Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[BlazikenLover]

Excellent writeup!

I would like to add: The CEs are kinda shit in a sense that it forces a huge sway of people to play tank. It is very, very unforgiving and as opposed to Bozja you can't imbibe an Elixir to get some passive mitigation. Vulns don't drop and as a DPS getting hit once or twice basically means you are dead. Yes, it forces people to group up, but even in that 75% of the people are playing tank because the stress of having to perfectly do everything is just not what they are looking for in content like OC. As tank on the other hand you can ignore mechanics, stand in AoE for uptime or outright ignore combat gimmicks like the Trade Turtle. In turn, this means that CEs take way, way longer than they need to because tank DPS still quite low.
I have been playing SAM recently and the amount of times I get to tank the mob because non of the 20+ tanks around me use stance is quite frustrating.

I thought FATEs/CEs would get easier with gear and higher phantom job levels but in the end it wasn't by a lot so they are still a ballbuster and that leads me to get fatigued fast. Sure two or three are fine, but by the fifth one I want to quit playing for the day and YOU HAVE TO DO SO MANY OF THEM IF YOU WANT THE ARMOR AND UPGRADES, then there is the fact you have to rush from FATE to FATE and get there ASAP or you won't get shit since they go down so fast anyways, I don't get why they don't have more than one fate spawning at a time so you don't have all people rushing to a single one and clearing it within seconds.

That post from a few pages back really opened my eyes, content is more stressful and difficult sure but that doesn't translate to fun and whats more I have heard savage raiders complain about how every other mechanic is a body check. "You must have all dumbasses alive to survive this move" Real challenging and engaging gameplay there.

 

[Kier Starmer]

So I have been playing since 1.0, and I am a very seasoned WoW player. I would label myself as casual/hardcore. It makes me sad on so many levels how fucking dire FF14 is and has been since EW.

For me, the brakes Storm was rocky, but I appreciated the direction. But at that point, I was starting to notice how shitty world design was. The maps were just a mass of nothing. You would spam compass on hotbar for aethercurrents, and once complete will not even land on the ground. It also introduced this magical thing of characters I don't give a fuck about. It recovered but it was a bloated mess. Fast forward to EW, EW for me was when I started looking for errors.

The massive one being pacing and story on top of, as I player, am I doing SOMETHING? SO MANY FUCKING QUESTS ARE GOING TO POINT A AND B!!! I got to Elpis, and multiple fucking times I switched off and went to play FUCKING SHADOWLANDS!! because at least there I could do Torghast. It is not only brainrot but insulting to my time, which was in lockdown too. For an expansion to be about the end of the world, it was so sterile and uninteractive. There were good story beats, but the expansion lacked any payoff. It should have really gone back to the drawing board and killed all the Scions.

It is abundantly clear that as of July 23rd 2025, Creative has no fucking idea where the game is going or what they are doing. They're so paralyzed by their conveyor belt development that they're unable to respond to major issues.

The game needs new direction now because I think Yoshi P has corrupted development with his formulaic structure. There needs to be a new engine because the new visuals made it worse, but the overworld needs some life.

I very rarely throw WoW any bones, but I will here. Delves are a fantastic addition to personalising your gameplay. You get loot that you can use, but also it gives you are challenge. Hell, classes feel a lot better too because class design in FF14 is a fucking joke. They took my main class, A LITERAL SPREADSHEET CLASS, and raped it royally. I will never forgive them for that alone because you took anything gratifying and killed it out back. They killed Sam too, which was my melee dps and Astro, my healer.

I could turn this into an essay but I will leave an image to say how bad it is.


You killed my class, Yoshi, fuck you!

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

Are the fights at least challenging and fun? I know they dont tell much in the way of story.

Would you define "one retard can wipe the entire raid" and "you only get three wipes before you get booted and have to grind again" as "challenge" or "fun"?

And it's not like 'an idiot dying means you don't hit enrage,' it's 'there are multiple responsibilities that specific people with specific phantom job actions have to undertake, and if they fail to do so, everyone dies and there is no recovering from it.'

 

[Baguette Child]

And it's not like 'an idiot dying means you don't hit enrage,' it's 'there are multiple responsibilities that specific people with specific phantom job actions have to undertake, and if they fail to do so, everyone dies and there is no recovering from it.'

This was ultimately why I gave up on it despite having initially been pretty excited for OC. It was just too frustrating to fail over and over again despite 99% of our group doing everything right.

 

[Troon Whisperer]

I very rarely throw WoW any bones, but I will here. Delves are a fantastic addition to personalising your gameplay. You get loot that you can use, but also it gives you are challenge. Hell, classes feel a lot better too because class design in FF14 is a fucking joke.

I have been having a stupid amount of fun in delves, working on bigger and bigger pulls as my gear improves, it's nice to have to push a variety of buttons and actually think during combat other than XIV's "group everything up, AOE down". Sure WoW is very fucking similar in that regard but needing to actually use CC abilities in regular content is a massive leap ahead.

 

[Baron Reginald]

Would you define "one retard can wipe the entire raid" and "you only get three wipes before you get booted and have to grind again" as "challenge" or "fun"?

And it's not like 'an idiot dying means you don't hit enrage,' it's 'there are multiple responsibilities that specific people with specific phantom job actions have to undertake, and if they fail to do so, everyone dies and there is no recovering from it.'

Because people clearly loved that aspect of Chaotic raids, it needs to keep coming back!

 

[Xerxes IX]

Because people clearly loved that aspect of Chaotic raids, it needs to keep coming back!

Its a smaller issue for how JP does high end content so as far as they're concerned sounds like a skill issue for retard gaijin.

But seriously I can't believe they did this again after the negative reaction to the body checks in the third Endwalker tier. And at least then you only had to replace one person in a group of 8 if that was your problem. It's not that it's too hard it's that the difficulty is being at the mercy of One Fucking Retard.

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

Could you tell me what is so appealing in this game, except major content for furries and lolicons?

500 hour long visual novel/JRPG adventure with a visually customizeable main character in terms of race, armor, sparkly weapons, and class animations. The only other JRPG stories of similar or greater length are the Trails series (recommend if you go in accepting that the plot is almost entirely filler and there are no satisfying payoffs on the big overarching storyline), Rance (the prurience which would turn people off), and gacha games like Genshin (the characters being sold means they almost never die which kills the tension). Good looking corridor dungeons, flashy boss fight cutscenes. Soundtrack is good. The game is not like WoW where only the latest expansion matters. You can unsub from the game still on the Stormblood storyline and then come back years later and not be ripped away from that and sent straight to the latest expansion. The story is good up through Stormblood and then begins declining starting with Shadowbringers, but overall the presentation is good enough even through Dawntrail. It's just that once you are finally caught up on the story and have done the major side stuff like the trial and 8 man raid storylines, there is no reason to remain subbed until the next patch unless you have fallen into the housing trap.

 

[Well Intentioned]

Could you tell me what is so appealing in this game, except major content for furries and lolicons?

Honestly? It's a (mostly) solo-friendly MMORPG that is basically 'Final Fantasy: Nostalgia' for me. If this were a generic MMO I'd probably have given up eons ago.

Beyond that, I enjoy a lot of content in the game. Encounters are interesting and fun at the higher levels and there was some compelling story that was interesting to me. Decent for a JRPG, great for an MMO, middling for actual literature/narrative.

It's just the recent expansion that's just sunk things quite a bit.

And I'd argue that the 'major content' for furries/pedos that you're alluding to doesn't really exist in the game -- it's brought on by third party tools and mods. There are some folks who treat this like the sequel to Second Life, but unless you:

a) have a mod-sharing program called MARE
b) actively seek these freaks out
c) aren't playing the game and treating it as a fancy graphics chatroom
d) go onto Discord and engage with them there

You generally won't have to deal with these shitheads. You will see them out in the wild here and there, and there's some retards who are obnoxious if you participate in public content, but you're gonna come across cringe tards in any MMO.

 

[Well Intentioned]

Excellent writeup!

I would like to add: The CEs are kinda shit in a sense that it forces a huge sway of people to play tank. It is very, very unforgiving and as opposed to Bozja you can't imbibe an Elixir to get some passive mitigation. Vulns don't drop and as a DPS getting hit once or twice basically means you are dead. Yes, it forces people to group up, but even in that 75% of the people are playing tank because the stress of having to perfectly do everything is just not what they are looking for in content like OC. As tank on the other hand you can ignore mechanics, stand in AoE for uptime or outright ignore combat gimmicks like the Trade Turtle. In turn, this means that CEs take way, way longer than they need to because tank DPS still quite low.
I have been playing SAM recently and the amount of times I get to tank the mob because non of the 20+ tanks around me use stance is quite frustrating.

I'm kinda torn on this because I feel that apart from one CE, I don't think the mechanics are all that terribly difficult and you can survive getting smacked a few times even on DPS.

The one that is kinda jank is the Urn CE (which is still not that terrible once you figure it out) and that's only because I think that they could make indicators a little more visible. I feel they blend in a bit and it can be hard to track.

That said, I do agree it is infuriating thinking a tank is going to, you know, tank, and you unload and subsequently get felted.

 

[John Roguelike]

And it's not like 'an idiot dying means you don't hit enrage,' it's 'there are multiple responsibilities that specific people with specific phantom job actions have to undertake, and if they fail to do so, everyone dies and there is no recovering from it.'

This was ultimately why I gave up on it despite having initially been pretty excited for OC. It was just too frustrating to fail over and over again despite 99% of our group doing everything right.

Similar to how one retard failing kills everyone (nice 'teamwork'), the main reasons I dislike the raid structure of this game and even, in some ways, the highly scripted battle structure overall, are that I would rather a fight have a lot of things happening fast and often enough that I get hit despite my best efforts, but still have ways to mitigate or come back from the damage or just cope, instead of being given 5+ seconds to mentally prepare for a very simple attack that, if flubbed, just destroys my health bar. It feels less like teamwork in the earlier case, and more like everyone having to memorize and just do something trivial. The second case feels less like a fight, more like Simon says with a long downtime. Good fight design would have lots of ways to fuck you up, but also lots of ways to cope with it, and would allow actual teamwork to make a difference. Times where the boss funnels you into only responding to a move in a specific way should be used more strategically, instead of for every move.

 

[SnowBall]

The game’s msq should have just ended at base EW. The expansion had its flaws and should have been 2 instead of one but it was still good and was satisfying enough to close the book on the whole msq. Unfortunately being a live service game the show must go on and 6.X onwards feels like a soft reboot without any new things to hook the player in with. A lot of writing decisions feel like they wanted to reset the msq so newcomers could understand this new arc without needing prior knowledge of the plot (I think Yoshi-P even said he wanted to give new players the option to skip to 7.0.) If EW was a series finale of a TV show then 6.X and DT is a post cancellation season or series reboot.
Also I haven’t touched OC or even Cosmic Exploration which is sad because I used to be so excited to try all the new gameplay stuff in previous expansions. From what everyone here is saying I guess I’m not missing much,

 

[Agarathium1066]

And I'd argue that the 'major content' for furries/pedos that you're alluding to doesn't really exist in the game -- it's brought on by third party tools and mods. There are some folks who treat this like the sequel to Second Life, but unless you:

a) have a mod-sharing program called MARE
b) actively seek these freaks out
c) aren't playing the game and treating it as a fancy graphics chatroom
d) go onto Discord and engage with them there

You generally won't have to deal with these shitheads. You will see them out in the wild here and there, and there's some retards who are obnoxious if you participate in public content, but you're gonna come across cringe tards in any MMO.

This is the big thing to keep in mind while its horrifying its also all opt in. Thank God for it as I am certain if it wasn't this shit would have gotten the game banned lickety split. I'd even say they've made some smart moves in more "recent" times like adding word filters you can put into your chat. Still want to keep Shout up but not potentially see weird shit? You can hit the word filter up and its blissfully free.

Still have stupid fuckheads talking about dumb things elsewhere and there's no real "fix" for that beyond never socially interacting with people.

 

[Sheep King]

3 is already kind of a thing that happens - basically every fight has timeline sections where nothing happens (maybe there's tank autos, or a TB, or a raidwide, but no actual mechanic) and you just pump DPS for like 30 seconds. In a game with more group optimization and job variety, trying to organize your buffs and bursts around these opportunities would be an interesting aspect of optimizing a fight.

Those sections don't really achieve the desired result though, because players are expected to maintain uptime, mechanics or no mechanics. All an empty section does is make it a little easier. There is pretty much never a time except maybe when you have to kill an add where a player is expected to do anything than pump DPS on a boss as long as it's targetable.
If there were buffs with a 7 minute cooldown it'd make sense to save them for a free uptime section, because you only get one use a fight, but for a 2 minute cooldown, getting as many uses as possible during a fight is always going to be optimal over delaying them.
If bosses had phases with a flat "vulnerability down" where all damage, or even one type of physical/magic damage, was less effective, then saving your burst would be less damaging overall and playing more defensively would be a valid choice in a tight situation.
Also, most importantly, it would make parsers mald.

 

[SnowBall]

This is the big thing to keep in mind while its horrifying its also all opt in. Thank God for it as I am certain if it wasn't this shit would have gotten the game banned lickety split. I'd even say they've made some smart moves in more "recent" times like adding word filters you can put into your chat. Still want to keep Shout up but not potentially see weird shit? You can hit the word filter up and its blissfully free.

Still have stupid fuckheads talking about dumb things elsewhere and there's no real "fix" for that beyond never socially interacting with people.

The only problem is spam filters are case sensitive and people have gotten smart so now they use uppercase letters in their shouts to bypass usually filtered terms. I’ve had that happen to me and now I just turn off shout completely.