Don’t Ignore the Novice Hall

Good Morning Friends! I come to you with a heavy heart because last night I realized that we veterans of Final Fantasy XIV have been doing a massive disservice to the sprouts. We have been preaching for so long to completely ignore all side quests and focus only on the Main Story Quest or MSQ, that we have likely been sabotaging attempts made by the Square team to ease the player base into group content. In Final Fantasy games there is a construct generically referred to as the Beginner’s Hall, and generally speaking, it is a room somewhere at the start of the game that has a bunch of NPCs you can talk to in order to get some fairly generic tips about playing the game. When this was put into Final Fantasy XIV as the Hall of the Novice, I completely ignored it because I was already deep in the game at that point and had no desire to talk to a bunch of random NPCs.

The game however really wants us to pay attention to this system, even placing the leader of the guild in all of the starting city Inns. However, when you first encounter this system, you can’t really use it because it requires the player to be level 15 in order to register for training. It has a unique icon that looks like a sprout, so in theory that I am guessing was supposed to indicate to new players that they should be talking to this person. I have been spending some time on an alt on the Primal data center, and yesterday was the very first time I actually engaged with this system. The thing is it is shockingly good and we should probably be telling our sprout friends to make sure they don’t miss it.

This is of enough significance that Square now sends the player there as part of the revised Main Story Quest. It doesn’t however go far enough. I think that realistically it should ask the player to complete all of the missions for their class role before progressing forward. The timing and location of this Hall of Novice is extremely specific, given that it is quite literally located around the corner from the first dungeon you will encounter Sastasha. On the main story quest, you have to go in and talk to the Smith, but you don’t actually have to register for any of the training. The thing is, I knew that you could earn a pretty nice set of gear from completing the training so I went through the process of registering and completing it for Tank.

I’ve played a significant number of different MMORPGs and encountered several systems designed to try and ease a player into group roles. However, I have never seen a system that actually gives you a very firm understanding of how these things work while also setting up short scenarios to test out those skills. For example, as a tank, it fully explained what Enmity is, and how one gains it and then proceeded to put me through a series of paces that were specifically tailored for the job that I was tanking on. It covered things like how to build threat on multiple targets, and which targets to focus on first. It also had an entire chapter on how to get out of things on the ground, and given that FFXIV works slightly differently than other games it is probably a solid idea that players go through this even if they are already used to other MMORPGs.

The training is all well and good, but the real reason why you should always complete the Hall of the Novice is that you are rewarded a set of actually nice-looking gear. Early tank gear specifically looks awful, and through running this series of missions you are awarded gear that is going to probably be your main glamour for about fifty levels. Similarly for the Healer and DPS roles you are given the Acolyte and Foestrikers set appearance, which is one of the more iconic looks in the game. More important than all of this however is you are given a ring that is going to greatly boost your experience gain on all jobs going forward up to level 30. Experience boost gear is always welcome and when combined with the expansion earrings, should serve to make leveling those alternate jobs go at least a little bit faster.

Maybe I am wrong and maybe I am the only person who had completely ignored this system. However I think given how much time we have spent trying to tell people to only focus on the MSQ, that there are probably a large number of sprouts that have never engaged with it. I would also say that if you are wanting to go into Final Fantasy XIV and start dabbling with roles you have maybe never done before, this is actually a very good way of teaching you the ropes. If I were to write out a guide on how to tank, a lot of the topics I would cover are things that the series of missions goes over. We would probably all be better players in general if we ran through the missions for each of the roles. Seeing as I am going to be leveling my healers soon, I am likely going to run through the Novice Hall quest series just to see how well it does on that role as well.