Unlocking Heavensward

Hi,
I am a fairly new player.
I purchased A.R.R a couple of months ago and then bought Heavensward a few days ago, right before I hit level 50.
After hitting level 50 i was really excited to start the heavensward content but was slapped in the face as I found out that I have to complete another 100 quests before I can go to ishgard...
Are you kidding me?
I can understand if this was a requirement for a short time after the xpac was released but its been out for a while now.
This is ridiculous. I'm going to be taking a break from the game now and am seriously considering quitting altogether.
You don F'd up Square Enix. :mad:

Oh really? THIS again?
Yes, you do have to go through the story because Ishgard doesnt allow strangers - and you are one right now - inside its mighty halls. There is a lore-reason thats keeping you outside of Ishgard and I'm glad they're taking the lore and the story serious. Granted there are a few quests that have to be considered filler (really, Tataru? Tea?) but after all the game is telling you a story - if you dont enjoy that: Yes, it might be better if you just quit.

Can someone at this point please explain to me why people are soooo excited to go into the HW-areas but dont seem to care about the story or the game at all? Like really, do you only want to go to idleshire to cap your respective tomes for a week and farm the new EX-primals for their mounts? Is THAT really what makes the game fun for you? If you want a grind cant you go play... farmville or however those games are called?

If you don't want to play the game, then why purchase an expansion to said game? If you hadn't been aware of all those quests and just found out about them, why aren't you happy at finding out there's even more content than you had realized?

I think the 100 story quests is what reduces the amount of bot activity done the heavensward areas.

You don't have to rush it. ARR story is as good as HW. Just enjoy the game.

It is because the expansions in this game CONTINUE the story. They are not a completely different story, and thus you need to complete the ARR story first.

If you dont care at all about the story and just want to skip everything to see the newest stuff then this might not be the right mmo for you.

Not gonna lie, I skip all the cutscenes and don't read quests. I find the story boring and have no interest in it. Regardless, I still did all the random quests I had to do to get into HW without complaining because thats just how it works in this game.

A lot of the content is gated behind the MSQ, if you're not used to it by now, welp.. I dunno what to tell you.

There is a lore reason Ishguard is locked off to you, they do not trust strangers and have not allowed anyone into Ishguard in a long time. They are not just going to throw open the gates all of a sudden and let just anyone into their city. You have to do the quests to earn their trust to gain access as well as some key events which I will not spoil.

I am glad they are sticking to the lore and keeping it locked behind completing the ARR quests. Final Fantasy is a heavy story based game which I love. If this is not for you then you will be better off with another game.

Oh man people are so dumb. The game didn't just immediately go from the end of Praetorium straight to ishgard... sorry dude, but you're gonna have to play the same story we had to play piece by piece over almost two years before HW was released. Deal with it or gtfo

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Originally Posted by EpicName

You don F'd up Square Enix. :mad:

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I'm sorry, so what's your point, exactly? FFXIV does function a little differently from other MMOs in that you have to fight to progress the story and can't main it as a crafter and the like, but it is a story-driven game. In fact, going to Ishgard and doing any of the quests there literally means nothing unless you're invested in the story anyway*, especially since most of the raids are still in ARR due to HW still being current content. I find people going back to run ARR content just as much as they run HW content.

*Barring that you aren't in the game with a group of friends

I skipped all of ARR story. I was annoyed with the story and having to go through it just to play the xpac. But HW was actually good and I watched and read every part

Dungeons, trials, raids, leves, mounts, airships, barber dude, retainers, grand companies (and therefore pvp) and Isles of Umbra are also locked behind Main Scenario. Shouldn't come as a surprise that some new things might require it also. Even if you got into Ishgard freely you'd have a pretty crappy time leveling without flying... cause it's also gated by the Main Scenario. :D So is the current expert roulette. Better get used to it cause it isn't going anywhere.

Maybe you should do some research next time you decide to spend money on something

yoshida actually mentioned this was a mistake on his part, and said the MSQs won't be required for future expansions. they're jsut not going to fix it for this one, because they prefer moving forward instead of revising old content.

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Originally Posted by Chasely

yoshida actually mentioned this was a mistake on his part, and said the MSQs won't be required for future expansions. they're jsut not going to fix it for this one, because they prefer moving forward instead of revising old content.

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So they dont care about new players either? That sounds like a flawed business model.
I bought this game due to seeing all of the great reviews for heavensward.
I just figured this game would work like every other mmo - when an expac is released you get to do new things right away. but i guess not. Oh well.

And to all of you fanboys defending the fact that heavensward is gated behind 100 filler quests you have to know that it's pretty silly. They could have combined everything into 1 large quest which generally explained everything and took an hour or two. But they didnt.

And how do you propose they put everything in a compressed package? A few quests I can see them trimming out, but it's literally impossible to cut a huge chunk of the quests without rewriting the story.

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Originally Posted by EpicName

So they dont care about new players either? That sounds like a flawed business model.
I bought this game due to seeing all of the great reviews for heavensward.
I just figured this game would work like every other mmo - when an expac is released you get to do new things right away. but i guess not. Oh well.

And to all of you fanboys defending the fact that heavensward is gated behind 100 filler quests you have to know that it's pretty silly. They could have combined everything into 1 large quest which generally explained everything and took an hour or two. But they didnt.

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They want you to suffer through the endless drudgery of performing menial tasks for no real reward, like carrying items 20 paces because an NPC is too lazy to walk across a room. I honestly feel for you. the ARR quests were mostly useless filler and boring exposition which had nothing to do with actually advancing the story. They could cut out 80% of the post 50 per-Heavensward quests and you wouldn't lose anything at all. I feel for you; really, I do. But I can't make SE fix that hotmess of a story.

that said, Heavensward's story is truly an amazing adventure full of action, suspence and interesting characters who treat you like a hero, rather than a glorified mule.

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Originally Posted by EpicName

And to all of you fanboys defending the fact that heavensward is gated behind 100 filler quests you have to know that it's pretty silly. They could have combined everything into 1 large quest which generally explained everything and took an hour or two. But they didnt.

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Good luck with that. The final cutscene alone is almost an hour long.

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Originally Posted by EpicName

So they dont care about new players either? That sounds like a flawed business model.
I bought this game due to seeing all of the great reviews for heavensward.
I just figured this game would work like every other mmo - when an expac is released you get to do new things right away. but i guess not. Oh well.

And to all of you fanboys defending the fact that heavensward is gated behind 100 filler quests ect

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Lol such whining.. all of the quests between the end of the original storyline and beginning of heavensward can be finished in three days at most. Besides that /going to Ishgard to begin with is tied in to the story and nothing going on there including the entire dark knight storyline would make any sense at all without having first finished the storylines leading up to you getting there and all of the areas are level 50+ so you wouldn't be wandering around at a low level anyway unless you wanted your face eaten/

Not every MMO hands you things, wanting to play heavensward immediately would be like buying a three book series and starting on book two without reading book one "because book two got better reviews"

Those "100 filler quests" were actually amusing to me, and didn't take long to get through, and if you aren't a "fanboy" or whatever then why are you even playing. There are plenty of instant gratification games around according to all the every other mmo nonesense being thrown around. Have fun playing those, i bet with the exception of the ones that people play like an addict punching holes in the wall over they aren't around as long as XIV will be.

Because some people are casual fans or new to a genre, and that's okay. How about instead of attacking him, you offer to help him? Everything's more fun with a friendly face.

EpicName, what days do you play? I'll level a character on diabolos and we can slog through those 100 quests together.

It does wonders for keeping RMT out of HW content so that a plus.

I'm sorry but it doesn't take that long to get from ARR to HW if you skip all the cutscenes... and from the sounds of your complaining and lack of care for the story is EXACTLY what you would do anyway. Most of my FC mates who joined the game for HW got through ARR in no time at all. Yes the ones who enjoyed story took a bit longer because they watched and read everything...

I also don't see it as there being no reward, you should gain several levels before reaching HW which is a huge benefit seeing as you can't do the first HW dungeons until you're 51... that grind from 50-51 without story is difficult and tedious. Not to mention to me the story is a huge reward, I love the story.

If you don't like the story or the game why are you playing? The people who care about story will stay even if they have to do the quests... so despite what you say SE will retain countless players.

I have only seen complaining about this issue on the forums. I may only have 60 or so people in my FC but of those who have had to complete the quests to get the HW none of them were so angry that they needed to come to the forums to make another thread about this. The ones who didn't like story complained but they got in done in less than a few days....

Once you get to 50 you have so much to do I would think story is the least of your worries.. you have to unlock all the level 50 dungeons and get cross classes so forth... :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by EpicName

So they dont care about new players either? That sounds like a flawed business model.
I bought this game due to seeing all of the great reviews for heavensward.
I just figured this game would work like every other mmo - when an expac is released you get to do new things right away. but i guess not. Oh well.

And to all of you fanboys defending the fact that heavensward is gated behind 100 filler quests you have to know that it's pretty silly. They could have combined everything into 1 large quest which generally explained everything and took an hour or two. But they didnt.

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Guess you have no ideal how SE does stuff then.

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Originally Posted by Youkulm

I also don't see it as there being no reward, you should gain several levels before reaching HW

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Actually, the quests only give about 20-30k EXP each. Doing all of them, and the dungeons, barely puts a dent in your EXP from 50-51.

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Originally Posted by Chasely

Actually, the quests only give about 20-30k EXP each. Doing all of them, and the dungeons, barely puts a dent in your EXP from 50-51.

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It got me from Level 50-51, but they don't provide a ton of EXP I'll admit. I haven't completed all of it yet though. They might have boosted the total EXP gained at some point though.

I can certainly understand the annoyance of being stuck behind the MSQ, and I can feel the pain with all the fetch quests mixed in there. However, the story for 2.1-2.55 patches is actually pretty great thus far (the Ul'Dah storyline is really interesting and Merlwyb is pretty awesome in it). Just chug on through and you'll be in Heavensward.

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Originally Posted by EpicName

And to all of you fanboys defending the fact that heavensward is gated behind 100 filler quests you have to know that it's pretty silly. They could have combined everything into 1 large quest which generally explained everything and took an hour or two. But they didnt.

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Hearing that from someone who hasnt done those quests and probadly hasnt seen some of the important and amazing cutscenes seems more silly to me than us telling you that there is a reason... you wont understand a lot of the HW-story if you havent played the ARR-story. Yes, some quests are filler. But not all of them. Please, dont judge them if you havent seen them. If you dont enjoy playing a story-driven MMO - just quit. I dont know about other MMOs since I've never played one but I've played other FFs (oh yes, call me a fangirl here) and I enjoyed them because of their story. HW is great and better than ARR, yes. And I'm not gonna say "We all suffered so you have to suffer too!" because thats stupid. Maybe it was a stupid decision to let you "suffer" through a great climax but if you dont care for the story at all after all it might not be worth it for you - in that case you're better off with playing something else.
Stop playing something you dont enjoy, simple as that.

Edit: And as I said before: I'm glad they didnt. Someone - a person that I would consider an artist - put effort into writing that story. I feel sympathy for that person and your suggestion makes that effort meaningless, it makes the story meaningless. "Oh yeah, we wanted to tell you something but... its not really important, here have your expert-dungeons, now go and farm!". I dont say you have to like or watch the story but what SE did here is taking a valide stand: The story matters to them and is important to them so they decided to keep it. Thats their right as artists - an artist is pretty much allowed to do anything s/he wants even if the audience doesnt like it (their right). In this case the audience who does like it (or at least doesnt care enough) seems to outweight the people who dont. I got what I wanted from this game: A good story; that was the reason I started playing - maybe thats why I have little understanding for people who just dont seem to care about that at all.

I'm honestly not sure why you'd buy an expansion pack just because it's an expansion pack before you even hit 50 and haven't done any level 50 content.

It's not like the game mechanics are magically changing once you have access to 3.0.

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Originally Posted by Claymore65

It got me from Level 50-51, but they don't provide a ton of EXP I'll admit. I haven't completed all of it yet though. They might have boosted the total EXP gained at some point though.

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That's good to know, thanks! They must have increased EXP from the time I went through.

Wanted to just chip in here, I for one am excited to get to the expansion right away, but that's due to me wanting to main a mechanist, only thing I don't look forward to is having to start from 30 again and leave the expansion to later come back, but eh, whatcha going to do?

I find the game's story pretty gripping at times despite this being the first final fantasy I've ever played, only thing I am sad about is having to wait so long for the job I actually am interested in.

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Originally Posted by Chasely

yoshida actually mentioned this was a mistake on his part, and said the MSQs won't be required for future expansions. they're jsut not going to fix it for this one, because they prefer moving forward instead of revising old content.

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Well, he did mention that future expansions wouldn't require it, but at least in the interview I saw (about which many players said just what you did), there was no suggestion of anything being a mistake here. The patches that were written to be a lead-in to Heavensward are required for Heavensward, naturally enough. They won't be required for the next expansion because they don't relate to the next expansion. Their story is about the current one.

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Originally Posted by EpicName

I just figured this game would work like every other mmo - when an expac is released you get to do new things right away. but i guess not. Oh well.

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Well, you are doing new stuff. Those quests are one-time only, so if you're not past them yet, they're new.

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Originally Posted by EpicName

And to all of you fanboys defending the fact that heavensward is gated behind 100 filler quests you have to know that it's pretty silly.

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Except that we're not talking about filler quests. We're discussing the Main Scenario of the game. Sure there might be an occasional quest here and there where the story drags a bit, but overall it's a good story, and more significantly, it's the focal point of the whole game. Throughout FFXIV:ARR, you've seen how nearly every feature is unlocked either directly through the Main Scenario, or at least has a prerequisite that you need to have reached a certain point before you can unlock it. Heavensward is still part of FFXIV, so of course it follows the same pattern. The Main Scenario remains the focal point that determines what else you can unlock, just as it's been all along.

These quests form an essential part of the Heavensward storyline, so if you want Heavensward, they're a part of it. I can't believe the number of threads I've seen complaining about the fact that we were essentially all given the first chapter of Heavensward for free. The fact that you've paid for the remainder of the expansion is no reason to skip over its first chapter, nor to expect that you could.

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Originally Posted by Dergensaur

Wanted to just chip in here, I for one am excited to get to the expansion right away, but that's due to me wanting to main a mechanist, only thing I don't look forward to is having to start from 30 again and leave the expansion to later come back, but eh, whatcha going to do?

I find the game's story pretty gripping at times despite this being the first final fantasy I've ever played, only thing I am sad about is having to wait so long for the job I actually am interested in.

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Now, that seems like a more valid complaint. I wish they'd put the unlock quests (and level 30 to 50 quests) for the new jobs in the ARR areas, so that people wanting to do them could unlock and use the new jobs while going through the remainder of the ARR Main Scenario, before getting to Ishgard. It would, from what I understand, require somewhat different job stories, though, to match the location. I suppose that has to do with why they put them in Ishgard instead, and thus locked behind reaching it.

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Originally Posted by Chasely

Actually, the quests only give about 20-30k EXP each. Doing all of them, and the dungeons, barely puts a dent in your EXP from 50-51.

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I don't know what you did but between doing story on my alt and running level 50 roulette everyday I was nearly 55 by the time I reached HW lol. Again story is not your only concern once you reach 50.

I find ignoring everything just to reach HW so you don't have all your tools available to you on your journey to 60 and once you reach 60 a mistake.. but maybe that's just me.

Edit: and yes they did increase the amount of EXP you get from the quests in one of the patches.

Just do it. The story is really good and there are characters who come up again who will be hugely important come Heavensward. If story really does mean nothing look at it more practically. They redid the awards for those quests to give you gear that will help you out a LOT as you start in on HW content.

What?! There's more story and content in the game for you to enjoy after ARR before getting to the expansion pack?

Those bastards!