When you Love the Story, but are Really Bad at the Gameplay

[Packetdancer]

I'm surprised you did go through MSQ with bard as quick as you did since you have to relearn the job after every level cap, which probably slowed down your progress significantly. Grats on freshly getting through the MSQ in a month.

And then there's Black Mage, which feels like it's an entirely different job at arbitrary non-capstone intervals. Like 6 levels and it's a new job, 7 more, then 5, then... *quiet screaming*

(I don't enjoy Black Mage.)

[redheadturk]

For me, it was the red mage level 60 trial. Insanely unforgiving and took a number of attempts. Grit my teeth and figured it out. Refused to go easy mode on any of the trials. I think the one where you play Estinien took a couple attempts though, but that was just due to overlooking a mechanic.

That guy was the bane of my existence until I figured out you need to keep vercure on standby for both yourself and Arya. Arya will not heal herself which honestly makes the fight twice as hard lol.

[redheadturk]

Have to ask; is there a good guide anywhere, for idiots who can't get their head around the game's mechanics?

I've played through the Omega storyline and currently working my way through Pandemonium... but I still stink at the gameplay. And whilst the teams do tend to be quite forgiving, I do still feel like I'm a burden to them. I mean, I played the Third Circle and try as I might I just couldn't grasp the mechanics there and, understandably, annoyed one of my teammates. And it's fair to say that I was totally carried through that instance.

I'm admittedly finding it hard to motivate myself with this in mind. I persisted with the MSQ due to how much I enjoyed the story. I guess I could do side-quests, but sooner or later I'd have to play content that requires teaming with other players, and I don't really have any good excuse for being as lousy at the gameplay as I am

I guess I could look for an 'idiot's guide' via Google, but I strongly suspect there'd be a confusing number of links and it's hard to tell which ones keep things simple and which ones don't.

Third Circle is rough even for good players. Orange AOES on an orange floor is just a bad idea.

[redheadturk]

This is probably one of the most overlooked issue in this topic on hand.

I've got people telling me "Are you crazy???" when I show them my UI: my hotbar having several Alt+hotkeys that people find awkward to use in mid-combat like Alt+Z/X/C/F, etc. But I rarely had issue with this (thank you, 'Piano fingers' lol). At the same time, I'm also amazed when I saw my friend playing on console with their controller. I saw all those hotbar swapping etc and I was like "How did you do that so far?!"

People can probably give general tips like "Don't put your important, frequently used buttons too far away." but ultimately it's up to us to figure out ourselves which setup works the best.

I have mine like this, single keys, all I can reach with a finger on my left hand, my movement is set to my arrow keys.

[Carin-Eri]

I'm surprised you did go through MSQ with bard as quick as you did since you have to relearn the job after every level cap, which probably slowed down your progress significantly. Grats on freshly getting through the MSQ in a month.

"Oh, have this mechanic" 'Oh by the way it's reworked and your timing is different' and repeat that from 52 to 90 made the class really annoying to learn for me. Now that you're 90 you can finally slow down and learn the job instead of relearning the entire job all over again.

Third circle is pain and has a few tells you didn't see before, on top of orange circle on orange fight with orange background and orange boss. Not exactly fun for anyone. As stated before, MTQ/Xenosys Vex are great for guides/mechanic review. Play by play on bard there are many sources for such, including IcyVeins apparently.

Yeah, that was challenging to be honest, but I started the game as an Archer/Bard and was determined to see the game through to its (current) 'end' as one.

And still have a lot to learn - whilst have briefly explored other jobs I really want to be less awful at Bard before concentrating on trying to learn something else

[Packetdancer]

That guy was the bane of my existence until I figured out you need to keep vercure on standby for both yourself and Arya. Arya will not heal herself which honestly makes the fight twice as hard lol.

Solo duties as a WHM main where you have to heal an NPC who is not in your party list drove me to actually bind both "Set Focus Target" and "Re-focus on Focus Target" to hotkeys. Now I can just focus-target the NPC (Shift-F for me), and then re-target them with the backtick key to heal without having to actually go click on them. I seem to recall being very glad I'd already started doing that when I did that particular RDM duty.

(As an added bonus, that has come to serve me well in other things. Notably when a boss is so large that tab-targeting won't re-select them when you're in too close. Or in things like P3S during Darkened Fire, where you have the boss and four invulnerable but targetable blobs of flame, and if you target someone else to heal them and then switch targets back via tab targeting, there's a very good chance you select one of the invulnerable fires instead and waste your casts. So I just keep the boss focus-targeted during raid and then hit backtick whenever I want to return from targeting someone to heal to actually targeting the thing I mean to attack.)

[Packetdancer]

Yeah, that was challenging to be honest, but I started the game as an Archer/Bard and was determined to see the game through to its (current) 'end' as one.

And still have a lot to learn - whilst have briefly explored other jobs I really want to be less awful at Bard before concentrating on trying to learn something else

Allow me to actually offer a counterpoint: trying the other jobs is actually a surprisingly good way to improve at bard. And I mean this seriously.

Playing other jobs gives you different views of fights, and can open up greater understanding of how the pieces of a fight -- and of a job -- work together. This is particularly true across roles; I think having been a healer main made me a better tank when I was starting out, because I could look at what I was doing from a healer's perspective. Similarly, I think having tanked made me a better melee DPS, because I had a tank's understanding of where and how they were likely to have to position a boss. And I started as a healer, but I think I came back from leveling All The Things as a better healer than I began, because now I could look at a fight from the PoV of a tank or melee DPS or whatever else. Etc.

But even within roles, it can help. Bard didn't click for me when I first played it. (Which made me sad, because I was actually an archer/bard during the 2.0 beta and had hoped it would be a good job to try.) But when I was leveling absolutely everything to 80 during ShB and circled back to bard, I found that it was much easier to grasp. And I hadn't really consciously done a lot of studying on how bard all fit together; it was just that by virtue of having taken most of the other jobs to cap, I'd converted what might've been a narrow view of fights (as just a healer, or whatever) to a much broader one about how all the roles would fit together, since I'd played all the roles. And as a result of seeing how things fit together on many other jobs, it was easier to see how bard's kit fit together as I leveled it.

[Carin-Eri]

Allow me to actually offer a counterpoint: trying the other jobs is actually a surprisingly good way to improve at bard. And I mean this seriously.

Playing other jobs gives you different views of fights, and can open up greater understanding of how the pieces of a fight -- and of a job -- work together. This is particularly true across roles; I think having been a healer main made me a better tank when I was starting out, because I could look at what I was doing from a healer's perspective. Similarly, I think having tanked made me a better melee DPS, because I had a tank's understanding of where and how they were likely to have to position a boss. And I started as a healer, but I think I came back from leveling All The Things as a better healer than I began, because now I could look at a fight from the PoV of a tank or melee DPS or whatever else. Etc.

But even within roles, it can help. Bard didn't click for me when I first played it. (Which made me sad, because I was actually an archer/bard during the 2.0 beta and had hoped it would be a good job to try.) But when I was leveling absolutely everything to 80 during ShB and circled back to bard, I found that it was much easier to grasp. And I hadn't really consciously done a lot of studying on how bard all fit together; it was just that by virtue of having taken most of the other jobs to cap, I'd converted what might've been a narrow view of fights (as just a healer, or whatever) to a much broader one about how all the roles would fit together, since I'd played all the roles. And as a result of seeing how things fit together on many other jobs, it was easier to see how bard's kit fit together as I leveled it.

Decided to follow your advice.

Chose to give Red Mage another look. I'd started it, and found it fairly interesting, but (at the time) decided to continue trying to improve on Bard. However, again with your advice in mind, I did return to Red Mage a few days ago, and reached level 60 earlier today. I'm really enjoying it, although still not a great deal better at the gameplay I do find the rotation a little easier to get my head around.

So yeah, your advice was spot on - thank you

[Illmaeran]

Decided to follow your advice.

Chose to give Red Mage another look. I'd started it, and found it fairly interesting, but (at the time) decided to continue trying to improve on Bard. However, again with your advice in mind, I did return to Red Mage a few days ago, and reached level 60 earlier today. I'm really enjoying it, although still not a great deal better at the gameplay I do find the rotation a little easier to get my head around.

So yeah, your advice was spot on - thank you

Something that's been helpful for me is to do the raid(s) and trial roulette on my 90 for the tomestones and the others on the secondary job; in your case RDM. I main melee DPS, but tanking the "off-roulettes" really broadened my horizons in both roles, as Pax has said. Doing it this way will help you continue improving BRD while getting the tasty tomes while giving you a break to derp on the secondary job. There's nothing saying you have to stick to one secondary until max. It can be worth trying out different jobs as you get the urge. Who knows, you may like one you thought you'd hate! For me, that was PLD as I really disliked tanking in other games.

Thanks for keeping us updated on your progress. I look forward to future posts from my Suboptimal Sister.

[TaleraRistain]

Solo duties as a WHM main where you have to heal an NPC who is not in your party list drove me to actually bind both "Set Focus Target" and "Re-focus on Focus Target" to hotkeys. Now I can just focus-target the NPC (Shift-F for me), and then re-target them with the backtick key to heal without having to actually go click on them. I seem to recall being very glad I'd already started doing that when I did that particular RDM duty.

(As an added bonus, that has come to serve me well in other things. Notably when a boss is so large that tab-targeting won't re-select them when you're in too close. Or in things like P3S during Darkened Fire, where you have the boss and four invulnerable but targetable blobs of flame, and if you target someone else to heal them and then switch targets back via tab targeting, there's a very good chance you select one of the invulnerable fires instead and waste your casts. So I just keep the boss focus-targeted during raid and then hit backtick whenever I want to return from targeting someone to heal to actually targeting the thing I mean to attack.)

My old school is showing but I have a macro that does /assist, lol