Woke up early and played before work and omg so good!!!
The engine seems much smoother. The first thing I noticed is when you talk to NPCs there's like a half-second delay for their speech bubble usually, but now it's instant. Cutscenes feel smoother/higher framerate. NIN's Kassatsu used to lag when refreshing the cooldowns of the ninja magic but now it's totally instant. Everything just feels really smooth. Not sure if this is just because not a lot of people online early on a Fri morning in NA, more servers because SB launch, or dropping the PS3 and engine optimizations, but it's running fantastic.
The new area is great and it's SO AWESOME being there at the start. People everywhere and every fate early on has like a hundred people on it like this:
I've never seen fates like this in all my 440 hours of ARR & HW. I can't even see the enemy or what's going on
Tons and tons of people running through the map alongside you, tons of people doing fates, so much yelling/shouting chatter on the box. Feels like a community thing which is something I've never experienced because everyone left HW by the time I started last November. It's really cool!
Also I tossed up the drops I was getting from enemies on the MB and they're selling really good right now for the crafters
Like 2-3k per skin. Will help me make some money.
First merchants sell i255 NQ gear. Which is good because I was i242 so it's just around where I am. The only problem is my Fisher is lvl.60 from GC turn-ins but I haven't upgraded his gear since lvl.50 and Merchant tools start at lvl.62. So if I wanna start fishing in SB areas I'm gonna need to buy lvl.60 fishing gear off MB and a full set is probably gonna be pricey so idk if I want to spend that kind of gil or just keep doing GC turn-ins until lvl.62 and outfit Fisher with a cheap merchant gear set.
Role actions are kinda good/bad. I thought you get to choose a role, but I couldn't see a way. With the default role action for melee DPS I gain some useful skills I never had like 20 second HP absorb and North star removing directional requirements meaning I can trick attack in front if needed. BUT I lost Internal Release which sucks because NIN should be all about those big crits
NIN also lost B4B, but since I never had it I guess it just brings everyone down to my level
Oh well, I will live. The new gauge stuff is ok but for NIN it's just a bigger icon than we had before so no big deal.