What’s your FFXIV Hot Take?

To expand upon my last post I also think instead of new jobs we should get special ability skins for leveling up other jobs. Imagine replacing machinist chainsaw with Kaze's Phoenix shot from final fantasy unlimited, because you maxed summoner.
https://youtu.be/ZAODeV3aClY?si=M6IzefybtDfNj34q

While damage and aoe are the same. This way we get something akin to cross class skills or kit customization that won't upset balance.

Here's an actual hot take.
2 new Jobs per expansion is not enough, especially when you account how the gaps between expansions have become longer and longer.

Figured since I started the thread I’d also fire in my 2 cents:-

1) 2 Fanfests during the covid era was a lot better than 3, 2 felt more substantial than 3 and the digital format meant everyone got the same experience.

2) Generally, FFXIV Fans are insufferable, they’re very good at driving a somewhat funny meme into the ground and beating it to death, raubahn savage, the grape pictures, the LV1 deer, etc. it’s kinda amusing for maybe a day then the player base rips the shit outta it for weeks.

3. I preferred dawntrail over heavensward, mainly due to when I was progressing through ARR the amount of people who said “but WAIT til heavensward! Heavensward is amazing! Ohhh you’ll love it!” Killed it for me.

Dawntrail was the best expansion and Wuk Lamat isn't just the best character in FFXIV but also the pinnacle of writing in fantasy literature across the board. Tolkien stand aside.

I think the battle content in this expansion was really good overall and I don't really understand why people call it a failure.

People who say SMN is dead and was better before clearly either never played it in StB/ShB or have rose-tinted glasses and having a job which is easy to play like that is good for the game. We just need a new warlock to replace it.

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Originally Posted by DiaDeem

Oh yeah, some people would lose their minds if they didn't get their 2 Ultimates.

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Funniest thing is with an ultimate in 7.5, it probably means no ultimate in 8.1 because thats way to soon.

If that ultimate gets pushed to 8.3, it means the next Ultimate after would be 9.1, leaving the next expansion with only 1 ultimate.

I've said before, possibly on this very forum, that having the ultimate at the end of the expansion after all the balance changes and mechanics introduced is the best way. It can iterate on those mechanics and serve as a final test of skill after all the savages and the ARs, that one ultimate is then the combat peak.

Give me my relic weapon at the start. Let me upgrade and modify it how I see fit including its secondary stats and that it gets more powerful with each big patch. Let me put unique effects on my relic weapon that is specific to my job so I can feel like my job plays in a more interesting and fun and different way.

Someone said my take about the 2 min meta was bait, I just want to say that nope, I well and truly think the 2 min meta has been good for the game. Speaking as someone who cleared all of Arcadion Savage. As for my other hot takes....

- Dawntrail has a better MSQ than Heavensward
- Endwalker patches are one of the worst parts of the story despite 6.0 MSQ being top 2 expansion story. The doom and gloom people were feeling about Dawntrail? I was feeling that during Endwalker
- Dark Knight's series identity being about sacrificing HP has always been stupid and I'm glad they don't do that here.
- Some posters in this thread are too addicted to getting upvotes and only contributed safe, community approved takes. Hot takes are supposed to make people disagree with you!

This game should not be called an MMORPG.

I was going to do another hot take talking about how bad level sync is, but someone else beat me to it... so I'm going to do a relic grind related hot take instead.

Endwalker Relic grind was the best relic grind in all of Final Fantasy XIV.

People hate this game, but they still play it.

BLU should've been either a full fledged job with exclusive side content and "spell glamours" (because that's what 80% of their kit is anyway) or have far more features to play with and keep the job engaging in the long term, not this short-lived, sporadically updated, heavily contrived, poorly implemented, waste of time and resources hot garbage we call limited jobs - and if it wasn't bad enough, now there's a second one on its way who they'll fight over the crumbs with .... yay

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Originally Posted by SticksToFloors

People who say SMN is dead and was better before clearly either never played it in StB/ShB or have rose-tinted glasses and having a job which is easy to play like that is good for the game. We just need a new warlock to replace it.

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Oh my goodness gracious

https://i.imgur.com/K0xmwSM.png

1. RDM, NIN, VPR, PCT, SGE should have an off-hand slot
2. solo instances should have far harsher enrage timers; you should not be allowed to play with others if you complete any solo instance below normal difficulty
3. this game's msq shouldve ended in ew, dt and beyond's msq should be optional
4. hw, stb, and ew's stories were bad; people only remember how they ended
5. fishing achievements are overrated as, despite gp usage and skill, it is almost entirely rng
6. pvp should be removed entirely
7. 3/4 of this thread has been frigid cold takes (this, of itself, is a cold take)
8. jp players arent inherently better, na players just idolize them
9. crafting should be removed from the game; gear should be acquired by getting mats from duties, overworld mob kills, and gathering and then turning them into an npc
10. lalafell should be more akin to high fantasy dwarves
11. zenos and graha tia are overrated, probably missing a few here
12. all a ranks and s ranks should be current level cap
13. party buffs are a brick wall to interesting job design
14. loot should prioritize people who do the most damage, opt to roll for it, and do not have it (or any containing items, if it is a coffer)
15. people who refuse to use discords for forays content self-filter and this is a good thing
16. tt cards should be in even more facets of content (fishing, chocobo racing, sidequests, to name a few)
17. it's not hard to be above 1m gil
18. any dungeon that takes >20 minutes is a catastrophe, barring emergency afk's
19. arr gaius' voice actor is more fitting

It's undersold how obnoxious the playerbase is.
The "Look at this idiot I found in duty finder" thread is the longest running megathread on the forum. So big the old one broke the software and they had to make another.

>Stormblood was the most fun expansion in terms of job design, combat encounter and overall content (even if combat design got better and more fun imo).

>All the problems and gripes we have now can be dated back to Shadowbringers.

>Monk is the most boring job in the game at the moment.

>Cold take but Viper should have been left unchanged

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Originally Posted by Doomfist

Someone said my take about the 2 min meta was bait, I just want to say that nope, I well and truly think the 2 min meta has been good for the game. Speaking as someone who cleared all of Arcadion Savage. As for my other hot takes....

- Dawntrail has a better MSQ than Heavensward
- Endwalker patches are one of the worst parts of the story despite 6.0 MSQ being top 2 expansion story. The doom and gloom people were feeling about Dawntrail? I was feeling that during Endwalker
- Dark Knight's series identity being about sacrificing HP has always been stupid and I'm glad they don't do that here.
- Some posters in this thread are too addicted to getting upvotes and only contributed safe, community approved takes. Hot takes are supposed to make people disagree with you!

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Reminder that community cried about 2 minute meta because certain jobs were better than others or "how can I parse my 99-100 score?!?!". Now we get this state of homogenization.

My hot take for today; More jobs need party/alliance wide buffs/debuffs that boost DPS/healing received, reduce damage received, job gauge generation, and MP generation.

I had to spend a few days thinking that if posted my hottest take after the previous one, it would just be downhill from there, so here is an EQUALLY hot take for everyone.

Dawntrail's writing is on par with Gundam SEED, where the only thing missing is the blatantly obvious NTR fetish the the writer blatantly obviously has.

Stormblood was terrible.

ff14 is a Shonen and the consequences don't matter

DO NOT READ IF NOT PAST ENDWALKER

#1
All the Scions should have died at the end of Endwalker... bringing them back in a contrived way was cringy and vomit-inducing, with the "power of friendship" writing and proved futile because none of them brought anything to Dawntrail.

Let the Scions go FFXIV, they've had the time, they were never that interesting characters in the first place.

#2
Following on from 1, the game should give you the option to tell the Scions to go screw themselves and tell them you are not friends every time they forcibly refer to you as one in cutscenes.

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

Let the Scions go FFXIV, they've had the time, they were never that interesting characters in the first place.

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You take that back. Hoary Boulder is a good boy. I hope we meet him in Corvos soon.

1. limited jobs are a mistake
2. retire scions, give us new friends, EC is a great moment to introduce new faces for the new era

Hot take:
The new expansion is for people with 'busy lives'

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Originally Posted by LanceSummers

The gear system needs to be completely trashed and replaced with new gear with unique stats, abilities and bonuses.
Also, Materia should either be removed or replaced with a more interesting system.

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They should just look at their materia system from 1.0, or better yet the actual good MMO they made, FFXI. Actual unique meaningful stats beyond STR DEX AGI etc

More players should care about how the other races are treated and speak up to defend them against bias.

The developers need to know popularity of the player races is not something they should bend the narrative to, and to keep their bias in check be it due to Japanese culture or whatnot. It's shameful and I'm fed up of players trying to justify it.

We should all want for everyone to have nice things.

-a/-ra -> -aga/ga -> -aja/ja >>>> II, III, IV for spell naming conventions.
And I think Koji Fox simply had way too much nostalgia for the time he played the pre PS1 era games when going with that for the localization. This is the only Final Fantasy game where they go with the dated convention and even re-releases/remasters/remakes of the first six games just go with the japanese suffixes.

And another one, I think there should be fewer Miqo'te NPCs starring in events and MSQs for a little while. Their bias for that race has been very evident since ShB.

Stormblood is a great expansion. My favorite, if I'm being honest.

Right, actual hot take:
People are far too concerned with what "might" happen if jobs aren't closely balanced and leads to this wild fear that specifically your job wont be brought to content.

If jobs were actually unique and not the exact same dog wearing a different shirt, there would be a reason to diversify comps based on how you actually play and it would lead to a "bring the player, on this job". It's not bad if certain jobs just suck unless you're actually good at them, and there's nothing wrong with jobs that are easy to pick up and do well with less time investment.

This game is like 80% a social simulator and if you're playing with friends you've made/already had I highly doubt any job is going to be discriminated against or excluded, and if the devs see a job is highly excluded or has a really low play rate they can actually look at it and see whats going on, maybe undertuned, maybe doesnt scale well on crit but scales well on haste (skillspeed).

Job discrimination is a boogeyman that I dont think anyone has experienced on a real scale. If it was real exclusion/discrimination if you did DRK in dailies people would just leave and take the time out because its that bad, and you wouldnt see any DRK's completing any content. Thats actual exclusion

The game is only worth playing for about 2 weeks at the end of each expansion, and 2 weeks at new expansion release. No reason at all to sub outside of that.

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Originally Posted by Azurarok

- The 292 incident still haunts both the devs and community to this day.

- The job system and current role trinity are at odds with eachother and they need to revisit the way they handle roles.

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What's the 292 incident??

My hot take is this:

1. The Hardcore Raider player base ends up getting angry and hating themselves for failing to clear or progress through certain fights and instead of taking time to ask themselves if they're needing to take time and step away or do anything else, they go and blame the casual player base for everything wrong in their life.

2. Please know I mean no offense with this one, but I feel FemRoth's were a waste of time and development. Female Hrothgar's creep me out. I don't know what it is, maybe it's just the design? Again, no offense is meant if you play as one, keep on doing so if you enjoy it.

3. Lalafel are awesome and the hatred towards them needs to stop.

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Originally Posted by SamuraiMiqo

3. Lalafel are awesome and the hatred towards them needs to stop.

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I'll drink to that! HUZZAH!!

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Originally Posted by Mars_Feroshia

People are far too concerned with what "might" happen if jobs aren't closely balanced and leads to this wild fear that specifically your job wont be brought to content.

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https://media.tenor.com/iKrYU9i6IlYAAAAM/bravo.gif

For literal years, people have been complaining about every job being good at everything. I'd rather have unbalanced jobs that are better at different things rather than everything being optimal to run everything.

To add to your hot take: Unless someone's going for a World First clear or some kind of Parse Record, "optimal" jobs don't matter. Just play whatever you want. You'll clear stuff well enough.

Zero is another Wak Lamat. Same Mary Sue level writing but she is tolerated I don't get why. She reeks of "fan-fiction self-insert" energy.

Echoing the 'rather have interesting/unique Job design than perfect balance' sentiments, because perfect balance can never exist unless Jobs play 100% identically to one another. We lost a lot of 'uniqueness' over the years, and still ended up seeing some Jobs excluded even in Dawntrail, so we now have evidence that the 'forsake uniqueness for closer balance' path just doesn't work in practice

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Originally Posted by ReynTime

-a/-ra -> -aga/ga -> -aja/ja >>>> II, III, IV for spell naming conventions.
And I think Koji Fox simply had way too much nostalgia for the time he played the pre PS1 era games when going with that for the localization. This is the only Final Fantasy game where they go with the dated convention and even re-releases/remasters/remakes of the first six games just go with the japanese suffixes.

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With how FF11 inspired the original version of this game was, I feel like they should have, in all regions, copied FF11's spell naming system. Numerals dictate the strength of the spell (Cure III is stronger than Cure II, for example), -Aga dictates that the spell is AOE. So, instead of High Fire needing to exist on BLM cos they ran out of numbers, they'd have Fire, Fire II (currently Fire3), Fire III (currently Fire4), Firaga, and Firaga II (High Fire). PCT and RDM, instead of 'VerAero II' or 'Fire II in Red', would have VerAeroga' and 'Firaga in Red'. Etc.

For WHM, you'd have Cure, Cure II (as currently), but instead of Cure III for the AOE one that is weaker than Cure II (causing confusion for some new players), it'd be called Curaga. There's a book in the Gubal Library that mentions 'Cure Iv' as a very powerful healing spell, and with the above, you'd be thinking 'wow, I've not even seen a Cure III, Cure IV must be crazy strong'

Endwalker story felt VERY rushed and it shows with how the main BBEG is just a bird with collective depression and anxiety, and the abominations that were SUPPOSED to be the BBEG from Emet-Selchs perspective just being relegated to role quests, and the ALL of the role quests for both Endwalker and Dawntrail should have been mandatory to progress AT ALL in their respective MSQ and have dungeons EXCLUSIVELY MADE with Role Quests in mind via Duty Support, but still have the option to play with other players if you don't feel like going through Duty Support.

Postin another
I like Wuk, Lyse and Zero. Lyse I didn't like on my first go through of storm blood but I've run that part of the story at least 4 times now, and every time I started liking her better. I can understand why people don't like them. But I do. I feel like they get a bit more flak than they otherwise would because they're women. (Obv not that thats the sole reason/eveyone who hates them is a secret sexist. Just smth ive seen.)

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Originally Posted by Aviatorhead

Postin another
I like Wuk, Lyse and Zero. Lyse I didn't like on my first go through of storm blood but I've run that part of the story at least 4 times now, and every time I started liking her better. I can understand why people don't like them. But I do. I feel like they get a bit more flak than they otherwise would because they're women. (Obv not that thats the sole reason/eveyone who hates them is a secret sexist. Just smth ive seen.)

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I think it is unfair to write off complaints about both characters as "sexist". I do not think that is the reason at all, there are many great female game characters who happen to be woman and it is not even coupled to the era or time as Lara Croft from the OG Tomb Raiders in the 90's was one of the biggest gaming characters ever. I think the problem with both Zero and Wak Lamat is how they are forced into the story in an obvious attempt to make people like them, or force them into some "iconic" status that they do not deserve. It is very easy to brush off legitimate writing criticisms of somebodies "OC" as *insert-ism* here because then you do not have to justify yourself as a writer. Both Wak Lamat and Zero are written in self-congratulatory ways and both do things that usurp the main character of the story (which FFXIV's marketing team has always made out was the player, I don't want to be the main character but the game frequently forces the player character into that role).

Male characters such as Alphinaud are ALSO written in the same way and I do not like him either but he does have SOME growth in the story. (Such as his massive mistake in Heavensward). Wak Lamat does not learn anything over the course of the story so its hard for the audience to relate to people who make the universe bend to them to make them seem in the right.