FFXIV

[Positive Touch]

Years of platforming in Guild Wars 2 have prepared me for this day.  EZiest tower climb of my life.

edit: you're not in GAF too are you? a bunch of us were attempting to climb it tonight as well.

Nah I'm on hyperion. there was still a shitload of people attempting it at the same time i was though

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Ultros (or just the influx from SB in general) has the worst players. Did the 2nd trial in SB and 1 second in the tank runs and starts the fight and everyone is moving before anyone has time to even put protect or explain any mechanics. Like 3-4 people said they were new, but the tank and some of the others just didn't give a shit and started fighting.

This is like every dungeon/trial I've done in SB. No one stops at bosses or talks at all to explain shit. Prior to SB, the player quality was pretty good and people were nice and friendly and talked a bit and would stop at each boss/trial and explain some stuff if people said they were new. But these new players are awful. Glad most of the game is single player and will stick to FC for extreme fights.

 

I'm not sure why you seem to have the worst luck with DF players during your first runs of stuff, even during your ARR days. We barely had any explanations during my two SB trials, but at least people waited until ready before they started the fight.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Yesteday was aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawesome. I took speedstats and another FC mate and a learning party for Emanation Extreme, stating that we wanted to go in blind. We went through two parties (with some people sticking around after others left) and cleared it after I made a macro telling people to pop Vril every time they needed to do so. Fun fight! (SMN friend got double casting drops, lucky fucker)




Soon after, our 4th musketeer who plays from Japan logged on and we decided to give some older EX Trials a shot as a man party since some of us hadn't cleared them. Ravana and Bismark went down easily enough, but then we hit up Thordan and made up plan after plan to cheese as many mechanics as possible. Lots of echo later and panicking later, we beat that one too.



We tried to do Nidhogg and Sephirot, but soon learned that neither of them are possible to 4 man because of tether mechanics involved (and you can't have one person grab more than one, otherwise it'd be doable). Unfortunate, but we then pressed on to Sophia, who took us for a RIDE. Probably the most daunting of the "slams the arena and makes you fall off" variety of EX primal, and her AoE attacks even felt like they hit harder than Emanaition EX's in a lot of points. We managed to edge out a last second DoT/pet kill as we were falling to our deaths from missing a last second shove mechanic, which had us all reeling.

https://twitter.com/i/videos/881443965723176961?

But hey, clearing it is all that matters. Just leaves Zurvan as the only HW EX trial we haven't attempted, before moving onto Alexander Savage.... (lol)

[Bebpo]

Sunblade, do you already have all your classes from 60-70? Or just your main battle class?


I got a nice new body armor for my NIN, back to being stylish while scratching my butt.



Then lvl.69 MSQ lock...fuck! That is a lot of xp needed! At like 800k per frontlines, that's probably 5 matches. Don't even wanna think how bad lvl.70 lock is gonna be!



At least I've figured out how to watch Netflix while grinding frontlines. So will get through some more eps of Glow during that grind.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

I've had every job/class at 60 for a while, yeah. Even Jobs I have little to no interest in are easy enough to level just by doing Beast Tribe / leveling roulette every day for a while, and Moogle Beast tribes made leveling the crafters completely trivial.

I've got Warrior and Red Mage at 70 right now, leveling Dark Knight (so I can get rid of my tank leveling gear soon) and Fisher for when I wanna casual it up.

[Bebpo]

Nice. Yeah I saw you had everything at 60 so was wondering how long/fast it takes to get everything up another 10 levels with a new expansion. If you've got 2 at 70 already that's pretty good. My Fisher is at 67 which is my next closest after my lvl.68 NIN.

Speaking of Beast Tribes, the ARR beast tribes are a paaaaaaain in the butt to get to the near-max rank to do the combined quest. Flying really made beast tribes quest much more bearable. I have Ixali like 1 rank away but doing only the turn-in quest is going to take like a year at this rate. At some point when I'm bored down the line I'll just grind out all the ARR beast tribes for completion (and their stories; I actually like the Ixali story so I wanna finish it).

[The Legend of Sunblade]

It helps that I basically left sidequests completely untouched while doing the MSQ. I play a tank, so I'd just do a few dungeon runs with Speedstats, combined with the bonus exp FATES made it so we only got level locked from the MSQ at like 68-70, and not by much. She leveled Astrologian afterwards and sped up my Red Mage dungeon queues, and now I'm doing the same for her as Dark Knight/Ninja while feeding all the sidequest exp that I didnt use on the first go.

Also religiously doing my SB hunts every day for the job that I'm leveling, since its like more than a million xp at lower levels and even higher as you level them up. Likely gonna leave the pool of other jobs untouched until the Kojin / Ananta beast tribe quests come out.

Thanks to all those dungeon runs, I have new leveling gear for every Tank/caster slot from 64-69.....

[Bebpo]

Did my 5 frontlines and got to 69, I think for 69-70 I'll get to the final dungeon and then do my roulettes even if the xp payout is weaker (especially considering queue times) for some variety. Don't think I can take another 10 frontline matches...

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Level 69 dungeon is much like 59's Great Gubal in that its an exp fountain. 3-4 runs of that + the MSQ exp will get you to 70 no sweat.

[Bebpo]

Never knew leveling roulette gave way more xp than the others.

At lvl.69:

Trial Roulette = ~800k xp
lvl.50-60 dungeon = ~800k xp
leveling roulette = ~1.5 million xp

That combined with the actual xp from the stuff got me from 0 xp to 5.8 million already and I only need 10.8 million for lvl.70 and haven't done the lvl.69 dungeon yet or final area. Hopefully that will be enough to get to the ending.

[Bebpo]

Got to lvl.70 and the final map. Kinda boring looking just like Peaks and Fringes. The more I think about it, the more I think the Gyr Abania side of the expansion is kinda mediocre. Lyse sucks, the snake beast tribe sucks, the maps are all boring desert/rocks, the plot is zzz. Whereas Doma has pirates and ninja turtles and catfish funny guys and warring tribes and ninjas and samurai and Gosetsu and Yugiri and Heian, underwater oceans and Hingashi. Doma is fun, Gyr Abania feels like "stuff they just had to take care of because of lingering storylines and the only area left on the continent from 2.0"

Also the game feels like two completely separate expansion. It's really done a piss poor job tying the two plotlines of Doma and Gyr Abania together. Hell, at the end of Doma:

spoiler (click to show/hide)

Wasn't Yugiri coming back with you to help from Doma's side?...so far she hasn't been in anything, done anything. Also Estenien stuff is so disconnected as well.

[close]

Hopefully the end stuff is good, but I definitely feel like the expansion does some stuff better than HW, but other stuff is a step back. Azy Lls was such a cool final dungeon area (although it needed another teleport point), and locations like the Sea of Clouds, Churning Mists, Tailfeather just had so much variety. I really hope when they do an expansion in the empire at some point that they put more effort in variety for the maps so it's not all just magitek sci-fi fortress maps. I kinda wonder if they'll do 2 different countries at a time with that expansion to because it's a way to add variety in locals (doma being very different than gyr abania).

At least the Doma maps are varied. You have giant sea ocean, you have shenmue china, and you have game of thrones great plains. Gyr Abania maps are way too similar due to the climate being the same across the region. Maybe it should've only had like 2 maps and they could've used one for a final area like Azy Lls or given Doma another one.

[Valkyrie]

Edit: Whops, ended up replying to page 1 posts.

[Bebpo]

How long is it going to take to grind to i300 assuming Omega tomorrow is min i300 to get in? I unlocked the final dungeon and got my i290 lvl.70 job gear. Assuming I do the final dungeon/boss tonight, how quick can I grind from 290->i300 tomorrow to join friends playing Omega normal?

[Bebpo]

Well, scratch that. A friend hit me up right after I posted that and was in town so we got dinner/drinks and caught up. Duckroll says I need 3-4 hours free between queuing for the final dungeon and the end of the credits so with maintenance in 80 mins I'll do them tomorrow. If I don't get to i300 tomorrow, that's fine, I'm sure people will still be playing Omega later this week and this weekend.

[Bebpo]

Didn't have time to do the final dungeon so did ZURVAN (normal) and finished the warring triad storyline. Zurvan was a fun fight, I liked the platform dropping at the start, didn't expect that. All the warring triad fights were pretty cool. Looking forward to doing them on extreme sync at some point.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

ilvl to get into Omega is apparently i295. The dungeon gear from the dungeons is i300 and the verity gear is i310, so getting to i300 is p cake.

[Bebpo]

Welp, got to the final boss trial but can't beat the game because everyone is on their fucking roulette and drops after first wipe because they don't want to spend the time. We had a wipe at the start on the first attack and then both healers dropped and we never got two back. Someone said it was their 4th attempt because people keep quitting right away.

There needs to be a huge penalty for quitting a duty unless it's been 15 mins or fewer than max players. Like I think you should lose a fucking level. If you're not willing to at least give 15 mins of effort, don't roulette.
I might have to get an actual PF or GAF FC full 8 person team together just to do the final boss fight without people dropping (which sucks because the queues are like 20 mins each time that happens).

Then I was reading how Omega has the weekly capped loot thing like usual, but I just realized that if everyone grinds Omega today over and over to get their 1 token for each tier, then...by tomorrow it'll be impossible to get a team to do Omega because there's no point for most people who have their tokens... Just feels like the community is weird at launch and if you miss things by a day or two you're fucked.

[Bebpo]

GAF FC to the rescue. Got a team together and did the final boss. Watching the credit roll now. Good game, but one of the worst stories I've seen in an rpg in years. Reminds me of bad PS2 rpg stories. Not sure if it's the worst FF story for me, but definitely top 3. I liked XIII's plot & cast better than this which is tough to be worse than! Even ARR was better than Ala Mhigo.

Doma half was good tho

[Bebpo]

Wrote up my Stormblood review of 4.0 on GAF: Ending spoilers, so obviously don't read unless you've beat the game.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=242611546&postcount=10432

[Positive Touch]

currently feeling maximum triggeration

[Bebpo]

Did both of the post-game dungeons and got just enough drops that with one verity tomestone exchange hit 295 exactly and unlocked the first set of Omega. Just gotta do that tomorrow and then done with all the SB content and get to go back and do all the 3.x I've got left (which is a lot).

Oh yeah, and the two Ex fights, forgot about those. Hopefully doing Omega will get me drops to go from i295 to i300 so I can do those.

Also, been reading on how they overcompensated with Paladin and made it way too good and now PLDs are like solo-ing every boss. Coming from the last 6 months of playing where everyone is like PLD is the worst of the three, PLDs suck, everyone is a WAR, it's weird. I feel like they have a hard time balancing the game and jobs go from underpowered to overpowered and back and forth.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

3.0 WAR was great because the whole kit had great synergy between all of its skills, making for a really fun job that provided great raid utility and was a blast to play well. DRK was always a poorly designed job that people still played because it had a few fun ideas, and PLD was "the simple tank" that had the worst defensive CDs, the lowest damage potential, worst forms of mitigation and no form of AoE damage.

Along comes Stormblood and both WAR and DRK are heavily affected by the change in combat philosophy it brought. "Easy" single press damage buttons like Fracture, Scourge and Mutilate got removed. Press and forget free damage oGCDs like Brutal Swing, Low Blow and Reprisal got removed or changed to not do damage. All tanks had their mitigation reduction debuff removed. The introduction of gauges completely changed the way WAR and DRK play the game, as well as nerfing some of DRK's MP recovery options. Suffice to say that those two jobs require heavy re-learning on how to effectively play their jobs now.

But then Paladin seemly gets totally ignored by all of the combat changes the other jobs in the game went through. They kept both their single press AoE DoT and their single target combo DoT. They kept their GCD Stun move while the other two tanks have to grab a role action to stun. They kept BOTH of their free oGCD damage moves. Every single one of their previous moves had its potency buffed. They had a brand new physical AoE attack added as a level 47 skill, meaning Paladin got an additional new move that no other job in the game got. Where the other two tanks have to use their new meter gauge to execute their attacks, all Paladins use their gauge for is two defensive CDs (and they dont have to actively raise the gauge, its done so automatically). Where WAR had its fell cleave nerfed by changing the main stat value for tanks and Dark Knights had their single largest source of damage (Scourge) removed, PLDs not get a ranged, uninterruptible magic Fell Cleave that they can spam independently of anything they're doing.

As strong as 3.0 WAR was, I honestly think 4.0 PLD might be even more broken that that. 3.0 WAR was capable of surviving own for long periods of time, but all it did affectedly only its own survival. 4.0 PLD can dish out 3.0 WAR's damage, can heal itself AND the party with single ridiculously strong spells (that also heal himself when done on party members), can toss out defensive buffs to let party members survive shit, and has the lowest penalty for needing to swap stances. I was always a huge proponent of the other tanks being made as fun/strong as 3.0 WAR rather than WAR getting brought down.

tl;dr - PLD is seemingly the only job in the game that wasn't at all changed by the 4.0 combat changes, got free shit outside of its new 61-70 skills, got to keep a lot of utility and shit that got deleted from the other tanks plus was made even stronger.

[Positive Touch]

i'd argue blm was also mostly unchanged. a lot of little stuff was shuffled around, but the way the class plays is largely unchanged from 3.0 to 4.0. not that i mind, bc i ofc think it's really fun and like that it's more lenient with fuckups now.

also i started red mage yesterday and really enjoy it! it's fast and easy to use, and the sword moves look like they took some inspiration from devil may cry lol. think i'll be putting a lot of time into it.

[Bebpo]

Gonna try to finish up Omega this weekend (need V3/V4) and then might take a couple month break as I'm starting to feel burnt out. For some reason seeing how fast people level makes me feel like I'm doing it wrong and wasting my time. Like I have no idea how people have all their crafters/gatherers at 70 already. Seems like you'd need to either have 100 million gil to spend (using leve tradeins) or somehow put like 200 hours into crafting/gathering in 2 weeks time.

I mean I'm not sure if there's a more efficient way to level all those jobs? I do all my daily GC turn ins and try to do HQ if possible + 3 moogle quests a day. Doing every single day since SB's release, my crafters/gatherers have gained maybe 3-5 levels each on average. I was just around lvl.50 with all my crafters and now they're around 53-55. I have 100 leves that I never use because grinding leves as gatherers is incredibly dull and as crafters it's just too damn expensive in the post-50 world. I don't have the gil to spend more than about 20-30k for a GC or leve trade-in item and most in the lvl.50+ game are like 80k-120k, especially if you want HQ. If I spent 100k x 8-10 classes on HQ items per day that'd burn through 1 million gil a day and I can't afford that. Idk, just feels like doing GC turn-ins and moogle crafting quests for crafters under 60 is gonna take like 6 months of doing that every day to get them all from 53/54/55-70. So when I see people doing it in 2 weeks, knowing it's going to take 6 months of an hour of work every day to get to the same point, just sorta burns my interest in the grind out.

Maybe I just need another break from crafting/gathering. Leveling those classes really burns you out on the game like nothing else. Never feel burnt out from battle class stuff, it's always just the daily grind work for very tiny xp progress in crafting/gathering classes (daily GC turn in XP feels really tiny as you get closer to and above 60; even moogle crafting quests would give me near 1 level per day from 3 quests, but at 59 it took like 4 days/12 quests to go up 1 level to 60 with my GSM; 4 days of work just to get one level... :|)

[Akala]

Some people just grind nonstop. I can't and wouldn't want to do it, IDGAFOS about clearing stuff Fast I move glacially. There is tons of content I still haven't done and I've been playing since 1.0 

That said I did hit 70 on my WHM and finished up the class quest, will beat MSQ today or tomorrow hopefully. Still haven't unlocked new jobs, only unlocked new mining chain.

[Bebpo]

I'm surprised. I actually would've thought Odin both FATE and trial would be tougher now with the -25% DPS penalty on death since Odin = massive deaths. Unless on the FATE you can use lvl.70 characters now? That would probably overshadow the DPS loss by higher DPS.

Doing Odin Trial sync now though...fffffuuuck that. They really screwed over DPS check bosses/enrages with the new weakness. We couldn't beat Omega V3 the other night entirely because of that change. We just weren't doing enough damage and would hit the enrage every time and it's not because people aren't doing good enough DPS, but that there are a lot of deaths and then everyone is doing -25% DPS.

[Bebpo]

Finished Omega V3/V4! V3 is pretty rough even with good teams. The part where the boss fan cleave AoEs, puts targets on some players and does a stack at the same time is just brutal and even with a good party we had deaths (I died). But still beat it.

I actually think they nerfed V3 in the latest patch. The night before the patch we kept hitting the enrage so much I could basically tell how many patterns the boss would go through before enrage wipe, but when we did it tonight I kept thinking we were going to wipe but the enrage never came and it kept going and going and we beat it...idk. V4 was fun but kinda easy...until I was told about the mechanics afterwards and realized my team carried me ^^; It's a bit grindy though, so much HP.

Also finished Alexander A9-12 normal with gaf fc! Was a bit boring on normal, but I liked some of the mechanics in T12 with the

spoiler (click to show/hide)

time freezing

[close]

Also the story was enjoyable. So now I just gotta somehow find people who want to do A1-12 Savage sync with me. Gonna be hard!  :'(
Otherwise just have all the Ex bosses from HW & SB left outside Thordan which I did already. That takes care of all the tough fights.

Being a fisher I've caught a lot of SB treasure maps and have been hanging on to them even though they sell for about 60k+ gil. Need to try them out with a team as I've never done team treasure hunting. Also never done Aquapolis or the Diadum thing, so wanna check those out.

[Akala]

Beat MSQ. was an ok ride but kinda expected a bit more from zenos. Last trial pugs were a. It of a disaster, went in blind 

By third go round I wasn't the one dying, but toook three groups till could beat.

We obliterated in third group lol

[Bebpo]

Don't do Diadem solo unless you're going as a DoL, preferably at max.

 You won't be able to clear even some of the weaker mobs by yourself, and 100% of the time you'll only be partied with other bot/min/fsh.

Oh, it's not a combat thing like PoTD? Interesting. Is it a good way to level gatherer/crafter jobs?

[Bebpo]

Also, finishing the MSQ, Omega and Alexander feels like I hit a turning point in the game. No more big long things left, just bite sized stuff I can do at my own pace. Being able to go on and just do a dungeon or an ex boss or a job quest or two feels a lot more chill, like instead of being the main game taking up all my gaming time for months, it can be sorta a secondary thing I just pick up and play a little here and there.

Feeling less burnt out now.

[Positive Touch]

diadem is another field map, set up like sea of clouds. you go in as a fighter or gatherer and fulfill certain objectives to get currency and drops. theres a bunch of unique items and events, including a huge superboss fight that requires coordination across multiple teams.

[Valkyrie]

The temporary server I'm on is garbage. It's really empty and no one ever queues. I wanted back into Tonberry but it's not accepting new characters, and will probably be locked for a long time.

[Positive Touch]

bleh that sucks, you tried using party finder? i know it'd be a pain for dailies, but could at least prolly use it to clear content.

grinded Thordan Ex today with my fc, and we came away with nothing... except for me, who got the mount, the music sheet, and the triple triad card. all on the first round.

i should feel guilty, but i don't 

[Positive Touch]

figured i'd play some more story tonight, so i do a quest that takes me to the lochs. i see a bunch of fancy mounts running into the pathway and then rubber banding right back and im like ? turns out everyone is just camping for the stupid ixion fate to get the mount, and the map is so full no one else is allowed in! and that hasn't stopped a whole shitload of people from trying over and over again. its raubahn all over again. the fate might not even be up for another 4-5 hours. this sucks so fucking bad all i can do is laugh. good lord.

[Bebpo]

Wow, that's ridiculous. Yeah, people seem really hung up on these fates. Whenever I'm in Yanxia for fishing all I see on the chat is tons of people constantly talking about the fox lady fate. Idk what the big deal is.

[Positive Touch]

they want the new shiny asap. it's fucking annoying. like i get se fucked up by getting rid of instances too early, but knowing that it'd be nice if players chilled out a little and let others thru. instead it's like a 4chan circlejerk shitshow of fuckery in there.

i did get in btw, by setting my controller upsidedown so my character would keep charging the entrance.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

I can't entirely blame SE for this one because its a community created problem by people who are doing nothing but squatting in the zone for like more than half a day now waiting for a FATE that may or may not even show up today. I get that people want their ugly Ixion mount, but you need to do the FATE six times to get it. Ye ain't getting it done by camping there for all eternity.

[Positive Touch]

exactly. people are just being obnoxious about it. especially people that ALREADY HAVE THE FUCKING MOUNT but are still hanging around anyway.

also omg the mount is so ugly. it looks like ixion's stumpy pony cousin.

also also people get really mad when you walk around and keep fake calling out sightings lol. unfortunately this is apparently against tos so I had to stop

[Bebpo]

Did Neverreap. Was ok, but I realized the only way to make old dungeons fun is to do min ilvl runs because otherwise there's no challenge at all and it's zzz. Going to try to recruit on pf/gaf fc for the rest of the 3.x dungeons as min ilvl runs.

I tried making a Susano ex pf called "Blind run for fun, plz don't know mechanics" to counter all the 50 other pfs that are like YOU BETTER KNOW MECHANICS OR WE KICK YOU ones, but no one joined after a few mins so I bailed.

also also people get really mad when you walk around and keep fake calling out sightings lol. unfortunately this is apparently against tos so I had to stop

 

[Bebpo]

Also, for everyone who was there at the HW launch, how many months will it be until I can get back into older content like 24man raids? I saw that WT did upgrade and pays out Verity and VI materia and stuff and requires runs of that but barely anyone seems to care about WT right now. Right now it seems like 90% of players just care about getting their drops from the 2 Ex Trials, Omega and the Ixion/Fox fates, leveling to 70 using Frontlines and anything else, no one gives a shit about and good luck getting parties.

At some point based on my experience in the last 6 months prior to SB, most of these players will quit the game and unsub, and then the regulars will stick around and at a certain point if you're willing to wait for 20-30 mins in queue or pf you can find a group for everything. And in the 6 months prior to SB everyone was WT everything constantly in pf which helped a lot. Is WT less important now because the rewards are less attractive than they were in HW?

Is the anima/relic/zodiac weapon thing the major driver for people to re-populate old content? And will that show up in 4.1 and then people will start doing old stuff again? I've been trying all 6 24-min raids each day since SB's launch just in case they were every populated and they've all been totally empty. Tried Diadem for the first time today and both maps were totally empty.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

The big differentiator between how relic weapons used to be done before and now is that Yoshi-p has said that Eureka, something that's coming in the future, will be the method through which you obtain/upgrade those weapons for Stormblood rather than making players farm old content. Depending on how that pans out, Wondrous Tails may be the major reason to make people do old Raids/EXses for the forseeable future.

[Bebpo]

Well that sounds like a terrible design decision.

[Bebpo]

Joined a learning party on pf for Susano Ex, was most people's first try after watching the video. Most people like me were min ilvl (I'm exactly 300 with an i290 weapon). At first we wiped a few times, then got down to 20%, then 10%, ran out of time around then so one person left, and we got a new person and gave it another hour, this time we did 10%, 8%, and 3% (3% was post-LB3). One of our tanks dc'd around then and we waited with 16 mins left and they came back at 14 mins and we did one more attempt but totally blew it, so we all took off.

Still, was a lot of fun. Everyone was really nice and getting him down to 3% with all new people at min ilvl felt good. I definitely feel like I know the fight down 100% and can pretty much do it in my sleep at this point. Occasionally I get a bad RNG stack like NIN's new lvl.70 move where he can't move for 10 secs and I start it and then some AoEs pop under me and I gotta move and lose all that DPS ><, but otherwise I've got it. Gonna do some roulletes this week and get my 500 verity for a i310 weapon which will let me output the best DPS I can in the fight and try to find a good clear party group and do it.

Haven't tried Lakshmi Ex yet, but a few people in our group had and they said it was way easier once everyone know when to pop the vrill, so if I can pass Susano Ex, I should be ok with that fight.


Otherwise, finished the HW Miner quests, Miner is almost at 63, so will start my first SB Miner job quest soon. With Fisher I'm like 300k from lvl.70, so in the next day or two I should hit 70 and do the final job quest and lvl.70 gear.

[Positive Touch]

damn. tried the full 90 minutes but couldn't get the last boss down past 20%. will have to try again tomorrow after work. epic fight tho and i'm looking forward to the sadistically hard extreme mode version.

[Bebpo]

damn. tried the full 90 minutes but couldn't get the last boss down past 20%. will have to try again tomorrow after work. epic fight tho and i'm looking forward to the sadistically hard extreme mode version.

It's tough getting a good team for it. I couldn't even get a df team to give it a try, so I played with gaf fc and basically got carried. Need to do it again at some point. The fight wasn't too bad outside the platform falling stuff at the start that you gotta watch out for.

Otoh, I still haven't tried Nidhogg's Rage Ex and I think I'm gonna be afraid to try it (sync) for a while. That fight in the normal MSQ was brutal, more than the SB final boss imo; was the toughest fight in the MSQ with the group I was with.

[Positive Touch]

it's pretty hard and i still haven't cleared it. there's a phase with two different tethers that really seems to confuse people, and that's where they usually wipe. very fun fight tho.

[Positive Touch]

holy shit this game has bonus dungeons after you finish the main story this is awesome i love this game

[Bebpo]

Lemme know if you want to run something together using cross-world pf.

[Positive Touch]

ok i'll definitely be grinding omega soon

[Bebpo]

Oh god, did 3 leveling roulettes in a row (50/60, 1-50, Expert). Never doing that again. Cannot take the monotony of dungeon grinds. Maybe just Expert Roulette since I can still use a couple of the drops (have 2 slots left below i300), but otherwise would rather stick to just doing some hunts and maybe a trial roulette and Omega (if it gives verity when it's no one's first time?). Gonna do Omega again this week and hopefully get i320 feet and i320 hat since they take 2 drops each.

Don't really care about grinding, but just want to get strong enough to DPS Susano Ex. Then again maybe I should be going after Lakshima Ex in that case since I hear she's easier and I can use any gear drops from that to get stronger. Hmmm, why didn't I think of that earlier? Damn ^^; Well that's tomorrow's plan, Lakshima Ex learning party!

[Bebpo]

2+ hour learning party with Lakshima Ex and we just cleared it The second to last time was fucking bullshit, we wiped at <1%, like she was at 1% and we still wailed on her for another 2-3 seconds and then wiped. Had to be like a .25% wipe. And that run I feel like I died from some kinda glitch because I nailed the mechanics and still had 1 death which without that -25% DPS for 60 secs would've won it for us. On the last run, didn't have a death and we won with a good 10-30 seconds to spare since she didn't even start her wipe move.

Now I feel like I can do both Susano Ex and Lakshima Ex as melee in my sleep. Just gotta actually beat Susano Ex later this week Up to i305 now. Will run Omega one more time and get another piece or two of i320 gear and maybe if I get enough verity get one more i310gear and then will take on Susano Ex again.

But yeah, Lakshima Ex is my first launch window Ex fight clear and it definitely feels satisfying & earned. The post-launch window stuff is definitely a lot easier because of stronger gear parties even without echo or anything. Also people have the fights down by then, while these Susano and Lakshima parties I've done were mostly with people who just watched a video and it was their first attempt like myself, so a lot of learning early on and figuring out the patterns and when to do what. I like that with DPS once you learn the order of patterns you can figure out "safe zones" of time where you can just tune out and focus on your attack rotation doing combo after combo after combo until the next event you have to do something in. Like in Susano Ex if you don't get the dice on you there's tons of time to do that and lightning runs back and forth are pretty easy once you get the hang of the motions. On Lakshima outside of the Vrill pop events, and the add face, and the stacks, you can pretty much cruise which is nice when you get used to the timings so you know when those vrill moments will come.

Omega normal had some challenge at V3, but Susano & Lakshima Exs are definitely on another level. Both fights felt really tight like you could only make 1-2 mistakes the whole 10 min run and no deaths allowed as a DPS because of the -25% penalty. Any run where a DPS died I feel like we hit enrage and with all the one-shot mechanics you really got play 96% perfect. Whereas even V3 in Omega has room to mess up as long as you get the main big mechanics down. Though I'm sure Savage will be incredibly tight with no room for mistakes.

Gonna get Susano Ex down so I feel like I've cleared all the current content and then planning on going back and doing all the HW Ex fights (sync) and I haven't done any outside Thordan, so that's a lot of fights. I think the 3.x dungeons are gonna be the last thing I do since for the most part dungeons are super boring outside some good bosses. Really wish they spent their budget on trials over dungeons.

Oh and my Fisher hit 70 with today's GC catch, so I geared him up in lvl.70 clothes and just gotta do the lvl.70 job quest and then I'm done with a class until next patch

Also my controller just ran out of batteries so that was good timing.

[Bebpo]

Had a pretty good night. Joined a group doing week 2 Omega V1-V4 runs. My first map had bad RNG and didn't get anything, but then had great luck and got the V4 minion + the tokens I wanted for 2 more pieces of i320 gear this week. Then did some hunts and a frontlines where our team destroyed the other team (when you have a good team with coordination PvP is AWESOME) and got 100 verity from that so had 410 and got a i310 leg piece to replace my i290 AF3 which brought my character up to i310 now with no <i300 pieces. Feel ready for Susano Ex clear attempts tomorrow night

Doing Omega week 2 and certain floors a few times was actually pretty cool. Last week my DF teams just totally wrecked V1/V2/V4 to the point where I never learned the mechanics and just dodged shit and followed what everyone else was doing. V3 was the only one I had to learn. I did watch the guide for V4 after I beat it last week and learned the mechanics to that fight. Doing V4 a couple times this time and knowing what I was doing was great, man these fights are so easy coming from Lakshima & Susano Ex, even V3 is a joke compared to those two, so there's much room for mistakes and sloppy playing. V4 is a fun fight and surprisingly really easy and the boss HP burns down pretty fast. V1 is a bit boring but fine and the couple of times I did V2 (and learned the mechanics this time) the fights went for a while and it felt like V2's got a lot of HP so it's a bit dull.

In theory it's kinda nice learning the Omega (normal) fights really well to the point they're super easy and you know all the motions, because I gotta assume that will come in handy for Omega (savage) since they will share a lot of patterns.

Not sure if I'll bother with Omega (normal) week 3. If I can clear Susano Ex this week I'm where I want to be prior to Omega (savage).

[Valkyrie]

https://twitter.com/JizzLizz/status/882074349771128832

[Bebpo]

Post-game grind from i290 lvl.70 vendor gear -> i300 HQ scrip gear for fishing is total bullshit. You need to catch Ala Mhigan Ribbons at Arms of Meed in The Peeks with a red scrip Suspending Minnow or the yellow scrip bait. As I don't have access to yellow scrips yet, I saved up red scrips and bought the bait tackle, went to the arms of meed, cast my line in and the first fish ATE MY FUCKING SUSPENDING MINNOW I had to camp 2 spots and turn in 4 collectible mining items to buy.

So done with that. Maybe I'll come back next patch if they make it easier to get into. Otherwise I'm good until 5.0 on Fishing.

[Bebpo]

Finished the 3.x Hildebrand questline. Was...ok. One of the few parts of HW that's a step down from ARR. With no trials, no instanced fights, no puzzle solving, not that many jokes, not enough Nashu, it was basically like 3 hours of just talking to people and watching cutscenes which is sorta boring. Might as well just make it a movie. I think in FF14 long questlines like that need something to break them up, either by having action bits (like the final "battle" even if they didn't have time to make a trial should've been an instanced solo duty), or what would work better since Hildebrand is a detective is there should be some actual puzzles, puzzle solving. I mean I love PnC adventure games that are nothing but talking to people a lot of the time, but there's at least some gameplay to it with the puzzle solving and there's no reason FF14 can't add some of that in its quest design. There have been a few quest throughout that required players to actually figure something out though they are incredibly rare. But being able to direct type input "say" gives a lot of freedom if they want to make puzzles where you have to figure out what to say to people for instance.

Anyhow, now I just gotta finish the Scholastic questline.

Enter the world of the rough part of end-game grinding and what it really means to be a "badass" and do relic/top-tier gathering etc. Not exactly how many bring it out to be.

 It's all totally intentional and they'll make it easier later on. Though I think they always play it off like "oh we didn't realize how hard it was for players to do X content so we made it slightly easier" for each patch.

;_;

[Bebpo]

Cleared Susano Ex with GAF. Fight is still very, very tight. We cleared on 3rd or 4th attempt at <1 second until enrage. Basically the enrage animation started and I got the achievement. Way too close for comfort. Was sweating bullets and I was even dead the last 30-45 seconds because of the "Abandon whoever ye be rocked" in the last phase before enrage strategy and I was rocked so I couldn't contribute DPS which I think would've made it a lot safer clear for sure.

Considering all he drops is one weapon...that's gotta be a pain to farm. I don't think the fight is that hard mechanically but DPS check is really really tight. Also I think every party I've ran it with has used the LB3 on something that wasn't DPS which is a big factor, so we get to maybe LB2 at the end again for DPS LB2. Ideally if you don't need Tank or Heal LB you can Melee LB3 midway for 4-5% and then Melee LB2 at the end for another 1-2%.

[Bebpo]

OMG I just watched the Ravana Ex guide. How did people do this at release jeez that is an insane number of mechanics for one fight. Tempted to try to do this a min ilvl lol

[Positive Touch]

lol isn't that pretty standard for an ex fight tho? he was still extremely easy compared to the hellscape that was thordan ex imo.

[Bebpo]

Idk, seems about 2-3x as many mechanics as Thordan Ex or Susano/Lak Ex.

Read the live letter change stuff, a lotta different stuff all around, though a bunch of it isn't getting implemented until 4.1 in I guess September. 24-man raid roulette FINALLY, there was no reason not to have this before and it'll be nice to actually get parties for the older raids. My NIN is getting a slight debuff, oh well. Tanks are getting more balanced it seems, though people are saying PLD will still be best, just the other two might actually be viable now again.

[Bebpo]

I think I'm getting close to putting FF14 on break again and getting back to other games. Just finishing up the Scholastic questline thing which is kinda boring but ok. All the stuff I have left is HW 3.x content and for the Ex Trials, getting a party is gonna be a pain for each one. Tried all morning to get a Bismark Ex team with no luck, and then there's the dungeons which I'll just have to wait 30 mins for a roulette team and they'll be zzz trash mobs with maybe a few good bosses.  Not all that motivating right now. Might be a good time for a few month break until 4.1.