Dawntrail PVE Role Quests

First I'd like to say I found them pretty mediocre. It is pretty obvious that the aim was to make us go after villains that aren't very smart and are pretty unhinged with "comedy" undertones to it, but unlike Hildibrand those are swinging between a serious setting and tone and obvious clown moments. It's hard to tell whether this is supposed to be comedic or actually serious, because let's be honest, we have serious themes and moments with each allied NPC and their cultures, and then suddenly jump to evil, sometime mustache twirling villains accompanied with goofy hildi music (the music really is a big mood breaker on those quests).

I still have to do the melee one (and I assume the secret one that all of them unlock?), but after having done the caster dps series I have also been left relatively sick seeing it to its conclusion. Perhaps it is just me but the villain here, on top of being unhinged, is pretty obviously sick in the head and unlike the others I found him very pathetic and it just felt sad. And at a certain point I did hope they would not go for the punishing end of the other quests, but alas, we just beat the crap out of him, strip him of his dignity (or what was left of it), and we even get a line that "perhaps some time spent in a jail away from the sun will make him think again about it all". I found this frankly pretty crass and ignorant. This doesnt excuse the man's actions but is this really something you'd tell to someone obviously suffering from serious mental illness?

I honestly don't know if I'm just dreaming the parallels with mental illness or if this was a totally different intent on the writers' end, but the fact remains that it's the first time in this game I actually found a questline pretty uncomfortable morally.

i played 2 role quests sofar. melee dps and tank.
the shape shifting villain in melee dps has some Serious creepy and bad vibes IF done correctly.. but he's using his godly powers for very minor issues... his research is next to nothing. knowing not that the ninja's are the WoL's allies. knowing not that the WoL has many allies pretty much everywhere.

i feel like it was halfbaked. a villain with very scary powers but done no research and only doing petty crimes really.

tank role quest... well wtf is there to say. other then a few fun solo duties the part where the villain could stay awake by forcing others to sleep IS a scary thought.
if it was correctly used. again next to no research done on her target besides knowledge of her being a former temple knight. and really... why go after the very nation that kicked you out.. really is much less suspicious if she went to limsa or gridania and caused havoc there. she wud be unknown and hard to find. in ishgard half the damn temple knights know who she is... and yes, we found her really quick and put an end to her and her shenannigans.

again a half baked villain with 3 brain cells and a lack of understanding the basic idea's of don't do crimes in your former home towns... and do your research... there is a hero running around who saved the whole damn world and liberated several nations. YOU DO NOT WANT TO ATTRATC THIS PERSONS ATTENTION

yet they do... and barely even know you for whatever reason...

I lost interest after doing the healer role quest and pretty much skimmed through tank and magical range DPS stories. The patterns are the same: you go to a state, search for clues about a certain person here, search for more clues there, slay some enemies, and then do the solo duty for last. It's like the stories were fed to an AI and change it up into different settings but the plot is the same.

I'm having the opposite experience. So far I've done caster, healer, and tank, and I love these quests. I really loved working alongside partners that were far more competent and fleshed out than anyone in the Dawntrail MSQ, and I enjoyed learning about their cultures and distinct perspectives. And each story explored themes that I found interesting. And for caster and healer, I loved the campy villains; I was honestly a bit disappointed that the tank villain wasn't camping it up nearly as much, even though I still found that story interesting.

I've done every Role Quest except healers.

They are generally all terrible; the all follow a lazy formula and have a seemingly identifcal flow.

Each has a follow Portion; Each has a final boss duty; each has a magic maguffin that explains why they are even a challenge.

Really it felt like someone was phoning in the quest writing and just fed the first role quest into a AI to alter the story elements enough to make them different. None of these things feel like they add to the world lore or story as a whole because they are all these compartmentalized one off's.

Can we PLEASE have class quests back where my class fantasy is actually built on? Why is Esteem becomming stronger? Why is my Avatar manfesting in Perfectio? Why do machinists now have these cool new weapons?

Really I loved the class quests because they built on the lore of the classes and therefore helped explain whats going on in the world. The Reaper Organization (The Lemures) should have been expanded on with the fact we now have Mannalis; the whole Red Mage arc should have developed with the fact we can now travel to the 13th and the whole paladin arc with Zero should really be explored.

Honestly there is mountains of wasted potential and a blatant "arcadisization" of the game by adding quests for the explicit intent of eating up time rather then actual enjoyment. The comedy of the Ranged DPS follow quest made that clear when they have you follow a NPC in LAPS around a rock.

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Originally Posted by LilimoLimomo

I'm having the opposite experience. So far I've done caster, healer, and tank, and I love these quests. I really loved working alongside partners that were far more competent and fleshed out than anyone in the Dawntrail MSQ, and I enjoyed learning about their cultures and distinct perspectives. And each story explored themes that I found interesting. And for caster and healer, I loved the campy villains; I was honestly a bit disappointed that the tank villain wasn't camping it up nearly as much, even though I still found that story interesting.

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I didn't negatively criticize the allied NPCs we're being given. In fact I like them and they feel solid enough for sidequest material (but I also loved the new DT msq NPCs so...). They're definitely the redeeming side of those rolequest as far as I'm concerned.

I just don't like how some of the rolequests (caster notably) treats mental illness. I find it very uncomfortable which was the main point behind my post. I wouldn't post that kind of message if it was just about average or mediocre questlines, else I would have spent months of my life doing it.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I just don't like how some of the rolequests (caster notably) treats mental illness. I find it very uncomfortable which was the main point behind my post. I wouldn't post that kind of message if it was just about average or mediocre questlines, else I would have spent months of my life doing it.

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That's fair. I struggle with mental illness myself, and I do find myself weary of how poorly FF14 treats mental illness. Honestly, there would basically be no need for the Warrior of Light if there were a handful of competent therapists in FF14; that's all that basically any "villain" in the series needs. And finding a way to navigate and come to terms with that sad truth is something I've found fundamental to being able to enjoy FF14's stories.

I think what made these quests different for me was the absolutely ridiculous intro to the entire series, where everyone sits around a table in public and the leader loudly announces, "Welcome to the first official meeting of the Evil League of Evil!" For me, that set the tone that these were not characters we were meant to take seriously in any way. And I was glad for the reprieve after having wasted the energy required to take the DT villains seriously.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I didn't negatively criticize the allied NPCs we're being given.

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Never intended to suggest you did, I was just talking about what I liked about the quests.

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Originally Posted by Valence

(but I also loved the new DT msq NPCs so...)

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I really enjoyed Konoa and Wuk Lamat up until they were crowned; but after that the author seemed to consider their growth over (despite them clearly demonstrating incompetence at regular intervals) because nobody ever corrected their courses again, and it felt terrible to watch these characters I had come to enjoy lose their complexity and start feeling so artificial. But I'll end that there, as I don't want to make this yet another DT MSQ thread! ^^;

I had a different impression about this. Yes they are silly quests until I realized the artifacts we have been recovering are essentially the same as Whalaqee totems that we learn Blue Magic from. There is an air of mystery about where or how or why these items were created, but blue magic explains it all. Eventually we will learn all these powers for ourselves. (Just may take till 8.0 unless they do 20lvls of blue mage this expansion).

I actually liked most of them. The only one that made me go "...huh?" was the Caster one.

I'll say though, the caster and ranged physical took great efforts to not include the leaders of the regions which I thought was... A little weird. Like, ain't no way that Lyse didn't see that dude trying to take over Ala Mihgo and Vrtra could have easily ended that situation.

The melee one used one of my favorite things they do in this game and I appreciated seeing it again. Lol

It wouldn't matter me to if the role quests were amazing. We were robbed of job quests in exchange. Would that be a lot of job quests? Of course it would. If they choose to add more jobs and levels, they should include more job quests. The job quests through Stormblood all had their own flavor (same goes for crafting quests). They got lazy in ShB with role quests and combining the DoH/DoL into just a handful of quests.

In ShB, maybe they had an excuse. If they wanted the job quests to take place in the First, it would be a bit difficult to work out how that would happen give that the WoL is the only person that can freely travel between the Source and the First. And in some ways, the role quests in ShB paired the WoL to one of the Warriors of Darkness - so it sort of made sense, lore-wise.

Going forward though? They have no excuse. It is just a lazy design decision to cut out job quests entirely.

I think role quests in general worked in ShB because they sorta tied into the story, and at least they were providing some backstory for a character that mattered (Arbert) in addition to giving some info on the setting.

But, they kept them going for the same reason they keep most things: they're following a design document first and inventing story to keep it cohesive. All the tribes had a totem of identical make stolen by the same crew so that they could easily have all the roles conveniently in the same spot. This sort of thing is convenient to the player and developers but I think it probably limits what they can do with the story.

I actually liked the Tank one quite a bit, mostly because of the tribe introduced and the two Eyes' relationship, and the melee one because the stakes and my involvement didn't feel undercut by comic relief.

I don't know that this had anything to do with the piteous villain seeking revenge for their falling asleep on the job in the past or the tank role in particular.

So, these quests persist because at one point we had job quests, then we had a change of pace in ShB, and we're holding that pace because that's less effort for the devs to make a new or different system.

Why not just have these stories exist in the zones of the expansion waiting for players to find them? Did we need to have them tied to roles so we can unlock dye options for gear we use for like a day at most? If they feel they can't tell the job stories forever, fine, I get that, but why replace it with another system that has constraints on it that end up making it feel forced?