So lets talk about a peddler from the New World

 So allow me a minute to feel a little smug about this one. Since the rumours of it or RDM for Stormblood my theory on BLU and how it would work was constantly met with "thats stupid, you are stupid, they would never implement a class like that!".  However Fanfests announcements have come and gone and after waiting for the 4.5 special site to show up for confirmation i can whip out 'smug_anime_girl.png' in any forum argument over it with a great big 'told you so' on this one.

 With that moment of smug ass behaviour i earned out the way lets get to Blue Mage and why i didn't shit out some heated reaction like so many other people i know over this 'Limited Job'.  So what is a 'Limited Job' in this regard?
 Essentially it is a job with a specific focus or you could say 'market' of user. There have been MMORPG's in the past that to some measures of success or failure introduced new classes with a focus on being a pure pvp class, or a support in a game with nothing else outside the 'holy trinity' of traditional roles. Theres are intended to not be the endgame class for every activity and to not really excel in the same ways as others. Just to throw a twist in the mix and give players something to do as a fun alternative. Like how you can level by quests, fates and dungeons on an alt Job or if you want to just hit the Deep Dungeon train hard. Kind of.


 Basically it goes like this: Next month when patch 4.5 drops a questionable looking trader will spawn somewhere in the 2.0 areas. He claims to come from 'The New World' which if memory serves has only been this strongly name dropped before by the Mamool-Ja in Wanderers Palace Hard Mode and is assumed to either be an analogue to the undiscovered Americas of the world or a reflection of Vana'diel in the same way our Ivalice is to the Tactics games setting. He has brought with him strange new Soul Crystals that confer a new type of magic neither White nor Black but one that taps into the aetherial abilities of monsters. Simply put 'Monster Magic'. For a price, as in Gil not some kind of Bloodpact mind you, one of these new sketch as fug Job Crystals can be yours. You get one starter ability and then its on your way as a new lvl.1 Blue Mage!

So pretty much this is mechanically at least exactly what i predicted. Like Quina or the Warriors of Light from FFV you go out into the world, fight monsters and some run ins give you the ability to learn some Monster Magic. Cactuar will give you 1000 Needles, Malboro/Morbol will give you Bad Breath and so on. Treated like drops some skills are common, some very rare and some inbetween. There are -to begin with at least- 49 skills out there to find.

 Once you have gained a skill it can then be dragged onto a cross role style set up to allow you to arrange up to 24 of those 49 skills to form a loudout of sorts to match the activity or simply your tastes. Maybe there is a situation where 'Lvl.5 Death' is super useful but close range skills are pointless? Maybe you are going to constantly be dropping in and dragging out Spells and Abilities for every kind of situation. Not that you will be doing every kind of situation mind you.
 See this is what has some peoples jimmies all up in a rustle and i'll touch on that in a minute but the BLU mage is 'Limited' in the sense that it isn't a class you rush to 70 and jump into the final Ivalice raid with. In fact upon release they will be hard capped at lvl.50 with level increases coming during Shadowbringers. Perhaps this is so its not a balancing nightmare they dont need when it would just need the same again in 5.0's system wide combat revamp. Perhaps its never intended as something you take to endgame like the other three Mage Jobs at all?

 The only clear cut thing to go on from Yoshi and the team right now is this: The Job is going to have some ridiculously overpowered moves and will not be allowed in Party Finder. Period. Does this mean you will have to stick to PUG's for some content or you just cannot enter at all? Does this intended the class to be a way to get more life out of older content as a move hunting minigame? we just don't know. In some ways it almost makes BLU feel more like a combat version of a Disciple of Land Job than a traditional PVE MMORPG combat class. Not that you are just revisiting old content that is.
 Announced with the Job is a new activity called 'The Masked Carnival' which they seem to be teasing as BLU specific Guildhests but lets be honest anyone who has played World of Warcraft from Mists of Pandaria onwards can recognise this: Its the Brawlers Guild. A enclosed single player PVE combat scenario with increasingly challenging bosses or combinations of enemies right out of the Olympus Tournament from Kingdom Hearts. I doubt it will be for everyone but after seeing the Brawlers Guild grow a fanbase and knowing how crazy the min maxers can get with things as simple as materia melding alone i could see this having some ridiculous speed run style competitions as people try to get the right combo of abilities and tactics down to shave time off the servers high score for a clear or something.

Now we need to talk about people, shock of shocks, being mad on the internet.

 So fanfest ends its opening show and already the news that BLU won't be something you can speed to max level and jump into new content for has people ranging from mildly disappointed to what i can only describe as "Platinum Tier Buttmad". A whole lot of 'not a real job' and 'what a waste of time and resources' going around. Ranging from people from XI who have been waiting to retake their old main job as i did with RDM and finding for now at least thats not going to be the case to people who honestly seem made for the sake of it.

 To a degree i can get it but at the same time this is a game with a job system y'know? You aren't being locked into BLU and being left behind. Just as i have all the crafters and gatherers maxed because i want to live out muh Log Horizon production class fantasy doesn't mean everyone wants to or has to. Like Chocobo breeding/racing, Lords of Veminion or Triple Triad BLU seems less like yet another dps job in a game thats really not starved for dps right now at all but a new minigame/sub activity and personally thats fine. For me at least.

 Right now if i log in i need like 2 more yellow script items and i'm done with crafting. I finished Doma and the Namazu last night after taking it real slow so after completing the MSQ in the next patch my options are going to be BLU or Eureka WHICH APPARENTLY STILL HAS ANOTHER BLOODY AREA TO COME I FORGOT ABOUT?!? so you know what i'm going to do? I'm going to walk right by the Eureka npcs as usual and go pick up that BLU job crystal. Why? because it looks like fun. Does it suck for the people from XI who wanted their main job back? absolutely. I was worried when we first heard the leaks about RDM that it was just going to be a severely limited BLM in mechanics and thankfully its a Rune Fencer with Black and White magic and while not exactly the same i got my main back. For those who haven't yeah they should be as buttmad as they wish to be and more power to them.

 The people otherwise who are still acting like the sky is falling? i say what i say when i recommend the game over its competitors: Your character is your account, not your class. You are never locked into anything so if BLU sucks its a shame but at best it cost you some gil and time. Thats it. If its great eventually its level cap will be increased for more content but who cares if its fun right now doing the 50 levels of stuff it has to do now? it honestly beats the SB 60-70 of "do you want to spam like 3 of the possible dungeons inbetween the daily roulettes? again? 14th times the charm right?" alternative right now. After a year of that yeah i'll go stomp around our ARR grounds on a BLU vacation till Shadowbringers. 

Who knows, if its popular enough and can be balanced or given a 'locked in for duty finder content' rotation maybe 'Limited' wont be a prefix forever?

 right now i'm excited for the job after enjoying it in multiple other games in the series and worst case scenario i don't care for it and simply don't take part in it longterm. Considering the fact it scratches my completionist/collector itch and offers a unique activity i'm going to guess its probably my kind of thing but who knows right? roll on January so we can all get our hands on it and find out!

Fan Fest in review

 Well i let this sit for a while rather than vomit out a word salad like a fair number of places i visit in the last week or two. All in all this fanfest has been an interesting one. We have an expansion name and rough release window, but we don't know where or even when its set. We have a new job, but we don't know what its for. We have new mechanics, but we don't know when we will be using them.
 Its not like people are upset, its just a lot more vague and i imagine some of that is because they dont want another thing like the previews to Heavensward that spoiled the absolute shit out of the shocking twists at the end of A Realm Reborn. I guess its just an unusual feeling for FFXIV to know about content, but also to know comparatively little when put up against the fan fest reveals of Heavensward and Stormblood.

 So anyway. Shadowbringers. Guess the leaks were legit thus far huh? What we know however is pretty slim. The trailer shows the highlander going through all his jobs from 1.0 Archer to 4.0 Samurai/Monk while talking about becoming the warrior of Darkness. We see Thancred with a Gunblade, perhaps as the rumoured Soldier job escorting a young girl and -something which i feel people haven't really touched on that seems important- both Thancred and the warrior of light are being attacked by Amdapori constructs. Last time we saw them was when the magic levels in the ruins of Amdapor were going haywire and the SB Summoner questline where you find out Kuribu was in part connected to a summoning ritual rather than just being an animated statue. I can only imagine the latest patch talking about the aether being drained out of the land is related to this. Beyond that very little story. We know Zenos/Elidibus will be the final big bad of Stormblood so thats no spoiler. It was nice to hear Sokens theme since Uematsu is on a break but on the whole it was a great teaser trailer that ultimately tells us very little and thats weird but new content is new content so thats that announced.

Now we come to the quickfire info:

"Multiple new jobs coming in the expansion" - Strange thing here being that BLU was announced, i'll get to it later, and thats not coming in the expansion. Its a patch job for Stormblood. So whats coming in Shadowbringers? we know a Gunblade user is confirmed but aside from that? nothing. Just 'multiple jobs' and with the leak suggesting Blue Mage, Soldier and Dancer maybe multiple just means two in 5.0 and Dancer is coming later and Soldier uses a Gunblade? who knows. Personally i'm hoping SLD is a tank and DNC is a healer as we have enough dps for now and could use more tanks and healer jobs for variety. Lots of mmos treat tanks and healers like second class customers and give them one new job every 5 or so years in general and it would be great to see FFXIV give them some more love.

"Level to 80 in all new areas" - Big question here was "where?". We have new zones listed. The Rak'Tika Greatwood which looks extremely similar to a locations from FFXII and is home to a certain race of note in that game and Amh Areng which is a destroyed castle dotted landscape similar in appearance to the final area of Dark Souls 3. Apparently a new culture, well a new old dead one that is, but beyond that we know nothing. Where are these zones? are they even connected to each other? we simply don't know anything more about them at this point. New areas are always exciting for me regardless but its odd to see an MMORPG expansion reveal without a big "and we're going to [BLANK]!" during said reveal. Maybe its Thavnair. Maybe its undiscovered parts of Aldenard. We just don't know right now.

"9 dungeons at launch and new raids and alliance raids to follow" - nothing too shocking but 9 is a solid number to start with. It feels like you only really do Sirens Song, Bardams Mettle and Doma Castle before cap nowadays in SB and the lack of variety really makes levelling alt jobs a bit boring so variety is very welcome. Big question is whats the raid storyline this time? theres no Alexander or Omega set up thus far and we don't have many large tier bosses from previous games to dust off in this regard. These speculation of time travel in this expansion so maybe it comes in there, but i feel that could just feel like Alex again even if its not clockwork and gobbos.

"Take the war to Garlemald while averting the greatest Umbral Calamity of all and become the Warrior of Darkness" - This ones interesting. I wasn't expecting Garlemald so soon and the trailer makes it hard to tell if we are the hero's or the villains of the story. Perhaps the Kuribu style entities are attacking to defend something rather than be mindless monsters attacking the player? When we were warned of 'the world being destroyed in overwhelming light' does that mean a straight up army of light aligned constructs like the amdipori creations?

"Nu Mo beast tribes, a familiar face from XII showing up in the final Ivalice raid and a new playable race" - So Nu Mo from 12, a certain character thats a 'fan favourite but not balthier' in the next patches raid and a race teased by a Bugs Bunny shirt? Hmm. I wonder what that could be? (yeah we all know its Fran and Viera, get ready for SE to make back those recent losses on Fantasia alone!). Overall its nice to see Ivalice love. Hope the rumours of 16 being a return to that setting but viera being the last race isn't that surprising. In terms of archetypal FF species they are really the only none beastial one left that could wear current gear models.

"TP is gone, freeing up the GCD and DRK getting a rework" - TP is interesting. Were it at the end of HW it might seem a bit more dramatic but considering a lot of the gauges are good for so little i can easily imagine those reworked to be a resource gauge like how RDM uses it for its melee combo attacks. As for DRK? well i've not had much issue with it right now as a casual tank but the people i know who main it and only tank have barely played Stormblood because they hate the class. Apparently thats quite common and we all know what happened to PLD and WAR in the past and with Shadowbringers looking like the DRK expansion as the current is SAM/MNK and the last was DRG/PLD leaning who knows how big the changes will be?

All in all it was some interesting stuff but nothing too breath taking. There are a couple of other things i will talk about in other entries to break this up but we all know it ended with a bit of a surprise thats left people 'mixed' in terms of reactions, shocking for the internet i know, but i'll get to that at another time. For now its more FFXIV and we have 4.5 on the way and thats also promising to make Stormblood go out with a bang so exciting stuff all around, but a bit more vague than usual and Yoshi alluded thats clearly for good reason. We just gotta wait for the next fanfest to see what it is!

No i'm not making a pun about the 'I'm Blue' song.

But lets talk about the Blue Mage Leak/Rumour anyway. According to said rumour not only is Blue Mage or BLU one of the Jobs for the next expansion but it will be a preorder bonus of sorts and will become available to players who prepurchase the game. Sort of like how Blizzard did with the Demon Hunter Class for World of Warcrafts Legion expansion.

So first off what is a Blue Mage? Blue Mages first appeared in Final Fantasy V as a new option alongside the traditional Black, White and Red. While Black was damage, White was healing and Red was a weaker blend of the two Blue Magic was essentially a form of mimic magic. In Most examples of the Job -even times like in FFIX where it was never actually given the name- the Blue Mage does not learn their skills from a mentor or a tome but by experiencing it themselves. Most often from Monsters. Fight a monster that uses the regen spell White Wind? well you can use 'copy' or a similar skill to learn it should you defeat the monster and you keep the spell forever. Notable examples being the Warriors of Light in V, Quina Quen in IX and most popular with fans Khimari Ronso in X. As a notable side thing the rumour also states Ronso are a playable race in 5.0. Perhaps they are the more tribal mages who created Blue Magic while the Amdapori and Mhachi worked on Black and White magic?

 So how did that work in an MMORPG? in FFXI Blue Mages showed up as a Job in the Treasures of Aht Urghan expansion. They were basically elite anti monster tanks, trained to become a monster themselves and take in the essence of powerful monsters while struggling to combat their "inner beast" lest they become a mindless force of destruction themselves. To any WAR's reading this i'm sure the concept sounds familiar to a degree.
 In gameplay terms they were a close combat, tanky mage. They had a few basic attacks and buffs to power up Blue Magic but by and large their focus was on -shock of shocks- utilising Blue Magic spells to deal damage and resist damage. Crazy i know! But unlike other mages they were regarded in two ways. Physical spells were close range, impactful magic. In XIV terms think something like a RDM's Enchanted Rapier Skills. Then Monster Magic or Monster Affinity Magic. None impactful stuff more connected to elemental abilities. For example you might fight a crab and learn a water element spell. Just like a conjurer casting Stone or Water. The big deal for BLU was how you got them.
Monster Magic is acquired by defeating, or being in a part with allies that defeat a monster using the skill you want. You just need to be a BLU and not get KO'ed while doing so. You them, based on level have a number of BP or Blue Magic Points you can use to spend on a hotbar of skills from your library of skills. Basically imagine the cross role spells of XIV but with the mod mechanics from Warframe. Have 8 BP free for your last slot but Bad Breath costs 10BP? too bad you dont have the points even though the slots open.

 Now how would i implement this in XIV?  Essentially i would use job quests to give the core skills and the hunt log to point you in the direction of what you can get skills from. I know they kind of want the hunt to replace the hunt log but it just seems like such a perfect fit. You leave your early town and can get your stun from the jellyfish outside Limsa Lominsa for example. You just take the hit, beat the monster and bam. Now your spell list has a monster magic spell to add onto your BLU specific version of the cross bar. Simple. Kind of.
I would make it a tank myself since magical cloth tank is a really neat idea, maybe give it evasion based stuff and use NIN gear? but knowing how popular dps are in online games over tanks i could see it becoming another BRD or RDM. I wouldn't care for it as a RDM main who already heals and res'es players in raids with no desire for another supportive mage job but you never know.


A lot of people think the leak is legit and honestly i wouldn't be unhappy to see BLU added to the game. It could fit with the Ronso and we all saw last time around the demand for it is really up there in terms of FF jobs yet to show up in game but honestly i also wouldn't be upset if it didn't show up this time. I can take or leave it.

What about you? excited for it? worried it wont be the role you want?

What kind of BLU do you want to see in FFXIV?

Happy 5th Anniversary!

Good lord. Half a decade gone by already? It feels like just yesterday the internet at large was having a laugh at Square -not popular at the time during its "decade at lightning" debacle- shoving out FFXIV 1.0 or "4.0" as it was known based on review scores at the time with people considering the game dead on arrival.

 But we all know what happened, or who happened, to FFXIV next and Yoshida saved the game and arguably salvaged the Final Fantasy brand that once again seems to be in need or another goodwill boon from just about every product but XIV again giving the consumer issues with the brand. roll on Fanfest right?

I've mentioned it to a degree before but i think the only reason i got into FFXIV as a Final Fantasy die hard that had finally written the ip off after its disastrous PS3 experiences was the novelty of getting a beta code to try an mmo on my PS3. I had to delete all the installed games and it ran like shit but playing that A Realm Reborn beta as a WoW veteran getting disillusioned with World of Warcraft i found myself exploring Gridania and the South Shroud and thinking "Hey now, theres something to this game. Maybe this is worth looking into on release?" and the rest is history. From Raiding Coil as a BLM with his brand new Stardust Rod to taking down Nidhogg on the final steppes of faith as NIN with my Sandungs Lux to Taking down Omega as RDM and just waiting for the big bad of the expansion to show up for a bruising its been a hell of a ride.

Now just in game however. I can gush about the art style, amazing music that puts all over MMORPG's to shame and the like but what keeps me going is also the community. People that unlike every other online game i've tried don't rage on the first wipe. Don't quit over the smallest things. They come together be it to solve a new raid boss, deal with a massive organised group of assholes trying to crash the server market in a bid to take over the economy or worse. This is a community that cares about being in this together. Its not the individual power fantasy or the single player game with optional multiplayer. These are names and faces you know, for years now. You wave when you pass. You recognise each other from memorable times in expansions past.
 To say nothing or outside the game. When i'm running into a Hildebrand cosplayer at Comicon and dancing the Manderville, playing the FFTCG at a local tournament and shooting the shit over what might be coming in the next expansion or as simply as having someone in a comic book store tap me on the shoulder, point at the Job Stone on my bag and say "Hey man, what server?" both inside and out its the first fanbase for a game i've ran into that feels like an actual community comparable to stuff like the FGC or TCG crowds. These are people with a passion and its the same one you have for the same virtual world we all inhabit and thats really the MMORPG dream, isn't it?

Now days from the next Fanfest and the expected reveal of 5.0 and while excitement for Stormblood has been honestly pretty muted over the last 6 months or so people are really revving up the excitement for what the future holds. Heres hoping they can keep this up for another 5 eh?

Its pre fan fest expansion predictions time! again!

 Is it really that time again? so soon after the shitstorm of nobody's paid stream working for the last one? boy how time flies eh?

 Naturally of course this means its time to speculate our hopes, dreams and far less exciting expectations for the next expansion in what at the time of writing appears to be Square Enix's only ongoing Final Fantasy project thats not some form of burning trash fire. No pressure Yoshi.

 So this time around i'm basically listing things two ways: What i want to see and What i expect to see. One is my personal wants no matter how unlikely and the other is what i honestly expect based on the games support up to this point. So lets cut to the chase and jump right in!

What i expect to see:

New Job GEO/Geomancer: Will be a melee ranged magical dps with support elements like BRD. With positional effects added to moves right out of FFXI. You hit from the north and a move adds a fire dot, hit from the south and the same move gives your nearby allies a small attack speed buff. Positionals have had a bit of a rocky history in this game but i dont see how else you use the job without making it just another mage -or conjurer for that matter. But the entire SB expansion has been dropping strong hints and while i can't consider any expectation set in stone this certainly feels like a job in XIV's future even if its not in this particular expansion

New Job SLD/Soldier: Not a personal want but something a lot of people are expecting and i can see why. In working with Garlean rebels -gunblade users included- we have an already very fleshed out set of flashy moves and story connection. If MCH's can make artificial job crystals in some sweaty workhouse in Ishgard is it so unlikely the Garleans havent made similar? Folks seem to be expecting Squall: the class, personally i'm expecting a tank like FFVI's magitek knight as a defensive equivalent to Machinist. Things like the SMN questline in SB in particular has started pushing the idea that allagans pre collapse were beginning to augment weak magical abilities with technology and that sounds like something Garlemald would dig up and learn to use doesnt it?

New Playable Race Viera: Its been in high demand forever, they have been namedropped in the Ivalice storyline and most importantly they modelled a woman with bunny ears for the Tsukuyomi primal fight. They know people want it and some measure of the works done already. I could see them before something like Bangaa or some form of beast tribe.

New Regions: Now personally i don't think we are heading right to the empires front door with this expansion. I think they are intending for rebellions and internal struggles to push Garlemald over the course of the next story arc to become the big bad. Perhaps in reference to FFXV they are put so far on the defensive they do something unspeakable to weaponise the innocent civilians to turn them into some monsters or resort to summoning like beast tribes? i think they are going to be pushed to cross some line and have yet to reach the point to be desperate enough. We need to fight back and break down their expansion for a bit longer to rationalise that i think.
 Instead i think we are going to head south to southern Islabard, Thavnair -with the expansion capital in tropical Radz-At-Han, home to the morden Eorzean school of Alchemy and the only nation to trade with Garlemald- and perhaps the end of Erueka will lead Krile and Alphinaux back west to the 3 island chain of Old Sharlayan?

Class changes: Instead of something like another meter i imagine upon hitting level 80 our signature skills will change. They started to implement this in SB. If you hit the right level of Summmoner Bio II becomes Bio III automatically for example. It scales down for level synchs but at max level is a stronger, more flashy version. I think thats the direction in general for lvl.80 abilities.
To use Summoner as an example i think we will finally see Egi changes with max level changing them so Titan Egi becomes Sephirot Egi for example. Its not as exciting to some as straight up new moves but it allows your character to feel more powerful without buttonbloat. You might hit lvl.30 and get your carbuncle replaced with an Ifrit Egi as a new player and then see a lvl.80 summoner with a Ramuh Egi replacing it and go "oh man, i want to get to that level of power!"
 I also think we will see a couple of class revamps. Not as dramatic as PLD and WAR have had in the past but i firmly think DRK, NIN and WHM are all going to get some form of soft rework as their participation numbers have dropped dramatically in Stormblood and the sentiment seems to be DRK is mindlessly easy and NIN/WHM are either boring or their new SB mechanics made them actively less fun to play. I think 3 jobs being left behind is something Yoshi and the team wont want to see left to sit and thats going to change.

Theming: I think, based on the writers past ebbs and flows and the current state of the MSQ while writing this that the next expansion is in some ways going to be a lean back to ARR in some aspects. I think Ascian influence and Allagan tech causing trouble will come back to the forefront. Perhaps as some kind of arms race, perhaps as Garlemald is put on the defensive it simply gives others more time to dig too greedily and too deep but i think 'digging up forgotten secrets' is going to be the active theme of the next expansion and theres nothing that represents that better than stuff like the Allagans. Maybe we will even get a new zone by Mor Dhona? Beyond that i think they can't leave the idea of 'overwhelming light destroying the world' to just sit. Something has to give and i think thats going to start happening soon. Something is draining aether out of the land and if its not Zodiark then perhaps its actually Hydaelyn? What if the 'Shadowbringers' rumour is true and we have to end up taking a role more akin to the warriors of darkness?

Raiding: This is a bit of a muddy prediction but i think something is going to chance. Again. People are getting very vocal about missing something like Coil and having "the baby raid where everyone wants a carry and wipes all the time" or "savage with the perception that its only for the hardcore" which completely ignores normal modes as anything but a training mode and ultimately hurts the raiding overall. Back in ARR we went into Coil for the story and the fights. Sure there was gear but it wasn't seen as a pinata like alliance raids but nor was the early coil seen as the hardest of the hard stuff like savage that drove people away. Anyone who was playing at the time remembers the huge crowds at Wineport as pick up groups got ready to take their first steps into the Binding Coil of Bahamut and while few got to the end it was a memorable experience for all. In the current system it seems like the options are brainless loot farm -though i think the last Ivalice raid that released was a nice balance in terms of difficulty- or savage that people view as the elitist content and by and large dont bother with.
I'm not sure what the easy remedy is to be honest but i feel like the raiding model is going to change once again. Raiding proved far more popular in its domestic market than anticipated and they want that draw to still be there. But if you arent a savage raider it seems like the overwhelming majority see extreme primals as their endgame and for one item per job. I just dont see them settling on that as the happy outcome. I dont know what the change will be but i predict there will be one.

Gimmicks: The little things, the quality of life changes, the things you use to sell the casual player. These aren't the big sweeping changes but the things that add a little something to the core to expand upon it. We've had flying, swimming, diadem, eureka, treasure maps, squadrons, housing. What do they do next?
 Personally i don't think we see a new transport gimmick. Flying is already suffering from 'the warcraft problem' where upon its introduction it was like getting the Zoras Flippers in Zelda. Now places you could never reach are easily accessible and thats great. Its feeling like you reached a new tier and all these new secrets are waiting to be found. Then in SB i'm basically using it to reach mining nodes and otherwise just to skip gameplay just like modern WoW and to be frank that sucks. Swimming even more so. Without underwater combat swimming only serves to collect items for quests and thats so bland. So i think they have no ideas for them as gameplay ideas and probably wont try new ones anytime soon. Perhaps bring back real time airship rides and have them fly over zones with the option to jump off to get to out of reach places or something instead?
 I imagine housing might get a new area or simply new wards but i would love some more interaction with them. Technically you can make your house a item shop, blacksmith or cafe but why would players go there and how would they even know it exists? that needs work.
As for another Diadem/Eureka? ehh i think its been a failure as an experiment. Personally i think its more rational and logical to expand on successful systems like the Hunt or Khloe's diary instead. It just feels like time to revamp and improve existing systems instead of another time consuming experiment and while SE is not exactly doing so hot nowadays it makes sense to improve your core rather than waste time on another risky potential for failure.

Now thats all i expect to see. There may be more stuff i havent mentioned or maybe less stuff changed with more dramatic changes but what would i actually want to see but dont expect?

-Puppet Master as a job. Some kind of pet using tank that has constructs hold aggro while you lay traps and use the puppets to bring them into their path. With some kind of gothic/baroque aesthetic like the clowns/jesters from devil may cry.

-2 announced jobs and a 3rd kept secret. This would never happen with dataminers but i love how in FFXI there were times i just want into the quest to unlock a none starting job like DRK and it was a nice surprise to show my friends i was this new job they didnt even know was in the game yet. It would be spoiled in hours for most of us that keep up with the game news of course but i still love the idea of finding some old dude in trouble and getting a BLU job crystal as a reward and freaking out.

-Replace triple triad with an ingame version of the FFTCG like Hearthstone but for XIV. I like triple triad, but i love the physical card game, my XIV deck in particular. Trouble is finding people to play with is a hassle but if the ingame card game wasn't a 30 second steamroll i would be more inclined to play it and collect cards. Will never, ever happen but i can dream can't i?

-Give us a reason to fly and swim. Underwater combat, High up villages like some native people that live off the land you can only reach via flying for new endgame content. Stuff that makes us use the mechanics as something to move from A to B to collect something and avoid the mmo gameplay we pay a sub fee for. Give me adventure and a reason to explore!

-Highly unlikely but with the Ivalice stuff in game i would love one of my favourite underrated games to get some love with Vagrant Story's Sunk City of Lea Monde as an underground, inside based quest zone. We've had a sky zone, a sea zone and deserts, forests and more. Why not underground? and why caves when ivalice has a perfectly explorable buried ghost town right out of demon's souls?

But these are things i want that i also know are never going to happen. Its now a couple of days to the US fanfest which will at least be an expansion reveal and a trailer, maybe they will be kind and give the Americans a job reveal or something for once but who knows. For now we can only wait and dream of what new jobs and adventures we will be getting in the next major expansion pack to our mmo of choice. What are you expecting? What do you want?

A quick break from our usual content to talk about Vanadiel

 So ain't this something? Square Enix has announced that accompanying the FFXIV Fan Fest we know and love there will be a smaller 'Fan Event' for Final Fantasy XI.

This is interesting for two reasons. First 3 years ago they effectively said the game was dead and going into maintenance mode, i even made a video about it on my youtube channel at the time, and with this announcement all official fan events came to a close. It was sad but after 13 years and the game becoming a straight up Ghost Town it was a sad but understandable development. Yet here they are 3 years later where the game saw some level of resurgence, both in player interest and in development of new small scale updates, and once again this 16 year old game has news to announce.

 Secondly a lot of people either forgot or never saw it to begin with but there was in fact confirmation of a mobile remake of FFXI in the unreal engine that had a few screenshots leak but then it vanished and years later has never been heard from again. Perhaps its not as dead as people expected?

Personally i see SE going out of their way to do this after years without for two reasons:

1 - The game is actually dying this time and this is one last hurrah to toast the players that stuck with it for 16 long years.

2 - The Unreal Remake is finally being revealed and its not just coming to mobile anymore.

Now i'm a cynical bastard and would usually lean to the former. If not for the state of the mmorpg industry since the 'soft maintenance mode' announcement 3 years ago. Classic/Progression servers are a thing thats growing in popularity. Even Blizzard is doing it with World of Warcraft. So maybe Square is looking at that project thats been on the downlow for mobile for years and thinking 'hey, the markets changed, maybe theres money in this?' and a FFXI resurgence of a sort is on the way?


Honestly i have no idea but the concept of them touching on Vanadiel again is always a welcome one.

What do you think they are up to?

The Final update to Eureka and Good Riddance!

 Now its no secret i have a dislike for Eureka. Intense isn't quite the word since my general sentiment to it is "Why would i waste my finite free time playing a gold farming bot simulator?" and as such its not really some smouldering outrage and more a simple case of regarding the content as utterly redundant and having no reason for me to engage with it.

Personally i've said more than once while talking about it to other players that i feel it was intended as the "laidback, chill grind" filler content to launch with the expansion and serve as the backbone of the whole experience. However it came out late after multiple delays. The experience was boring, monotonous and all around a chore to take part in. From everything i've seen the drop off levels appear to have been pretty spectacular. Very few people i know, play with or just see regularly on the forums and the subreddit stuck with it into its second area. Their reasoning being "well the relic will probably be some 390 weapon with amazing stats, right?". 

So about that.

Now that Pagos is out and datamined to be giving 385 weapons with randomised stats those people are now understandably less than enthused with the idea of joining in on the grind for a third time. Meanwhile one last Omega run today and i got my 380 Rapier for RDM with great fixed stats and it took me a grand total of around 10 minutes per week for 7 weeks. So just over an hour for a great weapon that will last the rest of the expansion versus hours upon hours of grinding over the year for a chance at a weapon that at best is a nice model and will last a few levels into the next expansion as your levelling stat stick.

Personally i don't think the trade off is worth it.

Bare in mind i got every relic from ARR and HW. Including all the Padjal Weapons and the like. To say nothing of all the gear from all the tomestone and wolf mark vendors. So grinding for rewards is a total none issue to me as long as i am having fun doing it and the reward isn't randomised. Compounding the issue of lame rewards put simply i have had no fun in Eureka. At all.

Now you have to ask yourself 'whats the difference between this and things like Diadem right? Is it the variety of fates and monsters leading to different situations? not really since eureka has that. Is it the ability to go in as a Disciple of Land/Hand and actually do something other than killing mobs? perhaps thats an element. But personally? i think it comes down to two things based on the type of player: the explorer vs the chaser.

The Explorer plays games to dig in every nook and cranny and find secrets. Wether they are rare treasure or simply easter eggs to find this is a more meta level experience where you appreciate the craft of a virtual world made from nothing and all its nuances. Doing things as a NIN main at the time like using Hide to go stealth and sneaking through caves and such to find chests full of rare treasures for the entire group was a satisfying experience. I was using my class abilities to do a thing completely separate from the completion state goal we set out to do and sneaking around finding treasures for the team. That was great. Can't really do that in a bland instanced island full of trash mobs and nothing else can you?

Meanwhile the Chaser has a goal and works towards it. Maybe they plan, maybe its organic but for them the fun of the gameplay is working towards a specific goal. In Diadem it was "okay team we got X, Y and Z to do. Lets jump on it!" and they got a structured experience without the stress of organised raiding and with some more free roaming than a linear dungeon to let them have their fun. Place the same people in Eureka and its like they went from a day of regular grocery shopping to trying to get that super cheap flat screen on Black Friday and theres 20 for sale and 300 people after it.  You are not just given your goal. You are given competition. You may as well log back into FFXI and get your 2005 on standing around the spawning spots for Leaping Lizzy hoping you can tag her before all the farming bots do. Its basically the same thing but with a little more moving around involved.

All to say nothing of a story that nobody i know is experiencing purely based on the off putting gameplay. I still see folks like Sly on State of the Realm say stuff sometimes like they "just never got around to Scholisticate" and i go "what? come on its story how can you just ignore it!" but here i am with Eureka and i went in wanting to discover what that building was and why Krile was on a personal mission there. Yet i never did. The guy who has done every quest no matter how monotonous -see my Whisper-a-Go-Go mount for proof- and loves the story of this game and i just found the gameplay so off putting its the one thing i dont think i'll ever see myself. So its a case of of the gameplay being so dull it actively dissuades my far greater interest in the story. Thats bad.

Regardless of what personally rubs you the wrong way the crux of the issue is you are not having fun doing what you did in Diadem because of the way Eureka is structured and you can't fix that with patches. With time and the drop off of players who like myself simply consider it not worth the time this has only gotten worse as the groups in it for the long haul are getting more aggressive with each other. Every time a player from another group 'steals' mobs around you thats your combo going down. Thats resources taken from your group. Thats extra time you need to spend. Thats time and again constant negative reinforcement tailoring you to see other players as "assholes interfering with MY good time" and its not even a good time to begin with in this case!

 Now Pagos is the apparent end to Eureka's storyline and content i sincerely hope that Yoshi and the team take a good hard look at the thing in its totality. Player retention, player reaction and sentiment. This was multiplayer game poison on a level not quite there but comparable to WoW's "Garrison" system that left players sitting in a soft instanced solo hub that did everything for you if only you sank time into the monotony of it. That lead to the biggest critical bomb in maybe Blizzards entire history as a company (before a certain Diablo announcement at this weeks Blizzcon that is) and there really seems to be two possible extremes here:

1 - The userbase abhors Eureka in such significant numbers that its never touched on again and its time and resources are spent on either additional options for existing content or another new experimental idea.

2 - Either enough stuck with it, god knows why, or in terms of time and resources it was so cheap to make that they consider it a worthwhile filler which means we continue to get less content like dungeons and new minigames and just more of this nightmare.

I'm kind of hoping its the latter and some of that "we can admit when we shit the bed" sentiment is still around so the typical corporate shaming doesn't make them double down like other developers do when mistakes are made. Because its not like this is the kind of thing that leaves people screaming "heads must roll!" like yet another angry mob on the internet falling for the outrage culture meme. Simply put sometimes you experiment with new ideas and they don't work for the majority of your core audience.

But who knows, perhaps when the next FFXIV census does the rounds the number of players with the endgame achievements for Eureka will be shockingly high and i'm full of shit? but based purely on player sentiment and what i'm seeing personally the thing is dead and obviously they had to release the whole thing rather than leave it unfinished and abandoned but even the devs seem to have lost interest about it in live letters compared to the first big reveal where they were so excited to talk about the elemental levelling system.

The best we can hope for is that it was a learning experience for the future. Its looking like Stormblood has been somewhat less popular compared to A Realm Reborn and Heavensward and i think some of that -when not putting blame on trying to divide the team over two core stories at once- is things like eureka eating time and enthusiasm. No dev wants to work on something, send their baby out into the word and get back a resounding "yo shit sucks man" from their users and that kind of thing, especially if this was intended as a core pillar of the expansion can be a real defeating moment for developers who wanted to try something new. All i can say is sometimes you try something new and it is bad. It is just not a fun time. Yet if people didn't love your game and believe you can do far better we wouldn't still be here paying a monthly subscription fee would we?

For now at least we can, some of us at least, be glad that Eureka is done and dusted. Wrap it up, tuck it away and lets quickly move on. We've got the final Ivalice raid, the conclusion of the Stormblood main story thats really heating up and Fan Fest on the way!

and in the longrun who's going to care about totally optional timewastes after they lose their relevancy in terms of gear rewards when the Big Bads are on the horizon, both far more intertwined than we possibly imagined.

So long Eureka, you should have stayed Forbidden!

Raiding, Casuals, Tryhards and the 'Meter Debate'

 Now i don't talk about this kind of thing much mostly because i'm not a huge group player in FFXIV. I have my real life friends in our little Free Company and we do stuff together now and then, often separately because of our differing tastes for in game activities but i stopped with the '3 figure organisation of players that regularly raid/pvp' schtick back in the first tier of WoW's Mists of Pandaria. So i'll pug a raid now and then but its never a burning need to progress beyond normals for me since its not really what i play for.

 So as you might gather i consider myself an average player. Middle of the road in all roles who isn't amazing but always gets the job done. Thing is there are people to whom thats not good enough and others who consider it being 'try hard'. Really i think it comes down to a few different kinds of players i would roughly sum up as the following:

The Tourist: These are people that use MMORPG's like a very detailed chat room. For them it is a virtual world they can walk around and talk with people in. They will do endgame content at its easiest level and its fine. They saw what they wanted to, took some screenshots and moved on. The world and the people are its own experience for them and they may spend hours just standing around in their house with FC members trying on outfits and talking about the last movie or tv show they saw or something. They are the number padding users you will see in town but never run into in any matchmaking content.

The Anchor:  One of the more disliked subsets by and large. Players that are in most situations, to be blunt, a detriment. You would recognise them from the use of phrases like "Fuck you, you don't pay my sub!" or standing still and silent when asked if they need to know a fight while getting extremely angry if you point out a mistake they made and offer advice on how to improve. They are a combination of lazy and selfish mindsets that are really a fun void. I'm a firm believer in the old saying that 'The Party only moves as fast as its slowest member' and these are the people that dont use cooldowns, often for jobs like RDM or BLM wont even do their full rotation and spend more time in a fight dead than alive. Essentially they want a carry. They believe a subscription fee entitles them to everything without trying and we are all there to facilitate their good time over everything else.

The "Average": People that consider themselves the baseline in terms of skill, commitment and ability but actually might be more skilled than they believe they are but lack the drive or 'hardcore' mindset and don't like to brag. These are the players that are not the "no lifers" that min max everything but read up on patch notes, ensure all their materia is melded, they have the right cross job abilities and do things outside their role such as dps that battle res to save healers in a pinch. They treat the game less like a social experience or a job but just as another videogame where they get out what they put in but often its only one game out of many they play regularly and as such dont commit as much time to it as the progression crowd.

The Statistician:  No not a job in game but the 'number crunchers'. It doesn't always have to be progression raiding for world firsts, it can be obsessive crafters or rare item hunters. Regardless of drive these are the people that crunch the numbers. They have to squeeze every gil, minute and point of damage/healing to get the optimum output for their input. For them part of the fun is to know they did the best they could and for some who use parsers to know that others saw they did better than them.

The Vanguard: First in on patch day, last to leave at the end of the night. These players put their nose to the grindstone not just to progress but to be the first to do so. For them the game IS raiding. Its about pushing the numbers beyond even above average to get to places the average player wont for weeks if they ever will. The chase is brief but for that week of a new content drop it consumers their free time and inbetween its all just upkeep for the next challenge. Golden Saucer? Beast Tribes? completely meaningless content with no relevance to them.


 So why mention all of these? because i've seen a lot of debate brought up lately about the state of the FFXIV userbase and a conflict between the hardcore, casuals and the extremes of either. The arguments can be summed up into a few subsets:

Stalkers: Some people don't just take a bad run and brush it off. Some take it as the beginnings of a vendetta. They will stalk users they dislike and take to forums to badmouth them. Too demanding 'no lifers' or 'asshole shitters looking for an easy carry' are the obvious extremes but in general its a game with a comparatively small userbase of characters with so few players making alts. So your name is your name, your face -until you fantasia- is your face. You have a reputation. I still remember the german dude who melded the Materia for my Stardust Rod back in the day and sometimes we pass each other by at crafting hubs and wave and talk about the recent game updates now and then. Personally having a character rather than an account has always been part of the draw for me. I dont consider my character myself, but i consider it my character. When people think about experiences they have playing with me that character is the name and face and i like moments like someone asking me if i can craft a sword because their friend whos got them into the game bought theirs from me. Thats the .HACK fantasy right there and its great.
Buuut it also means you get this kind of stalking. Dont get me wrong theres at least 6 people i know that in game are huge loot ninjas or trade scam artists and i would always warn anyone away from them. I think i mentioned a good while ago that in the first release of ARR a bunch of french players crashed my servers economy claiming they were trying to 'drive the english pigs out' but in the end their names were blacklisted and nobody would buy from them or run content with them so they fled to Balmung or Moogle since those servers are known for being the 4chan/Reddit unofficial servers where they could find like minded arseholes. So sometimes its okay to remember a name/face in game and warn others. But it just as easily used by dickheads themselves to constantly harass and target others. Maybe they join the same raid and say 'i have logs that say they are shit, kick em' and wether they have improved or not since then its a kick. It also says something about the state of players i'll get to but point is there is this meta creeper idea to the two extremes trying to police each other. Sometimes a little of a userbase policing themselves is fine. But like anything its also very easy to abuse and lead to abuse.

The Changing Face of the Community: Now this is one that is kind of hard to deny. MMORPG's by and large are known for the shit rising to the top in terms of players representing the userbase at large. World of Warcraft in particular has the most rude, arrogant, short fused players in a large number i have ever run into in an MMORPG. If a party wipes once in a dungeon usually 2-3 players just up and leave. If someone makes a mistake theres liberal use of "FFS" and "GTFO FGT" and worse.
Comparatively it used to be different for FFXIV.
I remember the ARR beta. There was a version of 'Raubahns Wall' back then too. it was the MSQ that introduced Yda and Papalymo involving interacting with a stump in the South Shroud. Ask any beta tester and they will no doubt remember this. See there was one issue with this quest: Only one person could do it at a time. Were this any western game it would have been a mad dog pile like the infamous jedi holocron situation that killed Star Wars Galaxies. In a japanese game however? People queued. They formed an orderly line, chatting about the game and what they liked in the beta over 1.0. It got articles all over the web written about 'the most polite mmo userbase in the world' and for a time that was true.
But i don't think it is anymore. Its no secret the game has 'settled' and isn't really drawing in huge new user numbers and as the userbase is stable -though some would say shrinking- the pool of people for any in game activity shrinks. This means the crap rises to the top and its far harder to get people to go from the casual tomestone capper to a full on raider when their first experience is far more likely to be off putting. From what i've read this seems to be a bigger problem for american data centres over eu/asia ones. But just because i dont see it much doesnt mean its not well documented as a growing problem. The crux of it can be summed up pretty easily as one of two things listed below.

The "You dont pay my Sub" faction:  This is a game with a sub fee. That alone can instill in people a sense of 'its MY time and MY money, how DARE you tell me how to have fun' and in theory its not wrong. You dont pay to not have fun, you dont pay to play a game only to be told what to do. This is a fact.
 The issue with the extremes of this is the aforementioned 'Anchor' playertype. They are a weight holding the ground back because they dont want to try and dont see why they should. If they are playing badly, doing their rotation wrong or failing mechanics any attempt to helpfully inform them of how to solve this will be met with vitriol and verbal diarrhoea from a player who either feels insulted/embarrassed by being singled out or they simply dont have the drive to try and since they pay a fee are insulted that you would dare tell them how to have fun.

The "You are holding us all back" faction: Conversely however an MMORPG is by nature a collaborative, team based experience. You work together or grind alone. You do your best as part of the team or everyone else suffers due to your inabilities. Fights take longer, Instances timeout, Wipes happen that did not need to. These lean more to the hardcore crowd. They care about the destination, not the journey and are conscious of the group effort with other players existing as part of the team rather than a carry to facilitate personal gains. Some of which can be impatient and this leads to arguments over parsers and the idea of what is 'good enough'.

 So parsers in general are a big part of the issue. I play on PS4 exclusively nowadays so it doesn't mean anything to me but there are people that sim on the Sky, Stone Sea dummies for hours trying to get down THE rotation they need for peak performance and should someone not be doing the same numbers or similar they call them out leading to one of the two above reactions. A defensive, offended solo player or a hardcore minmaxer making everyone else awkward.

These are the extremes of course with varying levels of people inbetween but the long and short of this is that as time goes on the more extreme, abrasive and hard to ignore these camps become. On one side there are people that dont try to give it their all and don't see why they should when its their time and money. On the other its people that put in an obsessive amount of time and demand everyone else do the same.
 Personally i can empathise with both. I dont do savage much because i dont want to. I pay my sub for a good time and i get it doing what i want. At the same time if i see a RDM not doing the melee half of their toolset then i will mention it in case they simply dont know, but if they are intentionally phoning it in so to speak i can understand the distain too because at the end of the day i have to try harder to compensate for them in the group content.

 The issue here is essentially 'does this harm the longrun "player economy" for raiding and recruitment?' and on some level i think it is, or its starting to at least.

The players who don't want to try make anyone who screws up look bad and many of them are afraid of trying because they see the reactions they get from others. Conversely the hardcore players parsing people and shaming them before they learn the basics can put them off trying at all and i think its starting to look like there are less people getting into raiding to replace the ones stopping because they are getting tired and would rather settle in the 'average' camp instead.
The devs themselves have said in the past they never expected raiding to be the draw it is to so many and compared to other games you can ignore raiding and still have plenty to do rather than be funnelled to the treadmill so to speak. So in a game where there are so few incentives to do so surely these debates, shamings and fueds are only serving to push people away before they really try in a game that was once known for its welcoming, patient userbase.

I think in the long run you should be able to play how you want but this isn't a game with millions of people so you never run into the same assholes twice. This is a somewhat set userbase where grudges and issues can linger, festering for months as you keep running into each other. I dont think theres some big answer to give at the end of this post to magically solve this but more to highlight that the 'we are all in this together' sentiment remains the key to my own opinion and no matter your playstyle and opinion if you act like a dickhead and teach new players grouped up with you that its okay then it spreads like a goddamn plague.

 Sometimes to avoid burnout you gotta ask yourself 'what am i playing for', the thing asked far less often is the equally important question for looking at the people around you 'what are THEY playing for?'

 I think far more people could do with asking that nowadays.

Patch 4.4 in review

I'm pretty happy to say this has thus far been a much, much better experience then the previous patches for Stormblood. Better fights, better variety in music, more going on and generally it just felt more focussed than it has since Heavensward. Again i have to say i believe in part this is because with the Ala Mhigo and Doma stories wrapping up they are no longer so divided in terms of workload in this regard. We are back to the Empire/Ascians and that focus allows for a more linear creative process that allows most of the work to flow better. Though that said i do have to comment on just how many spelling and grammatical errors there are in the English translations on screen. Not only do they often not match the voice actors but there are straight up misspelled or duplicated words like "they were were" as the VO says "they were" for example. Its the first time i've actually seen an mmo do it this much beyond beta testing. Perhaps there were issues with the team, some were sick and the rest got overloaded i dont know. All i can say is it was noticeable on more than one occasion and this many years in you would think the scions names would be spelt right in conversation text.

 So onto the content. I've got it all out of the way bar the Savage Omega fights, and any Eureka content because i simply refuse to waste my time on it, and all in all i can say its good but like usual i'm going to break it down a little below.

The Story
 Quite honestly the story hasn't interested me in Stormblood much at all. They could afford so little time to both regions that Yotsuyu was really the only standout and beyond that most of the story was forgettable and completely paled in comparison to ARR/HW in general. This still suffered from a lot of "walk to this person to start a cutscene" just like SB has in general but much like the finale of the last patch did with Alphinaux this patch gives other characters some time in the spotlight and it was very welcome. As time goes on i find Lyse and Hien increasingly uninteresting. Likeable characters to be sure but storywise what are they bringing to the table compared to what the likes of Nanamo or Ameryic in their storylines in the last few outings they had? so far not much and since they were the focus of so much i found it hard to care. Here we return to familiar characters and give more time to folks like the Xaela tribes on the Azim Steppe and it was a very welcome change of pace.
 Beyond that, without heading into spoiler territory, this saw a refocus of the story on what i consider the 'core' story to Final Fantasy XIV rather than just the contained story of the expansion. The Ascians are making their moves, we get some character reveals and a tease for what i assume is a certain Big Bad we haven't seen mentioned since like The Chrysalis or earlier. Overall it felt a little more substantial even if it does still suffer from 'talk to the cutscene npc' syndrome a little too much still. I was invested in the events, exclaimed out loud at certain reveals and was genuinely bummed when it ended because it left me wanting a lot more which is always the sign of a story patch doing its job well. Something i found myself really saying for the first time for this expansion so all in all not perfect but a total improvement and step back to the quality HW taught us to expect.

The New Dungeons
 Now these were interesting. Overall they are fine dungeons, MSQ one is a bit too linear feeling and the other a bit too flat in terms of layout, but other than that i've done both multiple times and enjoyed every run. Compare that to previous additions like the Drowned City which i did once and its another case of the update feeling less simple. Like they saw complaints things were too easy, people were bored and not bothering to run the content and they spiced things up again which is great.

The Arboretum Hard Mode is honestly easier than its Normal Mode if i'm honest. Copperbell HM it is not! but the bosses, second and third in particular, are good fun and there are a fair few great new mechanics both in battle and out. For example all the mobs are covered by a mud based formula making them hyper aggressive but if you hit switches for water valves it swap the mobs model out for a clean version thats less aggressive and easier to fight. That kind of fight control thats entirely up to the players to shift difficulty should they choose reminded me of the similar systems in WoW's critically acclaimed Ulduar raid. Something people always lamented was never really brought back. Its nice to see them experiment with that here. Along with some new ideas like telegraphs not for damage but for effects that physically move you around could really lead to some interesting fights in the future if the ideas prove popular enough. Its a nice enough dungeon but the music, a broken scratchy version of the original like a run down malls spooky intercom still playing old ambient shopping music when its long abandoned, does add flavour to the scene but also gets pretty annoying as the dungeon goes on. Still its a fun if easy run i would compare to Xelphatol or The Vault.

The MSQ however is great in a very different way. As a dungeon its basically "take X boss and their mechanics and spice them up, but its still very much like fighting the same boss" -a theme that ran through the whole patch but more on that later- and its very point A-B as you clear a lot of trash that only really serve to pad the place. Where it shines is the visuals. You go in knowing theres a giant monster on that part of the world map, you go in seeing teasing signs of said monster, you are sure knowing SE its just that and its a lame attempt at surprise but then you crest a hill and the party just stops dead. Its exactly not what you expected and then when you realise what IS waiting at the end the reveal is all the more exciting because it set up your expectations then completely pulled a 180 on them. Its a eye candy dungeon thats great but trash heavy i would compared to The Fractal Continuum or Amdapoor Keep HM. But boy is that final boss Stone Vigil 2.0 in terms of a hard story wall for people with bad connections i tell you what!

Suzaku/Pheonix
 A lot of the stuff is just described with a shrug and "hey its signs of improvement" but good lord this is the best trial since Nidhogg hands down. Great looking boss, great arena, great music. Throw in some Rythmn game style mechanics -a sadly dwindling genre i adore- and this was all around a delight to run and i can't wait to do it again. Story is still completely barebones and uninteresting for the Four Lords stuff but but is this a step up compared to everything but Shinryu in the Trials category for Stormblood. Totally worth running just to see it. Unlike Byakko or Tsukuyomi this didn't just feel like the "storymode for dumb babbys" and it was easy to wipe in and people had to do the mechanics rather than get carried through by a healer. Fantastic fight and can't wait to try the harder version.

The Raid
 Omega has been a mixed bag for me. Yeah its great fan service but a lot of the first while visually cool are a bit too simple. For every Phantom Train theres 3 or 4 thats just 'a thing in the middle of a flat area' and after so much of that in Alexander i preferred the stuff that stands out. Thankfully -and i will not spoil the reveals- the fights for Omega's final ark are very satisfying. An easier final fight than Alex but on the whole the difficulty spiked up to a more satisfying degree. Making it feel less like a chore and more like a challenge which i the longrun is what feeds that need to conquer content and chase gear to increase your power an MMORPG needs for longevity. Part of why so many people seem to have dropped off in 4.1/4.2 was because the content was all pretty damn easy so there was no need to gear up much. Here across the board theres a minor but noticable increase to what i would consider closer to 'just right for an rpg challenge' instead of the previous 'dont pay attention its here for the cutscenes really' monotony of the difficulty in previous pre savage difficulties.

 The first fight is A pretty simple stance dance i would compare to Titan HM but with a faster beat to it. The second is the same for Nidhogg while the third feels like a lot Alex mechanics tied together and the finale is just kind of Kefka meets elements of Sephirot and Cruise Chaser. It starts simple, ramps up and up and then gently inclines down with a victory lap finale. It was just challenging enough for a blind pug to 2 or 3 shot everything but feel accomplished rather than checking off a objective when you did. I don't feel there are any like the Gravity fight in Deltascape that i simply just don't want to do after clearing because its anti fun for me. It was all a bit rounded in mechanics but fun. Sometimes you don't need a gimmick fight in a tier and thats just fine.
 As for the story? well its mixed. Its not as satisfying as all of Omega's build up was but at the same time feels a bit more thought out and deep compared to the earlier sections or parts of Alex. It almost felt like an episode of an anime, the ending in particular and while its a shame they don't expand more on Omega's origins some characters show up you don't expect and it really feels like a nod to the people who have been pretty vocal about missing the themes and tones of Heavensward ever since it finished.
 Still it left me wondering: Where the hell did Estinien go?

So overall i'm happier with this patch than the last two. I had a lot more fun and i think thats because of a number of things. The story is no longer split and as such can focus again, theres are new mechanics being experimented with -no doubt for the expansion being revealed at Fan Fest- that freshened things up and personally it feels to me as though there has been something of an ethos shift in the design team. They seem far more comfortable with challenging players a little more at the entry difficulty levels which is just fine by me. The content felt more satisfying to beat and i found myself going 'okay when i come back with better gear-' which is music to an MMO devs ears as thats a subconscious commitment to play more, because you want to.
 It also feels both in story and mechanics a lot more like "lets try to reinvent what we have" compared to Stormbloods thus far "lets try and make up new gimmicks". So many fights in this patch are "Oh this is Titan, but better", "Oh this is isgebind, but better" or "Oh this is Nidhogg, but better" and happening so many times feels a little too common to be just coincidence. It feels like they are looking at what worked and what players enjoyed more than throwing extremely casual content out and telling us we need to enjoy it wether we like it or not.

 For the most part 4.1 an 4.2 left me somewhat worried about the future of the game and my interest in it. 4.4 and to a lesser extent 4.3 has reinvigorated my interest and i am not alone. Its still a shame Eureka is getting so much focus and we never got a true relic questline to go on an adventure to get rather than a reskin from a mob grinder but on the whole this is the perfect time for this when buzz about the next expansion is starting to show. How many patches do we have left? personally i'm guessing 2 majors. One for the final Ivalice, the other for the end of the Four Lords and the story trial. Perhaps one in early December and the other in late March with another summer release for 5.0 in 2019?

 Its all speculation really, we don't even have the job conspiracy theories doing the rounds till we see the shirts Yoshi wears at Fan Fest in a few months of course, but people are back playing, people are enjoying the content again and personally i'm logging in to cap tomes, do my roullette dailies and i'm having fun doing so. Something i really burnt out on doing for the last few months PS4 meltdown or not. This is a hopeful sign of better things to come and if you have burnt out or taken a long break i recommend maybe paying for a month of sub time to check all this stuff out for a good time. The quality of life changes were nice, the new GATE at the Golden Saucer is fun but probably not for too many repeat tries but i'll still take it over the damn jar one thats not thankfully been replace with this one. As a RDM it was great to get buffs, not so great to see the FOTM crowd naturally jump on it and need all the gear i'm chasing in the new dungeons while bringing back the 4.0 "ummm, ya, no im a mage? why would i ever do melee attacks? lol" stuff that means i can be with 3 others in a trial and i'm the only one casting Verholy/flare because they simply don't know how. Thats not so fun. Overall its mixed but satisfying. Hopeful but still wanting more. Little more vague overall i know, but boy are we getting into end of ARR level spoiler stuff with this one folks which is making it real hard to talk about some of this stuff, but i guess that shows its still investing folks in the material, right?