The Masked Carnivale is Some of the Worst Content in FFXIV

[0blivion]

idk why we necroed this but Masked Carnivale is some of the best non raiding content this game has lol. Sure, some are a bit long winded, but most of the time failure is a skill issue. comparing it to savage is disingenuous because watching a guide will show you it's genuinely not hard. savage takes hours, often days to prog, esp. with PF, whereas with Masked Carnivale, the only weak link is yourself. You csn prog most fights in under an hour. thanks for playing. if spell acquisition is an issue, idk what to tell y'all: unsync exists and for non-dynamis players, PFing an all BLU party works.

[MayuAmakura]

if spell acquisition is an issue, idk what to tell y'all: unsync exists and for non-dynamis players, PFing an all BLU party works.

"Works" yeah if you can manage to get enough people for blue mage farming. A lot of the days there will be none.

[MayuAmakura]

Yeah, no kidding. I've been stuck on Stage 29 for years because I'm not a Savage raider, and if I can't beat Stage 29, I very likely can't beat any Stages that come after. Can't get most of the magic from Stormblood and Shadowbringers either, so even learning new spells stopped eventually and my spellbook remains unfinished.

Now all my Blue Mage does is complete its weekly Masked Carnivale (well, 2/3 of it anyway) and 10 FATEs for the week, but even that's only good up through Shadowbringers.

Stage 29 is relatively annoying if you don't have proper spells. I suggest that you get all high potency spells that can one shot hands instantly as they spawn and you'll win easily. This is the only hard mechanic, after that it's done.

[MayuAmakura]

Most of carnival stages can be completed within seconds if you have newest spells. Get moonflute, then do breath of magic and bosses are like instantly done. Get dancing plague spell and moon bleed which are high potency and help a lot. More broken spells you obtained, the easier stages become.

Only hard stage in my opinion is the last one stage 32. To get achievement you need physical spells which deal meager damage and this fight alone can last for 15-20 minutes. It's annoying and there is one mechanic which is pure RNG based so those lightning AOEs can constantly fall on you and then you're done. But once you do it, you get umbrella weapon.

[IOwn92FCHouses]

Yeah, man, I really necro’d a two-year-old thread — that’s how disappointed I am with Blue Mage’s exclusive content.
And yeah, most Carnivale stages go down in a couple of tries. I often ignored the “intended” mechanics on purpose — brute-forced them with damage, abused Ultravibration, or just tanked through. But that doesn’t mean they’re not annoying. The issue isn’t the difficulty — it’s the design. “Remember that random spell you learned a year ago and never used again? Well, now you need it for this one specific stage. Go find it!”
Is that supposed to be the identity of Blue Mage? Learning a hundred spells, using maybe twenty of them, and pretending the rest finally matter because the Carnivale forces you to? Keep that “identity” to yourself.

And please, don’t call that creativity. Creativity is when you use your tools to find your own solution — not when you’re forced to equip a forgotten spell just to pass.
Learning Tail Swipe solo — no one-shots, no Mimicry — that needed real creativity! I has to perfectly time White Wind, slow the boss to find space to dodge, and still keep DPS because the boss won’t kill himself. Or take the exploding slime stage — I had to get creative to complete it in the shortest possible time, using only wind-element spells to earn the full reward. But even there, that creativity only came from the three optional bonus conditions on the stage — and only because I happened to get that particular challenge rotation.

The Carnivale kills creativity with mandatory gimmicks. Success isn’t about how you use your abilities — it’s about whether you remember which obscure spell the devs decided was “required” this time. That’s not challenge. That’s obligation.


Oh, and yes, I did mean the final stages (I’m pretty sure I wrote that), when I said any mistake is fatal. Dancing among tons of AoEs, each one ready to send you back to the very first act — an unforgettable experience! That’s exactly where I had to memorize the entire fight down to the second, and only then was I able to clear it.

Lol. Ima ignore the rest of the post because it's all just whining and complaining for the sake of it. I just wanted to comment on complaining about... Learning a fight and being punished hard for mistakes... Is a negative to you. Speaks to who you are as a person. You want the reward without the effort. Without doing what's required for that reward. So you cry for change when it's not handed to you.

Just... Stay out of content you don't like and don't call for change based on your personal character flaw, ok pumpkin? Don't bother responding to me. I don't like to talk to people with your particular character flaw. The one where you break down and go on multi paragraph rants when faced with a little challenge. People like you are why Square feels the need to gut the game more and more each expansion. And it'll bother me for all of time. You're, unfortunately, way too common.

The only change we need is perma bans for thread necros. 2 years is a lot of time, kids. If you think you have a fresh perspective, start a new thread. Not rehash an outdated one.

[Roland_Deschain]

Yeah, no kidding. I've been stuck on Stage 29 for years because I'm not a Savage raider, and if I can't beat Stage 29, I very likely can't beat any Stages that come after.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. If stage 30 is actually easier than 29, then stage 31 is at least twice as hard. The second act is pure AoE hell — you have to constantly move along a precisely rehearsed route since many AoEs need to be dodged *before* the boss even starts casting them.

I remember struggling with stage 29 until I realized the boss was quietly applying a deadly debuff — yet another test to see if you have the right spell in your loadout. You also have to take down the hand that drains your mana first. Even then, I only cleared the fight thanks to luck, because even knowing all that, I still wiped on the hand phase several times — the boss just hits like a freight train. When I finally got lucky with crits and managed to burst down the boss and both hands quickly, the rest of the fight was fine, since that phase doesn’t repeat.

[Roland_Deschain]

Lol. Ima ignore the rest of the post because it's all just whining and complaining for the sake of it. I just wanted to comment on complaining about... Learning a fight and being punished hard for mistakes... Is a negative to you. Speaks to who you are as a person. You want the reward without the effort. Without doing what's required for that reward. So you cry for change when it's not handed to you.

Just... Stay out of content you don't like and don't call for change based on your personal character flaw, ok pumpkin? Don't bother responding to me. I don't like to talk to people with your particular character flaw. The one where you break down and go on multi paragraph rants when faced with a little challenge. People like you are why Square feels the need to gut the game more and more each expansion. And it'll bother me for all of time. You're, unfortunately, way too common.

The only change we need is perma bans for thread necros. 2 years is a lot of time, kids. If you think you have a fresh perspective, start a new thread. Not rehash an outdated one.

Lol. You clearly ignored even everything I said earlier, judging by the nonsense you just made up about me. Why even bother writing that text then?
Keep trembling over your precious “rewards” that must be earned through effort. Yeah, a glamour set and a stick with two materia slots — such a prize, truly worth blood and sweat. (That was sarcasm, by the way.)
How did you even survive the fact that every other job gets the same — or even better — rewards just for “talk to a couple of NPCs, kill one mob, and watch three cutscenes”? Counting your gray hairs yet, or have they all fallen out already?

[Selsix]

I -loved- the Masked Carnivale. It gave me something to do with my BLU and I liked that the game added at least somewhat complex gimmick fights for solo play. I'm honestly more irritated that they stopped adding more fights to the Carnivale years ago, as with abandoning it they've given me zero reason to play BLU beyond what I already have. Every time they raise the BLU level cap and add more spells I just say "okay but what am I supposed to do with it?" because there is quite literally zero reason to play BLU now. Do they expect me to just steamroll old content with it I've already done? That's really really stupid if so. Why even bother updating BLU if that's all there is for it?

Funny enough this is also my major concern for Beastmaster. It's allegedly launching with unique content too like how BLU had the Carnivale, but my worry is they'll eventually just say "good enough" and abandon that content just like the Carnivale and give me zero reason to level Beastmaster every update since there will simply be nothing to do with it. Limited jobs feel like a massive mistake because the dev team can't even bother giving you regular content to do with them beyond what was added on launch.

[Hyperia]

I gave up on BLU because they started to attach raids to getting the spells and that really limited the job for me. This forced what was going to be a solo friendly job into a mandatory group job and if you didn’t get the spells on content, it became increasingly difficult. If the devs would add an alternative means of getting spells, I would consider looking at the job again.

[Infindox]

I think Masked Carnivale is the better point of Blue Mage; a bunch of solo fights that act as puzzles. The rest of Blue Mage is "hope other people want to do the content with you".