelve all return back to the Star (except Oschon, who stays not because of you but because of that stupid monkey). We saved all those peoples in the Omicron tribal quests, but we do nothing for the Ancients. It feels like a betrayal of Azem to go along with that.

That reminds me, I ought to actually finish Endwalker at some point.

I'm generally happy with SAM, RPR, and NIN for melee DPS, so I don't have a real jones for another one (that isn't a big 2h hammer wielder or somesuch); logically, they needed something else to use Scouting gear.

Updated benchmark is coming out Monday. I’m a little concerned they haven’t shown any updated pictures of viera, but it’s hard to say they aren’t trying to be responsive to feedback.

Oh right, I completed UCOB... April 11th

Definitely my least favorite out of the three Ultimates I've done, if I had to rank them I'd put TEA at #1, UWU at #2, and UCOB at a solid #3. There's definitely a lot of jank, and some mechanics take a lot practice because you have to be FAST sometimes, mainly heavensfall.

The fight has been cheesed to hell and back, it's not that tight of a damage/heal check. Some group recently got a 6 man clear, and some cheesy other things have been done for a long time already like 7 man runs, mainly tank runs, 1 or 2 puddle runs. It's insane how the fight has been broken.


We did play around with DSR for a few weeks before it fell apart because of summer plans ramping up. I'm on break until Dawntrail, hopefully. I'm interested to see how Viper turns out. I'm really on my way out for healing, doing it in DSR just reinforced that it's a little bit too much for me these days with too frantic heal checks. I did not enjoy healing P8S for that reason, and was happy to be DPS in P12S.

I imported my character into the new benchmark. It looks mostly better now, but the eyes are still vibrant. I’m pretty sure I complained about the other way here in the past, so I’m not going to complain about that now, but I do wish there were options for desaturated colors. The mouth also looks a bit funny. I don’t know whether I’ll stay viera or go something else for Dawntrail.

With the freebie, I’ll have four Fantasias plus extra time to tweak things after using one, so I’m not too worried. The threads on the official forum are ridiculous. ThE pIXeLs aRe DiFfEReNt.

Did Yoshi-P stop playing BLM? There’s a lot of complaining about them. I’m still working on leveling BLM, but I don’t like what I see either.

I also don’t like the Manafication change. It’s completely unnecessary. If you have a problem with capping mana, stop being bad.

48 hours until expansion launch!

I'm on the absolute fringe of BLM, so I see what the more established players are upset about. I'm just hoping the changes raise the skill floor a little - it's just a brutal job to play at higher levels.

I'll be maining SGE again this expansion so my job barely changed. Looking forward to full patch notes tomorrow to see what all they decided on for the jobs at launch.

I’m impressed. Square Enix actually has a good CDN. The update downloaded steadily at ~48 MiB/s.

It also appears they got rid of the old WMV videos from ARR and went with the Bink-encoded videos from the Mac version. (I noticed this because my derivation links them from the store, which is read-only, causing the update to fail until I changed it to copy them.)

I may try PCT, but I’ll probably stick with RDM and DNC again this expansion. I also have BRD at cap, but I only play it in PvP. Other capped combat jobs are for role quests. Hopefully the society quests aren’t as disappointing as the tribal quests were in Endwalker.

I logged into the game this morning. I’m still not sure whether I will stay viera. I updated my appearance to what I had in the benchmark, but it still looks off. I want to check out a couple of cutscenes before I (probably) switch to miqo’te.

People on the official forum are unsurprisingly unhappy about the changes. They’re nitpicky in a lot of ways, but some of the changes are baffling. Why are the mouths so different? Why are veena eyes different?

And what did they do to the framerate? I used to get 120 fps on the title screen, but I now get ~40 fps. Fortunately, that seems to be what I get everywhere, but still. I'd turn on FSR, but it’s FSR 1. Why couldn’t they have implemented FSR 2 or 3?

I played some tonight. I did some PvP and finished the MSQ where you come back and eat the boss from 6.55. The graphics are generally pretty. Performance seems locked at 35~40 fps. I don’t know if there is a setting I can tweak to bring it back up, but at least it’s still that even in 24v24v24 PvP with lots of pewpew.

This is the before (left) and after (right) for my viera. The lighting conditions aren’t the same, but that’s not my issue. The problem is she looks like she got punched in the nose and had some dark weirdness going on with her eyes. The color is wrong (because it seems all eyes are vibrant now), and the iris is still too small (but at least it’s not the Rava iris from the first benchmark).



Edit: After spending more time in the character creator tweaking things (ultimately eye color and skin tone), I got something pretty close. I still prefer the way she looks in 6.55, but I think I can be okay playing her in 7.0. I tried going miqo’te for a bit, but it just didn’t feel right.

Hit level 92 on bard, and I haven’t even started the expansion. I’ve just been doing PvP for fun. The MSQ in 6.55 is garbage, so I just can’t be bothered to start DT, especially given the reactions I’m seeing on reddit and the main forums. I’ll do it eventually, but meh.

Early DT MSQ is easily the most disconnected I've been from the story and any motivation to move forward since early ARR.

xcmt said:

Early DT MSQ is easily the most disconnected I've been from the story and any motivation to move forward since early ARR.

Click to expand...

I’m seeing others online saying the same thing. It sounds like they doubled down hard on the WoL’s not actually being the protagonist, which is nuts.

(Still haven’t started the DT MSQ because the 6.55 patch MSQ sucks.)

There are a lot of factors feeding into the narrative malaise, but yes the story focus shifting to an NPC protagonist who isn't particularly deep or interesting is certainly a major problem. I'd go so far as to say all the new NPCs (ally and foe) are extremely one-note and boring and don't compare favorably to ten years of on-point character development with the Scions, many of which just aren't here, or the Ascians or Garleans of eld. Plus, I get that they had to hit the giant reset button and it's going to take time to establish medium- and long-term plot arcs with new personalities in new places, but right now it's not good.

I've also heard that the main writer for ShB/EW has stepped back and handed the pen off to some subordinates for DT and I think it kind of shows, though it's more of an intangible feeling that I'm not equipped to provide examples for. That delicate balance between heartbreak and camp isn't there, replaced with...I don't know, a glazed clueless smile and a shaken fist.