The ending to Stormblood...

Was amazing! Thanks Yoshi-P and the devs for continuing to deliver a phenomenal MMO experience!

Yeah it was quite good. I loved the part where

all tension was immediately removed by an off-screen deus ex machina

and that final scene was just

extremely disappointing because there was no kind of build-up or cliffhanger that left you wanting more. It was just a big cop-out that just screamed "PLEASE BUY OUR NEW EXPANSION FOR THE GOOD STORY". So I'm pleased to know that our story will lack any kind of risk or challenge and we'll just hop on over to another shard and do everything we normally do but with a different coat of paint. .

I dunno guys. I think I'm gonna have nightmares from

Varis sos Galvus's face. Like omg please do not zoom up on his face like that ever again!

I thought it was a tad short. But other than that I am ready for ShB.

Well I liked more than the other ending, the only duty is much more interesting and unlike previous expansions I do not know what will happen and that motivates me to buy the exp because I want answers, I want to know what is going to happen because this story does not have the point of knowing what will happen like the previous ones.

Was hoping for a bit more to be honest, especially in comparison to how 2.0 and 3.0 ended. This didn't need to be split into two patches

I was really expecting to get a better picture of what exactly Shadowbringers was going to be about.

We didn't get even a slight explanation from our mysterious voice as to what was going on and just know that we're needed at the First, which was a given considering what we learned from the recent fanfest. Not so much as a word as to why we need to become the Warrior of Darkness or anything.

I felt like Heavensward got a more satisfying send-off personally, since we were left with a clear goal in mind that we were simply waiting to act on, whereas this time we're just left hanging.

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I was really expecting to get a better picture of what exactly Shadowbringers was going to be about.

We didn't get even a slight explanation from our mysterious voice as to what was going on and just know that we're needed at the First, which was a given considering what we learned from the recent fanfest. Not so much as a word as to why we need to become the Warrior of Darkness or anything.

I felt like Heavensward got a more satisfying send-off personally, since we were left with a clear goal in mind that we were simply waiting to act on, whereas this time we're just left hanging.

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I agree that Heavensward was much more satisfying of an ending because we knew where we were going next. I feel the reason this one sorta dangles is because our character does not know what is in store. So unless you've watched the trailer and fanfest most players are prolly clueless as what will happen. I also feel there wasn't enough substance to warrant a story patch. Just two quests? I'm not gonna complain fully because what we got I felt was great.

And the instance trail with Zenos was really fun on drg. I don't know for other classes but it was a blast.

I liked it but damn was it short. I would have liked a bit more. Especially as it has been cut in 2 patch.

I might remember things wrong as well but I thought I saw some scenes in the trailer for 4.5 that still aren't in the game. Were are they??

I had been hoping for something to do :) oh well LOL

I think they could have concluded it better.
Maybe it could have ended with us going to -Redacted- and getting a tiny bit more exposition to lead us directly into Shadow Bringers.
That way first quest, we back at -Redacted- and we are thrust into the expansion Immediately.

Overall, Im nothing but more and more excited.

EDIT: Ok it turns out there was 2 more cutscenes after the Credits. I feel a little better now on how it ends.

For me it was .. disappointing. The whole Exp was cool dont get me wrong, it had great moments.. but this ending.. its just cliffhangers. No real "finish" for this exp. Everything is up in the air.. I didnt like it

SPOILERS

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We should have been able to KILL ZENOS/ASCIAN whatever for sure. Finish KILL. It feels .... underwhelming. Just Meh

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It ended rather abruptly.

Should have at least given a face and a name to the guy calling us out, anything more than "Enigmatic Figure" and just a quote about "throwing wide the gates". What we got, the fight with the Ascian in Zenos felt like a complete quest and the aftermath of it felt like half a quest... Kind of felt like we should have gotten the beacon and what not from the Tower at least. Also I am pretty sure that scene with Varis kind of implied he's been Ascian'd too.

But hey at least they did entirely reveal who the Katana Wielding Elezen is that's been going around... Kind of ironic that an Ascian is using Zenos' corpse as a body after that reveal...

I am soooooo looking forward to stormblood part 2 now... I mean shadowbringer.

I donno. The instances were really lack luster and I am not nearly as hyped as I was at the end of ARR and HW.

I am very curious only because I know where we are going from the fanfests, but the story itself didn't do much to excite me.

I think they really spread the story too thin.

It was a bit...

Empty ? The ending came abruptly, but oh well. I'm still hyped for Shadowbringers, but I thought they'd do something like the last expansions, where they teased Au Ra with Yugiri's appearance before HW or the samurai job with Gosetsu's fighting style before SB.
Technically they did teased Viera with Fran in the Return to Ivalice raids but I mean MSQ-wise.

I just find it funny that they keep the elezen's identity hidden even thought it's pretty obvious it is OG Zenos in there.

Nevertheless, still good, just a bit flat, but we'll see the next episode soon enough :D

Those credits go on way too long. :/

ugh again ANOTHER duty with a stupid meter you need to kill everything in like 1 minute, or fail the whole thing, why all the new ones have that awful mechanic? the meteor in the steppes had the same, if i don't do enough damage it means i have to rise my whole item level which could mean weeks of dungeons for that -_-
why even putting a timer on the whole fight at 30 mins or so if you're going to be putting a 1 minute or fail timer inside of it?

The most anti climatic MSQ ever.
There was exactly 0 plot threads cleared or any sort of advancement.
And I really loved the off screen deus ex machina who saved the day yet they didn't bother to show him doing so or his face.
Gods I hope the expansion won't be like that.

Why does Hien, master samurai, only know 4 abilities and not one of them is a combo action?

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Originally Posted by SuperScotsman

Why does Hien, master samurai, only know 4 abilities and not one of them is a combo action?

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It's a preview of the simplified gameplay coming in 5.0

I... I really love that the *off screen deus ex machina* guy... I really do! BUT...
I hope they give him a proper role, rather than 911ing.
It was good to see him though... It's... complicated...

I liked the instances but overall it was really short to be held back for its own patch.

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Originally Posted by SuperScotsman

Why does Hien, master samurai, only know 4 abilities and not one of them is a combo action?

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Two reasons:
1. He's not the hero of the story, you are. All the NPCs are shown consistently to not have abilities anywhere near approaching the Warriors of Light, except for the villains.
2. Perhaps more importantly, they're afraid of overwhelming people with a job they haven't played. Did you see how many people complained when they had to play Y'shtola with four abilities just because they had to heal?

It felt like the most non-conclusion conclusion ever. The battle between the allied forces and Garlemald is still at a stalemate. The threat of black rose they've been building for the last few patches is still hanging in the air. Elidibus is still walking around in Zenos's body while the real Zenos is still wandering around picking off nameless fodder.

As a lead-in to Shadowbringers I suppose it worked, but as an ending to Stormblood, it kinda.....didn't.

Ending to ARR gave us a major character death and WoL a d Scions being branded as traitors and villains and having to lay low and escape to a new area to clear our names. Ending of HW gave us a major character death and then Omega VS Shinryu epic anime battle. Ending to SB gave us nothing of any sort except more mystery, no exposition, no conclusion to anyone's story. We still don't know wtf is going on, and we don't even get to see Estinien fight Zenos, it's all offscreen and then talked about in passing.

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Originally Posted by Tsukino

Two reasons:
1. He's not the hero of the story, you are. All the NPCs are shown consistently to not have abilities anywhere near approaching the Warriors of Light, except for the villains.
2. Perhaps more importantly, they're afraid of overwhelming people with a job they haven't played. Did you see how many people complained when they had to play Y'shtola with four abilities just because they had to heal?

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1. Whilst valid in theory - not in practice. In Eorzea, a samurai like that would be a liability on the battlefield and nothing more than cannon fodder. This is Hien we're talking about - not some grunt.
2. As you can see from my post count I haven't been a frequenter of these forums so no, I hadn't seen this. But there's a big difference between hand-holding and flat out mollycoddling.

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Originally Posted by SuperScotsman

1. Whilst valid in theory - not in practice. In Eorzea, a samurai like that would be a liability on the battlefield and nothing more than cannon fodder. This is Hien we're talking about - not some grunt.
2. As you can see from my post count I haven't been a frequenter of these forums so no, I hadn't seen this. But there's a big difference between hand-holding and insulting mollycoddling.

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Well it was a lot, and the players are bad!

Welcome to the forums though.

Me: *crying/screaming*
Forums: Meh
>:C well fine!

I liked the thing you get at the end at least.

Honestly I didn't get it sooner that elf sword was -redacted- maybe if I had paid attention earlier. I guess that was an interesting twist

still, lot less closure to current events then I would have liked.

It just confirms for me how Stormblood dragged on uninteresting scenes and completely skipped what could have been more appealing.
This 4.56 MSQ was lukewarm, like Stormblood overall.

The only thing I enjoyed was the part where in the Zenos Elidibus duty where he has a special line when you play Dark Knight, which went somewhere along the lines of, "You think you may know the power of darkness, but I shall show you our true power!" brought a smile to my face.

Other than that, meh.

To me it was really underwhelming. I'm not gonna lie, I had far more fun doing the Hildebrand stuff.

First off, I was really disappointed in Hien having literally the one basic move like someone else said. I consider Samurai my second main, and it was really jarring hitting hakaze over and over again, not to mention incredibly boring. I couldn't wait for that fight to end. Even if they dumbed it down purposely because of the whole Y'shtola thing, I'm still of the opinion that they did that man dirty. NPCs may not be stronger than the Warrior of Light, true, but damn, just hakaze?? And gyoten too but... lmao seriously dpsing with gyoten... It was just boring to me and lackluster.

I don't even mind the thing with Estinien, because I love Estinien. It's interesting seeing people saying they're upset with his appearance. For me it was probably the one highlight of this part of the story which is saying a lot, because it was a deus ex machina. I guess it's just seeing a character I really love again and all, but the circumstances were still pretty bogus, even I understand that.

The Elezen dude being Zenos was obvious, but dang, are they really not going to let that man sit out? I love Zenos, don't get me wrong, but if he's going to be another antagonist in Shadowbringers it's kind of like, he already had his time to shine. I really hope they don't give him a really significant role in the next expansion. :x As much as I love him I don't love him enough to sit through the same stuff twice. I'm kind of wary on that standpoint. The fight with Ascian!Zenos was pretty cool though I'm not gonna lie, brought me back to the beginning of Stormblood when Zenos completely decimated everyone in Rhalgr's. But the whole 'voice' thing in the middle of it was really cheap, and I hated that they kept that extremely vague. There's no build up or suspense really, just another boatload of questions. We ain't get no name, no nothing. No explanation whatsoever, no exposition. God.

And what about Fordola?? I feel like they did all that stuff in the previous patch way back, set up such a nice story for her and then just put her back in her cell and never really wrapped up where they plan to take her next... disappointing.

And I mean that's pretty much it? Maybe it is because they didn't really need to split this part of the story into two patches which is why this part suffered so hard, but the end of Heavensward and A Realm Reborn really did this better.

I really can't forgive the Hien thing they really had my mans out here spamming hakaze omg this is gonna bother me all day

EDIT x2: Actually with original!Zenos it'd be pretty cool if he just went hog wild on the Ascians himself if Square's smart and totally veers away from making him a tired villain doing the same old 'I think it's hella sexy when we fight and you killing me turns me on' shtick. I'm gonna assume he intends to get his original body back and could totally just see him (or rather I'd like to see him) going full balls to the wall Chaotic Neutral, straight up wild card, an 'enemy of my enemy' thing. I wouldn't even be mad at that and it'd be funny watching Zenos chew on them Ascian ankles.

I thought it was okay, I'm in the crowd of having the both patches as one as I feel it just flows better overall. I understand they made the decision for this as to get more content out sooner(Mainly for Orbonne) but I feel that it did hamper the MSQ more by accident having us do Ghimlyt prior.

Absolutely the worst roleplay duty we've had. Whoever decided to give Hien just Hakaze, a gap closer and a DoT must have been out of their freaking mind. I understand it's meant for players not used to melee in the same vain Alphinaud and Y'shtola were but give us something else. Have us do his LB move like he does in GD or give us something cool to do. When Lyse and Yugiri are the ones actively doing cool things and you're just off to the side snared, it really takes a lot away from the impact.

I'm looking at it now after thinking about the events like 6 hours after and while at first I was very negative on the ending it's warped out to just be passable. I know it's due to ShB coming out in three months and bracing us for it but SB from the beginning has been a very split story.

I was extremely interested in Ala Mhigo/Gyr Abanian lore due to loving Monk and I was excited to see more of its world but due to SB's story pacing it felt so underutilized. So many parts of Gyr Abania between Dimworld(The swamp marshland area in the Fringes), Nynukrepf's Keep(The big ship on the mountain in the Peaks), and others just were underutilized or ignored in MSQ. I would have killed for dungeons (Maybe revisiting these areas in Shadowbringers?) for these as Gyr Abania gets the shaft especially when the dev team almost forgot about the area when making another primal after Susano (Only reason Lakshmi is in the game which I absolutely love her). I feel the team really hit a homerun on 4.3 as it was just a fantastic MSQ related patch even if it did all take place in Doma. I really wanted something like that just done for Gyr Abania but all I got in the end of 4.5 was a destroyed battlefield, politics, and a united assault (which I don't think is bad persay just a little upsetting considering we just freed them). Not even a chance to really take in the newly found Ala Mhigan culture (4.1 was getting there!) as it was just throttling into Elidibus and ShB.

All in all SB isn't bad by any means, it was my first expansion I followed with everyone and I enjoyed what it had to offer. My only hopes are that the team learn from what people didn't like in the SB story and keep their focus on to one entire plot instead of splitting it into two.

Wasn't a fan. It felt very underwhelming and short and I was like 'wait that's it???"
Also the cutscenes were very stale and boring to look at

So as a PLD with an ilvl of 384, I'm having a hard time DPSing down "you know who"s three swords...

Any pointers? Or so I just NEED to gear up a DPS job for this?

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Originally Posted by Yshal

So as a PLD with an ilvl of 384, I'm having a hard time DPSing down "you know who"s three swords...

Any pointers? Or so I just NEED to gear up a DPS job for this?

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WHM is king. Aero is your friend. I've tested duties by standing in AOEs and you can totally sit in them if Benediction is ready. Or just git gud at tank DPS.

Eh, I enjoyed the story as a whole, but the story wasn't nearly enough to stretch into 2 patches, unlike ARR's 2.5/2.55, which were both very meaty in terms of story content, even the end of HW offered more.

I dunno, I can't help but be a bit disappointed, it was far from amazing, I was actually annoyed by how short it was, it didn't really add all that much to be honest, it really didn't warrant being split into 2 parts, there simply wasn't enough for it. Also the Hien section was pretty terrible, mostly due to how obnoxiously limited it is, which was a problem with Y'shtola's duty too, though to be fair, some players are mind boggling bad at this game and had trouble with it, so its no wonder they make them idiot proof.

Overall a bit of a disappointing end to an very mediocre expansion, I do hope the story is more interesting going forward.

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Originally Posted by Tsukino

1. He's not the hero of the story, you are. All the NPCs are shown consistently to not have abilities anywhere near approaching the Warriors of Light, except for the villains.
2. Perhaps more importantly, they're afraid of overwhelming people with a job they haven't played. Did you see how many people complained when they had to play Y'shtola with four abilities just because they had to heal?

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He definitely seems more competent than what you can do while playing him in his other portrayals. And while I can agree with people potentially being overwhelmed, I think this might have been a good use case of the autocombo system PvP has. Even if hitting that basic melee attack button would have had the same damage, it would seem less immersion breaking if it at least varied up the visuals.

Dat rescue...yo dawg...we heard yo like reinforcement...so we put reinforcement to reinforce yo reinforcement so yo can reinforce while yo reinforce.

I enjoyed what we got. However I do think what we got didn't need to be split in half. I know they split this part off because they wanted have the "shock" reveal at Japanese FanFest about where we are going, but there's just not a lot there story wise that we didn't know we were getting thanks to the FanFest. Unless you didn't watch the FanFest in which case I guess learning where we are going was a shock so... *shrugs*

I enjoyed the fight with ElidiZenos. I even died once because I thought Lyse was doing damage with her AoE marker and didn't bother to stand in it some times. Ending felt like we were saying goodbye to everyone tho so my theory about us being on the first for a long while while the scene with Y'stola is happening on the Source is coming to the fore front of my mind again.

Hildabrand was good tho and the trial was really fun. Also rather challenging considering most people don't remember the Enchain Mechanic lol.

The beast tribe quest was fun but I'm getting a little sick of the same villain in every one. Would also be nice to get a Grand Beast Tribe Quest next expansion involving all the Beast Tribes in the game... well... all the ones on the same Shard anyway lol.