Various Thoughts

FFXIV’s second expansion is something of a mixed bag.

While it’s true that most sidequests are back to the base game’s standard of repetitiveness (not sure whether I hate the ones that require the use of emotes or the ones that require you to say stuff in chat more)… most of the excessive back-and-forth traveling has been moved into the class quest lines. So clearing general sidequests is no longer a chore, but clearing the class quests kind of is (particularly since you only get a decent reward for the last one in each line). The exception here being the crafter quests, which are a massive improvement over Heavensward‘s. They behave more like the beast tribe crafter quests now and no longer require any grinding and/or large amounts of money to clear.

Speaking of grinding, this expansion decides to gate some story content behind its relic upgrade mechanic. Rather than have to grind FATEs or dungeons to upgrade the new relic equipment this time around, you instead get to visit a special area where you’ll have to re-level yourself from 1-60 while collecting new varieties of crystals that (infrequently) drop from enemies. I briefly tried it out and gave up at level 5 or so after realizing the only way to efficiently advance is to co-ordinate with other players to form impromptu parties.

Aside from that though, I’ve been able to clear every other Stormblood quest without much trouble. This is in notable contrast to the base game (where it’s pretty much impossible to find groups to beat the Extreme primals or Bahamut line synced) and HW (in which I couldn’t get Extreme Ravana to launch even after 2 days of trying).

Meta and gameplay issues/improvements aside there is one other key area this expansion stands out in: Plotline development. The various questline developments which occur here are… how should I put this… utter trash. Worse than those in the base game. Not only is summoning shoehorned into all sorts of places it has no business being in, but the game seems to want to present you as both an infallible god-killer and an underdog freedom fighter. It does this by having you dispatch massively powerful primals with ease on the one hand while forcing you to lose horribly to one of the Empire’s middle managers (two of whom you’ve already wrecked) in a couple of scripted solo duties. It’s garbage and the goofy nemesis subplot does it no favors. I’m not thrilled about how the epilogue to FFT plays out either; Delita is far, far more cold-blooded than he’s depicted here.

Getting back to the gameplay now, here’s some thoughts on the classes I’ve been playing:

Red Mage is awesome if for no other reason than you can instantly cast Resurrection spells all day long. The only real flaws are a lack of (non-dual cast) instant-cast and damage-over-time spells, and you have to keep track of quite a few abilities in order to maximize your damage output. The second issue can be alleviated a bit with macros:

/macroicon "Corps-a-corps"
/macroerror off
/ac "Corps-a-corps" <t> <wait.1>
/ac "Embolden" <me> <wait.1>
/ac "Riposte" <t>

/macroicon "Jolt"
/macroerror off
/ac "Verfire" <t>
/ac "Verstone" <t>
/ac "Jolt" <t>

I’ve sort of lost interest in Black Mage since it mainly comes across like an inferior Red Mage. Sure it does more damage, but it’s far less mobile, requires better timing in switching between abilities, and lacks any healing capacity. Summoner meanwhile hasn’t lost any of its charm. It’s still highly mobile, can resurrect in a pinch, and gains quite a number of high-damage instant-cast abilities at later levels.

The flipside to Summoner is the Scholar, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to get the hang of this class. The trick is to throw up barriers/shields before your party gets hurt and then sit back and DPS away until they need to be refreshed. This is in notable contrast to White Mage and Astrologian, both of which are better at healing large amounts of health quickly. They’re also both better at doing AOE damage… which puts Scholar at something of a net disadvantage.

All 3 of those healer classes are pretty ability-heavy when you get to the later levels though. So once again I ended up turning to macros to help lighten the load:

/macroicon "Raise"
/macroerror off
/ac "Thin Air" <me> <wait.1>
/ac "Swiftcast" <me> <wait.1>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <1>
/ac "Raise" <2>
/ac "Raise" <3>
/ac "Raise" <4>
/ac "Raise" <5>
/ac "Raise" <6>
/ac "Raise" <7>

/micon "Helios"
/macroerror off
/ac "Earthly Star" <me>
/ac "Celestial Opposition"
/ac "Aspected Helios"
/ac "Helios"

With those I can keep my number of go-to hotkeys down to a manageable 6 or so, while only having to use direct hotbar selection for emergency or niche situations.

Now it’s finally time to see whether the touted NPC party members introduced in the third expansion can actually credibly replace use of the Duty Finder (which seems to always be in desperate need of tanks recently).