Bwana Reacts to "FFXIV Changes- Efficiency or Creativity?" Final Fantasy XIV

6 thoughts on “Bwana Reacts to "FFXIV Changes- Efficiency or Creativity?" Final Fantasy XIV”

1. There were dungeons other than TR that have nothing but a chest in a side room/hallway or what appears to be a chest and then some trash pops out. When I was new I wanted to open these chests and go down these hallways, but they often had a potion in them or something equally useless to the roulette crowd. As a sprout the requirements in the 2.0 dungeons was impressive to me. The fact that they were made so much more complex than lower level dungeons in other games impressed me – they took a chance other MMO's won't. I think streamlining the lower dungeons gives sprouts a better experience, but only because veterans won't be whining likely babies over them going down a hallway. There are lots of roulettes one could sign up for and I quit signing up for level roulettes because it is mostly whiny vets which gives me WoW PTSD. So I make a choice rather than sign up for a roulette and then take out my displeasure of the dungeon on the rest of the group – more vets need to take some sort of accountability and not take their dislike of content they willingly signed up for on others. I do no roulettes that are 4-man other than MSQ raids – because otherwise I have to put up with whiny people. I would rather take 30 minutes to run an old dungeon with a new player who wants to explore than deal with whiny vets.

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2. Complaint about events is that the devs argue that no gil sinks exist but still deny us the ability to use gil for event items. Forcing us to repeat the event, to farm event currency.
   Generally you cant get everything in one run of the event either.

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3. Dungeon mobs haven't given experience for a while so that's one less reason for diverging pathways.

   I don't think the changes had to do with efficiency as much as it was about teaching the mechanics of FFXIV combat earlier. There were several stack mechanics before but you didn't see a universal stack marker until the Nidhogg fight, now they are littered throughout ARR.

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4. Durty Roulette: Mentor
   It needs to stay for vets who explicitly wants to assist sprouts.

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5. Oh man hold up I'm at 22:46 and my mans is making this point all wrong. There's no need to bring materia into it at all, see in HW the big deal was that accs were all either all classes, or DoW or DoM, so because the base gear got tanks to such a level of survivability that they didn't need any more vitality, tanks were pressured (and often voluntarily chose) to wear Striking/Maiming accessories for the additional DPS (and to help keep up with enmity, which at times could be a legit challenge with BLM going ham with Raging Strikes triple flare nukes). As a result, Yoshida and the team made sure that was never possible again, and since then have locked all accessories to their roles, you cannot choose to wear another classes accs. Also the argument about point allocation, Bwana was spot on, especially since the stat point allocations weren't visible to other players, so even if the amount of damage or survivability differences HAD been measurable, and meaningful, it wouldn't matter, because you can't tell it without doing some math. Whereas bad melds are visible from the outside (for some reason) and people are still, to this day, criticized (sometimes rightfully) for bad melding. Also the stat bump materia was removed not so much because of creativity issues, it was removed also because of item bloat. Same way all the glamour prisms were unified, both across types and grades, and dark matter was reduced and simplified. It's to remove item bloat among expansions as well.

   End of the day I think Bwana hit the nail on the head. 2.0 content was originally built on top of 1.0, and it was meant to provide a bridge that old 1.0 players would find familiar enough to not be put off by. Now I never played 1.0, but I did see some gameplay, specifically of the Nael fight at the very end at Cartineau. And something struck me as odd about it that I talked to my FC mates about, and it's only now starting to make sense. 1.0's playstyle was very much stand still, do your action, move, stand still. It was very much split into movement, and combat, even in the middle of a fight. Often your characters just stood there doing nothing. There was nothing to react to a lot of the time and you were just standing there blowing all your abilities. There's a lot of this in the 2.0 content as well (having just done Haukke manor, I'll use that as an example.) In the original 2.0, Lady Amandine was tanked somewhere-, and dps and healers would arrange themselves at max distance near her so they could run to get those flames -when they popped and then get back, they had to do this twice, but aside that, there was never any motivation to do anything else, to move your character, to turn them, there were no mechanics just this "hit the button to stop the pulses of damage… or just ignore it, healers adjust" mentality. The fight now involves turning away from the Manor Servant's gaze attacks, moving to engage slow summoned spawns, Amandine moving around the arena on her own to do said summons, it's a much more active fight now, and it feels more like a Final Fantasy 14 fight. Where before you had 2.0 style fights, which were very passive dps race fights, and then you had 3.x+ fights that were all a lot more active, had you moving and reacting to content. I think in 2.0 their primary concern was making good on the promise to 1.0 players that they will find something familiar that they love in 2.0, but now all those 1.0 players are playing and having fun in 6.1, and you're left with this stark difference between 2.0 content, and 3.0+ content that new players have to see for the first time, instead of the whole game feeling like one cohesively designed game. But that's just my observation, I could be wrong.

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6. As a ffxiv vet I’m thankful they made the ARR dungeons more straightforward. I remember my first time running through those dungeons as a tank and getting lost or forgetting to grab certain items etc because of the layout of the dungeons.

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