It's been a lot of fun thus far. I'm about 80 hours deep into the game, and I haven't really felt particularly "roadblocked" at any point. There have been two separate occasions where I have had help from higher-level players — once to open the "Three Mage Gate" I mentioned a few posts back, and once to help me with the fight against Siren as part of the Rhapsodies of Vana'diel series of missions that run parallel to all the main stories — but for the most part, I have successfully beaten and bashed my way through the game as a solo player using the computer-controlled "Trust" party members.

I thought I had reached a roadblock towards the end of the Rise of the Zilart storyline where you are presented with a chain of five difficult boss battles, and I was having real difficulty with a couple of them. As I'm playing a Warrior, I have been working on the assumption that I should be the main "tank", you see, and thus trying my best to ensure all enemies fixate their attention on my while my Trusts repeatedly punch them in the buttocks. This is, after all, the way things are in Final Fantasy XIV, even though mechanically the two games are otherwise quite different.

However, what I discovered in these difficult fights (the "Ark Angels" fights, to any FFXI veterans) is that being the sole human player and the main tank is not always desirable. Y'see, some high-level enemies have the ability to Charm you, and when that happens all your Trusts get unsummoned and the fight effectively resets. It's an instant "kill", in other words, and I really thought this was going to roadblock me.

Then I thought about things a bit, and wondered what might happen if I let one of the Trusts handle the tanking instead. Wouldn't you know it, those fights suddenly went much more smoothly. I could keep dealing damage — which, besides tanking, is the other thing FFXI Warrior is good at — while Trust-y Valaineral the Paladin took the brunt of everything the boss threw at a single target, including that pesky Charm. And, because I also had Kupipi the White Mage and King Of Hearts the Red Mage in my party, they cleansed that status off him pretty quickly. I only really came close to failing in one of the fights, where everyone got Silenced and Valaineral got knocked down because no-one could heal him. Thankfully, this happened late enough in the fight that the remaining party members, including me, were able to finish the job.

By contrast, the actual final boss of Rise of the Zilart was very easy indeed. Granted, I was probably a few levels higher than "intended" for this encounter — Final Fantasy XI isn't particularly rigorous about locking stuff to particular level restrictions, particularly in the main story sequences — but it was still pretty straightforward. Fun, though; it was satisfying to finally bring down a "big bad" who had been taunting me for some time.

Now I'm on to the Chains of Promathia expansion, which a lot of longtime players seem to think is one of the best bits. It makes the curious decision to base the early hours of its story around the level 30 mark, rather than assuming you would be at the level you're probably at around the conclusion of Rise of the Zilart — 75+ — but I assume that things ramp up pretty quickly, as the official "content guide" on the Final Fantasy XI website recommends the expansion as an activity for level 75+ players.

I'm really glad I've done this! I'm going to write a big, detailed article about my experiences over on MoeGamer when I'm finally done with everything I want to do in the game, but for now, my feelings are that, in terms of gameplay, progression and a general sense of adventure, this is actually one of the very best Final Fantasy games. Yes, it is the very epitome of a "guide dang-it" game, in which you will almost certainly not get very far without looking some stuff up, but the moment-to-moment gameplay, the overall sense of progression and the fact that it feels like a Final Fantasy game, arguably a lot more so than XIV, has really left me with a big grin on my face. I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the game has to offer.

I have played pretty much all day, though, so I should probably stop for now, though, right? Probably…

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The post #oneaday Day 717: Putting down the Zilart appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

You get a quest, it will inevitably involve finding some object that is a relatively low-chance drop from a very specific monster that is deep in part of a dungeon that is exceedingly inconvenient to get to.

You reach the level cap, you have to complete one of these quests every five levels until you reach 99 — though thankfully you only have to do this once per character, not once per job.

You get your "subjob", to add abilities from a second job to your main one, you have to level that as well as your main job — though only half as much, since it caps at half the level of your main job.

There are times when all this feels a bit wearisome, particularly when compared to Final Fantasy XIV, which at times feels like it's keen to take as much "friction" out of the entire process as possible. But if you think about Final Fantasy XI in different terms — not as a "theme park"-style MMO, but simply as a more traditional RPG — it makes a lot more sense, particularly now you don't have to be dependent on other people for a lot of the "main scenario" side of things.

Dungeons in Final Fantasy XIV are spectacular affairs, but they are theme park rides — completely linear, the same every time. Dungeons in Final Fantasy XI are much more elaborate: maze-like structures filled with dead ends, hidden secrets and varied encounters with monsters. The complete lack of signposting for quest-critical items — usually this involves finding something marked "???" when you target it — means that you have to actually explore these places thoroughly… or look at a guide, of course. But the longer I play, the more interesting the prospect of just exploring becomes. And the more I feel like the game has been designed around this.

If you look at a lot of Final Fantasy XI guides online, you will inevitably see a focus on levelling as fast as possible, then steamrollering your way through all the content. But the way I've been playing, it feels a lot more natural and a lot more like it's the way it was intended to be played. I've had a couple of instances where I've had to sneak around monsters much tougher than me to find a useful item, but for the most part I've found that if I treat the game like a regular, offline RPG — that is to say, fighting my way through monsters as I proceed through a field area or dungeon rather than avoiding as many as possible — it means that progress comes naturally and without you feeling like you're having to make an inordinate amount of effort to achieve that progress. As a result, the game is fun rather than a chore.

There are still points where it feels like you are "roadblocked" in certain ways — right now I'm dealing with a particularly complicated main scenario mission that involves finding specific items in three specific dungeons, along with a level cap quest that is demanding much the same sort of thing — but only in terms of the ongoing narrative. In terms of actually playing the game and engaging with its mechanics, I feel like I'm constantly doing interesting stuff and seeing new places rather than just going through the motions.

I'm going to make it through this game! I'm excited to see where it goes! Now, if I can just find an Orcish Crest, a Quadav Crest and a Yagudo Crest, plus pieces of Magicite from their three respective bases, I should be good to go and beat up the Shadow Lord. So that's what I'm going to do today, I think.

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The post #oneaday Day 708: Proper adventuring appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm enjoying the game a lot, though my desire to attempt it without a guide was a foolhardy endeavour. Final Fantasy XI was always designed with "community" in mind, and built on the assumption that said community would share information with one another and help each other out, and as such there are a lot of things it just doesn't tell you. It's a lot better in this regard than it used to be, primarily thanks to the "Records of Eminence" feature, which gives you a series of objectives to accomplish that can guide your progression, but you'll still often be given a mission that tells you to go to a particular zone and find something in that zone, with absolutely no indication whatsoever of exactly whereabouts in that zone the thing is to be found. There is no minimap and no quest marker feature in Final Fantasy XI, so you're either off to find a needle in a haystack yourself, or consult the community (which now, of course, also includes comprehensive wikis) and be able to focus your efforts a bit more.

There are still one or two roadblocks that require actual interaction with a human being. One of the missions for Windurst requires that you get through a door called the "Sealed Portal", which is colloquially known by the community as "Three Mage Gate". The reason for this is that the originally intended method of opening this door was to gather a party containing a white mage, a black mage and a red mage and get them to stand on the appropriate marks on the floor, which would open the door. This was subsequently updated to only require someone with the "Portal Charm" key item — which, naturally, you get just after the mission in which you would first need it — to make things marginally easier and less dependent on wrangling an entire group.

These aspects aside, though, the game has been eminently soloable so far, thanks to the Trust system. You're given some decent Trusts right from the get-go, and more are unlockable quite easily. There are some borderline overpowered ones available without too much difficulty, too, but with the number you get to add to your arsenal very quickly, you can pretty much build a party however you like to play, and use the characters you find most appealing. My only slight beef with the system is a narrative one; many of the Trusts you get early on are characters that you probably won't have met yet, and this makes it tricky to feel a sense of attachment to them. Because, in the context of Final Fantasy XI's story, Trust magic is dependent on you having a strong bond with a particular person, this feels a bit dissonant, but you soon learn to deal with it — and after a while, you'll be able to get together a party that feels like it consists entirely of "story" characters anyway.

It's definitely a very different sort of game to Final Fantasy XIV. It's not actually turn-based, but with its pacing it might as well be. It's not a game where you attacking requires you to be constantly pressing buttons to unleash combos, unlike its follow-up; instead, it's more about equipping your character well, ensuring they have good training in the skills they need to succeed at the challenges ahead of them, and approaching combat encounters carefully and thoughtfully. Sure, you "do less" on a moment-to-moment basis, but it's a different kind of satisfying to successfully clearing difficult encounters in Final Fantasy XIV; it's less about skill with the buttons and more about traditional RPG-style number crunching. I'm not saying either way is "better" — both games are very good at what they do — but it is interesting to note quite how different they are from one another now I'm deeper into XI than I've ever been.

My next big milestones for Final Fantasy XI will be breaking a couple of level cap barriers, and then completing the base story from the original game, which culminates in a big fight against the dreaded Shadow Lord. There's still a lot to do after that, though, and most folks seem to agree that things start getting really good story-wise after you've got through the base game's material. I'm looking forward to it — and at the rate I'm going, I should be getting through it at a decent pace, too.

I'm glad I finally decided to do this. Final Fantasy XI has kind of been a "white whale" for me in terms of completion, so I knew I just had to make the time to play it and do it properly. Now that I'm doing that, I'm having a really good time. I doubt I'll get too hardcore into its "endgame" stuff — my main priority is to beat the story, and after that I will probably return to XIV — but there is plenty to do just on the journey from 1 to 99. And that's absolutely fine with me!

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The post #oneaday Day 704: Vana'diel progress report appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I am also reminded that Final Fantasy XI is not a game for everyone. Specifically, it is not a game for the impatient, because there is a lot to do, and it takes quite a long time to do pretty much anything… except level up, now, which goes at a significantly more brisk pace than it did the first time I played it all those years ago.

But we're talking about a game where the ability to run slightly faster than normal is dependent on someone completing a long and difficult quest, it rolling a random chance of the "Swift Shoes" effect coming up, and then you healing to full and having a nice sit down for a couple of minutes to "charge" the slightly-faster-than-normal movement speed — which, of course, immediately fades away the moment you either attack something or get attacked.

We're also talking about a game whose original implementation of "fast travel" required you to fight your way to a huge "crag" two zones away from your starting city and collect a crystal from it, all for the privilege of being able to teleport an inconveniently long distance away from any of the game's towns.

We're talking about a game where, when you want to cross the sea, you have to physically stand and wait for a ship, and when you're on the ship, you have to wait for the voyage to complete. (Sometimes monsters attack. A lot of the time you just have to enjoy the ride.)

If those descriptions make you smile, even a little bit, you are probably someone who will enjoy Final Fantasy XI.

The fact the game demands so much patience makes it feel very rewarding, though. When you achieve something, you feel like you've bloody well earned it. This is not a game where you are a super-special Warrior of Light pretty much from the get-go; this is a game where you are a relatively normal person — albeit one with, arguably, extraordinary combat abilities compared to your "peers" among the NPCs — just trying to make their way in the world. Make a bit of cash, get a bit of training in, visit some new places.

It's this rather open-ended feel that I really like about Final Fantasy XI. In many ways, it feels like a very pure reflection of what I call the old "world RPG" formula exemplified by titles like the early Ultima games. There is a long-term goal to go and complete, but the vast majority of your playtime will be spent doing rather freeform activities to build up your character in a way that you see fit.

Some of the best things that have been added to Final Fantasy XI since its original release are designed to make it more than just grinding monsters for hours at a time. The "Records of Eminence" quests do a great job of giving you things to do and acting as a sort of guide to what it is possible to do in the game, without having to spend half your playtime looking at a wiki. The "Field Guide" and "Grounds Tome" books at the entrances to field and dungeon areas respectively provide you with focused sets of monster targets to down in exchange for generous experience bonuses. And of course there's plenty of quests, the main storyline missions and, once you get later into the game, lots and lots of side activities. I don't yet know how "important" some of these things are — or indeed what 90% of them are at this point — but I'm intrigued to find out.

Thus far I'm up to level 25 on the job I started with — Warrior this time around — and I'm levelling Monk as a subjob for now. I'm on the "rank 2" missions for my home nation, and making good progress. I've also kicked off the Rhapsodies of Vana'diel storyline that was added much later than the other main stories, and acts as another kind of "guide" through what the game offers, with its own narrative to follow — and plenty of extremely helpful benefits as rewards along the way.

I'm enjoying myself a lot. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get through the various storylines, but levelling has been going at a brisk pace, and I'm feeling good about how things are going so far. I'm looking forward to finally doing things like taking down the Shadow Lord, which I've never done before, and particularly getting into the well-regarded Chains of Promathia expansion storyline, which longstanding FFXI players have been banging on about the quality of for years.

So yeah. It's a good time. You just need patience. And if there's one thing I have developed over the years, it is a very strong sense of patience.

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The post #oneaday Day 699: Final Fantasy XI and the art of patience appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

And then indulge me while I write two things today, because I feel like I "should". I'm just like that. Also I have just reinstalled Final Fantasy XI and it has to go through its whole many-hours patching process, so I may as well do something to fill the time.

I've decided to give Final Fantasy XI another honest go because I've always enjoyed it when I've played it in the past, I have been wanting to play through its story for more than 20 years (and there's a lot more of it now than when I first wanted to play it!) and I'm sort of "between games" right now. This time around, I want to make a proper effort to get through the main scenario. I know there's a lot of other stuff in Final Fantasy XI, but we'll see if I feel the need to jump into any of that as I work my way through; my priority is just seeing what the main storylines are.

The reason I say this is because I've pretty much made a decision: I'm going to head back into Final Fantasy XIV at some point before the new expansion drops — likely when the new "Beastmaster" job is added in the next main "part" of the Dawntrail finale patch, which is looking like July. Before that happens, I'd like to have had a good crack at Final Fantasy XI, so I'm going to treat it as my "main" game for the immediate future. I think it's going to be interesting — particularly as, for several years now, the game has been in a state where much of it is eminently soloable thanks to the fact you can bring recruitable NPC "Trusts" along with you for pretty much everything in the game, not just instanced dungeons like in Final Fantasy XIV.

As I say, I don't know how much into the weeds I'm going to get, because my main priorities are 1) getting to the level cap of 99 and 2) getting through the main storylines of the base game and all the expansions. The two will likely intertwine somewhat, and gearing up, particularly once at level 99, will likely involve dipping into some of the activities outside of the main story, but we'll see. I'm going to try and minimise guide usage as much as possible, too, because I think that will be much more interesting. I'm also curious to see if it's even possible to play that way — and if it isn't, well, there are 20+ years worth of FAQs, wikis and all manner of other resources out there to follow along with.

I'm excited! I'm also aware that I've fallen off Final Fantasy XI multiple times in the past, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because something else came along that occupied my attention. Hopefully that won't happen this time around — because I'm increasingly conscious that, because of the game's age, there is likely only so much more time I have to be able to actually do this quest.

So Vana'Diel awaits! In about two hours' time, according to the PlayOnline Viewer, anyway. So how should I occupy myself in the meantime… hmmm?

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The post #oneaday Day 696: The missing day appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Been soloing a bunch of Palace of the Dead in Final Fantasy XIV over the last few days, so I thought I'd assemble some tips for those who are looking to challenge it.

General tips

• Take your time on the early floors. You want to equal or exceed the boss' level when you reach it, so clear each floor thoroughly rather than rushing through. You can safely avoid enemies once you hit level 60.
• Stay aware of your surroundings at all times. Most floors have patrolling monsters; keep an eye out for these and engage them in the corridors between rooms before pulling the monsters in the rooms themselves.
• When fighting on the normal floors, DPS as hard as you can. Summoners, use Garuda-Egi. Tanks, use your DPS stance. The quicker things die, the easier a time you'll have. In most cases you'll probably want to concentrate on one enemy at a time — pull from a distance whenever possible.
• When fighting bosses, the priority is on doing mechanics rather than DPSing as hard as possible. Summoners, get Titan-Egi to tank for you. Tanks, use your tank stance.
• Drink potions whenever you can if you're not at full health. The last thing you want is to die to a landmine or exploding chest.
• Save Pomanders of Serenity for floors where Auto-Heal is disabled. Most of the other floor effects aren't really anything to worry about, but Auto-Heal not working can really fuck you up.
• Don't use Pomanders of Safety and Pomanders of Sight on the same floor because they're redundant. Safety removes all traps on the floor, and Sight allows you to see traps and thus avoid them. There's no need to use both.
• Pomanders of Alteration are a gamble best used before you hit 60. If they spawn Mandragora-type enemies on the next floor, that's free EXP. If they spawn Mimics, however, you're in for a miserable time.
• When using one of the transformation Pomanders, remember that you're not invincible. The Manticore may be able to kill everything in a single hit (assuming Knockback isn't disabled by a floor effect) but its HP and defense are the same as yours in your regular form.
• Transformations are immune to Toad traps, and Pacification/Silence doesn't affect the transformation's ability. Landmines are still very dangerous, however, particularly as you can't drink a potion to heal yourself while transformed.
• Save Pomanders of Resolution for the floor 100 boss. You'll need all three during the fight.

Enemies to watch out for

• Hornets, found in the 1-10 block, have Final Sting, which will do a shitload of damage if you let it go off. You can actually run away from it and avoid the damage if you get far enough away, but it's best to try and kill the hornet before this happens.
• Slimes, found in the 11-20 block, cast Rapture if you take too long killing them. This will almost certainly kill you, so kill them as quickly as you can.
• Gaze attacks — marked by a very obvious glowing purple eye over the enemy model while they're casting it — can be avoided completely by simply turning your back to the enemy. It's particularly important to do this when dealing with Palace Cobras (petrification), Palace Deepeyes (powerful paralysis) and Palace Pots (Mysterious Light, which causes heavy damage and Blind).
• Morbols will show up in the 11-20 block towards the end, complete with Bad Breath attack. Run towards them for the easiest path to avoid the large cone AoE.
• Wraiths have a huge AoE attack that causes Terror. If you can stun it, do so. Otherwise, run for dear life as soon as you see the marker appear.
• Palace Skatenes will cause Sleep on you shortly after they cast Chirp. This isn't a huge issue, however, since you'll wake up immediately upon taking a hit.

Boss tips

Floor 10: Palace Deathgaze

Pretty easy, and if you've fought basic Deathgaze-type enemies in the game you'll know what to expect. It has a heavy attack called Whipcrack that will do a chunk of damage, so pop a potion after it does this. Stormwind (a large cone AoE) and Bombination (circular AoE) can both be avoided. Aerial Blast covers the whole arena and causes Windburn (damage over time for a few seconds). It will cycle through these abilities until one or the other of you are dead.

Floor 20: Spurge

The Easy Way: Level to 35 or 36, pop a Pomander of Strength and a Pomander of Lust and then just go ham on Spurge and you'll probably kill it before it summons its first set of Hornets if your gear is up to snuff.

The Proper Way: There are two main phases to this fight, and they simply cycle around and around. In the first, Spurge will twat you for a chunk of damage with Bloody Caress, then fling two circle AoE attacks at you — one around itself and one aimed at you. During this time, keep your HP topped up and wail on Spurge as much as you can. The second phase starts when Spurge moves to the side of the arena. At this point, two Hornets will spawn, and Spurge will stay in place, occasionally shooting a large linear AoE attack called Rotten Stench. Avoid Rotten Stench while knocking the Hornets down as quickly as possible — otherwise they will use Final Sting on you — before returning to the punishment on Spurge.

Floor 30: Definitely-Not-Hydra

Pretty easy. When it hits you with Ball of Fire or Ball of Ice, immediately move to avoid the effect of the circular area the attack causes — damage over time for Ball of Fire and slowed movement for Ball of Ice. Keep hitting it while this is going on, and try not to bait any Balls of Fire or Ice into the very middle of the arena. When Definitely-Not-Hydra moves to the centre of the arena and starts casting Fear Itself, stand inside its hitbox to avoid the attack completely. Then repeat the process.

Floor 40: Ixtab

Ixtab will spew void crap over the ground every so often — move out of this to avoid damage. He will then summon two Bhoots which you should kill as quickly as possible to avoid being caught in their attacks. He also has an arena-wide attack that causes Terror, often causing you to stumble into the Bhoots' area of effect if they're still up. Aside from this, not a lot else to say.

Floor 50: Edda Blackbosom

Pay close attention to what Edda is doing. If she uses Cold Feet, turn away to avoid its Terror effect. If she uses In Health, you'll either need to get well away from her or stand right on top of her — react quickly to the AoE marker, but you have plenty of time to get from one extreme to the other if the cast goes off. If you get hit by In Health, one of the letters on the floor will light up. The more of these lit up when she casts Black Honeymoon, the more damage you'll take. Aside from this, she's pretty straightforward. Watch out for In Sickness, which causes Disease and slowed movement; cleanse this off yourself if you can.

Floor 60: The Black Rider

A few things to watch out for here. Firstly, keep out of the large purple circles he drops on the ground at all cost — they cause Bleed, which deals heavy damage while you're in them. Secondly, watch out for the aether sprites he summons around the outside of the arena and don't get caught in their blasts, as these deal extreme damage. Their appearance will often coincide with his charge attack, a linear AoE marker that follows you around. While this is casting, make sure your back is to a "safe spot" away from the aether sprites to avoid being knocked into their blast radius.

Floor 70: Big Snake Thing

I can't remember Big Snake Thing's name, but it's a big snake thing. The most important thing to do in this fight is move Big Snake Thing out of the watery patches it drops on the ground when it casts Douse. While it is in these areas, it gains Haste, which makes it nigh-impossible to avoid Electrogenesis when it casts. Aside from this, Big Snake Thing should cause you no real difficulty.

Floor 80: Definitely-Not-King-Behemoth

This is a daunting fight, but fairly straightforward if you know how to handle all the mechanics. Firstly, when DNKB casts Charybdis, move well away from the AoE marker because it will drop a tornado. Said tornadoes inflict a heavy damage over time debuff if you get sucked into one, and periodically they will suck in everything around them — there'll be a very brief AoE marker to show the effective range of this when it happens, so to be safe don't be anywhere near the tornadoes. Next, when DNKB walks away from you, follow him, because he's about to use Trounce, a massive conal AoE attack that is much easier to avoid if you're right next to him. Thirdly, at around 10% HP remaining, he will begin channelling Ecliptic Meteor, and unlike the other times in the game where this happens, there's nothing to hide behind. Try and kill him before it hits, but don't worry too much if it does — it hits for about 80% of your HP, so if you're topped up before it happens, you'll be safe and free to finish him off after the attack.

Floor 90: The Godmother

This is a bit like the final boss of Pharos Sirius (Hard). Attack The Godmother until a red bomb spawns, at which point you should stun its Blast ability if you can and kill it as quickly as possible while avoiding the AoE markers from the untargetable smaller bombs that spawn around it. When it's down, return to wailing on The Godmother. When a blue-grey bomb spawns, hit it with an instant ability while facing The Godmother to knock it towards her. You want the blue-grey bomb's Hydrothermal Combustion ability to hit The Godmother and interrupt her ultimate attack. From here, simply repeat these two processes until The Godmother is down.

Floor 100: Nybeth Obdilord

Try to make sure you have three Pomanders of Resolution by the time you reach floor 100 — block 91-100 seems to throw them at you, but save them up from earlier blocks to be safe if necessary. Nybeth himself isn't too much of a threat if you take care to avoid his AoEs, particularly the large cone-shaped Doom attack. The important mechanic in this fight is the adds that he spawns at roughly 90%, 70% and 30% of his HP remaining. As soon as they appear, pop a Pomander of Resolution and use Kuribu's attack to firstly kill the enemies, and then use the ability again on their corpses to remove them permanently from the fight. Click off the transformation before you turn your attention back to Nybeth. Repeat two more times and you're home free.

The post 2482: Palace of the Dead: Solo Guide appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

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I'm going to do a more detailed write-up on this over on MoeGamer when I've read and thoroughly digested everything in this massive tome, but I thought I'd give some initial thoughts here.

Encylopaedia Eorzea is here! Yes, for a long time the Final Fantasy XIV team had been suggesting that a lore book might be on the cards, and at FanFest last week, it was finally revealed. It was put up for sale at the start of this week and seemed to develop a waiting list very quickly; fortunately, I managed to get in early and snag a copy.

£34.99 gets you a formidable hard-backed book over 300 pages in length, printed on gorgeous thick, parchmenty paper and presented in full colour. The book is heavy enough that it would probably do some damage if you smacked someone with it — and you all laughed at Arcanist, Summoner and Scholar's auto-attack!

The tome as a whole is split into eight different "books", each dealing with a different aspect of Eorzean lore.

The first, and shortest, concerns "the basics" of the planet Hydaelyn and what makes Her tick, including geography, the relationship between Hydaelyn's light and Zodiark's darkness, the Twelve gods in the Eorzean pantheon, and the basics of "aetherology" — the underlying (fictional) science of how the elements interact with one another to create life, magic and other effects.

The second, and one of the longest, concerns Hydaelyn's history, reflecting on the world's cycle of Astral and Umbral eras, with the latter's arrival being heralded by a Calamity of some description — each elementally themed in the case of the first six, and the seventh (used as the initial story catalyst for A Realm Reborn) covering all elements in the sheer magnitude of its disaster. This book is particularly interesting because it gives some background reading on the mysterious ancient civilisations of the Amdapori, the Mhachi and the Allagans, all of whom are explored to a certain degree in the game itself. It also provides a good primer of the storyline for Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, which is no longer playable, but which is concluded through A Realm Reborn's cycle of raid dungeons, The Binding Coil of Bahamut, The Second Coil of Bahamut and The Final Coil of Bahamut.

The third book provides a primer on the different people of Eorzea and where they came from. It only explores the playable races of Hyur, Elezen, Lalafell, Miqo'te, Roegadyn and Au Ra — those hoping for some information about the Padjali or a hint as to whether or not we'll ever see Viera in the game will have to keep theorycrafting.

The fourth book is the longest and concerns the geography of Eorzea, including all the zones from A Realm Reborn and Heavensward as well as short look at Ala Mhigo (subject of the upcoming expansion Stormblood) and the Garlean Empire (recurring villains).

The fifth book concerns Hydaelyn's "servants", and explores the various characters that you come into contact with throughout the game, right from the main "protagonists" the Scions of the Seventh Dawn to the recently introduced Warriors of Darkness. This section also includes information about groups involved in sidequests in the game, too, such as Hildibrand's Agents of Inquiry, the organisation NOAH who spearheaded the investigation into the Crystal Tower and a section entirely devoted to more minor NPCs such as those who served as the face of the Relic quests, and poor old Edda, who has had a rough ol' time of it both during life and in death.

The sixth book looks at Hydaelyn's "disciplines" — in other words, the playable classes in the game. Interestingly, the book makes no mention of the base classes on which the more familiar "Jobs" are based; the focus is entirely on the higher-level incarnations of the Jobs.

The seventh book concerns Hydaelyn's "burdens" — the various beast tribes of the realm, and the Primals associated with each of them. This section also looks a little at as-yet underexplored groups such as the gigants, as well as the eikons of the Warring Triad, which we're halfway through the story for in the game at the time of writing.

The eighth and final book is a bestiary of monsters from around the realm, divided into the various "-kin" categories. It also incluides a look at voidsent, elementals and chimeras.

There is a lot of information in this book, and it's presented in a clear, enjoyable to read manner. The thing I've found most beneficial about it is that it provides a good summary of the various storylines that have unfolded during the game since its launch; this is several years ago now, so it's not surprising that some details may have slipped many players' memories! The lore book acts as a good reference guide for those who may have forgotten some of the finer details.

Above all, though, Encyclopaedia Eorzea is clear evidence that the team behind Final Fantasy XIV have built more than just a game. They've truly built a world for people to inhabit, which has its own history leading up to today, as well as many more stories yet to tell. And if you flip through it's pages, you'll understand just why so many people still like to call Eorzea home.

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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…)

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I respond very strongly to music that I enjoy — so much so that any time I think about hanging up my Eorzean adventurer's shoes for good, it's pretty much always the music that gets me coming back time after time. Or, if it's not the only reason, then it's certainly a leading reason as to why I keep coming back.

So let's look at some great tracks from the game.

"Patch 3.4 boss theme"

I don't know if anyone knows the actual name for this theme yet, but it's an excellent one. It seemingly became tradition with A Realm Reborn that the last couple of patches in a cycle would use different boss music from the ones we had been enjoying previously, and Heavensward is continuing — or, perhaps more accurately, confirming — this tradition.

This boss theme mixes two important themes from the game as a whole: Heroes, which we'll come to in a moment, and Penitus, which we'll also come to in a moment. To put it another way, it mashes together one of the most recognisable musical motifs from Heavensward with one of the most recognisable musical motifs from A Realm Reborn to produce a track that very much feels like a "reward" for people who have at least been playing since 2.0.

Heroes

This theme, played during vanilla Heavensward's final boss fight against King Thordan and Knights of the Round, brought the already exciting story of FFXIV's first expansion to a climactic head. While the fight was a bit easy even when it first launched, people still enjoy running it today just to enjoy this music and the spectacular graphical effects throughout the battle.

Penitus

I was already thoroughly wrapped around this game's little finger by the time I got to level 50 and was faced with the two 8-player story dungeons that wrap up vanilla A Realm Reborn's storyline, but getting into Praetorium and hearing this wonderful piece of music — snatches of which had been heard in a variety of different styles right the way through from level 1 all the way to 50 — got me absolutely hyped to see the story through to the end.

Ultima

And then the game goes and throws this incredible track on you for the Absolutely Definitely Last Boss, Yessirree (Not). I'll let this one speak for itself.

Thunderer

Ultima is followed by this little wonder featuring one of the best key changes ever. Sadly the first time you hear it, it doesn't last anywhere near long enough because everyone absolutely obliterates the Real Final Boss, Definitely Totally For Real This Time in a matter of seconds these days.

Thankfully, Square Enix clearly knew they were on to a good thing with Thunderer, as it was reused in a couple of places — most notably in the Chrysalis trial which was added in one of the content patches, and, for many people, its most iconic appearance in Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut, in which you fought the dread dragon Twintania, and which in the game's vanilla release acted as the "true" final boss. (Of course, this later all changed with Second and Final Coil, but still.)

Footsteps in the Snow

Shiva was one of my favourite Trials to be added to the game almost entirely because of this excellent piece of music that opened the fight and ran until the phase change. This music was first heard in the trailer for patch 2.4, Dreams of Ice, and got everyone well and truly hyped.

From the Ashes

Raid dungeon The Final Coil of Bahamut was, for many players, a highlight of the game due to its fascinating story — which, unlike the narrative of A Realm Reborn itself, which span off in a different direction, followed up on how Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 ended. Turn 12, the penultimate turn, is often cited as a particular favourite by many players simply due to this unique music, which was a highly dramatic, spine-tingling take on A Realm Reborn's main theme song Answers. The whole of The Binding Coil of Bahamut had featured music based on Answers, and this track felt like it was bringing everything to a dramatic conclusion.

Answers

And, having mentioned Turn 12, it would be remiss of me not to mention the way Answers was used in Turn 13, the absolutely definitely positively totally final boss of the game, or at least of the raids. I present it here in context, including battle sound effects, to show how it is used in the fight itself. The incredible crescendo during Teraflare is made of goosebumps.

I'm yet to do the new Alexander raid — my item level isn't quite high enough yet — but I understand the grand finale is suitably spectacular. T13 is going to take some topping, though.

The post 2445: The Best Music of Final Fantasy XIV appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Spent a bit more time with the non-story aspects of FFXIV's 3.4 patch Soul Surrender today, so here's a few thoughts with that in mind.

First up, I finished my first Wondrous Tails journal, albeit rather poorly, so I have a good handle of what that's all about now.

Wondrous Tails is a new weekly quest where you acquire a journal from the adorable young Miqo'te Khloe Aliapoh. Khloe wants to hear all about your adventures, so you agree to help her out by filling in her journal with tales of some of your exploits. You are then presented with 16 different challenges for the week, nine of which you need to clear to complete the journal.

On the opposite page to the challenges you are to face is a 4×4 grid of blank spaces for stickers. You acquire these stickers by completing the challenges — one per challenge, though you don't get to choose which sticker you get. Fill a line in the journal and there's a reward separate from the one for completing 9 challenges. Fill two lines and there's another reward. Fill three and there's another still. These rewards are significant, at higher tiers consisting of Allagan Tomestones of Scripture, the current "top end" endgame currency, and even item level 250 armour which, while not the best in the game at the moment, is certainly pretty good.

They are not, however, easy to accomplish, as I've discovered this week. It's not completely random chance as to whether or not you fill some lines — by helping new players complete duties for the first time, you earn "Second Chance" points, which can be used in one of two ways: firstly, to mark a completed challenge as incomplete while marking an incomplete one as complete. This effectively allows you to do something again while removing the need to do something you don't want to do. You can choose the complete challenge to make incomplete, but not the incomplete challenge to make complete. Alternatively, you can spend two Second Chance points to shuffle the entire board of seals (including the ones you've already placed) in the hope that you will get a more advantageous arrangement. In order to make three lines with nine seals, you need their placement to be absolutely perfect — a horizontal, a vertical and a diagonal. As such, it's a bit of a gamble that you can't necessarily rely on.

I gambled and failed, ending up with no lines at all by the time I had nine seals — you can only use the shuffle option when you have between three and seven seals, so you can't just shuffle a completed board around. Still, I at least got the reward for completing the journal for the week, which is meaningful in itself, and there's always next week to try again.

Next up, I jumped in to the randomly generated Palace of the Dead in an attempt to finish my Aetherpool weapon and get something to take the place of my outdated i210 Anima weapon until I can finish the upgrade process. New to Palace of the Dead in this patch is the addition of the Accursed Hoard, a series of hidden treasures that can only be located by using Pomanders of Intuition, which last until you unearth a piece of the Accursed Hoard. Your party banks the pieces of the Hoard until you complete the tier of the Palace that you're on, and like everything else, if you party wipes you lose them.

Assuming you successfully completed a tier, each piece of the Hoard the party acquired will reward you with a sealed sack which must be taken to a new NPC in Quarrymill to appraise. There then follows a gacha-style appraisal sequence, during which you can anticipate how good the item you're about to get is via the animation that plays (or not!) during the appraisal sequence. There are some decent items available through this system — in my first batch of three sacks, I got a paissa minion, the expensive Thavnairian Bustier top and a firework. In the seven other sacks I acquired throughout the evening, I got more fireworks. It seems fireworks are the default "normal" draw, at least from the common bronze sacks, but there seems to be an above-zero chance of getting rare items from this, too, making Palace of the Dead a worthwhile activity for reasons other than acquiring the weapon.

There's obviously a lot of RNG in both of these systems that I've described, and some people don't like that, preferring a predictable goal that you can take aim for and always see your progress towards. Final Fantasy XIV has always been heavily RNG-driven, however, and so these two systems, while having the potential for enormous frustration, are firmly in keeping with what we've come to expect from the game to date!

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Final Fantasy XIV patch day has come and gone, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts. I'm going to mostly talk about the Main Scenario quests in this post, so I'll put in a Read More link for those browsing the front page who don't want to accidentally see spoilers.

MAIN STORY SPOILERS AHEAD!

In numerous ways, I think Soul Surrender is the best content patch Final Fantasy XIV has had to date. Not only does it add numerous new gameplay systems — Wondrous Tails and Adventurer Squadrons mix up the action a bit, even if the latter is fairly bare-bones at the moment — but it has, I think, one of the best sets of Main Scenario quests the game has seen for a long time.

Soul Surrender unfolds after the events of Heavensward and its first three content patches came to an end, which is to say that the Dragonsong War is over, and the former Holy See of Ishgard has undergone a revolution and become a republic, with longtime Warrior of Light buddy Ser Aymeric in charge of keeping order. All has seemed peaceful for a while now that the Ishgardians and the dragons have successfully laid down their arms and starting the long healing process from their centuries-long conflict.

Right on cue, then, unrest stirs elsewhere in Eorzea, as rumours once again surface of the Warrior of Darkness and his companions. Their motivations aren't immediately apparent, but the end result of the chaos that they sow is that the realm's various beast tribes have been thrown into despair, leading them to once again, out of desperation, attempt to summon their Primal gods.

The Warrior of Light initially thwarts their scheme in the Ixali homeland of Xelphatol, just as the Ixal head honcho is in the process of finalising the process of re-summoning windy madam Garuda for the fifth(?) time since Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0. The battle at the end of Xelphatol is pretty spectacular and chaotic, with the boss actually using Summon Garuda as a move several times throughout the fight, forcing you to deal with some of Garuda's distinctive mechanics and area of effect attacks while simultaneously pummeling another boss altogether.

Following this, rumours abound that something similarly suspicious is going on with the kobolds near O'Ghomoro in Upper La Noscea on the isle of Vylbrand. The Warrior of Light and the Scions go to investigate only to discover a Maelstrom camp mildly inflicted with chaos by the apparent presence of a kobold intruder. The Warrior of Light eventually chases this interloper down, and it turns out to be a child kobold that recognises his elders are preparing to summon Titan once again, and that this is a very bad idea indeed, particularly as numerous adult kobolds — including his parents — have been taken away, never to be seen again. The Warrior of Light and the Scions conjecture that these missing kobolds may have been killed and their remains used for ritualistic purposes in summoning Titan, but resolve to investigate rather than jumping to any conclusions.

The Warrior of Light arrives, with the young kobold in tow, at The Navel, deep within O'Ghomoro. The ritual for summoning Titan is reaching its final stages, but has not yet been completed, but things are thrown into chaos when the young kobold spies the bodies of his parents lying motionless next to the head of his tribe and his henchmen, apparently having been used as the latest sacrifices to appease the Lord of Crags. The young kobold, completely grief-stricken and filled with absolute despair at the loss of his only family, screams out in pain, and the sound of his anguish awakens Titan once more.

In gameplay terms, this then provided an opportunity for the game to reuse the Titan Hard Mode level 50 fight, but a severe emotional gutpunch is delivered during the battle when you see that Titan's lines — usually of the "Bow down, overdweller!" variety — have all been changed to the young kobold's various screams of anguish, with Titan's ultimate ability coinciding with the kobold screeching "WAKE UP!!!", at a complete loss as to how he can possibly handle the devastation his life has just suffered.

The young kobold is left in the care of the Maelstrom soldiers, who promise to take care of him rather than put him to the sword, as is usually the approach taken to those "lost" to the Primals' influence. At the last moment, the young kobold regains his voice, still full of pain and grief, but starting to show that his tribe's god doesn't quite have a hold of him just yet.

In the meantime, the Warrior of Light and the Scions are called away to Little Ala Mhigo in South Thanalan, where they hear rumours of further unrest — specifically, a suspiciously large shipment of crystals which makes the group think that another Primal summoning is imminent. Indeed, when they encounter a mysterious figure known as "The Griffin", who appears to have become a prominent individual among the Ala Mhigan refugees, and who promises that his countrymen have a "great power" hidden within them, it seems all but certain that something is amiss.

However, the Warrior of Light and the Scions uncover the truth in short order: the shipment of crystals was not for the Ala Mhigans to attempt to summon a Primal in an ill-advised attempt to retake their homeland from the Garlean Empire. Instead, it was used as a trade with the local Amal'jaa, who apparently wanted to use it to summon their Primal Ifrit once again.

Upon arriving at the Bowl of Embers, hoping to stop the summoning ritual, The Warrior of Light and her companions discover that the Amal'jaa have, in fact, been decimated ahead of their arrival, and waiting for them in the Bowl of Embers is not the fiery Primal Ifrit, but the Warrior of Darkness and his party of companions.

A grand battle ensues, with both sides competing to channel their aether into one of their number who can best handle it, and eventually strike the other down. The Warrior of Darkness and his companions fight for their very lives, for they believe they are fighting to save their world — a parallel world to Hydaelyn, and one which runs the risk of being consumed not by Darkness, but by a surfeit of Light. They seek to redress the balance between the worlds, all of which are shards of what was once a greater reality, and they even gave up their corporeal lives and very souls in order to be able to travel between the worlds by means of crystals, much as the Ascians do.

Utterly defeated by the Warrior of Light, however, both sides of the conflict are drawn into the mysterious space between worlds where Hydaelyn has previously addressed the Warrior of Light alone through the Echo. Minfilia, revealed a while back to have transcended her mortal existence and become the Voice of the Mother, speaking for Hydaelyn herself, agrees to journey back to the Warrior of Darkness' ruined world and take into herself the excess of light in an attempt to stave off the cataclysm that threatens to turn it into the antithesis of the Void, itself another of these parallel worlds that was previously consumed by Darkness.

We're left with a number of questions. Chief among them is the matter of what The Griffin is really up to. It transpires that The Griffin the Warrior of Light and her companions met was merely a figurehead; the real Griffin is much more hesitant to show his face, but clearly has plans to retake Ala Mhigo, perhaps with the assistance of the Ascians, who never do anything for free.

And then in the final scene we see Nero tol Scaeva, last seen after our adventures in the Crystal Tower and the World of Darkness, stumbling across some ominous-looking Allagan ruins. He claims to have finally found something. But what? The smart money is on Omega Weapon, which could well spell disaster for all of Eorzea and beyond if true. We'll have to wait and see what happens next in the final content patch for Heavensward in three months' time, at which point we should have some information about what we can expect from the new expansion.

Exciting times for the Realm, indeed. And this is just the main story! I'm pretty certain that for me, this has been one of the best "episodes" of the game to date, and I can't wait to see how it continues.

I haven't even touched the grand finale of Alexander, yet, and I still have plenty of other adventures to catch up on, too. There'll be plenty of time for those tomorrow, though… for now, probably time for bed for this particular Warrior of Light!

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The first MMO I really got into was Final Fantasy XI. This was after a few previous aborted attempts including EverQuest and Ultima Online (over dial-up — not recommended, particularly EverQuest, which crashed every time I zoned) as well as slightly lesser-known titles like Dark Age of Camelot.

I never stuck with the earlier games because they never quite resonated with me for one reason or another — perhaps it was their clunky interfaces or their painfully slow progression. All I know is that Final Fantasy XI, despite also having a clunky interface and painfully slow progression, managed to capture my attention for a decent period of time before I finally moved on to something else — Final Fantasy X-2, as I recall — and never went back.

Just recently, some Final Fantasy XIV friends and I have been getting nostalgic for XI, so I thought I'd go check it out, given that it's been a number of years and several expansion packs since I last tried it. And while the game is still recognisable as what it once was — a steadfastly traditional MMO more in the EverQuest mould than the now more fashionable WoW mould — it's been considerably streamlined to make the experience much more friendly to new players and solo players. On top of that, players now have a hefty amount of options to choose from when they log in and want to decide what to do next. This is not something Final Fantasy XI was ever lacking in, but the additions and refinements that have been added to the formula over the years benefit both new players and grizzled veterans.

Take the Fields of Valour and Records of Eminence systems, for example.

The former sees you examining "field manuals" in each zone and taking on a training regime of your choice. Completing said regime rewards you with experience, gil and a currency called tabs that can be traded in for various benefits ranging from teleporting back to your home city — a godsend if you've been grinding several zones away, since fast travel isn't anywhere near as accessible as it is in XIV — to having temporary buffs cast on yourself.

The latter, meanwhile, is accessed through your Quests menu and allows you to assign yourself up to 30 objectives at a time from an extremely comprehensive list of possible challenges that range from "defeat 100 enemies" to "deal 100,000 points of damage in total" via "loot 10 wind crystals from enemies". Most of these objectives are repeatable, and all reward you with experience points upon completion.

Just the addition of these two systems, which support the existing style of play FFXI veterans will be used to, makes levelling a considerably less painful, time-consuming process. What once took weeks of grinding can now be done in a few hours — to put it in context, I played for about 2 or 3 hours earlier and made it to level 16. First time I played this took me several weeks to achieve; in several months of play I never got any further than level 30.

It's a bit of an adjustment to go back to XI after the tightly structured gameplay of XIV. XI, by contrast, is much more freeform; there is a main storyline to follow, but it's of considerable benefit to players to go out and level up a bit first before even thinking about tackling these missions. The story can even be ignored completely if you'd rather just go out hacking and slashing monsters, unlike in XIV, where it was an integral part of overall progression by gradually unlocking game features and challenges as you went through.

One of the best additions to XI in recent years is the Trust system, which allows you to recruit "alter-ego" versions of various NPCs from around the game world after meeting the requirements to unlock them. Once unlocked, these "alter-egos" can be summoned at any time in the field for you to party up with, effectively allowing you the ability to take on considerably stronger monsters than you would otherwise be able to tackle solo, and all but eliminating the need for standing in Valkurm Dunes for hours at a time shouting "RDM LFG" in the hope that someone would pick you up to go and kill lots of crabs with.

One might say that the Trust system takes away from one of the key defining aspects of FFXI as a massively multiplayer online game, but in practice it's simply more convenient for many players. You still have the option to party up with other people, of course — and chances are they'll play their roles much better than the relatively limited AI of the Trust companions — but for those who prefer to play solo, Trust NPCs can form a formidable party with you once you've unlocked a few of them.

The other interesting contrast between FFXI and FFXIV is how it handles combat. XI's combat is relatively simple in the early levels, relying mostly on your auto-attack and occasional use of Weaponskills when your TP bar hits 1000 or greater. XIV, meanwhile, is much more active, demanding that you both dodge enemy attacks with telegraphed areas of effect and keep performing your class's combo or rotations as efficiently as possible, preferably without stopping. Both are considerably slower paced than true real-time combat, striking a good balance between a turn-based feel and actually allowing the player to feel like they are in full control of their character, but XI is even slower than XIV, providing you with plenty of time to pick abilities in advance from its traditional FF-style menu system rather than XIV's hotbars.

I've enjoyed returning to Vana'Diel so far; the experience contrasts well enough from XIV that the two games can sit quite comfortably beside one another in a gamer's collection, and the state they're both in in 2016 means that you can sit down for either a long or a short session with either and feel like you've achieved something.

Mostly I'm wanting to play through Final Fantasy XI to see its main story content, which is supposed to be good, but the sheer amount of stuff to do in the game — it's got over ten years on A Realm Reborn, after all — is more than likely to prove a bit distracting!

The post 2413: Dropping in on Vana'Diel appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

With it being Final Fantasy XIV's third anniversary it's only fitting that I take a look back at the reason I've been playing it since its closed beta — and why, even though on several occasions I've felt like I might be "done" with the game, I keep on coming back, time after time.

These memories are presented in no particular order, but it makes the most sense to start with this one.

Knowing FFXIV was going to be something special

I jumped into Final Fantasy XIV's closed beta after a casual discussion with a Twitter friend about Final Fantasy XI and how much I liked it despite never really getting all that far with it. Eventually I found myself with an invite to the testing period of the game, and I was immediately smitten with it. Everything about it felt Final Fantasy. The look, the feel, the music, the controls, the battles, the monsters — and yet, it had enough of its own unique identity to make it feel like far more than just series fanservice.

Specifically, Final Fantasy XIV adopts a somewhat "dark fantasy" tone throughout, clearly heavily inspired by works such as Game of Thrones and The Witcher in places. Sure, there are still moogles and chocobos, but there are also complicated political machinations, betrayal, murder and, technically, just prior to the start of 2.0's story, apocalyptic catastrophes.

I was immediately drawn into the world in a way that World of Warcraft never quite managed to enrapture me. NPC dialogue, although localised with more than a few liberties taken from the original Japanese, much to the chagrin of people who play with Japanese voiceovers, was beautifully written with an almost Shakespearean tone in places, blending old- and middle-English words and phrases with modern spellings to make it actually comprehensible.

The fact that Final Fantasy XIV placed any emphasis on its main story at all — let alone to the degree that it has ended up doing so — was a unique feeling for me. Even its predecessor Final Fantasy XI's main story had felt like a side activity you did when you had done enough level grinding to be able to take on the next mission; here, the main story was tightly tied in with your character's progression: you advanced through the levels and became more powerful both in terms of mechanics and narrative, until you eventually reached level 50 and took on your most terrifying challenges yet.

During the closed beta, I only played up to about level 20 or so, but that was enough to know that I wanted to keep playing — and to know that I wouldn't mind when the servers were wiped post-beta to prepare for the start of live service.

Making some great friends

My friend who had urged me to try out FFXIV was all set to assemble a Free Company — FFXIV's take on guilds — as soon as the facility became available, and many members of that free company, centred around the Giant Bomb video games website, became great friends. I even took a trip to PAX East to hang out with a bunch of them and had an absolute blast. And while I recently left said Free Company in favour of a smaller group who are more local to where my wife and I are, FFXIV's various ways of keeping in touch — as well as extra-game means of communication like Discord — mean that I'll never be far away from this band of loveable rogues.

Castrum and Prae keeping me up until 5am

When I reached level 50, I was proud. The only other MMO I'd ever reached the level cap in prior to that day was World of Warcraft, and I'd stopped playing shortly afterwards, as my lack of friends playing had made that game a rather lonely experience at high level — this was the days before its current Dungeon Finder system, itself inspired by FFXIV's Duty Finder.

I'd heard the final two story dungeons, intended to be done pretty much as soon as you hit 50, were quite an experience, and so I asked the Free Company very nicely to accompany me on my first run through them. This was — and still is — the best way to run these dungeons, since they're both full of cutscenes, and running with a completely preformed party means no risk of other people running ahead and starting boss fights while you're still watching dramatic scenes.

The experience of running Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium left such an impact on me that I immediately wrote about it on USgamer. It remains one of my fondest gaming memories to date, and it makes me a bit sad that people coming to it now will more than likely be partied up with a group of people who outgear it to such a degree that every boss fight is a complete steamrollering. Pro-tip, then — if you're just hitting 50 for the first time and you have 7 friends handy, queue up for Castrium then Prae and check the "minimum item level" option in Duty Finder in order to experience these two dungeons at their original difficulty level from shortly after launch.

Entering the Coil

I happened to be up and about one night when some Free Company-mates were heading into the endgame raid dungeon The Binding Coil of Bahamut. At this point, the raid had been "unlocked" because better gear than it offered was already available, and so it was there for people to run just for the experience of the unique story it offered, as well as unlocking subsequent chapters.

Coil was a whole other level of the game for me. The encounters were much more complex, they demanded much more coordination and awareness of what was going on, and the unique story, music and enemies you fought in there made it feel like a truly "special" experience.

Forming LoCoBomb and tackling Coil proper

Loose Cannons, or LoCo, were Giant Bomb's neighbours in the Limsa Lominsa housing district of Mist, and they're now my new Free Company. LoCo is a tiny little group compared to the hundreds of members of Giant Bomb (many of whom are inactive players, but still) but we struck up a mutual friendship with one another, even going so far as to put together a rather casual, slapdash static for tackling The Binding Coil of Bahamut, a little later than much of the rest of the player base, but tackling it nonetheless.

Raiding together was a great way for us to get to know one another better, and we had a lot of fun times working out way through the first four Turns until we hit our first real barrier: Turn 5.

Toppling Twintania

Turn 5 of Coil was originally the hardest fight in the entire game, facing a party of 8 players off against the rather angry dragon Twintania. Accompanied by the fantastic piece of music Thunderer, this was a genuinely terrifying confrontation in which you really felt like you were battling against insurmountable odds.

Twintania was our first real encounter with having to properly coordinate raid tactics thanks to now-notorious mechanics such as Divebombs and Twisters. Taking her down for the first time was an incredible feeling, only to be matched by the time we finally bested the final boss of the Second Coil of Bahamut.

Nailing Nael

Turn 9 of Coil — or Turn 4 of Second Coil, if you prefer — quickly took over from Turn 5 as being the hardest fight in the game, mostly due to how unforgiving it was. The fight featured a wide variety of tasty instant death mechanics and even a few sections where careless play could wipe the rest of the raid without too much difficulty.

After a long slog through Second Coil — Turn 6 gave us a lot of grief, though the subsequent two went a little smoother — LoCoBomb persevered and were eventually victorious, however, and we still weren't sick of the two incredible boss themes Tempest and Rise of the White Raven.

This encounter remains, to date, my favourite boss fight of all time in any game ever. Ten character levels, over a hundred item levels and one expansion later and it's still not particularly easy to clear.

Phoenix from the Flames

A lot of people will note that Turn 12 — Turn 3 of Final Coil — is as memorable an encounter as the grand finale Turn 13, and I'd certainly agree with that. Resolving a large number of questions surrounding what really happened at the end of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, Turn 12 sees the party facing off against the iconic Phoenix, accompanied by this magnificent arrangement of the game's main theme Answers. I still get shivers every time I hear it. And the recent The Rising event in the game now brought it out at the perfect moment to genuinely give me goosebumps all over my body.

The Final Witness

The final battle in Final Coil is appropriately spectacular. It wasn't horrendously difficult by the time we got to it — each subsequent patch had increased the amount of bonus HP and damage you'd be blessed with when you went in, theoretically allowing more and more people of lesser skill and/or gear to enjoy all of Coil's story — but it was still an immensely worthy absolutely, positively, definitely final boss. And it made incredible use of Answers.

An in-game marriage and a real-life proposal

(if the embed doesn't work, go here to embarrass me)

January 3, 2015: Amarysse Jerhynsson married W'khebica Qimi (now Wuckle Bunny, because no-one can spell authentic Mi'qote names properly). During this process, the player behind Amarysse Jerhynsson — yours truly — made a rather lengthy virtual speech that culminated in him proposing to the player behind W'khebica Qimi, who was sitting in her study upstairs from him at the time.

We married in June 2015. And who says computer games are antisocial?

Heavensward and beyond

The first full expansion for Final Fantasy XIV was an exciting moment, as it would take us to brand new areas, see us tackling brand new dungeons and battling fierce new foes. It was everything most people hoped for, with an excellent story — to some, better even than A Realm Reborn's at times meandering narrative — and one hell of a final boss fight.

While the long lull between Heavensward's release and the first major content patch finally arrived with us was, I feel, largely responsible for the fact that my former Free Company are no longer quite as obviously "active" (at least in public channels) as they used to be, Heavensward has, on the whole, been a great evolution of A Realm Reborn's base, even introducing a number of brand new types of content to the mix, with my favourite being the new randomly generated Deep Dungeon.

Heavensward's raid scene hasn't appealed that much — I'm not really a fan of steampunk in general, and the narrative set up around Alexander was feeble and unmemorable compared to the majesty of Coil — but there's still been plenty of stuff to do, and as we saw with the Live Letter yesterday, there will continue to be more and more stuff to do as we start the buildup to the second full expansion, set to be revealed for the first time in October.

It's not many games you can play almost continually for three years and still look upon fondly, but I guess anything you spend that much time in the company of eventually becomes something you really, truly can't ever let go of.

It's hard to get this across to people who haven't been on the journey I've been on, and it probably won't be quite the same for someone who starts right now, but I stand by my nomination of Final Fantasy XIV as my Game of the Year for 2013 over on USgamer, and given the number of hours I've played, it's probably my GotY for 2014, 2015 and 2016 too.

The post 2412: Looking Back on Three Years, Off and (Mostly) On, in Eorzea appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's 5am and I'm still up because I decided it would be a really smart thing to do to stay up and watch the beginning of the 14-hour livestream to celebrate Final Fantasy XIV's third anniversary. It's not as if I have to get up for anything in the morning, though, so it's fine.

The reason why I wanted to watch at least the start of the livestream is because of the Live Letter from the development team, featuring a preview of the upcoming patch 3.4. These are always interesting and exciting, because they often reveal new game features and content, some of which ends up being a surprise to everyone.

I'm interested to see where 3.4 goes because the story begun in Heavensward is now essentially over — patch 3.3 saw adventurers defeating the dread wyrm Nidhogg and saving Ishgard from another thousand years of war with the dragons.

Previous patches did, however, tease the existence of dark counterparts to the player's Warrior of Light, and it looks as if 3.4 and 3.5 will concern these individuals in the run-up to whatever the next full expansion will be. (We find that out in October.)

I'm watching a livestream with a concurrent live fan translation, so I'll just write some thoughts as I watch, then post the whole shebang in one go when it's done.

3.4 will be called Soul Surrender and concern the aforementioned Warriors of Darkness. It will also apparently feature a great deal of lore about the planet of Hydaelyn itself, where the game takes place. It will be out on Tuesday, September 27.

As usual, there will be new main scenario quests advancing the main storyline. It looks as if Alphinaud and Alisaie will finally be reunited after being apart for pretty much all of A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. Alisaie was the main NPC for the excellent Binding Coil of Bahamut raids in A Realm Reborn, and apparently this patch's story will make reference to Coil, even going so far as to change dialogue if you previously completed Coil. (Cue a rush on unsync'd Coil runs!)

There will also be new Scholasticate quests. These started a couple of patches ago and sort of tailed off without any resolution, but they had potential to be interesting.

And Hildibrand will be back. His content has been a little weak in Heavensward, lacking the custom boss fights of A Realm Reborn, but his quests have nonetheless remained amusing and well written.

There will be some tweaks to the battle system, including recast timers being reset when restarting battles — a godsend for raiders or people trying to clear new content for the first time. The changes will also include some changes to auto-attack — Yoshi-P mentioned he wanted to make some changes here in a recent interview with Famitsu, and it looks like we're going to get the first stage of that with 3.4 — you'll no longer have to worry about character facing, just be in range of your foe. In other words, this means you can keep moving around a target without worrying about losing auto-attack damage for those periods when you're not directly facing it. Good news for bards and machinists in particular, who are perhaps more reliant on auto-attack damage than most.

Some Extreme Primal fights will be added to the recently added Raid Finder. These Trials aren't quite full-on raids, but still have quite a lot of complexity, so it will be good to have a means to organise learning or clear parties other than Party Finder.

The UI will have a Countdown feature added. Exactly what this does remains to be seen, but it's apparently intended to be a replacement for macros that some players used, perhaps to announce when certain abilities come off cooldowns.

The final chapter of the Alexander raid cycle is coming this time around: Alexander, The Creator and a Savage counterpart. Last chance for them to get this right after a somewhat lukewarm reception from much of the player base.

There's a new trial that sounds as if it will be a second member of the Warring Triad, since it's called Containment Bay P1T6, much like the previous Sephirot fight. Apparently the foe this time will be Sophia, the Goddess.

New dungeons include Xelphatol, the Ixali homeland, and a Hard mode variant of The Great Gubal Library. Still just two rather than the three ARR got with each patch, though this isn't surprising any more.

PvP is getting a duel mode that can be done in the Wolves' Den in a new part of the map. You'll be able to queue for dungeons while dueling, which is nice, and there will be no time limit; matches only end when someone wins or leaves the duel area.

PvP will also get a Custom Match feature allowing two light parties to set up a clash against each other, and a Spectator mode. FFXIV's PvP is actually pretty good, so it's good to see it getting some love.

The roguelike-esque dungeon Palace of the Dead will get an update in patch 3.45, bringing it to 200 floors total. There will be a job-specific ranking system based on a score you build up as you play. Floors 51-100 will be about the same difficulty as the current floors and bring the dungeon's story to a close. Above floor 100, things get much harder but they'll be worth many more ranking points.

Grand Companies are getting an update after being dormant pretty much since 2.0. A new Grand Company rank will finally be available, Platoons will become available and have some sort of missions attached to them, and new gear will be available, presumably this time geared to level 60 characters.

The Platoon system looks to have something to do with raising NPCs, and you'll be able to go into content with these NPCs from the sound of things — you can make a team of one player and three NPCs.

A new game feature is Wondrous Tails, which involves helping a young Mi'qote girl create something by completing objectives in a book. No other details were given.

Gold Saucer is getting an instanced Triple Triad battle hall for each data centre, allowing you to find opponents from other servers and thus expanding the minigame's scope considerably.

RTS minigame Lord of Verminion will also be added to the Duty Finder, allowing you to queue up and find opponents that way.

Housing updates will include the introduction of the Apartment system, presumably functioning something along the lines of Final Fantasy XI's Mog House system. It looks as if there will be a public lobby in each building as well as instanced rooms for players, and there will be 1536 apartments per server, assuming 3 buildings (one for each of the Eorzean cities) with 512 rooms each. They will cost 500,000 Gil, so much cheaper than current housing. Hopefully they won't all get bought up to be resold!

A system called the Double Cross Hotbar will be introduced for controller players. It's intended for people who don't feel they have enough available buttons when playing with a controller and want to be quicker to get at certain abilities. You'll be able to double-tap a trigger to access the extra buttons, and it can be used in conjunction with the existing Expanded Cross-Hotbar for even more available buttons. Essentially it adds an extra 16 button slots, and you'll have the option to keep these visible on screen at all times, and adjust the transparency of the hotbar you're not using at the time to make it clear what actions you have available.

The Double Cross Hotbar stuff looks like a great quality of life improvement for the game. Is it wrong that this is one of the things I'm most excited about? It will certainly make more complex jobs more straightforward to play with controller. Apparently Yoshi-P and his team are pretty excited about it too, as I think they spent more time showing it off than anything else in the Live Letter!

The exploratory missions to The Diadem are getting some minor updates, including the ability to queue as a gatherer rather than having to change once you get there. It will also start dropping item level 235 gear, making it potentially worthwhile again. A brand new exploratory mission — hopefully with lessons learned from the Diadem — will come in patch 3.5.

The new Allagan Tomestone endgame currency will be Tomestones of Scripture, and the gear they purchase is rather Sharlayan in its look, particularly the Dragoon's rather fetching robe and hat combo.

An online status for role-players will be added. FFXIV doesn't seem to have that many RPers in my experience, but that doesn't mean they're not thete, so having a means for them to find each other will be good. You'll also be able to use hyphens in character names at last — no more errant apostrophes!

Finally, The Rising event starts today. Last year this was an awesomely meta event in the game where you could warp out of Eorzea and visit the writers' room to meet the development staff. It was an extremely cool moment, and gave the feeling that the FFXIV team love and are grateful for their players.

Exciting times ahead for the game, then, and I'm well and truly back on board after my short break from it. Events like this remind me why I can never quite quit it.

The post 2411: Happy 3rd Birthday, FFXIV appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I last played World of Warcraft in the Wrath of the Lich King era. I played it off and on ever since launch, to be honest, but it was Wrath of the Lich King that saw me finally get to the level cap, although looking back on my time with the game through the eyes of an experienced Final Fantasy XIV endgame player, I now realise that I barely scratched the surface of what WoW had to offer.

World of Warcraft is one of those games that I consider to be part of the ill-defined, amorphous "gaming canon" — it's a game that I thoroughly believe everyone should play for at least a short time to understand what an impact it's had on the games industry as a whole: its importance to popular game design, the influence it's had on other games, and the aspects that it's drawn from its successors back into itself to evolve and adapt.

Like most MMOs, it's fascinating to chart how WoW has changed over the years because it's virtually unrecognisable from when it first hit the market. This most recent time I've been taking a look at it represents probably the biggest change I've seen to the overall game structure and experience, and among other things it's put certain aspects of my Final Fantasy XIV experience into a broader context.

My time with Wrath of the Lich King was spent primarily playing PvE (Player vs Environment) in the game's open world. This is still an entirely viable way to play World of Warcraft right the way through until level cap, unlike something like Final Fantasy XIV, which gates significant portions of the main story behind group content, albeit only of the most casual, straightforward variety right up until you reach the original level cap of 50.

The pacing of WoW is also very different to Final Fantasy XIV. While Final Fantasy XIV is relatively slow-paced with an almost turn-based feel thanks to its long "global cooldown" — the period of time between which you can use most of your abilities — WoW is relatively fast-paced and frantic. This comes at a slight cost, though: whereas Final Fantasy XIV's encounters are, for my money, much more interesting thanks to their strong emphasis on dodging and being in the right place at the right time — a distinctly Japanese approach to encounter design — World of Warcraft appears to be, to my limited experience, much more about gearing up and overpowering your enemies as much as possible. There's still an element of "don't stand in the shit" at times, but not to anywhere near the same degree as Final Fantasy XIV.

The two approaches are both valid, although the fact that it's possible to WoW-style overpower some of what used to be Final Fantasy XIV's most formidable encounters leads to a certain feeling of dissonance at times; there's always that feeling of conflict between the beautifully paced and choreographed encounter that the designers of Final Fantasy XIV put together, and the players' desire to bulldoze their way through it as quickly as possible. It's sort of a shame to see what a mockery modern groups make of fights like Garuda Extreme, although when you take this in the context of Final Fantasy XIV being a JRPG at core, it could simply be likened to the experience of level-grinding to a ridiculous degree, then steamrollering everything that once gave you grief into oblivion.

WoW also feels a lot more "free" than Final Fantasy XIV thanks to its diminished focus on storytelling — something which I always used to regard as a bit of a drawback to Blizzard's game, but which with more seasoned eyes I can see allows it to feel much more explicitly "game-like" than Final Fantasy XIV. This may sound odd, but it's true: FFXIV very much likes to put everything in some sort of narrative context, necessitating unlocking everything manually by completing various quests, whereas modern WoW simply unlocks things automatically and organically as you level up; you can jump into a dungeon as soon as you hit level 15 without having made prerequisite progress through a questline, whereas Final Fantasy XIV brings you to your first dungeon as part of its main scenario.

Modern WoW also features something I like very much, but which further contributes to its "game-like" feel: the Adventure Guide. This screen can be popped up at any time after level 10 and gives you suggestions of what to do next, allowing you to automatically start questlines without having to manually go to the location first, jump into dungeon queues the moment you've unlocked them, and even review strategy guides for dungeon bosses to save the tedious cries of "go watch a youtube video, noob" when a more inexperienced player enters group content for the first time.

WoW also seems to have taken some inspiration from Final Fantasy XIV's FATE (Full Active Time Event) system in the form of its pre-expansion Invasions. These are events that occur in the open world and require the cooperation of multiple players (albeit not in an organised manner) to accomplish various challenges. WoW's Invasions are much larger in scale than FFXIV's FATEs, however; an Invasion typically encompasses an entire zone, with objectives scattered around the place, whereas FFXIV's FATEs are constrained to a smaller area.

WoW also makes use of an incredibly elegant scaling system for these Invasions, where the monsters that appear as part of the event appear at different levels according to each player's own level. For example, I was participating in one earlier tonight as a level 12 character, so the enemies were appearing as level 12 with appropriate amounts of health and damage. Meanwhile, my friend Cat came to join me on her level 100 character, and the enemies appeared to her as level 100, with appropriately inflated amounts of health and outgoing damage. The higher-level characters still have an advantage due to better gear and a wider selection of available abilities, but it's nice that it's so simple for people of different levels to be able to cooperate on something and get meaningful rewards from it — it's a bit more elegant than FFXIV's slightly clunky Level Sync system in that you're not artifically gimping yourself to participate; the encounter gimps itself to lower-level players.

One thing where I've felt WoW has always had the edge over Final Fantasy XIV is in terms of gear. FFXIV has a strictly vertical gear progression system, with very little in the way of variety within each tier of equipment. As you're levelling, you get a new set of gear roughly every 5 levels or so until you reach level 50, at which point a few dungeon runs will allow you to purchase gear that will take you to about level 58 before you need to replace it. Once you hit 60, there are generally two or three "tiers" of gear that are "relevant" at any one time — one that is available with the endgame currency that has no weekly cap on it, one that is available with the endgame currency that does have a weekly cap on it, and, depending on what stage in the patch cycle the game is at, one or more tiers of raid gear from either the 24-player "casual" raid or the 8-player super-difficult "Savage" raid. In other words, everyone at an equivalent gear level in FFXIV will be wearing the exact same stuff as other people playing that class, though the last set to be introduced did at least encourage the insertion of Materia for limited customisation of secondary stats.

WoW, meanwhile, has a huge variety of gear right from the get-go. Shitty grey gear, poor white gear, slightly more exciting green gear, very exciting blue gear, mega-exciting purple gear and OMG I GOT IT Legendary gear. (And possibly some more tiers besides.) WoW throws a lot more loot at the player than FFXIV, particularly during dungeon runs, with green gear in particular taking an almost Diablo-esque approach to itemisation with prefixes and suffixes denoting variations on a particular item level's gear.

FFXIV does have an item "rarity" system along these lines — there are white, pink, green, blue and purple items — but in practice, getting a blue item simply means that you've acquired some level-cap gear, and purple items are, so far as I know, exclusively for the grind-tastic Relic and Anima weapons at levels 50 and 60 respectively. The only items that have any real variety to them are the pink items you find in dungeons while levelling up; these have standardised basic stats for the item level, but randomised secondary stats. In practice, though, it never really feels like the secondary stats make that much difference; perhaps this will change at higher item levels, but at the moment, adding 5 points of Determination on to your armour doesn't feel like it has a big impact on how powerful you are, and this is, I feel, a real weakness of FFXIV that should be addressed in future expansions.

Do I like one better than the other? No, I actually like them both for different reasons, and can quite feasibly see myself playing both, since they're both enjoyable and distinct experiences from one another. Oddly enough, spending a few hours playing WoW and getting to level 20 has made me appreciate the things that FFXIV does better, and also given me a certain amount of understanding as to why some players are the way they are. That doesn't excuse their behaviour at times, of course, but if you look at how they play in the context of having had previous experience with how WoW does things, certain behaviours like the desire for speedruns or overpowering encounters start to make a little more sense.

All in all, it's been a positive experience — and if you're a lapsed WoW player who has been thinking about checking out what the game looks like in 2016, I'd encourage you to do so. The experience for new players has been made a whole lot smoother, and the whole package is significantly slicker than it once was. Plus, regardless of whether or not you bought any of the previous expansions, all WoW players now get all the expansions up to Warlords of Draenor completely free, with only the impending Legion requiring you to spend any additional money. The game as a whole seems much more friendly to short, casual sessions than it used to be, and that can only be a good thing — though naturally once you hit endgame, it doubtless won't be long before the desire to raid kicks in… and that's when things get a bit time-consuming!

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I quit Final Fantasy XIV today.

I am sad about this. Really, genuinely sad. The game has been an important part of my life for quite some time now, and will always be special to me — hell, it's where I proposed to my wife.

But I think I'm gone for good this time. I've just had enough.

Not of the game, mind you; the game itself remains one of my favourites, with an enjoyably rhythmic combat system, plenty of distinction between classes and some truly memorable encounters — not to mention an incredible soundtrack and a great story.

No, I've had enough of the people who infest it.

The community's slide into unpleasantness has been a gradual but noticeable process. Whereas I described FFXIV's player base in my USgamer review (circa 2.0-era A Realm Reborn) as one of the most helpful, supportive and friendly communities in gaming, these days I regrettably can't say the same — though I find myself pondering whether or not it's because at the time I wrote that review, I'd only been playing endgame content for a short period.

Let me talk a bit about the incident that drove me over the edge today, then I'll talk a bit in more general terms about what I feel has gone wrong.

A short while back — like, earlier this week — FFXIV introduced a new type of content called Deep Dungeon. This was a completely new way to play the game, and involved descending into a 50-floor dungeon with up to three companions and clearing it out, one randomly generated floor at a time. The rewards on offer include tokens called "potsherds", which can be exchanged for various valuable items, and if you fully upgrade the weapon and armour you use in the Deep Dungeon — these are separate from those which you use in the main game — you get a high-level weapon for a level 60 character that is not quite the very best in the game, but certainly very respectable and suitable for all levels of content.

Upgrading the weapon and armour requires that you find silver treasure chests in the Deep Dungeon. Opening one of these will do one of three things: upgrade your weapon, upgrade your armour or explode, dealing damage to you and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more likely it seems you are to come across trapped chests, and your weapon's upgrade level is also capped by your character's level within the deep dungeon — also measured independently of progress in the main game. To put it another way: your weapon and armour can go up to level +30, and in order to upgrade them to this level your character must reach level 60 in the Deep Dungeon, though thankfully levelling up is considerably quicker than in the main game.

After completing all 50 floors once, it's likely that your weapon and armour will be around the +10 to +15 mark, depending on how lucky you've been. This means you then have to challenge the dungeon again from floor 1 but with your upgraded gear, hoping you'll get luckier on the deeper floors this time. As incentive to run it again, however, every 10 floors gives you a generous shot of gil as well as Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Esoterics and Lore, all of which are used to purchase the best level 50 or 60 gear available, so it's not as if running the upper floors again is a useless waste of time. Alternatively, if you enter the Deep Dungeon on a class you don't yet have to level 60 in the main game, completing 10 floors awards you with a large chunk of XP for your character's level in the main game, so it's also a good means of levelling alternative classes.

You may have surmised from that description that this structure puts a lot of pressure on Floors 41-50 to get players up to the magical +30/+30 needed to take away a shiny new weapon into the main game. And indeed, this is where the problems arise, with players doing everything from skipping fights with monsters that they don't feel the party "needs" to fight (despite some players not having reached level 60 at this point, and some enemies dropping treasure chests) to outright Vote Abandon-ing the whole dungeon if they don't feel they got "enough" silver chests in the first couple of floors.

I ran into one of these people today: a white mage, which is to say, a healer, and so an important, useful part of any group. Deep Dungeon, unlike everything else in the game, doesn't matchmake you into a party made up of one tank, one healer and two DPS, so it's entirely possible you'll find yourself running in a group with no healer at times, and as such having a healer in your group is something to be celebrated.

Unless it was this guy. Right from the very start of Floor 41, he ran off in completely the opposite direction to the rest of the party, leaving the remaining three of us to fight off monsters and get afflicted with various status effects that could have easily been cleansed if he had been there. But no; he had places to be, apparently, and finding those silver chests was more important than actually helping the other three people in there.

"Will you PLEASE stop running off?" piped up one of my companions halfway through Floor 42, obviously getting as impatient as I was with this git's shenanigans.

"I'm skipping mobs," replied our friend.

I then pointed out that not everyone in our party was level 60 yet — one was 56, one was 58 — and thus it would be in everyone's interest to kill as many monsters as possible, particularly as it's also necessary to kill a certain number to open the exit to the next floor anyway. He then complained about us being "slow" and "inefficient", and took great umbrage at several of us accusing him of "speedrunning".

Speedrunning is a bit of an issue in Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, particularly in dungeons, most of which are tuned more to the "casual" end of the difficulty spectrum, but nonetheless remain a good source of income for those valuable Tomestones. With a well-geared, confident party that knows what it is doing, most dungeons can be cleared in about 10 minutes or so, but this relies on everyone being both well-geared and confident in the speedrunning process, which usually involves the tank pulling as many enemies as possible at the same time, the healer working overtime to keep their HP topped up and the DPS doing area-effect attacks as much as possible.

It's quick, sure. It's also boring, because more often than not fighting like this means that you use maybe two or three of your complete suite of abilities, and fighting the monsters just becomes a case of standing in place hitting the same buttons over and over for ten minutes. Not interesting, and certainly not doing justice to the impressive encounters the Final Fantasy XIV team have created throughout the game. But no, at some point between 2.0 and 3.35, where we are now, someone somewhere decided that the de facto way to run dungeons was as quickly — sorry, "efficiently" — as possible, and woe betide anyone who slows it down for any reason, even if, say, the tank or healer say they don't feel confident or geared enough to do it.

Now, the thing with Deep Dungeon is that speedrunning is largely pointless, because monsters respawn, everyone needs to level up, you need to kill a certain number of monsters to open the exit to the next floor and, as with any good role-playing game, if you split the party you're probably asking for a bad time. With the levels being randomly generated, too, there's no set route through each floor, either, so you can't even work out a route that lets you avoid certain encounters as in certain fixed dungeons in the game, so it's really more trouble than it's worth.

That didn't stop this obnoxious White Mage from arguing his case increasingly aggressively though, eventually descending to insults about his perception of the rest of the party's skill levels. Hilariously, he even had a go at me on the grounds that I "wouldn't last five minutes in Expert Roulette" (the current two highest difficulty level 60 dungeons, neither of which are very tough) — I chose not to engage with him by explaining that actually, I had been playing the game since its open beta and as such knew it pretty fucking well by this point. Instead, I just voted to dismiss him from the party; my companions silently agreed, and thankfully he was booted shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a much friendlier person who unfortunately wasn't a healer.

This White Mage's attitude is representative of a considerable proportion of Final Fantasy XIV's player base as it stands today: the game, for these people, is about the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" so that they can acquire all the best gear, get all the achievements — achieve whatever they want to achieve, in other words — as quickly as possible then, in all likelihood, go on the official forums and Reddit to complain that three months is too long between content patches and that there's "nothing to do", despite smaller patches with additional features (such as Deep Dungeon, which was a significant addition) being added on a monthly basis.

I also saw this among a number of active Final Fantasy XIV players I used to follow on Twitter. There was a marked shift in their attitude over time; one person in particular that I started following as a result of attending an in-game "funeral" for a player who had sadly passed away in real life began as a very pleasant person to talk about the game with. But gradually over time he started caring more and more about parser figures — a parser being an external program you can run to see how much damage per second (DPS) everyone in the party is doing, a common means of harassing other players for "not pulling their weight" and technically against the game's Terms of Service, though I don't know of anyone who has been punished for it. He'd complain about parties he'd come across in Duty Finder; he'd post images of the parser figures; he'd shame people for not playing "well enough" or being "lazy". That relentless pursuit of "efficiency"; your DPS must be this high to ride.

I just can't stand it any more. It's ruined the game for me. Dungeons that I used to love running, like A Realm Reborn's final storyline dungeons Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, lose all their drama by people skipping all cutscenes — and yelling at people who don't — and speedrunning their way through as quickly as possible, even if someone in the group hasn't seen this part of the story before. (Not coincidentally, those two dungeons were also the last to have lengthy cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon run.) If I decide I want a leisurely run through a dungeon rather than a stressful but boring speedrun, I get yelled at. If someone in the party makes a mistake and there's a single death, everyone gets yelled at. And apparently not going fast enough in Deep Dungeon is now a cardinal sin, too.

Fuck all that. Fuck everyone who has ruined one of my favourite games of the last few years. And fuck this shitty behaviour being considered "normal" in all games, not just Final Fantasy XIV — indeed, I'm under no illusions, and am well aware that this sort of thing is a problem in all MMOs.

I just thought Final Fantasy XIV's community was better than that. It certainly was once — at least, I think it was. But no longer. The buildup of this crappy behaviour and how not-fun this makes the game for me has led me to both cancel my subscription and uninstall the game completely for the first time ever since open beta. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.

The post 2378: People Ruin Everything: FFXIV Edition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Patch day for Final Fantasy XIV today, and it seems like a good one so far. I haven't yet delved into absolutely everything on offer — partly because I went out for the evening — but what I've seen so far is pretty great.

Of particular note is The Final Steps of Faith, the big new Trial for this patch. This sees players taking on the mighty Nidhogg in a battle to the death as he brings the full force of his rage down on Ishgard and those he believes to have betrayed him.

The Final Steps of Faith is a cool fight, because — at the moment, anyway — it's genuinely challenging, even in its story mode incarnation. It's not excessively difficult by any means — the challenge factor comes from the fact that you actually have to pay attention to mechanics and can't just cheese your way through it. I'm all for this; while there's a certain amount of pleasure in being able to overpower old content with top-end gear, it's always a bit of a disappointment when fights that were once challenging, exciting and dramatic become a matter of simply soaking up all the damage being thrown at you and repeatedly smacking the enemy in the teeth.

I'm sure this situation won't last with The Final Steps of Faith, but for now it's nice to have an important storyline fight carry the appropriate amount of drama for the context.

This got me thinking back to the reasonably hefty amount of time I spent playing World of Warcraft, and how that game never quite got me feeling excited about combat. Things got a little better when I went a bit crazy modding the game's UI and added a "Jukebox" mod that allowed you to play music in combat, but it still never felt quite the same as an exciting encounter in a single-player RPG.

Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, absolutely nails the drama aspect. While the movement-heavy nature of combat means that it's not able to include the sort of cinematic camera work that people have associated with Final Fantasy since VII hit PS1s all those years ago, the combination of amazing music, gorgeously spectacular visual effects and a genuine feeling that you're struggling against a foe of unimaginable power help make the game's most important fights shine as some of the most memorable things I've ever done in a game — and certainly in an online game.

I've now finished the main story (and the enjoyable, optional "post-story" quest, which had a really heartwarming ending) so I find myself pondering what's next for Heavensward. While this patch brings the Dragonsong War plot arc to a close, there are still some unresolved threads that are clearly going to be tugged at further in the next couple of patches, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the stakes will be raised towards some sort of dramatic showdown that will inevitably lead into the next full expansion pack.

And in the meantime, I hear those bloody Moogles need some help with their crafting…

The post 2331: Revenge of the Horde appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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!

The post 2287: Deep Dungeon is Exactly What FFXIV Needs appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Playing some Dungeon Travelers 2 this evening, I found myself pondering exactly why I have, so far, spent 130 hours on this game — the longest I've ever spent on a single-player RPG, I believe — while a short time back, I decided that I really needed to take a break from Final Fantasy XIV, which was previously something of a life and free time-devourer.

On reflection, it comes down to a need for progression; more specifically, a need for a near-constant feeling of progression.

Herein lies the main reason I've set Final Fantasy XIV aside for the time being, and it's by no means an issue exclusive to that game, either — it's a genre-wide thing with all MMOs. And that issue is that once you reach "endgame" level — i.e. you hit the level cap, and progression becomes about acquiring better gear and taking on tougher challenges rather than earning experience points and levelling up — progression stops being constant and instead comes in fits and starts, in extreme cases, with instances of actually improving coming weeks apart from one another.

To put this in some sort of context for those who are unfamiliar with MMO endgames: you have several means of acquiring new gear at the level cap in Final Fantasy XIV. You can loot it from dungeons, which is based on random drops. You can acquire it from the raid dungeon Alexander, but this requires strategically acquiring items from its various floors, because you are limited in what you can acquire each week and different bits of gear require different numbers of items. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Esoterics, which have no limit on how many you can acquire per week. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Lore, of which you're limited to collecting 450 per week. You can take on the lengthy Anima Weapon quest. Or you can acquire it by running the top-tier challenging stuff such as the latest Extreme primal fights or Alexander on Savage difficulty.

Part of the issue here, I guess, is that everyone generally wants to go for the biggest upgrade possible at any given time, and it's these bigger upgrades that you're somehow limited in, meaning progress is artificially constrained. In order to earn a piece of body armour using Tomestones of Lore, for example, which is among the best equipment in the game right now, you need at least two weeks to earn the 825 or so Tomestones required, since you're capped at 450. In that intervening period, all you're doing is grinding for no discernible gain: the actual gain comes only when you've finished the process and you get your shiny new armour. (And then moan about it not having the stats you want, probably.)

Now, this sort of design is a key part of how MMOs generally keep people engaged over a long period — if everyone could get the best possible gear immediately, they'd complain about having "not enough content" more than they do already (which is a lot), and that is obviously undesirable for the development team, who are put under pressure to put out more content more quickly, which inevitably leads to quality suffering. Instead, these moments of progression are significant, but time-consuming: they have a noticeable impact on your character's abilities, but only after a long period of doing the same things over and over again until you've earned enough whatevers to get your doohickey.

That sort of treadmill progression had started to become a little less enjoyable to me than it had been, particularly as the current endgame of Final Fantasy XIV now has a number of different grindathons required to get the best possible gear. And so I put it down for now and instead focused on Dungeon Travelers 2's postgame (actually bigger than the main game) which is also a grindfest, but which is considerably more appealing to me right now for that feeling of constant rather than sporadic progression.

Progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 comes in several forms. The most obvious is in the earning of experience points and levelling up: finishing the main story will get you to about level 50, but the postgame will take you to the cap of 99 by its conclusion. This means that rather than hitting a level cap early and progression slowing by very nature of one of its sources being cut off, there's the constant satisfaction of earning experience points right up until the end of the game. And if you're still hungry for more, a "Level Reset" system allows you to discard those hard-earned levels in favour of some bonuses to the character's base stats if they had reached a high enough level, meaning you can level them up all over again and they'll be marginally better.

That's not the only means of progression, though. Gear is another important aspect of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2, much like other dungeon crawlers. The gear system is very interesting, in fact, since it's based around just a few base items, and then built upon with an enchantment system. What happens is you have a piece of base gear (say, a piece of leather armour) which has a bonus value attached to it (say, +5). The bonus indicates how much better than its base incarnation it is, and the value can keep going up and up and up. In order to make it go up, you have to enchant your gear using the Sealbooks you acquire by defeating sets of 9 of each monster in the game. Each of these Sealbooks has a level, and when you use it to enchant a piece of gear, two things happen: the bonus goes up by the tens value of the Sealbook's level (up to a maximum of 5 for books of level 50 and above) and one or more of the Sealbook's special effects (ranging from bonuses to stats to special effects such as regenerating health and TP each turn) is attached to the piece of gear.

Here's an example. I have a set of Leather Armour+40. I run across the wandering blacksmith in a dungeon, who allows you to enchant your gear. I use a level 50 Sealbook to enchant the armour, which increases its bonus to +45 and attaches a DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect to it, making it considerably more defensive than before. Then I use another level 50 Sealbook of the same type to boost it to +50 and keep the same enchantments. Then I use a different Sealbook of a level higher than 50 (to increase the bonus, the Sealbook must be of a higher level than the bonus' current value) to boost it to +55 and add a Max HP Up effect to my existing DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect, since equipment over +50 can have three, not two, effects attached to it. By this point, I've run out of money for the moment, so I take my leave of the bear blacksmith (yes, really) and proceed on my way, secure in the knowledge that I could upgrade that armour twice more before it becomes "capped" and I'd have to start looking for a stronger base item to progress further gear-wise.

These two systems intertwine so that you're always making one form of progress or the other. Levelling is quite slow in Dungeon Travelers 2 compared to more conventional JRPGs, but it has a noticeable impact, particularly on your characters' maximum HP. In the meantime, you can partly plug the gap for an underleveled character by giving them gear with huge bonuses — there's no level restrictions on equipping items — but you'll need to level them to ensure their survival and their usefulness in most cases.

But that's not all, either. The third means of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 is simply getting further through the dungeons. Every expedition, you'll manage to get a bit further, perhaps even unlocking a shortcut allowing you to get to the new stuff more quickly next time you head in. Perhaps you'll beat a boss. Perhaps you'll find a nice piece of treasure. Perhaps you'll run into an area that has different enemies to the start of the dungeon. Point is, there's always something to discover, and while you're still wandering around grid-based mazes, swearing at one-way doors and teleporters and fighting battle after battle, at no point are you doing exactly the same thing over and over. You're not running the same dungeon time after time; you're discovering new parts of these sprawling mazes. You're not fighting the same bosses; you're taking on progressively more difficult challenges. And yes, you are grinding, but you're not doing so on a treadmill: you're always moving forwards.

This, I've come to the conclusion, is important to me, and it's why I'm not feeling the MMO thing right now. It's also why I've repeatedly bounced off the Souls series, despite trying to like them several times: those games are so heavily based on learning through repetition that I quickly get frustrated with the lack of forward momentum and tend to put them down after being smacked off a cliff by an armoured douchebag with a hammer for the umpteenth time, only to get smacked off a different cliff by a different armoured douchebag with a hammer on the way to reclaim my hard-earned souls and effectively undo the potential for progression I had before the unfortunate incident.

Nah. Give me a constant feeling of moving forward; that's what I really crave from my RPGs these days. And Dungeon Travelers 2 is very much scratching that particular itch right now.

The post 2275: A Need for Progression appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've been back and forth on whether or not I should continue playing Final Fantasy XIV for a while now. I do love the game and all it offers, but the long period of time between the release of expansion pack Heavensward and its first major content patch caused me to get significant burnout, and while I did get temporarily enthused around the start of the patch 3.2 cycle, I'm once again feeling that I don't really want to do the endgame grind, nor do I want to raid.

Those who have been following my blog for a while will know that I've been one of the loudest, most enthusiastic people about Final Fantasy XIV ever since the beta of A Realm Reborn. So why the change of heart? Well, a number of reasons, really.

First up is the aforementioned endgame grind. This has always been present in the game — it is an MMO, after all — but first time around it somehow didn't feel so bad, perhaps because I never got "ahead of the curve" and made content irrelevant by outgearing it within a day or two of it releasing. In other words, taking on challenges was always exciting and there was always something to aim for; that aspect is still there, but if anything, I think there's now too much to grind on for what feels like relatively little reward.

Take the Anima weapons, for example — Heavensward's version of the Relic weapons from A Realm Reborn. The first step of this process either requires you to give up a fully upgraded level 50 relic (which a lot of people had at least one of by this point) or to repeatedly run FATEs around the Heavensward areas until you got Atma-like drops at a very low chance. The second step requires you to run ten dungeons that, at the level you're constructing the Anima weapon at, are completely irrelevant to you unless you're collecting gear for alt classes. The final step requires you to collect 20 each of four different items and then do some other bits and pieces.

The first step either takes seconds or hours of boring FATE grinding, though you can at least attempt to get the items from FATEs while levelling another class. The second step is just plain tedious, though it is presumably there as an attempt to keep older dungeons populated for those who are coming up through the 50s. And the third and final step is an absolutely brutal grind that either takes weeks of daily quests or repeated running of dungeons and/or the first (now largely irrelevant) part of the Alexander raid dungeon. Oddly, the jump in item level and power for this final step is significantly smaller than that for the second step, despite the final step being by far the most significant undertaking.

I currently have 8 out of the 60 items required to upgrade my Relic to its (currently) final form, and the next step of the process is coming soon. I just don't feel any inclination to do this alongside grinding daily quest reputation, Tomestones to purchase gear, XP for classes that haven't reached 60 yet, not to mention crafting and gathering, both of which are one of the few reliable ways to make a decent amount of money in the game.

The trouble, then, is not that there's nothing to do as such — it's that there's too much to do, but that too much is based on doing the same things over and over again for weeks or even months. The worst of both worlds, if you will — for me, anyway. There are plenty of people still playing who seem to be quite happy indulging in this grind. Some are even already working on their second or third Anima weapons.

I don't begrudge anyone how they spend their time, but having been playing a bunch of other stuff recently, I just don't want to commit the amount of time necessary to progress at a meaningful pace in Heavensward, because it means that I won't have time to enjoy other games like Senran Kagura Estival Versus, Dungeon Travelers 2, the upcoming Trillion God of Destruction and the many, many RPGs that are still on my game shelves, as yet unplayed. I've tried finding that magic balance between FFXIV and other games, and it just doesn't really exist for me — I always end up going in an "all or nothing" direction, and right now I'm feeling like I would rather play other things.

I'm not hanging up my Eorzean adventuring shoes completely; I fully intend to continue dropping in on the game to see how the plot develops with each new content patch, but I no longer have any desire to stay "current" with content progression, raids or Extreme-level Primal fights. In a way, I'm a bit sad that I feel this way, as FFXIV has been such a significant part of my life for so long — and my wife now plays more than I do — but ultimately, if you're not happy or having fun doing something that is supposed to be enjoyable, then there's really no point carrying on with it.

Alongside all this is the social matter: our Free Company has become very quiet over the last few months. I'm not entirely sure what's caused this and I don't really want to investigate for fear of dredging up any drama that might be involved. But playing the game isn't the same social activity it once was, with Free Company chat a lively place filled with people having fun, joking around and enjoying themselves. Many of the regular faces are still there, but remain quiet in "public", instead preferring to converse in small, private Linkshells rather than the main guild channel. It's made for an atmosphere that isn't anywhere near as welcoming and fun as it once was.

And alongside this is the matter of the overall game community and how it has declined somewhat over the last few months. MMOs always have a problem with elitism at their top end, but Final Fantasy XIV always used to feel like it was one of the more positive, friendly communities out there. Now, though, it's a place where you get yelled at if you don't speedrun dungeons, where newcomers to fights are sometimes kicked out of groups, and where players bitch about people they perceive to be "inferior" to them both in-game and on social media. The rise in popularity of DPS parsers also means that the particularly elitist players have data to hold over the heads of people they think are underperforming, and rather than offering feedback on how to improve, many of these people think that simply quoting them their DPS figure is enough to make them want to "git gud".

This is a generalisation, of course; I've still had plenty of positive experiences in the game in recent months, and I always made a point to be the change I wanted to see in the community by being friendly and conversational when playing with others, offering advice without berating when necessary. But it's just got to a point where this side of things has become exhausting and even stressful at times, and that's not conducive to having fun.

So I'm stepping away. For how long, I don't know, though as I say, I'm pretty sure I'll be back in for the next patch, at least to see how the main scenario storyline develops. Raiding, though? Nope. Sephirot EX? No thank you. Anima grind? No, thank you.

Now, I'm 86 hours deep in Dungeon Travelers 2 and I have grinding to do… he said, without a trace of irony.

The post 2259: Back to Solo Play appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I upgraded the processor on my PC yesterday. It was the last bit that needed upgrading to make it decently up-to-date, and I'd been meaning to do it for a while. It was also a good excuse to wipe everything, reinstall Windows and have a nice fresh, clean system that wasn't clogged up with all manner of crap. For a little while, anyway.

PC gaming, for many people, is the relentless pursuit of ever more impressive frame rates, preferably at ever more impressive resolutions. I've never felt particularly strongly about either, given that my PC is hooked up to my TV and thus is limited to a maximum of 60 frames per second at 1920×1080 resolution; in other words, anything above 60 simply wouldn't benefit what was on screen at all, and in fact would often result in unsightly "screen tearing", where different parts of the screen update at different times. Consequently, I habitually play everything with VSync on, which limits the frame rates to 60 and completely eliminates any tearing. It's kind of deliberately hobbling performance to look better.

That said, even with a theoretical maximum frame rate of 60, my old processor couldn't quite keep up with some of the more modern games. I have a decent graphics card, so nothing was actually unplayable, but I knew that I could probably get more out of said graphics card with better base hardware. Final Fantasy XIV, for example, ran perfectly well at anywhere between about 30 and 60 frames per second depending on how much was going on at the time — it would be pretty damn smooth in the relative peace and quiet of instanced dungeons, while the frame rate would drop a fair bit in densely populated areas or busy battle scenes with lots of players. I'm not someone that these frame rate disparities bothered a great deal, but they were noticeable.

So with some degree of curiosity, after assembling the new bits and pieces and putting my computer back together, I fired up Final Fantasy XIV to investigate if the performance was any better. After a little fiddling with settings — previously, it ran better in "borderless windowed" mode, while now it runs better in dedicated full-screen mode — I was very pleased to discover that it was now running at an absolutely rock-solid 60 frames per second, constantly, regardless of what was happening on the screen at the time. It didn't make a massive difference to the visual fidelity of the game, but it was nice.

Then I jumped into a dungeon, and the true nature of the improvements better hardware brought on became apparent. While the graphics had never really struggled much in dungeons — except with the bizarre bug in the old DirectX 9 version of the game where facing certain directions would cause your frame rate to tank, presumably because the game was trying to render more "out of sight" stuff at once — what really became obvious as I was running with my new hardware was how much more responsive everything was. While the background graphics never really struggled much on my old rig, you could occasionally see things like the interface elements juddering a bit, particularly the damage numbers and status messages that scroll up and down the screen during combat, keeping you informed of what's happening.

Now, those messages are just as smooth as the animations and effects. More importantly, the controls are significantly more responsive, because there aren't any "dead frames", for want of a better word, where the game doesn't register a button input for whatever reason. It was a minor issue before; now it's completely absent, which is lovely. I hadn't anticipated quite how lovely it would be, but it really is; knowing that my performance can no longer be hampered by the complexity of the visuals on screen or how much is happening at the same time around me is a thoroughly pleasant feeling, and, surprisingly, makes the game more enjoyable.

So okay, I'll admit it; frame rate does make a difference. Sometimes. I maintain that "cinematic"-style experiences such as adventure games and their ilk don't particularly benefit from 60fps visuals — they can look nice, but if you're going with realistic imagery, 30fps can sometimes look more "natural" as it's closer to the frame rate of film and TV — but in games where precision and split-second timing are important — fighting games, shoot 'em ups, arcade games, MMOs such as Final Fantasy XIV — smoother hardware performance leads to smoother player performance. Which is kinda cool.

Oh, and no, I haven't tried Crysis yet.

The post 2237: The Insufferable Frame-Rate Obsessives May Have a Point appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Tonight, we cleared the last area of the new raid dungeon in Final Fantasy XIV… in its "normal" incarnation, anyway. Savage is likely to prove a somewhat stiffer challenge, but regular ol' vanilla had plenty of hurdles to overcome, too.

Now that we've been through all four of the new raids, I thought I'd ponder how I felt about them, and about Alexander as a whole compared to The Binding Coil of Bahamut.

The first thing to note about Alexander is that the overall tone of the whole thing is very different to Coil. Coil represented one of the most serious, dramatic parts of Final Fantasy XIV's story, and over its entirety revealed some very significant background lore about the Allagans and the Meracydians, both of whom we'd seen mentioned (and occasionally explored the relics of) but never encountered, mostly due to them both being long dead.

Alexander, meanwhile, largely concerns the goblins, and much like their Final Fantasy XI counterparts, goblins in Final Fantasy XIV are rather silly, afflicted with distinctive speech patterns and, for the most part, there for comic relief. They're not very threatening, in other words, so for them to be introduced as the main villains of the new raid cycle was… interesting, to say the least.

The overall aesthetic of Alexander is very different to Coil, too. Coil began as an expedition into the bowels of the earth and gradually gave way into a combination of fantastic, otherworldly scenery and pure sci-fi, futuristic environments, many of which were absolutely breathtaking in their scale. Alexander, conversely, has a pretty consistent "steampunk" look throughout its entirety, though Midas does a somewhat better job than Gordias in terms of presenting a bit of variety in the way things look.

This difference in aesthetic extends to the main attraction of the raids, too: the bosses. In Coil, you fought a wide variety of foes, ranging from a giant genetically modified snake to a fearsome dragon god via technologically advanced defence systems, a bioengineered lamia, a robot treant and, of course, the reincarnation of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0's main villain, Nael van Darnus, now going by Nael deus Darnus having apparently changed gender and gone a bit, well, dragonish.

Alexander, conversely, sees you fighting a lot of things in a similar mould: in Gordias, you fight a large steampunk robot thing, followed by a swarm of goblins and large steampunk robot things, followed by a squishy Pepsiman wannabe in what appears to be a sewage outlet, concluding with a battle against The Manipulator, which is a large steampunk robot thing. Midas is a bit better: first you fight a mad scientist goblin who keeps drinking his own concoctions and growing to Hulk-like proportions, then you fight a series of four large steampunk robot things, then you fight the main villain of the plot arc (and his cat), then finally you fight five large steampunk robot things — four of which you fought earlier in the raid — that then combine to make one enormous steampunk robot thing.

While I still like Alexander less than Coil in terms of its aesthetic and enemy designs, Midas is a big step in a better direction. Everything about it is better, from the variety between the four areas to the background plot that is revealed as you progress, which was rather lacking and forgettable in Gordias. It still lacks some of the outright drama that Coil had — the final boss of this particular cycle is an intense fight, but it's more chaotically humorous than terrifying like Twintania, Nael and Bahamut were — but things are improving a lot.

Of particular note is the boss music for the final boss, which I present with some pleasure for you below, in all its '70s anime glory:

Happy with how things have turned out with 3.2. I was getting concerned the game was losing its magic, but it's well and truly back on target.

The post 2231: Initial Impressions on Alexander: Midas appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Final Fantasy XIV's new patch came out today, bringing with it some new dungeons and a spectacular new boss fight against Sephirot, The Fiend, one of the Warring Triad previously seen in Final Fantasy VI.

Unlike most of the other Trials that have been in the game so far, the Sephirot battle is separate from the main questline, and having a pop at it earlier revealed why: it's surprisingly tough! Once you know what you're doing, though, it's pretty straightforward. As such, I thought I'd share my observations from a couple of goes today in the hope of helping out anyone struggling with it.

Note that this isn't intended to be a particularly comprehensive guide and I can't remember the exact names of many abilities, but given that the Sephirot fight is largely dependent on observing animations and visual cues rather than cast bars, ability names aren't actually terribly helpful here.

So then. Here's how it works. I think.

Phase 1: That's Not Sephiroth

First phase is pretty straightforward. Main tank should pull Sephirot and turn him away from the rest of the group as normal and proceed to wail on him. Apply DoTs and AoE DoTs as appropriate.

Sephirot has a few different attacks in this phase. He has a conal AoE in front of him called Triple Trial, so this is the main reason the tank faces him away from the group. It doesn't do a lot of damage, but you'll want to keep the MT's HP as high as possible. MT should save cooldowns for the moment though.

Next is a jumping attack away from the MT onto a random player, after which he returns to the MT. Again, the damage isn't horrific, but keep on top of things. Priority after the jump should be topping off and shielding the MT for what comes next.

Sephirot will pull his left arm back ready to deliver a powerful punch. (Note that if you are tanking him, his left arm will be on the right of your screen, as you're facing him.) When this happens, MT should blow a suitable defensive cooldown (Shadow Skin or Rampart is enough) and Convalescence if you want to help out your healers a bit. When the animation completes, the big punch Sephirot was winding up for will deliver a powerful tankbuster in the region of 16-17k or so, though this can be reduced with cooldowns and shields.

Other than this, Sephirot has a large AoE that he blasts out towards a non-tank member of the group, which should be healed through.

At around 60%, Sephirot will become untargetable and spawn a bunch of adds. Both tanks should pick them up and pull them all together for DPS to AoE them. Prioritise the larger adds first, as they hit a bit harder and have more HP. As one set gets close to being killed a second set will spawn, so be ready to pick them up and bring them to the group.

When the adds are down, Sephirot will do his ultimate. You have quite a long time to prepare for this, so make the best use of the time. Sephirot will fall backwards off the platform and nothing will happen for a few seconds. Use the time to heal everyone up, then when you see Sephirot's newly giant hand grab the platform to pull himself up, drop Sacred Soil or other suitable defences ready for the incoming damage.

Phase 2: He Got Big

Tanking Sephirot is less important here, since he stays in one place and fires out mechanics at random players rather than whoever has aggro. Tanks should feel free to switch to DPS stance and wail on him as much as possible.

Note that Sephirot's hitbox is huge and you don't need to be standing anywhere near his model to actually hit him. Target him and stand on the edge of the circle on the ground and you'll hit him no problem; this is important for one of his main abilities in the phase.

At intervals throughout Phase 2, Sephirot will drop blue puddles on the ground. After these have sat there for a moment, he'll slam his fist down on the puddle, knocking everyone backwards. To counter this, stand near (not in) the puddle with your back to the side of the arena furthest away from you — think the final boss of Neverreap. He'll do this three times, so run back into position after being knocked back: first one is always directly in front of himself, then on the left, then on the right.

For Sephirot's other attacks, you once again need to watch his animations rather than cast bars. When he lowers himself down so his head is level with the platform, he's preparing to do a huge raid-wide knockback, so stand in front of him with plenty of space behind you to avoid falling off.

Immediately after the knockback, three adds will spawn: two that you've seen before and one tornadoey whirlwind thing. DPS down the tornadoey whirlwind thing as quickly as possible and it will drop a (harmless) tornado marker on the ground: this will be important in a moment. Then kill the other two adds. Shortly after you've done this, a big flashing arrow marker will appear over the tornado marker, so get in it. Sephirot will probably do a small knockback on you while you're getting into position, so make sure you immediately move back into the tornado: the reason you do this is so that the tornado blows you up in the air to avoid Sephirot's devastating arm-sweep attack, which is an instant KO if you get hit by it.

When Sephirot seems to charge energy into his chest, everyone should spread out because people are about to get hit by energy blasts with splash damage. Simple enough to avoid.

When two players are marked with shining silver markers — the same as in Turn 13 if you've done that — these two players should move to the sides of the arena to bait Sephirot's Earthshaker line AoE move away from the rest of the group. (Yes, this is indeed the exact same Earthshaker that Bahamut Prime does.)

When Sephirot holds two orbs out in front of him… I must confess I'm not entirely 100% on what this mechanic does, but it appears to be something similar to the Angra Mainyu fight in World of Darkness in that the arena is split into two different coloured sections, and you need to stand in the correct one. Perhaps someone can clarify in the comments if you have a better idea.

Shortly before or after the two orbs, Sephirot will summon two towers similar to those seen in later stages of Turn 13. Like those towers, you need to stand in them to minimise raid-wide Bad Stuff happening. Only one person needs to stand in each tower.

After that, these mechanics just repeat, though Sephirot will be flinging small circle AoEs around the place while all this is going on too, but these are easy enough to dodge.

Congratulations, you've toppled The Fiend!

The post 2226: Sephirot, The Fiend appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I made a difficult decision today: to quit Final Fantasy XIV. Temporarily, at least.

This is a decision I've been mulling over for quite some time, I must admit, since following the initial excitement over the expansion pack Heavensward, the new content that's shown up since was 1) very, very late indeed and 2) not great. The one thing that had kept me clinging on was the good friends I've made while playing it, but I've come to the conclusion that with the state of endgame as it is now, it's just not fun enough to warrant the endless grind.

Before we go any further, I would like to point out that Final Fantasy XIV is still an excellent game, and its storyline through A Realm Reborn and Heavensward is one of the best Final Fantasies I've had the pleasure of playing over the years. Its battle system is great, its graphics are wonderful, its music is without peer and it has numerous memorable setpieces and boss fights that will doubtless stay with me for years afterwards.

The issue comes with endgame — what you do when you get to level 60, have no more experience points to gain, and hit the ceiling of available content. At this point most people do one of two things: level another class, or get on the gear treadmill to equip their "main" class as well as possible, either simply for the satisfaction of doing it, or with a mind to taking on the game's most challenging content such as raids.

The main trouble with Heavensward endgame as it exists today is that it's not all that different from A Realm Reborn's endgame, only with a fraction of the level cap content that A Realm Reborn had by the end of its cycle of patches. This may be an unfair comparison, but given that most people who played through Heavensward spent months or more at level 50 in A Realm Reborn, the shift back to having a very limited selection of meaningful content to play was somewhat jarring — particularly as people raced through Heavensward's main scenario and initial levelling process to 60 way quicker than they beat A Realm Reborn, despite them being comparable in length.

So what do you do in endgame? As previously mentioned, you gear up. This is primarily accomplished by collecting "tomestones" from running dungeons, daily roulettes and a couple of other sources. There's a weekly cap on one of the types of tomestones — the one that gets you some of the best equipment in the game currently — which means that it unavoidably takes several weeks, even months, to put together a complete armour and weaponry set for just one class, let alone multiple.

There are other means of acquiring gear, of course; the newly added Void Ark raid is designed to get people into better gear without grinding for tomestones by allowing them one piece of gear per week of comparable level to an unupgraded Tomestone piece. And The Diadem, the home to the exploration missions, can drop some seriously good equipment, though in that case it's very much left up to random chance.

Part of the problem with Heavensward's endgame right now is that the high-level raid — the most difficult thing in the game, and source of some of the best equipment — just isn't very interesting. A Realm Reborn's The Binding Coil of Bahamut was spectacular: it told its own story, had unique bosses and music, and was extremely rewarding to play through, particularly once its entire saga was completed and gave you an opportunity to fight A Realm Reborn's "true" final boss.

Alexander, the current level 60 raid, meanwhile, suffers for a number of reasons: firstly, its Normal mode incarnation, designed so those who aren't up to the challenges of raiding could enjoy its story, is far too easy and quite dull. And secondly, said story is not interesting at all, building on one of the more ridiculous side stories from A Realm Reborn rather than the world-shaking drama that Coil offered. For many people, clearing Coil wasn't about gear; it was about seeing a cool story through to its conclusion. And while Alexander has a story, it's not a patch on Coil's.

There's also the fact that Normal mode removes that incentive to progress that Coil had. The only way to see Coil's story was to beat Coil, whether you did that when it was fresh, new and extremely difficult, or when it got considerably nerfed (but was still a stiff challenge) months down the line. With Alexander, you can beat its Normal mode rather easily, even if you have no experience with raiding, and by then you've seen its whole story, meaning its Savage incarnation becomes little more than a more difficult version of exactly the same thing.

This is my main problem, but there's a number of other issues that have been bugging me for a little while too. I was really looking forward to the exploration missions, since they sounded like something new and interesting, but they turned out to be glorified Hunts, and Hunts are rubbish, since all they are is 300 people dogpiling a monster designed to be fought by 8 people, closely followed by at least 150 more people whining in /shout about someone "pulling early". Diadem at least limits the chaos to 72 players at once, but there's no "exploration" going on; within hours of it appearing for the first time, people had already figured out the most "efficient" way of getting the best rewards, which involves standing in one place and fighting the same damage sponge enemies over and over again until some slightly stronger damage sponge enemies show up and hopefully drop some slightly better loot. There was a "loot whore" angle to Diadem that showed promise, but in practice, with the way Final Fantasy XIV is designed in terms of stats, it's not really a concept that works within the game's overall framework.

Perhaps the thing I've found most offputting, though, is the changing attitudes of a lot of the playerbase. I recall complimenting Final Fantasy XIV's community when it first launched for being incredibly friendly and helpful to one another, sharing information and tips with newcomers and cooperating to make the virtual world of Eorzea a better place for everyone. Over time, this appears to have dissipated somewhat, to be replaced with a bevy of whiny players who insult you if you don't speedrun a dungeon, and people who constantly run damage parsers in the background just so they can post screenshots on Twitter and bitch about how awful the Bard they just ran Brayflox with was. The unfortunate elitist attitude of a lot of these players drives off newcomers and makes them afraid to make mistakes, which in turn puts people off trying more difficult content, which ultimately only hurts the high-level players, who can often be found in Party Finder bitching about not having anyone to clear Alexander Savage with.

I'm not sure why this shift in attitude happened, or if it's always been there and I just hadn't been aware of it. I know that a lot of Final Fantasy XIV players that I follow on Twitter seem to have changed for the worse, though, preferring to post screenshots of bad parses and arguments in party chat rather than celebrating their victories.

There's part of the trouble, though, I think; there's not that many victories to celebrate for veteran players any more. Even victory over a floor of Alexander Savage feels somewhat hollow, because everyone doing Savage will have already beaten all those bosses in Normal mode. "I beat The Manipulator" doesn't have the same gravitas to it as "I killed Bahamut!", after all.

With the lack of new victories to celebrate, it's understandable that people might get jaded and want to complain about things. It's understandable that those who want to be challenged with new content would get frustrated and start to take it out on people who haven't been running Savage for several months, or who don't know how to beat Ravana Extreme. It's not particularly okay that these people do this, but it is at least understandable.

And I don't want to be one of those people, continuing to play a game that feels like work and complaining about it endlessly when I could, instead, be doing something more fun — exploring new worlds in other RPGs, or catching up on my backlog, or enjoying some retro classics for the nth time.

Final Fantasy XIV will always be special to me. It's a virtual world that I've spent a good proportion of the last few years in. I made some great friends while playing, all of whom I sincerely hope will continue to be friends outside the game — something I'm confident about, since we all hung out together at PAX and didn't kill each other. And it was the setting for my proposal to my wife. So although my criticisms above may sound harsh, they're entirely personal, and I certainly do not and never will hate the game at all. It's simply time to take a break from it — perhaps indefinitely, or perhaps just temporarily.

Either way, thanks, Eorzea, Square Enix and Yoshi-P; it's been a wild and magical ride for the last few years, and I'm never going to forget it.

The post 2158: Farewell, Eorzea... For Now appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One of the things I really like about Final Fantasy XIV is how easy it is to switch jobs to one of the other classes. Swap out your weapon (and, more than likely, armour) and bam: you're another class, with no need to create a new character.

This system encourages people to try out more than the class they start with, and provides a great opportunity for players to learn about not just the role they choose to "main", but also other types of character they might run into in cooperative content.

It's actually really interesting to run the same thing as each of the three main types of character — tank, healer, DPS — because the experience is often significantly different for each. And it's not always just a case of "tank stands in front of monsters, DPS stand behind, healer makes sure no-one dies" — one of Final Fantasy XIV's biggest strengths is that its encounters are often designed to keep things interesting for everyone in the party, with tanks, healers and DPS alike being expected to deal with mechanics and take care of themselves as much as possible.

Take something like the fourth floor of the Alexander raid, for example. As a tank, your job is relatively straightforward: stand at the front repeatedly hacking away at The Manipulator's legs until it falls over; try and mitigate as much of the incoming damage as possible. Straightforward, that is, unless you're the off-tank, in which case you'll be frequently sucked into a side "Quarantine" room with a DPS and expected to defeat a not-particularly-tough add before being returned to your party. DPS, meanwhile, are expected to pop exploding orbs that appear around the room, try and position themselves so tanks can intercept damage from laser attacks, defeat additional enemies as quickly as possible and, above all, try not to die. And the healers, aside from keeping everyone standing, have to deal with a unique mechanic in the last phase where they need to keep apart from each other and the rest of the party, lest everyone keel over dead.

It's not always this complex, of course, but even so, walking a few miles in each of the three roles' shoes gives you a better overall understanding of how the game as a whole works, and that's really important when playing cooperatively — if only to know exactly what all those buffs the healers are throwing on you mean, and that you shouldn't Stun enemies when the Dark Knight has Blood Price up!

That and it's just kind of fun to see how the different classes play, because even in ostensibly similar classes (Paladin, Dark Knight, Warrior, for example — all are tanks) there's plenty of variation in play style and overall "feel". You might even find yourself liking a new class more than what you originally considered to be your "main" — it's happened to me twice to date!

The post 2125: Walk a Mile in the Tank's Shoes appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Finally cleared Ravana Extreme in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, bringing me up to date on absolutely everything in the game so far with the exception of Alexander Savage, which I'm not in a particular hurry to rush through at the moment.

Ravana, though, was a lot of fun. I'd held off even trying that fight for a while for some reason — I'd got it into my head that it would be "scary", and I didn't want to be a burden on any group who took me along with them. In some ways, this was quite a nostalgic feeling; when I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV, the prospect of pretty much any group content was absolutely terrifying, and playing a role with responsibilities more than "dodge shit, do damage" (both important, to be fair) was simply out of the question. Now, of course, my best-levelled, best-geared classes are both tanks, and I have a healer on the way to the higher levels, too, while I haven't really touched my Black Mage — the class I started with — for quite some time.

Anyway. Ravana EX is a challenging fight, to be sure, even with decent gear. There's a lot of damage, and a lot of reliance on party members knowing and understanding mechanics together. But, for me, this sort of fight is the most satisfying kind of battle in Final Fantasy XIV; it's a really fun experience to see eight people working together, moving as a team and doing their best to overcome a stiff challenge. A couple of years ago when I first decided to check out Final Fantasy XIV more out of curiosity — and some fond memories of the 20 levels of Final Fantasy XI I played a few years back — I couldn't have imagined I'd be challenging difficult battles like this, but now I'm happy to be not exactly at the top tier of players in our Free Company, but certainly someone who can be relied on to jump in and try their best at whatever the game has to offer.

I like Ravana EX because there's a nice combination of learnable mechanics with a little bit of randomness thrown in to make things interesting. Ravana does the same moves in the same order for the most part, and the way in which you deal with them is the same. However, things like positioning and who is initially targeted for his most powerful attacks vary with each attempt, so you have to be on your toes. As a tank, there's also some fun mechanics, most notably dodging his frontal cone "Tapasya" (sp?) attack and sharing the damage from his devastating Blinding Blade tankbuster with the offtank; it's certainly a lot more than "stand there and get hit while doing as much damage as you can". Which is nice.

Now that I'm up to date on everything, I'm very keen to see what patch 3.1, which is out in a couple of days, has to offer. A few days ago I commented on the things I'm particularly looking forward to; mostly, I'm excited about the fact that the new content is likely to bring a bunch of people who maybe haven't played for a little while back to the game; they're tricking in already, but there will doubtless be a big surge once the patch is actually available, the main scenario storyline continues and the more impressive new content is ready to be challenged.

In the meantime, since my Dark Knight sword failed to drop in three successful clears of Ravana, it looks like I have a bit of farming in my immediate future if I want to have a decent weapon ahead of the new Relic's arrival in 3.15…

The post 2119: Squishing a Bug appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The preliminary patch notes for the long-awaited Version 3.1 of Final Fantasy XIV were released earlier today, and there's a lot to take in!

Main Scenario

Heavensward's main scenario was satisfyingly complete, with a wonderful final boss fight. But, in the best tradition of Final Fantasy XIV to date, it teased a coming storm, specifically involving a "Warrior of Darkness", who is presumably intended to be some sort of dark counterpart to our own player characters, the Warrior of Light.

Yoshi-P spoke in a Japanese language interview recently in a bit more detail about 3.1 and what to expect from the main scenario. It seems like the game will be moving away from the completely linear main scenario quest it's had to date, and will instead have a number of concurrent storylines. The reason for this is partly practical — parallel storylines afford the opportunity for the devs to unlock group content a bit more quickly rather than relying on linear main story progress — and partly to allow the story to develop in a few different directions simultaneously. It should also — hopefully, anyway — discourage people from skipping the (actually really good, well-written) main scenario quests just so they can get at the new dungeons/trials/whatevers.

Anyway. I'm not yet sure where the main scenario will be taking us, but it's clear we'll be seeing more of the shadowy Ascians, who are the Recurring Bad Guys You Never Actually Defeat that you always need in an MMO. We'll also be seeing the Warrior of Darkness, presumably, and perhaps visiting some strange and wonderful locales. Given that Heavensward appears to be heavily inspired by Final Fantasy IV, it's entirely possible we'll be taking a trip to the moon at some point, though exactly how that will be implemented remains to be seen, particularly as there's still a whole lot of Hydaelyn left to explore.

Dungeons

As I've previously noted, the fact that there are only two new dungeons in 3.1 was initially disappointing to me, but hopefully they should be good fun. The Arboretum dungeon in particular sounds like it has the potential to be interesting and challenging, and Pharos Sirius (Hard) apparently has a bunch of surprises in store; it's not just a run from the top of the lighthouse down to the bottom, as its appearance in the recent trailer seemed to indicate.

On the raid front, the Void Ark 24-man raid dungeon will doubtless be a highlight. It looks like it will have a suitably menacing atmosphere that's a bit different from other dungeons we've seen to date. It also sounds as if there will be some sort of diverging path mechanic, where the three 8-man parties will split off in different directions to do different things at the same time. Whether this is similar to the Atomos fight in Labyrinth of the Ancients, which simply involved three groups doing the same thing in different places at the same time, or something more ambitious remains to be seen. Either way, I'm looking forward to it a great deal — particularly as we're making a big effort to try and get a full 24-person Free Company run going the weekend after the patch.

Trials

Thordan Extreme, or rather The Minstrel's Ballad: Thordan's Reign is the big highlight here. A reprise of the formula from The Minstrel's Ballad: Ultima's Bane, Thordan's Reign is a more difficult version of Heavensward's spectacular but disappointingly easy final boss fight. Supposedly its difficulty is tuned somewhere between the current Extreme primals Bismarck and Ravana, and the current "Savage" raid dungeon Alexander, though it was also compared to the notorious Turn 9, still regarded as one of the most difficult fights in the game, even when playing with unsynced item and character levels.

Thordan's Reign will apparently be a ten-phase fight, making it sound as if it will be one of the most complicated fights in the game to learn, depending on how complex each individual phase is. To put this in context, the previous most difficult fights in the game had considerably fewer phases: Turn 5 had five, Turn 9 had four, Turn 13 had four, though each of these phases had a number of different mechanics that had to be dealt with appropriately. It's entirely possible that each "phase" of Thordan's Reign will have just one or two different mechanics at a time, but we shall see!

The Diadem

This is the bit I'm most interested in: the Exploration Missions, in which you fly off in an airship (either borrowed from Ishgard or belonging to your Free Company) to explore floating islands in the sky. Once there, you have 90 minutes to piss about with up to 71 other people, killing monsters, finding treasure, gathering goodies and completing objectives. The rewards are worthwhile, too; Tomestones of Esoterics will be awarded for completing objectives, and treasure chests dropped by monsters will contain item level 210 equipment, which is theoretically among some of the best in the game, though their randomised secondary stats will make them either amazing or useless for anything other than spiritbonding.

The reason I'm most excited about The Diadem is that it's probably the most significant shakeup to Final Fantasy XIV's structure since the launch of A Realm Reborn. Up until now, the game has followed a fairly standard formula: solo content in the open world, group content in linear instances, occasional group open world activities such as FATEs and Hunts. The Diadem occupies a curious space somewhere between an instanced dungeon and open world content; the area you're in is instanced and time-limited like a dungeon or trial, but there may be other players in there at the same time as you and your friends, and the structure is inherently more open-ended than the extremely linearly designed dungeons and trials. In other words, a trip to The Diadem will not be something you can "learn" and then perform by rote like the current dungeons and trials — not that there's anything wrong with that format! — but rather, hopefully anyway, will provide a degree of randomness that will make things interesting to revisit time and time again.

Relic

The new Relic — known as an Anima weapon — isn't launching with 3.1, but is instead coming a month later in 3.15. The previous Relic quest was one of the most notoriously time-consuming activities in the game, intended to be an alternative route to getting one of the best weapons in the game for those who didn't want to — or weren't able to — raid. We know next to nothing about what the new Relic questline will involve as yet, but you can probably count on it involving grinding, revisiting old content, completing objectives and a shared sense of camaraderie with your companions as you're gradually driven mad by what initially appears to be a completely unreasonable, unmanageable set of expectations.

Despite being at times irritating and demoralising, the original Relic quest was ultimately extremely satisfying, as it's the most convincing "build your own lightsaber" moment I've experienced in any game. This was a single weapon that you kept hold of for a long time, gradually improving bit by bit until it was a force to be reckoned with… and eventually transformed into something even more impressive. Doubtless the new weapon will be a similar situation — and those who made the effort to get a Relic weapon all the way to its final "Zeta" form will be rewarded with being able to skip about 10 hours' worth of grinding, apparently, so that's nice. (Of course, it took quite a bit more than 10 hours to make said Zeta, but any bonus is better than no bonus in this instance!)

Gold Saucer

The new addition to the Manderville Gold Saucer is the interesting-looking real-time strategy game Lord of Verminion. This appears to be a surprisingly well fleshed out game in which there's finally a use for all the collectable minions everyone has been racking up over time. Each minion has its own element, stats and abilities, and they're thrown into virtual combat against either the CPU or another player as you attempt to smash up your opponent's structures before they do the same to you. It will be really interesting to see if the player base takes to this, or if it ultimately becomes little more than an idle distraction.

Gold Saucer is also finally being added to the Challenge Log, allowing a much easier means of acquiring MGP for the Gold Saucer's exclusive rewards, most of which are primarily intended for vanity purposes. Simply adding things like the minigames to the Challenge Log will hopefully encourage people to party in the Gold Saucer once again, as when it launched, it was a whole lot of fun, but these days it seems a little bit dead, since people have mostly moved on.

—

Patch 3.1 is out next Tuesday. I'm looking forward to it a lot, and I'm also looking forward to the inevitable surge of people coming back to the game to check it out, too; hopefully I'll see some people I haven't had the chance to play with for a while. Doubtless I shall be gushing further thoughts on 3.1 over these pages once I've had the chance to play around with it a bit, so Please Look Forward To It.

The post 2117: Preparing for the Coming Darkness appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Level 58 on Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV now… almost there! I'm still really enjoying the class, and I'm looking forward to having my full suite of abilities to play with. I feel like I have a good handle on how it all works, now; Dark Knight seems to be a pretty flexible sort of tank, able to mitigate a decent amount of damage Paladin-style as well as heal themselves to a certain degree through abilities like Souleater and a cross-classed Bloodbath.

And the damage. Oh the damage. I haven't played Warrior enough to know what sort of numbers they put out on the road to 60, but Dark Knight is miles ahead of Paladin in terms of killing efficiency. Paladin isn't built for killing, of course, being a mitigation tank, but Dark Knight seems to strike a nice balance between being able to take some hits and put out some impressive damage numbers. It helps, of course, that I'm wearing almost entirely Strength-boosting accessories rather than the HP-boosting Vitality accessories, but I haven't had a problem with having too few HP at any point yet, so I intend to stick with that particular course of action for the immediate future until something comes along that twats me for more than I can take in a single hit.

Mostly I'm keen to get Dark Knight safely to level 60 — and preferably item level 190 — in time for the 3.1 patch on Tuesday the 10th. There's a bunch of interesting new stuff coming to the game that I'd like to be able to explore with my new class, most notably the two new dungeons (for which gear shouldn't be a problem for, since I already have tank gear up to about item level 189 or so) and the Extreme version of The Singularity Reactor fight.

The latter is one of the main attractions of the new patch for many people. Taking a similar approach to the "Minstrel's Ballad: Ultima's Bane" fight from A Realm Reborn, it's a remix of the final boss fight from Heavensward with (presumably) considerably more complex mechanics and a higher challenge factor. This is good, since although Heavensward's final boss fight is undoubtedly spectacular, at current average gear levels you can trounce it pretty quickly. It doesn't make the fight any less impressive, of course, but I know I certainly wish it would last a bit longer. Yoshi-P and the team say that the new fight will have a mighty ten phases to learn, so I'm looking forward to seeing how complex it can really be. It has the potential to be one of the most interesting, complex battles in the whole game at this rate.

Other than the more conventional content, the other appealing aspect of 3.1 is the Island Exploration mechanics that are being added. Heavensward added the ability for Free Companies to build their own airships and send them out on exploratory voyages into The Sea of Clouds, after which they'd come back bearing goodies, sometimes having discovered islands in the sky. I haven't looked into this much at all — our Free Company has one particularly dedicated member who has been taking care of our fleet of airships so far, so I haven't really needed to. The Island Exploration system, however, actually allows groups of players — up to 24 at once — to party up and explore some of the strange places the airships have been discovering. Once there, it's a much more freeform experience than the rather linear dungeons in the game. You have 90 minutes to explore, fight things and find stuff. Exactly what you'll find remains to be seen, but we know there is Aetherial gear to be found as well as gathering nodes for miners, botanists and perhaps fishers too. There will also be objectives to complete, which will reward players with the all-important Tomestones of Esoterics, which hopefully will be dished out with sufficient generosity to make Island Exploration a viable alternative to endless Dungeon Roulette grinding.

Then, of course, there's the continuation of the main story. Heavensward's main story was great, in my book even better than that of A Realm Reborn, so I'm interested and intrigued to see where it goes next. The "vanilla" Heavensward experience ended with an intriguing cliffhanger concerning the "Warrior of Darkness", presumably some sort of counterpart to the player character's "Warrior of Light", but it remains to be seen exactly what this means. There's also a number of unresolved teasers from A Realm Reborn's finale that need wrapping up, so I'm hoping we'll see some more information concerning what was going on here, too.

It's an exciting time to be a Final Fantasy XIV player, for sure, and I'm very glad that deciding to make the switch to Dark Knight has got me out of the "rut" I was feeling like I was in with only Paladin at the level cap. I'm really looking forward to putting a level 60 Dark Knight through its paces and seeing what the future holds for the land of Eorzea — more than that, though, I'm looking forward to lots of friends coming back to play the game once there's some new content in place that they haven't run a thousand times already… yet, anyway.

The post 2113: The Dark Knight Rises appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I ran The Aery for the first time in months earlier tonight, and I realised that, having not run it for months owing to being at the level cap, I had forgotten almost everything about it. So in an attempt to brush up on my Heavensward dungeons as I continue to level Dark Knight — and also to provide an excuse to write a guide, which is something I enjoy doing — I present to you some information on how to beat the dungeon bosses in Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward. Largely for my own reference.

The Dusk Vigil

Level: 51-52

Boss 1: Towering Oliphaunt

Towering Oliphaunt has a few abilities to watch out for. Firstly, there's Rear, which is an easily dodged area-effect attack around himself, and Prehistoric Trumpet, which hits the whole room.

You should also be aware of his other abilities: Rock of Ages will stun a non-tank player, Wooly Inspiration is a conal pull attack, and Rout is a charge attack. Similar to Wild Charge in The Final Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1, Rout's damage can be split between a party member and the targeted player. It's a good idea for the tank to get in between Oliphaunt and the targeted player when this happens.

Tank tank, healer heal, DPS DPS and this shouldn't present too much difficulty.

Boss 2: Ser Yuhelmeric

Tons of adds appear in this fight. There are two main types: melee adds have a few area-effect attacks, while caster adds have the ability to buff everyone around themselves, including the boss. The tank should try to keep the boss away from the adds.

The only real ability Yuhelmeric has that you need to be aware of is Death Spiral, an attack somewhat similar to Nael's Lunar Dynamo in The Second Coil of Bahamut, Turn 4. In other words, it's a doughnut-shaped attack that you can avoid completely by ensuring you're in melee range when it goes off.

Boss 3: Opinicus

This is the most complex fight in Dusk Vigil. Opinicus has several different abilities, some of which are easier to deal with than others.

Alpine Draft is a simple line attack that can be avoided without too much difficulty.

Freefall is an attack where Opinicus jumps at a player, destroying any piles of rubble they're standing near. These piles of rubble are important, so try and stay clear of them when you don't need them.

Whirling Gaol is a room-wide ability that causes you to be repeatedly "pushed" towards the middle. If you reach the middle, you'll be stunned and hit. To prevent being dragged in, hide behind one of the piles of rubble.

Winds of Winter is an ability that covers a reasonable area and stacks Wind Vulnerability Up on anyone hit, making Opinicus' other abilities more dangerous. This attack also destroys all current piles of rubble and causes new ones to drop from the ceiling.

Sohm Al

Level: 53-54

Boss 1: Raskovnik

This is a considerably more forgiving version of the Rafflesia fight from The Second Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1. If you've completed that, you'll know what to do here.

Acid Rain is a circular area-effect ability that takes aim for all players.

Sweet Scent causes Dravanian Hornets to spawn and slowly move towards the boss. These deal no damage, but should be killed if your party has low DPS, since they buff the boss if they're in range of Devour.

Devour is an ability that goes off after a player is marked and stunned for two seconds. It's a circular AoE attack, and any hornets in range will give Raskovnik a stacking damage increase.

Finally, Spit is a room-wide attack to simply be healed through.

Boss 2: Myath

Myath will periodically spawn jelly adds around the room, and use attacks based on which ones he consumes. When he consumes a blue add, move away from the party member with a blue marker. When he consumes a red add, stack up on the party member with the red arrow. Remember, blue is poo, red gives head. Or something.

The only other thing to be aware of here is the big green snot add. Kill this as a priority when it appears.

Boss 3: Tioman

Sohm Al's final boss has a number of different mechanics.

To minimise damage from the frontal cone attack Abyssic Buster, tanks should ensure that Tioman is facing away from the party.

Chaos Blast places AoE markers on each player, so avoid these.

Comet is the main ability to be aware of here. Two players will be marked and AoE circles will appear on the ground. When the marks fade, comets will fall where the players were standing, dealing room-wide damage to everyone based on how close they were to where the comets fall. To minimise damage from this, marked players should move away from the party — ideally to an edge — while the rest of the party keeps their distance too.

At around 45%, Tioman will become invincible and you must destroy her wings to continue damaging her. During this time, she will use Heavensfall, which marks a player and then spawns a cluster of circular AoEs on top of them. The marked player should move away from the rest of the party to minimise damage.

Finally, Dark Star is a room-wide AoE that you need to heal through.

After the wings are destroyed, the fight continues as before.

The Aery

Level: 55-56

Boss 1: Rangda

Rangda only has two main abilities to concern yourself with. To avoid being hit with Electric Cachexis, move into melee range with Rangda, similar to avoiding Nael's Lunar Dynamo or Chimera's The Dragon's Voice.

If you get marked with Prey, move to one of the tall pillars at the outside of the room to transfer it and stay safe.

You should also kill adds as they spawn; none of them are particularly tough. Rangda also has a few other AoE attacks, but none of them hit particularly hard, so just heal through them.

Boss 2: Gyascutus

Gyascutus will gain a damage-up buff for every cloud of poison it farts out around the room. To get rid of these, use the Mustard Gas bombs that spawn occasionally to eat one or two of the clouds, then kill them. If the bombs eat four clouds, they will self-destruct, deal damage to the whole room and poison everyone four times. Don't do this.

Boss 3: Nidhogg

Nidhogg's go-to attack is The Crimson Price, which shits out fiery orbs at you. These burn for a few seconds, then blast a line AoE. If Nidhogg faces you and you're not the tank, he's going to cast one of these at you. Step aside to avoid damage.

The Sable Price is Nidhogg's jailing ability. One player will get trapped, and the remaining party members must destroy it before Sable Weave casts, otherwise the trapped player will die.

At about 30% HP, Nidhogg will retreat to prepare his ultimate attack. During this time, you must defeat all the adds and ensure that Estinien remains standing. Tanks should grab the adds as quickly as possible, and healers should divide their attention between the party and Estinien to ensure he stays healthy. When the final add falls, Estinien will put up a shield, which you should dive inside to protect yourself from Nidhogg's ultimate.

After this, the earlier mechanics simply repeat.

The Vault

Level: 57-58

Boss 1: Ser Adelphel Brightblade

The first phase of this fight is a simple tank-and-spank — kill Adelphel's companions first, then knock him down. He'll change form and the fight proper will begin.

When Adelphel casts Holy Shield Bash, he'll jump to a player, stun and hit them. Paladins can Cover this.

Holiest of Holy deals damage to the whole room. Heal through this.

Finally, Adelphel will occasionally charge around the room and leave big explodey balls behind. Do not be near his balls when they explode, otherwise you'll be very sorry indeed. (Huehuehue.)

Boss 2: Ser Grinnaux the Bull

Like Adelphel, Grinnaux has a trash phase first. Batter him down to start the fight proper.

Most of this fight is about dodging the various ground AoEs that Grinnaux applies around the room, but there are a couple of specific abilities to watch out for.

Hyperdimensional Slash lays a red AoE in front of Grinnaux in the direction of a random player. When this goes off, anyone in the way will take damage, and an Aetherial Tear will appear where the attack hits the wall. These Tears will tether to anyone near them and damage them, so ideally bait them all to the same part of the room.

After two Hyperdimension Slash attacks, Grinnaux will cast Faith Unmoving, which will knock everyone directly backwards when it finishes casting. Make sure your back is to part of the wall that is free from Aetherial Tears to stay safe.

Boss 3: Ser Charibert

Filthy rats! Charibert has a bunch of nasty abilities that you need to watch out for. It's a good idea to tank him near the entrance to his arena rather than in the middle.

Altar Pyre is a simple room-wide damage attack. Heal through it.

Holy Chain tethers two players together — run apart to break it, otherwise you'll both take damage.

Heavensflame causes flame rings to appear on the ground. Avoid them.

Charibert's most annoying ability is to summon a row of knights, who will march across the arena and Slow anyone they trample over. Each row will always have a gap in it, so position yourself so they'll pass you by safely or run through the gap to avoid this.

At about 50% HP, Charibert will disappear, then reappear with a bunch of Holy Flames around the room. Kill as many of these as possible, because Charibert's next attack deals more damage the more Holy Flames are left. You can leave one or two Flames up and still be safe when this happens.

After this attack, the cycle repeats, though both Heavensflame and Charibert's knight-summoning become more dangerous: Heavensflame has two sets of flame rings, and two rows of knights appear instead of one.

The Great Gubal Library

Level: 59-60

Boss 1: Demon Tome

This is very similar to Demon Wall in Amdapor Keep, albeit without the time limit. Instead, there are some new abilities to watch out for, including an instant-kill.

The first thing to do is avoid Demon Tome's line AoEs, since these apply a Slow effect. The lines will come down the middle of the room first, then the sides. Position yourself ahead of time to avoid these.

Dark Blizzard III is a circle AoE that targets a random player during the line attacks. Avoid this.

Disclosure is Demon Tome's instakill ability. When it starts to glow, run around the side until you're behind Demon Tome to stay safe. If you're in front of Demon Tome when Disclosure finishes casting, you'll die.

Finally, Words of Winter is a ground freeze attack that causes you to slide while it is in effect. Plan your moves carefully, particularly when Disclosure is casting, and only move when necessary.

Boss 2: Byblos

When Byblos runs to the centre of the room, two books will spawn, with the ability to cast Death Ray at you, a line AoE that, despite the name, doesn't do all that much damage.

When they die, orbs will tether to players. Tethered players need to position themselves so the orb hits Byblos to break his invulnerability period.

In subsequent phases, Byblos will spawn clouds of fumes. Party members should take it in turns to disperse these by running through them, since this causes damage. It's important to manage them, though, as they can interfere with the orbs.

When Byblos isn't invincible, he'll perform Gale Cut on the tank. When this is being cast, the tank should run through Byblos or to the side to avoid it. He also has a Tail Swipe attack on anyone behind him.

Finally, Head Down is a charge attack similar to the one seen in Amdapor Keep (Hard). The targeted player should ensure the line AoE doesn't intersect with any other players to minimise damage. The easiest way to deal with this is simply to run straight at Byblos.

Boss 3: The Everliving Bibliotaph

Three times during the fight, The Everliving Bibliotaph will use Void Summon as a supernatural "Help Wanted" advertisement. In order to prevent his questionable hiring practices, you need to stand on the glowing platforms on the ground. The number of players who need to stand on a platform is indicated by how many lights are lit up on the platform in question. Multiple platforms will highlight at once, so be ready to spread out.

If you get targeted by Bibliotaph, run away from the party to bait the AoE he's preparing for you. Everyone should keep away from this, as it pulses several times, applying damage and Vulnerability Up in the process.

At around 55% HP, Bibliotaph will cast some combination of Deep Darkness and Magic Burst. Deep Darkness covers the outside of the arena and causes a Heavy debuff for about 30 seconds. Magic Burst, meanwhile, deals damage and knockback. Neither are pleasant.

If you're new to Final Fantasy XIV and want some more help, I wrote a bunch of guides during my time at USgamer; some of this information is a little out of date now, but the basic boss strategies and suchlike are still valid.

• Dungeon guides
• Level 50 dungeon guides (up to The Lost City of Amdapor)
• Trial guides (up to Leviathan Hard)
• Labyrinth of the Ancients guide

The post 2108: Heavensward Dungeon Boss Guides (For My Own Reference) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Continuing to level Dark Knight in Final Fantasy XIV, and I'm having a lot of fun with it. I wasn't quite prepared for how much more powerful it feels than Paladin, but I'm really enjoying the overall feel of it a whole lot — much more than Warrior, which seemed enjoyable enough, but didn't quite "click" with me for some reason.

I think the reason I like Dark Knight so much is that it appears to be a little less dependent on strict rotations to perform its job most effectively — or, rather, there's more than one rotation to play around with. I particularly enjoy the fact that when playing Dark Knight it's absolutely okay — even encouraged — to drop out of Grit, the main "tank stance", in order to do some additional damage. This appears to be of particular benefit when fighting single-target bosses, since taking fewer overall hits means that Blood Weapon (increase attack speed, drain MP from enemy with every hit, only available when not in Grit) becomes a more efficient means of restoring MP than Blood Price (gain MP when taking damage).

Even though many of the abilities are somewhat similar in function to those found in Paladin, they somehow feel more satisfying to use. Dark Knight has an area-of-effect damage over time skill called Salted Earth, for example, that bathes an area in black and red lightning, whereas Paladin's nearest equivalent is Circle of Scorn, which has its own little pyrotechnics display but somehow doesn't feel quite as enjoyable to use. Dark Knight also has Scourge, which is a damage over time that can be immediately applied rather than only used at the end of a three-hit combo like Paladin's Goring Blade. When everything lines up nicely and you can apply Scourge and Salted Earth to an enemy before letting rip with a non-Grit Dark Arts Souleater combo for a significant amount of damage, it's a great deal of fun.

Learning my way around Dark Knight has been enjoyable, and it's helping me rediscover my respect for Final Fantasy XIV's combat system. People who come to FFXIV from more traditional, customisable role-playing games are sometimes a bit put out at the relative lack of personalisation FFXIV offers in terms of abilities — everyone gets the same abilities at the same levels, and the only real flexibility is in any cross-class skills you choose to use, but even here there are only certain ones that are particularly useful — but in practice it works enormously well, behaving, of all things, more like a fighting game than anything else. A slow-paced fighting game, admittedly, but a fighting game nonetheless.

Allow me to clarify. Modern fighting games demand that players learn specific button and directional inputs to perform various special moves. In order to get good at a fighting game, you need to develop a certain degree of muscle memory to be able to pull these moves off automatically. Once you've done that, you need to master the timing of these moves to chain them together into effective combos, and then you need to understand what the most appropriate situations to use these individual combos are.

Final Fantasy XIV is exactly the same, just at a fraction of the pace of your average fighting game. Positioning is important; responding to your enemy's moves is important; using the right ability at the right time is important. Even muscle memory is important, particularly if you're playing on controller — while you're not doing Hadoken button inputs to throw a fireball at someone, you do need to be able to remember where you put all your most important abilities and be able to practically automatically perform combos with no gaps for the most efficient possible damage output. For example, on Dark Knight, my average combo runs something along the lines of LT+Y, RT+Y, LT+A, LT+RT+X, A, LT+RT+B, LT+X, RT+B, RT+X, RT+A, RT+LT+B, RT+LT+X, RT+LT+up, RT+LT+A. This pulls an enemy with Unmend, cements aggro with Unleash, kicks them in the bollocks to stun them for a few seconds, drops a Salted Earth on the ground, applies Scourge, blasts them and anything near them with Dark Passenger, does my three-hit aggro combo then my three-hit, Dark Arts-buffed Souleater combo for a nice chunk of damage. And this isn't even getting into the situational weaving in of various defensive cooldowns to ensure that I don't take too much damage, or other skills to support the battle.

That may all sound exceedingly complicated, but I've done it so many times now that it feels "automatic" to be able to perform these abilities in the order that seems to work most effectively at my level. I'm sure I'll have to shake things up a bit as I get closer to 60 and challenging more difficult content, but for now it's extremely satisfying to nimbly pull off these combos without breaking a sweat.

Onwards to 60 then… I should hit 54 tonight, all being well.

The post 2107: Dark Knight Chronicles appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The official trailer for Final Fantasy XIV patch 3.1 came out recently, and it's looking simply marvellous. I am happy about this, because although I feel like I've got over my "rut" with the game, I'd still love to see something new at last. It's been a long time coming, after all.

My initial reaction to the announcement of 3.1 was slight disappointment, but in retrospect this was rather silly. I'll tell you my thinking, though: previous content patches for the game tended to include three new dungeons, a new raid (either a 24-player casual raid of the Crystal Tower ilk, or an 8-player hardcore raid of the Coil ilk) and maybe some new quests and minor mechanics here and there. And gear, of course. 3.1, meanwhile, only includes two new dungeons, one of which is a "Hard Mode" version of an existing dungeon — Pharos Sirius — which immediately made me feel a bit let down that we weren't getting as much new stuff as we had in the past.

But then I considered things a bit more, and there are plenty of interesting things happening outside the dungeons, because dungeons aren't the only interesting thing you can do in the game. They're cool, sure, but I get the impression that Yoshi-P and the FFXIV team very much want to try and shake up the basic formula of the game a little bit having got it where they want to be over the course of A Realm Reborn and vanilla Heavensward. In other words, that means getting people out of the "grind the same thing over and over" mentality and into doing more varied things.

Perhaps the thing I'm most intrigued by — and most mystified by — is the new Exploratory Missions system, whereby individual players, parties, alliances and Free Companies can fly off into the Sea of Clouds with their airship(s), explore a region for 90 minutes, kick the shit out of some monsters, find treasure, complete objectives and gather stuff. This has the most potential to shake up the basic structure of the game, and I really hope it turns out well.

Details are still a bit thin on the ground as yet, but it seems like there will be three difficulty levels for these exploratory missions, with the hardest level being pitched towards Free Companies with their own airships. Monsters will have difficulty ranks between 1 and 6 instead of conventional levels, and there are apparently Hunt-esque "marks" to defeat as well as regular monsters. There will be objectives to complete that will allow players to earn the all-important Tomestones to upgrade their equipment, and treasure chests that contain new Aetherial equipment with randomised stats.

The randomised element of the Exploratory missions is the thing I'm looking forward to the most, to be honest. Exactly how random it is I'm not entirely sure as yet, but I know at the very least there will be several different areas that you can fly to when you start one of these missions — it seems you won't be able to explicitly pick where you want to go and will instead be assigned a random landing point in a random region. The equipment you can find will be scattered in bronze, silver and gold chests, and presumably tracking these chests down will involve actual exploration of the area rather than the current situation in dungeons, where equipment can be found in boss chests and stuff in all the other chests is fairly underwhelming in its awesomeness, usually consisting of either potions or crafting materials.

Aside from the Exploratory Missions, the thing I'm looking forward to the most is the new Minstrel's Ballad trial, which is a considerably expanded version of the final boss fight from the Heavensward story quests. This was an absolutely spectacular fight, albeit not particularly difficult, so it will be exciting to have the opportunity to see this realised as something closer to what the creators apparently originally intended. It will be a ten-phase fight — they stopped short of going for thirteen phases to match the thirteen Knights of the Round — and will apparently be on par difficulty-wise with Extreme-level primal fights and the first area of Alexander (Savage). Hopefully this doesn't mean it will be a glorified DPS check like Alexander is, but from the little I've seen of it so far, it looks like there's going to be some interesting mechanics at play.

Anyway. Patch 3.1 is coming in early November, which isn't far away now. I'm really looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, and actually a little bit thankful that the new Relic weapons — which are apparently known as "Anima Weapons" — aren't coming immediately, instead inviting us to grind ourselves into oblivion from patch 3.15 onwards.

In the meantime, I've got Dark Knight to level 50 today, so only ten levels to go before I can officially retire Paladin for the most part and start playing a tank class with a bit more damage output at high level! Darksiiiiiiide!

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I decided that I was going to get over my "rut" with Final Fantasy XIV today and get my mojo back, so I booted it up and decided to try something I hadn't done before: give Dark Knight a go.

Dark Knight is the new tanking class that was added in the Heavensward expansion. So far, I've levelled Paladin (the main "defense tank") to 60 as my main, and I have Warrior (the main "wallopy tank") at 50, so I have a reasonable understanding of it. Dark Knight was a bit of a mystery, though; although I'd read a bit about it, I didn't really have a bead on how it might actually feel to play it.

Turns out it feels like a hell of a lot of fun — far more so than the rather weedy-but-graceful-feeling Paladin, and, for my money, also more so than the cumbersome swings and heavy hits of Warrior.

I've only levelled fro 30-34 so far (you start Dark Knight at 30, unlike pre-expansion classes, which start at 1) so I don't have a huge amount of experience as yet, but I've enjoyed what I've done. The class feels like a good balance between the relatively straightforward, set combos and defense of Paladin and the more intricate combos and damage-buffing of Warrior. There also seems to be a bit more in the way of "stance-dancing", since there are a number of abilities that only work when you have a specific status effect active — or in some cases, if you don't have it active. The skill "Blood Weapon", for example, which increases your attack speed and allows you to drain MP from enemies, will not work if you're in the defensive "Grit" stance, but that's fine, since Blood Weapon is an offensive skill and Grit carries a hefty damage penalty, so the two aren't really compatible.

I like this way of playing; rather than Paladin's approach of sticking with Shield Oath most of the time and giving it a bit of Sword Oath only when you have a hefty aggro lead on the rest of your party, Dark Knight allows you to switch back and forth a lot more freely, giving combat a much more dynamic feel. The rhythm I was getting into by the end of tonight's session saw me doing my basic aggro combo, weaving in the "Low Blow" stunning kick (which is off the global cooldown) and also dropping in the off-GCD "Reprisal" proc to reduce enemy damage after a successful parry. Then, when Blood Weapon was up — it actually has a pretty short cooldown — I'd drop Grit, hit Blood Weapon, unleash as many attacks as I could manage — including DRK's DoT, which, unlike PLD's, isn't part of a combo, so can be applied immediately — before switching back into Grit again once Blood Weapon dropped. The timing of Blood Weapon's cooldown usually meant that I could rotate defensive cooldowns at the same time as throwing up Blood Weapon, too, so I could mitigate at least some of the increased damage I'd be taking by dropping Grit's considerable (20%) reduction in incoming damage.

DRK's AoE aggro move is also a bit more intuitive than PLD's Flash, whose radius I'm still not entirely 100% sure of. Unleash, meanwhile, displays a very clear area of effect when you use it, making it extremely apparent whether your positioning is right or not. It's not quite as satisfying as WAR's cone-area Overpower, being a weird-looking spell with an annoying sound effect rather than a distinctly HULK SMASH-style swing of your axe, but I've also found so far that DRK appears to be able to hold aggro pretty well even with only a couple of Unleashes at the start of the fight — perhaps a side-effect of its increased damage when compared to something like PLD.

I'm digging DRK so far, then, and although it's another tank class like my main, it feels different enough from PLD already that I feel like it's going to be enjoyable to level. And who knows? I might even end up maining it if and when I get it to 60.

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I haven't been playing Final Fantasy XIV all that much recently. This is partly down to the fact that I've been really enjoying the other stuff I've been playing, and also due to the fact that the current content is feeling a bit stale and stagnant; Heavensward came out quite a long time ago now, and aside from the introduction of raid dungeon Alexander (which proved to be a little underwhelming after the dramatic insanity of The Binding Coil of Bahamut) there hasn't been much new stuff introduced. Consequently, the grind to get other classes to level 60 — or to gear up my main class, for that matter — isn't feeling all that appealing right now, particularly as there really isn't a huge amount to do at level 60 at the moment: two dungeons, two Extreme boss fights, and Alexander in its Normal and Savage incarnations.

This, along with some of the other stuff I've been playing recently, got me thinking about ways the formula could be shaken up a little — partly to make the grind a bit more bearable, partly to make replays of old content a more attractive option, and partly to address some common complaints of certain aspects of the player base, specifically the lack of challenge in dungeons and the desire to show off your skills a bit more outside of the tippest-toppest highest-level content.

Final Fantasy XIV is heavily based on instanced content such as dungeons and boss fights, so I had an idle thought that the addition of two optional ways of playing this content would make the game interesting: specifically a Time Attack mode, which would reward those who can slice through a dungeon at high speed, and a Score Attack mode, which will encourage "full clears" of dungeons as well as skilful play.

I'm no game designer and I am under no illusions that these ideas would ever be implemented into the game, but I'll share my thinking for each mode, anyway.

Queueing

Added to the existing Duty Finder options — Undersized/Unsynced Party and Minimum Item Level — would be the options for Score Attack and Time Attack. You would only be able to challenge one or the other at a time, but there could potentially be some additional options such as difficulties, whether to run it with level/item level sync or not and so forth. (There could also perhaps be an additional option for a "Story" run, for those who want to enjoy dungeons for the first time as originally intended, which could perhaps make cutscenes unskippable, bosses untargetable until everyone is out of cutscenes and perhaps even force a minimum iLevel sync. Alternatively, not selecting Score or Time Attack could simply assume that the run is for "story" purposes, without the restrictions suggested above.)

Time Attack

There are a few ways this could work. The simplest means would be for the party's clear time to be recorded, starting from when the barrier comes down at the outset of the dungeon and stopping when the dungeon's final boss is defeated. The final time would give the party as a whole a letter grade between, say, D and S — D being the worst, S being the best — and the rewards for the dungeon would be adjusted accordingly based on the grade attained.

Each player's best time is recorded, and this could provide additional incentives: perhaps a small extra reward if you beat your previous best, or leaderboards showing which players/parties/Free Companies/servers have cleared content most efficiently.

A second means of approaching this could be to give the party a fairly strict time limit countdown from when the dungeon starts, with time being extended by reaching checkpoints or defeating particular enemies. This provides the opportunity for failure — something which the game as a whole is lacking a bit, particularly in dungeons, where you can just respawn until the currently implemented and overly generous total time limit expires — as well as the chance to reward efficient play; again, the run should be concluded with some sort of rating system or bonus based on time remaining to encourage speedy runs.

My thinking behind this system is that there are already people who like to rush through dungeons as quickly as possible, and this often leads to conflict with people who aren't as confident or simply prefer to take things slowly. Providing a separate "mode" for those who like to speedrun — as well as incentives for everyone in the party to be on board with speedrunning the dungeon — would, I feel, alleviate at least a certain amount of this tension. Plus trying to beat your best times makes for an inherently satisfying means of rewarding replays of old content.

Score Attack

This would be a little more complex, but the basic principle is the same as outlined above: clear a dungeon, get a grade, adjust the rewards according to how good the grade was.

In this case, the grade would come from the total score the party attains in the dungeon. The score could change via any or all of the following possible events:

• Dealing damage/overall DPS
• Defeating an enemy
• Overkilling an enemy (dealing more damage than necessary to knock its HP to 0)
• Landing hits in rapid succession (skillchains)
• Hitting multiple enemies at once with AoE skills
• Tanks maintaining aggro
• Losing points for non-tanks taking aggro
• Clutch healing (i.e. the same circumstances where a well-timed heal increases the Limit gauge)
• Using limit breaks
• Finding treasures
• Defeating bosses quickly

There could then be a number of point bonuses awarded, either at the end of the dungeon or at checkpoints (likely the bosses):

• Time bonus according to how quickly the section/dungeon was cleared
• Bonus according to the percentage of all enemies in the section/dungeon defeated (encouraging full clears)
• Penalties for party KO's or failing to deal with boss mechanics properly
• Bonuses for achieving specific goals such as overkills, enemies simultaneously defeated and the like

At the conclusion of the dungeon, the party receives a letter grade between D and S, with rewards increasing for better grades.

My thinking behind this mode is that it would force players to play in a slightly different way; it would require cooperation, players playing their job well and being more willing to be thorough about clearing a dungeon. Because well-geared players are less inclined to do full clears of dungeons, the rewards for performing well in Score Attack should provide sufficient incentive for them to play in this mode, since better gear will inevitably allow for the attainment of higher scores.

Someone out there doubtless has a compelling argument as to why both of these are stupid ideas — off the top of my head, perhaps the strongest argument against would be making something so "gamey" fit into the overall lore, though FFXIV isn't above a transparently shoehorned explanation or two here and there. (See: anything PvP; the Crystal Tower weekly quest; anything involving the Wandering Minstrel; the recent seasonal event in which you could meet the developers) To be clear, these are not by any means serious suggestions in the slightest. I do think they'd both be pretty fun, though — and they'd certainly get me pumped up to chase some high scores and best times.

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I've tried PvP in various other MMOs and never really got along with it. I never got far enough through Guild Wars for the PvP to be relevant outside of the single match you're forced to play in the introductory chapter; Star Wars: The Old Republic's PvP was unbalanced garbage; and The Secret World's PvP just seemed too chaotic to be manageable.

The trouble with PvP in a game with RPG mechanics is that it often becomes nothing more than a numbers game rather than a test of skill. In other words, whoever has the best gear will almost definitely win every time. This is particularly apparent in games that make seemingly no effort whatsoever to balance things out for a fair competition, the most egregious example of this I can think of being Blizzard's Diablo II. (To be far, PvP wasn't really the point of that game at all, but the fact it was in there at all in such a gleefully unbalanced state was just baffling.)

One of the nice things about Final Fantasy XIV's PvP is that it puts everyone on a pretty level playing field by syncing gear levels to a relatively low standard — iLevel 80 for level 50 PvP and iLevel 150 for level 60 PvP. This means that even if you haven't spent months farming content for the very best gear, you can still be both competitive and an asset to your team, making PvP as a whole a lot more accessible to a wider bunch of people. Which is good, because it's pretty large-scale, with 72 participants across three teams fighting it out all together in most cases.

Seal Rock is the newest addition to Final Fantasy XIV's PvP lineup. The previous PvP matches on the Carteneau Flats saw you either capturing and defending points from enemy assault, or simply attempting to defeat as many of the enemy teams as possible. The "Seize" mode you play on Seal Rock, meanwhile, is a slightly more involved, dynamic affair that requires coordination and teamwork, challenging your team to activate and hold Allagan Tomeliths that activate at random at various points across the battlefield, with the ultimate goal being to score 800 points before the other teams.

Points are scored by holding onto the Tomeliths; when one is in your team's possession, your Mammets gradually download data from it until it runs dry, at which point new Tomeliths will activate after a short period, and the process continues. The twist is that not all Tomeliths are created equal; there are B-, A- and S-rank varieties, with B-rank Tomeliths being worth the least potential number of points and S-rank Tomeliths being worth the most.

It's not as simple as just charging for the most valuable Tomelith, though. At times, it can be more advantageous to watch the other two teams scrap over an S-rank while you sneak around behind their backs and capture all the other ones for a greater total number of points than the S-rank by itself is worth. Add to that the fact that every time one of your team members is knocked out, your team loses a few points, and you have a mode where confrontation is something you want to avoid as much as you can unless you have a significant numbers advantage, at which point it's enormously satisfying to steamroller members of the enemy team.

What I think I like most about playing PvP is how different it feels from the PvE content. PvE can often feel quite "by rote" after a while, particularly in the more scripted encounters, and while this is satisfying in its own way at times — I've described the more intricate boss fights as being delightfully dance-like — PvP keeps you on your toes, challenging you to respond to new and unexpected situations as they crop up, and no two matches are ever quite alike. This makes it fun and enjoyable even if you're on the losing side, particularly as matches are wrapped up within 20 minutes at the very most, usually less.

I haven't quite figured out what the best strategies are quite yet, but I've been enjoying the experience a great deal so far, and I'm looking forward to battling those scoundrels of the Maelstrom and the Adders again soon.

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It's not that I've gone off the game per se — I still see myself playing it for many years to come — it's more that I've got out of it what I wanted to get out of it so far. The Heavensward storyline was exciting and dramatic — and, for my money, better than A Realm Reborn's main quest — and the Alexander raid dungeon was an enjoyable challenge, though we're still yet to clear its Savage incarnation.

Trouble is, outside of levelling alternate classes there's not a huge amount to do at level cap right now.

This is the exact situation A Realm Reborn (and, I imagine, most MMOs) found itself in at launch, of course; the difference here, however, is that whereas it took me a good few weeks to make it to 50 in A Realm Reborn — I reached the level cap a while after the more dedicated players in my Free Company — I got through Heavensward pretty quickly. This was deliberate, of course; I binged on the new story content because it was enjoyable and interesting, and also because I wanted to see everything that the expansion pack had to offer. I also wanted to avoid inadvertently being spoiled on the storyline, since Final Fantasy XIV is that rare example of an MMO where the story is actually worth paying attention to and even told pretty well.

Consequently, I got to the "end" a lot more quickly than I did with A Realm Reborn, and consequently I've found myself with a lot more "dead time" with stagnant content. Sure, I could run Alexander over and over again to try and get some more gear sets. Sure, I could level other classes — I probably will do this at some point. Sure, I could run the current two level 60 dungeons over and over to get as many Tomestones of Esoterics as possible to gear up one or more classes.

Trouble is, I simply don't have a lot of motivation to do so right now. And that's sort of fine by me, really; whenever I play an MMO I always find myself in a weird place where I'm really enjoying the experience of playing the game and getting good at it — I maintain that Final Fantasy XIV is one of the few games I genuinely consider myself to actually be pretty good at — but also feeling a strange sense of "guilt" that I'm not playing any of the other million and one games that have been staring at me from my shelves for the last few years. Conversely, I play a game that isn't Final Fantasy XIV and I feel a similar sense of "guilt" that I'm not playing Final Fantasy XIV more. I can't win. Stupid brain.

On balance, though, this "dead time" is actually proving to be rather welcome, as since I have little inclination to log in right now for anything other than my weekly raiding commitments — and the group as a whole is pretty half-hearted about the whole thing at the moment, to be honest — I am having plenty of time to delve into other experiences. I managed to get the Platinum trophy on Omega Quintet. I'm working on the Platinum trophy for Hyperdevotion Noire. I am loving the shit out of Sword Art Online on PS4. And I'm also really enjoying Splatoon, Heroes of the Storm and any number of other games right now.

The trouble with any hobby that has a lot of different elements to it — be it gaming, music, reading, movies or whatever — is finding that perfect balance where you can enjoy all those different elements at different times and not feel like you're neglecting any of them. Right now, even though I know that I don't have much motivation to play Final Fantasy XIV, I still feel like I'm neglecting it because I'm not logging in to talk to my friends. So perhaps I still haven't quite found the right balance there. But eh. I'm not going to worry about it for the moment — a new content patch for the game might rekindle my interest for a while, but in the meantime I'm going to cut right back and enjoy the other experiences I have on the go right now.

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I'd heard Alexander was significantly easier than The Binding Coil of Bahamut and was mildly concerned about this, but there are two things that set my mind at rest, having run through the first area now: 1) it's not easy, though it's straightforward enough once you know what to do, and 2) "Savage" mode is coming in a couple of weeks for the truly hardcore. (And it has different loot from the sound of things, too, unlike the Savage mode of Second Coil of Bahamut, which was largely a "bragging rights" sort of situation.)

I wasn't quite sure what to expect from Alexander. The concept itself is pretty weird: an iron giant raises itself out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, but stops moving just as its hand grasps the bank. Through a convoluted series of interactions with the local goblins, you manage to find a way through the portal that is in its hand, and start working your way through in an attempt to find and destroy the core; the giant, it seems, is a Primal, and while it's active, even if it's not moving, it threatens to suck the very life out of the land.

Once inside you're in a cool, mechanical and metal environment. It's a big contrast from the previous raid dungeon, which made heavy use of the neon-glowing Allagan aesthetic, but since Heavensward as a whole has a lot of neon-glowing Allagan stuff just in its normal content, it seems the devs made the wise decision to not continue down this road with the new raid. Fine by me.

The bosses so far are appropriately steampunky in nature, and unlike Coil, which tends to be a short run to a single boss, the first level of Alexander features two bosses. The first is pretty much a pushover, but it's fun that it's more than just a single thing to fight. The main boss of the level, meanwhile, is a fairly involved fight that demands everyone knows what to do and performs their role appropriately. It's a little more forgiving than Coil was — mistakes are less likely to immediately wipe the whole group, though they will put you all at a disadvantage — but still challenging. We managed to clear it within a couple of hours, though, and even went back in to go get some more loot for those who lost the rolls after we'd finished.

We're hopefully going to jump in and see some more of it over in the weekend; I'm curious to see what mechanical mysteries the later levels have in store, and excited to be running with my regular group again.

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Spoilers ahead!

I was pleased that the team went all-out and gave us a full-on Final Fantasy finale. The final dungeon, the Aetherochemical Research Facility, gradually gets weirder and weirder as you progress through it, until you eventually reach what is clearly The Final Boss Room, in which you're set upon by not one but two Ascians, the dark-robed ne'er-do-wells whose evil machinations have been behind most of the Bad Things happening in Eorzea throughout the Final Fantasy XIV narrative.

Delightfully, this battle against the Ascians even does the typical Final Fantasy thing of unfolding across multiple forms, with the "merged" form of the two Ascians creating "Ascian Prime" and battering you with some of the most spectacular attacks in the entire game. Lest you thought that Final Fantasy XIV would lose some of the series' trademark spectacle owing to the fact that its multiplayer nature makes cinematic camera angles and lengthy spell sequences impractical, this confrontation very much dispels that notion.

That's not the end, though. The battle against Ascian Prime — the conclusion of which finally sees recurring villain Lahabrea apparently dealt with once and for all — is followed up by an eight-player Trial in the research facility's Singularity Reactor, in which you face off against Ishgard's Archibishop, Heavensward's main villain.

This being Final Fantasy, however, you don't just fight a doddering old man with an obscene amount of hit points. No; shortly before your battle with him, he draws upon the power of the Eyes of Nidhogg to channel the spirit of Ishgard's legendary king Thorden — he who, with his knights twelve, originally laid Nidhogg low and took the great wyrm's eyes — and become a Primal incarnation of the ancient king. Naturally, this involves him growing to approximately ten storeys in height in the process, and his bodyguards, the twelve knights of the Heaven's Ward (do you see what they did there) undergo similar transformations prior to your final battle against the whole sorry lot of them.

The actual battle against Thorden and the knights is amazing. Final Fantasy veterans will doubtless recognise this setup as an excuse to bring in the notorious summon "Knights of the Round", and indeed the final boss battle is effectively you fighting Knights of the Round, complete with ridiculously overblown attack animations — including, at one point, the reactor in which you're fighting seemingly floating up into space, then your entire screen shattering to bring you back to reality. (This animation is pretty much a direct reference to Knights of the Round's appearance in Final Fantasy VII, whose attack animation "Ultimate End" was the most powerful ability you could equip your characters with in the whole game.)

It's a fitting end for Heavensward's story, which has overall been a great addition to the ranks of Final Fantasy narratives throughout history. And it leaves some nice open teaser threads at the end ready for future content patches and the continuation of the story — most notably the character Estinien's possession by the spirit of Nidhogg, the latter of whom is understandably pissed off at the world for numerous reasons, not least of which being the fact that he had his eyes scooped out, and some thousand years later, was killed by some young upstart claiming to represent the spirit of the planet itself.

Anyway. It was good stuff, and sets the scene nicely for the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, which must be due pretty soon now. (Indeed, the ending cutscene shows Alexander rising out of the water in the Dravanian Hinterlands, though it is as yet impossible to enter the great iron giant.)

I'm glad I beat the story (and the two "post-ending" dungeons Neverreap and The Fractal Continuum, both of which are a lot of fun — and pleasingly challenging) and am looking forward to seeing what's next. In the meantime, I have an official full-on review of the expansion to write for Gamespot, so watch out for that soon.

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Heavensward has achieved that which I wasn't sure it would be able to do: it's surpassed A Realm Reborn in almost every possible way, but particularly when it comes to the main story. While A Realm Reborn had a solid narrative that chronicled your character's humble beginnings up to their awakening as the Warrior of Light and beyond, taking in their victories over the fierce Primals of Eorzea and the Empire's ultimate weapon in the process, I found the Final Fantasy XII-style political manoeuvring that made up a significant part of the plot to be less interesting than something a bit more, for want of a better word, "JRPG".

Heavensward, meanwhile, feels more like a "Final Fantasy". This isn't to say that A Realm Reborn didn't feel like Final Fantasy at all — I described it as one of the best new Final Fantasies in recent years back when I reviewed it for USgamer, after all — but Heavensward feels more like a traditional Final Fantasy.

It achieves this in a number of different ways. For one, it tones down the political machinations that gradually built up over the course of A Realm Reborn, and which came to a rather shocking climax at the end of patch 2.55, Before the Fall, which acted as a prelude to Heavensward. These narrative threads are picked up and explored further — though some look as if they're going to remain unresolved until a later content patch — but for the most part Heavensward is an all-original story.

For another, the narrative feels more like an epic journey. In A Realm Reborn, you spent a lot of your time going back and forth between the three main areas, and, aside from the initial quest where you leave your starting city to go and visit the other two, it didn't really feel like the typical JRPG journey of gradually getting further and further away from your starting point, with more and more outlandish things happening as you go. Heavensward, meanwhile, does adopt this style of journey, beginning in the familiar snowy wastes of Coerthas, some of which we had the opportunity to explore in A Realm Reborn, but before long giving way to the lush forests and rocky mountains of the Dravanian Forelands, the otherworldly floating islands of the Churning Mists and the Sea of Clouds, the mysterious abandoned city of the Dravanian Hinterlands — an important location to Final Fantasy XIV lore as a whole, as it turns out — and, ultimately, a final region which doesn't feel at all like a typical MMO field, instead very much feeling like an authentic JRPG The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.

The journey you undertake throughout the narrative is emphasised by some lovely narration from David Warner upon your first entry to each area. A Realm Reborn had plenty of florid prose, but Heavensward refines this with some almost poetic writing that gives the game a very distinctive voice and tone throughout. It feels strange to compliment the writing in an MMO, a type of game not particularly known for stellar storytelling (Hi, World of Warcraft!) but Heavensward really doesn't skimp on this front, and it's all the stronger for it.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the story ends — and, of course, getting involved with what comes after that. It can't be long now until the launch of the new raid dungeon Alexander, and I'm very intrigued to see how all that fits in with the overall lore. Previous raid The Binding Coil of Bahamut turned out to be extremely relevant to the original game's lore — and even more relevant to Heavensward, as it happens — so I'm looking forward to experiencing Alexander's encounters and story to see what happens.

For now, though, I'm still flagging a bit after all the excitement of the weekend, so I think it's time to get some sleep.

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Paladin often drew some criticism — or, rather, accusations of being "boring" — for the fact that it was a relatively straightforward class to play, with only two real combos of abilities to use in different circumstances compared to a much wider array of things to do if you're playing a Warrior. Its main perk over its raging counterpart, however, was its survivability; Warriors have a ton more HP than Paladins, but they also take more damage, while Paladins have fewer HP but a lot more in the way of defensive abilities to mitigate or even nullify damage.

Still, though, I understand the criticisms; once you unlocked all the abilities to form your basic combos, it very much became a case of pressing ability 1, 2, 3 and occasionally stepping out of enemy ability telegraphs. Post-50, though, things get a lot more interesting.

The oddly-named Sheltron, for example, is an ability whose usefulness doesn't become immediately apparent. What it does is guarantee that you will block the next physical attack you take. Blocking an attack is usually determined by random chance, influenced by the stats on the shield you're wielding alongside your sword. Sheltron guarantees a block, and while blocking doesn't nullify damage altogether, it does reduce the damage by a significant amount. It also has the handy side-effect of restoring some of your magic points when the block goes off, meaning that the Riot Blade combo is no longer the only way to regenerate MP.

Blocking also allows you to counterattack with a move called Shield Swipe, which is actually one of the Paladin's more potent offensive moves, and also inflicts a status that prevents the enemy from using abilities of the "weaponskill" type. It's not quite as good as a Stun or Silence, but it can be helpful and give a moment's grace. The damage is very nice, though — particularly as it's been buffed since its original incarnation — and it also now generates aggro, meaning you're not losing out by weaving in a Shield Swipe when it's up.

The other ability I've had the opportunity to play with now is Goring Blade, which follows on from the Riot Blade combo, previously used just for regenerating magic points to allow you to keep casting Flash, your main means of controlling larger groups of enemies at once. Goring Blade, meanwhile, has a solid initial hit followed by a damage-over-time effect. Paladins don't do a lot of damage generally — it's not their role, after all — but adding the ticks of damage to what you're doing anyway — particularly if combined with other DoT effects like Circle of Scorn and Fracture — you can actually put out some fairly respectable numbers. Plus Goring Blade has like the coolest visual effect of all Paladin's moves that I've unlocked so far.

I just reached level 56 this evening, which is a level at which I unlock another new ability. I'm not sure what it is yet, but I'm very much looking forward to finding out and experimenting with it — one of the most exciting things about the new expansion is the fact that everyone is getting these new abilities at the same time, so there isn't yet an established "right way" to do things. As such, experimentation is key, and it's really rewarding to work out an efficient use of abilities for yourself.

But anyway. That's three days in a row I've talked about Heavensward. (It's really, really, really good.) I promise I will attempt to talk about something else tomorrow. Probably. Maybe.

The post 1979: One More Post Where I Gush About Heavensward, Then I'll Find Something Different To Talk About Tomorrow (Probably) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's been an odd adjustment to move from the rather freeform, "pursue your own goals" gameplay of a level cap character back into the routine of doing quests, exploring and all manner of other things. But I'm enjoying it a lot, particularly as so far Heavensward is proving itself to have a wide variety of things to do and ways to earn those all-important experience points.

The main story quests have been very good so far. They always were mostly quite interesting (though in the post-50 ones there was quite a lot of lugging boxes around and other menial tasks in between the more dramatic moments — not exactly the Warrior of Light's finest hour) but Heavensward has raised the bar somewhat.

One way in which it's done this is through the use of instanced quest battles — scripted encounters that take you out of the main multiplayer world and put you in your own private little area to complete objectives. In A Realm Reborn, these were usually fairly small scale but fun; in Heavensward they're much more ambitious affairs with their own unique mechanics. One particular highlight relatively early on sees you running through one of the earlier dungeons by yourself in the attempt to rescue a prisoner — while you do so, their captors start filling the place with poison gas, so you have to deal with that as well as finding a way to release them.

The main story itself is interesting and feels more focused than A Realm Reborn, too. Taking a somewhat darker overall tone, the plot thus far has seen the Warrior of Light (you!), one of your erstwhile companions and two other characters who each played roles in A Realm Reborn exploring the lands beyond Ishgard in an attempt to stop a war between the Dravanian dragons and Ishgard that will doubtless end with much death and destruction on both sides.

A Realm Reborn set up dragons mostly as fearsome, dehumanised foes to be treated with respect but defeated nonetheless. They played a relatively minor role in the overarching storyline until the latter hours and the Binding Coil of Bahamut storyline, but they were there nonetheless — and as you progressed, particularly through the Bahamut narrative, it became very apparent that they weren't quite the simple foes you might have expected them to be based on their appearances in other fantasy media.

Heavensward runs with this theme, with both the main story and sidequests going some distance to help us understand the dragons a little better. One questline in particular sees you helping out an Ishgardian who is essentially a "racist" of sorts against dragons — he refuses to believe they are anything more than monsters, but as you complete his quests, both you and he come to see that the dragons apparently have feelings and society just like the humanoids of the world.

The sidequests are kind of interesting in that they further your understanding of the game world much like in A Realm Reborn, but unlike the base game, the darker tone seeps in quite often, with many quests ending in less than perfect circumstances. In some regards it feels like some cues have been taken from Nier — also published by Square Enix — by demonstrating that sometimes, even with your best intentions and god-felling skills and abilities, you simply can't bring about a happy ending for everyone. It's sobering, but very much in keeping with the overall tone.

Then you have boss fights in which you and seven friends take on a giant insect god with a penchant for swinging four gigantic swords around at once, and you remember that this is still very much a Final Fantasy game at heart — and oh, do I love it for it.

The post 1978: Some More Heavensward Thoughts appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's good.

The story follows on directly from the end of the 2.55 story arc, which I won't spoil here for those who haven't seen it in all its ridiculous and tragic glory. Suffice to say, however, that it provides good reason for the Warrior of Light (that's you!) and occasional companion Alphinaud to head in the direction of Ishgard, a region which had previously been closed off to outsiders, but which became a little more open-minded after seeing how you (and seven friends) fended off an absolutely massive dragon towards the end of A Realm Reborn.

The city of Ishgard itself is beautifully rendered, being somewhat similar in design to a cross between Final Fantasy XI's cities of San d'Oria and Jeuno. It has its own very distinctive character that is separate to the three previous city-states we had the opportunity to visit in A Realm Reborn — the verdant, nature-filled environs of Gridania; the tall towers and tall ships of Limsa Lominsa; and the juxtaposition between extreme affluence and extreme poverty of Ul'Dah — with an austere, almost unwelcoming facade and some beautiful architecture. The kind of place where you'd be slightly afraid to touch anything, lest you befouled or defaced it in some way or another.

Outside the city, things get interesting. Early on, the main scenario quest sends you off in two separate directions: in one direction lies the Coerthas Western Highlands — a snowy, mountainous region similar to the existing Central Highlands region, but with more in the way of sheer cliff faces and inconvenient but impressive-looking lumps of rock all over the place — while in the other lies the Sea of Clouds, a floating archipelago of islands in the sky where skies are often clear and blue by simple virtue of the fact that the islands are above the clouds, but whose altitude drops the temperature to less-than-inviting levels. There's a huge contrast between these initial two areas; Coerthas is drab, monochromatic and somewhat grounded in reality for the most part (huge dead dragon corpse aside), while the Sea of Clouds is dramatically colourful, the stuff of pure fantasy. I haven't proceeded further afield just yet, but the main story is shortly to have me heading for Dravania, home of the dragons, so I'm interested to see how that compares.

One really striking thing about Heavensward is its sense of scale. A Realm Reborn was no stranger to sprawling environments that were impressive to behold, but Heavensward takes it to a new level. Ishgard is gigantic and imposing in the same way an old cathedral is; meanwhile, the field maps are huge in terms of both surface area and variation in altitude — the latter aspect of which is, in part, designed to accommodate the new flying mounts you can ride around after completing the surprisingly enjoyable task of hunting down a number of hidden "aether currents" scattered around the region.

Another striking thing about Heavensward is nothing to do with its architecture, however: a good 80-90% of the original voice cast appears to have been replaced, meaning some characters sound quite different to how they sounded in A Realm Reborn, with several even having picked up regional accents (primarily Yorkshire so far) in the intervening period. It's initially somewhat jarring, but overall the quality of the voice acting is much better than A Realm Reborn. This isn't particularly difficult, however, because although A Realm Reborn had an excellent localisation (albeit one that diverged quite a bit from the original Japanese script and took on something of a life of its own) its voice acting was passable at best and woefully awful at worst. At least in English it was, anyway; the Japanese voice acting makes use of well-known voice talent like Rie Tanaka (Hyperdimension Neptunia) and Eri Kitamura (Senran Kagura) and as such has always been pretty good, but it's clear that the English dub was perhaps, to put it politely, done a little bit on the cheap side.

It's not entirely surprising, mind you; A Realm Reborn was a huge risk for Square Enix given Final Fantasy XIV version 1.0's critical and commercial failure. As such, the decision to perhaps skimp a bit on the voice acting budget — many scenes in A Realm Reborn and indeed Heavensward also are unvoiced — was understandable. However, since A Realm Reborn achieved the seemingly impossible and rescued an all-but-dead MMO from oblivion, turning it into one of the company's greatest success stories in the process, it's gratifying to see that a bit more effort has been put into aspects of the presentation such as voice acting — even if the change in some characters' voices is a little surprising the first time you hear it.

I'm yet to try out a huge amount of the new gameplay features — I'm concentrating on levelling my main class Paladin to 60 before levelling anything further — but the new skills for existing classes look interesting, and the altogether new classes seem to be really cool, though it looks as if "lolDRK" is going to become the new "lolDRG". (Context for those unfamiliar: for the longest time, Dragoons (DRG) were notorious for dying a lot, due in part to their low magic resistance but also due to awkward animation locks on certain skills making it difficult to move out of the way of attacks; hence, "lolDRG" as the response to a Dragoon's inevitable death; Dark Knights (DRK), however, appear to be ready to take up the mantle for themselves, from what I've heard so far.)

Oh, and the music is amazing. And the story is interesting. And I've fallen in love with this stupid game all over again. There goes the next few years of my life…

The post 1977: To The Heavens appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As the "true final boss" of the game, I was hoping that the Bahamut Prime fight would be pretty spectacular, and sure enough I wasn't disappointed. Here's a video (from my character's perspective as a Black Mage) of our clear:

The fight is not only a suitably challenging battle to bring the main endgame raid of "vanilla" Final Fantasy XIV to a close, it's also a fitting conclusion for a Final Fantasy game. Japanese role-playing games are often known for getting a little… peculiar in their final confrontations, with final bosses often being fought in space, in clouds of darkness, in strange swirling miasmas or inside the cores of planets. In the case of Final Fantasy XIV, your battle against Bahamut Prime takes place within Bahamut's own heart — Bahamut Prime, it seems, is not literally Bahamut himself (since he is both absolutely massive and in the process of being regenerated by the various Coils) but rather a manifestation of his will and rage.

This doesn't stop him being a formidable opponent, mind you. The fight combines mechanics from a number of earlier battles to create a confrontation where you have to use everything you've learned about handling mechanics to be successful. There's heavy amounts of damage. There's people taking responsibility for ensuring the group isn't wiped out by carelessness or inattention. There's puddles of nasty shit on the floor that you have to drop carefully. And, of course, there are Divebombs, Final Fantasy XIV's most notorious enemy ability, first introduced in the Turn 5 fight against Twintania, later seen in a somewhat different format in the Turn 9 fight against Nael deus Darnus and finally seen from not one but two independent sources in the Bahamut Prime battle.

Divebombs are notorious because in the case of Turn 5 in particular, they were the "roadblock" that stopped a lot of groups from progressing further, simply because they're tricky to handle properly and can have devastating consequences for the whole group if handled incorrectly. Their inclusion in each of the three "final" battles in the three separate parts of Coil shows the battle designers' awareness that they are a challenge — albeit a surmountable one — and a desire to test players' abilities to the maximum, often without the helpful visual telegraphs that many of the other enemy attacks in the game have.

But anyway. You didn't come for a deconstruction of the mechanics of Final Fantasy XIV's raids. (Probably.) You came to hear me enthuse about beating a spectacular final boss fight — and, if you've watched the video, you'll see that it most certainly is.

As I've written about a few times previously on these pages, I'm a big fan of well-done final confrontations, and a big part of an effective one in my book is good use of music. Turn 5 and Turn 9 (the previous "final bosses" of the game prior to the introduction of Final Coil) both had great music that was unique to the fight (or "almost unique" in the case of Turn 5 — it's also used for the final boss of the main 2.0 storyline as well as a later confrontation); Turn 13, meanwhile, makes stunningly effective use of the game's main theme song "Answers".

"Answers" is one of the first things you hear in A Realm Reborn, since it accompanies the dramatic introduction sequence that depicts the end of the 1.0 world through the Calamity — an event that those who played the original incarnation of Final Fantasy XIV actually lived through.

The Calamity saw the descent of the artificial moon Dalamud as a result of the machinations of Nael van Darnus, an overly ambitious Imperial legatus and the main antagonist of the 1.0 storyline. As the moon approached Eorzea, however, an unexpected thing happened: it burst open to reveal a very angry Bahamut, who proceeded to lay waste to the realm in his somewhat understandable rage — after all, you'd be pissed off if you'd been locked inside a moon since ancient times, wouldn't you?

All looks lost for Eorzea, but the intervention of Archon Louisoix, a major character in the 1.0 storyline and quests, sees something mysterious happen that no-one quite understands or remembers. Everyone wakes up five years later in a realm that is somewhat different to what it once was, but still very much intact. This is how A Realm Reborn kicks off, but the main storyline then goes off in its own direction and the truth of what really happened in the Calamity doesn't start to be revealed when (if) you venture into the Binding Coil of Bahamut.

Through your explorations of the three Coils, you discover not only the truth behind the Calamity, but also what happened to a number of important characters who had apparently disappeared or died — most notably, Louisoix himself and Nael. Needless to say, everything comes back to Bahamut in the end — but during your investigations you also discover exactly what it was that led to Bahamut's imprisonment inside the artificial moon, and why he's so full of rage and resentment towards humanity.

Since "Answers" is a song so closely tied to this storyline, it's fitting that it should be the accompaniment for its final conclusion. And it's used beautifully throughout the fight, too, beginning with the mournful baritone lyrics speaking of suffering and pain, moving through the gentler, sweeter female lyrics that speak of "the land's light of justice" and walking free before eventually culminating in the gloriously thick-sounding choral finale. The music isn't just played straight through, though; the simple, sparse baritone singing is used in the fight's first phase, the female lyrics come in in the second phase as you start having to deal with Bahamut's minions as well as the dragon god himself, and the explosion of passion that is the finale comes as Bahamut Prime begins casting his ultimate attack Teraflare: a devastating blast of flaming energy that, assuming you survive, signals the beginning of the end.

Final Fantasy XIV uses music spectacularly well throughout to help with its storytelling. Each of the story's main confrontations are accompanied by their own unique theme tunes, many of which have relevant lyrics. The presentation of the game's absolutely, positively, definitely final battle (until Heavensward, obviously) is no exception to this, and I'm very excited to hear what Soken and his team come up with to accompany our new adventures.

It's now 1am, though, and since I've had like three hours sleep, I think it's probably time I caught up a bit.

The post 1975: Bahamut Down appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Turn 12 is an enjoyable fight, though. It took a bit of practice to get it right, but we eventually got there without too much difficulty and frustration. It's interesting in that it's quite unforgiving of any mistakes you might make, but also relatively straightforward and easy once everyone knows what they're doing. There's a lot less in the way of randomness than some of the other encounters (particularly in Coil) so there's a lot less in the way of unexpected things for the party to deal with — any unfortunate happenings can usually be traced directly back to someone doing something wrong somewhere.

Interestingly, a guildmate pointed out that the fight is very unforgiving because unforgiveness is an important narrative theme of the confrontation itself. I won't spoil the story context of it for those who are yet to clear and hoping to remain unspoiled — it's a significant narrative moment in the grand scheme of Final Fantasy XIV's overarching storyline, particularly the spectacular cutscene that follows your victory — but I found it really cool that the mechanics of the game mirrored the narrative themes so nicely. It's a subtle thing, but as someone who is very much interested in the different ways interactive entertainment can tell stories, I liked it very much.

I've been a little burnt out on the game recently, as prior to the imminent expansion Heavensward it's been going through its longest drought of new content since it launched, and it's been hard to motivate myself to keep running the same things over and over again, particularly as in some cases the things I "need" to run for various quests are things that have been in the game since launch, and as such I can probably do them in my sleep. (The Aurum Vale is a bit of an exception; I kind of like that there's a dungeon that can still kick the arse of an unprepared or complacent party, even if it can be frustrating to plough through sometimes.)

There's also the fact that with Heavensward comes a level cap increase, too, and as such a lot of the shiny, top-end gear that everyone's been stocking up on will probably be irrelevant in a matter of weeks following the expansion's release — though not much has been revealed about new gear as yet, so it will be interesting to see how they deal with the discrepancy between character level (currently capped at 50, rising to 60 with Heavensward) and gear level (currently capped at 130, with a couple of individual items being level 135) without revamping the whole system. (Or perhaps they will revamp the whole system, I don't know. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.)

Running T12 tonight, though, reminded me the main reason I play this game; it's not to always be running new and exciting things, it's not to bring down fearsome foes — though that's cool — and it's not to experience the story (which is also great) — but instead it's to have a good time with people who have become really good friends over the course of the last couple of years. The feeling of camaraderie you build when playing a game like this over a long period is unlike anything else in all of gaming, and it's a delight to be able to team up for nights like tonight, where everyone bands together against a common challenge and helps each other out.

So yeah. I may be a little burnt out on grinding for tomestones and the current gear treadmill, but there's still plenty of life in Eorzea's champion Amarysse yet; and I have no doubt whatsoever that Yoshi-P and his team will deliver a spectacular experience with Heavensward that will make me fall in love with the game all over again. Only 6 days until Early Access starts… man, I better finish Omega Quintet before then…

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Since we're approaching the release of expansion pack Heavensward, which will feature an all-new raid set inside giant fortress/robot thing Alexander, The Final Coil of Bahamut has been "nerfed" slightly in order to allow a few more people to make it through. Specifically, the "Echo" bonus that was gradually introduced in previous Turns has been brought in, giving anyone who enters an immediate 10% boost to their maximum HP, damage dealt and healing.

This doesn't make the encounters easy, by any means — although we've all cleared Turn 10 (aka The Final Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1) several times, today we had real difficulty with it for some reason. So after a while we gave up and took a look at Turn 11, which none of us had seen at all before.

For the unfamiliar, the Binding Coil of Bahamut storyline in Final Fantasy XIV is effectively a direct follow-up to how version 1.0 of the game ended — with "The Calamity", which saw artificial moon Dalamud called down from the sky, only to burst open and reveal a very angry dragon god called Bahamut, who promptly proceeded to blow seven shades of shit out of Eorzea. Archon Louisoix — grandfather of Alphinaud and Alisae, the former of whom is a main character in A Realm Reborn's main storyline and the latter of whom serves as the "protagonist" of sorts for the Binding Coil of Bahamut narrative — did something appropriately spectacular when all hope looked lost, leaving a number of adventurers temporarily trapped in limbo until they woke up five years later in an Eorzea that was in the process of being rebuilt. What happened to Bahamut? That's the question that the Binding Coil of Bahamut sets out to answer, and you gradually discover bits and pieces about what really happened as you progress through it.

That's not all, though. Although Final Fantasy XIV's setting of Eorzea is very much "swords and magic" fantasy, with a hint of magical technology lifted pretty much directly from Final Fantasy VI, there's also a hint of sci-fi in there. Like any good sprawling role-playing game worth its salt, Final Fantasy XIV has an ancient race of long-dead weirdos who left mysterious, technologically advanced relics all over the world. The background of said weirdos — known as the Allagans — runs as an interesting undercurrent to everything else that is going on, and is specifically explored through both the Crystal Tower and Binding Coil of Bahamut story arcs, with it being necessary to complete both to get the full picture — or at least, everything that has been revealed about them so far.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut is where some of the most interesting, exciting and surprising developments in this aspect of the game's overall lore come, and it's also home to some of the most spectacular visual settings in the whole game. By jumping head-first into the sci-fi angle, the Binding Coil of Bahamut is free to let loose with some enormously creative, absolutely massive environments that are quite unlike anything seen anywhere else in the game. Turn 11 in particular, which we saw for the first time tonight, is quite astonishing to behold, unfolding in and around an enormous scale model of the artificial moon Dalamud, and I understand that 12 and 13 are even more spectacular. I'm looking forward to it.

The thing I'm looking forward to most about this, though, is the fact that it represents the "true final boss" of the game as a whole as it exists today. And, while I haven't spoiled myself on the encounters in Turn 12 and 13 as yet — though I can pretty much figure out who/what you'll be fighting there — I have had a listen to the music. And it's going to be quite the experience battling with this — the music from Turn 12 — in the background, I feel.

We have a big hydra… thing to flatten first, though, and we're taking another pop at it tomorrow. Wish us luck!

The post 1923: Target: Bahamut appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Golden Rules

As a DPS class, your job is to maximise your damage output as much as possible — but at the same time, you're no good to anyone dead. Black Mages wear light armour and have significantly lower HP values than melee DPS classes, so try and avoid taking damage as much as possible. If it's avoidable, you should be avoiding it — even if this comes at the expense of a spell you're in the middle of casting.

In other words, if you find yourself in an area-effect marker and you're in the middle of casting a spell, don't hesitate, move, even if this interrupts your cast. The only exception to this is if your cast bar only has about 10% or so remaining, in which case the spell will still go off even if you start moving. Learn encounters and be able to anticipate attacks so you know when it's safe to stand still and let off some spells and when you should be prioritising movement. If you outgear content, you may be able to survive some big hits, but this isn't a good habit to get into. Particularly heavy hits will interrupt your cast anyway, so just get out of the way, okay?

Black Mage Basics

Learn how Astral Fire and Umbral Ice work. Astral Fire increases the damage from your Fire spells but nullifies MP regeneration. Umbral Ice increases your MP regeneration at the expense of damage for your Fire spells. Thunder spells are unaffected by whether you're in Astral Fire or Umbral Ice, so should be cast while you're in Umbral Ice and regenerating for your next barrage of Fire spells.

Blowing a Thing Up

Black Mages have two real modes they'll be in depending on content: single-target, used for bosses and individual enemies, and area-effect, used in dungeons and particularly on big pulls.

When attacking a single target, here's the sequence of spells you should be using:

Fire III -> Fire -> repeat Fire until 770MP or less -> Blizzard III -> Thunder I -> Blizzard I -> repeat

This has (apparently) been calculated as the optimum DPS rotation for most Black Mages, since it allows you to cast pretty much continually. The 770MP threshold is there so that you have enough MP to cast Blizzard III once — which puts you into Umbral Ice status and thus starts your MP regeneration — and get off a cast of Thunder I (which deals damage over time) even if you haven't yet had a "tick" of MP replenishing.

Why not Thunder II or Thunder III? Because they cast considerably slower. Once you hit level 50, Thunder II will be largely irrelevant, and Thunder III should be saved for your "Thundercloud" procs, which allow you to instantly cast a Thunder spell to deal all its damage immediately plus the damage-over-time effect it usually does.

On that note, because Thunder III has a stronger, longer damage-over-time effect than Thunder I, if you hit a Thundercloud proc before Blizzard III in the combo above, replace the Thunder I with another Blizzard I or Scathe, since there's no sense "overwriting" the Thunder III status effect with an inferior effect. The only exception to this should be if there's only a couple of seconds left on the Thunder effect.

When to Hit Firestarter and Thundercloud

If the target currently doesn't have a Thunder effect on it, Thundercloud can be hit immediately to bump up your DPS somewhat — remember to use Thunder III rather than Thunder I. If the target does currently have Thunder on it, it may be worth saving it for the Umbral Ice phase; the immediate cast may allow you to get an extra Blizzard I or Scathe in there at the end for a small DPS increase.

Firestarter should be used immediately if in Astral Fire, and never in Umbral Ice. If you get a Firestarter with your last Fire before your Blizzard III and it's too late to cancel the Blizzard III cast, don't panic; cast Blizzard III -> Thunder -> Blizzard I as normal, by which point your MP should be back at full, then drop in a Transpose. This puts you back at Astral Fire I status, which is a slight damage decrease from Astral Fire III, but still enough to make the free Fire III from Firestarter meaningful. After using Firestarter in this way, continue from Fire.

Blowing Several Things Up

When facing three or more targets, it's probably more efficient to use area-effect spells. Here's a sequence of spells that works well and is apparently, again, optimised for maximum DPS.

Fire III -> Flare -> Transpose -> Fire III -> Fire II -> Fire II -> repeat from Flare

This combo allows you to use Flare considerably more often than the frequently seen Fire III -> Fire II until 250MP -> Flare and thus represents an increase in damage potential.

Target an enemy as close to the centre of the group as possible. If the enemy you're targeting is down to about 20% HP or less, switch to another target with more HP so you don't have your cast interrupted by the enemy being killed before you get your spell off.

Double and Triple Flares

Flare normally costs all your MP and requires at least 250MP to cast in the first place. As such, it usually leaves you with 0MP in Astral Fire III status, which is no good to anyone. As such, Transpose is normally used immediately after Flare to regenerate some MP, and indeed this is how the sequence above is built.

However, there's a couple of little tricks Black Mages can use to get more than one Flare off in quick succession. All you need to do is get at least 250MP back, which can be done using either an X-Ether potion or the skill Convert, which sacrifices some of your HP to give you some MP.

To perform two Flares in a row, do one of the following:

Fire III -> Flare -> X-Ether -> Flare
Fire III -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare

To perform three Flares in a row, simply combine the two:

Fire III -> Flare -> X-Ether -> Flare -> Convert -> Flare

Since Flare has a long cast time, it's worth using Swiftcast on the final Flare in one of these sequences to make it cast instantly.

Note that triple Flare in particular generates an enormous amount of aggro, so either warn your tank that you're going to do it, or make use of the level 34 Bard skill Quelling Strikes — which Black Mages can use as a cross-class ability — to reduce the aggro you're generating before you unleash the beast.

Also note that X-Ethers, Convert and Swiftcast all have cooldowns of varying lengths (Swiftcast is back up quickest, then Convert, then X-Ethers), so don't double or triple Flare carelessly; save it for when you're dealing with a large group or need to deal a massive amount of damage very quickly.

Staying Safe

Black Mages have a few skills that help them stay safe, chief among which are Manawall and Manaward. Manawall will absorb two physical attacks before it's dispelled. Manaward will absorb up to 30% of your maximum HP's worth of damage before it's dispelled. Both have a time limit and a moderate-length cooldown, though, so you can't simply keep them up all the time.

It can sometimes be tough to tell which are physical attacks and which are magic attacks. As a general rule, anything that involves elemental damage — fire, ice, thunder, wind, water — is probably magic, while everything else is physical. Note that the earth damage Titan does seems to be considered to be physical damage rather than magic damage despite it being elemental in nature.

One interesting side-effect of Manawall — and the game's damage system in general — is that if you don't take any damage from something, associated Bad Things won't happen either. This means that Manawall, when used effectively, can be used to avoid status effects and knockbacks. Learn which encounters allow you to do this.

Another interesting ability that Black Mage has is Aetherial Manipulation, which causes you to fly through the air to a target player. This is useful for getting out of the way quickly — or in trials like The Whorleater (Extreme) where you're at risk of falling off the platform, it can be a lifesaver.

Finally, squishy party members and tanks alike will thank you for casting Apocatastasis on them, which reduces elemental damage for a short period. Plus it makes a great noise. Note that once someone has had this cast on them, they can't have it cast on them again for a short period. The ability also has a cooldown period, so only use this when it will actually be of benefit to the party member in question!

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Warrior is one of the two tank jobs in the game — i.e. their job is to maintain the attention of enemies and get punched in the face so the rest of the party doesn't get punched in the face. Having gained a lot of experience with how Paladin does things, I have to admit I was somewhat skeptical about how different Warrior could possibly be. After all, their reason for existing is the same, and it's not like damage-dealing classes where you can make a distinction between ranged and melee characters; a tank is, by its very nature, a melee class.

I've been pleasantly surprised by how different it feels, though. This is down to several factors, both mechanical and aesthetic.

On the mechanics front, Warrior initially appears to be a more complex class to play. Whereas Paladin only really has two main "combos" of abilities to worry about — one for single-target threat generation, one for maintaining your stock of MP so you can keep aggro on larger groups — Warrior has several more, each of which has its own function. There's a basic aggro-generating combo that is the backbone of your single-target tanking, but there are also two combos that branch off the damage-increasing "Maim" skill, one of which reduces the enemy's damage output, another of which reduces their resistance to a particular kind of damage while increasing the healing you receive. Alongside this, fighting as a Warrior in your tank stance builds up stacks of "Wrath" which, when they reach five, can be expended for one of several special abilities.

So, to put things simply, there are more buttons to press as Warrior — or, more accurately, more different combinations of buttons to press according to the situation. Paladin is mostly about managing your defensive abilities to mitigate as much damage as possible; there's still an element of this with Warrior, but it's a much more aggressive, active class with self-heals and attacks that inflict various status effects.

Aesthetically is the other big different. Although most classes in Final Fantasy XIV work off a 2.5 second global cooldown (i.e. 2.5 seconds has to elapse before you can use another ability) and consequently play at the same "pace", Warrior and Paladin feel worlds apart due to their animations and sound effects. Paladin's sounds are higher in pitch, the animations more fluid; Warrior's animations look more cumbersome and make lower-pitched, heavy-sounding impacts. The reason for this big difference is the difference in weapons, of course — Paladins use a one-handed sword and shield, while warriors use axes as big as themselves — but it's surprising quite how pronounced the contrast is between the two classes, even though the basic "pace" of how they play is very similar.

Having got Warrior to 50, I'm not sure if I'll do much more with it, but I'm glad I've experimented with it and now have the flexibility to use it in endgame content when I want to. Overall I prefer the faster-feeling fluidity of Paladin, plus I know that class a lot better and thus feel more confident using it in difficult fights, but I'm not going to rule out a bit more axeplay in the future!

What's next? Probably Bard, which I've already got to level 40; while a ranged DPS like my Black Mage, Bard plays very differently owing to the fact you don't have to stand still to use abilities and don't have as much of a set skill rotation as Black Mage does. After that it's on to the classes I haven't used much or at all before: Monk, Dragoon, Ninja and Arcanist (which becomes both Scholar and Summoner).

The post 1896: Mastering War appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

FFXIV's endgame raid is split into three main parts. The Binding Coil of Bahamut (which consists of Turns 1 to 5) is mostly — mostly — trivial in terms of difficulty these days owing to the fact that the average gear level of a level 50 character who plays a reasonable amount each week now exceeds the level these encounters were designed for by a considerable margin. As time has gone on, The Binding Coil of Bahamut has also been "nerfed" in terms of mechanics — i.e. made easier — and parties challenging it are now given a substantial buff to their HP, damage dealt and healing when they walk in, though those looking for a bit more of a challenge can optionally turn this buff off.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut reaches its conclusion with Turn 5, a notoriously difficult fight that sees a party of eight taking on Twintania, a very angry dragon. Turn 5 remains a challenge for many groups to this day not because Twintania is particularly difficult to kill in terms of her HP and damage — the aforementioned gear issue here makes the encounter much easier than it once was — but because everyone in the group needs to have a solid understanding of most of the fight's mechanics in order to succeed. Again, the power creep has meant it's easier to recover from critical errors, but if you don't know how to deal with her notorious Divebomb attack, for example, you're going to die and quite possibly take the rest of the group with you.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut is followed up by the Second Coil of Bahamut, which consists of Turns 6 to 9. These are significantly more challenging, even with the "Echo" buff to player HP, damage and healing. Mechanics are more unforgiving — though again, a number have been nerfed over time — and they're still not exactly the sort of encounters you can pick up and expect to coast your way through without knowing anything about them. Groups need to work together and be able to communicate effectively in order to pass through these challenges, and it all comes to a head with Turn 9.

Turn 9 remains notorious as one of the hardest fights in the game, even with the Final Coil of Bahamut subsequently being added after it. It proves to be a considerable roadblock to many groups, and indeed our party has been working on beating it for many weeks now.

The reason why it's such a challenge — even more so than Turn 5 — is because of its extreme complexity. In this one fight, which takes in the region of 10 minutes to complete, there are roughly as many mechanics as you'd see in at least four separate boss encounters earlier in the game. There is a lot to learn, and it feels like an insurmountable challenge the first time you jump in, but as our group have proven tonight, taking it a step at a time and practicing together whenever we get the opportunity allows you to eventually reach success.

And my God what a wonderful feeling it was as that HP bar dropped to 0% tonight. We'd had several close calls earlier in the evening — first a 9%, then a 10%, then a 6% — but there was no guarantee that we were going to beat it. But beat it we did, and many celebrations were had; now we have until June to make it through the Final Coil of Bahamut before the expansion pack Heavensward comes along and gives us an entire new raid set in Alexander to take on.

I'm looking forward to the challenge. The feeling of jubilation at finally defeating this notoriously difficult boss this evening is unlike pretty much anything I've ever experienced in any other game — and at least part of that comes from the game's multiplayer element. It wasn't just my victory, it was our victory. We worked together, we practiced, we communicated, and eventually we prevailed. And it felt great.

We poked our head into the first turn of Final Coil this evening, but didn't get anywhere, as expected. That's an adventure for another day! In the meantime, here's our clear video:

The post 1890: Nael deus Defeated appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

As previously noted, it's a long and gruelling — though not especially difficult — process.

First you have the quest to acquire the weapon in the first place. This is an involved, multi-part affair that involves tracking its timeworn and weathered form down — usually from the depths of a monster-infested area — and then setting about finding the materials that master weaponsmith Gerolt needs to restore it to its former glory. Rather inconveniently, these materials can only be found in the somewhat uninviting lairs of Eorzea's Primals Ifrit, Garuda and Titan, so having already floored these massive enemies once during the course of the main story, you're now tasked with killing them again. This used to be a genuinely challenging task, back when the base Relic was pretty much the best weapon you could get in the game, but it's become almost trivial now thanks to how well-geared the vast majority of the level 50 population is now. There's also a dungeon to run (Amdapor Keep, which was the hardest four-player dungeon in the game when it launched, but which again has now become somewhat trivial) and two more boss fights against a Chimera and a Hydra that are new to the Relic questline.

After all this — and a bit of testing out the unfinished form of the weapon on unsuspecting members of Eorzea's beast tribes — you're finally blessed with an item level 80 weapon, which can be upgraded to item level 90 and made to glow in a rather fetching "this is special!" manner through the judicious application of Thavnairian Mist, a rare concoction that can only be acquired by exchanging Allagan Tomestones with collectors of rarities. Tomestones are a special currency rewarded for completing content at level 50 — since you no longer get experience points at this level, having reached the level cap, they form the basis for progression beyond this point. Pretty much anything that involves other people will reward you with Tomestones, be it four-player dungeons, eight-player Trials, twenty-four player raids or the extremely tough challenges of the Binding Coils of Bahamut.

This form of the weapon, known as Zenith, used to be pretty much the best weapon you could get outside of downing Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut — a tall order even for well-geared players even today — and acquiring one of the Allagan weapons. But as time went on and the game gradually expanded with each new patch, so too did the Relic quest.

It began with Atmas, a step which, for many, proves an insurmountable obstacle, but which sets the pace for the amount of commitment required to finish this lengthy process. Atmas are small crystals containing the souls of fallen warriors, and can be acquired randomly by participating in FATEs — public events that occur every so often in each of the game's zones — and completing them successfully. There are twelve Atma in total to collect, meaning you'll have to visit twelve different zones to participate in FATEs. In game terms, this step was designed to get level 50 players helping out with low-level FATEs, since a tweak to how experience points were awarded in the game's early days saw people turning to instanced dungeons for quick experience points rather than wandering around out in the open world helping one another.

The cruel twist in the Atma step was that once you'd acquired all twelve Atma, all that happened when you "upgraded" your weapon was that it lost its cool glow from the Zenith step. Its stats didn't change at all. But it was still an important step, because it made your weapon ready for the gradual upgrade process that came next.

By exchanging further Allagan Tomestones with a collector in Mor Dhona, you could acquire books telling tales of the "Zodiac Braves", and you're told that by recreating these tales of derring-do using your Atma Relic, you can improve it considerably. What this boils down to is a set of objectives — 100 specific monsters to kill, three specific dungeons to complete (or, more accurately, three specific bosses to beat), three specific FATEs to participate in and three specific levequests (short, repeatable quests) to complete. You had to do this nine times in total; each completed book rewarded you with a small increase to the stats on your Atma weapon, so it gradually improved over time. When all the books were completed, your Atma weapon regained its glow — a more substantial one this time — and became its Animus form.

Next up, you're told that you can improve the weapon further — and, crucially for this step, customise it — by infusing materia into a "sphere scroll". In order to do this, you need the sphere scroll itself (which costs yet more Tomestones), seventy-five pieces of Alexandrite as a catalyst to infuse the materia into the scroll, and at least seventy-five pieces of materia of the appropriate types to give your weapon the stats you want. Alexandrite can be acquired by participating in FATEs, bought with Allied Seals acquired by beating the giant monsters of The Hunt, or by digging it up using Mysterious Maps acquired from a strange old lady in Mor Dhona who appears to have been using them to clean her kitchen. The more materia you attach to the scroll, the higher the chance that the infusion will fail; fortunately, you only lose the materia if this happens, while the Alexandrite remains in your possession. Your reward for successfully infusing seventy-five points' worth of stats into the sphere scroll? Your Relic's Novus form, which has a somewhat more imposing glow.

For a while, again, Novus was the pinnacle of what you could have in terms of weaponry, and it was particularly powerful due to the fact that you could customise it. The materia to do this — particularly for popular stats like Determination (which increases damage) and Critical Hit Rate (which increases the likelihood an attack will deal considerably more damage than usual) — didn't come cheap, and the only other alternative was to "Spiritbond" equipment by using it to defeat monsters either in the world or in dungeons, then turn this equipment into materia, with random chance determining whether you'd get the kind of materia you wanted or a useless alternative. Thus, Novus was a long, difficult and expensive process for many, but taking the time to complete it would give you a strong weapon that would see you through pretty much anything the game could throw at you.

Then came another step. By "soulglazing" your relic and using it to collect soul energy — known colloquially as "light" owing to the fact your weapon glows with varying levels of intensity when it acquires this energy — you could make it more powerful still, improving the stats you'd infused into the Novus by a set amount according to the combinations and amounts you put in. In order to acquire light, you simply had to do pretty much anything that involved other people — dungeons, trials, even FATEs. Light was acquired at a very slow rate, however, and many resorted to running the same things over and over again for hours at a time in order to gain light most effectively. In practice, however, you could gain light at a good rate simply by playing the game as you normally would, attempting to acquire Tomestones to gear up your armour to match your increasingly powerful weapon. Upon filling your Novus with light, you'd be able to turn it into its Nexus form, the ultimate incarnation of the Relic you found all that time ago, and a weapon that you've truly helped to make your own.

But your efforts don't end there. Through this whole process, you've been developing a relationship with both a scholar of these ancient weapons and a local master blacksmith, and it eventually becomes clear that it's possible to recreate the legendary weapons of the Zodiac Braves themselves — but in order to do so there is, unsurprisingly, a somewhat convoluted process involved that requires you to do the dirty work of four separate individuals who have what you need to complete the weapon, but who aren't about to give their prizes up quickly.

By far the most gruelling part of this phase is acquiring specific items from specific dungeons. These are drops similar to the Atma in that there's only a random chance of you acquiring them when you complete a dungeon, and no guarantees. Consequently, you may find yourself running one dungeon lots and lots of times in order to acquire one specific item; at the other end of the spectrum, however, sometimes you get lucky and acquire it straight away. It's unpredictable and, at times, infuriating, but oh so satisfying when you get what you need.

After completing this epic slog, you're rewarded with a brand new weapon, recreating the form of one of the Zodiac Braves' weapons and infused with the soul energy you collected using your Relic. (These Zodiac weapons take the form of iconic weapons from past Final Fantasy games such as Excalibur for a Paladin, Kaiser Knuckles for a Monk, Yoichi Bow for a Bard and so on.) This is the stage I got to tonight: I now have Excalibur and its companion Aegis Shield.

But there's one final step to go: embracing the weapon's apparent sentience and sense of will, and forging an unbreakable bond between the two of you. In order to do this, it's another light grind similar to that for the Nexus, but this time instead of having to collect it all in one weapon, you gradually fill up twelve "mahatma" with soul energy, and the process is considerably quicker than before. This is the final step of a quest that's been in the game since launch, and your reward is a weapon that is likely to be the absolute best piece of equipment you can get until the expansion Heavensward arrives later this year and makes all this work irrelevant. (Actually, that's not quite true; producer Naoki Yoshida has said that those who put in the work to complete this questline will have a leg-up on whatever comes next come Heavensward time. Thankfully.)

It's a slog, to be sure, and it's even something that a lot of players will find offputting and want nothing to do with — thankfully, there are numerous alternative means of acquiring weapons, so even if you're playing multiple classes you don't have to go through this epic grind for all of them — but by God it's satisfying to reach a milestone in. I've likened it before to the idea of "building your own lightsaber" in a Star Wars game — something which has never been given the gravity it deserves, even in the Star Wars MMO The Old Republic — and it's true. By the end of this process, your weapon, even though it's just a collection of numbers, is part of you and your play style, and an important part of your character as a whole; the unbreakable bond between character and weapon isn't just for lore reasons — you'll feel it yourself as a player, too.

So wish me luck as I proceed on the final chapter of the Relic quest; I'm hoping to have Excalibur's "Zeta" form before I head off to PAX later this week. We'll see if I'm successful!

The post 1868: A Relic Reborn, Again (and Again) appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, here we go. The servers are down for maintenance, to come back up in 11 hours at the time of writing, and then the grand finale of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn will be officially underway. I'm excited.

Before the Fall is the official name for patch 2.5 for Final Fantasy XIV's wonderful reboot A Realm Reborn, and it brings the main story that launched back in August of 2013 to a close… almost. Actually, tomorrow's release is just the first of three parts to the finale which is going to unfold over the course of the next three months, ultimately leading into the official expansion pack Heavensward, which is estimated to arrive sometime around April. (Just in time for my birthday!)

Why am I excited? Well, aside from the fact that Final Fantasy XIV's ongoing story has actually been very good, it's also the first time I've played a game like this through one of its transitional periods from "vanilla" to "expansion". I played a bunch of World of Warcraft back in the day, but it wasn't until Wrath of the Lich King was out that I actually made it to the level cap, and by then I already had two expansions worth of content to work through owing to the fact I had played it somewhat sporadically rather than with any great sense of commitment. Final Fantasy XIV, by contrast, is a game that I've been playing since its beta period back in 2013, and have been in love with ever since — partly due to the fact that it's simply a very good, very well-designed game (for the most part, anyway — everyone who plays has at least one thing they'd change if they had the choice!) but also due to the fact I've been lucky enough to have a regular group of people to play alongside, many of whom have been there since day one.

That sense of camaraderie, of having been through things together, of having "seen some shit", can't be understated. We may just be people scattered around the world playing a game together, but we've done a lot of different activities together. We've struggled from level 1 to level 50; we've put an end to Ultima Weapon's reign of terror; we've flattened the Primals of the land several times over; and we've started (or, in some cases, finished) to discover the truth behind elder Primal Bahamut and the fallen moon Dalamud. We've gathered legendary Relic weapons and powered them up through numerous lengthy and demanding quests; we've (well, I've) spent more time than strictly necessary putting together the perfect "look" to go adventuring with; we've crafted thousands upon thousands of metal ingots, meat pies, magic potions and deadly weapons. It hasn't always been easy, it hasn't always even been fun, but a core of us have stuck together through thick and thin and forged some close friendships as a result. And, of course, this happened.

This is, I'm aware, the third Final Fantasy XIV post I've done in a row — and with the patch launching tomorrow I can pretty much guarantee there's at least a couple more still to come. What that should tell you is what an entertaining and fun part of my life it's become over the course of the last year and a half or so; at this stage, it's more than just a video game: it's an activity I can enjoy with friends, and one I hope I can continue to enjoy in this way for many years to come.

Twelve bless you, Yoshi-P; you've done the Final Fantasy name proud and created an experience pretty much unlike anything else I've ever enjoyed in all of gaming. Here's to many more years of adventuring.

The post 1827: Before Before the Fall appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Since clearing that a few times, we've managed to get a regular group together to take on the Second Coil of Bahamut, a four-part dungeon that follows on from the original Binding Coil — and which is soon to be superceded by The Final Coil of Bahamut, bringing this particular side story to a close in suitably climactic fashion with patch 2.4.

We're by no means ready for the Final Coil of Bahamut yet — mainly because you have to clear Second Coil in order to even enter Final Coil — but we've been discovering the joy of having a regular, committed and enthusiastic group together to take on challenging fights.

The first Turn of the Second Coil of Bahamut (known in FFXIV vernacular as "Turn 6" or "T6", since it's the sixth overall part of the Coil storyline) is deceptively simple, much like the other Coil confrontations. You begin by making your way across some perilous terrain and fending off the unwanted advances of golems that spawn from chunks of dark matter and corrupted crystals. Having fought your way past these — destroying the crystals on the way — you find yourself in front of a fragment of Dalamud, the moon that fell from the sky at the end of Final Fantasy XIV's version 1.0 incarnation (and, by extension, the beginning of A Realm Reborn) and burst open to reveal the elder primal Bahamut. Over the course of the first Binding Coil of Bahamut, you come to discover some interesting bits and pieces about what Dalamud really was, why Bahamut was inside it and, indeed, what happened to it following the apocalyptic "end of the world" that appeared to happen at the conclusion of 1.0. Second Coil is elsewhere in the lands of Eorzea, and promises to offer further insights into the truth — but, of course, it's not that easy.

Your main obstacle towards even getting inside the damn place is an unpleasant little thing called Rafflesia, a plant from the Gridanian Twelveswood that has been corrupted by dark matter and which now appears to be a tad on the pissed off side. You ain't getting inside the Dalamud fragment without getting past Rafflesia, and thus begins another extremely challenging battle that our group is yet to clear — but which we've made significant progress on in our two attempts to date.

Like the previous encounters in the various Turns of the Coil, the battle against Rafflesia initially appears to be extremely complex and insurmountably difficult, but in reality it's all about being organised, communicating effectively and knowing how to deal with the various situations in which you find yourself.

Shortly after the fight begins, Rafflesia whips two party members with thorny vines, which attaches them together and continues to do damage as long as they remain joined. The only escape from this spiky fate is to run in opposite directions until the vine is snapped.

The plant monster then goes on to spawn dark matter bulbs, deadly seedlings that sprout into spiky briar patches that slow the movement of anyone unfortunate enough to step into them. A key part of this battle comes in the management of these briar patches; our attempts involved keeping Rafflesia as central as possible and only worrying about bulbs if they appeared where Rafflesia was. This occasionally demands that you dance around a little to make sure you're not standing in thorns, but it does allow you to concentrate on what you're really there for — punching/stabbing/burning/chopping a plant monster to death.

Rafflesia is a hungry beast, though, and every so often a party member will find themselves the target of the monster's appetite. She'll suck in everything in front of her, then devour it before spitting it out again; ideally, by the time she's doing the first thing, you're well out of the way, ensuring that the second and third things don't happen to you.

Rafflesia, being a plant, also has numerous unpleasant spores and gases designed for the obliteration of unsuspecting adventuring parties. Most deadly among these is her Blighted Bouquet, a devastating move which causes immediate death to anyone unfortunate enough to have been doing anything — moving, attacking, using an ability — when it goes off. She's also fond of glazing a party member in honey, which causes dark matter-corrupted hornets to come in and give the unfortunate adventurer some unwanted attention — and eventual death, if they're not defeated, too.

So far, we're yet to defeat Rafflesia; her Blighted Bouquet and dark matter hornets have proven particularly troublesome to deal with, but we've made honest-to-goodness progress in the two sessions of about 2.5-3 hours each that we've had to take on the fight to date. Along the way, we've come to work well together as a party, too, and the desire is there from all of us to continue the fight against Rafflesia, onwards into the fragment of Dalamud and, eventually, into the Final Coil of Bahamut to discover the truth behind the Calamity. (And, of course, to get some sweet loot in the process, too.)

I've been really enjoying our sessions so far; as I've noted before, Final Fantasy XIV is the first MMO that not only maintained my attention from beginning to level cap, but which has kept me interested with its endgame, too. Second Coil is, as of now, the most challenging dungeon in the game — though this will change on Tuesday when Final Coil arrives — and it's a pleasure to be able to take on these tough encounters with a group of people who are becoming not just online comrades, but friends, too.

The post 1742: Reaping Rafflesia appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This time around, I decided that I was going to try and tank it. Although I have a level 50, well-geared Paladin class that I'm pretty confident in using for straightforward stuff like dungeons, complicated 8-player fights like Turn 5 have been something I've generally shied away from to date, unless I could rustle up a group of people I know and trust — and whom I don't think will yell at me if I make mistakes.

I decided I wanted to give it a go this evening, however, if only to be able to help out other prospective Twintania-downers with more than one possible role in the future. And so I stepped up.

For those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV or MMOs in general, a couple of definitions are probably in order. Tanking is the role in a party that maintains the attention ("aggro" or "enmity") of an enemy and takes the brunt of the damage while the rest of the group either stick them with the pointy end (melee DPS), throw pointy or flamey things at them (ranged DPS) or heal people as necessary. In 8-player battles such as Turn 5, you generally have a "main tank" (or MT) that maintains aggro on the boss for the majority of the time, and an "off tank" (or OT) that either has a different role to perform in the fight (as in the case of Turn 5) or alternates tanking the main baddie with the MT (a process called, unsurprisingly, "tank-swapping").

Being an off tank doesn't necessarily mean you have an easy job, though. In Turn 5, the off tank's job is actually probably harder than the main tank's, so I volunteered for the main tank role, while our other Paladin, who had previously main tanked Turn 5 on our previous clears, stepped into the off tank role to get some experience there.

The battle began. Jovayne, our off tank, started the fight, pulling Twintania and her three Scourge of Meracydia enemies to him and getting their attention. I then ran in behind him, used my Provoke ability on Twintania, then pulled her away from the main pack, as is the main tank's job in this fight.

It's at about this point you realise quite what a different affair tanking is to almost any other job on the battlefield. While if you're playing something like Black Mage or Bard, you're probably flinging things at the back of your foe, as a tank they are right in your face — and when it's something as giant and threatening as Twintania, the experience is genuinely intimidating, particularly as you see your hit points fluctuating by frankly terrifying amounts with each hit you take, though.

You have to trust in the people with you, though; unlike a single-player game, you can't do everything yourself in an MMO, and learning how to trust others is an important part of learning to play well. I'd take a lot of damage from Twintania's powerful attacks, but I knew that the healers would be there to keep me safe. I'd make their job easier by making use of my defensive abilities, which reduced some of the incoming damage, but ultimately my life was in their hands.

The rest of the fight progressed slowly as, on the whole, the party was fairly inexperienced compared to the last time we cleared it. We did make steady progress, though, with the notorious "Divebombs" phase, during which Twintania swoops across the battlefield, dealing heavy damage and an enormous knockback to anyone she hits, proving most troublesome, as ever.

Mistakes were made by all — particularly me, since I was playing a role that is still relatively unfamiliar — but eventually we made it through together. When we successfully passed the second most difficult phase of the fight (known as "Twisters", after the instant-death ability Twintania uses in this phase) and were into the home straight, it was a real, genuine, heart-in-mouth moment: just a video game, perhaps, but the feeling of genuine excitement of knowing that you are (probably) going to overcome one of that game's toughest challenges is absolutely magical.

I was really happy after we finished, since successfully tanking it felt like a significant milestone in my development as a player. I've talked before about how I feel like I'm actually quite good at this game, in contrast to a lot of other things I play, and broadening my virtual skill set in this way is very satisfying and enjoyable indeed. Plus it makes me feel like I'm growing in confidence — not just as a player, but personally speaking, too. That's pretty awesome, no?

The post 1729: Twintania's Revenge appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

In order to explain the situation for those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV, indulge me a moment, veterans, while I define a few things.

One of the main systems in Final Fantasy XIV is known as the Full Active Time Event (or FATE) system. These are essentially "public quests" that spawn at predictable points on the map, but on an unpredictable schedule. Some spawn more frequently than others; some are required to progress in certain quests; some are more "popular" than others owing to their convenient location or rewards on offer.

There are three important things to note about FATEs: firstly, they're time limited, usually providing you 15 minutes to complete the main objective, which is generally plenty of time; secondly, if you are standing inside the blue circle that represents the FATE area on the map and hit just one enemy once — even if it's just a glancing, accidental blow from a weapon better suited for channeling powerful magics than melee combat — you are considered to have "participated" in that FATE; thirdly, the number of people who participated in a FATE the previous time it spawned determines how difficult it is the next time around: in other words, at peak periods, FATEs are designed to be challenging for larger groups of people, whereas if the last time a FATE spawned no-one took part in it at all, the next time it appears it will probably be completable by a (well-geared) solo adventurer, perhaps with a chocobo companion in tow.

Completely separate from FATEs is a newer system called The Hunt, in which each area in the game has three Elite Marks that players can hunt down for substantial rewards: a B-rank mark, which you can fight solo, and which only offers rewards if you have a specific Mark Bill inviting you to hunt it down; an A-rank mark, which requires about 4-8 people minimum to take down, but which offers rewards according to how much you (and, in most cases, your party) contributed to the kill; and an S-rank mark, which is much more powerful but works along the same lines as the A-rank marks in terms of rewards. We're mostly concerned with A-rank marks here, since S-rank marks have special conditions that need to be fulfilled before they'll show up in most cases, whereas A-rank marks will just show up regardless.

A-rank marks spawn on predictable schedules — you can see the timers ticking away for the server I play on right here, for example — and appear roughly once every four hours. What normally happens is that hunting parties will gather when the first marks on the list are approaching the "four hours since last killed" mark, then spread out and start looking for the beasts to respawn. There then follows a phenomenon that has become known as the "A-Train", where hunting parties move from zone to zone and pick off all the A-rank marks on the list one at a time until they're all dead, at which point the parties will all disband — unless there's the possibility of an S-rank showing up — and reconvene again when the first timer on the list hits four hours. It's like clockwork; it's perhaps not how the designers intended the system to work when it was first designed — and indeed, it's been tweaked and reorganised several times since it launched — but if you can get involved (which is usually as simple as throwing up a Party Finder ad with the word "Hunt" in it) it can be both fun and rewarding, if not particularly challenging in most cases.

Anyway, the point here is that when an A-rank mark shows up, a horde of players normally follows — and I do mean a horde. We're talking maybe 30 or so people minimum, and usually much more than that.

When I was sauntering around the lands of Western La Noscea earlier today, hacking and slashing my way through some FATEs in an attempt to collect the very last Atma crystal I needed to upgrade my Paladin's relic weapon into its Atma form, I happened to stumble across one of these gatherings, who had showed up to fight the giant crab Nahn. Nahn, as it turned out, had spawned right in the middle of the FATE I had actually run to this area to complete, and as such there was something in the region of 50 people standing around, killing Sahagin indiscriminately to clear the area ready for the big group push towards Nahn. The important thing to note here is that the Sahagin they were hacking, slashing, punching and setting fire to (depending on class) were parts of the FATE I had shown up to complete, so as far as the game was concerned, when that FATE's boss fell, over 50 people had participated in it.

I'm sure you can imagine what happened a little later, after Nahn was defeated and after I returned to the area to complete the same FATE again as it happened to appear while I was passing through.

Yes, believing that 50 players being in the area, battering Sahagin left, right and centre, was a representative example of the zone's population at that particular hour, the game adjusted the difficulty of the FATE to cater not to little old me and the two other people who happened to wander into the FATE at the same time as me — oh no — but instead to the 50+ people who were no longer present, now doubtless considerably further down the tracks of this particular run of the A-Train.

I didn't notice this initially. I thought that the "trash" enemies that you have to defeat before the main boss monster showed up were a little stronger than I remembered, but I thought nothing of it. My companions and I slaughtered our way through them until the boss showed up, at which point I, as the Paladin — a protector "tank" type — got its attention by smacking it firmly upside the chops with my shield, and then began inserting my sword into various parts of its anatomy while my companions got busy with magic spells and poking it with a spear respectively.

I figured something was amiss when the health bar of the boss was moving very slowly despite us all unleashing our most powerful attacks. To put it in context, the boss' health was declining at roughly the same speed as a well-geared party taking on Ramuh Extreme, currently one of the most challenging fights in the game. Fortunately, the boss didn't receive a damage buff at the same time as his vastly increased hit points, otherwise we would have been in real trouble.

We persisted, though, shaving away a tiny sliver of health with each hit. Andie happened to be passing by at one point, and joined the fray to contribute a bit of extra damage from her Bard class. We were making progress, a tiny bit at a time, though the longer the fight was going on the more exhausted my Paladin was getting, my ever-declining TP (Tactical Points, used for triggering physical attacks) getting perilously close to the zero mark. I had the boss' attention pretty firmly, though, so I eased off the powerful attacks and let my (TP-free) automatic basic attack do its work for a little while.

The timer ticked down. We were into single digits of minutes remaining, despite the fact that we'd all entered the fray with the full 15 minutes on the clock. The boss was barely at 50% of his HP, and I was starting to doubt whether or not we'd be able to beat it. Still we persisted.

"DIE DAMMIT!" I typed in frustration, on the /say channel so that my companions (whom, aside from Andie, I didn't know) could "hear" me.

"for real!!!" came back the response from one of them. We'd shared a moment. It was nice. Still we fought on.

My TP had recovered a bit by now, so I triggered my Fight or Flight ability — which temporarily increases my Paladin's damage output — and started hacking away with a bit more gusto once again. I wasn't sure if it was my imagination, but the boss' health bar seemed to be going down noticeably faster. It looked as if we might just make it.

In fact, it was beginning to look like we'd make it just as the timer hit zero. Would we pull it off?

Sadly not. At less that 1% HP remaining, the timer expired and we failed the FATE. Our characters all fell to our knees and wept for the 15 minutes of effort we'd just put in — and, of course, to add insult to injury, I didn't get an Atma crystal from that FATE either.

I don't regret the experience, though. As I say, I shared a moment with those other people who were there at the same time as me, all doubtless thinking the same things, willing their characters to do just that little bit more damage. When I happened to run into them again doing another FATE in the area about half an hour later, we exchanged pleasantries and had a laugh about how the new FATE was quite a bit easier than our earlier tragedy. Then we went our separate ways. It was a real "ships in the night" moment, but it made what would have otherwise been a frustrating experience into something highly memorable — and, indeed, something I ended up wanting to write about at length.

I've got one more Atma crystal to go before my Paladin's weapon and shield can be upgraded, hot on the heels of my Black Mage's weapon reaching the powerful Novus (second-to-top) upgrade phase recently. If I can have more experiences like the one I just described, though, I really don't mind it taking a little longer; shared hardships like that — while fairly trivial in this instance — can bring people closer together, even if it's just for a moment or two.

The post 1722: Shared Hardship on the Shores of La Noscea appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm glad. One issue with MMO endgame play is that after a while, you're so well-geared that a lot of the challenges you'd normally take on become quite easy, and progressing becomes a matter of doing things almost by rote: you know that in this dungeon, you can afford to pull this many enemies before having to stop and fight them; than in this boss fight you need to stand here at this moment in order to make sure you don't die. I don't mind this aspect of play at all, as it happens — I actually rather like the heavily "choreographed" nature of many of the endgame encounters, as it's really quite an awesome sight to see eight people moving as one to dodge incoming attacks and position themselves appropriately to deal as much damage as possible as quickly as possible. But the fact remains: a lot of stuff is quite easy.

Which is why I was keen to challenge myself with the Extreme difficulty boss fights — particularly those against Good King Moggle Mog XII, Leviathan and Ramuh, all of which I was yet to clear. I gave myself a double challenge for the first two by tanking them as a Paladin rather than going as my main class Black Mage; it was a lot of fun, and helped me gain some confidence in what goes on when you're tanking an eight-player encounter. For Ramuh, however, everyone needed to be on top of their game, and as such I was back in my lovely dark blue yukata — my current Black Mage outfit — to take on the old, somewhat electrifying presence of Ramuh.

I'd held off taking on the Extreme primal fights because the initial three against Garuda, Titan and Ifrit were all very difficult — unsurprising, given the Extreme moniker, of course, but I found them rather stressful rather than just challenging. Moogle, Leviathan and Ramuh were all a different matter, however; these were just plain fun fights in which yes, you needed to know and understand all the mechanics well in order to succeed, but they were enjoyable in that everyone had something interesting and useful to do; no-one was stuck just standing around flinging damage or "tanking and spanking".

It was also a great opportunity for bonding with the Free Company members. It's always nice to have the opportunity to do things together with other people, and as we've all been progressing at slightly different paces and discovering the things that we each enjoy doing, it can sometimes feel like those occasions are rare. Tonight was a great example of people pulling together for a common goal, though; we'd decided that we were going to beat Ramuh, and by gosh we sure did at that.

Now it is after 4:30 in the morning and I should probably get some sleep. I anticipate dreams filled with an old, bearded, lightning-flinging man.

The post 1678: Old Man of the Forest appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Suffice to say, patch 2.3 is excellent. I, along with many of my Free Company-mates, took today to work through the new episode of the main scenario quest, which included a spectacular battle against Ramuh, Lord of Levin (aka "the old man who flings lightning everywhere") as well as a ton of other story content. I also completed the new Hildibrand questline — a comedic questline that, for many, has proven a highlight of Final Fantasy XIV's ongoing updates — as well as trying out all three of the new 4-player dungeons.

And I've barely scratched the surface. I've bought a room in our Free Company's house for my character, but I'm yet to fill it with furniture — there's just a bed, a couple of chairs and a table in there for now. I haven't even touched the new 24-player Crystal Tower raid, which promises to be an enjoyable clusterfuck, just like the previous 24-player Crystal Tower raid. And there's a ton of other stuff I'm yet to fiddle around with, too — not to mention returning to the tasks I was already working on prior to the patch, which will now be somewhat easier thanks to improved rewards from a bunch of game content.

So far there have been numerous highlights. Although some disliked the amount of dialogue and cutscenes in the main scenario quest, I enjoyed what was offered, as if you stopped to read it and see what was going on, it proved to be a nice "here's what's been happening elsewhere in the realm since last you saw these people" affair. There was also some neat — if rather obvious — foreshadowing of who the next "big fight" is going to be against.

The new dungeons are great, too. Tam-Tara Hard is particularly fun — as one of the low-level dungeons that comes up most frequently in Low-Level Roulette, Tam-Tara is a dungeon that many people were growing sick of, but its Hard incarnation successfully reimagines it into one of the best — if not the best — dungeon in the game. Featuring a creepy atmosphere, some brilliant boss fights and a narrative twist that is sure to please those who were paying attention earlier in the game, Tam-Tara Hard was a real highlight of today's session.

Stone Vigil Hard has proven more divisive, but it's certainly an interesting, challenging experience. The regular enemies are more than a match for even a well-geared party, and the bosses all make use of interesting mechanics that require far more than a simple "tank and spank" approach. This is nothing unusual for Final Fantasy XIV, which features some very involved boss battles throughout, but Stone Vigil Hard features some particularly interesting mechanics.

Finally, the all-new dungeon Hullbreaker Isle was great. Unfolding mostly outdoors, the "dungeon" sees you attempting to track down the treasure of the pirate Mistbeard. Along the way, you have to contend with various groups of angry wildlife, some unpleasant traps left behind to deter unwanted visitors, and, at the end, a rather annoyed kraken who wants nothing more than to pick you up, fling you around and splatter you with ink.

Final Fantasy XIV continues to go from strength to strength. It remains, as it has done since it launched last August, one of my favourite games, and if the strength of this new content is anything to go by, it has a significant amount of life in it. I'm genuinely intrigued to see where the main story is going, and in the meantime I'm really enjoying the other tasks and challenges the game faces me with. And there's some stuff — like the super-challenging endgame raid The Binding Coil of Bahamut — that I'm still barely touching. There is so much to do, and I'm having an absolute blast doing it — not to mention making some good friends in the progress.

Now, my brain is fried, so I should probably go and get some sleep. It's back to the doldrums of hunting for work tomorrow, though I don't doubt I shall reward myself with an hour or two in Eorzea as the day progresses!

The post 1632: Defenders of Eorzea appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

What follows, then, is an account of how the fight went, written (hopefully) in a means through which a non-MMO player can understand what is going on. I found it an exciting experience — and if you've never tried it, you learn something about what high-level play in a massively multiplayer game like Final Fantasy XIV is all about.

Turn 5 of the Binding Coil of Bahamut focuses entirely on one encounter: eight comrades-in-arms against an ancient dragon named Twintania, put there by the ancient Allagan civilisation to do their bidding. Actually, to be exact, it's eight comrades-in-arms against an ancient dragon named Twintania and her three friends, but said three friends aren't nearly as much of a threat.

The fight began with our de facto leader the paladin — a strong defensive fighter whose strengths lie not in doing a lot of damage, but instead in keeping the attention of enemies off the more fragile members of the party — charging in and provoking Twintania and her allies. The remainder of the group then followed — at a safe distance for those members such as myself, who were able to inflict damage from a distance — and concentrated on dealing with Twintania's three friends. Meanwhile, we were fending off attacks from Twintania and her companions — fiery rings that dropped on the floor and hurt a lot if you didn't get out of them as quickly as possible when they fell on you.

Once the three smaller dragons were down, the group turned its attention to Twintania proper, gathering around her with a strong defensive fighter at the front and another defensive fighter at the side, accompanied by our Scholar's fairy companion Eos. The group aggressively attacked Twintania until one of the three Neurolink devices around her neck dropped to the floor, at which point the real fun was about to begin.

A curious "blip-blip" sound — perhaps from the Neurolink? — heralded the imminent arrival of a fireball attack from Twintania on a member of the party. No-one knew who these attacks were going to target, but as soon as the telltale signs appeared, they ran to the defensive fighter and fairy standing to one side of Twintania and shared the damage with their two companions — a direct hit without the support of others would have meant instant death.

As the healers frantically worked to help those hit by the fireball recover, the rest of the group prepared for another troublesome ability Twintania had up her sleeve: the ability to summon a terrible conflagration and trap a combatant within. The telltale "blip-blip!" sound came again, but this time with a different marker; its appearance signalled that the victim was about to become caught in a fiery prison, and would need their companions to break them free before it exploded.

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, it was impossible to break through the Conflagration before the next fireball attack came, but here it was possible to take advantage of a curious property of the Conflagrations: while those caught within were completely immobilised, it was possible to break in from without, and despite the temporary incapacitation, a Conflagration provided surprisingly good shelter and respite from the relentless fireballs.

After successfully dealing with this tense situation for some time, Twintania took to the skies and flew off. Had we driven her away? Of course not; this was just the beginning.

A second Neurolink fell from Twintania's neck; the signal that we had to move into a recessed part of the platform upon which we were standing — actually the right hand of the dormant dragon god Bahamut, who wreaked havoc on the realm of Eorzea five years previously. Keeping a careful eye on the dragon revealed when she was likely to swoop across our battleground, attempting to kill us off with her "divebomb" attack. Fortunately, staying nimble on our feet meant it was eminently possible to stay out of the way of these deadly swoops, and instead focus our attention on some new friends: three snake-like creatures, one of which was known as Asclepius and the other two of which were known as Hygieia.

Although terrifying and against the principles of everything we'd trained for up until this point, the party stood firm directly in front of these three new opponents, eyes occasionally darting to the sky in case Twintania decided to swoop in once more. We weakened the two Hygieia without killing them, then set to work on the Asclepius — and then Twintania resumed her assault. Once again, some nimble footwork saw us dodge all but one of the deadly swoops — the last of which knocked me clean across Bahamut's palm, but thankfully didn't finish me off — and it was time to deal with two more Hygieia that had appeared to join the fray.

Muttering an incantation under my breath, I summoned all my willpower and unleashed my Limit Break skill, calling down a shower of meteorites to pelt Asclepius and its four children with devastating, fiery projectiles. The two weakened Hygieia fell to the assault, enfeebling Asclepius, the two remaining Hygieia and the brave frontline paladins in the process. It wasn't long before the other two Hygieia fell, weakening Asclepius further in the process, and shortly after the larger snake was also defeated.

By this point, Twintania was obviously furious and preparing for some sort of last-ditch "ultimate" attack. We had but moments to dart for the safety of the fallen Neurolinks on the ground — and then to hope and pray as the room was filled with the brilliant white light of an aetheric explosion.

Not all of us survived the blast, and it wasn't long after this that Twintania's summoning of deadly whirlwinds finished the rest of us off. We collapsed to the ground — beaten for now, but determined to return once we had gathered our strength and prepared once again for the deadly conflict — and Twintania lived to fight another day.

The post 1623: Attack on Twintania, Part 1 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The reason why it's a shadow of its former self is twofold: firstly, the average equipment level of most endgame players in Final Fantasy XIV is now considerably higher than it was when it first launched and Coil was the hardest thing in the game; secondly, you're now provided with a buff called "The Echo" upon entering, which boosts your HP, damage, healing and a few other bits and pieces by 15%. Second Coil has no such buff, but it will have one in the future, when Third Coil, or whatever comes next, is released — and so on as the game gradually ups the stakes time and time again.

This is a clever and sensible move on the part of producer Naoki Yoshida and his team. The Binding Coil of Bahamut, despite still being a very challenging set of mini-dungeons and boss fights even with the Echo buff, is part of Final Fantasy XIV's overarching story. Working your way through it provides you with information about the ancient Allagan civilisation, whom you keep discovering artifacts of throughout your travels, and also what the main recurring villains of the piece — the Ascians — are up to. It also provides a tantalising glimpse at what really happened to the dragon-like god Bahamut as part of the Calamity — the in-game, in-lore justification for the shutdown of Final Fantasy XIV's version 1.0 incarnation in 2012 — and what the artificial moon Dalamud was actually hiding inside itself besides Bahamut.

All interesting stuff, I'm sure you'll agree — well, you might not, but humour me. To put it another way, it's all stuff that people who are interested in the detailed lore and worldbuilding of Final Fantasy XIV will probably want to experience. And through the gradual "nerfing" of it as new content arrives, eventually everyone will be able to make it through Coil and see what's what — just some people will do it sooner than others.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up tonight is that I've been doing a bit of Coil myself this evening. This is something of a big step for me, as I've previously only ever set foot inside that place in the company of my comrades from my Free Company. With a lot of high-level content in any MMO — not just Final Fantasy XIV — it's assumed that you know what you're doing when you step inside, and that you won't mess things up, because in many cases one mistake can bring an entire eight-person team crashing to its knees.

This is, I'm sure you'll appreciate, an enormously daunting prospect, particularly for someone like me, who sometimes lacks confidence in himself. But tonight I not only voluntarily went into Coil "solo" (to be automatically matched up with seven other random players), I also did so on White Mage, a healer class, rather than my "comfort zone" (and main) class Black Mage. And while there were a couple of aborted attempts — largely due to poor party makeup rather than anyone making any horrendous mistakes — there was none of the rage, none of the aggression, none of the elitism that can make playing through difficult content even more daunting than it already is. On the whole, it was actually quite a pleasant experience, despite being challenging — and I was rewarded for my efforts, too, with a new ring for my Paladin and some new boots for my White Mage. Score!

I'm always secretly pleased with myself when I overcome a fear like that. Because although Final Fantasy XIV is just a game, and I understand that, the anxiety and fear I feel from social situations is as real online as it is when I'm getting tongue-tied trying to make small talk with someone I don't really know. My ticking that box in Duty Finder, queueing up and then repeatedly going back into Coil this evening might not sound like much, but believe me when I say it was actually quite a big step for me in terms of self-confidence.

And who says games can't do any good?

The post 1622: Another Turn in the Coil appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

For those unfamiliar with Final Fantasy XIV's endgame, Titan Hard Mode was formerly one of the hardest encounters in the game, taking the form of an 8-player variation on one of the main story's 4-player bosses. Mastering (or at least clearing) the fight is an important part of endgame play, since acquiring your class's "Relic" weapon requires you to beat him along with the other two Hard Mode primal fights and two original bosses Dhorme Chimera and Hydra.

The actual battle against Titan bears some resemblance to its story mode counterpart in that Titan makes use of many of the same abilities throughout. The main difference is that the fight is overall a lot longer and incorporates a few new mechanics — most notably the addition of "Bomb Boulders" that drop down from the sky in set patterns and then explode in sequence, requiring the party to quickly and carefully manoeuvre from position to position in order to avoid damage — and while avoiding Titan's other abilities such as Landslide, which can knock you off the arena and out of the fight completely if you're not sharp enough.

Like the other Hard and Extreme mode Primal fights in Final Fantasy XIV, Titan Hard is quite a "choreographed" fight that requires the party be in the right place at the right time, and respond quickly to prompts on the screen. Titan always uses the same abilities in the same order, so there's very much a sequence and timing you can learn, though there will be slight variations on exactly what you need to do each time you play owing to people standing in different places.

It may sound odd to say, but it's a strangely beautiful sight to see a party pulling off a fight like Titan Hard efficiently and effectively. The group moving as one from place to place in response to the incoming threats is a very satisfying thing to watch, particularly when you're part of it. It's a hard thing to convey to anyone who hasn't experienced it for themselves, but in many ways it's like pulling off an impressive "dance" as a group — eight people working as one (for the most part… there's usually at least one person who falls off remarkably quickly, and up until tonight it's usually been me) to achieve a common goal.

I must confess to feeling pumped up and happy about my victory this evening — and, now, much more willing to jump into the Trials Roulette mode of the Duty Finder, which I'd previously been extremely hesitant about making use of despite the helpful rewards on offer. The Extreme Mode primals may still be a while off before I can confidently tackle them — same for Twintania, the notorious boss that guards the end of the first super-tough endgame dungeon The Binding Coil of Bahamut — but for now, I feel I have conquered Titan Hard and can move on to stiffer challenges.

Oh, and I should give a shout-out to Andie, too, who has been playing Final Fantasy XIV and has just got her first character to level 50, putting my friend James — who has been playing a lot longer — to shame. Nice job, W'khebica (an authentic Miqo'te name, apparently) — I look forward to enduring the endless Myth grind with you at my side.

The post 1610: Titan Falls appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I was running Haukke Manor's normal mode as part of the daily "Low-Level Roulette" system, whereby you're randomly thrown into one of the pre-level 50 dungeons with three random strangers and, depending on whether you're still earning experience points or at endgame, earn big bonuses that are of benefit to you regardless of what level you actually are. There's also an "Adventurer in Need" bonus for classes there are a shortage of at any given time — given that there's about 4,500 gil on offer for jumping in to the requested class, it's worth doing if you have the classes available.

Anyway, jump in as a healer (the Adventurer in Need) I did, and Haukke Manor began. It quickly became apparent that the tank, a level 28 Gladiator who hadn't yet upgraded to the advanced job Paladin, hadn't been there before, as there were enemies that he didn't know to watch out for. He was also being very cautious, taking great care to mark enemies with thoroughness — an admirable enough trait, but he didn't need to be quite so thorough — and taking his time working his way through.

I snuck a peek at his gear and some of his equipment was a little low-level for the dungeon we were challenging — a fact further emphasised by the fact that I, the healer in the party (typically the "weakest" player in terms of attack and defense power) had more hit points than him. Still, we pressed on, and as the healer I made sure he didn't die as much as I possibly could.

I noticed after a little while that he didn't appear to be using the skill Shield Lob, a useful trick in the Gladiator/Paladin's arsenal and the typical way most battles begin. The Gladiator/Paladin flings their shield at an enemy, which attracts their attention onto the Gladiator/Paladin, and starts the fight off right, with the enemy in question attacking the tank. This is then, usually, followed up by a couple of Flashes, which attract the attention of nearby enemies. Once this is done, the enemies' attention is usually pretty firmly on the tank, which then allows everyone else to go hog wild killing them.

Our tank in this group wasn't using Shield Lob because he didn't have it. He was level 28; you get Shield Lob at level 15 by completing the appropriate Gladiator class quest at that point, meaning he hadn't done that. To be fair to him, the first time I tried tanking in a dungeon I forgot to pick up Shield Lob first, but that was a little different in that I was still level 15 at the time. Tanky boy here was nearly double that level, and still didn't have it. Whoops.

When you spot something like this happening in an MMO, you're always faced with a choice. Do you press on and hope the rest of the group is strong enough to make up for the weak link's shortcomings? Or do you quietly slip away, leaving them to fend for themselves? Being an altogether decent sort of person, I chose to stick around and offer the struggling tank some helpful, non-aggressive advice. (One of my partymates was less understanding, his only utterances throughout the whole dungeon being "lol", "omfg" and "wtf". Great communication there, chap.) As a result, we eventually — very carefully — managed to make it through the entire dungeon intact. I was genuinely pleased to see the tank make it through in one piece and pick up some good new equipment along the way, and I hope he felt the same way.

I can't entirely blame the "lol omfg wtf" guy for his attitude, because it's easy to get into that mindset when you've been playing for a while. It's easy to assume that everyone is as skilled at the game as you are, and that everyone has the same knowledge of the game's mechanics and systems as you are. This is what leads to feelings of anxiety about living up to people's expectations — feelings that even people like me, who have been playing for hundreds of hours by now, still feel regularly.

The reality is, in fact, somewhat different. People make mistakes. Some people don't know the game well. Some people might not even really know what "tanking" actually is, thinking the "dude with sword and shield" character class is more of a hack-and-slash affair rather than the important defensive role they play. Some people might not know that you have to do your class quests every 5 levels to get all your abilities — though to be fair, the game is pretty explicit about this at the outset.

In a game like Final Fantasy XIV, it's everyone's responsibility to help make the game a pleasant, friendly place for everyone to enjoy. It's everyone's responsibility to help out those who are struggling, or who don't understand. It's easy to laugh and point fingers at "noobs" or "bads", but it's much more beneficial in the long run to help educate them so they know how to play the game better.

After all, what's better: people leaving the game in droves because of elitist attitudes, or the gradual growth of the available base of players who understand the game mechanics and are able to take on its toughest challenges? It's not a stumper, really, is it?

The post 1606: A Little Pleasantness Goes a Long Way appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The reason for this is that, more so than any other type of game out there, MMO patches can considerably improve the experience of the game for everyone playing as well as adding new content to enjoy. And Final Fantasy XIV has definitely been delivering on that front since it launched.

Since launch, the game has, so far, enjoyed two major content patches and a few smaller patches along the way. These smaller ones are arguably the most interesting ones in many ways, because they tend to be the ones that improve the players' "quality of life" in various ways — perhaps through interface refinements, perhaps through balancing tweaks, perhaps through adjustments to the way the game works based on the community's feedback.

So far, we've seen all of the above. We've seen the easy to miss red targeting markers for enemy attacks replaced with more brightly coloured, pulsing markers. We've seen the addition of the Challenge and Sightseeing logs to give people more things to do and ways to earn rewards. We've seen adjustments to the endgame currencies as the average "item level" of endgame players gradually increases. And we've seen much-appreciated little usability tweaks, like the fact you can now get off a chocobo you're riding by pressing the shoulder buttons on your controller rather than having to twat about with hotbars and icons.

The game is still recognisable as what it was when it launched — it was already a solid game then, after all — but the refinements it has enjoyed ever since mean that it has been consistently, constantly improving — and, more importantly, it's proof that the development team is both willing to listen to players and implement some of their best ideas.

The game is going from strength to strength, in other words. And they said subscription-based MMOs were dead.

The post 1599: Through the Maelstrom Again appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This second run to 50 has been interesting for a number of reasons, firstly because it's involved playing the game in a completely different way. During my first runthrough, in which I took the Thaumaturgist/Black Mage class up to 50, I was following the game's "Main Scenario" questline, which takes you through a complete, authentically Final Fantasy story in the purest sense. And it's a resolutely old-school Final Fantasy, too, all about crystal-related mysticism, powerful ancient forces stirring to cause chaos and, of course, a cast of villains in memorable-looking but impractical armour that probably makes it impossible for them to go to the toilet without lacerating their genitals. It's also paced in such a way that aside from a slight "dry spell" in the mid-40s, it's always taking you to new places in the world and providing you with a bunch of sidequests to do — by the time you reach the grand finale, you'll be level 50 and have a thorough understanding of how your class works, and consequently should have little difficulty challenging the "final" eight-player dungeons and obliterating the Big Bad from the face of Eorzea.

Conversely, once you're done with all that, there's not quite the same narrative push to keep you earning XP and progressing — the game switches, for the most part, from being all about following a linear storyline to "living" in the game world and making your own fun to a certain extent. It takes on a much more freeform feeling — though there's still something of an "optimal" route to level up as quickly as possible — and provides fun of a different sort. There's also a lot more flexibility to take on your own personal challenges — I'm hoping to eventually collect all the unique sets of equipment from the various dungeons, for example, but this will require me to be a bit more organised than I currently am, clear out my bulging Armoury Chest and make some checklists. Soon. Soon.

As well as this shift in play style, playing a completely different type of class has been interesting, too. Ever since my first serious attempt at playing an MMO — World of Warcraft — I've largely focused on playing heavy damage dealers, usually mages or the local equivalent. While these roles are demanding in their own right — particularly later in the games, there's an expectation that you have a thorough understanding of your abilities and how to use them efficiently to inflict as much damage as possible in as short a time as possible — there's often not as much "responsibility" as comes with the other two important roles in a typical MMO party: the "tank" and the "healer". Consequently, when I came to Final Fantasy XIV, I wanted to start with something I was familiar with — and while Black Mage comes with its own unique mechanics that I haven't seen in an MMO before, it was still largely about flinging flamey things at bad things until they fall over.

Switching to Conjurer/White Mage, though, was truly interesting, and it becomes particularly clear how different it is to play a healer the moment you step into a dungeon. No longer are you concentrating on the enemies and queueing up devastating attacks; instead, you're focusing your attention for the most part on the little party window in the upper-left corner of the screen, and making use of your restorative abilities to ensure none of those numbers reach zero as much as you can. This is very easy early in the game — a lot easier than I was expecting, in fact — but becomes more challenging the more abilities you have available to you. By the time you're healing later dungeons, you're having to content with status effects (dispatched with a swift cast of the "Esuna" spell) and bosses that inflict damage on the whole party at once. You start having to prioritise your actions carefully — can the tank take a few more hits while you buff up the armour of the more squishy party members, or should you fling him a heal or two first? — and the responsibility of knowing that the fate of the party largely (though not completely in many cases) lies with you becomes more obvious.

I actually thought this experience would be terrifying — to be frank, I was worried I'd fuck it up and get yelled at by people who died as a result of my incompetent healing — but I've found myself enjoying the experience a great deal, and seemingly being quite good at it. I haven't yet been thrown into an eight-player dungeon — the first of those don't show up until you reach level 50 — and I'm a little nervous at the prospect since I'm not quite sure how two healers divide up the workload of healing a much larger party, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. Plus it's always nice to be useful, and healers are certainly that.

Anyway. Time for bed. It's been a pleasantly peaceful day today, and I can feel my head gradually getting back to whatever passes for "normal". Not quite perfect yet, but getting there.

The post 1468: Magick and Mend appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The ability to purchase currency is usually touted as a time-saving feature that eliminates the need for grinding. In some cases, it's simply that — an option. In others, it becomes abundantly clear before very long that the game's economy has been balanced on the assumption that most players probably will purchase in-game currency at some point, and consequently those who just want to play the game without having to get their credit card out every ten minutes can just go fuck themselves.

Now, in many ways, choice is a good thing. Not everyone has time to spend earning virtual money in games to achieve somethingorother. But does that mean they should have the option to spend real money in order to get ahead in the game? I'm not so sure.

You see, the second you put that option there, it devalues the efforts of those willing to put in the work to earn the money themselves. Why would you bother working for something if you can just throw money at it, effectively paying to not play the game?

The reason I bring this up is that my Free Company in Final Fantasy XIV has started saving up for a medium-sized plot of land on which to build a house for guild activities. We already have a small plot, but the shed-like house that fits on the small plots is already full to bursting with the furniture that the crafters have been churning out. Consequently, active members of the guild have been working together to earn money in order to purchase one of the larger plots, which allows you to build significantly larger houses.

This evening, we spent a couple of hours in a "spiritbonding party" — we grouped up together, equipped with items of jewelry that weren't part of our normal equipment loadout, and then proceeded to battle hordes of monsters until said pieces of jewelry were "spiritbonded" to us — a mechanic in Final Fantasy XIV that means you can then break the item of equipment down and turn it into "materia". Materia are items that can be socketed into pieces of equipment for various stat bonuses, and certain among them — particularly the better ones — sell for pretty high prices due to their usefulness in completing the high-level "A Relic Reborn" quest that culminates in a character acquiring their almost-best weapon.

As you may have surmised already, someone in the guild had the bright idea of mass-producing a bunch of these jewelry items, taking them to an area with enemies that respawned quickly, and then indulging in some mass Water Sprite genocide until we had all Spiritbonded with the items enough to turn them into materia. We could then sell the resulting materia and plough some (or all, depending on how generous we were feeling) of the profits into our fundraising efforts for the new house.

The point is, while the act of going through the spiritbonding process is rather tedious — it largely involves killing lots of things that you're way overpowered for — it was something that brought a lot of us together for an enjoyable time. The experience was meaningful, worthwhile and even fun for the fact we were working together on it, even though the actual things we were doing were pretty mindless. And, when each of us successfully and finally spiritbonded with the items we had equipped, there was a feeling of achievement; a feeling of achievement that amplified considerably when the little message popped up on screen some time later saying that the materia we created had sold for a respectable amount of money; a feeling of achievement that amplified even more when voluntarily donating some of our own in-game currency to the guild coffers.

Everything I've described above would have been utterly meaningless had the option to purchase currency been in there. Attaining the medium-sized house would have felt like a hollow victory, as we wouldn't have done it through our skill and dedication to the game — we'd have done it through how deep our collective pockets are. That carries no meaning in the game world; one of the nicest things about Final Fantasy XIV's land of Eorzea is that the real world never intrudes. There's no "cash shop", the game never once asks you for your credit card details — you set up your subscription before you start playing — and once you're in the virtual world, everything you do relates to the virtual world somehow. It's a highly immersive experience, and one of the best things about the game.

Drop in a "Buy Gil" button and that goes out of the window. When working hard to attain something challenging in the game that costs a lot of money, the thought would always be there: "I wonder if I should just pay up and get it instead." And sure, it's certainly nice in the short term to be able to buy your way to victory — but in the long run, it's much more satisfying to know that everything you've achieved is because you've put the effort in.

A bit like life, you know.

The post 1462: Filthy Lucre appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

But I don't want to focus too much on the less positive aspects of the experience because they're all things that can be solved with a degree of self-control and discipline. What I instead want to focus on is, as I mentioned at the beginning, the positive impact it's had on me.

I started playing Final Fantasy XIV's new version A Realm Reborn for several reasons: I'd been curious about it for a while, but had never played the much-maligned version 1.0; I'd enjoyed my time in Final Fantasy XI, but had never got that far; and someone I knew via a combination of Twitter, 1up and possibly some other places around the Web too invited me to come and play with a group of like-minded somewhat casual players who were in it to have fun rather than become the sort of people who run tightly-regimented raids and complain about "noobs".

When I fired up the closed beta version of the game, I was instantly smitten, and my love for the game only continued to deepen as the closed beta became open beta, and open beta became live service — with significant, noticeable improvements along the way. But what keeps me playing day after day is the fact that the people whom my friend invited me to come and play with have turned out to also be extremely pleasant virtual company — and while I don't know very much (or indeed anything) about their real-life selves in many cases, in the land of Eorzea I most certainly consider them to be friends.

The growth of these friendships has not only helped me from the simple perspective of making friends and having a reliable group of people to interact and play with every time I log on, but it's also helped me to build up my own confidence slowly and gradually.

As longtime readers will know, I struggle somewhat with social anxiety, particularly from an assertiveness perspective. Even when I'm among friends, family or other people I trust, I find it difficult to be truly assertive and say what I'm thinking or what I want. And indeed I often find myself acting the same way in online games — I find myself apologising in advance for messing things up, or not knowing how something works, or not being as familiar with the challenges ahead as more experienced players.

Over time with FFXIV, however, I've noticed myself changing somewhat. Whereas a month or two ago I'd respond to a guildmate's request for companions to take on a dungeon or boss fight with an "I'll come if you've got room for me" or "I'll come if you don't mind a newbie coming along" whereas now I feel a lot more confident in stepping forward right away without qualifiers. I've even stepped up and led my own expeditions into particular dungeons, or helped provide the impetus for a group excursion into more challenging content by expressing my desire to see it.

There was still the question of strangers to conquer, though. Final Fantasy XIV features a system called the Duty Finder whereby you can queue up to play the multiplayer content by yourself or with friends, then get matched up with other people to fill the spare slots in your party. For someone with anxiety issues about meeting new people and disappointing them, this is a daunting prospect, but again over time I've noticed myself changing. I've not only been happy to queue for the level 50 dungeons I now know quite well by myself, I've become more confident at stepping into the "Duty Roulette" option to challenge a random dungeon with a group of random strangers.

Not only that, but I've started experimenting with party roles other than my traditionally-held post of black mage — a damage-dealing class that specialises in standing back from the main melee, flinging spells, killing monsters and trying not to draw the attention of the more powerful enemies. No, while I still consider Black Mage to be my "main" class — largely because it's the one I've spent most time with, feel most attached to and have consequently kitted out the best — I've been having a lot of fun with playing as a healer, though I haven't yet got to the dungeons where it's a significant challenge to be the healer, and this evening I tried tanking for the first time.

Tanking is a particularly daunting prospect in a game like this because you become the de facto leader of the party. You're the one who goes up front; you're the one who starts fights; you're the one who's supposed to protect everyone else. The tank has important responsibilities — ensure you maintain the attention of the monsters, and don't die. A tank is generally expected to know what they're doing but, of course, everyone has to begin somewhere.

I'd levelled Final Fantasy XIV's "Gladiator" class to level 15 previously, which is the earliest point at which you can take on the game's multiplayer dungeons. But I'd never yet had the courage to step into a dungeon and lead one like a proper tank. The prospect was scary; I was worried about doing a bad job and getting yelled at by my fellow party members. And as such, I'd put it off.

This evening, however, I formed a party with my "real life" friend and board-gaming buddy James, who's recently started playing, and another guildmate who agreed to come along. That only left one slot for strangers, and that helped me feel a bit more confident about using our run through the game's first dungeon as a learning experience.

It didn't start well; I died at the first monster, but that was because James was busy figuring out important healer things like how to target me and how to cast curative magic on me, not himself. As we progressed through the dungeon, I felt myself getting the hang of what was expected of me — still hesitant and keen to get the advice of my comrades, but more confident about being the one standing at the front. By the time we reached the end and successfully beat the boss, I felt like I'd happily take on that challenge again — though I couldn't resist a quick apology to the lone stranger in our party — who was also something of a newbie, as it happened — for my "incompetence".

"It's cool," she said. "We made it through, and that's all that matters."

As any social anxiety sufferer will tell you, the reality of a situation that's been a considerable source of anxiety to you is rarely anything even a little bit like what you've built it up to be in your head. And that's something that Final Fantasy XIV is helping me remember more regularly.

The post 1451: Learning to be a Better Virtual Person appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I've only ever reached the level cap in one other MMO to date — World of Warcraft — and in that instance I didn't really explore a lot of what the endgame had to offer. In fact, I think I stopped playing not long after getting that far; I tried to return after a break when Blizzard offered a free upgrade to the Cataclysm expansion back and a free boost to the slightly-higher level cap of 85 that they introduced then, but the magic was gone, and I've felt no inclination to go back since.

You see, as I mentioned in that post I linked to above, for me, a key part of the appeal of MMOs — and indeed RPGs in general — is that journey you make from, quite literally, zero to hero. The road to the level cap is paved with a variety of new skills and things to learn, and by the time you reach your "pinnacle" you're well-equipped with everything you need to survive… and continue onwards.

You see, once you hit level whatever-the-cap-is-in-your-game-of-choice, it stops being about gaining XP, and it starts being about doing other stuff. It starts being about running dungeons, acquiring new gear, taking on new challenges with friends. For those who played through most of the game solo, now is probably the time to jump off the train, because most endgame content is reliant on playing together with others, whether that's running small-scale dungeons to get gear, or taking on raids that require larger parties.

It's also often where the story grinds to something of a halt. In Final Fantasy's case, "endgame" is where you've beaten the final boss of the main scenario quests, so the main story is indeed over. But there's plenty of things still to do, most of which have some sort of narrative context, and if the impressive recent trailer for the upcoming patch 2.1 is anything to go by, the main scenario quests will continue to be added to with each new update every three months, which is nice.

What I've found interesting in the endgame stuff I played this evening, is that it lets you concentrate on the game mechanics a lot more than if you're trying to pay attention to the story. Some MMO players play through the whole game this way, skipping cutscenes and not reading any text, but I can't help but feel in Final Fantasy XIV's case that this is missing the point somewhat.

Regardless, once you reach endgame you're probably going to be running a lot of the same dungeons and other content over and over again, often with different groups of people each time. And while this might sound boring, there's a few things to bear in mind: firstly, some people plough hundreds or even thousands of hours into games like League of Legends and Dota, and those have very few maps, and secondly the appeal isn't necessarily in seeing new and unique content; it's in seeing new and unique people.

I braved Final Fantasy XIV's Duty Finder system for two runs into the "so you've just reached level 50, what now?" dungeon the Wanderer's Palace this evening. My two runs were markedly different from one another, despite the monsters being in the same place and me playing exactly the same character class.

In the first case, the party was well-organised, careful and methodical. We didn't talk much because it was clear from our behaviour that we'd all done this before, and we all knew what we were doing. Consequently, we got through the whole thing without any serious mistakes — and, more importantly, no-one dying.

Compare and contrast with the second party, in which the de facto leader — usually the "tank" class, who runs ahead to get pummelled by enemies while everyone else hangs back and throws fireballs at them — was seemingly trying to race through the dungeon as quickly as possible, and causing issues in the process. Speedruns of dungeons aren't particularly unusual, particularly in the case of places like Wanderer's Palace that provide a good source of material for acquiring high-level gear, but in order to be successful at them you need a well-oiled party that communicates well.

Our poor old tank wasn't very good at speedrunning, you see, and ended up getting him — and the rest of us — into situations that it was difficult to survive. Wanderer's Palace is particularly harsh due to the presence of an unkillable "Tonberry Stalker" enemy who runs up to you and stabs you in the throat if you enter his field of vision; on more than one occasion, the tank attracted so many enemies that we weren't able to defeat them all before someone got throat-stabbed.

This was interesting to me. It wasn't frustrating or annoying because everyone took it in good humour and no-one was a dick about it — a constant risk with online games — but was instead fascinating to see. I have a feeling there's some intriguing psychological observations to be made about the different ways in which people play — and how people like me respond differently to different types of people — but I'm not sure I'm altogether qualified to make those observations.

It was also an interesting experiment for me in that throughout most of the game, I've played with people that I'm at least casually acquainted with. These two runs were attempts to test the water and see what it's like playing with random strangers; you often hear horror stories of people getting together with a bunch of jerks in the Duty Finder but, aside from the tank's clumsiness, there was nothing untoward going on, and so it's something I'd feel comfortable doing again.

Fortunate, really, because I need one hell of a lot of Tomestones if I want to upgrade my equipment to a suitable level to be able to take on the later dungeons and boss fights…

The post 1419: Endgame appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Wrong. For starters, if you've ever taken that attitude, it's entirely possible that you aren't a dickwad yourself and just simply find the prospect of coming face to face with a dickwad distasteful — and thus it stands to reason that there are probably other people out there like you. (You may also take that attitude because you're a dickwad yourself, and use it as an excuse to behave like a dickwad. If that is the case, I'd encourage you to take a good, long, hard look at yourself, and perhaps indulge in some self-flagellation until you see the error of your ways.)

Anyway, I have a specific story that happened today — one that filled me with a pleasant amount of hope. It was only a little event in the grand scheme of things, but it was one where I felt happy after it had transpired.

A little context, first: Final Fantasy XIV allows you to play cooperatively with other players in one of two ways: either forming a party with them manually, or by letting a mechanic called the Duty Finder match you up with people who are looking to complete the same challenges. The advantage of the former option is that you can get together with people you know, or at least people on the same server with whom you'll be able to communicate with afterwards. The advantage of the latter option is that it allows you to play with the entire player base of the game, rather than just the 5,000 (maximum concurrent players at the time of writing) present on your specific server. Both approaches have drawbacks, though: in the former case, it can often be difficult to find people who are available at the same time who want to do the same thing; in the latter case, you're usually paired up with complete strangers, with all the inherent risks that carries.

Earlier today, I took on one of Final Fantasy XIV's dungeons with a party of random people found through the Duty Finder. Things were going reasonably well to begin with — though I would have preferred that the tank mark targets to help mages like me know what order to set fire to things — but after a while I started to notice one of the players behaving a little strangely.

Her in-game name was "Amelia," and she was a black mage like me. She'd obviously run the dungeon before, as she was regularly charging ahead well before the rest of us had got our bearings — sometimes even causing enemies to start attacking before we were ready. Partway through the dungeon, I could see her continually running off in the opposite direction to us, only to come running back when the tank started the next combat. I could tell she was getting frustrated, but she wasn't saying anything for some reason. So, once the next combat had finished, I spoke up.

"Amelia," I typed. "If there's something you'd like to show us, please say something rather than just charging off by yourself. Thanks!"

I gritted my teeth and was prepared for a barrage of abuse. A lot of online players don't like being told how to play the game and get very defensive if someone criticises them. I was all set for "Amelia" to start yelling at me, or even to quit the party in a huff. It wouldn't be the first time I had seen something happen.

What happened next surprised me.

"Yeah," she replied. "I was just thinking that myself."

The rest of the party stopped — the tank hesitated before pulling in the next group of enemies — and I could feel virtual eyes on me.

"Communication helps," I typed. "Is there some treasure down there or something?" I asked, referring to her continual attempts to run off to the south.

"Yes," she replied quickly. "There's two chests down there."

"Okay," I typed. "Let's go get those before we go any further then."

After that, we followed Amelia's lead and, sure enough, found our way to some extra enemies and some treasure chests. I was sure to thank her for her help, and when it came to time to fight the boss at the end of the dungeon, she volunteered some helpful information that ensured we were able to take it down without too much difficulty.

Ultimately, a bit of communication helped rescue a party that was at serious risk of falling apart. I'm not-so-secretly quite proud of the fact that I was the one to initiate communication and help hold things together — and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover "Amelia" was receptive to the things I was saying, and apparently knew she wasn't handling things as well as she could have done.

So wherever you are now, "Amelia," thanks. And I hope we get the chance to play together again soon.

The post 1322: Online Gamers Aren't Always Jerks appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

While I'm not exactly what I'd call a hardcore MMO player, I have been present at the launch of a number of reasonably-to-large-sized MMOs, including World of Warcraft, Star Trek Online, DC Universe Online and a few others I've doubtless forgotten. And I have to say I've been pleasantly surprised at how well things have been going for Final Fantasy XIV so far — more often than not, an MMO's launch is a complete disaster, with servers going down, significant gameplay problems and at least one Legendary Error that becomes a meme before the first day is out.

Today's experience on Final Fantasy XIV hasn't been completely flawless — on more than one occasion, there has been problems with the instance servers, for example. For those not au fait with MMO lingo, an "instance" is a private copy of part of the game world specifically for your character and, in some cases, your party. Final Fantasy XIV makes extensive use of instances not just for multiplayer dungeons, which is how World of Warcraft popularised their use to the world, but also to keep significant "story events" for your character private and free of naked catgirls wandering around ruining the atmosphere (or enhancing it, depending on your view on naked catgirls).

FFXIV isn't completely reliant on these instances, thankfully, but the game's main story quest and class-specific quests do make use of them quite frequently, so the fact that they haven't been working properly for part of today has meant some people haven't been able to make as much progress as they'd like to have done. Naturally, some players have expressed anger at this — this is the Internet, after all, where people start petitions to remove Ben Affleck as the next Batman, for fuck's sake — but, as ever, this isn't particularly reasonable. Sure, it'd be lovely to have the game working as intended from the moment it's turned on, but we're currently in an "Early Access" period, with official service not starting until Tuesday for players who didn't preorder or play the previous incarnation of the game. As such, it's a good opportunity for Square Enix to work out any last-minute kinks — like this instance issue — and ensure things are running as smoothly as possible when new, non-preorder players start to arrive.

I should also draw attention to the fact that Square Enix hasn't just been sitting back and letting these problems go on; they've been investigating the causes and trying their best to fix them. There was a maintenance period earlier today that temporarily fixed the instance issues, but then they came back; as I type this, they think they've found the solution, but are testing it thoroughly before rolling it out to the game proper. By later tonight, it should hopefully be a lot more stable.

So far, then, FFXIV's launch has been one of the smoother ones I've seen. It hasn't been without issues, no, but at the same time they've been handled as well as can be expected — and things can only improve from here.

So here's to many more adventures in Eorzea; I've had fun today, and I'm looking forward to the further adventures of my character Amarysse as she becomes an ever more skilled thaumaturgist.

The post 1314: Day One in Eorzea appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This carries its own considerations however — the main one being that if you switch to a class based in a city you've already done all the low-level quests in, you might struggle to find things to do if you're not used to all the additional stuff the game offers. In that particular situation, you turn to any one of a number of different possibilities: the short, snappy, time-limited Levequests; your Hunting Log, which challenges you to hunt down specific monsters in set quantities in exchange for very generous experience point rewards; Guildhests, which are short, extremely fun co-op challenges you take on alongside other players; or simply grinding.

I wanted to give another shout-out to the amount of effort that's been put into the game's story. As well as the usual MMO-style "random people need you to do odd jobs" quests you get around the place, there's a "main quest" to follow, too. After a certain point, this quest tasks you with travelling to the other two capital cities in the world to meet their leaders and start making preparations for what is clearly going to be some sort of Epic Battle later in the plot. What was particularly great about this quest was the fact that it makes you feel super-important — you're sent off on an airship to the other cities, and as the ship leaves, the Final Fantasy prologue theme triumphantly blares out, as majestic as ever. Then you get some awesome "meanwhile" scenes — something that doesn't tend to happen in MMOs — that give you a real feeling of the plot unfolding even when you're not present. There's some characters who look a lot like FFXII's Judges in play, it seems, and I'm looking forward to the inevitable confrontation with them later in the story.

It's hard to pin down one thing that's quite so satisfying about FFXIV because it really is an example of lots of overlapping systems complementing each other very well. There are lots of different ways to play, and plenty of means to ensure that you shouldn't find yourself getting bored or with nothing to do — unless, of course, you don't enjoy the base mechanics, in which case there's probably not a lot that can be done for you. The final game's going to be great; I can't wait to see what the future holds in updates and expansions.

The post 1308: Adventurer's Guild appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'm playing a Thaumaturgist this time around — in the last phase of beta I played a Pugilist. I was a little concerned that the game would fall into the usual MMO trap of all classes playing in a pretty similar manner — spamming the same combination of hotbar items over and over again, repeat until dead — but the Thaumaturgist plays noticeably differently to the Pugilist. As it should be.

While the Pugilist is a melee character that demands you get close in to — and preferably behind — your enemies, the Thaumaturgist is a ranged magic damage dealer. Unlike your common or garden usual MMO mage, though, the Thaumaturgist makes use of an interesting mechanic that, thematically, represents their "aetherial balance" between "Astral Fire" and "Umbral Ice". Essentially, what this means is one of two things: if you're in Astral Fire state, you do increased damage with your fire spells, but they also cost more magic points to cast; if you're in Umbral Ice state, your spells do less damage but your magic points regenerate a lot more rapidly than they would usually. Playing a Thaumaturgist effectively involves knowing how to use these two states effectively to ensure you have good damage output while also keeping your stock of magic points high.

That's not all, though. Each of the classes in FFXIV has its own unique questline to follow, with new "episodes" in the story coming every five levels or so. The nice thing about these is that they have their own storyline to follow, but also they help teach you things about your class you might not have realised. The level 15 quest for the Thaumaturgist, for example, is essentially a stealth mission that teaches you about the effectiveness of your Sleep spell: you're tasked with sneaking in to retrieve an artifact, and rather than fighting the strong enemies who are between you and it, you simply put them all to sleep and prance through singing "trollolololol" or something.

What I've really been surprised about is how much effort's been put into the narrative side of things — something that's often neglected in MMOs. The genre giant World of Warcraft, for example, has an enormously rich and detailed setting to draw on, and yet — at least in its early incarnations, I haven't been back since Catacylsm — this storytelling potential was utterly squandered in boring quests that were given to you in the form of dull text readouts.

Final Fantasy XI, XIV's predecessor, was somewhat better in that there were "missions" as well as "quests" to do — these often incorporated cutscenes, story progression and even boss fights at times, but XI's difficulty and painfully slow progression meant that a lot of people might not have got very far.

XIV nails the balance. There's a ton of solo content you can do, with a storyline to follow that makes your character feel important. There are recognisable non-player characters whom you come to have various feelings about, and events occur that actually have some sort of meaning. There's also a lot of instanced battles where you get your own private special event without other players interrupting — proper boss battles. And these aren't just like fighting any other monster — sometimes you'll be battling alongside other non-player characters in a huge skirmish, other times you'll have to hold out against seemingly overwhelming odds until an NPC shows up to tip the balance in your favour.

It all feels like an actual Final Fantasy, in short, rather than an MMO with a Final Fantasy skin atop it. Your incentive for progression comes as much from the unfolding story and the cool setpieces as it does from gaining yet another level.

I haven't done a lot of group stuff yet, but I did try a Guildhest earlier. This also gave me the opportunity to try the Duty Finder system, whereby you mark yourself as wanting to do a specific multiplayer "thing" — be it a Guildhest, a dungeon or something else — and then let the game match you with other people looking to do the same thing automatically. Pleasantly, you can continue playing while you wait to find a party — it's a good time to take on the short, snappy, time-limited "levequests" for some pocket money and experience.

As for the Guildhest, it was short but very enjoyable. It was essentially a party-based arena battle intended to give players practice at working together and trying not to aggro multiple groups of enemies. Initially, you and your teammates must simply take out two parties of relatively easy monsters; then another set appears, accompanied by a huge boss monster. Inevitably, they all come charging towards you, so it becomes necessary to prioritise your targets — taking out the smaller things first before starting on the big boss. When you've successfully completed it, the iconic Final Fantasy fanfare plays as if you'd just completed a battle in a "normal" Final Fantasy game — a nice touch.

I'm really looking forward to seeing how the game continues once it officially launches later this month — the current beta only allows you to progress up to level 20 and is still lacking a couple of features. The only real challenge is going to be — as ever — juggling both it and other games I want and/or need to play!

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Well. Wow.

You remember how everyone hailed The Old Republic as a massive step forward for MMORPGs — before everyone realised it was actually just World of Warcraft in space, that is? Yeah. The Secret World actually is a significant step forward for MMORPGs.

Why, you ask?

Well, let's consider its thematic content for starters. The Secret World is a lush, rich combination of all manner of influences, including, among other things, Illuminati/Templar/some Asian dudes conspiracy theories, The X-Files and the work of H.P. Lovecraft. The early stages of the game feel very much like what a hypothetical Arkham Horror Online would play like — you're an "investigator" for one of the three factions in a town called Kingsmouth (which, in the "creepy American small town" stakes is in the unenviable position of being somewhere between Lovecraft's Innsmouth and Silent Hill's, uh, Silent Hill), you wander around trying to get to the bottom of what has caused a zombie apocalypse (I KNOW, ZOMBIES, but bear with me) and the mysterious fog that has come in from the sea. Also, big slobbering tentacle monsters. And people going "a bit mental." Apparently Cthulhu is involved at some point, but I haven't got that far as yet.

So The Secret World eschews the usual fantasy or sci-fi tropes of the MMORPG genre in favour of a modern-day setting dripping with Lovecraftian atmosphere — at least in its initial stages, anyway. And it actually bothers to tell a fully-realised story (with full speech and cutscenes) rather than a limp, loosely-connected set of questlines. But it's not just the theme and the strong narrative that distinguishes The Secret World from its numerous competitors. The game systems are also an impressive breath of fresh air.

Let's start with the quests. While some quests do include objectives such as "kill [x] [y]s", these are usually part of a longer chain of events. Where things get interesting are when you break away from what the game refers to as "action" missions and you get to take on "sabotage" and "investigation" quests. While "action" missions, as you might expect, involve killing things, "sabotage" and "investigation" challenges are a little different.

In a sabotage mission, stealth and environmental puzzle solving is emphasised. In an early example, you have to retrieve a number of security cameras from abandoned businesses around the town and set them up in strategically advantageous places for both the police and your faction. Many of the cameras are out of reach from ground level, necessitating a bit of exploration as you figure out how you can actually reach them. As the mission progresses, you eventually find yourself exploring an instanced "mini dungeon" in which you have to avoid security cameras and laser tripwires while working out a route to disable various control panels without being spotted.

Investigation missions, meanwhile, are a lot more elaborate. The current one I'm working on has 18 steps in it. If you consider that your average MMO quest has 3 steps at most (get quest, kill/collect shit, return to questgiver), this is pretty impressive. When you look at what some of these steps involve, it's even more impressive.

In investigation missions, the fourth wall is broken slightly as the player has to put their own intelligence to the test. Clues are given for various challenges, and it's up to the player to figure out how to solve them. An early, simple example involves working out the password for someone's computer using a couple of hints they've left around the place, but later ones see you doing everything from deciphering morse code messages to making use of the in-game web browser to research real-world things. (Of course, you could just cheat using said web browser, but the community is already rather sensitive about spoilers, so you'll be surprised at how few "answers" are out there already.)

This brilliantly diverse questing system is coupled with an excellent levelling mechanic. Players level up at a consistent rate throughout the game and can eventually unlock all the skills from all the disciplines — but it's only possible to equip seven active and seven passive skills at once, much like how Guild Wars does things. It's possible to save these "decks" of skills, however, allowing you to easily switch your character build on the fly according to the situation you're in or what the group you're with needs you to do.

Combat, too, is quite interesting. While it's the usual "hotbar and cooldown" approach, there's a much more "action game" feel to it here, thanks in part to the fact that positioning is important — particularly when baddies start doing area-of-effect attacks. You can take on a lot more enemies at once than in many other MMOs, giving the game a much more exciting, dynamic feeling rather than simply getting into the rhythm of pressing the number keys that titles like World of Warcraft offer.

In short, The Secret World is evidence that there is still some creativity among those who make MMOs. Not everyone wants to make a World of Warcraft clone, and Funcom have succeeded in creating an experience that is very much its own thing — and very much worth your time and money. C'mon. You can't say the prospect of doing a raid on Cthulhu doesn't appeal just a little bit.

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You know what, though? The Old Republic does one hell of a lot of things right, and might just be the big shakeup that the stale, overcrowded genre needs.

By far the best addition to the whole experience is the fact that plot is delivered with some degree of effort, rather than through static text boxes. One of the things which always bugged me about World of Warcraft was that there was this huge, epic storyline going on, but you wouldn't have known it. Text boxes do not make for good interactive storytelling. Interactive cutscenes with dialogue choices, however, do — particularly given the innovative implementation of "multiplayer conversations", where each "response" is rolled on by all party members to see who gets the chance to say their piece. It sounds odd, but works really well in practice, and is certainly a far more elegant solution than what Guild Wars did by only having the party leader visible in cutscenes.

It helps that it looks like being an interesting story (or, indeed, stories) too — I've only played as a Jedi Knight so far, but already the things I've been doing could have been straight out of a new single player Knights of the Old Republic game. This is very much a Good Thing, and the fact that you can have a completely different experience and story by playing with one of the other classes is also a Very Good Thing.

The game doesn't break completely with established MMO conventions, however. We still have a hotbar filled with abilities with cooldowns. We still have clearly defined party roles. We still have vendor trash, skill trainers, flight paths, rested XP, Elite mobs and all the other shenanigans we've come to associate with the genre. And while it would be nice to see a little more originality in some of these aspects, what we haven't seen before is the combination of these game mechanics with strong storytelling. And, unlike most MMOs, where the mechanics are very much at the forefront, here — at least early in the game — the story is very much front and centre, making you feel, as the marketing says, like you're in the middle of your own personal Star Wars saga.

It's ironic, really, that out of all the recent "new" Star Wars material, it's not the movies that were the most worthwhile things. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the Episode I-III movies were some of the worst things to happen to the franchise. Conversely, the Old Republic series has been one of the best things to happen to the saga, plot holes relating to the fact that the galaxy has been using the exact same technology for thousands of years notwithstanding. And the new game certainly has the potential to create an enormous expanded universe over the course of its lifetime. Will it ever eclipse the movies themselves, though? Probably not; the movies have a considerable head start on the game, after all. But there's so much potential here for BioWare and LucasArts to explore, and I for one am actually quite excited to see how it all develops. It's a very strong game now — where will it be in ten years' time? You only have to look at how far World of Warcraft has come since its 2004 release to see how much one game can evolve. And if The Old Republic is starting from such a strong beginning, I can't wait to see what the future holds.

This likely isn't any consolation to players of Star Wars Galaxies, which shut down earlier this week. But despite the fact that The Old Republic is far more focused on the heroic side of things rather than, say, being a dancer in a cantina, it's an authentic-feeling Star Wars experience that makes good use of both its multiplayer mechanics and BioWare's considerable chops in the storytelling department.

In short, if you've been considering trying it for yourself, then don't hesitate. Give it a try; you won't be disappointed.

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Instead, though, I've been spending a fair amount of time playing Champions Online, aka City of Heroes 2. This is one of a growing number of MMORPGs that used to be full-price products with subscription fees, but which have adopted the free to play model as a means of drawing in more customers and potentially earn more money via microtransactions.

Champions Online takes an interesting approach in that you can still pay a subscription fee for a "Gold" membership if you prefer, and that keeps the game pretty much in its original form — you get free access to all new content, are able to play a hero with your own completely customised set of powers and have a bit more flexibility in terms of how much currency you can own and the like. Free "Silver" members, on the other hand, are limited to selecting preset archetypes for their heroes and have to pay for episodic "adventure packs" — story-heavy instanced missions that offer experiences a little different from the regular world-and-instance-based PvE that the main game offers. Regular promotions allow Silver members to get access to some things for free for a limited period, and players can always buy individual things via microtransaction if they don't want to pony up for a full-on subscription every month.

The way this is implemented is incredibly smart. The fact that Silver players are limited to preset archetypes which are nigh-on-impossible to fuck up while Gold members actually have to plan out their builds in advance means that people are less likely to get themselves into a situation where it's impossible to proceed due to some unfortunate decisions 20 levels ago. It also allows players to effectively try out the various combinations of powers with characters that actually work properly — and have a lot of fun in the process. I'm playing a "Soldier" character right now and she doesn't feel gimped at all — she feels like a preset character class in a traditional action RPG. There's just enough level of choice to allow me to customise her a little bit without daunting me with complete freedom.

Champions Online falls into the usual traps that MMOs do — the interface is a bit clunky, the animations in cutscenes are either laughable or non-existent and aforementioned cutscenes have been put together by someone who doesn't know what "directing" or "cinematography" is. But that doesn't stop it being fun — and definitely higher quality than some of the crap that has been released under the free to play banner in the past. Quality of these games is definitely increasing, and I foresee that Champions Online will hold my attention for quite a while yet. So if you're a player, do join me! Look for "Lap Cat@AngryJedi" or just add me on Steam to see when I'm playing. Feel free to give me a shout and we can team up.

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