Various Thoughts

So I’ve been working on a secondary character for a while now to try out the Ninja, Monk, three ranged physical DPS classes, and Culinarian/Fisher classes.

Ninja is an interesting class that boasts both melee and ranged options for attacks and does similarly well against both single targets and groups. The rub is that using all of these attacks requires quite a bit of clicking and memorization. You can’t macro the Ninjitsu attacks (or base combo) and if you try to perform them too quickly they can causing clipping and fail. So it’s moderately skill intensive.

Monk is… kind of plain really. It just punches/kicks things at close range; no ranged attacks. That its damage over time attack is sort of hidden is also a mark against it. On the plus side you can easily macro the combos and it doesn’t require much manual dexterity to play. It does require a bit of memorization though, since some attacks are only effective from the sides, while others are only effective from the back.

Bard is a mix of pure offensive and offense-focused support abilities. It can do solid single target and AOE damage while concurrently buffing your party members. It also has two damage over time abilities and a couple no cooldown attacks that can be semi-spammed (making it highly mobile). There’s really nothing at all to complain about here. Meanwhile, Machinist is a little strange. It’s actually better against groups most of the time since its single-target damage primarily relies upon using a (non-macroable) 3-part combo. Sure it has a bunch of instants, but (apart from Drill) they don’t really do much damage and in effect have longer cooldowns than the Bard’s. So it’s odd. Not bad… just… sort of weird to play.

Dancer on the other hand is a ton of fun and vaguely like Red Mage in its mix of offensive and support abilities. It’s equally good against groups or single targets and has some pretty impressive high-damage attacks. I was worried that the ‘dancing’ mechanic was going to be like a QTE, but turns out its pretty laid back and simple to activate.

Getting to the non-combat classes now, apart from some notable restrictions Culinarian is mechanically identical to the other crafting classes. Those restrictions being that it can’t repair anything, can’t craft Glamour Prisms, and can’t desynth its own creations (only raw fish). So it’s essentially flat-out worse. Speaking of raw fish, that’s what the Fisher class gathers.

Fisher turned out to be quite a bit different from the Miner/Botanist classes. Mostly in detrimental ways. See, with fishing you can’t see what fish are in a gathering location until after you’ve caught them somewhere (and can never see your chances of catching them). Fishing also requires buying bait and/or lures, which take up inventory space. They take up a lot of inventory space. And even worse, Fishers can’t directly gather crystals (Culinarians can desynth fish into water crystals). So what are the benefits? Um… they have their own special ‘Ocean Fishing‘ leveling duty. That’s all I got.

In other news I’ve also been playing daily Frontline matches. This PvP mode is pretty fun, seeing as how it’s both chaotic enough that tight teamwork isn’t necessary and matches tend to play out quite differently from one day to the next. I’ve avoided The Feast (too competitive/teamwork heavy) and Rival Wings (reeks of DotA) so far though, and will probably continue to do so.

The experience this time around overall has been much smoother since I’ve been skipping any sidequests that don’t give equipment rewards or unlock something. Sure the tons of exclamation points on the map are annoying… but actually completing the quests would be more so.