Ff14!!!!!

[Brutaal]

So im excited bout the FF14 game coming out in august, anyone else a FF fanatic that plans on playing it?

or anyone try the beta and can give me some insight... i know unlike FF11 it will be more like wow im told and no more turn based battles...

[Zeyla]

I hope it is better than the initial release. It was terrible! The interface was by far the worst part I thought, I only played it for like a week.

I'll be curious to see what they have done with it after a year.

[Brutaal]

i had a couple friends in BETA starting at phase one going into four and they said its looking promising now...

[Zeyla]

Yeah, i am in the next beta phase that starts this Friday. My expectations are low at this point, but i'll give it a look.

[Zeyla]

So I had a chance to play the beta over the weekend and I was pretty impressed. That was the game I was looking for two years ago when it originally launched. I just wanted them to pretty-up FF XI and add some modern elements and a better UI. FFXI 1.0 had the worst game UI I have ever seen. Two years and a new development lead helped turn FF XIV into something enjoyable.

It has many of the new MMO standards, Auto looting, quest trackers, nice map and mini-map functionality, simple macro system, gear manager, etc. It also has a shared mob xp thing, if you tag a mob you get 100% xp from it, but if someone helps you kill it they get some XP also, another nice thing is for quest mobs you can get the quest items off them even if someone tagged it. They still have the xp combo system in place, which works in a group or solo setting. The level cap was only 20 for the weekend, but I am guessing that the forced grouping to level thing like FF XI had is no longer.

The combat is a little more fast paced than FF XI but it isn't super button mashy like some other modern MMO's. They brought over Limit break group abilities as well, so there is still group synergy type attacks and such that you can coordinate.

The Job system is really well implemented too, like other FF games. You switch your job just by swapping your weapon, if you are leveling a job that is lower than your main job, you get a scale able xp boost depending on the difference between them. It makes leveling up sub jobs much quicker. It isn't a job/subjob thing like FF XI. You can use certain abilities in special slots from any job, so you can pick skills that suit your role.

It looks very promising so far and they are letting everyone who purchased 1.0 play the new one no charge. Think there is a monthly fee of $12 after the first month. I'll be playing it for at least the first month, beyond that, we will see! I am on the Behemoth and found a nice guild with a decent amount of players, if you are going to play on that server, let me know and I'll get you an invite.

Early Release if you pre-order is Aug 24th (sadly 1.0 owners don't get in on this, which is odd). Full Game launch is Aug 27th.

[Brutaal]

Hey Zeyla, not sure if you have been playing FF at all, but im LOVING it... im sure ill be keeping with it... i canceled my wow account cause i enjoy it that much... im on adamantoise if ya ever come to another server.

[Zeyla]

I am still playing it, and probably will be for a while. It is pretty darn good so far. It is the finally the Final Fantasy XIV I wanted to play when it was released a couple years ago. I'm on Behemoth in a decent sized Free Company (Guild). If anyone is interested, I can get you in no prob. They are a good mix of hardcore and casual folks, good vibe.

[Stosh]

I'm also on Behemoth. I've been leveling up all the classes, so far I have unlocked three jobs, Black Mage, Summoner and Scholor. Once I get my Thurm/Black Mage to 50 I'm going to work on the Conjuror for White Mage so I have all the cloth caster classes covered.

[Zeyla]

Oh Hey Stosh, what is your character on Behemoth? I'm Zeyla Pahlo, Monk!

[Stosh]

Oh Hey Stosh, what is your character on Behemoth? I'm Zeyla Pahlo, Monk!

Stoshetta Du'Shea

[Brutaal]

Awwww i wanna get on that server but i think the character creation is halted on it for now and i dont really wanna start all over lol

[Allara]

Behemoth is locked for new characters, but I'm playing this as Allara Starmist on Zalera. :)

[Stosh]

If lock means what it did at release, that means that you just have to keep trying at different times of the day to make characters on a server. Anyway, losing steam. Tank I played with quit, game not "WoW enough" or something, who knows.

[Allara]

So I just started the game yesterday, but I'm really loving it so far. Feels like the best combination of Rift, Aion, WoW, and maybe a few others. Granted I'm only level 12. These things tend to fall apart later. But I'm already a big FF fan. Kudos to them for finally getting it right—FFXI was an abomination IMO.

[Stosh]

Behemoth is locked for new characters, but I'm playing this as Allara Starmist on Zalera. :)

According to the latest missive from SE, Behemoth is now open for new characters.

[Terminater]

So is it worth me getting?

[Allara]

So is it worth me getting?

Yup!

I just upgraded to the Collector's Edition, in fact. I don't think current end game will be worth much right now from what I've read, but patches will help.

[Elidroth]

I'm unfortunately on Ultros right now.

Story - Brilliant.
Visuals - Beautiful.
Combat - Dumbest shit EVER in an MMO. It's right up there with how EQ was for a Warrior at launch.
As a Gladiator.. I have three abilities that I use. If I'm in an instance. That jumps up to a whopping four. REALLY disappointed with combat. Now.. as I'm starting to multi-job, I CAN add some other flavor to the fights, but I mostly don't need to. IMO, they really dropped the ball on combat.

[Torrid]

I dunno. I always felt EQ got a bad rap when it came to having too few buttons. Giving people buttons just for the sake of giving them buttons is dumb. If I can write an autoit script to do the DPS routine, then it shouldn't be put into the game. Hitting sinister strike three times before eviscerate over and over again is completely brainless. I think Starcraft 2 made me invent the game developer's rule: if it can be automated, it either should be or removed from the game. (FU spawn larva)

As a warrior in a setting where multiple mobs were pulled and mezed, I would do things like position the mob currently being killed along side the next mob to kill, so I could stop autoattack, target the mezed mob, taunt it, retarget the old mob, and resume attacking. Or when no mez was available, switch targets and try to get a proc on each. (can be done with an enchanter around too) Or position mobs so rogues and pets had an easier time getting at its backside. Melee push was an issue as well, and if you remember our non-cornering statue kills, then you will recall how important the warrior's positioning was. I had us pushing it around in circles. This is even an issue in single groups, really.

Not spamming buttons every 1.5 seconds also allows you to communicate with your group easier and devote more attention to things like watching for respawns or charm breaks. Granted if your dps routine is brainless easy it'll just be handled subconsciously anyway.

[Nodd Oxide]

I do remember the Melee push was always an issue, but if you had a pet class to place their pet on the opposite side of the mob from the Tank you were golden.

[Stosh]

Fuck having lots of buttons for the sake of having lots of buttons to push. See EQ2 for an example of too many buttons. I have a level 12 Glad that I was saving to level with my wife, and I have more than three abilities worth using.

[Lonskils]

I remember everyone in wow begging for more buttons to smash. I mean fire was at one time, scorch 5 times, throw a living bomb up, cast fireblast to tag other mobs around your mob if there were any, then fireball a couple times for a pyro proc, hit pyro, scroch again to refresh, and hit living bomb if it ever blew up during that time, rinse repeat while running around from pools of whatever you couldn't step on this fight. It gets old, especially when you see other classes not half as crazy to do and have to keep up with casts times of insanity. Now I've not played wow in a while, but I doubt they've made it any easier really. In fact they had added a cicle you had to put down to have to stand in, and added in that orb that you also had to throw into the rotation. For what? I remember in vanila, frost mages did the most damage, but were labeled so boring, because all they had to do was spam frost bolt for win. I dunno, throws hands up!

[Andaas]

For EQ casters, the main thing was that spells had a considerable casting time; nothing like WoW and the 1-2 second cast max (aside from some 3-6 second channeled spells). When casting a nuke or something, you had anywhere from 3.5 - 6 seconds casting time, and then many spells had a longer cooldown so you weren't just spamming the same thing over and over.

Yes, there were spammable spells - but it was usually only efficient to use those in special cases like mass-AE.

[Lonskils]

Concussion was a spell I loved and hated at the same time due to it's spam-able nature. I just think if you are gonna give a class a bolt spell or whatever, designing 99% of your boss encounters to make them move about the time they start a rotation, isn't fun. Giving them a DoT that has to be refreshed every 15 seconds or less sucks too! Of course it created an entire class of twitchy casters though. Guess they wanted boss encounters to be more like pvp in that regards. At least they didn't introduce a large amount of resist gear and make casters completely ineffective or halve the damage of spell when they chose to pvp.

I really hate how wow has over time given in and really morphed a lot of classes into the same roles and abilities. Sheeping was huge at one time... Now why not just aoe. my list of ugg's goes on and on.

Just need something completely different. Like wow was completely different than EQ. While catoony, it felt alive with moving creatures that were just there to add ambiance.

[Torrid]

WoW added a lot of gimmicks like spell procs and ability rotations because they removed downtime. If your game has downtime, then you can't just chain cast your spells, and deciding when to use them becomes a strategic part of the game. For example, your puller might bring 4 mobs on a pull in a dungeon, and killing the first mob as fast as possible reduces the threat to the group a lot more than killing the last mob as fast as possible. Killing spell casting mobs faster than slowed melee mobs; nuking single pulled mobs late to ensure the tank has solid aggro on it; saving mana for a possible large pull in the future; etc.

Remove downtime and your spell casters might as well have autoattack spells-- you remove virtually all decision making from them. Blizzard had to add whack-a-mole with 3 flavors of fireball cooldowns just to make combat more interesting since they removed so much from the game by removing downtime. One of many reasons why EQ has way more depth than WoW ever did.

[Lonskils]

I was no fan of downtime. But WoW took the no downtime to a new level. You are correct.

[Zeyla]

I'm still digging it. Got my Monk up to 50 and am working on my gathering/production jobs. End-game has a variety of dungeons to run for tokens and a long quest chain for your Relic weapon (currently the best in the game I believe). When starting a new job your actions are pretty limited but you end up with a nice amount mid-late levels.

The combat is slower and a little more methodical with 2.5 second GCD. Feels less button mashy than other MMO's I've played and you have a nice variety of abilities. When I had gone back recently and played Rift again, that game had almost too many abilities and overly complex dps rotations (at least for most mage builds I tried). Then there was GW2 which had very few abilities you could have at a time (although you could swap them out as needed).

FFXIV is a nice balance I think. What you lose in amount of abilities and ability speed you make up with fight mechanics, starting in the mid level story dungeons while leveling, they get decently difficult.