Echoes of Vana'diel FFXI Alliance Raid

[Powercow]

Having the wiki while playing is pretty much a requirement lol.
I remember the days when we printed out stuff from old forums like killing ifrit, ffxiah, alakazham etc.

11 isn't a handholding game like 14, you dont have quest markers. NPC are generally cryptic on what you have to do for a story mission and side quests are generally a waste of time, you dont get exp rewards or anything.
It's a very different game made for a different era (pre WoW).

Dragoon AF helm quest: "The man you're looking for is studying dark magic to the south." Said in San d'Oria.

So what's south of Sandy? Valkurm? Bastok? Kuzotz? Maybe Vollbow? Yes, all of those. The correct answer though is the ass-end of the Temple of Uggalepih, which is as far east as it is south.

Also DRK AF quest in Ordelle's, which you only know to go to Ordelle's because someone said Zeid was wandering the world and you just happened to stumble across him by zoning in. "The monster attacked when the adventurer dropped a darksteel ingot." Okay, cool, so I guess I just... drop an ingot? Kind of pricey but okay...

Nope, you need to find a specific ??? marker, one of like 25 in that godsforsaken maze, and trade a darksteel ingot to that. Then you kill a monster and get a weapon. So now what, go find Zeid again? NOPE! Time to, for no discernable reason, go find another arbitrary ??? and trade the weapon to that to spawn another enemy, then repeat the process one more time, then zone out the back entrance of Ordelle's for an extra cutscene, all with no explanation of why you'd do anything after killing the first monster.

God I love that game.

[Elkanah]

The very first boss of the Echoes of Vanadiel Raid - - PlayOnline sign up and sign in.

Also, the gear HAS to be XI related. It cannot be this bs "inspirational gear" crap that we got [Example] the MonHun collab (that I'm still pissed at). If it's not, I don't think I'm gonna be playing till 8.0 and skill entirely lol.

[Wildsprite]

Some of you are for having Vana'diel be one of the unjoined shards. It could be, we have several that haven't been rejoined including the 11th. We have no idea how the unjoined shards developed. Remember the "Unlost world"(Yoshida let it slip that this is the 9th and I do hope they will find a creative way in lore to tell us) is a shard and it didn't develop anything like the other shards that we're aware of. The First I think is an exception in how close it developed to the source. My point is there is nothing to say the 5 races of Vana'diel couldn't be reflections of the races on the source. If they choose to go this route though I really hope they take the time to make a good story to bring us there.
I'm personally against it being a shard though. I would rather they found a way to have us travel to the actual universe that XI is in. This could give the current Devs of XI more to do.

[Avoidy]

All I want are new-feeling experimental mechanics, i.e. things besides stack/spread, or at the very least hide it behind a cool aesthetic so I don't just feel like I'm doing the same thing over and over again. Euphrosyne was so overtly guilty of this. My deity, the final boss of that place, was such a disappointment. Literally just a left/right style floating-lady boss with a reskin of the eden dog boss. Hell, it really was just a mix of E9N and E10N, wasn't it. A floating lady. A dog. Left/Right arena cleaves. Who made this? "Group of young devs," according to the interviews. And, no offense, but it showed. There was less a sense of "let's build on what came before and do something unique" and more a sense of "it's our first time making one of these, so let's just do what normal raids usually do."

Remember Ozma? Or TG Cid? Or hell, the giant rotating aoes in the puppets bunker? Remember when the 3 teams got split up and had to handle mechanics that could affect other groups? Remember stuff that felt like "wow, I've never seen this before" or stuff that felt like "wow, this chaos would really only be possible with 24 people," now it's just "everyone gets an aoe", god damn man.

[Daralii]

All I want are new-feeling experimental mechanics, i.e. things besides stack/spread, or at the very least hide it behind a cool aesthetic so I don't just feel like I'm doing the same thing over and over again. Euphrosyne was so overtly guilty of this. My deity, the final boss of that place, was such a disappointment. Literally just a left/right style floating-lady boss with a reskin of the eden dog boss. Hell, it really was just a mix of E9N and E10N, wasn't it. A floating lady. A dog. Left/Right arena cleaves. Who made this? "Group of young devs," according to the interviews. And, no offense, but it showed. There was less a sense of "let's build on what came before and do something unique" and more a sense of "it's our first time making one of these, so let's just do what normal raids usually do."

Remember Ozma? Or TG Cid? Or hell, the giant rotating aoes in the puppets bunker? Remember when the 3 teams got split up and had to handle mechanics that could affect other groups? Remember stuff that felt like "wow, I've never seen this before" or stuff that felt like "wow, this chaos would really only be possible with 24 people," now it's just "everyone gets an aoe", god damn man.

Someone could write an essay on how bad Myths of the Realm was in almost every regard. There were a few neat visuals, the music was generally good, and Nald'thal had one interesting mechanic that no one ever sees because of how low it was tuned, but it's drowned out by how terrible so much of the design(visuals and mechanics), balancing, story, etc was.

[AnimaAnimus]

Someone could write an essay on how bad Myths of the Realm was in almost every regard. There were a few neat visuals, the music was generally good, and Nald'thal had one interesting mechanic that no one ever sees because of how low it was tuned, but it's drowned out by how terrible so much of the design(visuals and mechanics), balancing, story, etc was.

On top of the multitude of other things wrong with the Myths of the Realm raids I thought stuff like how basically the God of Space and Time only had 1 little speed up effect. Then they combined him with the Goddess of Fate and nothing with fate happening at all either. The God of Knowledge had 0 puzzles. The Goddess of Love had 0 charm attacks. The God of Destruction who has a meteor as his symbol dropped a rock that was less powerful than the one a chocobo could drop. The list goes on and on.

They should have played on the portfolios of the Twelve much more when it came to their attacks. It was the perfect time for them to be really creative and give us something amazing and they dropped the ball so hard it deflated.

[Powercow]

On top of the multitude of other things wrong with the Myths of the Realm raids I thought stuff like how basically the God of Space and Time only had 1 little speed up effect. Then they combined him with the Goddess of Fate and nothing with fate happening at all either. The God of Knowledge had 0 puzzles. The Goddess of Love had 0 charm attacks. The God of Destruction who has a meteor as his symbol dropped a rock that was less powerful than the one a chocobo could drop. The list goes on and on.

They should have played on the portfolios of the Twelve much more when it came to their attacks. It was the perfect time for them to be really creative and give us something amazing and they dropped the ball so hard it deflated.

Yeah it would have been nice to see more creativity there. Give Byregot a mechanic where he crafts a device, and depending on what pieces and what order he uses them in it creates a different mechanic. Nothing too complicated, it's a 24man after all, but maybe a golem with 3 random components pulled from a list of 6 that the raid needs to execute in sequence. Hell if they want to trust their players, let each group "craft" a device by like, smashing crystals in order to help them in the rest of the fight.

And to be fair, the god of knowledge did have a puzzle, it was the little triangles and the rotating safe spot. Those... were really weak "puzzles", but I think after the backlash against Mathblaster they may have been a little hesitant to make 24man pugs use their brain.

[ReynTime]

Some of you are for having Vana'diel be one of the unjoined shards. It could be, we have several that haven't been rejoined including the 11th. We have no idea how the unjoined shards developed. Remember the "Unlost world"(Yoshida let it slip that this is the 9th and I do hope they will find a creative way in lore to tell us) is a shard and it didn't develop anything like the other shards that we're aware of. The First I think is an exception in how close it developed to the source. My point is there is nothing to say the 5 races of Vana'diel couldn't be reflections of the races on the source. If they choose to go this route though I really hope they take the time to make a good story to bring us there.
I'm personally against it being a shard though. I would rather they found a way to have us travel to the actual universe that XI is in. This could give the current Devs of XI more to do.

XI is handled by a handful of dedicated staff, and the actual developers who help with the small updates it gets are actually XIV developers.

[MikkoAkure]

Some of you are for having Vana'diel be one of the unjoined shards.

This might age like a banana in a month, but it was said by one of the developers that this is not the case so you can rest easy:

To be absolutely clear, there is no direct connection between FFXIV’s Hydaelyn and FFXII’s Ivalice or even FFXI’s Vana’diel. They are not the same world in different dimensions or time—they are their own separate worlds. However, there are certain connections to people or objects that appear in these other worlds that figure into the story of FFXIV as it has been conceived and is being told.

Besides geography remaining somewhat consistent across shards while Vana'diel looks nothing at all like what we have, Altana, Promathia, Kuluu/Zilart, Galka reincarnation/tails/missing digit, Tarutaru knees(?), the whole Crystal War split timeline/parallel world plot from WotG, and that world's origin story don't fit with FFXIV's setting.

[Rhivryn]

I'm so so so so so so so so excited for this. I don't care what the gears are, they'll be my glams for at least the next year, if not longer <3