"In from the Cold" Scenario, any way to skip it?

[Enkidoh]

Having just done this duty myself I can see both sides of the arguement because it is frustrating by design, because that is the intent - it's meant to show

the desperation and confusion the WoL is experiencing in that situation, having had their body stolen by their arch enemy and their soul plonked into a random Garlean centurion which has all the defensive capabilities of a wet paper bag (and the insinuaition is the Garlean whose body you inhabit in that scene was already dead - Maxima tells you afterwards that as soon as your soul vacated it the body went immediately cold and stiff, suggesting you were inhabiting a corpse to boot), and which Zenos proceeds to head to Camp wearing your skin in order to slaughter everyone for the evilz while his insane Ascian sidekick drops you in the middle of the capital ruins again purely for sadistic fun, so your normal way of handling such things is completely thrown out the window.

It is hence best to approach it like the earlier roleplay duty with Thancred, only with even less defensive capability and no actual way of hiding save running for cover.

Hence many aspects of the duty actually reflect this confusion, the timer being the big one - 30 minutes is more than enough time that you need to complete the duty, as the comments to "get to Camp Broken Glass

before Zenos does!"

is actually a lie from a gameplay perspective. Your objective is to stay alive and get out of the city - accomplishing that will automatically send you to the camp anyway so it's not an actual rush as much as it seems it is. Having said that, it's still best not to sit around twiddling

your borrowed Garlean

thumbs so be mindful of the time, but don't let it distract you.

As others have already laid out the strategy, the way to completing is actually quite simple, the hard part is having to skulk around the ruins and wreckage avoiding enemies, although you can afford to kill the occassional soldier,

as Fannyboy so enjoyed mockingly pointing out to you at the start, you simply don't stand a chance against the machina in your Garleansuit

- luckily they're more easily avoided and only seem to be (mostly) in parts of the city where you don't really need to go. This goes for when you find the fuel cannister - if an enemy attacks you while carrying it you will simply drop it and can pick it up again after the enemy is dealt with (this caught me out the second attempt I did it). And where possible, click on the bodies of the dead soldiers scattered around, as they mostly have medkits for healing, a vital means of staying alive. Therefore, the strategy in a nutshell is (possible spoilers):

Right at the start, use Rampart and Fight or Flight (the soldier will not attack you until you attack him, unless you're literally right in his face) then use the weaponskill combo to defeat him. After he's killed, select the 'pay respects' option first, then check his body for a medpack and to satisfy the first requirement which removes the barrier to the next area.
Keep to the ruins and try to avoid enemies if possible, especially the machina (although you probably could take on one of the slashers, the death claws, war machines and iron giants are just too strong and will kill you quickly)
From the starting point head east then south and west, keeping to the walls and wreckage to avoid enemies, this should bring you to a damaged magitek armour that the game will tell you needs to be repaired so as to get rid of all the enemies in front - this involves getting it's key and a fuel cannister.
The key can be found from the wounded soldier lying in a building adjacent to the magitek armour. Speak to him and he'll give you the key.
Double back the way you came, then from the original starting point, keep heading east til you come across another damaged magitek armour that is identified differently to the rest. Click on it to get the fuel cannister that you are now carrying.
Return the way you went, hiding behind rubble and diving through damaged walls and buildings to avoid enemies as much as you can - as stated above if you get attacked you'll drop the cannister, and can pick it back up after fighting the enemy.
Take it back to the magitek armour and once it's activated, climb aboard - it has three attacks, a manual positioning AoE attack that does heavy damage to everything in the AoE, apowerful burst attack that is actually not as useful as it seems, as it only is at close range and has a long cooldown, and a frontal AoE attack that is not as powerful as the burst attack but has a faster cooldown. Use the manual AoE to clear out the bulk of the enemies with the third attack picking off anything that comes in range while the first is cooling down. Once all the enemies are taken care of, you'll be prompted to dismount.
Follow the path beyond that will take you out of the city to underneath a highway overpass where Garlean citizens are fighting random monsters (ice grenades, polar bears and yetis). Help them out as they'll continue to fight if their initial enemy is defeated - just be aware of the ice grenades as they will explode once their HP reaches zero with no visible AoE field and will cause you to take heavy damage.
Eventually they'll reach a point where another Garlean is in magitek armour fighting off more enemies. At a certain point cereleum tanks will drop down and a full area AoE field appears with a small safe zone behind the magitek armour - the pilot will tell everyone to get behind the magitek armour so don't dillydally! A massive explosion will go off that will kill everything, and even knock you down to 1HP (don't worry this is actually scripted)
This sends you into a short QTE where you have to keep yourself from completely blacking out - all you need to do is stop the gauge from reaching zero after ten seconds which is actually easier than it sounds. Just hit the button rapidly and you should pass it (this is probably the easiest QTE I've had to do in the game).
This then leads to the final section where you appear lying on the roadway, and have to crawl a short distance (ignore the 'get to Camp Broken Glass before Zenos and save your friends!' message, you just have to crawl to the end of the street to complete the duty,

which from then on is just cutscene time and once it's all over you'll finally be past this.

So, don't give up hope! It is doable, you just need to approach things with a clear mind and not pannicking.

[Momo_Kozuki]

I really dislike this instance. I think the auto-HP regen suspension is kinda too punishing, forcing you to stealth around while the enemies keep doing their random direction check. Fight one will half-kill you, and fight two is near kill you. Let ignore the magitek cuz they will likely just kill you.


I was about to throw towel to do it at Very Easy, but I luck out till the end on the first try.


Atmosphere-wise, however, I give credit to the instance for making you feel helpless in a foreign body, desperately racing against time through a horde of tempered soldiers, crazy machines and help whoever you can help so that they will help you in turn, to stop Zenos from slaughtering your friends.


I think the dungeon experience can be vastly improved if:


-Removing auto-regen penalty. Don't let every fail attempt of stealth failure makes it harder to play further. This or medkit heals you fully.

-Enemies look at a fixed direction, and only turn after some time has passes. Or they patrol in a fixed path. Kinda like how Commando series do.
-Add some cues about where to go next on the map.

[Shougun]

Greetings and salutations,

Thank you for the feedback on this topic. I wanted to let you know that we're planning to make adjustments to the "In from the Cold" main scenario quest in Patch 6.01.

* The adjustments will only affect the Easy / Very Easy difficulties available after failing the duty, and will not affect the Normal difficulty.

Nice solution, also want to give feedback that I think the difficulty thing is a cool system. I don't think I said that before but when it was added I was like "oh, that's neat!" and went on my day but didn't say it lol. So, thumbs up for that idea.

I remember the ARR class quests were a bit challenging (not crazy hard, just not super easy) in the beta phase, but they were quickly made more accessible to not bottleneck players. . With this system more players could 'win' (very much a fan of when possible making content accessible yet also importantly fun for that large accessible group).

"get to Camp Broken Glass.

This actually threw me off because I was like "oh okay" and made the crow fly's direct path to location, full intending to scale objects to do it (some rubble wouldn't stop me!!!--- but an invisible wall will. . . ). Agreed there was some elements purposefully added to give a sense of desperation.

Honestly if SE was into making a hard mode, on their normal, easy system, I'd be for that... I had like 23 minutes left on the clock and 5 potions. . Once I got the hang of what they were expecting of me it was easy, also the monsters don't chase forever so I was able to run through a few places haphazardly and just de-aggro them lol. Maybe it would do to have less monsters, with larger cones of vision, that can dash to you and slow your movement and such. Not that it's needed, it was still fun (once I got over that I needed to do what the 'game' wanted me to do, and not what the quest objective wanted which was what I was fixated on originally-- STRAIGHT TO BROKEN GLASS, THIS TRAIN STOPS FOR NOTHING ).

[LaughingBanana]

I think simply giving the ability for the player to see enemy's view cones would massively improve this quest.

i managed to complete it on my second try, and context/atmosphere wise its really cool, but I'd be lying if I say I don't have a certain level of dislike towards how they handle the gameplay portion of the quest.

[ICountFrom0]

See, this is what happens when it's all in one topic, it gets large enough, it gets the crown, somebody shows up, and the easy mode gets easier so people don't have to struggle if they just don't have the reaction time.

[Shironeko_Narunyan]

working as intended
im guessing you spend most of your time rping on ff14?

Going out of your way to assert dominance on the forums and being an ass to people?

[Millerna]

Finally got to the point where I had to do this quest yesterday (Yes, I'm levelling very slowly ...)

I actually liked the instance. I wouldn't say it had stealth mechanics, since you couldn't actually really hide, just make sure you stay far enough away from the enemies. I never got close enough to any of the magiteks to aggro those, apart from right towards the end where I almost ran into one. I'm pretty decent at avoiding enemies though, that was one of the major things to do back in EQ and FFXI and such

But I think I liked quest because, like other have already said, because of the desperation. Also, I'm very attached to my character (I've been Elezen since 1.0, only changing to Viera for a little while, but that never felt right), so when my body got stolen, that really didn't sit well with me at all, and I wanted to get it back ASAP.

I can imagine a lot of people not liking it though, because it's a pretty hefty change of pace all of a sudden, going from near invincible to being very vulnerable.

[Loonies]

Greetings and salutations,

Thank you for the feedback on this topic. I wanted to let you know that we're planning to make adjustments to the "In from the Cold" main scenario quest in Patch 6.01.

* The adjustments will only affect the Easy / Very Easy difficulties available after failing the duty, and will not affect the Normal difficulty.

That is a very good idea, so everyone can choose to go the easy way or continue the more difficult way. Thumbs up for fast response, another fact why FF 14 is that good.

[Raoul9753]

Seriously?

This was one of the coolest instances the game has given me in a while, exactly because it was one of there very, veeeery rare ones that is not just braindead kill everything easymode.
The enemies have very predictable behavior and are basically blind when their back is turned, they only have 2 positions where they can go, and they stay in position for a long time. So its just a matter of taking a second to look where they are facing and planning your route accordingly.

I did it on the first try and I had to fight exactly 2 non-essential fights.

Though I have to agree on one thing, finding out where to go is not easy and really needs you to be lucky. I think I spend the first 5-10 minutes running around collecting Medipacks before I actually found the broken down Mech... The Soldier was easy to spot after that thanks to the big mark over his head, the fuel took a while.

After that, it was really just straigt forward easy mode, especially since I had alot of med-packs anyway...

[Loonies]

There is no change in normal mode, only easy mode is going to be easy.