Thread: Feedback as a returner to 4.0 with a new character

I'll try to keep this short and simple.

• Road to 60: very nice. This actually would be a perfect buff for all returning characters. If it applied to all characters of a returning account, it would be a great incentive for people to come and try out a new expansion, knowing they can quickly catch up to the new expansion. Please consider doing this.
• Silver chocobo feathers: why only body and legs? Why not a full set including weapon, armor and accessories for 10 feathers? Already saves a lot of Poetics farming, but still seems arbitrarily half-hearted. Giving a full set of 260 would definitely make one very excited to enter Stormblood.
• 2.0 Relic base weapon: some are often out of stock on the market board. Thankfully it's easy to find a crafter willing to craft one on the fly. Might become a problem in later expansions.
• 2.0 Relic Animus books: should change FATE category to "any FATE within this sub-zone". Camping for a FATE is not fun. Don't see a rational reason for forcing specific FATE. Also WTF is with that FATE to the north-western passage of Camp Bronze Lake? It literally always fail within the minute without player intervention because of how overpowered the enemies are. Players have to camp right there for any hope of completing this one. BAD. Bad design.
• Party Finder: long list of items for not yet unlocked content. How about a checkbox to always hide content the player has yet to unlock?
• Long queue as DPS on non-leveling dungeon: quite a disapppointment considering how everything else proceeds smoothly (except the Animus books FATE category). Gave up on Crystal Tower after a 3 hour queue, because I had to do an instanced fight in early Heavensward MSQ.

And a suggestion to improve the boring solo experience of CNJ/WHM:

• Lv 6 Trait: Stone has a chance to proc "Aero Hammer" effect, which makes the next Aero cast within 6 seconds hit for its full duration effect immediately. Doesn't overwrite existing Aero on the target.
• Lv 12 Trait: Aero ticks has a chance to proc "Raging Stone" effect, which makes the next Stone within 6 seconds an instant cast.

Both effects apply to the upgraded variants of Aero and Stone.

Generally speaking, it has been the same FFXIV as before. Still fun to play every once in a while. It's just full of small things that are "not quite there". All in all good work. Now give us that glamour log already!

I wouldn't mind it if you updated this as you continued your way through heavensward and into SB. Not to say I disagree or agree with anything you're saying, but it is interesting with your perspective.

Originally Posted by Zfz

[*]2.0 Relic base weapon: some are often out of stock on the market board. Thankfully it's easy to find a crafter willing to craft one on the fly. Might become a problem in later expansions.
[*]2.0 Relic Animus books: should change FATE category to "any FATE within this sub-zone". Camping for a FATE is not fun. Don't see a rational reason for forcing specific FATE. Also WTF is with that FATE to the north-western passage of Camp Bronze Lake? It literally always fail within the minute without player intervention because of how overpowered the enemies are. Players have to camp right there for any hope of completing this one. BAD. Bad design.

They will not change these because it is very old content that is completely obsolete. I like your suggestions but this content will never be touched again.

Originally Posted by Zfz

[*]Party Finder: long list of items for not yet unlocked content. How about a checkbox to always hide content the player has yet to unlock?

This has already been brought to the devs and they said they would look into it

Originally Posted by Zfz

[*]Long queue as DPS on non-leveling dungeon: quite a disapppointment considering how everything else proceeds smoothly (except the Animus books FATE category). Gave up on Crystal Tower after a 3 hour queue, because I had to do an instanced fight in early Heavensward MSQ.

Get used to long DPS queues because they are a problem throughout the game and everyone knows it. As for the CT series, apparently, we are getting alliance raid roulette in 4.1 so please look forward to that.

I've actually completed Heavensward when I wrote the post at the top. Heavensward isn't much different from when I did it in 3.x, and the extra guaranteed drop from dungeons honestly sounded cool but had minimal effect, mostly due to the Road to 60 buff skewing the experience a lot. But even back then in 3.x, I don't think I ever had to do the same leveling dungeon more than twice either. This run, I have seen no usable gear from coffers at all until level 57, which was the same for my PLD in 3.x. And the guaranteed rewards from Sohm Al replace my guaranteed reward from Duskvigil. So it was kinda disappointing.

I would think the quick succession of dungeons every 2 levels is too much. I liked the ARR pacing of being able to run a dungeon 4-5 times and get more upgrades before having to replace them. For 5.0, I would suggest maybe having 2 dungeons at level 71, then 2 dungeons at level 76, then 1 dungeon at level 79. This lets the pairs of dungeons share gear and creates variation, plus a period of time for our gear upgrades to settle in. But that's from a dungeon lover. I'm sure there are people who are throwing a fit now and calling me all sorts of names for this suggestion, ready to reply and write me off as a retard.

Interesting experiment I did was to have my WHM and PLD take all Heavensward quest EXP (Road to 60 doubles quest EXP as well). The RDM was responsible for actual questing (I was not going to endure that boring Stone spam for much longer) and together with SAM they do the daily roulette runs and quest dungeon runs. While waiting in the DPS queue, I'd take care of the side quests.

(Worthy mention, the clusters reward made the story dungeon queues less than 10 minute on peak hour, and mostly under 20 minutes off-peak. Very nice. But change to the Lv 50 and Lv 60 non-story dungeons, and DPS queues are never less then 30 minutes, with off-peak wait times sometimes often taking more than 40 minutes.)

Both the RDM and SAM hit 60 first (I took just over a month of calendar days to finish up to 4.0 MSQ, so I had a lot of daily roulettes to run). WHM got to 60 first, and PLD stopped short at about 59.5, because I made my share of mistakes accepting quest rewards on my RDM several times. The missing half level was quickly made up by going back to do the PLD job quests and a few Heavensward daily hunt marks.

(Before anyone asks, GLA 1-15 was Ul'dah beginner quests and hunting log, 15-30 was PotD, and PLD 30-48.5 was non-stop dungeon grind over a long night, 48.5-50 was hunting logs.)

So now my new character has 4 level 60 jobs from one run-through Heavensward content. Admittedly the WHM started Heavensward at 53, because the idea of this experiment didn't come to me until I realized I was overleveling too much on my WHM.

God bless whoever thought of the Road to 60. Intead of being locked into one job I selected but may not like in the end, I have a choice of 4 jobs to go into Stormblood.

What would have also been great was to let returners and newbies "link" a job to the main job. And let the linked job receive a copy of all EXP received by the main job. Replacing Road to 60 with this would also have been great for me. People could say play WHM and link up MNK, halfway through deciding that WHM was boring, and have MNK ready to take over any time (gear may be a problem, but the changes to city vendor takes care of that).

In general, I love how it's possible to just push on with the content I like, instead of having to wait for gated content in the current patch. I like how I can farm for Poetics as I need, instead of always worring about a 450 cap.

And indeed I'm looking forward to the alliance roulette. I stopped halfway through Alexander in 3.x, and definitely would like to finish it while syncced.

For laughs:

Crystal Tower Labyrinth of the Ancients queue. It did chime at about 172 minutes or so, but one of them declined quickly and from then on people started leaving the queue, and I took this screenshot just before I logged off to go to bed.

Originally Posted by Nhisso

Lmao at this. Especially the Japanese quest list. So much basement.

Failing to see whats so funny about someone who can apparently read and possibly speak in at least two languages.

Originally Posted by Nhisso

Lmao at this. Especially the Japanese quest list. So much basement.

Not sure what basement is supposed to mean, but just to clarify, I'm a professional translator, working English-Chinese bi-directional. I learnt Japanese as a hobby. So whenever I play a game, I mostly try to enjoy it in its original language. My apologies if you found the Japanese screenshot offensive. Or if you found it funny, then good for you, I suppose? The point was the queue time, which most people playing this game should be able to read.

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I don't think the 2.0 Relic was a waste of time. After all, it's a game in which a lot of options are provided, and we get to choose what we want to do. I'm not leveling up this character to raid 4.0 Savage. It doesn't matter if I took another 6 months to get to level 70. As long as I'm having fun, I don't think it's time wasted.

I mean, we don't go to people and say, if you're not having fun my way then you're wasting your time. Right?

As for the CNJ/WHM suggestion, I'd really just like to see something changed about the Stone spam. Anything to spice it up. Something very simple, yet breaks from the monotonous one-spell spam from level 1 to level 60. Not suggesting that WHM be made more complex, just something that's not a single-spell spam.

Regarding dead content, I have the feeling that the devs don't like to have too much dead content, and that's why the relic questlines force people back into old dungeons. They've restrained from doing this to raids and alliances up to now, but I don't think it's as easy as "dead content is dead". If there's a way to revive them, I don't see why not.

Well, the original purpose of the thread has been fulfilled, thanks everyone for reading and chiming in. I'll revisit and respond to further suggestions and discussion every now and then, but I don't think I've got anything else to add as feedback to being a returner in 4.0.

Thank you all.

Originally Posted by Zfz

Not sure what basement is supposed to mean, but just to clarify, I'm a professional translator, working English-Chinese bi-directional. I learnt Japanese as a hobby. So whenever I play a game, I mostly try to enjoy it in its original language. My apologies if you found the Japanese screenshot offensive. Or if you found it funny, then good for you, I suppose? The point was the queue time, which most people playing this game should be able to read.

Hey I have no issue with what language you play this game in but a lot of the lore and dialogue is made in English first.
I generally use the JP audio for voiced cutscenes but English text for the puns and other nice lore tidbits.

You should read into MCKF's work on this game it's amazing what him and his crew had done!