2479: Palace of the Dead, Solo

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One of the things that had me most interested in patch 3.45 for Final Fantasy XIV was the ranking system for the Palace of the Dead dungeon I talked about yesterday. This tallies a score for you whenever you play with a fixed party (be it solo or up to four players) and thus allows you to compare your progress against other players from around the world.

Alongside the introduction of this ranking system came a few rebalancing changes to make soloing Palace of the Dead a lot more practical than it was when it was first introduced; previously, anything above about floor 20 at a push was very difficult if you were by yourself, but now, you can theoretically go up to floor 100 and beyond if you’ve upgraded your gear enough and your skills are up to snuff.

One of the things I’ve appreciated about Palace of the Dead since its launch was the fact that since it’s largely impossible to “outgear” it — your regular gear has no meaning inside, only your Aetherpool upgrade levels, and even those are capped and synced if they’re too high for the floor you’re on and the level you are — you had to actually play properly. That means no cheesing mechanics, no standing in AoEs because you have enough HP to just soak them up, and swift punishment if you don’t know how to play your job properly and effectively, sometimes in an unconventional party lineup.

Today, I made it to floor 60 solo, initially using Arcanist to go as far as floor 50 (my Arcanist hadn’t yet reached level 30 and thus couldn’t be upgraded into Scholar or Summoner, but the experience point rewards from completing these floors were enough to get me from 23 to 30 without too much difficulty) and subsequently as Summoner.

Arcanist/Scholar/Summoner aren’t classes I’ve played much in the past, though I found Palace of the Dead’s accelerated levelling to be quite a good way to learn how they work. In particular, levelling Arcanist to 60 without Summoner’s extra Job abilities was a solid way to learn the basics of how the class worked, then upgrading to Summoner built on that foundation. I am now regretting the fact that I haven’t levelled Summoner prior to today, because goddamn, that class is fun.

The reason I picked Arcanist and Summoner to run solo is that they seemed the most naturally geared towards soloing in that they have the option of summoning a tank pet that can maintain the enemies’ attention while you cover them in festering boils and fling magic at them. The tank pet doesn’t get a lot of use in party play — largely because you normally have an actual human-controlled tank there that can perform the role better than an AI routine — but in Palace of the Dead, Topaz Carbuncle (Arcanist) and Titan-Egi (Summoner) have both proven invaluable, particularly when it comes to the bosses.

And speaking of the bosses, soloing floors 1-60 today has given me a new appreciation of these fights. When tackled in a party of four, they’re mostly rather easy (with the possible exception of floor 80’s boss, which has been the source of many a party wipe so far), though from floor 60 onwards they do start to have some more interesting mechanics. Solo, however, they all present a pretty formidable challenge as you have to dodge their mechanics, chug potions to keep your health topped up (assuming you’re not a healer) and somehow in the middle of all that find time to fling a few damaging abilities in their direction. I’m sure you can already see how helpful a tanking pet would be in this situation!

Thus far the secret to successful soloing seems to be having decently levelled gear — currently mine is around the +64 mark, which has seen me safely to floor 60 so far, and from this point onwards the upgrades from the silver chests are less likely to fail, too, so repeated runs will eventually push it up towards +99, which I suspect will be strongly recommended to tackle floor 80 and onwards.

According to the leaderboards on The Lodestone, no-one on Primal data centre has made it to floor 100 solo yet. I have little doubt that will probably change by tomorrow — I think someone on Reddit from another data centre had done it already — but for now it’s fun taking aim for the top spot. And if I don’t attain that top spot, well, at least I’ll be able to say I’ve done it.

2464: The Palace of the Dead (Savage)

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Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 3.45 is coming in early November, and bringing with it an additional 150 floors to the game’s current Deep Dungeon, The Palace of the Dead. I am excited.

Palace of the Dead is a great piece of content that I’m pleased has remained popular since its launch. It flips most of the conventions of MMOs on their head and provides something different for people to do, with meaningful rewards and a decent shot of experience points for those levelling alt classes.

Palace of the Dead, in case you’re unfamiliar, is a 50-floor dungeon that you tackle in blocks of 10 floors at a time, with a boss on each 10th floor. Each floor consists of a number of rooms arranged in a randomised layout, with an exit portal in one room and a resurrection gizmo in another for if things happen to go south and you don’t have a healer. Both of these things are inactive at the start of a floor, so you have to kill enough enemies to turn them on before they can be used.

Some rooms have treasure chests and occasionally monsters drop them too. These come in three different varieties: bronze chests hold consumable items such as Phoenix Downs to resurrect fallen comrades and potions to heal HP; silver chests have a chance to upgrade either your weapon or armour (with the chance getting smaller as they get more powerful) up to a maximum of +30; gold chests reward you with “Pomanders”, which are items that have immediate beneficial effects such as increasing your damage, turning all enemies in the nearby vicinity into chickens or frogs, temporarily transforming you into a manticore or removing all the hidden traps on the current floor.

In the last major patch, the Accursed Hoard was also added to Palace of the Dead; these are hidden treasures that have a chance of spawning on each floor. Standing on a spot where a Hoard is hidden reveals it, and if you successfully clear the block of 10 floors, you get one sack per Hoard you found, each of which contains a randomly drawn item from what seems like quite a large selection, ranging from the useless (fireworks) to the very useful (grade V materia) via formerly expensive glamour items.

The thing I like about Palace of the Dead is it takes almost everything the rest of Final Fantasy XIV established in terms of gameplay and throws it out of the window. Item level doesn’t matter, stats don’t matter and even conventional party composition (one tank, one healer, two damage-dealers) doesn’t matter. There’s some variation in individual performance according to the upgrade level of your aetherpool gear (which you can only use in Palace of the Dead until it reaches its fully upgraded level of +30, at which point it can be exchanged for a level 60, item level 235 weapon that you can use in the rest of the game) and your character level in Palace of the Dead (which is different to your character level in the rest of the game; you level up at a considerably accelerated rate in the dungeon, but have to reset to 1 every time you restart from floor 1) but otherwise, how well you do in there is entirely down to how well you know how to play your class.

It’s interesting to see people realising this for the first time. You can’t just ignore mechanics in Palace of the Dead because it’s literally impossible to outgear it. You can’t stand in area-effect attacks and soak the damage because, again, you can’t outgear it. And you can’t pull 30 enemies at once and hope to survive because, you guessed it, you can’t outgear them. It’s all about careful use of your abilities, consumable items and the Pomanders; you have to be constantly aware of the situation of both yourself and your party members, as an unfortunate mistake could lead to a wipe — and if you wipe in Palace of the Dead, you fail that set of floors immediately and have to start again from the last “checkpoint” you reached. (This is particularly heartbreaking if you reach the final boss on floor 50 with 5 Accursed Hoards in your pocket and then wipe because you forgot to pay attention to mechanics.)

The reason I’m looking forward to Patch 3.45 is that it promises not just more of Palace of the Dead, but that its last 100 floors in particular will be very difficult. And not “very difficult” in the sense that the current Savage raids are very difficult — i.e. they get quite a bit easier if you take the time to buff up your gear level — straight up difficult in that you’ll have to pay attention, dodge shit and play your class effectively, perhaps in an unconventional party formation.

I’m interested to see quite how they’re going to make it difficult. People have been clamouring for difficult (“Savage”) four-player content for quite some time now, and Yoshi-P and the team specifically said during the last Live Letter that the lower 100 floors of Palace of the Dead were designed to be just that. What I find particularly interesting is that this is (hopefully) super-difficult content that you don’t need to have spent ages preparing to be ready for, because your gear level when you go in doesn’t matter; everyone in the entire game, assuming they have Palace of the Dead unlocked (which they can do as early as level 17 rather than having to reach the current cap of 60), has the potential to be a “world first” clear, which is something that has never happened before. Previous “world firsts” in the game were by raiders who were at the absolute top of their game with the best possible gear available, so in most cases it was fairly predictable who the acclaim would go to. With this, however, the title is anyone’s.

I’m also intrigued by the proposed ranking system and how it works, since that hasn’t been explained in much detail before. We know that there will be rankings for both individuals and parties, and that rankings are stratified by class/job, but we don’t know exactly what causes you to score the “points” that determine your place on the rankings. Progress through the floors is a given — the mockup leaderboards we saw during the Live Letter displayed both the floor the characters had got to and their score — but what else will contribute to it? Clear time? Damage done? Kills? Accursed Hoard finds? Treasure chests looted? All of the above?

If they handle this properly, Palace of the Dead has the potential to become an enormously compelling metagame in its own right within the wider context of Final Fantasy XIV, not to mention a great way to learn and level alt classes that you perhaps haven’t used much before. I’m very much looking forward to challenging the lower floors of this Deep Dungeon, and hope that it provides a suitable alternative to raiding for those who seek a challenge but perhaps don’t have a group, have difficulty getting everyone together at the same time, or simply aren’t geared enough.

I guess we’ll see soon enough! (Also, I really want to see what happens when you sit on that bench…)

2287: Deep Dungeon is Exactly What FFXIV Needs

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I got burnt out on Final Fantasy XIV a little while back and haven’t felt particularly tempted to go back since — especially since my Free Company had been less than conversational for the last few months, making even the social aspect of the game less worth logging in for than it had been.

At PAX East this week, Square Enix announced an exciting new plan for some future content that has me clamouring to get back to the game once it releases: a new type of activity called Deep Dungeon, which will be familiar to fans of both Final Fantasy Tactics’ Midlight’s Deep optional dungeon and Final Fantasy XI’s Nyzul Isle.

It sounds as if Deep Dungeon is going to be a discrete type of activity for players to participate in, with the eventual plan presumably being to have a number of different dungeons for players to challenge. Initially, there will be just one, called Palace of the Dead.

The reason this excites me so much is because it shakes up the established formula of Final Fantasy XIV — which, don’t get me wrong, I like very much, but just needed a break from, thanks to the necessity of grinding the same content week after week in order to obtain the next incremental upgrade. Unlike the current substantial array of static content available in the game, Deep Dungeon has a strong random element, plus a great deal more flexibility than the rest of the game’s reliance on the MMO “Holy Trinity” of tank, healer and DPS.

Deep Dungeon sees you and up to three friends tackling a randomly generated dungeon. It also has its own progression system separate from the main game’s experience and item levels, mitigating the issue the game currently has of a significant proportion of players outgearing the majority of the current content. The in-game reasons for this are that the dungeon saps your character’s strength, and in order to power back up again you’ll have to make use of items you find within the dungeon itself, progressing and regaining your strength as you proceed.

If it’s anything like Final Fantasy XI’s Nyzul Isle — which FFXI veterans inform me, it sounds very much like — then each floor of the dungeon will not only be randomly generated, but it will also have various objectives to complete, as well as challenging boss fights every so often. It sounds like a lot of fun — and I really like the fact that it’s seemingly flexible enough to cater to any party makeup from 1-4 players, hopefully leading to some interesting combinations of classes exploring the depths. All-tank runs? Bring it on!

I have questions that will hopefully be answered in the coming months: firstly, what will the point of Deep Dungeon be? Will it be another means of acquiring progression currency, or will it be a completely separate activity? My main concern with it is that it ends up being a Diadem, which sounded awesome in concept but turned out to be a bit toss when it was actually released. Part of this was down to player attitudes, admittedly, rather than any real fault with the content itself, but hopefully the smaller scale of Deep Dungeon will mitigate this risk somewhat.

To be honest, if Deep Dungeon proves to be a significant enough challenge with enough variation on each run, I can see it becoming one of my main activities in Final Fantasy XIV, particularly if I have the option of running it either solo or with friends. And with the promise of score rankings coming in a future update, there’s the distinct possibility of some friendly competition, too.

The first Deep Dungeon, Palace of the Dead, is due to arrive in the game as part of Patch 3.35. I’m planning on jumping back into the game around Patch 3.3 to find out what happens next in the main scenario quest — the story is getting very interesting — but if Deep Dungeon lives up to its potential, 3.35 will see me getting back into things in a big way.

Please don’t mess it up, Yoshi-P and co. I have faith in you!