Various Thoughts

With all eight of my characters now through the Dawntrail main quest, I guess it’s time to post about it.

As far as the storyline goes the first half of the game is mostly good. There’s is a bit of a hiccup in the third area when one of the other throne claimants does a complete personality reversal out of nowhere, but otherwise it’s pretty damn solid. Only one quest to say something dumb in chat and only a couple that require forced emote usage. The second half though… the second half is just a near-constant stream of cringe-inducing nonsense. They even add a child as a major secondary character toward the end (replete with a ‘follow the idiot child through a ruined cityscape’ quest).

Sidequests are on the whole mostly better than Endwalker I think, with not all that many being purposely wasteful with your time. The role quests meanwhile are also pretty solid and even better can be rushed through pretty easily on secondary characters since now only the last quest in a line features a single-player duty.

As for the new classes, Pictomancer has a pretty unique playstyle and just unloads tons of damage to both single targets and groups. Once you get accustomed to when to re-cast the painting spells it ends up pretty fun. Viper meanwhile is basically just a cross between Reaper and Monk, more the latter than the former after they got rid of its damage debuff. If you want a faster Reaper or a less fiddly Monk, this is your class.

As for class changes:

• Warrior and Paladin haven’t notably changed.
• Dark Knight and Gunbreaker losing their damage dash is annoying, but otherwise they’re basically the same.
• White Mage, Scholar, and Sage haven’t notably changed.
• Astrologian is… pretty weird now. I liked the previous Card Draw system better, but this one isn’t terrible.
• I don’t like what they did to Dragoon. Separating Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust just creates a hassle.
• The new Monk is a bit of a shock, but I think it’s ultimately a slight improvement since there’s now less to keep track of.
• Ninja is a bit better I think without having to worry about keeping up the speed buff.
• Haven’t played much of Samurai, but it didn’t seem to have notably changed.
• Reaper is unchanged.
• Bard, Machinist, and Dancer are all essentially unchanged.
• Black Mage has been simplified a bit, and I love the changes made to Umbral Soul… but it definitely takes some getting used to.
• Red Mage is a bit more fiddly in the burst phase, which I’m not thrilled about.
• Summoner is unchanged.

First off, let me just get it out of the way that I do not ever recommend anyone creating more than five characters tops. Honestly, since the Data Center travel function got implemented there’s not really much reason to go higher than four (one for each location cluster). So then why did I create eight? Boredom. Completionism. OCD. Take your pick.

The first of the ‘tertiary’ characters (who will stop advancing the main quest just after unlocking Purple Crafting scripts) was created on the Oceanian DC cluster primarily because I wanted to see just how poor a ‘poor’ server connection was. As it so happens it’s not all that bad at all. I wouldn’t want to play Samurai or bleeding-edge savage raids on it, but generally it’s only really noticeable in how little time you have to react to telegraphed AoE attacks.

Aside from that the only things to be aware of are that Alliance Raid roulette is pretty dead most of the time (good luck getting anything other than Crystal Tower to fire), Shadowbringers 8-man raids take quite some time to fire, Frontlines only has a brief 1-hour window starting from about 2:30pm AWST time, and activity in general falls off a cliff around 8pm.

The next was created in response to the addition of a fourth North American data center. Nothing much to say about this besides that the population seems to be too low to support frequent Alliance raids (or Frontlines at all). That’s not much of an issue though since you can quickly jump to one of the other three to do those.

Finally we come to my first Japanese DC character (and eighth overall). I chose Elemental as the starting point since it was formally the ‘English-friendly’ one pre-Oceanian cluster… and that may have been a mistake. I was hoping for something a bit different in atmosphere or playstyle but there really isn’t much.

The only things that stick out at this point are:

1. You’ll occasionally get Frontlines ‘leaders’ who spam multiple sound effects every second
2. No one uses Alliance chat in Alliance roulette
3. Most people greet and sign-off with auto-translate phrases
4. I have yet to come across people having a public conversation in a city center
5. Tanks in 4-man roulettes seem more conservative with their pulls

Potential future characters (once I get that eighth one up to the start of Endwalker):

• Normal Elf: White Mage (gnb/drg/bard/???)
• Hroth 1: Paladin (blm, mnk, mch, ast)
• Hroth 2: Black Mage (rpr, drk, sage, dnc)
• Black Lizard: Bard (arc, drk, rpr)
• Sun Cat: Samurai (arc, drk, dnc)
• Tan Viera: Sage (pal, mnk, dnc, rdm)

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.

Endwalker turned out to be a remarkably solid overall addition to the game. Right up there with Heavensward narratively and mechanically more or less equivalent to Shadowbringers.

They have found new ways to waste your time though, mainly in the form of escort quests that prevent you from using mounts or teleporting while said quest is active. Fortunately you don’t have to ever worry about the NPC’s health in those quests. Experience-wise the main questline alone gives just enough to get a character from level 80 to level 90, though leveling others will take some time. While I’ve maxed out my crafting and gathering classes, only RDM and BLM are at 90 (with most of the others at 81) even after doing all the sidequests.

As for the new classes:

Reaper, though it ~vaguely~ resembles Dragoon with its focus on switching from side to back positionals interspersed with instant attacks, feels very much like it’s own new thing. It’s a very fluid combat experience and not overly complex.

Sage meanwhile just comes across like Scholar 2.0. Instead of a fairy that indiscriminately heals, there’s a modal that heals your chosen target every time you deal damage. The rest is basically the same, though with a bit more focus on flat damage mitigation rather than shield strength.

And then there’s Summoner, which got overhauled so heavily it’s basically a new class. You no longer have an autonomous pet which attacks on its own, but rather one that just sits there and does nothing but enable the use of a couple of your abilities. The class also no longer has access to any damage-over-time abilities. So what exactly does it do now? Well, first you cast a buff, then when that runs out you can use a summon as a one-off attack which then unlocks the use of additional summon-themed attacks. Ruby does the most damage but has a cast time, Topaz does normal damage with no cast time, and Emerald does the least damage with no cast time and half cooldown.

It’s become a very simple, and admittedly somewhat boring class to play. But even if you don’t decide to play it yourself, you should absolutely use the /petsize “All” “Small” text command to avoid being blinded by summon effects.

With the release of Endwalker imminent (~20 hours away for those with early access) I’ve been spending the last 3 weeks or so re-acquainting myself with the game.

Originally this meant completing Eureka with my first character, which I had skipped, but that only ended up taking a week. Turns out you can level quite fast by just showing up at any monster spawn, not dissimilar to the Bozja experience. Wasn’t able to do any Arsenal runs though since that character happened to be located on the Crystal data center, whose BA instances are completely controlled by a Discord group. Everyone else refuses to enter the place.

So I’ll have to wait for a server visitation option to get added to the game before I can clear that.

The next week was spent loitering in Eureka to make a few million gil selling expensive (and very rare) monster drops and loot boxes. The Tracker site ended up a true godsend for that goal. Partway through though I started thinking about how Shadowbringers has a bit of quest development locked behind completing all 4 role questlines; none of my existing characters met the requirements to accomplish that since they all had their own job-exclusive themes.

Basically there were two options: Either level some of the ignored jobs on one or more of the existing characters, or create a 4th character. I originally went with the latter both because I like the whole ‘progression’ experience and I wanted a character on a non-North American server (all three NA data centers had recently gone down twice). But on this last day I also decided to go with the first option as well.

Which meant raising Gladiator and Archer on my Soul of Magic (who will also pick up the new Sage and Reaper classes). Why Reaper? Because the preliminary EW patch notes mention that it’ll have five sets of role-specific questlines. So I’ll need a melee physical DPS class to see its bonus story bits.

Future plans then include raising Arcanist and Machinist on my Tank-specialist, and Gunbreaker, Red Mage, and Sage on my ranged DPS specialist. Finally, the most recently created character will raise Astrologian, Dark Knight, and Reaper (no ranged physical DPS though because none of them even remotely fit their theme).

Doing all that should take a great deal of time. Theoretical far-future plans include ~maybe~ raising Fisher on the SoM to see all the crafting-related role quests and creating a 5th character on the upcoming Oceanic data center (if the connection strength ends up too weak I’ll go with the European Light data center instead).

Just maxed the last class on my 3rd character, meaning that combined with the previous two I’ve now maxed out all classes in the game.

Dragoon is an annoying class because you have to constantly switch between two attack lines (if you want to keep your damage buff up) while simultaneously keeping track of your positioning. And it certainly doesn’t help that its questgiver is located out in the middle of nowhere. It has quite a few instant attacks however and ends up fairly decent at evasion once you get the hang of them. The party buffing abilities are a nice bonus.

Samurai gives you a bit more leeway with your buffs (they last longer), but forces you to keep track of an expendable resource in addition to adding a 3rd (shorter) attack sequence. That combined with the focus on high skill speed results in a class that’s extremely busy and a real pain to play optimally. The main saving grace here is that there’s no need to worry about positioning. One other thing to note is that, unlike all other classes, its level 60 quest requires an ilevel of 200+ to beat.

Paladin turned out to be a hybrid Tank/Healer; in addition to the standard suite of tanking abilities it also gets a strong single-target heal and some attack magic. The shield starts showing its worth once you get Sheltron at 35 and yeah this is definitely the class with the most survivability. It’s just generally good all around.

Warrior is sort of odd. It swaps out some of Paladin’s defense for more offense, but that offense is quite limited and not really worth the trade unless you’re doing solo duties/quests. Personally I only ended up using it for PvP.

Dark Knight has been my go-to tanking class and is quite a bit of fun. It’s magic themed, meaning it has some defensive abilities that only work against magic attacks (which I often forget to use) and uses MP to provide both more offense and more defense. The MP shield, Blackest Night, is fantastic and can even be used to defend the main tank if you happen to be off-tanking. Probably the busiest of the tanking classes though with all the instants and resources you have to keep track off.

Finally we come to Gunbreaker, which is a hybrid Tank/DPS with a bit of Healer thrown in for some reason. The healing abilities aren’t anything to write home about (beyond that they’re instant), but its DPS-like attack combo makes it one of the more aggressive tanking options available thanks to having a relatively short cooldown time.

Ultimately, tanking is quite a bit of fun and vastly preferable to playing melee DPS or (gods forbid) Healer. All you really have to worry about is keeping the boss faced away from the party (Hansel/Gretel fight excepted) and using defensive abilities if/when the boss uses a tankbuster attack. Most mechanics don’t even target you, and those that do will often barely hurt even if you mess them up. It’s great.

One thing I have noticed however is that tanks on the Aether data center in general seem to absolutely hate having their tank stance on (presumably because it used to lower stats?). Meaning if you aren’t tanking there be prepared to get swarmed by adds during raids and have your healers blitzed if/when the MT dies.