1909: How to Black Mage

Following on from yesterday’s post summarising what I’ve learned about playing Paladin in Final Fantasy XIV, I will now follow up with what I have learned about playing Black Mage, the class I initially started playing the game in. Again, I’m not claiming to be the World’s Best Black Mage, but this is what works for me.

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!

1908: How to Paladin

Can’t think of much to write this evening, so since I was helping some people out in Final Fantasy XIV earlier, I thought I may as well share the things I helped them out with in a more coherent form. That way, if anyone asks in future, I can simply point them to this post. Wild, huh.

Okay. Over the next couple of days, I’m going to share what I’ve learned from playing Paladin and Black Mage in Final Fantasy XIV. Paladin is a tank class, while Black Mage is a DPS class. Both are very different and have nothing to do with each other; they are collected together here simply because they’re the two classes I have the most experience with.

I’m also not claiming to be the be-all, end-all authority on either of these classes; I’m simply sharing what I know in the hope that it will be of some use to other players like me who enjoy the game, enjoy challenging the higher-end content like Coil but who aren’t five-days-a-week, six-hours-a-night hardcore raiders.

All right then. Let’s begin with Paladin.

Note: The following information assumes a level 50 character with access to all its abilities at the time of writing, but is mostly applicable to lower-level play, too; you simply don’t have as many abilities to use.

Paladin

As a Paladin, your job is to get punched in the face in lieu of the rest of your party. This is what tanks do. Paladins differ from the other tanks — Warriors — in that they have a lower amount of overall HP and damage output, but a greater selection of defensive abilities. Warrior, conversely, relies on a combination of self-healing tied to damage output, much higher damage output overall and significantly higher base HP.

Remember, as a tank your job is to maintain “aggro” (also known as “threat” or “enmity” depending on who you’re talking to) rather than dealing a lot of damage. You can check aggro in two ways: the coloured gems in the target list on the left of the screen — ideally you want them to be red, indicating that those targets are targeting you and not others — or the little bars that appear over the job icons in the party list in the top-left corner. Know which abilities generate the most aggro: any damage will generate aggro, but Savage Blade and Rage of Halone are specifically designed to generate more than usual. Flash generates aggro over a circular area around you, as does Circle of Scorn. And Shield Lob generates aggro at range. Provoke does something a little different, which we’ll talk about later.

Paladin is arguably the “easier” of the two tank classes to play, so for those trying tanking for the first time — like me, when I started Paladin — it’s a good choice. Warrior is more complex, with lots to keep track of at once, so if you’re uneasy it’s a good idea to save that for later.

Getting Ready

In a four-player dungeon, make sure you are in Shield Oath. This makes you take less damage and also increases the amount of aggro you generate. In an eight-player trial or raid, agree with the other tank who will be “main tank” and who will be “off tank”. If you’re main, go with Shield Oath. If you’re off, go with Sword Oath unless you’ll both be picking up separate enemies at the same time, as in the Battle in the Big Keep trial, in which case you should both be on Shield Oath in most situations.

The Pull

As a tank, it’s usually your job to kick off an encounter. In a four-player dungeon where you are the only tank, you should do this by running towards the group of enemies and using Shield Lob on what you intend to be your initial main target — some tanks like to mark this target to make it clear to their party which target they should attack first. The reason you should use Shield Lob rather than just running in and using a close-range attack is that it allows you to get an immediate, ranged head-start on aggro generation, because once the DPS and healers get going, you’re going to need that head-start, particularly if there’s a gear disparity between you and them.

Run right through the group of enemies to the other side, then turn around so you are facing the rest of your party and the enemies are facing away from the party. (This is so any enemies with “cleave” attacks — cone-shaped attacks that hit multiple targets — won’t hit other party members.) As you do so, use Flash at least twice, and Circle of Scorn if it’s ready to use. This extends your head-start on aggro on your main target and also builds aggro on the surrounding enemies.

You Got ‘Em, Now Keep ‘Em

What you do next depends on how many enemies you’re dealing with.

If you’re fighting a single enemy — like a boss, for example — then go with Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone repeatedly. This is the simplest possible tanking situation, and you are unlikely to lose aggro like this. If you are, make sure you are using Shield Oath.

If you’re fighting a small group of enemies (two or three), go with Fast Blade -> Savage Blade -> Rage of Halone on the main target, drop in a Flash every couple of times around the combo and change targets every couple of times to make sure you generate aggro on the whole group. Healers generate aggro by healing, so making sure you hit each member of the group every so often — with your main focus being on the main target — means that enemies are less likely to peel away and clobber the healer.

If you’re fighting a large group of enemies (three or more), as you will probably be doing on a “big pull” or a speedrun of a dungeon, go with Fast Blade -> Riot Blade -> Flash. Although Riot Blade produces less aggro than Savage Blade and Rage of Halone, it has the convenient side-effect of regenerating MP, which you’ll be expending with every Flash. By doing this combo, you have effectively bottomless MP with which to keep using Flash and keep the attention of the group. Make sure you move so that Flash hits all the enemies, but try and keep all enemies in front of you and facing away from the party as usual.

Getting ‘Em Back and Tank-Swapping

Lost aggro on an enemy? This is where Provoke enters the picture. Provoke is notorious for having the worst tooltip in the whole game, so here is how it works: when you use Provoke, your aggro level on the target is set to the value of the person who currently has the highest amount of aggro, plus one. “One aggro” is not very much, so if you don’t follow up Provoke with something, you’ll lose the target again and have pretty much wasted the ability.

As such, good Provoke practice is to use Fast Blade -> Savage Blade, then Provoke, then Rage of Halone to secure your lead on aggro. Alternatively, you can Provoke then Shield Lob if you need to pull in an enemy that has moved away from you. In a pinch, so long as you follow Provoke with something, you’ll probably keep the enemy on you.

Tank-swapping is simply deliberately using Provoke as above — including the follow-up hits — to take another tank’s target off them. This mostly comes into play during Coil and Extreme Primal fights, when taking too many stacks of a debuff a boss gives you will cause you to die. You can also use this to switch places with a main tank that seems to be struggling to mitigate the incoming damage if you know you’ll be able to handle it better.

Cooldowns and You

Paladin’s basic combos are easy to learn and less complex than Warrior’s, so much of the skill is in knowing when to use your “cooldowns” — the abilities which have a persistent effect for a short period, then take a short while to “cool down” before they can be used again. Here’s what they do:

Fight or Flight increases damage and, consequently, aggro. This is good to use at the beginning of a fight and indeed whenever it’s up. You’re never going to be going toe-to-toe with a good DPS numbers-wise, but this will help.

Rampart decreases the damage you take by 20%. It has a fairly short cooldown so in most dungeons you can simply use it when it’s available. In trials, which tend to be more “scripted” fights, you’ll want to save it for when you know big hits are coming. The Triple -> Spark attack the boss in The Chrysalis does is a good example, as is Ravensbeak in Turn 9 (though if you’re doing Turn 9, you probably don’t need a guide like this); you’ll still take a chunk of damage, but your healers will thank you.

Sentinel decreases the damage you take by 40%. It has a shorter duration and a longer cooldown than Rampart, so it’s an ability to be used a little more carefully. Again, if you know a big hit is coming, Sentinel is a good ability to use. In long fights, use Rampart first, then Sentinel, then in most cases Rampart will have cooled down by the time you need to soak another big hit.

Convalescence increases the amount you are healed by for a short period. If you are getting low on HP and want to help your healers out, popping this will get you fighting fit in no time, so long as you do it quickly enough. It is worth setting up a short macro to announce when you are using this so that the healers know you need healing in case their attention has been on other party members. That macro looks something like this:

/p Using Convalescence! <se.1>
/ac “Convalescence” <me>

Awareness means you won’t take critical hits for a short period. This is most useful during large pulls where you are taking lots of hits in quick succession — an unlucky run of criticals could do significant damage. It’s also useful to pop before a big hit if you have time; an already damaging move critting could knock you to the floor if you’re not prepared.

Bulwark increases your likelihood to block with your shield, which reduces damage. Again, it’s particularly useful to use when lots of hits are coming in at once, but it’s also good to use if both Rampart and Sentinel are on cooldown. Unlike those two abilities, it’s not a guaranteed damage reduction as there’s a degree of randomness as to whether or not you’ll block each hit, but it’s better than nothing.

Tempered Will doesn’t reduce damage at all, but it has two important functions: it cures Bind and Heavy status, and also makes you temporarily immune to any abilities that would normally cause you to move against your will. Titan’s Landslide and Leviathan’s deck slams are good examples. By popping Tempered Will before these moves go off, you’ll be able to continue standing where you are without worrying about being knocked off, but don’t get too overconfident with it!

Hallowed Ground makes you temporarily invincible for a very short period. Note that there is a short “animation lock” between triggering the skill and it actually activating, so it’s not an immediate “don’t lose” button. This is good to use during large pulls if the healer isn’t keeping up with the incoming damage, or when you know a big hit is coming and you’re not at full HP or your mitigation cooldowns like Rampart and Sentinel aren’t available. It also has a very long cooldown, so in most situations you’ll get just the one chance to use it effectively. It’s also useful to macro this so the healers know they won’t have to heal you for a short period; follow the same format as for Convalescence above.

Good Places to Practice

If you’re new to tanking, it can be daunting to think about what to try doing — no-one likes to mess up, after all, and if the tank messes up it’s pretty obvious. Here are some good fights where you can get some solid practice:

Brayflox’s Longstop is a good low-level dungeon to familiarise yourself with tanking effectively. Its final boss Aiatar demands that you both move it out of the pools of poison it spits and keep it facing away from the party. As a low-level dungeon, though, you don’t have access to all of your abilities.

Wanderer’s Palace is probably the first level 50 dungeon you’ll unlock, and it’s very easy to outgear it. This is a good place to practice doing larger than normal pulls, though be sure to check with your party if they’re okay with this before charging in!

Wanderer’s Palace (Hard) has a final boss that is good practice for moving and positioning enemies. Keep it out of the swirly areas on the ground, otherwise he’ll be considerably buffed; move him effectively throughout the fight so you don’t cover too much of the arena with unsafe areas.

Labyrinth of the Ancients, the first of the 24-player Crystal Tower raids, has far too many tanks, but the first encounters in this dungeon are good for practicing picking up enemies and grouping them together for area-effect classes like Black Mage to kill as a group. The Atomos fight is also good practice if you volunteer to be the one who picks up the additional monsters that appear and bring them to your comrades standing on the pad.

The Chrysalis, a trial towards the end of the main storyline, is good practice at cooldown management. In particular, pay attention to when the boss casts Triple and Spark; that’s the time to use Rampart or Sentinel to mitigate the incoming damage.

The Howling Eye (Extreme) is a good fight to learn about how two tanks are used. Not only do you need to keep the two additional enemies Chirada and Suparna away from one another, you’ll also need to tank-swap the Spiny Plume enemy to prevent either of you taking too many stacks of the “Thermal Low” debuff and dying.

Thornmarch (Extreme) is another good fight to practice working together with another tank amid absolute chaos going on around you. You’ll need to Focus Target your partner, and tank-swap the boss at the appropriate time. At the same time, you’ll need to make sure you’re positioned somewhere that isn’t going to get other people hurt.

The Binding Coil of Bahamut, Turn 1 is pretty straightforward until the last boss. When it splits in half, one of the two tanks will have to Provoke it off the other and drag it elsewhere, positioning it so that neither its frontal cleaves or its tail swipes hit other players. With the enormous “Echo” buff on this content now, there’s not much to worry about here.

Good luck! Tomorrow, Black Mage.

1898: A Realm Concluded

It was an interesting day for Final Fantasy XIV today, as it saw the release of Patch 2.55, also known as Before the Fall Part 2. This was a highly anticipated patch primarily for the fact that it promised to bring the A Realm Reborn storyline to a conclusion as well as set up the events of the upcoming expansion pack Heavensward, due out in June.

So far as “game content” goes, there wasn’t a huge amount of new stuff in this one — the main attraction was the one new Trial on the Steps of Faith, which we’ll talk a little about in a moment. But “content” was never really the intention of this patch; it was always intended to be a narrative-centric patch to send off Final Fantasy XIV version 2.x with a suitable bang and prepare the playerbase for what might await them in Heavensward.

I shall endeavour to refrain from major spoilers in this post, but a few mild ones may slip in.

The storyline for Before the Fall Part 2 primarily concerns the Dravanian Horde’s initial assault on the isolated land of Ishgard, a nation which was once part of the Eorzean Alliance alongside Ul’Dah, Gridania and Limsa Lominsa, but which subsequently closed off its borders and effectively locked the majority of its people inside its city walls. The Dravanians — who are big fucking dragons — have been making incursions into Ishgardian territory for some time thanks to a longstanding war between the two nations, and indeed the adventurers of Final Fantasy XIV repel their attacks on a number of occasions through the dungeons you challenge over the course of your career.

This time it’s different, however; there’s rumblings of one of the Great Wyrms making an appearance, and before long due to various unfortunate circumstances and villainy, the Ishgardian protective wards on the giant bridge The Steps of Faith are under assault from Vishap, probably the biggest enemy in the entire game, and his assembled Dravanian forces. The new Trial sees you and seven companions battling Vishap as he makes his inexorable progression across the Steps of Faith, hopefully taking him down before he breaches Ishgard’s last line of defence.

Following the pattern of past patches, this big battle (and it’s a pretty huge, quite challenging battle) isn’t the endpoint of the story; far from it, in fact. The overall conclusion to the A Realm Reborn storyline is quite genuinely shocking, surprising, dramatic and emotional. Oh, and long; the game warns you before triggering these cutscenes that you’re going to be sitting and watching for quite some time. It’s a worthy watch, though, and it drives home the fact that on the whole, A Realm Reborn has done a significantly better job with storytelling than pretty much any other MMO out there. You’ll care about these characters and what happens to them — be it triumph or tragedy, and for sure there’s a bit of both in the ending.

The finale isn’t perfect — some have already criticised the parts where it takes agency away from the player character, though it didn’t personally bother me all that much — but it forms a fitting conclusion to A Realm Reborn, bringing a sense of closure to the storylines that have been running for the last couple of years now while simultaneously building anticipation for Heavensward through the introduction of some new characters, the reintroduction of some we haven’t seen for a while and an extremely intriguing cliffhanger right at the very end.

Now all we have to do is wait until June to find out what happens next… although in the meantime, we still have the Final Coil of Bahamut to defeat, so I’m sure that will keep us busy until the expansion arrives!

1896: Mastering War

Ahead of the release of Final Fantasy XIV’s expansion Heavensward, I’ve been levelling some of the other classes that I either haven’t touched or had only levelled a little bit. Today I reached level 50 on my fourth battle class: Warrior. (My previous 50s were Black Mage, White Mage and Paladin, in that order; I now play Paladin more than anything.)

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).

1890: Nael deus Defeated

A group of friends and I (including Andie) reached a milestone in our Final Fantasy XIV careers this evening: we defeated Turn 4 of the Second Coil of Bahamut, also known as “Turn 9” owing to it being the ninth in the series of thirteen high-level raid encounters that make up Final Fantasy XIV’s endgame.

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:

1870: Cards, Cards, Cards

Spent a bit of time playing Triple Triad in Final Fantasy XIV this evening, and had a lot of fun.

Triple Triad, for the uninitiated, was a card game introduced in Final Fantasy VIII. It’s a very simple game, although optional advanced rules can make it surprisingly brain-melting, particularly when they’re used in combination. And it’s a flexible enough game that, by playing around with these rules, a player with a “better” deck of cards isn’t necessarily always going to beat someone with “bad” cards.

For those who have never encountered the game, here’s how it works: There’s a 3×3 grid onto which you and your opponent take it in turns playing cards from a hand of five. (This means there will be one card left over at the end.) Cards have four numbers on them, corresponding to the four edges of the card. When you lay a card down and it “touches” the edge of another card (for example, you played a card in the middle-left space while there was already a card in the central space, meaning the right side of your card is touching the left side of the card already there) you compare the numbers. Under the normal rules, if the number you laid down is bigger than the number that was already there, you flip the card and claim it as your own. (For example, using the situation above, if the card in the middle had a “4” on its left edge, and the card you laid had a “5” or higher on its right edge, you’d claim the middle card.) Whoever has the most cards under their control when the board is filled wins. Simple.

The advanced rules fall into several different categories. Variations on “Open” mean that you and your opponent reveal either three or all of your cards from the outset, allowing for a degree of forward planning. “Random” disallows you from using the five-card decks you’ve built yourself, instead pulling five random cards from your complete collection. “Order” forces you to play the cards from your deck in the order you put them in there. “Chaos” forces you to play the cards from your deck in a random order. “Reverse” flips the normal rules on their head, meaning smaller numbers now beat larger numbers — this rule makes a “bad” deck suddenly very good. “Ascension” causes cards of the same type to inflate in value the more of them that are placed on the board. “Same” allows you to claim cards if you put down a card and the numbers on two of its sides match two cards already on the table. “Plus” is a similar rule, only instead of matching numbers, the two sides must add up to the same value. Both “Same” and “Plus” can set off combos, too, allowing you to potentially take the whole board in one go with a lucky or well-planned move.

As you can imagine, combining these rules can make for a game with a surprising amount of flexibility, and change the feel of it altogether. But even in its basic form, Triple Triad is a surprisingly compelling little diversion, and the more you play it, the more cunning little strategies you’ll spot and be able to adopt. Final Fantasy XIV allows you to challenge various non-player characters around the game world to a game — who may potentially give up some rare cards if you beat them — and also to play other players. In the latter case, you have the option of customising the rules to your liking, or throwing caution to the wind and having a “Roulette” match in which the rules are determined randomly. There are also regular tournaments — the first one started today — in which you have a set period of time in which to complete (and hopefully win!) as many games as you possibly can in order to score points and get yourself on the leaderboard.

It’s an extremely well fleshed-out version of a game that was a lot of fun to play against the computer in Final Fantasy VIII; it’s even more fun to be able to challenge friends to a game thanks to Final Fantasy XIV’s massively multiplayer nature.

And if nothing else, it’s something to do while waiting in a queue for a dungeon…

1868: A Relic Reborn, Again (and Again)

I am finally on the final step of one of Final Fantasy XIV’s most lengthy, gruelling challenges: the “Relic” quest, which can begin the moment you hit level 50 and will keep you going right up into top-tier endgame play. It was designed as an alternative for more “casual” players to be able to get better weapons over time without having to jump into super-difficult raids — a process which requires organisation and commitment from people in order to make any meaningful progress. The intention was to give these “casual” players something that would take about as long to complete as it would for a raider to be able to master top-level content and score the sweetest possible loot from them, but somewhere along the line the Relic questline became all but obligatory for everyone to complete, if only as a matter of pride.

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!

1865: Virtual Career Choices

One of the more interesting aspects of massively multiplayer online games as they continue to grow and expand is that it becomes harder and harder to “do everything” for various reasons. In some cases, it becomes harder to complete old content because there’s simply no-one else running it any more — Final Fantasy XIV neatly sidesteps this by keeping nearly everything in the game relevant at all times through various sidequests, including the notoriously lengthy Relic questline — and in others, it’s because there is so much to do that in order to max out everything and “complete” the game to “100%” would be a full-time occupation.

We’re starting to reach that point in Final Fantasy XIV now. It’s still eminently possible for players to get from level 1 to level 50 and beyond and complete all the PvE (Player vs Environment, or regular cooperative) content without too much difficulty — though Second Coil and Final Coil are still an insurmountable barrier for all but the most skilled players — but that’s not, by any means, all that there is to the game any more. In fact, there’s been numerous different potential “career paths” in the game since it launched, and these have only continued to grow and expand with their own “endgames” as the game has blossomed over time.

There’s crafting, for example. Serious crafters will have levelled all of the crafting classes from 1-50 to get all of the possible cross-class abilities, and will have worked on their equipment to get it strong enough to create the more difficult crafts. They’ll have worked out a good skill rotation to use for crafting items — much like a high-level PvE player works out a suitable skill rotation to maximise their damage output — and they’ll have their own goals in mind, be it making millions on the market board from producing the most desirable items, or simply being able to make cool stuff for their friends.

Then there’s gathering; much like crafting, gathering has its own endgame with new equipment to acquire and more and more difficult-to-obtain items becoming available over time. There’s less of a “skill rotation” element to this — although skills are still relevant — and these classes act as a good complement to their crafting counterparts.

Then there’s desynthesis, which ties in with crafting: through desynthesis, it becomes possible to turn items back into their component parts, which can sometimes yield rare items which either sell for a decent amount of money or which can be used to produce desirable items. Levelling this skill is its own, separate, convoluted process from crafting, but it pairs well with the crafting classes.

Then there’s PvP (Player vs Player) combat, which takes either the form of small four-on-four battles in a little arena, or large-scale multi-alliance battles on a large map. Opinions vary fairly wildly as to whether PvP is actually any good or not — and the queues to get in to it are frequently hellish — but there are dedicated players out there who know all about the PvP-exclusive abilities and have access to some of the cool-looking PvP-exclusive equipment.

And most recently, the Manderville Gold Saucer provides a couple of career options for adventurers who tire of the XP and Tomestone grinds: Chocobo racing and Triple Triad. Chocobo racing has its own complex metagame that would make an interesting standalone title in its own right, and Triple Triad likewise.

In reality, most Final Fantasy XIV players dabble in most of the above at one point or another, prioritising one thing above all others at any given moment. At present, for example, I’m prioritising getting my “Zodiac” weapon for at least one of my classes; after that, I’m intending on spending some serious time chocobo racing when I’m not attempting to take down Second Coil and, hopefully, subsequently, Final Coil.

There’s a ton to do. And it’s incredibly daunting. And I love it.

1863: Gold Saucer

Final Fantasy XIV patch day today, and with it comes the introduction of the Manderville Gold Saucer, a much-anticipated addition to the game that is heavily inspired by the similarly named locale from Final Fantasy VII.

And they’ve done a great job! Gold Saucer has plenty of activities to participate in — although I with they’d have put in a Final Fantasy VII-style Battle Square with increasingly challenging handicaps — and lots to aim for. Only trouble is, it gives a game that is already bursting with content even more long-term goals for people to fret over — though for a game designed to be played over the long term, I guess that’s not really an issue.

Highlights so far are, of course, card game Triple Triad, last seen in Final Fantasy VIII, and the chocobo racing, which is far more fun than it has any right to be. The best thing about these two attractions is that even low-level players can enjoy them — you only have to have reached level 15 to go to the Gold Saucer, which is a nice change from a lot of the other content that has been released over time, which is primarily aimed at endgamers.

Triple Triad is a simple card game in which two players face off against one another on a 3×3 grid. Drawing from a hand of five cards each, players take it in turns to place cards in one of the cells on the grid. Each card has four numbers corresponding to its four edges. If you put down a card next to another card and the facing edge “beats” the card that is already there (i.e. it’s a higher number), then you take control of the other card. Whoever has the most cards under their control when the grid is filled is the winner. There are numerous other optional rules, but the basic game is simple to understand, hard to master and extremely addictive — thanks in part to the collectible aspect of it, with cards coming from beating NPCs, beating specific bosses in dungeons and numerous other sources.

Chocobo racing, meanwhile, is implemented similarly to Final Fantasy VII. You don’t directly control the chocobo so much as encourage it to do things; you can make it accelerate, which costs stamina, and determine its horizontal position on the track; you don’t need to worry about steering around corners, however. You can pick up Mario Kart-style items to help yourself or hinder your opponents, and special tiles on the course can likewise help or hinder you. It’s immensely competitive and a whole lot of fun, with progression completely separate from your character’s main levelling. It’s practically a whole metagame in itself; I’m looking forward to exploring it in depth.

The other attractions are fun, too. Simple timed button-press minigames see you hitting things with hammers and punching Gilgamesh in the face, and “Gold Saucer Active Time Events” (or “GATEs”) take place regularly and involve large numbers of players at one time doing everything from platforming challenges to stealth missions and dance competitions. There’s a lot to enjoy.

I’m happy that Gold Saucer has ended up being a lot of fun. It provides some welcome relief from the grind elsewhere — particularly at endgame — and has the scope to develop further in the future. For now, I’m looking forward to expanding my Triple Triad collection and rising through the ranks of the chocobo racing leagues… yeah, this game still has its hooks in me as deeply as ever.

1861: Raid Night

It was Raid Night this evening, and the assembled forces of LoCoBomb (sans Andie, who was not feeling too hot earlier) once again took on Final Fantasy XIV’s The Second Coil of Bahamut, Turn 4, aka Turn 9.

This is, as I’ve noted in previous posts, one of the toughest fights in all of Final Fantasy XIV. Up until the Final Coil of Bahamut launched with patch 2.4 a while back, this battle was effectively the “true final boss” of the game, demanding that all eight party members know their jobs well, can learn mechanics and know what to do when. Since Final Coil became a thing, it’s been gradually made a bit easier, but it will still absolutely obliterate any party who goes in there unprepared thanks to more than a few instant-kill mechanics, plus some seriously hard hits from both the boss and the additional enemies that show up over the course of the fight.

It’s been a strong test for our assembled group, but it’s brought us together and helped us understand how we all play. I’ve been developing some strong tanking skills — they’re demanded in this fight, particularly if you take it on, as we are, with just one tank — and that’s been helping me play better elsewhere in the game.

It’s been an interesting personal journey so far. When I first started playing FFXIV, I had a ready-made group of acquaintances to play with thanks to the fact that someone I knew from 1up.com and Twitter invited me to come along. I was still somewhat anxious about playing with people I didn’t know, though, particularly if it was in content that was new to me. I chose a DPS class (Black Mage) because they’re perceived as having the least responsibility, at least in the early stages of the game — in late endgame encounters, they have a lot more to do — and they’re less likely to get everyone killed. I didn’t like running things without at least one person I knew, and I was nervous about asking for help.

There are still times today when I don’t like running with strangers — usually if they’re the aggressive, unpleasant, rude, elitist type — but I’m much more confident about it. I’m also happy to jump in on the healer or tank roles — roles which have direct responsibility for ensuring the rest of the group doesn’t get killed. Black Mage will always have a space in my heart, of course, but I’m spending a lot of my time tanking on Paladin at the moment, and really enjoying it; I don’t know if it’s my “main” as such — my Black Mage is technically further advanced thanks to its progress in the lengthy Relic weapon quest — but it tends to be my default choice when given the option these days.

Anyway. Exciting times are ahead, since on Tuesday patch 2.51 is released, and coming with it is the long-awaited arrival of Gold Saucer and Triple Triad. I’m looking forward to it a lot; after that, it won’t be all that long until PAX East!

In the meantime, I guess it’s back to jobhunting, though…