Last night I returned to Final Fantasy XIV or at least attempted to. I had not played much since the first or second week after the release of the Eden raid. If my math is right this would have been around the beginning of August, and after doing my traditional FFXIV thing of leveling my tank and a dps class I checked out in a massive way. I’ve more or less purposefully been holding off knowing that if I could come back with a large chunk of MSQ to consume I might be able to stick around long enough to get into the swing of things. As a result I did not return when 5.1 released and since last night was the launch of 5.2 I decided that was a reasonable time to start poking my head back into the game.
I did not make a ton of progress and more or less unlocked the first dungeon and ran it with a trust. I did not at all expect the Crystal Exarch to fill the tank role… but the fact that he was a Paladin makes some measure of sense as far as tank roles go. I am playing my Samurai figuring it will be easier to get back into the game if I am able to do so with limited responsibility. My biggest challenge with FFXIV has been the fact that the game expects everyone to be a DPS, and if that is the case I might as well just play an actual DPS. I am of the mindset that Tanks should be Tanks and Healers should be Healers and if they can throw the occasional damage dealing spell awesome… but FFXIV is a game that has devolved into a state where everyone is expected to have an optimized dps rotation. I can’t say if this trip back into FFXIV is going to stick or not but at a minimum I will probably gobble up the main story quest and we will play it by ear after that.
Also happening yesterday was the launch of a new in game Destiny 2 mini-cinematic showing an a confrontation between Osiris and Rasputin. I guess this means that unlike the rumors of maybe going back to the Prison of Elders we will once again be entangling ourselves in some manner with the Warmind. I am split in a bunch of different directions this week because it is probably the last Iron Banner of Season of the Dawn and I really would like to earn a set of the armor available in its 2.0 variant. It was my favorite of the Iron Banner armor sets and I am sure with the changing of the seasons it will be gone. I am also sitting at level 60 of 100 and would feel sad if I did not manage to grind out all of the season levels.
Then there is Wolcen which I am completely enamored with and want to play more of. I was super happy to find out that cosmetic choices are on a per slot level and not per gear, so if you swap gear your cosmetic choices stay put. The only thing that I have done so far is hide my helmet because quite honestly I usually hate helmets in video games. I’ve not made a ton of progress because of course last night I was distracted by Final Fantasy XIV, so add this to the list of games that are pulling me in different directions.
Finally at some point I really want to finish off Mars: War Logs and see where that story goes… so that is a 4th game to throw on the pile of things fighting for my attention. On top of all of this… something has been going around at work and causing people to drop like flies and yesterday my direct boss as knocked out of commission by it. Last night I did not feel amazing and this morning I am feeling completely awful, so I am wondering if I am about to go on my own roller coaster ride of illness. Basically I have gone from being super single threaded on single player games… to being distracted constantly by the allure of multiplayer games that I am playing in a single player manner. I feel like for the entirety of this decade I have been living in this state of having way too much that I want to be playing.
I kinda did the same thing — I started up with the expansion again, but pretty much all I did was unlock and level Gunbreaker to 71, then unlock dancer and level it to 70, at which point I ran the Dancer through the MSQ catch-up from 4.2 up to 5.0, then finally started the expansion’s MSQ about 2 weeks after it was released. I went through that up until the final trial, and then…. stopped. This was in July.
I didn’t come back until sometime in November, though I’ve been going at it pretty hard since then. I’m still more focused on leveling my alt-jobs to 80 than I am worried about catching up the MSQ. In the past a new round of quests generally only lasted a day or 2 for me at most, so it’s not like I can’t easily catch it up. I mean I did all of the patch 4.2 through unlocking 5.0 MSQ in 2 or 3 days, so…. it goes quick.
Just a nitpick, but you are not the only one that thinks that tanks should be tanking and healers should be healing in Final Fantasy XIV. If I recall correctly the developers felt like that too and the changes to tanks and healers with 5.0 was to make them more like that. But a lot of players didn’t like it, thinking that everybody should be DPSing to some extent. I don’t know if the developers backtracked from their stance due to player feedback or not since then.
As for having too many games that you want to play… Yeah, I’ve been feeling like that too. It is why I keep saying it would be nice to have at least one year of crap game releases so I could play with a little bit more peace of mind all the games I already have and want to play.
Yeah I am not necessarily blaming squeenix for this one. The community is the one pushing this narrative.
nods Sorry for nitpicking too. I guess I was more worried that people who do not play the game would get the impression that Square-Enix pushes for that kind of gameplay than anything else. I tend to worry about silly things and overthink them. /sigh
Healers had their dps standardized in 5.0 — they all have 1 DoT, 1 Direct Damage, 1 AE, and that’s it. White Mages can use their Blood Lily to get 1 more AE every 90 seconds or so.
But that’s it. The idea was “use these if you’re leveling as a healer, but in instances you’re a healer.” That hasn’t panned out so well though, as HP increased for players, but mob damage hasn’t really been increased much, so healers are complaining they can use mostly just their oGCD heals and then have nothing to do except cast dps spells.
I haven’t really tanked in this expansion yet, but what little I’ve done, I’ve seen that there’s no damage penalty for using the tank stance anymore. Damage done on the tank jobs doesn’t feel much lower than on a regular dps job either.
Amazingly enough, I’ve actually been enjoying melee dps this time around. Even the monk that “everyone” is complaining about was perfectly enjoyable to me — I even got 80 on it last night too. And that’s all the physical dps… 2 casters, then the 4 tanks to go and I’m all capped out again.