Subtle Tweaks

Fountains of Gil

Last night was the first night I have played FFXIV seriously since getting Pokemon.  Well I suppose that is a bit of a misnomer as I was in game Tuesday night to help a guild member through the Garuda Primal… but suffice to say it was the first time I have really done something serious in a bit.  In that time they released a fairly significant patch to the server, and it was for most of us the first time experiencing the changes.  I have to say overall they are pretty positive.  You can see the full patch notes here, but I will talk about a few of the significant items.

One of my largest complaints, that I have mentioned a few times is that this game has absolutely tons of gold sinks… but no really viable gold fountains other than crafted high quality end game gear.  Even that has been dropping drastically as the best in slot HQ Robe of Vanya started out around 1.5 million gil and is now down to 400k gil on Cactuar.  The main problem is, that in our little group since hitting 50 each of our pools of gil has been falling severely with no real way of gaining it back at a reasonable rate.  Apparently Squeenix has heard our plea and implemented the strangest gold fountain I have ever seen in a game.

Apparently they did not like the fact that players were skipping trash packs in dungeons and doing “speed runs”, because when they put their fountain in it has in essence patched two holes in the boat.  In the level 50ish dungeons, the trash packs now drop a not insignificant amount of gil…  we were mostly seeing around 50 gil per mob.  This means that the dungeon as a whole is a really good way to gain back some of that cash we have been losing.  Over the course of the evening in running Amdapor Keep and Wanderers Palace once each I got around 6000 gil.  That is not enough to make me wealthy… but it is enough to stave off the slow bleed of currency.

Subtle Tweaks

To make Wanderer’s Palace more appealing they have increased the number of “rockbooks” aka Tomestones that drop.  Between a running of Amdapor and Wanderer’s I had enough to go out and purchase the Darklight belt, so I was pretty pleased with that.  The trend continued last night with minor drops happening for our dps and healing, and not a single viable tank drop in sight.  In the first picture in the post you can see I have swapped out my “so you decided to hit 50” chest piece for one that dropped in Wanderers…  but sadly it was an exact side grade.  I just wanted to look slightly different for a bit, so I snagged it.

In one of the patch notes threads, we had seen the extremely ambiguous patch note of “adjusted difficulty of level 50 encounters”, which we all took to mean that they made things more difficult.  However upon running the two 50 4 man dungeons last night, it seemed like a lot of the fights were easier, or at least I was not taking nearly as much damage as before.  Granted this could be to a large number of factors, not the least of which is that we are all fairly used to the encounters now.  However it did feel like I was taking less raw damage than I was previously, especially on a few of the more troubling packs.

Goodbye Bullshit

In the past I wrote about the absolute hackery that was the Dark Devices FATE in Northern Thanalan.  The FATE that essentially all players seemed to universally extend out as long as humanly possible to farm the constant flow of instant spawn cultists.  If you were in the right group, and you got a tag in on every mob you could get some truly amazing experience.  During one group we managed to get an over 300 chain of kills, and that FATE along was worth just over a half of a level a 48 when I was leveling my bard.  However if you were NOT in the chosen party… you got to waste 15 minutes of your time and next to no experience for the process.

I am proud to announce that they did in fact fix that bullshit.  Apparently now the cultists no longer instant spawn, and as a result there is no point in delaying the FATE.  So as a result I am imagining that FATEs in Northern Thanalan are now nice and smooth, as quite honestly OTHER than Dark Devices it was a rather enjoyable zone for grouping.  It is smallish in size but packed full of really high value fates including the really cool Chimera fate in the northern end of the zone that awards a pet.  Hopefully as a whole the experience of grinding from 45 to 50 is better for most players.  Our guild has just about determined that the best way to boost a player to 50 is to hang out in the zone and kill the various Garleans as fast as you can, rather than trying to FATE anyways.  We’ve helped a handful of folks get the last bit towards 50 doing this, and it seems like something that is easily repeatable.