FFXIV: A Realm Reborn

[tanstalas]

It's better.

[xRECKONERx]

What is the non-raid endgame content like? (for example, in WoW, getting heirloom gear for alts)

How does gear progression work?

Are there dungeons/raids as you level? What about at endgame?

What kind of innovations make this stand out from WoW? I read something about player housing -- how does that work?

[xRECKONERx]

Also: is there a trial version or something I can download to whet my appetite?

[ActionDan]

What is the non-raid endgame content like? (for example, in WoW, getting heirloom gear for alts)

How does gear progression work?

Are there dungeons/raids as you level? What about at endgame?

What kind of innovations make this stand out from WoW? I read something about player housing -- how does that work?

Well at endgame a few lvl 50 (the lvl cap) dungeons unlock: Castrum Meridianum (required for story), The Praetorium (required for story), The Wanderer's Palace, Amdapor Keep, and finally, The Binding Coil of Bahamut. People at end game will farm WP/AK for 'tomes' which will allow you to buy better gear. Coil consists of 5 'turns' each is like a boss fight basically, and that drops 2 pieces of better-than-tome-gear per turn (besides turn 3).

people farm AK/WP to get tomes to buy stuff for alt jobs, which you'd want to level by end-game to procure cross-class abilities. There are also tons of crafting classes that people spend time on to make money/make gear.

Before you hit 50, there are plenty of fun dungeons to participant in that'll drop useful loot as you level. levels for these are 15,16,17,20,24,28,32,35,38,41,44,47.

Also: is there a trial version or something I can download to whet my appetite?

I think maybe there is a benchmark thing that is still around wherein you can create a character and see some nice graphics... but no play.

[Iecerint]

More content and further UI improvements are coming with the version update in December. Free Company (i.e., guild) housing is being released at that time, and player housing is supposed to be added in update 2.2 (~March or so).

Gear progression is vertical so far.

[AngryPidgeon]

@Reckoner: Someone in our guild chat said that you can't enjoy any MMO after playing WoW, even WoW. And hes sort of right : P. But let me explain differences as I perceive them (I played WoW up to Cataclysm)

It can be compared to WoW, they are similar.

FF is more

story driven

, and there is a "main story" quest line that you are (extremely heavily) encouraged to follow as you level. Dungeons become available as you progress in the main story (and there are a few side dungeons you pick up from other quests). Getting into dungeons is 100% streamlined through the matchmaking system (alternatively you can queue as a group of however many people). I think WoW is moreorless doing things this way nowadays, but FF has like no concept of entering dungeons physically - all through finder, so very convenient. Anyways, expect an involved main story and several cut scenes throughout the game.

I dislike the

interface

compared to WoW. FF's map looks ugly in comparison and the different game windows could be more visually appealing. I feel like they are trying to be throwback-y with some of the UI and are sacrificing eye candy. But I know the HuD is configurable and I havent messed with that and I know the game is newly released to graphic updates will likely come.

I love the

tradecrafting

compared to WoW though. Every crafting (alchemy, cooking ,etc) is levelled exactly like a battle class. There is a little minigame involved with all the craftings, but I like there approach to it. There are "High Quality" items and when you use HQ items as materials for producing, your chance of producing HQ items improves. All in all, the market of FF is more interesting and seems to have more opportunities for making money with different levels of crafting. Levelling crafting can be a bit farmy/tedious, but the surrounding system and market is interesting/rewarding.

Levelling

is a little obnoxious. I feel like 1-50 is faster than 1-60 was in vanilla WoW (could be wrong, been ages). I dislike that killing monsters yields barely tangible amounts of XP. All levelling is through quests (and there will be splashes of quests if you follow the man story around) and..... fates. Fates are little mini events that pop up in regions and you show up (with a bunch of other people farming them), kill the very-high-hp monster(s) and get XP for it. Its efficient, but boring as all get out. Although apparently dungeons are having XP gains increased shortly to make them a good alternative. Also on this, FF has its own system for daily quests which is pretty alright once you get used to it.

I waffle on whether I like the graphics or not. Its weird. Some of the areas in the game have GREAT graphics and other parts of the game leave something to be desired. Once again, I expect this will only get better though since this is new.

Traveling

is a lot easier in FF once you get used to the layout of transportation networks. You can spend money to teleport to any city you've been too. So its kind of nice that mindless running is a bit less of the game (at the cost of money, which just adds to the interesting-ness of the market).

Gear

is acquired through crafting and quests (especially main story quest) and a little bit dungeons. Every class also gets their class gear at lvl 45 which is the pre-raid gear as I understand it. I cant really comment on endgame dungeons right now since I only just hit 50, but I know there are several endgame raids of size 4/8 people. I like the gear system because it is fairly viable to buy gear at a reasonable price and sell it at a reasonable price when it is needed to fill in pieces you dont have. Crafting gear at all levels is actually worthwhile to seek out while levelling on occasions.

Now one concept on FF is you have one character who can level ALL classes/tradecrafts and switch between them by equipping the right weapon/tool. You have an armory chest (in addition to your normal inventory which you don't need to hunt for bags for) which can store 25? items of every slot. This can get a bit chaotic trying to manage all the gear for different classes and equipping gear is a little weird with gearsets which need to be improved, but its all fairly manageable.

[xRECKONERx]

Hmm. Not sure how I feel about being able to be all classes. It seems kind of... well, it makes it seem meaningless. In WoW, it's a huge grind to struggle and get that character to the endgame and gear up that specific character for that specific spec, but when you've done it, it's a huge accomplishment. And when you start on an alt or another class, you see the huge trial ahead of you but it's worth it. It makes having alt classes a big deal and something to be proud of... if it's all on one character, then it seems kind of dumb. Especially since I love having varied races on my different classes.

I read online somewhere that there are 24 man raids... are any of those available yet?

[Iecerint]

Reck, I don't understand how your concerns about being able to change classes is related to a perception of meaninglessness. If getting one class geared is an accomplishment, surely getting all of them geared is also an accomplishment? I can understand wanting to play around with different races, though. FFXI handled classes the same way as this, so I guess I'm biased on this point in the opposite direction.

The Crystal Tower, which will apparently be a recreation of the Crystal Tower dungeon from FFIII complete with Xande and Cloud of Darkness boss fights, is being added in update 2.1 in December. It is 24-man content. As I understand it, the design will be an alliance of 3 groups of 8 who complete pre-boss content separately and join up for the boss fights, and the separate paths will differ in structure (e.g., maybe one path is a battle gauntlet, another focuses on puzzles, etc). It was originally planned for release at launch, but was delayed. I suspect they had trouble optimizing it for PS3.

[tanstalas]

Cross class abilities

[AngryPidgeon]

if it's all on one character, then it seems kind of dumb. Especially since I love having varied races on my different classes.

Ya, I miss this too. FFXIV is a little unique in tha you have to go the extra mile to unlock useful things, so not everyone will necessarily have everything useful when they hit endgame. I can't think of anything WoW did like this except finding rare drops for crafting which was exciting but... rare. (And gearing up, but eh thats standard and also present here).

FFXIV lets you equip some abilities from other classes to your current class (there are restrictions on what and when can be crossed) but it is kind of an interesting design. Makes leveling all classes on the same character sort of mandatory as opposed to different characters though. I wish there were an equivalent of talent points.

That said, crafting and CC abilities are really fun together since all crafts give you crafting abilities to help with other crafts.

[xRECKONERx]

Reck, I don't understand how your concerns about being able to change classes is related to a perception of meaninglessness. If getting one class geared is an accomplishment, surely getting all of them geared is also an accomplishment? I can understand wanting to play around with different races, though. FFXI handled classes the same way as this, so I guess I'm biased on this point in the opposite direction.

I'm just bad with words.

What I meant is that I loved going, "Okay, I'm hopping over to my max-level Shaman from my max-level Priest!"

Here it's just, "Okay, I have all the classes on one toon, so... yeah." You know? Like, each toon for me in WoW had such an individualized and personalized playstyle and memories associated with them. I transmog'd different gear for each one dependent upon their race or what type of person I imagined them being, I gave each one a name I felt best fit each one... here, it just seems a little less "rich" of an experience.

I do like some of the changes I've heard, though. Maybe I'll give this a try eventually. If there's no trial, though, I may wait awhile since I still have my WoW subscription and haven't cleared Siege of Orgrimmar yet.

[tanstalas]

It is better to have some jobs on certain races

[Iecerint]

Races have very small statistical differences, but these differences do not increase in absolute magnitude as levels increase, so they are negligible at endgame.

But you could use that as an excuse to min-max yourself multiple characters.

[Belisarius]

There are lots of excuses for rocking multiple characters. I play on 3 servers (4 if you count an old 1.0 character I haven't bothered to delete yet); One with characters from my home forums, one with people I work with, and the one with mafiascum people on it. On one of those servers, I have multiple characters so that I can build up heaps and heaps of rest exp so it doesn't matter if I burn up a pile of it doing stuff like gathering or synthing mats on a low-level DoH. I still plan on creating yet another one because I have nobody born in Limsa yet, so I haven't experienced its story missions pre-Satasha. Maybe you want to have a character with a mustache. There's no reason you can't level lots of alts!

[Iecerint]

They just announced focustarget functionality for PS3 in 2.1.

I...so happy...

[Iecerint]

I beat our hardcore raid group to Turn 4 of Coil.

Which was last week, but it felt pretty good.

[ActionDan]

I beat our hardcore raid group to Turn 4 of Coil.

Which was last week, but it felt pretty good.

race you to turn 5

[Iecerint]

I think Twintania is actually pretty beatable now that she's been nerfed. New people report beating her on the official forums every day.

[ActionDan]

oh. didn't realize. a little sad.

[Iecerint]

I actually find it kind of exciting.

Though my myth from the T5 drop is best in slot, anyway, so I don't know if Turn 5 really gives me anything too fancy.

They made her twister mechanic more forgiving; it used to be kind of impossible to dodge depending upon RNG.

[ActionDan]

ah. I mean it's nice that people can beat her. I just like bosses to be as hard as possible.

[Iecerint]

I think she was designed to be impossible pre-nerf (though they have claimed to the contrary). SE didn't want people to complete all of the available content too far ahead of the 2.1 release.

[tanstalas]

One group downed her before the nerf, was on the official forums.

In other news. 15 more crafting levels until I never have to craft again!

[Iecerint]

I thought Blue Garter was just after the nerf?

There were some other groups that killed her before, but they took advantage of an exploit where her scripting got messed up and she just stood there and let people kill her.

[Iecerint]

I went back and checked; you're right, Blue Garter did it pre-nerf. Here's a cute overview of the fight that they made.