October 2014 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Lalafell Rescue Squad

October 31, 2014 by Belghast

Rubber Snake Attack

Instead of coming home and gaming like normal last night, I actually went out and did something sociable with actual living and breathing people! I know it is a shock to the system to fathom the ramifications of that statement. Several months ago a group from work attended the live RiffTrax showing of the Matthew Broderick Godzilla and it was an absolute blast. I have been a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 since college, and RiffTrax is essentially the same folks doing the same sort of thing… without the robots and a guy trapped on a space station construct. During that they previewed the next movie and at that point we decided that we had to attend again so we could see Anaconda… a movie that I did not remember being as cheesy as it actually was. Thankfully we learned a lot from the first time, and arrived at the theater considerably earlier. Last time none of us actually got to sit together, but instead ended up having to pair up to get us all seated. Last night we at dinner at a restaurant in the same parking lot as the theater so we were able to walk over and got there well before they even opened up seating.

Anaconda… was seriously worse of a movie than I remember, and even at the time I thought the snake looked nothing like an actual snake. The cast was disturbingly “star studded” for as bad of a train wreck as it ended up being. You had Jon Voight, Eric Stoltz, Owen Wilson, Ice Cube and I believe this was the movie debut of Jennifer Lopez. At the very least it was before I was actually aware of who she was, as I don’t think she had released her first album yet. There were just so many cheesy things about the movie… like the fact that every single time that we see J-Lo on screen it is apparently super cold in the Amazon because they make a point of lingering on some massive nippledge going on. Aside from the snake being horrible… it looked like they recycled a ton of footage. The Rifftrax guys pointed out a moment near the end of the movie where the waterfall is going backwards… as they quite literally just reversed a shot from earlier in the movie. Similarly they seem to keep passing the exact same snake idol a half dozen times.

I did not however attend to watch the movie, but instead listen to the RiffTrax crew tear it apart. The Godzilla show was great but this one took it to all new levels. In fact I would have to say this is probably going to go down as one of their better performances. There was just so much to make fun of in this movie, and the fact that it had both J-Lo and IceCube in it… basically gave them free reign to mix in lots jokes about their careers as a whole. This is starting to become a regular thing that we do as a group. They previewed the next show coming up December 4th which is a strange rendition of Santa Claus from the 50s. The trailer bits they showed looked absolutely insane… Santa Claus in space… fighting and army of dancing devils. Hopefully we can once again muster the troops and go as a group. Not sure we get much “team building” done, but it is a really fun time nonetheless.

Lalafell Rescue Squad

This RiffTrax overall seemed a bit shorter than the last one, and as a result I ended up getting back home at a decent hour. I decided to pop into Final Fantasty XIV for a bit and see what all was happening. After milling around a bit in the housing district a few of us pulled together a run for the new Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard mode. This was one of those dungeons that we avoided like the plague because of its frustrating “one shot death” mechanics, so I think as a whole we were at the least concerned when we saw it would end up as a hard mode. Thankfully the mechanics are not that cheap this time around. Not to spoil this for anyone, but there are no bees this time around. What is there instead is a continuation of the original story. When we cleared the dungeon the first time, it apparently made the place safe enough for groups of adventurers to begin exploring it. However a group of tomb robbers triggered yet another trap, and you are going there at the bidding of a brother who wishes you to go rescue his sister. Adorable Lalafell needing rescuing… that sounds like as noble cause as any… my people need me.

I am not as geared as I could be, but I am no slouch overall. The bare minimum for the dungeon is ilevel 80 and I went in there last night with 103. Overall I think I was managing the damage pretty well, but it definitely put our healer through a workout. I think in part he was just used to healing Paladins with their significantly smaller health pools. With group buffs I was over 10,000 hit points, and a comparable Paladin would be around 6,000. So when the final boss hit me for 2,000 it really didn’t feel that significant, however with a paladin that would be 1/3rd of their available health pool. I think Tams complaint was that it felt like his heals weren’t doing much, but that is primarily because a percentage of my health bar is quite a bit more hit points than a percentage of someone else’s health bar. In any case we made it through the dungeon without any wipes and only I believe a single death. The content is hard enough to be challenging, but not so hard that it becomes punishing. I feel like Pharo Sirius is still a rougher dungeon than this one for example.

At the end of the day we finished the run, beat the big bad end boss and saved the adorable Lalafell Adventerer. I feel like it was a good way to end an already awesome night. One of my favorite things about the new dungeons is that they drop these tokens that can then be turned in for any ilevel 90 class piece of armor. So while they did in fact remove these from the Tombstone and Hunt vendors, you can still get the gear. The fact that they shifted it to a token system means the mobs have a more shallow loot table, and as a result each individual piece is more useful. I feel like I will enjoy picking up a level 90 set way more by running these three new dungeons than I ever would by simply grinding tombstones or hunts until I had the necessary currency. This is fine and dandy for experienced players, but I still feel like this patch and its changes made it significantly harder for a brand new player to gear up. Granted maybe they did that on purpose, so players would have to spend a bit more time running dungeons before leap-frogging into end game content.

Dimension Goodies a Plenty

With all the Final Fantasy XIV goodness, I am still playing some Rift Nightmare Tide… it has just taken a back seat. At the very least I am logging in a few times a day to make sure my minions are running the 8 hour long missions. These reward some crazy stuff, and so far as a result of all of my minion missions I have literally three 28 slot bags full of nothing but dimension stuff. At some point I need to sift through it all and see what I can actually use. You get a pretty broad mix of things from basic building blocks to intricate items like the Infernal Dawn Cannon. The 8 hour long dimension missions have a chance of rewarding these chests that each have half a dozen items in them… so it feels like buying those grab bags off the store. I really like the Rift dimensions system for player housing, so at some point I really should work on building a proper home.

Rift is more than likely going to be a weekend game for me as I do laundry and watch stuff off netflix or the DVR. The pace works well there and the fact that I can pop to the guild dimension when I afk, and return exactly to the point where I last left off is a really nice feature. The content in Nightmare Tide is significantly more enjoyable for me than Storm Legion was. At some point soon I want to try out one of the new dungeons. I dinged 61, so have made some forward momentum, but still have not really touched even half of Goboro Reef. While there may only be three new zones, each of the zones is absolutely massive in scale. I’ve not actually done any of the instant adventures, mostly because it seems like an excessive amount of area to try and cover rapidly. In any case I am still enjoying the game, but just playing it as a side venture with Final Fantasy XIV being my primary focus.

#RiffTrax #FFXIV #Rift

Bribing Good Behavior

October 30, 2014 by Belghast

Better Community

Yesterday I posted this picture and said that the person dancing with Sagacyte and I was a friend of his. Turns out that apparently this was not the case. The way she waved and immediately started dancing with us, made me think that she must have known him. So yeah… complete and total stranger came over and started interacting and now she is another person on my friends list. I guess I shouldn’t be shocked since this sort of thing happens all the time. There is a community spirit that infuses Final Fantasy XIV, and I am still not entirely used to just how prevalent it is. There are lots of quests that involve you walking into an area and a bunch of mobs spawn on top of you. The mobs that actually belong to you are marked but you can help out with any of them. It is a rare occasion that someone will move on after their mobs are dead and not help you kill yours. There was this one tank the other night that I swear “tanked” five sets of these mobs as new people walked into the spawning area.

This sort of thing is absolutely commonplace now, but the strange thing is… it wasn’t. What is strange about Final Fantasy XIV is that my friends and I played this game seriously at launch for roughly three months. Then we wandered off to do other things, and upon returning were shocked and amazed at how much the community had improved. At launch it felt like every other MMO, with folks doing the same kind of selfish actions that are so common place in other games. Running a random dungeon, likely meant that you would have one person complaining that you were pulling to slow, and another person complaining that the dps wasn’t somehow good enough… even though there are no meters for that. Basically the community had the same rampant asshatery that we’ve all experienced in “modern mmos”. Upon returning however we found that this negative element was almost completely gone. Sure you will encounter an abusive player every so often, but the community as a whole seems to have done a drastic turn around.

Bribing Good Behavior

One thing that we noticed quickly that had been added to the game since we last played was the player commendation system. What makes the system interesting is that at the end of every duty, each player gets a single commendation that they can award to another player from that group. Now normally when a game has a system like this, you can queue exclusively with guild members or friends and cheat the system. However in this case you cannot reward commendations to your guildies, but have to instead use it on a stranger. The other half of this equation is that you are rewarded both your giving commendations, and greatly rewarded for receiving them. Each week there is a challenge log entry for handing out commendations that gives the player a bit of experience and some gil. As far as the receiving side they have set up a system of increasing rewards for 10, 50, 100, 300 and 500 player commendations. The final reward is the golden colored Magitech armor that you see in the above screenshot… something that pretty much everyone I know universally wants.

What has happened as a result is that players are actively trying to win commendations while in dungeon runs. As a whole they are far easier to work with, and more willing to stop and explain mechanics if you simply speak up and let them know you are new to a fight. In fact I have seen entire raid groups come to a grinding halt just to explain the mechanics of a fight to a new player. Often times another player will mentor the newer player through what they actually need to pay attention to on a given fight. The only thing I have seen much frustration really is when a group wipes because a player didn’t understand the mechanics… and didn’t speak up about it at the beginning of the run. This leads players to be more willing to speak up about things that confuse them, or things they are having issues with… which then get solved as a group. Admittedly there is some content that is the equivalent of WoW’s LFR… but even then inside each individual team there is usually some camaraderie as the run goes on.

Rewarding Communication

I have long been one of those individuals who have stated that the addition of the dungeon finder to World of Warcraft made the game a significantly worse place. Sure it made getting groups easier, but it changed the way we ran dungeons permanently. The “push a button, get a group” nature of the tool had a ton of unforeseen consequences, the worst of which is it dehumanized your interaction with other players. Instead of people that you had to communicate with in order to get a group in the first place… they became roles that enabled you to get your loot Piñata at the end and nothing more. The first thing to go with the dungeon finder was discussion in dungeons other than screaming at other players for not living up to some set of standards. Folks stopped talking while running dungeons, and most players just kept their head down and tried to make it through the dungeon all the while trying not to be called in the carpet for being “bad”. It was during this era that I stopped running with strangers, because every time the experience was just so damned maddening.

With Final Fantasy, I restarted the game a few weeks ahead of the bulk of my friends… meaning my only option was to do random dungeons or either do no dungeons at all. The first thing I noticed when I set foot into a dungeon was that players greeted each other, and once that happened the communication started flowing again. Players seemed more willing to talk about what was going on with fights, what they needed help with… and even things completely unrelated to the current dungeon run. Granted all of this might be some elaborate act in an attempt to earn player commendations… and being the friendliest in the group usually earns you at least one… but whatever the cause it is a drastic improvement over the standard MMO environment. I think we have a case of “fake it until you make it” going on here, where players might start out faking a friendly attitude, but over time of doing this over and over… something changes inside you. I find myself not getting upset at the mistakes of other players, and not dwelling on what went wrong… but focusing more on what needs to happen for things to go right.

Positive Leadership

I am not sure if I can account all of the positive changes simply to the player commendation system. I feel like the more aggressive players that make up the early MMO rush have moved on from the game, leaving behind only players that are really dedicated to the Final Fantasy franchise for one reason or another. Additionally the way that the developers of this game interact with the fans is just completely different. I’ve talked about this before, especially in relation to the way the game developers at Blizzcon interact with their fans. It often times feels like they are living out some rockstar fantasy up on stage, and there is always a tinge of condescension when they answer fans. Watching Fan Festival on the other hand… was like watching one big fan talking to a bunch of other big fans. One of my friends commented that Yoshi-P seems to treat us more like investors in his vision, than customers. Another friend chimed in and said that it was almost like he was this super benevolent guild leader. In any case the difference in interaction shows, and trickles down to the player base as well.

So I think all of these little things add up to an atmosphere that rewards the player for being helpful and showing community spirit. So much in this game cannot be accomplished without other players, and the constant fiddling and tweaking with systems always seems to air on the side of supporting collaborative play rather than competition for resources. Granted Final Fantasy XI and XIV 1.0 had really interesting communities, and to some extent the XIV 2.0 and beyond community is standing on their shoulders. Even in the midst of all the rogue zergy nature going on with the release of a new class… players are still far more polite about everything than they were at launch. At this point I don’t care if they essentially have bribed us into being nice passive team players, the end result adds up to a very positive player experience. It had been a really long time since I had felt a sense of pride in a game community, and I am damned proud to be a Final Fantasy XIV player and even prouder to be a member of the ever amazing Cactuar server community. For years Azeroth was my home base as I wandered out to explore other games, but I think at this point that new title belongs to Eorzea. There is so much awesome stuff coming down the pipe, and I cannot wait to experience it all.

#FFXIV #FinalFantasy

Roguepocalypse

October 29, 2014 by Belghast

Awesome Overload

Yesterday was seriously one of the hardest days to get through I have experienced in a very long time. When I troddled off to work the Final Fantasy XIV servers were up and back from maintenance, and as I worked all day long I would see little tid bits of information here and there about just how great this patch ended up being. For the uninitiated yesterday was the release of Patch 2.4 “Dreams of Ice” which introduced a ton of new content, not the least of which is the Shiva primal encounter that the patch is named for. It is truly staggering to think about the amount of content that has been released for this game since launch. Roughly every quarter players get a major patch the size of 2.4, that generally introduces 1 to 2 new primal fights, 3 new hard mode dungeons, new main story quest chain, new Hildebrand story chain, new gear, new glamour bits, new hair styles and in this one they even introduced a brand new class and job combination in the Rogue and Ninja. On top of that we seem to see at least one minor content patch each month, the last one added personal housing so still no slouch content wise.

So when you contrast that with other games that can go six months to an year without any new content, it is phenomenal. This patch however is not with its controversies. Up until this point everything that has been available in game has either been earned doing in game things, or through subscription rewards. The game has some pretty insane subscription rewards that include tons of interesting mounts, pets and cosmetic items. This patch however introduced the cash shop, and they sprinkled a few really awesome items on it, not the least of which is the Slepnir mount you can see me on in the above picture. There is so much gnashing of teeth over the fact that this mount is $24, and the mini-pets on the store are $5 each. At this point however a cosmetic shop just seems like the status quo. One of the more interesting things they are doing with it is that each year there are unique rewards for completing holiday events. To allow players to get previous items they are putting the older items up on the cash shop for a minimal fee. Thankfully I have managed to pick up most of the holiday items I might want, but it is nice knowing that I could potentially get the items I missed during the Christmas events.

Focused Gameplay

Though out the day yesterday I thought about just what I would try and tackle that night when I got home. My focus was going to be on unlocking the three new hard mode dungeons so I could be ready to run them as the rest of my free company became available. I could always queue for the dungeon finder and take my chances with strangers, but I would really rather experience this content fresh with a guild group. There is something awesome about having to reason your way through the fights for the first time as a team, even if you fail to make the 90 minute timer. Even with my laser focus… there are certain things any proper Lalafell must do. While wandering around Uldah I bumped into Sagacyte Luxaloix and before I knew it we were dancing the manderville as is Lala tradition. Moments later we were joined by a friend of his Lirrianna Darkholme and there in the middle of the streets of Uldah we had an impromptu Lalafell dance party. We were all very busy, but traditions must be observed and social graces administered.

For those looking into unlocking the new content, there is an excellent blog post from a Lalafell blogger I just stumbled onto this morning talking about the start of each of the new content items. After we finished with our customary dance party, I went on about my business of unlocking the dungeons. Both Sastasha Hard and Sunken Temple of Qarn Hard were relatively simple to unlock, with fairly straight forward go and talk to this guy then go to the dungeon style quests that start in Mor Dhona. For Snowcloak however it is yet another quest tied deeply into the main storyline. So I set forth beginning that chain and two and a half hours I had reached a point where I was standing at the gates of the new Snowcloak dungeon. When they put in new story content… they put in a lot of story content. This however is what makes the game so damned phenominal, is that they keep moving the story forward and giving you a reason to care about the characters you meet. As a friend said last night, it is not so much that your character is the “big damned hero” but more that your character is the social glue that keeps all of the good guys working together. You are the one person they trust due to past interactions, and the lubricant to make things happen when something goes wrong.

Roguepocalpyse

I did not actually intend to start a rogue last night, but I ended up picking up a new quest in Limsa Lominsa near the Aetheryte crystal that just happened to lead me to the guild. I figured while I was there what was the harm of going ahead and unlocking the class. The server has quite literally gone insane for Rogues and Ninjas. The above photo is a scene from inside the Rogues guild in Limsa Lominsa, and there are even more folks milling around outside of the place. The Fisherman’s Guild port has never seen this much activity ever, and really the guild does a pretty piss poor job of disguising itself with all these people swarming around it. So while I picked up the Rogue I had no plans to level it until I got bored waiting around on a group to happen. Last night myself, Tam and Ash hatched a plan to make the guild some money that we could stockpile for our guild airship. Wanderers Palace is the bottleneck for the Relic weapon quest, in that you need a bloody weapon component to craft the precursor weapon for the entire quest chain. For most classes these are common enough that you can pick up a high quality version of the weapon for 20-30k gil and just be on your way.

This means that all of these newly minted rogues will need one eventually so that they can start down the Relic quest chain. As you can see there are only two currently available on the Cactuar market system and they are holding steadily at 300k gil each. The finished weapons are holding steadily at 500k gil a piece and both are in high demand. So we thought we could run Wanderers Palace a few times and if nothing else stockpile some blades for the guild, and at best pick up a bunch to sell on the market while the demand is high. We struggled to find a fourth, as there were a handful of folks available… but they all appeared to be either AFK or in a duty already. So while we waited around for something to happen… I decided to start working on the rogue. Overall the class is really damned fun to play, and in part it is the animations that make it so enjoyable. You feel like a whirlwind of death as pretty much every attack is some sort of a spin move. Additionally the way you hold your daggers… makes me actually kinda like wielding daggers. They feel brutal and swift, instead of awkward stabby weapons like daggers feel in so many games.

The only problem is that everyone is playing a rogue. This is what every fate looks like practically anywhere in the game right now. An army of rogues, their chocobos and a blinding flurry of circular slashes as far as the eye can see. As the second shot shows, some rogues have taken to putting Flash on their bar and run around gathering up all of the fate mobs while the rest of us hopelessly chase after them trying to do as much contribution as possible. I remember fates feeling like this at launch, and in reality it is like we have returned to that post launch period at least a bit. Additionally there are a ton of folks out there doing the fates as well trying to farm their Atma pieces, and it seems that the drop rates are in fact reasonable now. I’ve heard tales of folks completing a full set of atmas in a single evening, but I still feel you need to be lucky to make that happen. While I don’t so much care about my rogue, I plan on riding the FATE gravy train with my monk to see just how many levels I can squeeze out.

Broken Roulette

The influx of rogues has lead to some serious madness. I have not actually tried to queue as one, but I saw this tweeted awhile back with someone being stuck in the queue for over 120 minutes. DPS queues previously were 15 to 20 minutes on my server, and the low level roulette queues last night were reporting around an hour. Thankfully none of this madness has hit Syrcus Tower yet, as my dragoon queue there was still near instant last night. I feel like non-ninja dps will have a better shot at getting into dungeons, especially ranged dps since the game tries to match a ranged and a melee for each four man team. In any case if you have a tank or a healer that you plan on leveling, right now is the ideal time to do it. You will get instant queues and probably get the extreme gratitude of the ninjas inside the instance who have been waiting anxiously to do a dungeon. This reminds me of the way Ifrit and Titan were shortly after launch. My friend Tam used to queue doing “community service” as he called it. One time he ran into a poor black mage who had been sitting waiting on Ifrit for 3 1/2 hours. I am not sure if I will do it tonight, but I plan on working on my White Mage to help with the influx of folks queuing for things.

#FFXIV #Rogue #Ninja

Heavensward Job Speculation

October 28, 2014 by Belghast

Final Fantasy Downtime

Yesterday the world mourned as we were unable to play Final Fantasy XIV. While technically at this very moment the servers should be up, I am pretending that they are not so that I don’t get horribly sidetracked this morning. While locked out of the game yesterday, it lead many of us to start speculating about what the classes and jobs that have yet to be identified might be for the Heavensward expansion. Right now there have been extremely scant confirmed details. The Dark Knight being the only class that is 100% verified and confirmed by the Square Enix. However during the events of Las Vegas there was a moment when maybe the Samurai was confirmed. As Soken scrolled around on screen looking for a specific track to play, he scrolled past a folder labeled “Samurai”.

So while this isn’t a confirmation by any case it has caused a lot of folks to assume this is the next class. Since Dark Knight is a tank, would this maybe make Samurai a DPS? In any case I plan on playing one whatever it ends up being. There is a thread out on Reddit trying to collect various tidbits of information that Yoshi-P has said during official statements. While this thread predates the Las Vegas Fan Fest, there is still a lot of interesting information in it. Primarily the confirmation that there would be at least one gun glass, and that it would not be the gun classes that we would expect. What I think is meant by that is that there is been a Corsairs guild in Limsa Lominsa for ages, it just isn’t labelled as such formally. Since Merlwyb herself is a Corsair, it has always been assumed that this would be an early expansion class. I feel like Yoshi-P is specifically saying this isn’t the case.

The Agent

So if not the Musketeer/Corsair class then the question becomes what exactly will the gun job be. During the London Fan Fest Yoshi-P took the stage wearing a really awesome Black Mage outfit, however as soon as he stripped down out of the top part of it… he was wearing a black and gold 007 t-shirt. Then he pantomimed the traditional Bond opening sequence with a finger gun seen above. Normally I would think… this is Yoshi… he does all sorts of interesting things, this is pretty much the standard fare. However in Las Vegas the Dark Knight job that was eventually conformed in London… was first introduced with a Batman t-shirt. So this leaves us with what exactly is this job he is trying to tell us. Turns out there is in fact a job from one of the Tactics series games called “The Agent” that is apparently exclusive to that games “Cid” character. In fact the analogy pretty much fits Bond perfectly, considering the Agent is described essentially as a womanizing spy.

The Machinist

There however is a significant contingency that seems to believe that Yoshi might have already told us what the gun class would be. During an interview with MMORPG.com they asked him what his favorite class that is not currently in Final Fantasy XIV. He gave two specific answers, the first being Dark Knight which was confirmed in London. The second one he announced is the Machinist, specifically the version coming from Final Fantasy Tactics. This is traditionally a ranged attacker class, so it could very easily be this gun based class folks are assuming it would be. The version of this class that I am most familiar with is Edgar from Final Fantasy VI, and in that version he wields a wide variety of ranged contraptions, each of which giving him a different unique attack. Having not played much of the Tactics games, mostly because the game play style never really clicked with me… I am not sure exactly how this differs. It would be cool to have a traditional engineer type class, that fights using gadgets. Oddly enough the FFXI Puppet Master class is apparently considered a Machinist according to the wiki, and that is already a class that I would dig seeing in FFXIV.

The Chemist

Another possibility would be the Chemist, as it is one of the few traditional Final Fantasy “healer” jobs that exist but are not already in game. There is a precedent for being a gun class apparently. While I do not know which game this came from, the Wiki lists them as being able to equip guns in at least one game. Hoping that someone can fill in these details in the comments below as to which game they actually used guns. In any case even if this is not a gun glass I think it is a pretty strong candidate for a healer. They would present a unique healing style that isn’t already in the game, and could even do something similar to what they are doing with Ninjutsu to support the “mix” gameplay style from previous games. What if you had a series of commands that represented “ingredients” and then you had a mix command that you pressed afterwards. The combat effect would be based on which three ingredients you combined. Sure this would make for a strange healing style, but you could give them really strong heal over time capabilities to make up for and buffer the fiddly nature of mixing just the right potion in the heat of battle. I think this would be a really interesting game play style for someone looking for a class with an exceptionally high skill cap.

Blue Mage

One of the things that screams Final Fantasy to me is the more interesting classes. Every game has the holy trinity of Tank, Healer and Melee/Range DPS. Final Fantasy however has traditionally had some exceptionally nuanced classes that blur these lines. For me at least the king of the “odd” classes is the Blue Mage, in its various forms. This apparently is another class that there is at least some precedent for being a gun class, based on past games. However even if this never makes it in as a gun class… I still want the class in the game badly. In part because I know this would make a good friend of mine exceptionally happy… and we would likely never find it playing any other job. The Blue Mage game play style would be extremely difficult as compared to the traditional MMO tropes… but I feel like it would be something interesting to add in with a series of intricate quests similar to the “Egi” quests needed to learn the various “lore” spells. I could see getting pulled into a series of dungeon encounters to be able to learn things like “Doom” that are traditionally in their spell list. I could also see it playing out far more organically and you have to actually learn your spells through running dungeons and defeating encounters. In any case I think it would be an extremely interesting addition.

Berserker

Last bit of speculation this morning is one that seems like an absolute no brainer. In Final Fantasy V the Berserker had the ability to Equip Axes, which made them the almost natural choice for these weapons that most job could not use. As a DPS job, this makes them an ideal fit to be paired with the Marauder class and represent their DPS job, much the same way as Scholar and Summoner currently come from the Arcanist class. I have no clue if we will see this happen during the Heavensward expansion, but I think at some point each of the classes will end up getting a second job. It seems like a no brainer to make this happen, since most of the abilities in the marauder class could easily support the Berserker. The only question is how exactly would the game play work. I seriously doubt that they would try and replicate the weird glitchy “berserk” game play where the character just kind of goes off on its own making poor life decisions and getting the party killed. Instead I feel like it would be a traditional melee dps option, something they are of no shortage of currently. if nothing else I think this is a thing that is going to happen sooner or later, and I would welcoming having another class that uses all of the badass looking two handed axes.

Heavensward Job Speculation

Something to remember when reading this… everything but the Dark Knight is pure speculation. Yoshi-P is notoriously poor at keeping secrets, so I feel like he has already given us a bunch of information to figure out what sorts of classes and jobs we will see for the expansion. I also feel over the coming Live Letters he will start leaking more details, and hopefully between all of this we will start to be able to piece together what the final line-up is going to look like. I don’t think we will get much more confirmation however until the December 20-21 Tokyo Fan Fest. There are a ton of jobs that I would love to see in FFXIV. Mostly I feel like we have the strong core classes already in place, and would love for them to start adding in more of the trademarked Final Fantasy “quirk”. There are a ton of jobs that can be inspiration from decades of games, in any case I feel like we will have lots of interesting options this spring. Now I need to wrap this up and get to work… so I can rush home after work and play Patch 2.4.