Discussing your 'unpopular' opinions

[Connor]

As the title states, this thread is dedicated to discuss any feedback or opinions you have on the game that are contrary to the general discussion.

It feels like some threads on the forums have a slight tendency to become echo chambers rather than a developed discussion. I personally believe this to mostly be crowd appeasement; it doesn't feel nice to offer your own thoughts only to be criticized, ignored or insulted (e.g if you think X you aren't playing Y right). I think it'd be nice to have a thread dedicated to stating one's opinion without having to worry about whether it fits in with the opinion you're 'expected' to have.

To start, I'll throw out some of my own opinions that I don't believe are shared by others.

There are very few gear designs that are actually to my taste; the 'tribal garb that's missing fabric in some key areas' design gets very dull after both Heavensward and Stormblood used the crap out of the concept. That said, I can't think of any job-specific sets I didn't like (at in terms of the artifact armour sets).

Personally, I still feel Bard is too much Archer and not enough Bard, it just comes across as the reverse because you can occasionally use a 'music-flavoured ability' every now (then continue raining poisoning arrows on the enemy, as poets are wont to do according to FFXIV).

Scholar feels the exact opposite of a strategist in normal combat because you (should) pre-plan the majority of your healing to maximize dps. Whenever you're called upon, instead of having to adapt to the fight and make tactical use of your abilities, you just press Indomitability and everyone's already at max HP.

Lastly, I really enjoy having Cure and Raise on Red Mage and I'd happily take a dps loss if it meant giving Red Mage more healing/support oriented spells and abilities.

[Theodric]

Lyse, Minfilia, Aymeric and Haurchefant are some of the most predictable, overrated and tiresome characters in the game.

As for why? Simply put, as far as the MSQ's are concerned none of them can ever do anything wrong and everything they do ends up working out for the better with no actual threat of failure involved or negative consequences.

The Vault:

Haurchefant's demise also prevented most people from even bothering to see or understand the Archbishop's point of view, leading to him and his allies being seen not as a tragic antagonists but cackling villains with no redeeming qualities.

[CosmicKirby]

Haurchefant's demise also prevented most people from even bothering to see or understand the Archbishop's point of view, leading to him and his allies being seen not as a tragic antagonists but cackling villains with no redeeming qualities.

The lorebook does that. Almost all of the Heavensward are described as complete assholes, potentially villains. Some enjoy murder, some are rapists, others sleep around with no concern for others at all.

[Theodric]

The lorebook does that. Almost all of the Heavensward are described as complete assholes, potentially villains. Some enjoy murder, some are rapists, others sleep around with no concern for others at all.

I distinctly recall some of the Heaven's Ward being described as honourable and disliking their more uncouth brethren. Zephirin, for instance, yet he's shown to be smirking in-game when taking down a certain someone which only serves to give the impression that he is a psychopath as well. I suppose it's balanced out by Nidhogg not being much better, though.

I really like both Lyse and Minfillia

Out of curiosity, what do you like about them?

[AnimaAnimus]

Out of curiosity, what do you like about them?

Min I have a connection to due to v1's storyline and no one seems to understand that as a leader she of course isn't going to be on the frontlines, paperwork and securing relations doesn't happen on its own. A lot of what we did couldn't have been done without someone getting things done in the background.

Lyse has had a lot of character development and I am glad they took the worst scion and gave her some depth. I really didn't find her story so bad.

[TruebladeNuke]

Unpopular opinions you say? Well, I'm not entirely up to date on what opinions are popular and unpopular to the fanbase at large, but I can think of four things off the top of my head in which my own opinion goes against the rest of the overall fanbase's opinion. Mind you, it's mostly educated guessing on my part.

To list them off:

1: Minfillia, Alphinaud, and Lyse getting FAR more flack then they deserve. Especially poor Minfillia. Over all my time of playing this game, people seem to love accusing Minfillia of things. Before I add my own words to this, TV Tropes describes Minfillia's position all too well under a particular trope:

"Final Fantasy XIV has Minfilia, the leader of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn whose goal is to unite the city states of Eorzea against The Empire and finding a way to get rid of the primal and ascian threat for good. She also handles a lot of the political affairs between her group and the city states, which gives her a ton of responsibility and duties. Many fans declare her to be useless because she is "kidnapped a lot" and doesn't fight back, even though Minfilia is only captured twice and in both cases, she refused to give her captors what they were looking for and knew that she could be killed for resisting; her captors were a ruthless general and a Physical God, both which clearly overpowered her and she would stand no chance against them in an actual fight. Most people give Minfilia grief because in comparison to the other Scion members that are more active in the field, she is seen as passive."

I even bolded the particular part that grinds my gears when it comes to the fanbases treatment of Minfillia. To add my own words and also somewhat repeat, she refused to give her captors anything, even though it would very likely mean her death! But nope. People give her flack for not being a nail bitting badass. Nevermind the fact that she has little, if any, combat experience compared to the other members and would very quickly die if she so much as tried to punch or kick either of her two captors. Nevermind the fact that she assigned herself the position of handling arguably the most boring part of forming a team, which is the paperwork and diplomatic discussions with other nations. Nevermind the fact that SOMEONE had to handle that said paperwork (much of which happened off screen) while literally everyone else was off doing whatever they assigned themselves to do... or in the WoL's case, doing literally whatever they want. (Within limitations of the game's script of course)

... look. Long story short, Minfillia did more then the fanbase insists on giving her credit for. The major difference being that a lot of the work she did was the paperwork that SOOOOO many people find boring (because someone has to do it), and a lot of her said work happened off screen. Thus, I'm tired of hearing people claim that Minfillia does "nothing" when that couldn't be further from the truth. The ONLY flack she deserves is that she sometimes seems to forget you have a Linkpearl/Linkshell for a reason. But aside from that... ... actually, I'll stop myself there. Because I could keep venting for days straight about how disgusted I am of the treatment Minfillia gets from the fanbase.

Moving on to Alphinaud, I don't even know why people insist on continuing to give this poor guy flack. Have people seriously not paid any attention to his character development? Newsflash: He's no longer that guy he was when you first met him. This man went from being a somewhat annoying character upon first meeting him... to being that guy I'd trust as a combat bro to have my back in battle any day now. For goodness sakes people, this man has grown, and it shows. He's learned from his mistakes and has generally become a better character. Yet people still insist on acting like Alphinaud is literally the same guy he was when we first met him. Oh sure. Certain things about him haven't changed, but that's no excuse to flat out ignore his character development. :/

As for Lyse... I'll wait until Stormblood is over before I dive into her new character development. But as it currently stands, Lyse ALSO gets far more flack then she actually deserves. :/

Finally, we can move on to number 2. I'm sorry, but I was waiting for an excuse to vent all that out earlier for Minfillia, Lyse, and Alphinaud.

2: Those poor Moogles are getting more flack then they actually deserve. Yes, I realize I just got done with a similar matter via number 1, but the Moogles are a bit of a different case. To start, it's known in Heavensward that most of the Moogles in the Churning Mists are slackers. THESE guys actually did deserve some flack, and we did in fact get revenge on them via the Moogle Beast Tribe quest line and the DRK questline. The problem is that people seem to insist on holding a grudge against these little guys even after they turned over a new leaf. Not helped by the fact that the developers seem to have noted this and are now making Moogles this way in general for FFXIV. Just see the latest Valentine quest... which hilariously featured a Moogle who suggested you threaten to squeeze the poms of his workers. (Props to that Moogle, lol) To this day, even after all that's happened with them in FFXIV, I still find them cute. I mean hey... at least they aren't Squirrels.

3: This one is more of an "up in the air" thing I think, but I firmly believe the Tome system should remain as is. It's worked out for my casual play of the game so far. I can also see why there's an imposed limit 450 tomes per week too, given what some players would do if there wasn't any limit. I can't think of much to say beyond that.

4: I'm not certain if I should be listing this here or not, but I feel it needs to be said: The fact that the fanbase is extremely fragile about job changes, and the fact that no matter what the developers do, there'll ALWAYS be jobs that are preferred over others, no matter what changes are made. As someone who's been gaming for years, I've eventually learned to accept the fact that some jobs will always be left in the dust, even if it's just for a measly 1% difference. Because that is, unfortunately, the nature of too many MMO players. I'm going to be totally honest here: I think the developers have quite frankly done everything they could to balance the jobs to each other without literally making them all function the exact same way as the next job. (Said belief of job balance definately being my opinion) The ONLY job I'm actually frustrated with right now is DRK. And that's mainly because they killed the #1 thing I liked about DRK back in Heavensward. (Dark Arts + Dark Passenger combined with Dark Arts + Dark Dance = roughly 40% matrix dodge tank against enemy mob auto attacks. The larger the said mob, the more notable it was) Thus, even if they do get around to fixing DRK's other issues, I'm not certain I could ever consider DRK my main tank ever again if they don't get Dark Dance back... (I LOVE evasion tanking. It's the primary reason why DRK eclipsed my love of PLD during Heavensward. Now I'm back to PLD as my main tank)

I think I'll can it there. I've got other things I could list, but they'd definately be more just guesses on if said opinion is unpopular or not.

[AphraelAmarantha]

I hate pvp, and this overabundance of it in mmos (including this one) is tiresome. It's one of the reasons why I quit playing pso2 as well. The one good thing about this game is that it doesn't force you to do it like many others (-cough- Blade and Soul, Black Desert -cough-). Unfortunately, there are outfits I want that I wish they made available outside of pvp but I understand why they don't, so I will never get them.

I also hate parsers (yes I am bringing it up) because of how they change people. I've seen it first hand. Yes you have people who are jerks already but for some reason the people who you thought were nice start turning hostile and very unfun to play with once they become obsessed with a parser (saw this happen a lot in pso2, caused a lot of drama). The other thing with parsers is that they don't motivate people to improve, the people who are motivated to improve were already motivated before they started using parsers. I will use myself as an example with a game that has official parsers (blade and soul). When I see my damage numbers lagging, I just get discouraged and stop playing because I know i will never be good enough to reach these highly strict dps requirements. It's one reason why I dont liek enrage timers and doing Savage either because you either be a dps whore or you quit. I just want to play the game, not go into this super whole micro analyzing thing just to beat a boss. That's ridiculous. If I wanted something that in depth and take up that much of my time, I would play a sim like Cities Skyline or play Civilization (I love Civ V, best Civ imo but I just don't have time for that game anymore D: ). Anyway, my point is I don't want to see an official parser in this game.

The Valentine's quest. This one annoyed me. I was going to do it until I found out you need two people which is fine, I would have done it with my bff but he doesn't have access to the game anymore so cant play. Sorry, doing a quest like this with a complete stranger to me makes me HIGHLY uncomfortable because people are weirdos and I don't want anyone getting the wrong idea. So yeah, I can't do this quest either. Wish they wouldn't put quests like this in the game.

Weekly limits on tome collection. Can't stand this either. Let me grind for the tomes so I can get what i want. All the weekly limit does is make me play a few days a week and then I stop playing for the rest of the week because I already have max tomes. Collecting the best gear I can get outside of Savage is one of things I like doing but i cant do it because of the stupid weekly limit. Grrr.

Oh and I hate crafting too. Why does every modern mmo or rpg in general have to have some form of life skill/ gathering nonsense? Its not fun and its boring. Hence why I don't level those classes, I don't like it. Another reason why I quit pso2 because to get a specific piece of gear that goes in a specific spot and its required to be ain top form, but you have to do cancerous gathering and life skilling to get that equipment, its irritating. At least getting crafted gear here isn't necessary either but life classes are still annoying.

Ok sorry, done ranting.

Lyse, Minfilia, Aymeric and Haurchefant are some of the most predictable, overrated and tiresome characters in the game.

As for why? Simply put, as far as the MSQ's are concerned none of them can ever do anything wrong and everything they do ends up working out for the better with no actual threat of failure involved or negative consequences.

The Vault:

Haurchefant's demise also prevented most people from even bothering to see or understand the Archbishop's point of view, leading to him and his allies being seen not as a tragic antagonists but cackling villains with no redeeming qualities.

Yeah, I can see that with many characters. What annoys me the most about the msq though is that is doesn't permanently kill off any characters (except one) until plot demands it which is rather annoying tbh. Lets just say I wasn't happy with the ending to 4.2 msq.

[Zojha]

Unpopular opinions you say?

The power of healers in this game and the mechanics and gameplay that result from it make "difficult" content in PvE as well as PvP in general sadly unenjoyable.

[loreleidiangelo]

Unpopular opinions you say?

The power of healers in this game and the mechanics and gameplay that result from it make "difficult" content in PvE as well as PvP in general sadly unenjoyable.

Not as unpopular as you think; I staunchly agree.

[Ametrine]

Characters (like Alphinaud) with realistic flaws and have time taken to have slow growth and development being slung hate at every pass. Because learning and becoming a better person isn't a bad storyline.

The bizarre push of every job to do as much damage as possible to complete content as fast a possible makes certains roles less enjoyable.

STR Tank meta, in particular, is a vile bane of the game and I sincerely hope SE continues to force these inconsiderate tanks out by iLVL and gear limits preventing them from getting into content and torturing healers, or by adding STR to tank specific gear next to vitality and defense.