Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

Fcret said:
Raidtrannies are busy crashing out because the 2min meta is going away. Some are also mad about the new middle difficulty between normal and savage for raids.
Click to expand...
Any good examples to share? Is this on the forums? It sounds hilarious.

Shardhopping kinda makes sense to me, even leaving out the asspull about a natural Rejoining (yeah thanks for mentioning that, Hydaelyn). Considering entire worlds on each shard have been in mortal danger several times without any input or warning, it is probably a good idea to at least send them a newsletter now and then and maintain communication between each world. That's Y'shtola's whole thing, right?
Not crazy about the new Solstice thing though. It would've been so nice if EW had just been a final total victory against all the past drama, like everything about it implied.

I liked the last Alliance Raid more than the other two. Shanttoto was fun, even if ending with "hey, you're totally coming to visit us in FFXI, riiiiiggght?" is a bit manipulative, I don't mind.
It's a shame that the fun part of the last boss, the hopping between two floors, only occurs in the first phase, then it just turns into another wall fight.
 
I liked the patch.

The dungeon was okay, I liked the first two bosses but the third felt uninspired. I wish they had addressed the fact he'd killed civilians instead of just going "Oh I also don't want my home to be shit" an sent him off with an ass pat.

The trial was dope nothing too fancy in terms of mechanics but it has some of the best story telling in a trial we've had.

I genuinely like The Winterers and their motivations I think it makes sense to have this group of genocidal mad men who want to save their worlds and are willing to do anything to save them, I also get the feeling Halmarut is less a puppetmaster pulling the strings than an idiot way over her head desperately trying to stop the solstice.

I think the second half of the patch will focus on two things, the first and the Scions going their separate ways, I think bare minimum the twins will be on separate sides of this conflict.

Overall 7.5 is a 8/10 patch, I enjoyed it, it left me asking questions and theorizing and I doubt I'll hate getting the dungeon in Expert.
 
I see nothing wrong with it. They’ve been building up shard travel since 6.x, 7.4 basically spells it out for us serious shit is going to go down, and I like that the consequences of killing two load bearing gods is coming back to bite us in the ass. And besides even in ShB we spend most of the time helping normal people out with their grounded issues and we don’t really get into universe ending stuff until the last zone. Also ShB had massive buildup and tied a shitton of plot threads together (not just CT and patch 3.4 but also Omega and Alexander raids.) And EW makes sense because it’s the finale of a ten year long saga and build off the ground work laid in ShB and previous expansions while further tying in more plot threads. We were always having universe ending threats in the background with the rejoinings for the entire game, they were just happening offscreen and ShB simply showed us how an attempt looks like onscreen.

Also the spells it out for us that we’re traveling to Meracydia and Blindfrost and probably multiple other places on the source yet I’ve been seeing a lot of doomerism in the fandom that we’re going to completely abandon the Source entirely.

This also leads to one of the biggest issues with Dawntrail most people don’t point out- it wants to have its cake and eat it too. It want to please literally everyone. It feels like the Tural sections were created to please people who wanted grounded low stakes adventures while the S9 stuff feels like it was created to please people who wanted high stakes world/universe ending threats. Dawntrail doesn’t just copy the homework of ShB, it copies the homework of every expansion pack and speedruns tens years of stakes in one expansion to make everyone happy. With the Tural part Wuk is a rip off of Lyse and every other ruler from previous expansions we put into power. Several story beats feel like lazy rehashes of stuff we saw in ARR-SB. Then S9 switches to ripping off ShB. I think Yoshi-P even said somewhere that the reason the Scions were a part of DT instead of an entirely new cast while shoving Wuk in our face is that he wanted to compromise between both those who like the Scions and those who want entirely new characters.
 
Last edited:
For the first time in a long time, I'm actually a bit excited about MSQ. I was still pretty new to the game when I finished EW so the thoughts I had back then of "... but isn't everything gonna rejoin anyway if we kill her?" I just put down to me not understanding or having missed something. The story does a pretty good job of trying to make you not think about that because there's so much going on and so much emphasis on The Final Days. Thinking about it, I felt more urgency in terms of writing than the shitty Living Memory section of DT where we eat popcorn and go on fucking capybara rides with a supposed doomsday clock ticking down making the whole pacing feel schizophrenic. I know YoshiP has already said they know when we're going to Meracydia in future expansions, so that much is certain in advance, but I'm genuinely interested to see how the Solstice is going to be handled and what solution we'll find to it.
I dunno how ShB2 Evercold really will be (I'm hoping little to not at all), my expectations overall are minimal after DT but I'm quietly optimistic given the story has picked up in terms of quality since 7.3 and the amount of QoL they've been adding lately has been great. If they can rebound with Evercold, I know I for one will be able to write off DT as the "shit story but worked on game structure/features" expansion.

Alliance raid was enjoyable too, not really been invested in the story because I didn't play XI so disregarded it after Jeuno when it seemed it was gonna be fanservice for fags like Mr Happy. Thinking of alliance raids, possibility to get Nier raids more in rolos from now on that ShB is included in the free trial. I expect for 10.0 they'll add Endwalker and that'll be the whole first story arc for free.
 
Last edited:
Just finished the MSQ and I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going to go. Although I had to laugh in that the cutscene where the B-team scions rock up shows F'lhaminn and then she's nowhere to be found because they probably forgot about her.
 
Not going to lie Calyx became slightly more interesting (by an extremely, extremely tiny amount) ever since he became a squirrel plushie.

At this point all I ask is that EC has good writing that brings me back to caring about the setting and characters again. I have resigned myself to the fact that there’s a 95% chance it’s going to be ShB 2 and will probably have the same final zone shit but at this point if it’s going to be ShB 2 at least make it a good ShB 2. At this point I’m just going to automatically assume this will be the case from now on so I can spare myself getting let down and disappointed. Don’t get me wrong it would be annoying as fuck if they continue that but if they’re going to commit to it for the foreseeable future at least make the ride fun and interesting. I’m going in with extremely low expectations so far.

When it comes to this game’s msq as a whole I’m willing to be slightly more lenient towards plot contrivances and asspulls if they’re interesting and get me emotionally invested in the world and the people living in it. I loved Stormblood and Endwalker despite all those things being prevalent because I loved their stories and characters.
 
Troon Whisperer said:
Just finished the MSQ and I'm looking forward to seeing where it's going to go. Although I had to laugh in that the cutscene where the B-team scions rock up shows F'lhaminn and then she's nowhere to be found because they probably forgot about her.
Click to expand...
No sign of our boy Arenvald though. Like I get that he's a cripple now and can't do the adventure part but he could still be there.

As for the overall MSQ and the way the story is going, it was enjoyable enough, although I could do with less of Calyx showing up and trying to be all intimidating in a stuffed toy body. Like dude, we beat your ass so hard you got PTSD from it. I think the idea of this group comprised of residents of the various shards, all hell bent on making sure they come out on top is a nice idea and a good way to create tension and come up with a new long time story. Even as we go to the 4th to try and unfuck things there will always be that nagging thought of "what are the others on the rest of the shards doing?" I'm not opposed to more shard hopping as we apparently now have a magic maguffin that just lets us go where ever.

I'm on the fence about the combat changes. I'll give them a shot, especially since we know the new jobs being added will only have an "evolved" mode. I am glad about them breaking the 2 min meta, my only concern is, with less or no party buffs that unless they up the damage that Brd does, it will get left in the dust. As a Brd main, that isn't good. I know the Japanese raiding scene is different and it might not be a problem over there, but here in NA, the parse trannies sure as fuck are going to use Evolved mode and lower dps as reasons to not take jobs.
 
Yawntrail broke me, not even Stormblood managed to do that.
It's been 16 months since I quit it, I don't know if I have the strength of will to resub after Evercold comes out and they force me to do the rest of the MSQ...
 
Lou's Sentient Backfat said:
I'm on the fence about the combat changes. I'll give them a shot, especially since we know the new jobs being added will only have an "evolved" mode. I am glad about them breaking the 2 min meta, my only concern is, with less or no party buffs that unless they up the damage that Brd does, it will get left in the dust. As a Brd main, that isn't good. I know the Japanese raiding scene is different and it might not be a problem over there, but here in NA, the parse trannies sure as fuck are going to use Evolved mode and lower dps as reasons to not take jobs.
Click to expand...
I mean they already do that. The only real avenue the devs have for fixing this is increasing the raiding population to the point where PFs aren't dominated by retarded raidtroons which is what I think the new middle difficulty is intended to do.
 
RIPRhongoBongo said:
Reborn mode is going to be relegated to challenge runs
Click to expand...
I don't quite get why Yoshi P brought up Star Wars Galaxies as an example for why Reborn has to stick around. The combat update he's talking about was a total shift in the game's design - you went from having situational abilities to using cooldowns on a rotation, you now had actual levels, gear was on a treadmill etc.

I guess maybe for some ultra-casuals who learned their job once in Stormblood/Shadowbringers and just use that same rotation in current normal-difficulty content (I know a few people like this), but literally every expansion has resulted in normal players having to learn a new rotation. And it's not like Evolved mode is radical shift in design - you're still moving through cooldowns on a kind of rotation (albeit a less static one).

Maybe this is a bigger concern for the Japanese players?
 
Fcret said:
I don't quite get why Yoshi P brought up Star Wars Galaxies as an example for why Reborn has to stick around. The combat update he's talking about was a total shift in the game's design - you went from having situational abilities to using cooldowns on a rotation, you now had actual levels, gear was on a treadmill etc.

I guess maybe for some ultra-casuals who learned their job once in Stormblood/Shadowbringers and just use that same rotation in current normal-difficulty content (I know a few people like this), but literally every expansion has resulted in normal players having to learn a new rotation. And it's not like Evolved mode is radical shift in design - you're still moving through cooldowns on a kind of rotation (albeit a less static one).

Maybe this is a bigger concern for the Japanese players?
Click to expand...
The main issues (more than anything else) for Star Wars Galaxies is that it all happened instantaneously and could not (and would not) be reversed. It was one of the worst changes visited upon a game in history.

It's more of a stated commitment to shifting into evolved piece-by-piece instead of slamming into the entire concept all at once.
 
Surprised he didn't use Evolution of Combat update for Runescape as a better example. it's the best known example of a combat revamp literally decimating their player base, to the point where Jagex had to resurrect OSRS to bring people back.
 
Van Darkholme said:
It's been 16 months since I quit it, I don't know if I have the strength of will to resub after Evercold comes out and they force me to do the rest of the MSQ...
Click to expand...
Once you get out of the loop, it's kindof hard to really gird yourself up to get back in. The gameplay isn't really as good as other games, and the story even at its best really wasn't anything groundbreaking. It was a good timekiller... but there's plenty of those. The main appeal of the game, like any MMO, was its social aspect... and it's not like that's improved any. If anything, that hinges on a lot of people coming back.

From my perspective, I'll wait for the release and see how the reception goes. I could see if writing them a nicely-worded letter to un-delete my character would do anything, but I doubt it; and anyways if the game has truly been revamped, leveling again would be a fun way to see what parts of the story hold up and which are just nostalgia. But it has to be a pretty damn strong hook to actually get my interest back, and I still don't really think the team has what it takes.

Has the lead writer for the xpac been announced yet? While many people have cheered that the postgame sequences have been better-written, it's afaik always been the case that someone-else has written them. This 'it's about ethics in shard rejoining' and 'let's do shadowbringers, but again' seems like something Hiroi would have penned, honestly, and I'm not so confident that he's truly been ejected in the way that Kate was.
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
I could see if writing them a nicely-worded letter to un-delete my character would do anything, but I doubt it
Click to expand...
I know they do a one time restoration thing for your account; I know of someone who rage deleted her character after nuking her 3 FCs and houses after an e-breakup so I think you'd be fine if you've never asked them for anything to be restored before.
 
Fcret said:
I feel like DPS checks have just gotten much stricter. I remember raiding in Shadowbringers and while we'd still have to put in the work to prog, you were still likely to clear even with a couple of deaths.

Ever since EW, it feels like a single death is enough to just wall and reset the fight because if you're not getting at least 90% of the potential value out of your burst, then it's just not happening. It makes clutch wins much rarer and also completely kills motivation to try and carry new players through content since you can't really compensate for them.
Click to expand...
It is an underappreciated part of the 2 minute meta's impact how much more difficult it made fights without them actually being significantly more difficult "by the numbers", purely because things are so insanely weighted toward the burst windows that dying at an inopportune time and missing one, or worse, drifting your timers basically destroys your DPS output for the entire fight.

And you could really tell the difference right out the gate in Asphodelos compared to Eden's Promise, from what I remember from back then.
 
Rich Evans Ayypologist said:
Has the lead writer for the xpac been announced yet? While many people have cheered that the postgame sequences have been better-written, it's afaik always been the case that someone-else has written them.
Click to expand...
I don't think anything has been full on confirmed (I swear there was a story talking about a reshuffling with some roles but I can't find it now), but given that Kate has basically been vaporized from SE's existence and we have Koji Fox taking a more prominent role, I think it is safe to say there's been some changes made, there's going to be more direct oversight, and/or more collaboration with senior/junior team members.

E: Speaking of Kate, she apparently directed a play in Tokyo back in February.
 
Last edited:
I've been really enjoying the notch up in difficulty of the normal content in the post-DT MSQ patches despite being super out of practice and dying a decent bit on blind runs. But I gotta ask - how is this stuff to run in roulettes? Because I feel like a lot of it would get old when you're just trying to bang out your tomes for the week.
 
Just cull 30-50% of the filler like they did with ARR a few years back.

You can slim this shit down a lot by removing all variants of 'return to the waking sands' and other 'remember what we were doing six months ago' quests.

Otherwise, where the FUCK is my cosmic exploration? God damn japs announcing shit for 7.5 when they actually mean 7.51 or whenever the hell else they want.

At least its funny seeing people insist Evangelion will be lore relevant becuase we all know Nier was.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom