What’s your FFXIV Hot Take?

Ok a few of my thoughts.

Alisae and Gaia are over rated.

Papalymo deserved so much more and I feel Krile stole his place.

Viera and Hrothgar where a waste of resources they should have added more customisation and fixed what is needed. We get hairstyles for those races now and the other races are forgotten or so it seems. They are playing catch up.

Yugiri and Hilda are far better female characters and deserve to be in the story more along with F'lhaminn

Zero is ok but nothing special I find the hat tipping annoying and also Fordola I do not like.

I love the trust system as I am quite happy to duo or solo and I feel it is good they are expanding on it. I wish I could do all the MSQ fights with them.

I find people calling Derplander Meteor annoying lol as I know him as the Derp :D but that is not a game issue just me being daft.

Crystalline Conflict and Mahjong are probably the best content in the game.

Meteor/Derplander's Japanese name is semi-officially Hiroshi. His art assets and files always refer to him by that name and the JP audience adopted it the same as we call him Meteor.

I think I prefer Meteor but I read someone said that it's like meeting a New Yorker named Plane. Oh my goodness.

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

Meteor/Derplander's Japanese name is semi-officially Hiroshi. His art assets and files always refer to him by that name and the JP audience adopted it the same as we call him Meteor.

I think I prefer Meteor but I read someone said that it's like meeting a New Yorker named Plane. Oh my goodness.

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It is because I have known him for over 16 years while playing and everyone used to call him Derplander lol

Meteor is a nice name but I just know him as the Derplander haha

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Originally Posted by Luluna

Papalymo deserved so much more and I feel Krile stole his place.

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Papalymo was my favorite Scion because he had no hesitation in calling out stupidity (especially with Yda) and was cynical, a breath of fresh air within the group to be honest. He would've had a field trip in Tural.

Then the game killed him off and flashbacks to other secondary characters far more often. Hell he barely gets a mention despite having been an OG Scion.

Thread tax: Lyse wasn't so bad and I like Stormblood's story because it felt more grounded to me. I do miss Yda though, I miss her a lot.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

On the topic of Lyse, she's the worst and (SB spoilers)

they should have just stuck with Yda being Yda.

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To this day I consider that the worst, most redundant character reveal/introduction ever. It doesn't break immersion or retcons anything, but it just...annoyed me more than it should lol

(spoilers, just in case)

Yda was already depressed ever since Moen died and it only kept escalating from there, with Papalymo's sacrifice being the last straw, so she was already not in the best mental state, plus she hasn't been in Ala Mhigo for 20 years so she's a "foreigner" either way, and the fact all the other Scions already knew she was sus but played along...? Lyse's entire character might as well be "Yda updated her glamour plate"

I dont care and never cared about moenbryda.
Hilariously she gets more callbacks than Paplymo.

Y'shtola should have stayeded

Thancred needs to move on from Minfilia. If you talk to him in Endwalker it's the same dam thing xD nothing about what's happening, just Minfilia.

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Originally Posted by Skivvy

On the topic of Lyse, she's the worst and (SB spoilers)

they should have just stuck with Yda being Yda.

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Originally Posted by Xieldras

Papalymo was my favorite Scion because he had no hesitation in calling out stupidity (especially with Yda) and was cynical, a breath of fresh air within the group to be honest. He would've had a field trip in Tural.

Then the game killed him off and flashbacks to other secondary characters far more often. Hell he barely gets a mention despite having been an OG Scion.

Thread tax: Lyse wasn't so bad and I like Stormblood's story because it felt more grounded to me. I do miss Yda though, I miss her a lot.

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Papalymo was my favorite scion as well! Sure, there's some frustrations with how Lyse was portrayed in 4.0, and her character may have undergone changes, but she's all that those of us who started in Gridania have left now! I'm sure those who started in Ul'Dah and Limsa Lominsa are happy, but what about those of us who started in the Twelveswood? Yda and Papalymo were our starting scions. They were absent during Shadowbringers, when most of the Scions underwent their character growth and development and I'm still salty about it!

Those of us who started in Gridania got absolutely shafted and left in the dust!

Her absence is something I can accept but I'm still a bit peeved. lol.

Anyway, that's my hot take.

Retire Meteor. Change the MC every new xpac going forward to showcase how the MC is everyone that plays the game.

All Gameplay, Classes and Jobs, and Community forum categories (with the exception of New Player Help) should have a system that correlates your in-game commendation count to your total post number.
If you have more posts than you have commendations, your post is automatically hidden from view with an option to "Click to reveal" on the viewer end.

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Originally Posted by SKAshe

Those of us who started in Gridania got absolutely shafted and left in the dust!

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Kinda fitting, since Gridania tends to get shafted a lot. It has the least story development of the three starting cities, and aside from occasionally being a meeting hub for the Alliance (until Ala Mhigo supplanted that), it hasn't had any notable relevance in a long time.

Whoever thinks/thought that players should only be able to turn on their maintenance buffs during combat ONLY, needs to be fired and be nowhere NEAR combat design EVER AGAIN... I'm looking at you, guy who did the Shadowbringers Dark Knight de-work... No it was not a re-work, it was a de-work, calling it a "re-work" means you actively enjoy consuming slop gameplay design...

Grindy mounts should always feel distinct and never just be reskins or recolors.

Alright I have another one.

As someone who started in Gridania, you can check my Lodestone as proof if you are curious, I enjoy that Yda became Lyse, because Yda always felt like a very nothing character. Or more accurately, Yda and Papalymo often felt like a misplaced comedy duo, doing something of an in-media res version of a Boke and Tsukkomi, and while they were amusing once, maybe twice, I found the comedy around them ran dry very fast, while also making it impossible for me to take them serious, and harming both of their characterization. It sucks Papalymo died yeah, because maybe he could've been something, but I was otherwise thrilled to learn that they were ending Yda's antics.

95% of Lalafell hatred from the English speaking community is directly coming from and influenced by the RP spaces because they aren't goonable.

The rest of it is just because they are memes as they are played completely straight in game as just regular people despite their appearance, and lots of early villains being Lalafell and our Scion coinkeeper being terrifyingly shrewd and cunning information broker is just funny in its own way.

Despite having fascinating lore and charm, Lalafell players that try to enter creative spaces in the community get heavily side-eyed at best or accused of being pedos (because literally these people ONLY want NSFW content) at worst.

Meanwhile this has lead to a few players to quadruple down on "No, they're adults!” to the exact results you are likely thinking of.



So yeah. SE's refusal to go after mods is REALLY bad, actually.

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Originally Posted by Wildheaven182

Y'shtola should have stayeded

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… especially after she pulled the same stupid trick the second time. That one had zero emotional pay-off.

PvP in its entirety is a broken mess and needs to be stripped down and rebuilt from the foundations.
The current skill sets for the jobs were made with CC in mind and just don't work for Frontlines, and I would say Rival Wings too if I ever get more then 1 match of it.
At this point I only do the one roulette for the malmstone series and once I hit that lvl25 reward I drop it for the rest of the season; and I bet a lot of people do the same.

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

**Spoilers**

The concept of Meteion is very Japanese and cringy. Why make a series of probes a person with emotions? Makes zero sense. You don't want to a probe to have emotions for the whole reason as depicted in the stories, it might get sad and come back and try to kill everyone. Meteion is just Japanese V'Ger.

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While I have little to no Japanese media culture, I essentially agree.
The main plotpoint of Endwalker, and to be fair, the whole Hydealyn / Zodiark ark being set on such a thoughtless decision from Hermes still doesn't sit well with me, 5 years later. The whole "treatment of depression and hopelessness" in Endwalker feels so shallow to me.

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Originally Posted by Mansion

While I have little to no Japanese media culture, I essentially agree.
The main plotpoint of Endwalker, and to be fair, the whole Hydealyn / Zodiark ark being set on such a thoughtless decision from Hermes still doesn't sit well with me, 5 years later. The whole "treatment of depression and hopelessness" in Endwalker feels so shallow to me.

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You gave me an idea for my next hot take...

Metion is just Temu Jenova.

The Alliance Raids should be respected by the developers as a side content with different challenges than regular raids/dungeons and provide unique rewards, all while presenting an original story and stepping away from being mostly collaborations with other games/franchises, specifically the sci-fi non-Final Fantasy ones.

My next hot take...

What is the point of having dungeon trash in the dungeon if Square Enix designs it to appeal to speedrunners only? You might as well remove all trash mobs, because every trash mob plays the same way and all of them are wall to wall pulled because tanks want to get through everything so quickly. It saps a lot of the atmosphere out of the dungeons, a problem FFXIV's competitors do not have and reminds you that you are essentially in a mechanical hallway with no choice but to go forward.

XIV's biggest problem from my standpoint is that it takes the Final Fantasy XIII world map design and makes everything just a large hallway. Flying REALLY exposed the problems with the region maps, as you cannot even land on the tall cliffs as they don't have physics.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Isn't the Shroud also missing an entire zone that was playable only in 1.0?

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From what I can find in by a quick Google search, the West Shroud used to be accessible. The entire Shroud was entirely redesigned from 1.0, it used to be more of a labyrinth. There were also a couple of dungeons that were never re-added (and several more that were never implemented in 1.0 either).

Hot take: The age and lack of updates to the engine becomes more of an anchor around the game's neck every expansion.

Nuclear Take: Officially designate Balmung & Mateus as RP realms and heavily enforce that status. Oh, your name is King Buttlord? Forced transfer to another realm of your choice.

Super Nova Take: Allow limited addons. UI at least.

My hot takes:

- Roegadyn, especially Hellsguard, really continue to get shafted in the lore and representation department. :( I really, really want an expac where we go to the Abalathian Hinterlands, Aerslaent (I love sea wolves, too!), or even the mysterious Nagyn, which was said in a lore panel circa Stormblood (IIRC) to be the place of the origin story in roegadyn culture. (Just please don't sand off the roegadyn roots!)

While I will always reference Yoshida saying that prioritising one race in getting more lore questions answered is unfair, it does also feel unfair that the more popular races actually do get more food in terms of content and yes, lore questions being answered. I truly want everyone represented and happy, but man. :( Please, I beg of you!

- I loved Stormblood to bits, but Ala Mhigo has really become forgotten and we need a revisit, ala how the Ishgardian Restoration became Heavensward's love letter.

ETA:

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Originally Posted by RagAndBoneLady

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.

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Signal-boosting this because hear, hear!

Endwalker and Dawntrail MSQ need to be re-written to be BETTER PACED AND NOT HAVE CERTAIN CHARACTERS BE IDIOTS WHEN THE PLOT DEMANDS THEM TO BE IDIOTS(outside of Ascian influence of course) WHILE ALSO MAKING A VERY CERTAIN CHARACTER IN DAWNTRAIL ACTUALLY LEARN SOMETHING FOR ONCE, AND NOT BE A BUMBLING IDIOT WHILE ALSO BEING THE WRITERS FAVORITE CHARACTER... and make a VERY CERTAIN CHARACTER IN ENDWALKER ACTUALLY BE JUSTIFIED in what they did since BEFORE Final Fantasy XIV story began proper...

Also, how do we know that the Ascian that was revealed in Dawntrail isn't lying through their teeth? Because Ascians are kinda known to do that sort of thing as seen with Garleans, and of course the "Warriors of Darkness"... Just saying...

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Originally Posted by ddwarbird

My next hot take...

What is the point of having dungeon trash in the dungeon if Square Enix designs it to appeal to speedrunners only? You might as well remove all trash mobs, because every trash mob plays the same way and all of them are wall to wall pulled because tanks want to get through everything so quickly. It saps a lot of the atmosphere out of the dungeons, a problem FFXIV's competitors do not have and reminds you that you are essentially in a mechanical hallway with no choice but to go forward.

XIV's biggest problem from my standpoint is that it takes the Final Fantasy XIII world map design and makes everything just a large hallway. Flying REALLY exposed the problems with the region maps, as you cannot even land on the tall cliffs as they don't have physics.

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Not sure if a hot take itself but XIV dungeons are largely redundant if we think about it. We do them once for story purposes.... and that's it. Any repeated attempt would be exclusively to farm glamours or an easy 90 tomestones daily. They kinda only exist because dungeons are a staple to the mmo genre, but if XIV had its way, they'd all likely just be solo instances (Duty Support says hi)

I do not encourage something like WoW's M+ formula because that only breeds toxicity, but dungeons deserve to have a proper place as a form of content.

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Originally Posted by Aidorouge

Isn't the Shroud also missing an entire zone that was playable only in 1.0?

I suppose there's also the chance of Gridania getting more attention depending on how much BST quests take you back there and/or its lore is heavily tied as being Gridanian in nature.

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Yep, West Shroud. It was actually used as a map in the Feast PVP mode, and you can see it from most other Gridanian zones as it has an enormous plateau that rose up from the Calamity, and it's otherwise very swampy. Once the Feast was scrapped, the map went with it.

It's in bad, bad shape since the calamity and the reason we just never went there is because it's been wholesale abandoned by Gridania. I expect it to eventually get the dungeon treatment just as Xelphatol and Paglth'an did.

Keepers of the Moon are one of the subraces that are criminally underrepresented, but Miqo'te as a whole get lumped together as overrepresented just because of Seekers.

And Y'shtola has multiple traits that would fit a Keeper better and stole that identity from them, to the point that she was a spellcaster living in a dense forest, and was later referred to as the embodiment of The Moon by Magnai.
*And almost forgot to mention that she was part of, and the only Miqo'te, of a group that had a religion and culture worshipping the night.

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Originally Posted by Tahli

was later referred to as the embodiment of The Moon by Magnai.

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Okay let's be real this does not mean a single thing, Magnai reacts this way to any sufficiently attractive woman he sees, independent of how connected they are to concepts of sun and moon.

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Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi

Okay let's be real this does not mean a single thing, Magnai reacts this way to any sufficiently attractive woman he sees, independent of how connected they are to concepts of sun and moon.

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Magnai would see Azeyma herself and go "Are you my Nhaama?"

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Originally Posted by Tahli

Keepers of the Moon are one of the subraces that are criminally underrepresented, but Miqo'te as a whole get lumped together as overrepresented just because of Seekers.

And Y'shtola has multiple traits that would fit a Keeper better and stole that identity from them, to the point that she was a spellcaster living in a dense forest, and was later referred to as the embodiment of The Moon by Magnai.

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I had never considered this before! This really sucks for Keepers, I'm sorry. :(

I really hope neglected clans finally get their turn in the sun. Keepers, Duskwights, Hellsguard, and anyone else I haven't thought of!

The elderly lady storyteller in the Evercold trailer has a skin tone that looks more Keeper to me, she has a Miqo'te tail in the overhead shots of that scene, so I'm hoping, praying, we're going to get some Keeper rep on the Fourth. There were VERY few on the First, too.

I think SE suddenly caught to how underrepped some clans are since there are a bunch of Dusk characters all over Alexandria via the Eldite people, and they're used frequently in quests. Before DT, that clan had it the worst of any group in the game. Now it's the Keepers.

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Originally Posted by Heroman3003

Magnai would see Azeyma herself and go "Are you my Nhaama?"

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The StB Hildibrand quests should've been about finding his Nhaama.

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Originally Posted by LeCorbeaux

The StB Hildibrand quests should've been about finding his Nhaama.

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Absolutely not, Magnai should stay miserable for the rest of his life, it is his only role as a character, to be a pathetic little sod that we can always laugh at.

hard to laugh at him when the writers seem to have forgotten he even exists in favor of pandering to yuri fans via sadu/cirina

Dungeon mobs should have a buff: If anyone other than the tank pulls them, the enemy will one-shot the target. The buff goes away as soon as the tank pulls.

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Originally Posted by DiaDeem

Dungeon mobs should have a buff: If anyone other than the tank pulls them, the enemy will one-shot the target. The buff goes away as soon as the tank pulls.

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This would make "Tank DC/left, let's take it one pack at a time until they return/we get someone new" absolutely miserable, and give even more power to an already ridiculously pampered role.

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Originally Posted by Sui-Kune

I had never considered this before! This really sucks for Keepers, I'm sorry. :(

I really hope neglected clans finally get their turn in the sun. Keepers, Duskwights, Hellsguard, and anyone else I haven't thought of!

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I hope so! They could fill a whole expansion with the lore from those neglected clans.

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Originally Posted by RedLolly

The elderly lady storyteller in the Evercold trailer has a skin tone that looks more Keeper to me, she has a Miqo'te tail in the overhead shots of that scene, so I'm hoping, praying, we're going to get some Keeper rep on the Fourth. There were VERY few on the First, too.

I think SE suddenly caught to how underrepped some clans are since there are a bunch of Dusk characters all over Alexandria via the Eldite people, and they're used frequently in quests. Before DT, that clan had it the worst of any group in the game. Now it's the Keepers.

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I didn't see any fangs when I watched her mouth during the trailer, but I hope I'm wrong and they were just hidden by her lips.

the stakes dont matter in msq

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Originally Posted by VeyaAkemi

This would make "Tank DC/left, let's take it one pack at a time until they return/we get someone new" absolutely miserable, and give even more power to an already ridiculously pampered role.

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The buff can be off if there's no tank in the party, and then come back up once someone new joins.

I'll follow you up with another hot take: Every single self sustaining/healing ability (not mitigation) should be removed from every tank's kit entirely.