FFXIV Heavensward First Impressions.
I’ve played WoW for over 15 years but given the state of WoW right now, the lack of content in the game and care from the devs, some of my friends have convinced me to try FFXIV. So I wanted to document my FFXIV first impressions, document my journey through FFXIVand give my feedback along the way.
I’ve already done an 18 part series through ARR and now I wanted to cover my first impressions and document my journey through FFXIV Heavensward as a long time WoW player and refugee. Throughout I will be comparing FFXIV to WoW and referencing the differences between the two. Obviously I do have some bias, but I will try and keep an open mind all the way.
The story in Heavensword seems incredible, I normally get easily distracted, but I can see myself getting hooked to the story. If you have any tips for Heavensward or things I should do or pick up, I’d love the help! Obviously as we progress through heavensward there will be spoilers in these videos.
I stream all of this live on twitch and would love to see you there:
https://www.twitch.tv/medievalmarty
And we have a super active FFXIV discord with over 1000 people if you want to join the community:
https://discord.gg/a5bU6VsUqy
Time Stamps
0:00 Intro
2:00 Reaching Ishgard
3:30 Machinist Is Super Fun
4:50 Embrace The Darkness
6:40 Astro Seems Hard
8:20 New Heavensward Areas
10:30 Scholar and Tonberry Time
15:15 I Don’t Trust Him
16:35 Shiva Extreme
19:50 Rescue The Legend
21:15 Bunny Boi
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Oh boy! The heavensward first impressions
Heavensward was my favorite expansion. The whole Dragonsong storyline was amazing.
From WOW to Wow!
You are not ready, it's amazing
Hey everyone, whether you've been here from the ARR series or you're joining here, thank you so much for all the support! Heavensward is looking INCREDIBLE so far so I can't wait to keep playing (and fishing)!
Twitch to see all this live:
https://www.twitch.tv/medievalmarty
Discord to join our amazing community:
https://discord.gg/a5bU6VsUqy
Heavensward has to be one of my favorites because Dragons!
the good news re: not usually liking tanking is that tanking in this game is really pretty simple:
1) have tank stance on
2) space out your defensive buffs
3) do dps
also re: ast card management does get more involved and interesting later on but yeah if you're not feeling that angle, the job might be trouble for you
Hi Marty! 😜
Covered quite a bit of ground with this one.
As someone who leveled machinist or gets way better as you level. Dealing big damage with wildfire is really satisfying
EDIT: If you really liked the SCH quest, be sure to pick up the quest for wanderer's palace hard
The Ishgaard jobs are so fun. Dark Knight continues to be just awesome and feel smooth, Machinist does indeed get to feel more machinisty, and Astrologian is pretty fun. They really nerfed Astrologian, it used to be much more complicated with the cards. Now there are 3 cards that DPS buffs melee and 3 that buffs ranged, but you can really use them on anyone without a huge loss. Which honestly made it much less fun for me.
Your bunneeboy is cute, very lanky emo boy, stock up on Fantasia 😉
RE:AST, unlike WHM thats raw healing + good chunk of dmg, AST is more of a utility healer, the cards give dmg% buffs and the whole card system is a mini game of its own. Its confusing at first but it's the healer that's probably has the most active kit. If your question is does it get complex later on, oh it does and it's actually fun to play (bias I might be as an AST main) not to mention glowy stars lol. BUT give it up to lvl 50, if you don't like it then you won't like it beyond that. Additionally it's currently the only healer that can play either as a shield or regen healer (although they will be reworking that aspect come endwalker).
As a Machinist player, yes, they get drones, robots, a Drill and stuff more mechanical, the 1-2-3 combo also gets updated with more damage and some cool spins and animation, MCH is fun because you have a lot of things you can click to do more damage
As someone who's basically ended up maining Dark Knight (and later Gunbreaker), tanking can actually be a blast, and Dark Knight has, hands-down, the best tanking skill in the game. "Blackest Night" at level 70 gives you a shield that absorbs up to 25% of the damage you take, and as long as you have the MP, can be cast every 25 seconds. It's bonkers good.
Astrologist isn't easy to wrap your head around. It's a good healer with some fun tricks, but it's probably good to leave it be for now.
MCH main here, yes it does get more mechanical later (pun intended). By the end you have a drill blaster, poison gas gun, flamethrower, drones/mech, etc. Also with the newest expac they confirmed a shotgun.
It took me 330 hours of procrastinating to get to heavensward
You really should give Dark Knight a try. Even if it is tank, it has by far the best class story of them all. It's a big fan fav, and can be hard to avoid spoilers for it in the long run, so I'd say try it out before that happens, haha xD
I think one of the things that makes Heavensward so good is that I feel like they had years of polish to get out a story for the area. Since they were kind of leaning the story of Heavensward though out 1.0, but put the pause button on that before swapping on over to work on 2.0.
Just to give some perspective to how far out this was planned, Bismarck(the sky whale) was datamined during the beta.
SCH>WHM>AST for me personally. I just like mitigating damage>healing the damage. AST is a shell of its former self which is good and bad, more beginner friendly less interesting for vet players. MCH is fun, I love playing it your little turret helper gets upgraded to an actual robot, and all your shots get visually upgraded to be cooler, as well as getting all the tools that edgar had from ff6 really fits the.machinist fantasy for me, the only problem is that if I do the exact same rotation sometimes my wildfire comes out at 73k and sometimes it comes out at 57k which is really annoying.
i personally love astrologian! as it stands (changing in endwalker), there are two "sects" you will choose from depending on either your preferred playstyle or the other healer in the party: diurnal sect, which is regen (usually paired with a scholar). and nocturnal sect, which are shields (usually paired with a white mage)
there are six damage boosting cards in your tarot deck, 3 for ranged and 3 for melee, which will eventually start giving you three different seals depending on the card that you play. this is essentially your job gauge, your goal is to collect one of each seal in order to cast a party wide damage buff. at 50 you also get the ability to augment a card you've drawn for a larger single target damage buff in exchange for no seal.
in later levels especially, you get a few abilities that do delayed healing, such as a big star dome that does a big burst of damage and healing but doesn't trigger until either a certain amount of time passes or you manually trigger it.
overall i think its worth a try if you're interested in trying a new healer 🙂
Good news friend! If you like edgy classes one of the newly announced classes for Endwalker is just that, and it shares gear with Dragoon! I won't spoil anything about it for you until you get there, so for now enjoy Heavensward and the Dragonsong War!
Edit: Have you pre-purchased any of the other expansions, particularly Endwalker? If so, one of the in-game items you receive is an earring that boosts your experience gain by 30% up to level 80.
I love the three HW jobs, DRK is my favorite tank and AST is my favorite healer. I think AST is definitely worth sticking with for the class itself, even if the quests are like a 5/10, but level 80 AST is so satisfying to play and their party buffs are really really nice
If you make and Save the Male Viera Apperance data on the benchmark you can import it to the main game when EW releases.
I enjoy AST, it's my new main. But I understand it's not for everyone. What I like most is that I'm not just applying heals/shields but also giving party members buffs using the cards. There's nothing like it in WoW. A tip when you're doing Healer job quests: Apply a marker to any NPC's running around with you. It's easier to find them when you need to heal them.
Early ast is kinda boring but it ramps up. It's very flashy, you get the ability to do shields and regen. At some point, you can use 3 cards, get one of each symbol to get that fat party dmg buff. So you know the pain when you keep getting the same cards in succession. Or even funnier when you fat finger and give the melee buff to a caster. You know, and they surely know too but they wont say anything about it.