Baud Attitude

and I’ve been working like a dog.

As I mentioned yesterday, Final Fantasy XIV is still the new shiny toy that has been occupying most of my non-Lombax-related gaming time, and there are a few reasons for this which I will now drone on about at length.

First, of course, is that it lets me play as a catgirl in a pretty dress with a unicorn mount and a fairy pet, a statement which I feel needs to be followed up with a drastic and definite defense of my masculinity. Perhaps I will watch the football and drink the beers. I may belch.

Second, as I’ve mentioned before, it addresses one of my biggest pet peeves with MMOs, the bit where you can make the wrong choice at character creation and find out, months later, that you should have chosen something that would be more in demand. You can learn any of the game’s 13 “jobs” (other games call them classes, and FFXIV does have the concept of classes, so it gets a little confusing) and switch between them at will, so you never wind up benched. In addition, even once you switch to a specific class, you can make use of a small set of skills from other classes, as long as you’ve played that other job enough to earn the skill.

That being said, if your character’s primary function can be summed up as “dps”, it can take a little longer to get groups than if you are a tank or healer. We’re talking maybe a 15 minute wait here, though, not the hours-at-a-time sitting at the Sebilis zoneline of Kunark-era Everquest.

Because flexibility is such a focus, I wound up getting three separate jobs to the level cap (50) and then had to grind a couple of other classes into the low 30s to pick up a couple of skills from those classes. Now, I can fill any hole in a group, and if I wind up sitting on the sidelines, it will be because I’m either not very GOOD at a particular function, or because my gear isn’t up to the challenge.

For the record, that’s level 50 in Warrior, White Mage, and Bard, 34 in Scholar and Lancer, then 26 in Thaumaturge, 22 in Gladiator, and 15 in Pugilist. That’s a lot of grinding, but I am very happy with the outcome.

Another point in FFXIV’s favor is that it has very small group sizes. Regular dungeon groups are four people, most instanced raids are eight people, a very very few raids actually use “Alliances” of 24 people. I haven’t done any of the 24-player raids yet, but queuing for the 8s so far has been reasonably quick and painless, even as DPS. The only downside is that two years of mudflation lets the player base steamroll over most of the level 50 content without paying TOO much attention to mechanics, so there are raids I’ve done a half-dozen times and still have no idea how the script is supposed to work.

Yes, this is me admitting that I have frequently gotten into a raid and spent most of the time trying to dodge the OBVIOUS fire on the ground while co-incidentally being carried through by the other seven players who DO know what they’re doing. I have limited shame.

It ALSO, and I think at this point I have gushed almost-but-not-quite enough, ALSO means that my wife and I, and a friend from work and HIS wife, can do all of the single group content without needing to mix with strangers. It’s a remarkably relaxing way to play an MMO.

I think I’ll try to make this my last WOO FFXIV IS SO AMAZE post for a while. It’s coming close to the end of October and I wanted to at least try to play through a couple of horror games this month.

It’s been a couple of days since my last nerding out about Final Fantasy XIV, so here’s some more of it. Eventually I will get back to my usual quality posts.

Mind you, my “usual quality” posts are mostly pictures of random terrible food and waxing enthusiastic about fanservice, so I can’t imagine anyone actually WANTING me to get back to those.

I’m still pushing my way towards the pre-expansion level cap, which is 50, and I’m doing it while alternating between two “jobs” (for any other MMO, these would be “classes”), so I’m definitely taking more time to reach the level cap than I would if I’d buckle down and focus on just one. It’s not AS bad as you’d think, though, because you get a 100% XP bonus when playing any job other than your highest-level one. I’m also alternating between Tank and Healer roles, which means that the delay between thinking “I would like a group to run through a dungeon with” and “I am zoning into the instance” is very short. If I don’t want downtime, I don’t need to suffer downtime.

Along the way, I have been fortunate enough to experience a VERY polite community, which is something of an outlier in any online game. It’s not a very talkative community – most people don’t want to stand still and chat when they’re clearing an instance – but players say Nice To Meet You at the start of every instance and Thank You or Good Game at the end.

I’ve also made a few mistakes along the way, and haven’t yet gotten raged at for doing so. Part of that may be the result of playing on an Oceanic server, but I’d like to think that it’s just something about the player base.

With a little luck, I should be 50 in both jobs in a week or so, and that’s usually the point where MMO content spreads out like so much pancake batter across a griddle.

And this is where I surpress the urge to make pancake-related jokes. It’s a good visual image, dang it, it doesn’t need to be ruined by puns.

I’m more than a little tempted to evangelize the game to friends, especially since it’s got a PS4 client and I could theoretically recommend it to friends without gaming PCs, but the difficulty of getting them on to my play server is the biggest thing preventing me from doing this. I may still pick up a few copies in December to slip into stockings, because nothing says “you are important to me” like “here, have a game that will consume your life.”

This weekend makes four weeks with Final Fantasy 14, and I think I’m starting to get into the solid middle of the main story, so I thought I’d put up a post on how things have been turning out.

Obviously, I’m getting to it after a couple of years of patches and quality-of-life fixes, so I’m not qualified to comment on how it might have been at one point, and certainly not qualified to comment on the state of the game in its 1.0 form, but what I’m playing right now is a very polished MMO with a wealth – perhaps even an overabundance – of stuff to DO at any given time.

I’m particularly in love with the class/job system, because I have a lot of bad memories related to MMOs where you selected a class at level 1 and stuck with it to level cap.  Everquest, in particular, had a bad habit of straight-up breaking classes and leaving them broken for months at a time, so there were times when just getting into a group to get XP and progress would take hours on a waitlist or pity from guild mates.

FFXIV does not have this; you can level any class at any time and switching between them is just a matter of equipping a different weapon.  This lets me level up a tank class for playing with people I trust and a healer class for grouping with strangers.  It DOES mean that I’ve got a bit of an identity problem going on; I have both roles at roughly the same level so it’s hard to say which is my main job.

It is also VERY pretty.  TERA was my previous gold standard for good-looking MMOs, and I still think that my Elin bunnyzerker had a combination of cute and dangerous that hasn’t been topped in any other MMO, but FFXIV is a huge step up visually.  The weather effects along have spoiled me of the notion of going back to older games – most games are comfortable with “sunny”, “dark”, and occasionally “rainy”, but FFXIV has a huge spectrum of weather and lighting effects and isn’t shy about showing them off.

And, of course, it IS a numbered, main-line Final Fantasy, so it has a story that’s a little more sophisticated than “I don’t like wolves.  Go kill eight of them and I will give you these shoes.”

…not that you’re never asked to kill eight wolves, with a promise of shoes on your success, but at least the wolves-to-shoes conversion quests are usually the ones that are labeled as optional.  If you are cool with wolves and don’t NEED shoes, you probably don’t ever need to do them.

While the main story quest line is mostly done solo or with NPC helpers, it IS a “massively multiplayer” game, so you are occasionally sent into instanced dungeons to do stuff like kill dragons and get cheese.

So far – I’ve only seen the first half dozen of these – they’ve been very low-key affairs that take about twenty minutes to stomp through.  It’s been very easy to get groups, because higher-level players can join even very low level dungeon groups and still get decent experience, so it’s not too unusual to be fighting through a level 16 dungeon with three temporarily-depowered 50-somethings.  They can be a little annoying as a tank, because aggro in FFXIV is WAY more jumpy than I’m used to, but that’s where the whole playing-with-friends thing comes in handy.

The ones I’ve played through haven’t been much more than temporary speed bumps in keeping the story going.  At level cap, when the story is presumably done and it’s time to get down to compulsively grinding for shinier and shiner gear, I understand that they can actually get rather difficult and stress-inducing. I definitely won’t be tanking THOSE with random people.

In addition to the main story quest, every class has a unique story quest to go through.  These can be surprisingly challenging, and they’re mandatory to get certain class-defining abilities.  I’ve never gotten stuck at any given step for TOO long, but I’ve certainly had to repeat certain parts until I figured out the trick to them.

So to sum all of this up, it’s been a good first month with a new game and I’m looking forward to seeing where it goes.