so how you fell about stormblood so far

The Cold Steel instance thing left a bad taste in my mouth.

Aside from that, not as good as Heavensward in any regard. Music's not as good, story's not as good, zone design's not as good... the overall feel of everything in HW tended toward this desperate, grand adventure. SB feels slapped together so far. They decided they wanted to go to the Far East so they slapped together some kind of excuse to get us out there, and then they needed there to be a "Far East" so they slapped together some zone, whipped up some music, and launched.

Hopefully the story picks up, that'll forgive a lot. I haven't heard the music for the primals or all the dungeons yet, that's important, and if that's good then I'm more content.

I'm waiting to see Omega. If it's got the cool factor in the design like Alex, and the grandness of the story like Bahamut... but after the instance issue, I'm disinclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Honestly? I think the expansion is great - if you ignore the bottlenecks and the 're(de)balancing of jobs'
The new music is brilliant.
The areas are beautiful.
The story is engaging, and entertaining.
The new dungeons are implemented in a creative way.
WoL can finally swim, it's a miracle.
And the new two jobs are fun to play.
It honestly beats a WoW expansion.

My only woe is that I'm on Balmung, so before the houses come out my partner and i have decided to take the offer from SE and move to a mid populated NA server. I'm fed up with the lack of lots.

I like the story so far. Playing through it slowly to avoid burning out within the first week (my wife's decision, and she is wise) but it's better than I thought. Nothing incredible yet, but decent. Shame that the Elezen are irrelevant now but I knew that would happen after the feast of HW :D

(Mildly jealous that the Au Ra are finally getting some well-deserved tailored content too. Still waiting for Duskwights to be relevant to the game.)

The only early access issue annoying me is the instancing for zones which are empty anyway on a small server. It makes playing with friends more annoying.

Samurai and Red Mage both seem fun so far; I'm still adapting to Red Mage but I'll get there eventually. AST is godlike. However, the blatant neglect shown towards WHM and SCH (and the healer role changes in general) upset me, so I'm leaving my old mains on the sidelines for now until the developers rethink how to make healer play satisfying. I feel a bit annoyed seeing some of my friends playing with cool new toys when deleting some stuff and resetting my role skills only took a few seconds on my healers. But as I have so many level 60 jobs available, I'm not hurting for alternatives. It's all about satisfaction.

Some QoL fixes have snuck in, while others are still baffling in their absence. Talking about things like:

- Still no option to repair everything you have at once on repair NPCs. Whhhy?
- The Feast still has its rotten chat ban in place.
- We need a glamour log even more than ever.
- The localisation team are still insisting on giving me a headache by over-localising some things (like names and places) and making it nigh-impossible to communicate with anyone using a different client language without a wiki page up, even if you are fluently bilingual. Even the S-E team struggle to keep track of the name differences. It's so confusing; I love the localisation in some ways but at other times it makes me very sad.
- The PS4 mail glitch (cannot delete any mail without deleting it twice ever since a few patches ago) is sort of annoying.
- Undersized parties are still forced to be Unsynced. I want to play Undersized, but I don't want to completely overwhelm the content. Undersized plus Minimum iLevel works for some content, but it's unnecessarily limited, whereas Undersized with all of the players removing gear to reduce their iLevel is tedious, complicated and impossible to balance (even 'synced', having HW abilities in FCOB is a big difference in difficulty).
- Undersized parties are still unavailable in current content. Please separate the options to avoid people steamrolling SB too easily, then unlock just the Undersized feature. Hours and hours of extra content suddenly becomes available for maniacs like me with zero extra content creation required. It's madness not to do it. Everyone in my FC would love this.

And then new things need QoL fixes...

- The role skills are just as clunky as ever. Now we're meant to set Protect, cast it, then fiddle around setting something different because Protect is such a pointless thing to have the rest of the time? Being able to do it with macros doesn't make it less terrible; that's another hotbar slot gone for each macro. Weak.
- I can't use my wedding ring in the new zones yet - fair enough - yet I can use my two-seater mount to cheat if I want?
- Why is there no option to keep showing buffs in the buff bar (and in the floating combat messages) for those of us with old brains who now need to wrench their eyes all over the screen each time something happens? The new job gauges are good but not comprehensive enough to make up for this loss.
- I'm very sad about losing any ability to play The Feast in a group. There were better ways to deal with cheaters than deleting the entire mode.
- The PS4 menu/dialogue size change will take some getting used to. I already played in full HD but had these items much larger than they are now.
- Why did they break the controller interface for my crafting log for no reason? :(

Overall I'm having fun and that's what really counts. If I only played one job and it was one of the ones which got the short end of the stick in this expansion, I'd feel pretty grumpy.

Well I stayed off the beer yesterday to keep myself awake to log into Cerberus at midnight UK time. And stayed on for 5 hours to mess about with stuff.

Twice a game day unspoiled nodes is definitely an improvement.

Nope. Everything else is worse. To actually manage to make what was an awful battle system even worse, is a stunning achievement in anyone's book.
I actually ditched 5 minutes into the 50/60 duty roulette that I had gone into with 3 FC players. That was the total amount of time I could bear it for.
Not even a random queue party. 3 people from the FC with no queue to get in.

personally , I loved heavensward but I am enjoying stormblood even more

I like everything about the expansion from new gorgeous zones and mob design to the fun and engaging story and music

swimming and diving feel great and well implemented

no complaints from me so far

I've been lucky on my server and did not have a problem on either of the bugged istances nor Susano, and if I log in in the morning I don't even have to wait for queue.
I know I'm on the minority, but on my part the launch has been perfect and I've been playing a lot more than I should.
For my personal tastes, Stormblood might have the best and coolest looking maps and dungeons so far! And Susano has been outstanding!

I'll let you know after i get passed the que screen.

Edit:

So far...

Too much copy paste from FFXI, i think i just walked into a high resolution area of east/west sarutabaruta. (forgot its FFXIV name)
FFXI beetles, Wahmouras, grasshoppers, diatrymas... (might have misspelled a few)

It seems FFXIV will never be unique in my opinion.
It keeps borrowing stuff from FFXI.

Maybe i should have saved my money for FFXV instead...
(even that looks more fun, even thou its too "realistic" for my taste)
It's a shame a company can be so lazy & dont come up with more unique areas / monsters.
I get the feeling i've been here before, i've done this before.

maybe i should have saved my money & bought FFXV instead.
Thankfully, FFXII HD remaster isnt too far away.

I am not the best player in terms of experience and what not, but really enjoyed the two new dungeons and primal on my WHM. The eastern zones are so beautiful and the music so tranquil. The story has been pretty good so far but I've got a lot left to go. So many people over the weekend were so helpful, patient, and kind. Today too. Overall a very positive experience so far, and I'm at ilevel 264 without so much left (I assume, I mean obviously much of the story will be unlocked over time but I see some people flying all over and I still have quest-locked aether currents for all of the new zones I've reaches, sooo...).

After fully unlocking the ruby sea I do believe that it looks fine underwater but at the same time quite lifeless. There are some fishes but one would think that there should be way more. At least in the trailers I got the feeling that there are more fishes down there but maybe it was just a good shot of everything that is down there in one place..it would have been nice to have more things like reefs that are full of different kinds of fishes..yet right now it feels more like this sea is over-fished with barely anything left in it. If this is the only true sea where we can dive then I do believe that they should have done more with it. I do not get the feeling of wanting to dive there to take in the environment.

So far I'm enjoying it the new zones bring me back to s realm reborn days more realistic looking. The music is awesome love all the soothing piano music. The story seems Pretty good to me. Pvp is more fun and fast to me. I'm enjoying frontline shatter even more these days. Feast is fun also. Dungeon seems easy tho what I've played. But all and all I'm loving it.

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Originally Posted by Frankbrodie

Well I stayed off the beer yesterday to keep myself awake to log into Cerberus at midnight UK time. And stayed on for 5 hours to mess about with stuff.

Twice a game day unspoiled nodes is definitely an improvement.

Nope. Everything else is worse. To actually manage to make what was an awful battle system even worse, is a stunning achievement in anyone's book.
I actually ditched 5 minutes into the 50/60 duty roulette that I had gone into with 3 FC players. That was the total amount of time I could bear it for.
Not even a random queue party. 3 people from the FC with no queue to get in.

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how is the battle system worse in your opinion?

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Originally Posted by Laughlyn

Too much copy paste from FFXI, i think i just walked into a high resolution area of east/west sarutabaruta. (forgot its FFXIV name)
FFXI beetles, Wahmouras, grasshoppers, diatrymas... (might have misspelled a few)

It seems FFXIV will never be unique in my opinion.

It's a shame a company can be so lazy & dont come up with more unique areas / monsters.
I get the feeling i've been here before, i've done this before.

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Completely agree with you on those points. They were extremely lazy with zones and mobs this time compared to HW.

These are the most empty and bland looking zones I have seen in a long time. Flat grass ground textures for miles. What is this, year 1999? Where are the foliage, more props, wildlife and the general atmosphere? Everything looks so lifeless. When it comes purely aesthetics, even WoW doesn't look this bad.

But I do have to give them credit for beautiful dungeons. Wish the zones were at least half as good looking.

Just give me back HW, seriosuly.

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Originally Posted by Lildragora

Just give me back HW, seriosuly.

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You take your dull inferior expansion. I'll stick with Stormblood, which shits all over it. It's been fantastic across the board so far.

I'm salty about the WAR changes but I'm happy about the MNK changes.

SE seems to be trying to have people focus on their roles, but the fact is DPS is king in this game. More DPS is almost always better outside of certain fights like Levi EX. I don't trust pug DPS to be decent, so I see the tank and healer changes forcing more people to run with cliques.

I wish I could say something, but my biggest problem is the long queues everytime I want to play and before you say that "I'm on balmung yadda yadda", I've been actually playing an alt on Omega in hopes that the queue would eventually die down - and now even Omega has long queues a lot of times.

For rest I can't comment and I won't comment as I still want to continue living.

I hate the general negativity of the mmo community I like the game in its entirety. It is enough to see the beautiful zones and hear the beautiful music and quest honestly.

The only issue was Rabauhn and random disconnects caused entirely by DDoSers and it is not the developers fault. Networking is a seperate department from game development.

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Originally Posted by Hitsuzen

The only issue was Rabauhn and random disconnects caused entirely by DDoSers and it is not the developers fault. Networking is a seperate department from game development.

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Raubahn/Pipin bottlenecks were NOT caused by DDoSers. Nor did they cause the trial bug.

The good: Samurai. Everything I hoped it would be and more.
The story is really good so far.
I actually like the new areas. I find myself enjoying just running through them, ignoring aether currents for the time being.
I'm happy that PLD got the love it deserved, even if I don't play the job myself.
The new dungeons that I've played look really cool.
Kugane is my new home because it's absolutely gorgeous.

The bad: They gutted my favorite class, drk. Tanking overall seems to have been made way simpler. I agree and disagree with this because tanking wasn't necessarily difficult before SB if you actually knew how your job played. The changes will make it more accessible to newcomers, but it doesn't feel as rewarding as it used to. Give me back the old Blood Price. You can keep it gated by grit, but just let it give us the mp that it used to give.
I think overall they made the dps jobs way more interesting and fun to play than they did the tanks, which might cause some issues later on depending on how the player base evens out as the expansion progresses.

Aside from tanking, I'm really enjoying the expansion so far.

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Originally Posted by usalia

So how you fell about stormblood so far

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hmmm.... Lets see here. I fell off of the Kugane tower a few times. I fell for that catfish's trick. Oh and I fell cleaved a few things in Al Amigo.

I'm loving every bit of it!

Swimming is so much fun
I LOVE the Far East
The story is epic thus far which btw I like the villain Zenos and the funny thing is SE was expecting us to hate him lol
Love the battle changes; when I first started the expansion, I was quite puzzled, but after a while, I am getting use to my skills (for my BRD that is XDD Still gotta understand NIN and RDM).
There were definitely a lot of instances (Raubahn and Pipin EX SAVAGE LMAO!!) which I had fun going through them.

Personally, I am kind of lukewarm on it.

Obviously, a lot of us dealt with some unpleasantness during early access, but the actual content of Stormblood itself is very hit or miss for me.

Mild spoilers incoming, but I feel like the storytelling in Doma and Ala Mhigo is just too samey - like down to specific plot points just being identical. I also dislike the fake deaths - a lot. I feel like the overall story thus far is pretty weak, but I am trying to remain open-minded.

Another issue I have is the zone design. A couple of the zones are just SO BLAND. Aside from the awesome statue, Rhalgar's Reach is a boring dust bowl. Kugane and most of the zones in Hingashi are nice, however.

With those negatives out of the way, however, I am really enjoying samurai, and I feel like the dungeon design in this expansion is pretty on-point.

Also, the fact that we get the Bollywood dance sequence we never knew we need is pretty sweet.

Edit: While I am not in love with the story, I do like Zenos as a villain.

I just finished the main story and I loved it. I loved the villains as much as I loved the heroes and the boss fight at the end had me on the edge of my seat. I feel like the production value of everything has really gone up.