I’ve played WoW for around 15 years and consider myself a WoW veteran, with only 3 months experience in FFXIV. There is so much culture, history and change that has happened in FFIXV that I have never seen before.
On stream, people were telling me to watch/react to Lazzyzaur’s FFXIV History Lessons video and I loved it and I learned so much about how the game has changed. I think there are some real similarities to how FFIXV has changed and how WoW changed over the years, such as the dungeon finder, class tuning, skill change. I was so excited to see another video about the history of Heavensward, so I wanted to share my thoughts on the video and I I’ll throw a link below to check it for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYy6GInvKUo
If you know of any other cool changes to FFXIV over the years, I’d love to hear about them in the comments! I love how there are comparisons between final fantasy vs world of warcraft as the MMORPG has changed over the years.
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Tanking was harder back then. I remember having to get good at swapping between tankstance and dps stance, fighting your dps for aggro and wearing dps accessories. And managing MP. Tanks used to use the Number markers to mark the trash mobs in the order you want the dps to kill them in, simply because of aggro reasons.
You may be thinking its a reward to level other classes to get the skills from them but its really just mandatory to level all of those classes to the specific level that you need the skills for and then go back to your main class. It wasn't an enjoyable experience having to level DRG to 32 and MNK to 42 just so your NIN could have blood for blood, internal release and mantra which were mandatory skills for a melee dps.
As for the AST cards, the old ones were not fun for end game raiding. As a casual player they may have felt more fun but they were not fun at all. Balance was literally the only thing that mattered and making it aoe was the only thing you wanted, so you had to pull 2 specific cards out of 6 every time in order to buff your team. Literally every other card was thrown away by right clicking the card buff. Ewer, Spire and Bole were literally useless 99% of the time, Arrow was a detriment to anyone who wasn't BLM and Spear was just secondary to Balance.
I dunno when you last played WoW, but you haven't had to worry about DPS taking aggro from a tank for a long time. Unless you were talking about classic and just forgot to specify.
Yes, I regret I sold my full set U_U (still hurt!) Marty: I don't like casters… Stream later playing Summoner XD
I am not into cross-classes at all, and actually…. I would love to see Ninja with a Shuriken as a main Weapon (more like Yuffie stuff), and Rogue being completely separated class with knives and Interceptor xD (based on Shadow from FF VI).
What I don't like is shared experience between Summoner and Scholar. I finished Summoner as my first class, getting to lvl 80, and never really learned how to play Scholar properly, being already lvl 80, so I just did the quests.
If I would have to recommend some of the easiest and most comfortable classes to play, I would say Machinist would be nr 1 from all ranged/caster dps. Even number of skills on my hotbars is much less than any other class xD
And BM being more challenging to get into it, would be something for later. But, many people likes to start with BM, and they have some hard times going through mechanics from the beginning. Playing and levelling now BM is very satisfying, every time when all those small things, and your predictions skills, nail the game.
Cheers!
I remember hating dps in dungeons if i was slightly better geared than the tank, felt so horrible having to slow down your damage.
they totally ruined AST when they reworked it, i was not happy, i was an AST main
As someone who started in Shadowbringers and believes this game is good because it respects your time, cross-class sounds like a feature that doesn’t respect your time. I want my free time spent leveling this job, but no, I need to level this other job I have no interest in so I can have important skills.
In Regards to cross class skills, it wasnt always great, I have a friend that plays Ranged and hates Melee in any game. And as a Bard he was forced to level a Pugilist to like 28 or something to get internal release (Which was a crit chance up). Which was basically a must as bards strived on Crits back then
Oh man, I remember "Brayflox Nonstop" grinding for utter piles of Tomestones of Mythology (RIP)
I remember playing PLD through HW.
We had Flash, Protect, Stone Skin, and Raise.
I would cast stone skin mid battle because there really weren't much use for mana. This was great as a support tank.
I forget if the raise was a battle rez.
Lol Marty thinking Eulmore is the guys house Xp
Okay repurposing some parts of my previous comments elsewhere. Long comment ahead!
The Bard AoE that Larry erroneously calls Rain of Death was actually called Wide Volley. It was… kinda unnecessary in function. Quick Nock was 110 potency AoE in a 12-yalm cone for 140 TP, Wide Volley was 110 potency AoE in a 5-yalm radius circle around target for 160 TP. Because TP was a limiting factor for AoE, you'd just use Nock instead of Volley in most situations, so it was redundant. The animation was still cool though… Kinda wish we'd kept it instead of Nock, or maybe made an AoE combo out of them.
Similar thing with the Dragoon pole dance (Ring of Thorns). Doom Spike was (initially 135 but at some point in ARR upgraded to) 160 potency in a 10-yalm line for 160 TP, and Ring of Thorns was 100 potency in a 5-yalm circle for 120 TP, so less powerful and less potency per TP too. It did have a combo action from Heavy Thrust (a single-target attack that would do 100 potency, or 170 from a flank, and gave the predecessor of the damage up buff that's now on Disembowel) that would upgrade its potency to 150, but that didn't help much (oh and that combo only activated if you hit the flank positional right :)). Really all you'd do was hit Heavy thrust to get the buff up, then Ring of Thorns once, and then spam Spike until Heavy Thrust refresh, since Spike was just more damage per GCD and more damage per TP at 4+ enemies.
So yeah another functionally redundant AoE skill. They could again have chosen to keep that and scrap Doom Spike, but I at least personally prefer Spike – it being a line makes it a little more interesting when most AoE is circles. But personal preference.
You can still see some NPCs use these removed skills by the way!
The random weapons in Diadem: I only saw the special raid in there spawn ONCE in a decently long amount of time of trying. We cleared it. Someone in my party randomly got a Monk weapon, just about the best conceivable Monk weapon you could have. That person had not even unlocked Pugilist yet, and felt really bad about taking it from someone who actually plays the job. (And guess who was maining monk back then 🙂 ).
On the mention of Heavensward Bard and Machinist: Machinist had its base combo reliant on RNG. As in, it was RNG whether you could actually do the combo. Every time you shot, it was a coin toss whether the combo would actually progress. And if it didn't, you had to start over. It was kinda infuriating. Made even worse by the existence of the cast times, because since the combo proc could only show up after the attack landed, you had even less time to decide whether to actually go to hit the next combo part or the first one over.
On the crossclass point: When you were a base class, you could not only crossclass 10 skills instead of the 5 jobs get, you could also crossclass things from a wider selection – jobs could only borrow from 2 beyond their base class, classes could take from the whole set. This actually created an interesting period of time during ARR where you would not bring a Warrior to serious raiding, but instead you'd bring a Marauder – thanks to the extra crossclasses (and Warrior's job-specific kit being kinda weak) Marauder could bring both more damage and utility than a Warrior, while still being able to pull the offtank role decently well (Paladins were primarily main tanks). Weird times.
The crossclass system was kinda neat in theory, but it just had too many issues in practice. So many people missing vital skills because they were locked behind classes they didn't want to play. Sure was fun running into a Provokeless DRK in Bismarc EX, which required a tank swap 🙂 And all the DPS missing damage skills 🙂 Gotta love having a physical job that runs out of TP because they didn't level Dragoon for Invigorate 🙂
And even the bit of choice you had in the skill loadout you could pick was mostly illusion – some skills were useless, some were mandatory, some fights made specific ones mandatory, so you'd often have 0-1 slots you could make choices with.
The old Astro cards were fun for flavor, but really, the current iteration is more functional. Back then it was basically "draw expanded Balance or you're a bad Astro" – sure there were a couple others that could help with damage, but they were worse, and some couldn't help with damage at all and so were pretty much considered trash, so Astro was really luck-based on whether you could contribute properly to a party or not. It was actually the correct play in quite a number of occasions to just throw away your card and not use it, whereas the current system makes all the cards at least usable. Oh right and also the haste buff was a problem, since it could outright screw with people's rotations, and would do so even more now – many jobs would hate it now, even without the danger of running out of TP. Like, imagine that you've perfected your rotation so that everything lines up for a burst phase – and then some Astro throws a card on you and now it's all screwed up, because of another player doing something "helpful". I do not want that old system back as it was.
I do kinda hope the devs figure out some way to bring back the more varied cards without going all the way back to the RNG mess it used to be. I do have a couple possible ideas for how it could maybe work, but I'm not too confident in either…
Bit of a rough and busy week, so I'm way behind on your streams. Glad I can catch these vids though. Hope I can make it to your streams here soon! Great work! 😀
Cross classing was mostly gone by the time I joined in Stormblood.
What are called Role abilities were, however, more limited. We could only choose 5/10 I think, total. So you had to choose "Do I want to stun or do I want to interrupt spell casting?"
Also, as a Bard I miss Palisade and Foe's Requiem, but that will probably be gone over in the Stormblood history. The only thing that took mana from me was Foe's Requiem. I guess I do miss being tethered by Dragoons though. We had a thing.
As a healer, I don't really miss protect too much, because they did readjust things quite well – part of why I'm not concerned about the stat squish coming down the line.
I was in there, at the time, at Dun Scaith (by the way, if you didn't do yet the 24-raids for Heavensward, please, do! They are awesome!), when I first saw the Proto Ultima instead of the Succubus, I was like "WHO DA HELL ARE YOU!??" lol
At the time, cross class didn't seem like that big a deal, but I think it could cause a lot of problems overall that would have led to some pretty toxic interactions. For example, if you were a tank and didn't have Provoke from GLD, you couldn't be a good off tank because getting aggro wouldn't be easy (Shirk was not a thing back then). There was kind of a similar problem with healers back then because Swiftcast (level 26 THM) was 100% required. This wasn't just for raising, but back when getting a relic required Titan HM (which was super hard with just dungeon gear), I often needed to not only pre-cast Medica II for the series of stomps, but also follow that up immediately with a Swiftcast + Medica. I don't think people ever got booted for not having Swiftcast as a healer, but it was Very Much Looked Down On if you didn't have it.
Leveling other jobs for cross-spells is a good idea – but back then, leveling was much more tedious than it is now, I think. I started FF14 a little over a year ago and at times I struggled to get enough XP to get my MSQ done – on a single job. Afterwarts it took me around 6 months or so to level all jobs to 80 – without any XP boosts other than the food-buff – with a daily playtime around 2-4 hours (longer at weekends). And thats 5.2 and 5.3 for you – I think, back in Heavensward, even it was "just" to lvl60, it took much more time to level alternative jobs… Emphasis on "think", I have no idea ^^° There is always the difference between "choose to do" and "have to do": I choose to level up all jobs because I wanted that mount. I probably wouldnt have enjoyed it as much as I did if it was important for my gameplay. This leveling journey was for fun – and it got me a supercool award 🙂
I dont know if the old card system was so much better… I have enough to do destributing the right cards to the right job as it is (so annoying to get melee cards in a party full of ranges and spell dps… the tank's happy though…) … I probably get called out for that statement 😀
… Thank goodness Larry's lessons are NOT like school o.O I hated school… Seriously, I hated that place -.-
The whole cross class skills system is a lot of fun… in a single player rpg where that one player is only making decisions about how they spend their own time making their characters level up different job combinations. Unfortunately it turns out it sucks when you put the same system in an mmo and get players telling other players what they need to play.
The old Dun Scaith trash fight is still in the game – it's just incredibly unlikely that you'll ever see it again. Ultima shows up when at least a single member of the alliance has a certain weekly quest in their log. Not having a single person without is…very rare. But it can happen.
The Ultima fight is way more fun though anyways 😀