Apparently this week is E3, the huge video game media convention thing. I originally found this out when a streamer I was watching was complaining about how Twitch was all unstable because of the extra load from people watching streams from E3. Anyway, Square had a stream announcing various things as would be expected for an event like this and part of it involved a Q&A session with Naoki Yoshida (the director and producer of Final Fantasy XIV). One of the questions had to do with the new marriage system they're implementing for an upcoming patch. I was linked to a Kotaku article about it, but the question was just asking for more details and here's what Yoshida had to say post translation:
"We discussed it and we realized: within Eorzea, why
should there be restrictions on who pledges their love or friendship to
each other?"
Back in 2012 when they were talking about features to be added later to the relaunched Final Fantasy XIV (the original game was so terrible they had to bring in a new team and redo it) and marriage was one of the things they had planned. But initially they said they would only do straight marriage to start. I guess a lot has changed in two years!
One can't help but wonder if the concern around Tomodachi Life woke someone up inside Square Enix and made them take notice. As my friend Humbabella pointed out it's not like it's actually easier to implement just straight marriage in an existing video game. You do have to go in and make an explicit point while implementing any sort of pair bonding system to restrict it to one male and one female. It wouldn't be easier to 'test out' only straight marriage and I'm glad to see they walked away from that particular stance.
The guy in the video asking the questions didn't even seem terribly concerned about the potential for gay marriage, or for a cat person marrying a rock person. He only really perked up when Yoshida mentioned potential rewards for getting married. Gotta get an exclusive 'married' mount!
I haven't played FFXIV in a while, but it was fun when it relaunched. Maybe I should patch it up and give it another spin at some point...
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy XIV. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Final Fantasy XIV. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Wednesday, October 09, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: More Crafting Skills
On the weekend I went searching for a list of gear with 'control' stats so I could make sure I was keeping my crafting gear up to date. It took a while to find such a list, and along the way I stumbled across a thread where someone was talking about how they get a high quality (HQ) result on every single crafting attempt. I pretty consistently get around a 20% chance at a HQ result, so clearly I'm doing something wrong. Or it's possible the person making these comments was max level already with optimal gear? One way or the other, I want to find out. Each crafting class has 3 skills that can be used by the other ones, so there are 24 different skills that will be earned as I level up that I need to consider. They get unlocked at levels 15, 37, and 50 and I have all of the 15 ones and some of the 37 ones. I got into a nice rhythm using a couple of them and stopped really looking at the rest. Maybe there's a combo hidden in there that I'm missing? The way to find it is to look over what they each actually do!
The first thing to consider is how there are two aspects of crafting. You have a progress meter that you need to fill up in order to complete the item. You have a quality meter that you want to fill up in order to gain more experience and have a better chance at a HQ result. You always have to fill the progress meter and any extra resources you have can be used on the quality meter. As far as I can tell there are no abilities which help with both aspects. So you want the most efficient way to get through the progress section in order to have the most resources left for the quality section, and you need to use your last action to finish off the progress meter.
There are a few abilities that help with progress. 90% chance at 100% efficiency. 90% chance at 150% efficiency at a cost of 15 CP. 90% chance at 40 progress at a cost of 15 CP. 100% chance at 90% efficiency. 100% chance at 120% efficiency. 50% chance at 250% efficiency. 90% chance at 1/3rd of remaining progress at 15 CP cost. All of these cost 10 durability as well. Then there are the two ingenuity abilities which either lowers the level of the recipe to my level for the next 5 steps for 24 CP and no durability or lowers the level of the recipe to three less than my level for the next 5 steps for 32 CP and no durability.
How do those flat abilities compare to the ones that use my craftsmanship stat? No clue. How good is lowering the level of the recipe? No clue. What I do know, at least for now, is it doesn't much matter. I've been using the 100% chance at 90% efficiency ability and mostly only need to use it a couple of times. I find I have 20-40 durability left and all 275 of my CP after dealing with the progress part. The 100% chance at 120% efficiency ability needs me to hit level 50 in weaver to use, and I will switch to that instead. Maybe if I had a ton of CP lying around I could use a skill chance enhancer and one of the other abilities, and maybe using one of the ingenuity abilities makes sense for a given recipe. But I suspect spending my CP on quality is going to be way better.
What about those quality abilities? 70% chance at 100% efficiency for 18 CP. 80% chance at 125% efficiency for 32 CP. Double the efficiency of your next successful ability for 32 CP and no extra durability. 90% chance at 150% efficiency for 48 CP. 90% chance at 100% efficiency for 24 CP. (This one also adds an extra 20% efficiency per stack of Inner Quiet.) 50% chance at 100% efficiency for 0 CP.
Then there are the abilities which make the previous abilities better. +50% control for 3 steps for 18 CP. Inner Quiet, which is +20% control for every future action each time you succeed for 18 CP. +20% chance of success for the next 5 steps for 22 CP. +30% chance of success for the next 5 steps for 25 CP.
The key to my current way of crafting lies in the realization that the 0 CP ability is awesome. I used to have to try to balance out my CP and remaining durability in order to not run out of one or the other first. Now if I run out of CP I can just spam the 50% chance ability. I used to be in a position where I could use 2 of the 70% abilites because I'd have ~40 CP lying around. Instead I could use the +20% success ability, then one of the 70% ability and one of the 50% ability. Costs about the same, but I end up with a 90% and a 70% instead of two 70%s. Awesome!
There's one final type of ability and that's the type that lets me regain resources. These are useful because they let me use more and more abilities, especially more of the 50% success quality ability. I can spend 92 CP for 30 durability. I can get back 20 CP by using up a 'good' material condition. I can spend 160 CP for 60 durability. I can get back 8 CP per step, for 10 steps, for 66 CP. I can spend 88 CP for 30 durability, but it only comes back 10 at a time after the next 3 actions. I can spend 56 CP to spend half durability on the next 4 actions. Or 98 CP to spend half durability on the next 8 actions. I can spend all of my Inner Quiet stacks to restore some CP, maxxing at 60.
Spending all the Inner Quiet stacks is bad if I still have more quality to go, but if I've moved on to the progress phase it's just free CP to use. This CP could be spent on durability if I save a little of my base amount, which should let me finish off the entire progress bar even if I'm practically out of resources. I haven't been doing this thus far, though I have been using Inner Quiet, so I should really look into doing that. I can probably squeeze out a couple more quality abilities by doing that.
When it comes to restoring durability the most efficient abilities are really hard to use. They're the ones that reduce the cost of your next X actions by half, but the problem is some actions cost no durability and still use up a stack of these abilities. 56 CP for 20 durability is really good, but 56 CP for 15 durability is not. 88 CP for 30 durability is the one I'm using now, since the restrictions on it can be worked around. I shouldn't use it at max durability, or at 10 durability, but otherwise it works fine. Getting 60 durability back for 160 CP is more efficient but it only works if I have 60 durability to restore and some items only have a max of 40!
So I can spend CP on more durability... How does that compare to spending CP on quality? The basic way to spend extra CP on quality would be to spend 18 CP to upgrade from a 70% chance to a 90% chance of success. Or I could spend that 18 CP to get back 6.14 durability. So I could gain 20% of a success, or I could gain 43% of a success assuming I have enough CP to use a durability restorer and keep up my +20% success buff. What about the really good quality ability? I could spend 32 CP to guarantee I get 125% of a success. That same 32 CP could get me 10.9 durability. So either I gain 55% of a success or I gain 76% of a success. That's still worse. And that's before considering the extra durability gives me more stacks on Inner Quiet...
What about getting back 20 CP by eating up a 'good' condition. My testing indicates a good condition is worth +50% quality on that action. My current way to play involves using the big quality ability when the good condition comes up, to get 150% or 188% of a success depending on if the +20% buff is up or not. Instead I could use the good condition to get 20 CP and not spend the 32 CP to end up with 52 CP which becomes 23.6 durability which is worth 165% of a success. And I still have the 50% or 70% of a success by not spending the 10 durability, too. That's still way better.
So this is where I've been going wrong. I've been ignoring the ability which eats a 'good' condition, and I've been ignoring the ability which eats my Inner Quiet stacks. I should add these abilities in as cross class abilities to all of my crafting classes and see where that gets me. I think these, coupled with just getting lots of extra Inner Quiet procs by spending all of my CP on durability and buffs, could result in a lot of extra quality. And when you consider how the quality scale ramps up it isn't that much extra needed beyond 20% to get to 100%. Also, if I'm ignoring the quality buffs, I can switch to using the more efficient CP->durability converter when making things with 70 or more base durability.
I also really need to unlock the +30% success buff. It only requires level 37 in cooking and I'm already 33!
The first thing to consider is how there are two aspects of crafting. You have a progress meter that you need to fill up in order to complete the item. You have a quality meter that you want to fill up in order to gain more experience and have a better chance at a HQ result. You always have to fill the progress meter and any extra resources you have can be used on the quality meter. As far as I can tell there are no abilities which help with both aspects. So you want the most efficient way to get through the progress section in order to have the most resources left for the quality section, and you need to use your last action to finish off the progress meter.
There are a few abilities that help with progress. 90% chance at 100% efficiency. 90% chance at 150% efficiency at a cost of 15 CP. 90% chance at 40 progress at a cost of 15 CP. 100% chance at 90% efficiency. 100% chance at 120% efficiency. 50% chance at 250% efficiency. 90% chance at 1/3rd of remaining progress at 15 CP cost. All of these cost 10 durability as well. Then there are the two ingenuity abilities which either lowers the level of the recipe to my level for the next 5 steps for 24 CP and no durability or lowers the level of the recipe to three less than my level for the next 5 steps for 32 CP and no durability.
How do those flat abilities compare to the ones that use my craftsmanship stat? No clue. How good is lowering the level of the recipe? No clue. What I do know, at least for now, is it doesn't much matter. I've been using the 100% chance at 90% efficiency ability and mostly only need to use it a couple of times. I find I have 20-40 durability left and all 275 of my CP after dealing with the progress part. The 100% chance at 120% efficiency ability needs me to hit level 50 in weaver to use, and I will switch to that instead. Maybe if I had a ton of CP lying around I could use a skill chance enhancer and one of the other abilities, and maybe using one of the ingenuity abilities makes sense for a given recipe. But I suspect spending my CP on quality is going to be way better.
What about those quality abilities? 70% chance at 100% efficiency for 18 CP. 80% chance at 125% efficiency for 32 CP. Double the efficiency of your next successful ability for 32 CP and no extra durability. 90% chance at 150% efficiency for 48 CP. 90% chance at 100% efficiency for 24 CP. (This one also adds an extra 20% efficiency per stack of Inner Quiet.) 50% chance at 100% efficiency for 0 CP.
Then there are the abilities which make the previous abilities better. +50% control for 3 steps for 18 CP. Inner Quiet, which is +20% control for every future action each time you succeed for 18 CP. +20% chance of success for the next 5 steps for 22 CP. +30% chance of success for the next 5 steps for 25 CP.
The key to my current way of crafting lies in the realization that the 0 CP ability is awesome. I used to have to try to balance out my CP and remaining durability in order to not run out of one or the other first. Now if I run out of CP I can just spam the 50% chance ability. I used to be in a position where I could use 2 of the 70% abilites because I'd have ~40 CP lying around. Instead I could use the +20% success ability, then one of the 70% ability and one of the 50% ability. Costs about the same, but I end up with a 90% and a 70% instead of two 70%s. Awesome!
There's one final type of ability and that's the type that lets me regain resources. These are useful because they let me use more and more abilities, especially more of the 50% success quality ability. I can spend 92 CP for 30 durability. I can get back 20 CP by using up a 'good' material condition. I can spend 160 CP for 60 durability. I can get back 8 CP per step, for 10 steps, for 66 CP. I can spend 88 CP for 30 durability, but it only comes back 10 at a time after the next 3 actions. I can spend 56 CP to spend half durability on the next 4 actions. Or 98 CP to spend half durability on the next 8 actions. I can spend all of my Inner Quiet stacks to restore some CP, maxxing at 60.
Spending all the Inner Quiet stacks is bad if I still have more quality to go, but if I've moved on to the progress phase it's just free CP to use. This CP could be spent on durability if I save a little of my base amount, which should let me finish off the entire progress bar even if I'm practically out of resources. I haven't been doing this thus far, though I have been using Inner Quiet, so I should really look into doing that. I can probably squeeze out a couple more quality abilities by doing that.
When it comes to restoring durability the most efficient abilities are really hard to use. They're the ones that reduce the cost of your next X actions by half, but the problem is some actions cost no durability and still use up a stack of these abilities. 56 CP for 20 durability is really good, but 56 CP for 15 durability is not. 88 CP for 30 durability is the one I'm using now, since the restrictions on it can be worked around. I shouldn't use it at max durability, or at 10 durability, but otherwise it works fine. Getting 60 durability back for 160 CP is more efficient but it only works if I have 60 durability to restore and some items only have a max of 40!
So I can spend CP on more durability... How does that compare to spending CP on quality? The basic way to spend extra CP on quality would be to spend 18 CP to upgrade from a 70% chance to a 90% chance of success. Or I could spend that 18 CP to get back 6.14 durability. So I could gain 20% of a success, or I could gain 43% of a success assuming I have enough CP to use a durability restorer and keep up my +20% success buff. What about the really good quality ability? I could spend 32 CP to guarantee I get 125% of a success. That same 32 CP could get me 10.9 durability. So either I gain 55% of a success or I gain 76% of a success. That's still worse. And that's before considering the extra durability gives me more stacks on Inner Quiet...
What about getting back 20 CP by eating up a 'good' condition. My testing indicates a good condition is worth +50% quality on that action. My current way to play involves using the big quality ability when the good condition comes up, to get 150% or 188% of a success depending on if the +20% buff is up or not. Instead I could use the good condition to get 20 CP and not spend the 32 CP to end up with 52 CP which becomes 23.6 durability which is worth 165% of a success. And I still have the 50% or 70% of a success by not spending the 10 durability, too. That's still way better.
So this is where I've been going wrong. I've been ignoring the ability which eats a 'good' condition, and I've been ignoring the ability which eats my Inner Quiet stacks. I should add these abilities in as cross class abilities to all of my crafting classes and see where that gets me. I think these, coupled with just getting lots of extra Inner Quiet procs by spending all of my CP on durability and buffs, could result in a lot of extra quality. And when you consider how the quality scale ramps up it isn't that much extra needed beyond 20% to get to 100%. Also, if I'm ignoring the quality buffs, I can switch to using the more efficient CP->durability converter when making things with 70 or more base durability.
I also really need to unlock the +30% success buff. It only requires level 37 in cooking and I'm already 33!
Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: Jobs
The original version of Final Fantasy XIV didn't have any of the typical Final Fantasy jobs. Well, it didn't have any of the typical job names, anyway. For some reason they'd decided to switch all the names up for the races and the classes. Instead of being a Mithran Black Mage you'd be a Mi'qote Thaumaturge. It was one of the many things they did that may have had a good reason, but that the players universally hated. It turns out one of the things a Final Fantasy game has going for it is all the history from the earlier games and throwing that away for no reason makes people unhappy.
Ultimately they decided to fix that problem by adding a job system on top of the class system. I don't know how it worked in the first version but I looked into how it works now and it's pretty straightforward. There are 8 quests you can do to unlock the different jobs (each of the 7 classes has one, and Arcanist has two) and the jobs share experience with the associated class. So my level 33 Arcanist actually means I already have a level 33 Scholar and a level 33 Summoner. Or I will if I go do those two job quests. In order to do the quest I need to be level 30 of the main class (Arcanist in these cases, which I have) and level 15 in a secondary class. Which will be Thaumaturge for Summoner and Conjurer for Scholar. I don't have those, but 15 is pretty low so picking those up should be pretty quick I think.
What does switching to a job do for you? Well, you keep all your old abilities from the base class and you get some extra ones that specialize you more in one direction or another. You also have your multiclass abilities restricted down to being from only 2 classes instead of from all the classes and you only get half as many. So it seems like you get better at doing one thing but lose a bunch of versatility, but that's generally a fine trade in an MMO. Especially for dungeons, and especially for an Arcanist since Scholar is a healer job. And any experience gained while playing as a special job gets assigned to the base class.
All this means I have more stuff to go do! I especially want to get the Summoner class so I can bust out more than a Carbuncle pet. From the ability list it sounds like I can go beat down with Ifrit! Woo! So I need to go level Thaumaturge up to 15 and then do the quest chain. But first I want to get to 35 and unlock the levequests for miner... So much to do, so little time...
Ultimately they decided to fix that problem by adding a job system on top of the class system. I don't know how it worked in the first version but I looked into how it works now and it's pretty straightforward. There are 8 quests you can do to unlock the different jobs (each of the 7 classes has one, and Arcanist has two) and the jobs share experience with the associated class. So my level 33 Arcanist actually means I already have a level 33 Scholar and a level 33 Summoner. Or I will if I go do those two job quests. In order to do the quest I need to be level 30 of the main class (Arcanist in these cases, which I have) and level 15 in a secondary class. Which will be Thaumaturge for Summoner and Conjurer for Scholar. I don't have those, but 15 is pretty low so picking those up should be pretty quick I think.
What does switching to a job do for you? Well, you keep all your old abilities from the base class and you get some extra ones that specialize you more in one direction or another. You also have your multiclass abilities restricted down to being from only 2 classes instead of from all the classes and you only get half as many. So it seems like you get better at doing one thing but lose a bunch of versatility, but that's generally a fine trade in an MMO. Especially for dungeons, and especially for an Arcanist since Scholar is a healer job. And any experience gained while playing as a special job gets assigned to the base class.
All this means I have more stuff to go do! I especially want to get the Summoner class so I can bust out more than a Carbuncle pet. From the ability list it sounds like I can go beat down with Ifrit! Woo! So I need to go level Thaumaturge up to 15 and then do the quest chain. But first I want to get to 35 and unlock the levequests for miner... So much to do, so little time...
Monday, October 07, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: More 'Tanking'
There's a mechanic in Final Fantasy XIV where you get 3 'levequests' every 12 hours that you can spend on quests for any of your classes. They accumulate so you can store up to 100 of them, and they're worth a ton of experience, especially for crafting. There's a terrible gating system on them though, such that you need to complete a combat levequest to unlock each of the levequest hubs. My Goldsmith level is 39 and my Miner level is 35. I want to do some of the 36-40 levequests, but I can't open the hub without a combat class of at least level 35. My Arcanist is 30 and my Marauder is 22 so there's a long way to go if I want to get there with my tank class. Ultimately I decided to get my Arcanist up to 35 first, unlock the levequests for my miner, and see where to go from there.
I posted earlier that I didn't much like the Arcanist, but after doing the level 30 class specific quest I unlocked a new ability which helps a lot. It can be used twice every 60 seconds and spreads all of my dots from my current target to all other nearby enemies. It also has a 15% chance to refresh the dots on my current target. So I no longer need to worry about targeting all the enemies in order and trying to track dot timers in my head. I can just target the primary target and chunk out a ton of damage to everything else at the same time. There are no damage meters, but I know I'm doing a lot of damage now compared to at level 29. I do wonder if I really sucked before, or if I'm really awesome now, but it doesn't much matter. Do more damage!
My main storyline progression was stuck at another dungeon, so I queued up for it while questing. I got in, blew some stuff up, but I kept pulling aggro from the secondary targets and wiping the group. Or at least that's what I thought was going on... It turned out the healer was lagging out, so the tank was actually dying shortly after engaging and then I had aggro on everything else and they would come and kill me. Once we recovered, I think because the healer raised the tank while I was healing myself while tanking all the mobs, so I didn't really piece it together. Eventually the healer disconnected entirely and the other DPSer gave up and quit at the same time. But we still had the tank so the dungeon finder thing got us replacements in no time at all. With an actual competent healer the rest went smoothly and I wasn't pulling aggro on anything, which was good. So I think the earlier problems were just tank deaths and not too much splash damage.
The final boss fight started with a wipe because I wasn't told what I needed to do despite asking before the fight. The second time I knew what to do, did it, and we wiped when the other damage dealer disconnected and we got overwhelmed by adds. At this point the tank gave up too. The dungeon finder found us a new DPSer in short order but no tank arrived for 15 minutes. At this point I started wondering if maybe I should just pull out my tank pet and try to go with 3 people, but I didn't know if the healer could handle that sort of thing. But then the healer suggested we try just that! Run it! 3 people, no tank... No problem! Well, minor problem, in that the healer couldn't keep us all together during the large numbers of adds phase. The other DPSer died, but we'd burned a couple down by then, and I was able to finish the rest of them off. So I ended up tanking the boss on my DPS class. Woo! Undoubtedly it was entirely thanks to the healer being awesome more than anything special that I did, but it was still pretty neat to have happen. I feel like none of the prior fights would have been a problem with a yellow Carbuncle tank either, assuming good play from the rest of the group. The dungeon finder certainly won't let me try it, but I think it might work with the people in our old World of Warcraft low level dungeon group.
I posted earlier that I didn't much like the Arcanist, but after doing the level 30 class specific quest I unlocked a new ability which helps a lot. It can be used twice every 60 seconds and spreads all of my dots from my current target to all other nearby enemies. It also has a 15% chance to refresh the dots on my current target. So I no longer need to worry about targeting all the enemies in order and trying to track dot timers in my head. I can just target the primary target and chunk out a ton of damage to everything else at the same time. There are no damage meters, but I know I'm doing a lot of damage now compared to at level 29. I do wonder if I really sucked before, or if I'm really awesome now, but it doesn't much matter. Do more damage!
My main storyline progression was stuck at another dungeon, so I queued up for it while questing. I got in, blew some stuff up, but I kept pulling aggro from the secondary targets and wiping the group. Or at least that's what I thought was going on... It turned out the healer was lagging out, so the tank was actually dying shortly after engaging and then I had aggro on everything else and they would come and kill me. Once we recovered, I think because the healer raised the tank while I was healing myself while tanking all the mobs, so I didn't really piece it together. Eventually the healer disconnected entirely and the other DPSer gave up and quit at the same time. But we still had the tank so the dungeon finder thing got us replacements in no time at all. With an actual competent healer the rest went smoothly and I wasn't pulling aggro on anything, which was good. So I think the earlier problems were just tank deaths and not too much splash damage.The final boss fight started with a wipe because I wasn't told what I needed to do despite asking before the fight. The second time I knew what to do, did it, and we wiped when the other damage dealer disconnected and we got overwhelmed by adds. At this point the tank gave up too. The dungeon finder found us a new DPSer in short order but no tank arrived for 15 minutes. At this point I started wondering if maybe I should just pull out my tank pet and try to go with 3 people, but I didn't know if the healer could handle that sort of thing. But then the healer suggested we try just that! Run it! 3 people, no tank... No problem! Well, minor problem, in that the healer couldn't keep us all together during the large numbers of adds phase. The other DPSer died, but we'd burned a couple down by then, and I was able to finish the rest of them off. So I ended up tanking the boss on my DPS class. Woo! Undoubtedly it was entirely thanks to the healer being awesome more than anything special that I did, but it was still pretty neat to have happen. I feel like none of the prior fights would have been a problem with a yellow Carbuncle tank either, assuming good play from the rest of the group. The dungeon finder certainly won't let me try it, but I think it might work with the people in our old World of Warcraft low level dungeon group.
Tuesday, October 01, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: Reasonably Realistic Outfits
On the weekend I decided to go farm some monsters on the same class, and switched my tanking gear out for some more damage focused gear made of aldgoat leather. Other than the hat being an eye-patch (AWESOME!) instead of something protective this outfit also seems to make sense. The leather looks flexible to make it easier to do more damage (it has dex on it), but it's still completely covering and looks like it would be useful in a fight. Still very form fighting, mind, and I really don't know what sort of clothes you should actually wear to go kill wild goats, but this seems reasonable to me. I really like this outfit.
But wait, you may be saying... I want to see pretty clothes and animated cleavage! Well, it turns out Square has your back. The tank gear and the melee DPS gear may completely cover up, but there's some velveteen cloth crafting gear that does not. It's a nice outfit, clearly not of much protection against a wolf or an orc with a sword or something, but it's not used in those situations. This stuff is worn in town while making or selling stuff. In this case, food, as you can tell from the frying pan weapon. I really don't know what sort of clothes you should wear for making maple syrup, either, but this seems less inappropriate for crafting than it would be for fighting monsters. Of course the thing that really matters is what the stats are on the gear. I will wear whatever crafting gear has the best crafting stats on it for my level!
I'd prefer if I liked the gear (those glasses are pretty sweet) but I'm not going to wear something worse just to look better. World of Warcraft eventually added in a feature so you could swap the look of your gear so you could have the best of both worlds which was nice. It's not in Final Fantasy XIV, so for now I just need to hope the best gear keeps making sense visually as well.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: Elemental Shards
When you're crafting things in Final Fantasy XIV you need a small handful of elemental shards to go along with the actual raw materials for the item itself. I don't think there's any actual reason for this within the game itself, mostly it feels like that's how crafting worked in Final Fantasy XI and therefore that's how it works in this one too. Back in FFXI you'd need to grind monsters to get these crystals and they'd take up space in your inventory. To start crafting at all you'd need to use one of the crystals and then you'd get prompted to pick some more stuff out of your inventory to combine with the crystal. If you managed to pick a combination that made something you'd try to make it, otherwise you'd get an error message. So the crystals served as an item in the economy and as part of the game interface.
In FFXIV the shards have their own little tab in your inventory and you never directly interact with them in that tab. Instead you craft stuff by opening up your crafting log and finding the specific thing you want to make from a list. Very similar to the way crafting works in World of Warcraft, actually, except you then have to play a minigame to make an item instead of just watching a little bar fill up automatically. Each time you make something it uses up some of your crystals but I'd never paid any attention to them. Unlocking all of the crafting classes gave hundreds of every type of crystal and it felt like they were something to ignore. The gathering classes could choose to mine up crystals instead of ore but they're worth no experience and that just seemed like a bit of a silly option.
Well, today while leveling up my goldsmithing I actually ran out of wind shards. That was really surprising to me, especially when I checked my inventory and saw that I still have 1335 earth shards and more than 400 of the other four elements. Apparently I made a lot of things out of wind shards. Ok, fine, I still want to make more things out of them... How do I get more of them?
It turns out that isn't such an easy question to answer. Final Fantasy XIV in particular is a game where Google searches aren't as useful as they could be because most of the information on the game comes from message boards and blog posts and a lot of it refers to the original disastrous version of the game and not the more recent version that just came out last month. So I found lots of discussions about where to farm up more shards only to eventually realize that you can't actually kill monsters for shards in this game. You could in the first version, but not anymore. Now it seems there are four ways to get shards: quest rewards, killing elementals, mining/botany, and buying them off the auction house.
Elementals are pretty rare to stumble across, you get no experience for mining them up, and most of the quests with shard rewards are early on and I've already done them. There are some repeatable quests which give shards, but they all require you to craft items to hand in and it feels like you consume more shards than you get when you do them. At the very least the one I was doing today took 24 shards per turn in and you could get 4 or 6 shards back. And a lot of money and experience, so it was totally worth doing, but it wasn't a way to generate shards.
Realistically it seems the only reasonable way to get more shards is to buy them from other people. How do they get the shards to sell? Presumably they do the early crafting quests and then give up on crafting. I do have more than 4200 shards of the non-wind elements, after all! I fully intend on leveling all of the crafting classes though, so I don't intend on actually selling any of them off.
I wonder if creating a new character just to grind through the starting quests makes any amount of sense. I actually can't do that right now (it was $3 per month cheaper to get 1 character slot instead of 8) but it might be the 'best' way to get more shards. Which seems really terrible. Especially since if I sold off all my shards in my inventory for the same price I paid to get some wind shards I'd have about 6 times as much money as I've generated so far actually playing the game.
In FFXIV the shards have their own little tab in your inventory and you never directly interact with them in that tab. Instead you craft stuff by opening up your crafting log and finding the specific thing you want to make from a list. Very similar to the way crafting works in World of Warcraft, actually, except you then have to play a minigame to make an item instead of just watching a little bar fill up automatically. Each time you make something it uses up some of your crystals but I'd never paid any attention to them. Unlocking all of the crafting classes gave hundreds of every type of crystal and it felt like they were something to ignore. The gathering classes could choose to mine up crystals instead of ore but they're worth no experience and that just seemed like a bit of a silly option.
Well, today while leveling up my goldsmithing I actually ran out of wind shards. That was really surprising to me, especially when I checked my inventory and saw that I still have 1335 earth shards and more than 400 of the other four elements. Apparently I made a lot of things out of wind shards. Ok, fine, I still want to make more things out of them... How do I get more of them?
It turns out that isn't such an easy question to answer. Final Fantasy XIV in particular is a game where Google searches aren't as useful as they could be because most of the information on the game comes from message boards and blog posts and a lot of it refers to the original disastrous version of the game and not the more recent version that just came out last month. So I found lots of discussions about where to farm up more shards only to eventually realize that you can't actually kill monsters for shards in this game. You could in the first version, but not anymore. Now it seems there are four ways to get shards: quest rewards, killing elementals, mining/botany, and buying them off the auction house.
Elementals are pretty rare to stumble across, you get no experience for mining them up, and most of the quests with shard rewards are early on and I've already done them. There are some repeatable quests which give shards, but they all require you to craft items to hand in and it feels like you consume more shards than you get when you do them. At the very least the one I was doing today took 24 shards per turn in and you could get 4 or 6 shards back. And a lot of money and experience, so it was totally worth doing, but it wasn't a way to generate shards.
Realistically it seems the only reasonable way to get more shards is to buy them from other people. How do they get the shards to sell? Presumably they do the early crafting quests and then give up on crafting. I do have more than 4200 shards of the non-wind elements, after all! I fully intend on leveling all of the crafting classes though, so I don't intend on actually selling any of them off.
I wonder if creating a new character just to grind through the starting quests makes any amount of sense. I actually can't do that right now (it was $3 per month cheaper to get 1 character slot instead of 8) but it might be the 'best' way to get more shards. Which seems really terrible. Especially since if I sold off all my shards in my inventory for the same price I paid to get some wind shards I'd have about 6 times as much money as I've generated so far actually playing the game.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: Tanking
I decided I'd really had enough with being an arcanist and restarted as one of the base tanking classes: marauder. The great thing about a Final Fantasy job system is restarting as a new class doesn't force you to restart your whole character. So I have all my crafting skills and my inventory and my main story line progress. I also have all the low level quests in my area completed. I tried going to other areas to find quests but it seems I scooped up a lot of the 5-15 quests in all the other zones too. Perhaps most annoying is it let me pick up higher level quests, and I was able to grind a couple of them down, but I couldn't cash them in. I can understand why this restriction exists (they don't want me doing level 30 quests on my arcanist and cashing them on the level 8 marauder) but it's an annoying implementation. I think what I'd do is have the quest track which class killed the monsters and only let that class cash the quest. But even that has issues... What if the quest is to kill 3 of something and I kill them with 3 different classes? So I guess this is a reasonable solution, even though it meant I was going to have to gain 6 levels before I could turn in some of the quests I did.
One of the things they did in this game is make all low level stuff available from vendors. This has the side effect of making low level monster grinding completely worthless. World of Warcraft at least had linen cloth and copper ore that a low level character could sell for reasonable money to a high level character. When the high level character can just go spend 4 gil at a vendor it's really hard for the low level character to make any money at all. So with no quests and nothing to farm up, there wasn't a lot of options. The 'hunting log' feature where each class gets a list of monsters to hunt down around the world for extra experience was definitely nice. Once I hit level 10 I got the ability to run the training 'dungeon' which was where I grinded a lot of levels. I ran it once on my arcanist when I first hit level 10 but it had a long queue timer and really wasn't worth running again. The marauder had an instant queue to get in and the experience was pretty decent...
The training dungeon is designed to teach new players how to pull groups of monsters in a dungeon. It starts with two packs of 3 monsters spread out and easy to pull separately. Then it spawns in 7 monsters in a fairly tight pile. A boss and the same two packs again. It is definitely possible to pull just a 3 pack at a time, and that's what the training dungeon is designed to do. But I quickly discovered that by channeling my inner Bung I could ramp up my experience gain... Just charge into the group of 7 monsters as they're spawning! They spawn in a tight enough pile that I could hit all 7 of them with my AEthreat enmity ability. Pop a defensive cooldown (I added in a second one from another class) and burn them out. As long as the healer was paying attention it was no problem at all.
I must say, I've always hated the term threat. How do you explain why a monster is willing to attack the dude who does 15% of the damage of any
one else, and takes 25% of the damage anyone else would take, and has twice as much health as anyone else? Somehow they're more threatening? That just doesn't make any sense. We've always used the explanation that they're making fun of the enemy with their taunts and somehow that drives them to illogical decisions. It's the same mechanic here, but just by labeling it enmity instead of threat makes it feel better. I'm still heavily armoured, and do less damage, and have more health... But my abilities inspire hatred! I can throw an axe like a boomerang! I can shoot out a cone of force! Rawr!
Eventually I hit level 15, which unlocked the first real dungeons, but also unlocked my next class specific quest and happened to be where I had some quests saved up to cash in. I ended up hitting 18 before I got around to trying to enter a dungeon. I also stopped and made a full set of high quality gear before I went in. Smash! I don't have an actual taunt ability but just spamming my AE ability seems to be good enough to control enemies that get into my pile, and for the most part I was able to keep on top of things and make sure everything came into a pile at the start.
One thing that became clear in a real dungeon as opposed to the trainer is I have a serious resource limitation in the long run. I can spam my cone ability for an entire fight, but then I'm spent for the next fight. So I had to get into a rhythm of going full bore to start a fight, using about two thirds of my TP, and then just stand around for the rest of the fight wishing I could do more than auto attack. But I would still hold aggro and be tough, which is what they pay me for, so it's all good. I just wish I had a really cheap ability to spam after a fight was secure but not actually over.
Arcanists have a tanking pet, and I remember my first dungeon I used him because he's what I had out when I got in. I remember having my pet tank a boss while I used my pet healing abilities to keep him up and wondering why I even needed a team. Arcanists are tank, healer, and damage all in one! Well, I did the same fight as a tank, with an arcanist in my party, and got really bitter at the tank pet. I could hold aggro if I really worked at it, but it would keep my TP near empty. So when adds showed up I couldn't control them as well as I wanted to. The pet also did a terrible job of positioning the boss for his conal AE. And died later in the fight after I gave up on trying to hold the boss. Maybe that arcanist was worse at pumping heals into his pet than I was. Maybe the healer the first time was better than the healer the second time. But either way it's attempting to replace one of your two damage dealers with a second healer and it doesn't let the actual tank convert into something useful. So it sucks. (For the record, I'd started using the non-tank pet in dungeons after that first time so I could spam my terrible damage spell instead of my terrible healing spell.)
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| Look! A female character in armour that actually covers the whole body! |
The training dungeon is designed to teach new players how to pull groups of monsters in a dungeon. It starts with two packs of 3 monsters spread out and easy to pull separately. Then it spawns in 7 monsters in a fairly tight pile. A boss and the same two packs again. It is definitely possible to pull just a 3 pack at a time, and that's what the training dungeon is designed to do. But I quickly discovered that by channeling my inner Bung I could ramp up my experience gain... Just charge into the group of 7 monsters as they're spawning! They spawn in a tight enough pile that I could hit all 7 of them with my AE
I must say, I've always hated the term threat. How do you explain why a monster is willing to attack the dude who does 15% of the damage of any
one else, and takes 25% of the damage anyone else would take, and has twice as much health as anyone else? Somehow they're more threatening? That just doesn't make any sense. We've always used the explanation that they're making fun of the enemy with their taunts and somehow that drives them to illogical decisions. It's the same mechanic here, but just by labeling it enmity instead of threat makes it feel better. I'm still heavily armoured, and do less damage, and have more health... But my abilities inspire hatred! I can throw an axe like a boomerang! I can shoot out a cone of force! Rawr!
Eventually I hit level 15, which unlocked the first real dungeons, but also unlocked my next class specific quest and happened to be where I had some quests saved up to cash in. I ended up hitting 18 before I got around to trying to enter a dungeon. I also stopped and made a full set of high quality gear before I went in. Smash! I don't have an actual taunt ability but just spamming my AE ability seems to be good enough to control enemies that get into my pile, and for the most part I was able to keep on top of things and make sure everything came into a pile at the start.
One thing that became clear in a real dungeon as opposed to the trainer is I have a serious resource limitation in the long run. I can spam my cone ability for an entire fight, but then I'm spent for the next fight. So I had to get into a rhythm of going full bore to start a fight, using about two thirds of my TP, and then just stand around for the rest of the fight wishing I could do more than auto attack. But I would still hold aggro and be tough, which is what they pay me for, so it's all good. I just wish I had a really cheap ability to spam after a fight was secure but not actually over.
Arcanists have a tanking pet, and I remember my first dungeon I used him because he's what I had out when I got in. I remember having my pet tank a boss while I used my pet healing abilities to keep him up and wondering why I even needed a team. Arcanists are tank, healer, and damage all in one! Well, I did the same fight as a tank, with an arcanist in my party, and got really bitter at the tank pet. I could hold aggro if I really worked at it, but it would keep my TP near empty. So when adds showed up I couldn't control them as well as I wanted to. The pet also did a terrible job of positioning the boss for his conal AE. And died later in the fight after I gave up on trying to hold the boss. Maybe that arcanist was worse at pumping heals into his pet than I was. Maybe the healer the first time was better than the healer the second time. But either way it's attempting to replace one of your two damage dealers with a second healer and it doesn't let the actual tank convert into something useful. So it sucks. (For the record, I'd started using the non-tank pet in dungeons after that first time so I could spam my terrible damage spell instead of my terrible healing spell.)
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Choosing The Wrong Class
I've now played a fair amount of Final Fantasy XIV. I've done a lot of crafting, and a lot of gathering, and a little bit of actual leveling. I'm up to level 28 (of 50) in my starting combat class, Arcanist, and I'm really not liking the way it plays. Essentially the arcanist is like a warlock in World of Warcraft. I have a couple different pets I can summon to do combat for me, I have one nuke spell, a heal, a couple cooldowns, and 3 damage over time abilities. Each of the dots has a different duration and a different symbol that gets listed underneath the health bar of my current target with a timer.
My dots do more damage than my nuke, so ideally I want to fight by loading up the dots and then switch to another target and load them up too. I have a problem with the controller interface though that choosing the next target isn't as easy as I'd like, so sometimes I find myself cycling through NPCs, or allies, or my pet and waste DPS time. And since I only have timers for my current target, not any other target, I have a hard time knowing when I need to go reapply dots to different targets. If I could quickly tab around maybe I could do it, but with things as they are it's not really an option. And I don't know off hand which button corresponds to the purple background dot instead of the green background dot. It gets even worse when there's a second arcanist around since the distinction between my dots and their dots is a slightly different colour font for the timer!
It also sucks when I'm fighting easier enemies too. All my damage is back loaded, so I end up feeling like I'm not doing as much as other people. And not just with the way dots work, even with my nuke I hit my button and then do damage in 2.5 seconds. The archer gets to hit her button and do damage immediately. They may have to wait 2.5 seconds to do it again but they get one more attack in than I do on every fight. There are no damage meters that I've seen, so I don't know how much this matters and no one can yell at me about sucking. But I feel like I'm sucking, and I don't like that feeling.
The back loaded damage thing really hurts when trying to help out on the public quests that appear all over the place. A good way to level apparently is to join a roving band of people who just mount up and run between these when they spawn. I'm not doing that, but I do want to do them when I stumble on them in the course of doing other things. The problem is the first person to tag a monster gets full credit for killing it towards the quest and everyone else gets credit based on the damage they do. But I can't do any damage because dotting up something that dies in a matter of seconds is not a very useful thing to do and often I can't even cast my nuke before they die. Especially when trying to cycle through 20 players to get to one of the 3 enemies in the incoming wave. I've resorted to just trying to tag monsters with my instant cast dot when they spawn and hoping I get enough of them to get credit for helping out with the quest.
I also can't really control my pet very well. If I hit a button on my controller all of my buttons change to pet related buttons, but that shuts down my ability to do real things. I was never very good at using a pet in WoW either, but at least there I was able to switch my pet to a different target pretty easily. There may well be a way for me to switch up my interface to do it here as well, but I don't know what it is at this point.
Finally, when you're running a dungeon the game has a 'limit break' system where your party as a whole charges up a meter and then anyone can hit a button to consume the meter to do something awesome. A lot of healing, or a big taunt or something. Mine is apparently an awesome AE damage ability and people keep telling me to use it on boss fights. I have yet to do so. Even though it's an ability everyone has the game didn't put it on my bar, so the first time I was told to use it I had no clue what they were talking about. After that run I put it on my bar. The next time I mashed the button, and mashed the button but nothing happened. The people in my group then told me it's a targeted AE so I need to aim it on the ground and then shoot it off. But I don't know how I would possibly do that with a controller, or why it wasn't doing anything when I tried. I'd expect I should have limit breaked in a corner of the room or something! Maybe it's smart enough to only go off if there's an enemy in the targeting circle? I don't know. I didn't see a targeting circle, but I wasn't really looking for one. I can't test it out either, because I can only use a limit break in a group and I haven't run another dungeon since then. The 45+ minutes wait to get into one as a DPSer doesn't help.
On the plus side, I don't need to start a new character just because I hate my combat class. I can just equip a different weapon and switch to something else! The downside is I'll lose a lot of levels and end up unable to make progress on the main story until I catch up. Also I actually really like the arcanist quest chain and like the concept behind the class. I just don't like the combat implementation. I'm also not sure what to do instead... Healing with a controller seems like it might be a real problem considering how hard a time I had with targeting multiple things to dot up, but at least there's an interface showing all the players in my party. There is a macro system, so I may well be able to find a website talking about how to set that up. Generally in a MMO I end up playing a tank, so maybe I should wander down that path... I bet the dungeon timer isn't 45 minutes for them!
My dots do more damage than my nuke, so ideally I want to fight by loading up the dots and then switch to another target and load them up too. I have a problem with the controller interface though that choosing the next target isn't as easy as I'd like, so sometimes I find myself cycling through NPCs, or allies, or my pet and waste DPS time. And since I only have timers for my current target, not any other target, I have a hard time knowing when I need to go reapply dots to different targets. If I could quickly tab around maybe I could do it, but with things as they are it's not really an option. And I don't know off hand which button corresponds to the purple background dot instead of the green background dot. It gets even worse when there's a second arcanist around since the distinction between my dots and their dots is a slightly different colour font for the timer!
It also sucks when I'm fighting easier enemies too. All my damage is back loaded, so I end up feeling like I'm not doing as much as other people. And not just with the way dots work, even with my nuke I hit my button and then do damage in 2.5 seconds. The archer gets to hit her button and do damage immediately. They may have to wait 2.5 seconds to do it again but they get one more attack in than I do on every fight. There are no damage meters that I've seen, so I don't know how much this matters and no one can yell at me about sucking. But I feel like I'm sucking, and I don't like that feeling.
The back loaded damage thing really hurts when trying to help out on the public quests that appear all over the place. A good way to level apparently is to join a roving band of people who just mount up and run between these when they spawn. I'm not doing that, but I do want to do them when I stumble on them in the course of doing other things. The problem is the first person to tag a monster gets full credit for killing it towards the quest and everyone else gets credit based on the damage they do. But I can't do any damage because dotting up something that dies in a matter of seconds is not a very useful thing to do and often I can't even cast my nuke before they die. Especially when trying to cycle through 20 players to get to one of the 3 enemies in the incoming wave. I've resorted to just trying to tag monsters with my instant cast dot when they spawn and hoping I get enough of them to get credit for helping out with the quest.
I also can't really control my pet very well. If I hit a button on my controller all of my buttons change to pet related buttons, but that shuts down my ability to do real things. I was never very good at using a pet in WoW either, but at least there I was able to switch my pet to a different target pretty easily. There may well be a way for me to switch up my interface to do it here as well, but I don't know what it is at this point.
Finally, when you're running a dungeon the game has a 'limit break' system where your party as a whole charges up a meter and then anyone can hit a button to consume the meter to do something awesome. A lot of healing, or a big taunt or something. Mine is apparently an awesome AE damage ability and people keep telling me to use it on boss fights. I have yet to do so. Even though it's an ability everyone has the game didn't put it on my bar, so the first time I was told to use it I had no clue what they were talking about. After that run I put it on my bar. The next time I mashed the button, and mashed the button but nothing happened. The people in my group then told me it's a targeted AE so I need to aim it on the ground and then shoot it off. But I don't know how I would possibly do that with a controller, or why it wasn't doing anything when I tried. I'd expect I should have limit breaked in a corner of the room or something! Maybe it's smart enough to only go off if there's an enemy in the targeting circle? I don't know. I didn't see a targeting circle, but I wasn't really looking for one. I can't test it out either, because I can only use a limit break in a group and I haven't run another dungeon since then. The 45+ minutes wait to get into one as a DPSer doesn't help.
On the plus side, I don't need to start a new character just because I hate my combat class. I can just equip a different weapon and switch to something else! The downside is I'll lose a lot of levels and end up unable to make progress on the main story until I catch up. Also I actually really like the arcanist quest chain and like the concept behind the class. I just don't like the combat implementation. I'm also not sure what to do instead... Healing with a controller seems like it might be a real problem considering how hard a time I had with targeting multiple things to dot up, but at least there's an interface showing all the players in my party. There is a macro system, so I may well be able to find a website talking about how to set that up. Generally in a MMO I end up playing a tank, so maybe I should wander down that path... I bet the dungeon timer isn't 45 minutes for them!
Friday, September 13, 2013
Joust!
I did the main story mission in Final Fantasy XIV to get to the point where I could start earning grand company points. I set to work doing their crafting daily quests which earn a pretty hefty experience boost and give points. I spent my first 2000 such points unlocking my own personal chocobo mount. Woo! The first thing I got to do is name it, which of course is going to take me a lot of time to come up with the perfect name. Boco would be the default name, but it both seems boring and is probably a pretty popular name. I then thought of Silver, from "Hi-Ho Silver, Away!" which led me to trying a Google search for famous mount names. Which linked me to an article on Wikipedia about the Nazgul in Lord of the Rings. Which talked about how their flying mounts were absolutely _not_ pterodactyls, but how Tolkein could see why people might think they were.
Pterodactyls? Reminds me of Joust! Maybe I should name my chocobo after Terry the pterodactyl from that game. Was that even his name, or am I just making things up? But a chocobo isn't really a pterodactyl... It's more like the ostriches in that game. Ok, did they have names?
A lot of searching turns up nothing on the name front. Old school arcade games didn't have plots or stories and rarely had names. Apparently there was a movie planned in 2007 but it never got made; I bet it would have had ostrich names! On the plus side I did turn up a site that let me play Joust! I used to play this game a lot as a kid, but not the arcade version. I think we had it for the Atari 600XL home computer. It had better sound than this emulated one for sure, because I distinctly remember the sound of little ostrich feet running on the ground and screeching to a stop when you tried to chang directions.
So I don't have a name for my chocobo, but I do have a web version of a 1982 arcade classic to play. Woo!
Pterodactyls? Reminds me of Joust! Maybe I should name my chocobo after Terry the pterodactyl from that game. Was that even his name, or am I just making things up? But a chocobo isn't really a pterodactyl... It's more like the ostriches in that game. Ok, did they have names?
A lot of searching turns up nothing on the name front. Old school arcade games didn't have plots or stories and rarely had names. Apparently there was a movie planned in 2007 but it never got made; I bet it would have had ostrich names! On the plus side I did turn up a site that let me play Joust! I used to play this game a lot as a kid, but not the arcade version. I think we had it for the Atari 600XL home computer. It had better sound than this emulated one for sure, because I distinctly remember the sound of little ostrich feet running on the ground and screeching to a stop when you tried to chang directions.
So I don't have a name for my chocobo, but I do have a web version of a 1982 arcade classic to play. Woo!
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: HOW I MINE FOR FISH?
This morning I was looking up how to make an item I need to level up multiple crafting classes. It's a type of leather made by a leatherworker, but it is made out of two items you can't buy from vendors. One item appears to be a drop from two monsters in the game, but I know where those are and there seemed to be plenty of spawn points so I could just go farm those guys. The other item is found only by mining in a level 17 area. Ok, looks like it's time to try out the mining class!
Mining is different in this game compared to any other MMO gathering skill I've seen. Normally when you're out mining you find a mining point, you click on it a few times, you get some random stuff based on the type of point, and you repeat. In FFXIV when you start mining a window pops up listing all of the things you could get from this point along with the odds of getting the item, the odds of getting a high quality version of the item, and the level of the item. Then you get to pick which one you're trying for. Do I want an 84% chance at a zinc ore or a guaranteed lightning shard? I can buy the ore from a vendor (all low level crafting materials are also vendor bought, so low level mining is really worthless) but not the shard. But I have hundreds of shards, and the shard is only level 1. The level matters because the amount of experience you get from mining is determined by the level of the item you mine up. And since everything I can mine is worthless I might as well be maximizing my experience gain so I can reach the point where I can mine in the level 17 area.
Complicating matters further is the fact you get to try 4 times at each node. You get a experience chain bonus if you succeed multiple times in a row at the same node. Failing is not only worth no experience, it resets your chain. On top of that, I have an ability I can use to increase the odds of success for the entire node. I have a limited resource to spend on this ability that recharges slowly so I can use it on maybe a third of the nodes. The one I have right now adds a flat 15% to all of the odds of getting a regular item, so if I use it on the above node I'd be at 99% to get a zinc ore and 100% for everything else.
My gut feeling so far has been to go for the highest level item with a higher than 90% chance for success, but I want to quantify things a bit better than that. Could it ever be right to change items in the middle of a node? Take 3 hits of tin ore to build up my chain and then risk it all on a 84% zinc ore? The reason I think that might be the case is failing one of the initial three hits costs me experience on the last shot, but failing that one only costs me the experience for it alone. But first I need some base numbers for experience earned. (Note that until I hit level 10 I get an experience boost from an item I got for buying the original game.)
It looks like I get +4% experience for the first chain, +9% for the second chain, and +20% for the third chain. Base experience for the different items above when I am level 8 are 26, 77, 86, and 91. The level 1 item is right out. But I went and made a spreadsheet with a 16 row truth table showing the values and odds for each possible outcome. I made it so I could vary the item I went after each try if I wanted to, and got the following results:
4 zinc ore - 385xp
4 soiled femur - 392xp
4 tin ore - 382xp
4 lightning shard - 133xp
3 femur, 1 zinc - 391xp
3 tin, 1 zinc - 384xp
4 femur, buffed - 441xp
4 zinc, buffed - 462xp
At least for these specific items it doesn't make sense to vary the last item. I should be going for the same thing all the time. And that thing should be the soiled femur if I can't put up my buff, or the zinc ore if I can. Pretty close to my gut feeling. I was slightly overvaluing the consistency of the tin ore when the lowered experience makes it not worth the safety. Good to know!
Complicating matters further is the fact you get to try 4 times at each node. You get a experience chain bonus if you succeed multiple times in a row at the same node. Failing is not only worth no experience, it resets your chain. On top of that, I have an ability I can use to increase the odds of success for the entire node. I have a limited resource to spend on this ability that recharges slowly so I can use it on maybe a third of the nodes. The one I have right now adds a flat 15% to all of the odds of getting a regular item, so if I use it on the above node I'd be at 99% to get a zinc ore and 100% for everything else.
My gut feeling so far has been to go for the highest level item with a higher than 90% chance for success, but I want to quantify things a bit better than that. Could it ever be right to change items in the middle of a node? Take 3 hits of tin ore to build up my chain and then risk it all on a 84% zinc ore? The reason I think that might be the case is failing one of the initial three hits costs me experience on the last shot, but failing that one only costs me the experience for it alone. But first I need some base numbers for experience earned. (Note that until I hit level 10 I get an experience boost from an item I got for buying the original game.)
It looks like I get +4% experience for the first chain, +9% for the second chain, and +20% for the third chain. Base experience for the different items above when I am level 8 are 26, 77, 86, and 91. The level 1 item is right out. But I went and made a spreadsheet with a 16 row truth table showing the values and odds for each possible outcome. I made it so I could vary the item I went after each try if I wanted to, and got the following results:
4 zinc ore - 385xp
4 soiled femur - 392xp
4 tin ore - 382xp
4 lightning shard - 133xp
3 femur, 1 zinc - 391xp
3 tin, 1 zinc - 384xp
4 femur, buffed - 441xp
4 zinc, buffed - 462xp
At least for these specific items it doesn't make sense to vary the last item. I should be going for the same thing all the time. And that thing should be the soiled femur if I can't put up my buff, or the zinc ore if I can. Pretty close to my gut feeling. I was slightly overvaluing the consistency of the tin ore when the lowered experience makes it not worth the safety. Good to know!
Monday, September 09, 2013
More Final Fantasy XIV
I spent a good chunk of the weekend playing the new Final Fantasy XIV. I've got my primary combat class up to level 21 and have all of the crafting classes in the 12-17 range. I've decided I'm liking the game enough to set up a subscription once my free trial for buying the original game has expired. It's not all perfect by any stretch and it's clear this is a fresh launch of a new game with the missing features I've come to expect from a new game launch, but it's been a lot of fun and that's really all I can ask.
The biggest problem is probably the number of gold sellers who are getting away with spamming all the public channels into oblivion. There isn't an easy blocking mechanism and there doesn't seem to be a very good GM presence. This isn't an unexpected issue, but I guess they decided it wasn't worth investing time and money into fixing for the launch. I can't block people using just my controller, sadly, but I can go to the keyboard and type in /blist add "their name" to get it done. Once I learned how to do that things got a lot better. My blacklist is getting larger and larger, but I'm finding I just need to block one or two people when I zone into a major city and then I'm fine. A little annoying, but not a big deal.
Another issue is the lack of a sorting function. They've actually done something pretty great for inventory management and it's just missing a sort function to make it awesome. What they did is split your inventory up into different pieces. All key items for quests go in their own tab. All crystals used in crafting go in their own tab. But the big thing is every type of gear gets their own 25 slot bag. So I have a bag for rings, and a bag for boots, and a bag for weapons. This is needed because I currently have 19 different classes! There is a fair amount of gear overlap (all crafting classes want the same stuff for every slot except weapon and offhand) but since I could have them all at different levels it makes sense to have inventory set aside for all these things. There's also an item rack system so I can quickly change classes and have the right gear put on automatically. The only problem is there's no way when looking at an item in my inventory to find out if it's in any of the item sets. I'd like to know if I'm done with something before I vendor it!
A final issue is the existence of a critically important main quest line. I didn't realize how important this quest line was going to be when I started, and I ended up doing pretty much every single quest around my starting town except for the main quest line. This became a problem when I went to look up how to get to the other starting towns to unlock the other starting classes. Turns out you can't leave Limsa Lominsa until you've done a good chunk of the main quest line, and I'd outleveled it. So either I could do a trivial quest line or I could grind monsters in a circle with the other combat class in my area. I ended up doing the trivial quest line route. The main quest line also is a gate locking out the ability to use the auction house, and to disenchant gear into materia, and probably to get a chocobo mount. It also involved doing multiple dungeons, and I randomly chose a DPS class when I started. Dungeons in FFXIV only have 4 people, and as anyone who's tried to use a dungeon finder should know that means there simply aren't enough tanks or healers. I've been looking at a 45+ minute wait time to get into the dungeons with a 45 second window to accept when my turn comes up, which means I've had to stay logged in waiting all that time. I just went and crafted stuff because I like doing that so it wasn't actually a big deal, but if I had to do it again I would definitely start as a tank (marauder or gladiator) or a healer (conjurer) and make sure I stuck to the main story line as much as possible.
On the positive side, the game definitely feels like a Final Fantasy game, with lots of little throwbacks to the older games. Nobuo Uematsu did the music for the original FFXIV and that was pretty much the only part of that game that didn't suck. I got into one story line fight and the music was a remake of the Final Fantasy II combat music. I joined a secret society who's code word was 'wild rose', the same as the rebels used in FFII. There's an evil empire using magitek armour from FFVI. The whole thing just feels like Final Fantasy, and that's awesome for me.
The game has an interesting subclass system going on. You can pull in abilities from other classes, so when I started over at level 1 to get a feel for a different combat class I also got to include a healing ability from my main class. Each of the 8 combat classes has a different feel to combat, which is nice. The crafting classes also get to pull in abilities from other classes, which is a little weird, but each of them seems to get a unique ability at level 15 which is a slightly better version of a base ability, and I get to pick and choose which ones of those I want when I switch to other crafting classes. It makes the whole thing more complicated and interesting which I like.
There are still messages when I log in about server issues and character creation being locked on some servers, but I haven't had any issues at all. I got into a log in queue once when I tried to start playing at 9pm, but I was 10th in line and got on in the time it took to go get something to drink. So it sounds like probably there are some popular servers with huge guilds from the original game having problems, but Faerie doesn't seem to be having any of them. I got randomly invited into a guild in the game (I thought it was part of the tutorial) and it seems like there's a guild leveling system so guilds want as many chumpers doing things as they can. I'm not high enough level to do anything with them because I like to craft things, but it is nice to have random chatter to read every now and then.
The biggest problem is probably the number of gold sellers who are getting away with spamming all the public channels into oblivion. There isn't an easy blocking mechanism and there doesn't seem to be a very good GM presence. This isn't an unexpected issue, but I guess they decided it wasn't worth investing time and money into fixing for the launch. I can't block people using just my controller, sadly, but I can go to the keyboard and type in /blist add "their name" to get it done. Once I learned how to do that things got a lot better. My blacklist is getting larger and larger, but I'm finding I just need to block one or two people when I zone into a major city and then I'm fine. A little annoying, but not a big deal.
Another issue is the lack of a sorting function. They've actually done something pretty great for inventory management and it's just missing a sort function to make it awesome. What they did is split your inventory up into different pieces. All key items for quests go in their own tab. All crystals used in crafting go in their own tab. But the big thing is every type of gear gets their own 25 slot bag. So I have a bag for rings, and a bag for boots, and a bag for weapons. This is needed because I currently have 19 different classes! There is a fair amount of gear overlap (all crafting classes want the same stuff for every slot except weapon and offhand) but since I could have them all at different levels it makes sense to have inventory set aside for all these things. There's also an item rack system so I can quickly change classes and have the right gear put on automatically. The only problem is there's no way when looking at an item in my inventory to find out if it's in any of the item sets. I'd like to know if I'm done with something before I vendor it!
A final issue is the existence of a critically important main quest line. I didn't realize how important this quest line was going to be when I started, and I ended up doing pretty much every single quest around my starting town except for the main quest line. This became a problem when I went to look up how to get to the other starting towns to unlock the other starting classes. Turns out you can't leave Limsa Lominsa until you've done a good chunk of the main quest line, and I'd outleveled it. So either I could do a trivial quest line or I could grind monsters in a circle with the other combat class in my area. I ended up doing the trivial quest line route. The main quest line also is a gate locking out the ability to use the auction house, and to disenchant gear into materia, and probably to get a chocobo mount. It also involved doing multiple dungeons, and I randomly chose a DPS class when I started. Dungeons in FFXIV only have 4 people, and as anyone who's tried to use a dungeon finder should know that means there simply aren't enough tanks or healers. I've been looking at a 45+ minute wait time to get into the dungeons with a 45 second window to accept when my turn comes up, which means I've had to stay logged in waiting all that time. I just went and crafted stuff because I like doing that so it wasn't actually a big deal, but if I had to do it again I would definitely start as a tank (marauder or gladiator) or a healer (conjurer) and make sure I stuck to the main story line as much as possible.
On the positive side, the game definitely feels like a Final Fantasy game, with lots of little throwbacks to the older games. Nobuo Uematsu did the music for the original FFXIV and that was pretty much the only part of that game that didn't suck. I got into one story line fight and the music was a remake of the Final Fantasy II combat music. I joined a secret society who's code word was 'wild rose', the same as the rebels used in FFII. There's an evil empire using magitek armour from FFVI. The whole thing just feels like Final Fantasy, and that's awesome for me.
The game has an interesting subclass system going on. You can pull in abilities from other classes, so when I started over at level 1 to get a feel for a different combat class I also got to include a healing ability from my main class. Each of the 8 combat classes has a different feel to combat, which is nice. The crafting classes also get to pull in abilities from other classes, which is a little weird, but each of them seems to get a unique ability at level 15 which is a slightly better version of a base ability, and I get to pick and choose which ones of those I want when I switch to other crafting classes. It makes the whole thing more complicated and interesting which I like.
There are still messages when I log in about server issues and character creation being locked on some servers, but I haven't had any issues at all. I got into a log in queue once when I tried to start playing at 9pm, but I was 10th in line and got on in the time it took to go get something to drink. So it sounds like probably there are some popular servers with huge guilds from the original game having problems, but Faerie doesn't seem to be having any of them. I got randomly invited into a guild in the game (I thought it was part of the tutorial) and it seems like there's a guild leveling system so guilds want as many chumpers doing things as they can. I'm not high enough level to do anything with them because I like to craft things, but it is nice to have random chatter to read every now and then.
Thursday, September 05, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: Crafting
Back when the first version of FFXIV came out I started off as a crafting class. The idea was that you could level up as a mage or a fighter, or as a blacksmith or a fisher. There'd be crafting and gathering quests and there were little minigames to play each time you tried to gather or make anything. It was a very appealing idea, but it didn't really work out very well. The minigames were confusing and frustrating. You had to look closely at the colour of a little dot on your screen and pick the right command to use for that colour. But nothing was documented and everything had odds of succeeding based on the colour so working out what was doing what was hard.
Apparently they decided that system sucked as it seems to be pretty revamped. Crafting and gathering classes are still things, but you need to do your combat class level 10 quest before you can switch to one. The fishing minigame is completely gone and we're back to a system where your bait and location determine what you can fish up instead of your ability in the minigame. Cast your line, wait a bit, hit the reel button. Just the way I like fishing in a game! They did add fishing stats for gear though, to decrease the wait or to increase the chance of catching a bigger version of the fish. Get a big enough fish and you get a high quality version and bonus experience. Woo!
Crafting is similar to the old system in that you have different buttons to hit and you're trying to both complete your item while increasing the odds of getting a high quality result. But now the game actually tells you what your buttons do. I have two different resources to spend and five different buttons I can hit that spend those resources in various ways. The amount of experience I get from a successful craft seems to be based on how many abilities I resolve, so there's a balancing act between using fewer buttons to speed up the process against succeeding a lot to ramp up the chance of getting a good item and extra experience.
The stupid coloured light is still there. I don't know what it does. The internet seems to think a good colour makes adding quality work better, and a bad colour makes it worse and you should consider waiting when the colour is bad. I can't wait yet because I'm only level 12 and haven't learned that ability, so I think at this point I just ignore it and hope.
The question I have for now is how good one of my abilities is. It costs 0 durability and 22 CP and makes my next 5 abilities succeed 20% more often. It's not clear if that takes my 70% ability to 90% or to 84% or to 76%. I feel like based on a gut feeling of how often it seems to fail that it's the 90% one. I don't think I've ever failed my base 90% ability after using the buff, if that helps. Both of those abilities, which are the relevant ones, cost 10 durability to use. The 90% one is the one that actually finishes the item and costs 0 CP. The 70% one is the one that increases the odds of getting a HQ result and costs 18 CP. So using the buff straight up guarantees I can use the 70% ability one fewer time (unless the constraint was actually on durability) but makes it more likely the ones I use will work. Should I be using it?
Right now I'm making bubble chocolate, a food item good for combat casters. My combat class is a caster class, so it seemed like I'll probably want a bunch of this stuff. I made enough raw materials to make 20ish of these things, and I want to maximize my experience gain here. (Though really if I'd just done anything instead of typing up this post I'd have made a lot more experience...)
Bubble chocolate has a base durability of 60, so I get to use 6 abilities. I can spend a whopping 92 CP to get 30 durability back, so I could use 9 abilities if I go that route. I need to use the 90% ability 3 times to make the item. I also have 180 CP to use each time. And finally I have a 5th ability that costs 18 CP, no durability, and makes quality successes better in some way that I'll also need to test. So my options on ability use are:
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 4 quality abilities. (With durability to spare for 2 more progress if needed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 1 success buff, 3 quality abilities. (With durability to spare for 3 more progress if needed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 success buff, 1 quality buff, 3 quality abilities. (With no durability to spare for anything so I may have to throw away a quality ability in order to succeed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 1 success buff, 1 quality buff, 2 quality abilties. (With durability to spare for 4 more progress if needed.)
2 successes (no buff) - 110 quality, 4% HQ, 828 XP (+90%)
3 successes (no buff) - 165 quality, 6% HQ, 1024 XP (+135%)
2 successes (buff) - 114 quality, 4% HQ, 854 XP (+96%)
4 successes (no buff) - 220 quality, 8% HQ, 1194 XP (+174%) (actually HQ)
3 successes (buff) - 177 quality, 7% HQ, 1068 XP (+145%)
0 successes - 0 quality, 1% HQ, 436 XP
Judging from this data it looks like succeeding with a quality ability gives me 45% bonus XP, except the 4th one which seems worse. Or maybe when it's a HQ item I get a penalty? I only got 4 successes twice and both times it came out HQ. Using the quality buff is worth nothing on one success, 6% on two successes, and 10% on three successes. Since one more success is 45% in and of itself it seems like I should never use that ability unless I'm capped on durability and have CP to burn.
How about the success buff? Well, comparing the first two options we have:
1) 1% - 0 successes, 8% - 1 success, 26% - 2 successes, 41% - 3 successes, 24% - 4 successes ; EV = 124% XP
2) 0% - 0 successes, 3% - 1 success, 24% - 2 successes, 73% - 3 successes ; EV = 122% XP
So it looks like it's pretty close, but from an XP point of view and from an HQ point of view I'm better off not using the success buff and just taking the extra quality ability. But it's really close one way or the other. And the third option is likely just as close. It's basically the same as #2, with a small XP and HQ boost in the biggest categories. It does have the downside that failure is an option since you have no extra durability and you have to use one of the progress abilities without the success buff. But as long as you make that one your first one you get to find out if it's a failure or not. If not you have the safe third path. If it is a failure you can abort back into the first path.
The lights and waiting will probably make things even more complicated, and make the ideal path have even more branches. And will probably be different based on what you're making and how badly you want a HQ result. And based on your gear since what you're wearing changes how many times you need to use the progress ability and how much quality you gain from the quality ability and how many CP you have to use! I like it!
Apparently they decided that system sucked as it seems to be pretty revamped. Crafting and gathering classes are still things, but you need to do your combat class level 10 quest before you can switch to one. The fishing minigame is completely gone and we're back to a system where your bait and location determine what you can fish up instead of your ability in the minigame. Cast your line, wait a bit, hit the reel button. Just the way I like fishing in a game! They did add fishing stats for gear though, to decrease the wait or to increase the chance of catching a bigger version of the fish. Get a big enough fish and you get a high quality version and bonus experience. Woo!
Crafting is similar to the old system in that you have different buttons to hit and you're trying to both complete your item while increasing the odds of getting a high quality result. But now the game actually tells you what your buttons do. I have two different resources to spend and five different buttons I can hit that spend those resources in various ways. The amount of experience I get from a successful craft seems to be based on how many abilities I resolve, so there's a balancing act between using fewer buttons to speed up the process against succeeding a lot to ramp up the chance of getting a good item and extra experience.
The stupid coloured light is still there. I don't know what it does. The internet seems to think a good colour makes adding quality work better, and a bad colour makes it worse and you should consider waiting when the colour is bad. I can't wait yet because I'm only level 12 and haven't learned that ability, so I think at this point I just ignore it and hope.
The question I have for now is how good one of my abilities is. It costs 0 durability and 22 CP and makes my next 5 abilities succeed 20% more often. It's not clear if that takes my 70% ability to 90% or to 84% or to 76%. I feel like based on a gut feeling of how often it seems to fail that it's the 90% one. I don't think I've ever failed my base 90% ability after using the buff, if that helps. Both of those abilities, which are the relevant ones, cost 10 durability to use. The 90% one is the one that actually finishes the item and costs 0 CP. The 70% one is the one that increases the odds of getting a HQ result and costs 18 CP. So using the buff straight up guarantees I can use the 70% ability one fewer time (unless the constraint was actually on durability) but makes it more likely the ones I use will work. Should I be using it?
Right now I'm making bubble chocolate, a food item good for combat casters. My combat class is a caster class, so it seemed like I'll probably want a bunch of this stuff. I made enough raw materials to make 20ish of these things, and I want to maximize my experience gain here. (Though really if I'd just done anything instead of typing up this post I'd have made a lot more experience...)
Bubble chocolate has a base durability of 60, so I get to use 6 abilities. I can spend a whopping 92 CP to get 30 durability back, so I could use 9 abilities if I go that route. I need to use the 90% ability 3 times to make the item. I also have 180 CP to use each time. And finally I have a 5th ability that costs 18 CP, no durability, and makes quality successes better in some way that I'll also need to test. So my options on ability use are:
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 4 quality abilities. (With durability to spare for 2 more progress if needed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 1 success buff, 3 quality abilities. (With durability to spare for 3 more progress if needed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 success buff, 1 quality buff, 3 quality abilities. (With no durability to spare for anything so I may have to throw away a quality ability in order to succeed.)
3 progress abilities, 1 durability ability, 1 success buff, 1 quality buff, 2 quality abilties. (With durability to spare for 4 more progress if needed.)
2 successes (no buff) - 110 quality, 4% HQ, 828 XP (+90%)
3 successes (no buff) - 165 quality, 6% HQ, 1024 XP (+135%)
2 successes (buff) - 114 quality, 4% HQ, 854 XP (+96%)
4 successes (no buff) - 220 quality, 8% HQ, 1194 XP (+174%) (actually HQ)
3 successes (buff) - 177 quality, 7% HQ, 1068 XP (+145%)
0 successes - 0 quality, 1% HQ, 436 XP
Judging from this data it looks like succeeding with a quality ability gives me 45% bonus XP, except the 4th one which seems worse. Or maybe when it's a HQ item I get a penalty? I only got 4 successes twice and both times it came out HQ. Using the quality buff is worth nothing on one success, 6% on two successes, and 10% on three successes. Since one more success is 45% in and of itself it seems like I should never use that ability unless I'm capped on durability and have CP to burn.
How about the success buff? Well, comparing the first two options we have:
1) 1% - 0 successes, 8% - 1 success, 26% - 2 successes, 41% - 3 successes, 24% - 4 successes ; EV = 124% XP
2) 0% - 0 successes, 3% - 1 success, 24% - 2 successes, 73% - 3 successes ; EV = 122% XP
So it looks like it's pretty close, but from an XP point of view and from an HQ point of view I'm better off not using the success buff and just taking the extra quality ability. But it's really close one way or the other. And the third option is likely just as close. It's basically the same as #2, with a small XP and HQ boost in the biggest categories. It does have the downside that failure is an option since you have no extra durability and you have to use one of the progress abilities without the success buff. But as long as you make that one your first one you get to find out if it's a failure or not. If not you have the safe third path. If it is a failure you can abort back into the first path.
The lights and waiting will probably make things even more complicated, and make the ideal path have even more branches. And will probably be different based on what you're making and how badly you want a HQ result. And based on your gear since what you're wearing changes how many times you need to use the progress ability and how much quality you gain from the quality ability and how many CP you have to use! I like it!
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn
Last week apparently saw the launch of the new iteration of Final Fantasy XIV. FFXIV first came out almost 3 years ago, and it was a complete disaster. It had all kinds of server issues, and client issues. And it wasn't fun. To be blunt, it wasn't a finished product, and not in the way that Diablo III wasn't a finished product. Even worse than that. It was supposed to be a game with a monthly subscription fee and they ended up waiving the fee for a year and a half while they slowly worked on making a reasonable game. And despite my love for all things Final Fantasy and the fact it was free for that year and a half I only played maybe a couple of hours when it first came out and never looked back.
Square Enix ended up reshuffling the entire development team, saw the original guy in charge 'resign', and set to work making a better game. Eventually they decided the ideal thing to do was to scrap the current game entirely and rebuild from scratch with most of the same world and mechanics but with a proper backend. I've heard this before (how many versions has Magic Online gone through?) and was skeptical here, but the reviews I've seen had been pretty favourable...
And then I got emailed an article about the new launch, and how it was a disaster, and I'm not surprised at all. Well, I am a little surprised... It sounded like the problems were all related to unexpected usage and not to launching early with massive bugs. It would seem they underestimated how many people were actually interested in playing the new FFXIV. I was lined up at the door when the first came out begging them to take my money and hadn't even heard of the launch date this time, and I can't imagine I was alone in this, so I guess I probably would have underestimated demand too. But it sounds like they implemented reasonable measures to throttle log-ins and character creations and the game was at least playable for those who got in. Which is better than just having everyone crash constantly.
I clicked around from the article and found a link showing that they're giving the new game away for free to anyone who bought the first version, as well they should. They're also letting everyone with an old account log in and play for free until the 9th. So now I was torn... I don't want to play a game at launch, but free is also a good price. This free has a limited time offer, though... I figured that since it sounds like the issues were user density related, and that since I'm sleeping during the day right now, that I could chance it. Playing in the early, early morning rates to have fewer server density issues, I would think. Right?
I downloaded the game this morning and gave it a spin. The intro movie talked a bit about how Bahamut came and did terrible things to the world. It's nice that they have a reasonable story as to why the old FFXIV is gone and there's a new very similar one in its place. The old one let you start as a crafting class but this one forced me into combat right away. I chose the summoner class, which it turns out started in the same city my original character started in so it was vaguely familiar. The quests to start off were different though, and everything was much smoother. I did some combat, and while it is definitely pretty standard MMO combat it worked a lot better than the old one did. At the very least, everything worked and it was fun!
I've heard the crafting minigames were made a lot better in this version, but I haven't reached the point where I can switch to a crafting job. Which is fine, since I'm enjoying doing the combat quests. They've added a lot of convenience stuff to the game, like the now standard 15 minute heartstone. They also added teleport crystals around town so you can jump around quickly without running around or taking a speeder. (I hated that in SW:ToR!) They've also added in public events where some crazy thing will go on in the world and everyone in the area can come kill monsters to help out. I think this was taken from Rifts or Guild Wars but I haven't played either game. It gave something else to do with other people though, which I guess is a good thing.
They put in an interesting way to encourage people to help each other. The person who engages a monster gets full experience when it dies regardless of who actually killed it. People who help out get a share as well based on how much they helped. They've also added the chaining xp bonuses from FFXI, so helping a bunch of people burn down monsters was giving a good amount of chain bonus.
There's also a 'kill all the things' minigame where you have a monster log and need to kill 3 of everything in the list. It reminds me a little of FFX and running around catching one of everything for the arena. I like little things like that, where I get encouraged to wander around and kill random things for extra experience and to make a number get bigger.
I haven't played all that much, but I think I've played as much as I did of the original. And I liked what I saw thus far, so I will be going back to play some more in the morning. It didn't feel like a newly launched game, possibly because it has been a live game for almost 3 years. It did launch on a subscription plan system, despite Tobold's assertion that the business model is completely dead. Will I want to keep playing enough to pay up come the 9th? That remains to be seen. But for now I'm going to keep playing my little catwoman Polemical Ziggyny on the Faerie server.
Square Enix ended up reshuffling the entire development team, saw the original guy in charge 'resign', and set to work making a better game. Eventually they decided the ideal thing to do was to scrap the current game entirely and rebuild from scratch with most of the same world and mechanics but with a proper backend. I've heard this before (how many versions has Magic Online gone through?) and was skeptical here, but the reviews I've seen had been pretty favourable...
And then I got emailed an article about the new launch, and how it was a disaster, and I'm not surprised at all. Well, I am a little surprised... It sounded like the problems were all related to unexpected usage and not to launching early with massive bugs. It would seem they underestimated how many people were actually interested in playing the new FFXIV. I was lined up at the door when the first came out begging them to take my money and hadn't even heard of the launch date this time, and I can't imagine I was alone in this, so I guess I probably would have underestimated demand too. But it sounds like they implemented reasonable measures to throttle log-ins and character creations and the game was at least playable for those who got in. Which is better than just having everyone crash constantly.
I clicked around from the article and found a link showing that they're giving the new game away for free to anyone who bought the first version, as well they should. They're also letting everyone with an old account log in and play for free until the 9th. So now I was torn... I don't want to play a game at launch, but free is also a good price. This free has a limited time offer, though... I figured that since it sounds like the issues were user density related, and that since I'm sleeping during the day right now, that I could chance it. Playing in the early, early morning rates to have fewer server density issues, I would think. Right?
I downloaded the game this morning and gave it a spin. The intro movie talked a bit about how Bahamut came and did terrible things to the world. It's nice that they have a reasonable story as to why the old FFXIV is gone and there's a new very similar one in its place. The old one let you start as a crafting class but this one forced me into combat right away. I chose the summoner class, which it turns out started in the same city my original character started in so it was vaguely familiar. The quests to start off were different though, and everything was much smoother. I did some combat, and while it is definitely pretty standard MMO combat it worked a lot better than the old one did. At the very least, everything worked and it was fun!
I've heard the crafting minigames were made a lot better in this version, but I haven't reached the point where I can switch to a crafting job. Which is fine, since I'm enjoying doing the combat quests. They've added a lot of convenience stuff to the game, like the now standard 15 minute heartstone. They also added teleport crystals around town so you can jump around quickly without running around or taking a speeder. (I hated that in SW:ToR!) They've also added in public events where some crazy thing will go on in the world and everyone in the area can come kill monsters to help out. I think this was taken from Rifts or Guild Wars but I haven't played either game. It gave something else to do with other people though, which I guess is a good thing.
They put in an interesting way to encourage people to help each other. The person who engages a monster gets full experience when it dies regardless of who actually killed it. People who help out get a share as well based on how much they helped. They've also added the chaining xp bonuses from FFXI, so helping a bunch of people burn down monsters was giving a good amount of chain bonus.
There's also a 'kill all the things' minigame where you have a monster log and need to kill 3 of everything in the list. It reminds me a little of FFX and running around catching one of everything for the arena. I like little things like that, where I get encouraged to wander around and kill random things for extra experience and to make a number get bigger.
I haven't played all that much, but I think I've played as much as I did of the original. And I liked what I saw thus far, so I will be going back to play some more in the morning. It didn't feel like a newly launched game, possibly because it has been a live game for almost 3 years. It did launch on a subscription plan system, despite Tobold's assertion that the business model is completely dead. Will I want to keep playing enough to pay up come the 9th? That remains to be seen. But for now I'm going to keep playing my little catwoman Polemical Ziggyny on the Faerie server.
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