FINAL FANTASY ONLINE 2-2 Not shit edition

[beatbandito]

So I guess that means their version of tetra master will never stop sucking.

[Wheels]

So I guess that means their version of tetra master will never stop sucking.

Them's fighting words son!

...Unless it's roulette rules. Then I'll change the topic of the conversation.

[Blossom]

Of course! It all makes so much sense now!

[Friday]

Hi, Friday, age 7 here, and I recently reupped to WoW Classic because my friends are fucking idiots who think Vanilla was the best iteration of WoW playing and wanted me to play and roped me into it.

Anyway I lasted two months before I thought to myself "wow, this sucks really fucking hard! I sure wish I could play an MMO that didn't suck so hard!".

So what I'm saying is I played WoW and it reignited my itch to MMO but Vanilla WoW is fucking terrible and I also don't want to play Retail either.

And I heard FF14 is pretty good! Like, some people even say it's the best MMO experience out there!

So I've decided to try it.

So, let's lay some ground rules:

1. I played WoW and Guild Wars for probably 10 years or so. I know how to play an MMO.

2. I know literally nothing about FF14 except "there's a job system and you can be a catgirl."

Given these two things, my questions for the esteemed FF14 vets of this community are:

1. What should I buy? Just the base game? I don't know if I'll like it, so I want to try a cheap option first, if possible.

2. What class(es) should I start with? Does race matter or is it mostly just how you look?

Any tips for a complete newbie would also be appreciated! Thanks in advance!

[Niku]

yo i literally just downloaded the free trial to check this thing out finally so

same questions

except to friday also: there is a free trial before you need to buy anything

[Brantly B.]

I "bought" FF14 through Humble Bundle years ago and never cracked it open so that miiiiiiiiiight help you out? Or it might be useless now. You can give it a shot maybe though.

[Niku]

is this how you do it

[Wheels]

Final Fantasy XIV is my favorite MMO of all time. It also, like most things, has a few flaws.

So, keep in mind Friday that your Job (class) choice literally doesn't matter. You can switch to whatever job you want, whenever you want. Leveling up an alt is not logging onto a different character, it's equipping a different weapon. This makes FFXIV probably the best iteration of "bring the player, not the class" but at the same time you have a lot more work to put in to be relevant on everything. Downsides to everything.

If you were asking what to play in terms of giving you an idea of where to start... to do *well* at the game, DPS is far and away the hardest in general, followed by healing, and then tanking as the easiest. Don't worry too much though, the leveling four man party content and normal tier raids are essentially facerollable with a couple of exceptions.

Tank queues are instant, healers are short queues, DPS queues are forever as you'd expect. The game itself is *very* damage focused, and at the endgame tank and healer DPS matters alot. Threat is essentially non-existant, tanks take damage in *very* predictable spikes and healing is balanced around the expectation that you'll be casting damage spells. If you try to be what the community calls "honest healers" and only heal and do nothing else in group content, you'll be doing a lot of nothing for almost minutes at a time in some cases.

I personally and unironically love the plot of this game, and the main storyline of Shadowbringers (the latest expansion) is the best Final Fantasy plot in the last two decades, full stop, no I'm not apologizing because I'm right. *HOWEVER,* there's some downsides to the way they are telling a continuous story. For one, the main quest chain is an unignorable thread of quests that you will follow, forever, from 1-80, for the entire game, all its expansions, and all the patch content for those expansions. Generally, it is very good as I have mentioned. I will fully admit that the lvl 1-50 MSQ (Main Story Quest) "A Realm Reborn" line is slow at best and trite at worse, and the content leading up into the first expansion Heavensward is padded for length in noticeable ways. As soon as Heavensward proper starts, the writing pace and quest design changes noticeably, and it's a breath of fresh air.

You can buy a story skip, but I implore that you do not unless you find it a terrible drag. But please keep in mind I'm the special kind of nerd that loves reading all quests and will spend hours arguing with Norondor about the plot implications of a specific NPC's dialogue or the exact nature of the aetherial physics. Also note that you will essentially be treating it as a single player game for a hundred hours or so until you reach endgame, which kind of sucks. The MSQ is generally not groupable content, and there's a lot of "mini-instances" that it will put you in for a scripted story sequence or battle or what have you. The plot is *really really* good I promise, but I also understand if you skip ARR. Do *not* skip Heavensward or Stormblood.

In terms of where to roll, there are a few of us on Faerie with pretty strong resources. Ask Lyrai if you manage to get into Faerie, it's kind of a crowded server. I generally resub once in awhile to get caught up on the plot content.

I could also drone on about the endgame (which also has its ups and downs), but I'll save the specific thoughts for if anyone actually cares. Just know that it's really an ideal MMO to get into casually and there is challenging content if you want it.

[Wheels]

god who is this asshole just coming out of nowhere and posting a wall of text who does he think he is

[Friday]

I've got a friend who wants to try it with me, exactly how much of the 1-50 content forces you to solo? Like, percentage-wise, cause if it's a lot I dunno that's a big drawback since I prefer to level with a buddy.

edit: thanks for the wall, was helpful.

[Blossom]

Not a ton of the 1-50 story forces a solo, but occasionally it does. Every so often, you'll run into a Solo Instance, a little story instance you have to do by yourself. They're rarely very long. You see them a few times in class/job storylines as well. They get more common after 50, and longer, but they still won't be anywhere close to what you spend most of your time doing. You can expect to be able to do a lot of content as a duo, and you'll see most of the game's dungeons and trials in the main story quest - which will expect you to form groups of 4 or 8, so if nothing else, there's grouping opportunities there.

The only limitation on duoing through all the story is that your starting city and level 1-15 quests depend on the class you pick at the start of the game: Gladiators (tank, becomes Paladin), Thaumaturges (dps, becomes Black Mage), and Pugilists (dps, becomes Monk) start in Ul'dah; Archers (dps, becomes Bard), Conjurers (healer; becomes White Mage), and Lancers (dps, becomes Dragoon) start in Gridania; Marauders (tank, becomes Warror) and Arcanists (dps, becomes Summoner, and also turns into a Scholar healer) start in Limsa Lominsa. If you want to duo the 1-15 levels, pick those jobs to start. At level 15, your questlines merge, and you gain the ability to travel between the cities. It's not hard to level a new job to 15, in any event, but you do need to get your first job to level 10 before you can switch.

As for other jobs that you can't start as: You need a job at level 10 to unlock Rogue (dps, becomes Ninja) in Limsa Lominsa. You need a job at 50 and to have begun the Heavensward story to unlock Dark Knight (tank), Astrologian (healer), and Machinist (dps) in Ishgard. You need a job at 50 to unlock Samurai (dps) and Red Mage (dps) in Ul'dah. You need a job at 60 to unlock Gunbreaker (tank) in Gridania, and Dancer (dps) in Limsa Lominsa. You also can unlock Blue Mage in Limsa Lominsa once you're 50, but that's more of a side game, it caps lower, plays different, and can't go into normal groups.

You'll need to buy the base game, and you'll need to buy the third expansion, Shadowbringers. Shadowbringers includes the first and second expansions with it, but doesn't come with the base game. Keep in mind if you're playing on PC that Steam and Non-Steam are considered different platforms, so if you start on Steam (free trial included, there's a Steam free trial and a non-Steam free trial), you're locked into buying everything else for the PC version through Steam.

If there's a group of people you know on Faerie, great! Faerie is one of the servers in the Aether datacenter. I play on Balmung in the Crystal datacenter, and everybody I know in the game is either on Balmung or elsewhere on Crystal. As it's configured right now, you've got a lot of options for playing and chatting with people on your server or on another server in your datacenter, but none for people on another datacenter. They're talking about implementing a way to do things cross-DC but that'd be the better part of a year away. Balmung is the most populated server, because it's the "unofficial" roleplay server, and Crystal has a pretty strong community in that regard. Aether has most of the servers with the strongest server-specific raiding communities, but no datacenter is particularly short on that. It's really just about finding a good group. Balmung is a very good place to make a character, though, and there's a lot of good people there.

Race has an incredibly tiny mechanical impact. Like, the difference between the race with the highest Strength has 3 more than the race with the lowest Strength, and in a full group at ilvl cap on a Strength-focused DPS job, that's the difference between 4438 and 4441 right now. Nonzero, but basically zero. Go for aesthetic, keep in mind you can't be a lizardgirl or bunnygirl until you activate Shadowbringers. It costs $10 to change race, but you get a free race change item after completing the level 50 main story quest.

Seconding the admonition not to skip story. ARR's story starts slow, and stays slow for a bit, but it is building to something, and it is worth it. It's a slow burn with a payoff.

Whatever job you decide to play in the end, also level and play Dark Knight. It's a tank job and probably the most active of them, and I'm not just saying that because I main it. It's got the best story out of all of them, some of the best and most emotional writing in the game, such that the Dark Knight quest writer went to do the full Shadowbringers main story.

If you do land on Balmung, hit me up. I play a lot, and I'm always on Discord. I can help you get started, answer any questsions, hook you up with stuff, and if I'm not busy or tired I'm generally down to help with content.

[Wheels]

Frankly, Blossom is really overselling the multiplayer ability of the MSQ. Sure, there are kill quests in the world, a bit of fed ex, FATEs, and dungeons. You can do those together. The thing is, it's much easier to play with someone that's much newer to the game with you on a second job. Unless you play at EXACTLY the same times every day to stay in perfect sync, things can get annoying. For example, let's say you get to the first dungeon. "I better do something else wait fro my friend to catch up to do it with them." Except... you can't really progress further without doing the dungeon yourself. The main story plot revolves around you completing this dungeon, and it's not unlocked until you get to the appropriate point in the MSQ, so it's not like your friend can run it as soon as they come online either.

That leaves your options as being grinding, side quests (which are *very* finite), leveling up a new job, dipping your toe into gathering or crafting (don't, for crafting jobs it's not worth it until much later until you get the Moogle Beast Tribe to sidestep a lot of the raw cost.), doing some FATEs or Palace of the Dead which will grant you *way too much* experience for your first job.

Way too much experience you say? What do you mean? Well, one of the biggest strengths of FFXIV is its level sync system. It's not like WoW, where bringing my level 60 shaman to help you out in Wailing Caverns basically means you're standing back and watching, it will lower your job level and effective item level to something that you'd expect in that dungeon. So if you have a new friend join the game, you can help them out with all the bosses and dungeons without making it completely dumb, as well as keeping the lower dungeons populated through roulettes.

This is rad overall, but I had a friend who was on a low pop server who had such a glut of XP they were very annoyed when they got a cool new ability but weren't able to use it because while they were level 43, the MSQ progress tehy were at was at level 25 dungeons. Again, you can't go do the higher level ones until it makes plot sense to do so. The MSQ unlocks almost everything, which is a blessing and a curse.

If one of the two of you plays more than the other, just know you'll be doing a lot of backtracking to help the other. The one further ahead might consider a second job to stay better in sync. It's much easier to play with someone that's way way way behind or ahead of you than someone 5 Main Story Quests away, strangely enough.

[Wheels]

But the game is really really REALLY good. You should really play it!

[Wheels]

Also, wait you were on Balmung and *didn't leave*? We all were and took the crystal DC split as the perfect opportunity to escape that cesspit.

[Friday]

Blossom: Thanks, the info is helpful.

One more question: As a duo, is it particularly helpful to have someone bring a healer beyond faster queues for dungeons?

What I'm saying is, like, In WoW, leveling as a duo is good but having one of you be a healer is a lot better and saves downtime. Is that similar or is leveling as dps/dps or tank/dps just as quick?

[Büge]

I play FFXIV too! I'm part of a Free Company from Talking Time who are very cool and welcoming on the Sargatanas server on Aether.

Oh! That's something: You can join a Free Company. They are server-based groups that are essentially like Guilds from WoW, but I dunno if the ones on FFXIV are as heavily stratified and raid-focused. I do know that Free Companies do get the ability to buff exp for members, and many of them have real estate in any of the various wards throughout the realm.

Another type of group you can join is a Linkshell, which exist across servers. I'm part of a Linkshell for Roegadyn Ladies (Roegadyn are the tall, muscly pirate folk), and it's called She-Hulk Smash.

In conclusion, the real end-game content is playing dressup.

[Friday]

i like playing dressup

[beatbandito]

Yeah, endgame is ultimately club penguin where you complete content only for new emotes, outfits, pets, mounts, indentured servants, and houses. I have never been at a level of endgame for any FFXIV-retry while it was the current endgame, but I playing it as a solo story experience I can tell you:

by the time you get to endgame dungeons you will have multiple classes and options up to level on your main, if not totally geared
for leveling, tank/healer is still multitudes faster for all queues
I think you can get all npc companions for all dungeon content now so it doesn't matter

FFXIV is an experience, like a chatroom with a decent MMO built around it to give you something to fill your time between RPs and events.

[pacobird]

[pacobird]

XIV is a very fun iteration of Wrath of the Lich King that has introduced a bunch of fun things to do on the side that scrupulously avoid impacting anything in the central Wrath of the Lich King progression game, which will give you 2 or 3 new dungeons with 3 bosses and four pulls of trash mobs before those bosses every few months

now if you wanted a mechanically interesting and structurally varied MMO in the final fanta