Various Thoughts

The Island Sanctuary is Endwalker‘s version of the game’s ‘expansion-specific restoration project’. Sort of a more personalized version of the Firmament.

For the most part this area is pretty straight-forward, but there are a few things it will help to know about in advance:

– Everything can be built at Sanctuary level 9 (level 10 unlocks flying).
– Pasture and cropland both max out at level 3 with 20 slots. Workshops and granaries also max out at level 3.
– Each material has a ‘best’ place to farm it from. Logs/Clay along the river to the east and Limestone/Vines along the river to the north, for example.
– Logs are in highest demand for building materials (upgrading everything will require ~200-300).
– You’ll ultimately need 9 Garnets, 6 Spruce Logs, and 3 Silver Ore. All of which can only be acquired from specific daily expeditions.
– There doesn’t seem to be a huge difference between the various animals you can capture.
– Automating your pasture/cropland maintenance will not give you gathering XP.

It’s an interesting idea, and fairly well executed… but I do wish there were more personalization options available. You don’t really have much choice with which buildings to construct, and the only visual changes you can make are to downgrade to an earlier tier.

Originally, the plan had been to create the 5th (and final) character on the new Oceania data center. The lackluster connection quality unfortunately made that option unviable though, leaving the remaining choices of creating one on the European Light data center or waiting for the upcoming data center expansion. A choice I put on hold.

Then along came Patch 6.1.

In addition to making some rather significant changes it just so happened to mark the Light DC’s Lich server as ‘preferred’ (meaning new characters get double XP for an extended period). Making it the perfect opportunity to round out my character selection. This dovetailed nicely with the revisions made to various early-game dungeons, giving me the opportunity to play through them naturally.

Said changes range from minor to pretty major:
– Copperbell Mines seems shorter than it was and now the bosses are pretty straight-forward. They got rid of the annoying loitering bits, but the end result feels unfinished.
– The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak was also shortened (by quite a bit), but the bosses remain basically unchanged. This results in being painfully aware of how half-assed the first two are.
– Haukke Manor only had its final boss altered (aside from the welcome addition of a new teleporter) and the change merely makes it slightly easier. Presumably because NPC party members wouldn’t be able to turn off the lanterns.
– Brayflox’s Longstop also had a final boss change for the easier; no more poison pools that let it regen health. Again presumably because the NPC tank wouldn’t be able to pull it out of them. It also has less roaming enemies in the swamp section.
– A trait it now shares with the Stone Vigil dungeon, which in addition got a mid-boss overhaul. This change I have to say is unequivocally for the better, since the old fight was weird in that the tornado attack could make it impossible to interact with the cannons.
– The formerly repeatable Cape Westwind trial meanwhile has been transformed into a one-off single-player duty. What was once the fastest trial is now a 3-phase slog. At least it makes all those comments about him being one of their best warriors have a bit more weight.
– Castrum Meridianum meanwhile has been massively shortened; in literal size, quantity of players, and number of unskippable cutscenes. Frankly, I think it’s been cut far too much. Only having one shield generator to destroy just makes it feel incomplete.
– Finally we come to the Praetorum. What was once a nearly hour-long stop & go affair has been chopped up into 3 pieces. The first ends with the Gaius fight and for the most part feel decent enough. The only real problem being that the armor-riding sequence feels much too abrupt/unfinished. The second consists of the 2-phase Ultima Weapon fight which isn’t much different from the previous version. The last piece is the Lahabrea fight, which has been spun-off into a single-player duty with a really dumb ‘death’ scene thrown in for no apparent reason.

All-in-all I can’t really say the changes were mostly for the better. Though I do suspect a few were necessary to get the new NPC party option to work efficiently.

The other noteworthy addition in this patch (besides the new alliance raid, which is notable for not having any trash-mob pulls) is the PvP overhaul. Every class now has a completely rebalanced (and reduced) assortment of abilities while crowd control resistance has been removed.

What this means for Frontlines is that battles are even more random then they used to be, with it now being possible to wipe out an entire team with a couple limit breaks. Not sure how Rival Wings is affected since I’ve never played it and never plan to. As for the Feast, it’s been completely replaced by new Crystalline Conflict matches.

I’ve played quite a few of these by now (2 characters at gold rank, 3 at silver, 4 have the archfiend armor) and it seem like they generally go one of two ways: Either you utterly crush the enemy in the first minute or so, or your team can’t damage a fly and you lose horribly. Teamwork is important, but not exactly crucial like it was for the Feast. So long as you know basic things like ‘focus on the white mage’ and ‘retreat when heavily outnumbered’ you can generally do well.

A pretty eventful patch all things considered.