Random Thoughts.....What Are You Thinking?

I mean.. theres no freedom in battle. You have to spam an optimal rotation of abilities for DPS, there isn't much weight on the individual in battles mostly everyone dodging. The whole battle is essentially dodging mechanics, which you have to memorize thru 10m long videos. You can't try things with different strats for the most part, each job is copy paste with different visuals. The only different job being BLU but that isn't even used for anything serious. No unique stats on equipment, no elemental weaknesses to exploit like every other FF game made. No special equipment that allows you to play differently or approach fights differently.

The battle system is the main weakness in my opinion, but I'm sure I'm in the minority. It seems most are content with that at this point in that games life.

The socializing part, it seems that's all people do once they complete their content. They sit around in that one town showing off glamours and being really weird.

FFXIV's battle system is at its best when the fights are new, and there are no guide videos made yet. Figuring fights out is like solving a puzzle.

The no elemental weakness thing is kinda weird, but it was sort of a thing in the very first Final Fantasy where monsters only had resistance levels. These did impact damage, but you could be hyper ineffective and just spam one element and still hurt everything decently for the whole game.

its better than lua commands

I honestly didn't see BRD getting anything new.

Must have been not flashy.

AST got passively nerfed pretty hard based on the information presented already. Of course take everything with a heavy heaping of lily salt since things can change immensely between now and release. With that being said, AST lost the following:

-1.5s cast time was homogenized between all healers
-Single party buffs are now homogenized between all healers too (somewhat, we need more information)
-Divination is no longer a raid buff and is now a single target augment. Since AST damage is low to begin with, this will most likely not make up the loss of overall rDPS.

AST did get OG Minor Arcana back with a twist. It looks like it's no longer a function of Draw and it's on it's own CD. It also looks like an AoE instead of single target like it was back in... I think HW, may have been SB. The AoE aspect may be a Minor Arcana trait AST gets in the 80-90 range while the the lower level version may end up being single target like it's original incarnation.

Nope

I'm thinking about of how many people that started playing this game that are now gone...

Facebook is currently struggling with this issue of managing deceased people's accounts. There will be a giving time that the dead will eventually outnumber the living... Could this happen in FFXI too?

I mean, I started playing this game when I was 12 years old (I'm 30 yrs old now). I loved LOTR movies, books and fantasy, and this game was just what I was looking for, to really live in a fantasy world I really cherished. I made great friends along the way, I really got into FFXI universe, I only wanted to come back from school asap so I could log in and spend my day there, and start the fantasy once more.

And I had the most amazing memories from this game (like you guys did), there is no other game I've played that could bring this whole friendship and journey experience like ffxi did... like the first time you went to Valkurm dunes on the ship bound for Mhaura, the terror of sea monk (just like the old fisherman's tales from medieval ages), the lvling parties in V. Dunes that took rl hours, the first trip to Jeuno, the first time you went to the Jungle, your AF... and so on, and you did all these experiences with friends (that was the truly hidden value from FFXI that no other game brought to the table, and that haven't brought from my experience).

Many of these friends I played with, quitted the game. And it was like a rl death, we had no discord, no whatsapp, hell... even facebook was in pamppers, and to make contact again with them was really really hard, it was like a rl grieffing process. Some of these friends I'm telling you about, are no longer with us, one of them died in a motorcycle crash and the other of cancer.

And now I believe that just as FFXI was about, RL is about too. It is all just about the trip, and the friend we make all along the way.

Well, in certains aspects, thats the beauty of life.

Regardless happiness, sadness, tragedy or hardships, our role in universe is to keep moving, changing, turning energy in entropy till the day we completely stop. So, its all part of your destiny.

Thats, unless we all are just illusions from matrix, a program created to fabricate illusions that we live or exist, just to feed our human meat for aliens to devour

From what I recall from the live letter, it basically just got a follow-up attack to Apex Arrow and some kind of party-wide buff after using all three combat songs. The video showed what looks like an upgrade to Quick Nock as well.

So yeah, no major changes for the DPS job with the lowest damage output. On one hand, I like the way bard plays and don't want major changes to actual gameplay. But it is a bit grating that during the live letter the devs seemed really nervous about the prospect of allowing bard to benefit from the buffs that they give to the party. Because, you know, a very slight increase in damage would break the game if you gave it to the weakest DPS.

It's like the ads for the subscription manager service. Like who doesn't check their bank accounts?

I'm guilty of this haha, but the only reason I used to stay subbed back in the day is that I thought if we didn't, and we unsubbed for a certain amount of time, SE would delete our character >.> Now I could be wrong because I am just going off what people said and posted on LiveJournal back in the day haha.

You make a good point though, no point to sub if one dislikes the game and has no interest in it! It's just a waste of money ; ;

Nowadays money is no longer an issue luckily, so I can keep myself, my BF, and our WHM alt subbed, however, we do play all the time and every day :) I would imagine if we no longer had an interest in playing, I would just unsub and let the crysta chill in our accounts, no need to use it if we don't play! :)

Could you imagine trying to introduce someone new to FFXI in it's current iteration that may not be new to the MMO scene?

XI Player: "Hi, would you like to try FFXI?"
Potential New Player: "Sure, what do I need to install?"
XI Player: *Explains the long winded process of making an account and getting past PoL.*
Potential New Player: "Wow, that's long and convoluted."
XI Player: "Also, you need to install this third party program that runs a script that allows to you do things not normally intended by the vanilla client to play optimally."
Potential New Player: "... what?"
XI Player: *Nodding and points them to Windower and Gearswap.*
Potential New Player: "WTF?"
XI Player: "Oh, and if you don't have too many friends, you may need to play at least triple accounts at the same time to clear the content and gear up."
Potential New Player: "....."
XI Player: "Oh, it's alright, the third party application makes it relatively easy to control multiple accounts at once."
Potential New Player: "That's uh... not the point of my ellipses.."

Bad luck for me. Today is my monthly get-together with the group of friends I reference on here a lot. Y'know, the ones that go out of their way to insult FFXI in an effort to get me to play XIV with them. And of course, the new trailer just dropped, so I know for a fact that's all they're going to talk about.

I even called it almost to the minute when one of them was going to text me about Summoner being updated to not look like a pathetic train-wreck. I'm sitting here twirling my finger in the "whoop-tee-doo" motion because they fixed a job's aesthetic in a game where aesthetic is its only draw.

Watching the trailer last night further cemented how much I don't like how the game looks. Everything is so big - SO DAMN BIG - and yet it all happens frequently and ends so quickly that there's just no weight behind it at all. I'll fully admit that some of them looked kinda neat. One of Samurai's skills made me nod in approval, and I think one or two of Red Mage's effects did as well.

Now I'm sitting here debating whether I even want to hang out with that group of people, knowing full-well I'm going to get into another discussion with five people who have never touched XI tell me how it sucks because they watched a video of a guy saying it plays just like XIV 1.0.

lol...

Sorry, have you played current XI? Baked in 2s lock is the only reason weapon skills aren't going off as fast, if not faster, than XIV's base GCD at this point. Like, a well buffed/geared PLD could WS in ~2.3s if it weren't for the 2s lock.

It's ok to like both games. There's no war between them.

xi people care a lot more about 14 than 14 people care about xi, just saying.

the hate some people feel the absolute need to put towards ff14 is just astounding lol

you forgot the part where you tell him he has to initially hand edit the luas for the jobs he wants to play and everytime he gets a piece of new gear that situationally could be better he has to make comparisons and edits all over again.
you could also mention that while he's at it he should also catch up on some lua as even minimal customisations of existing gearswaps, which he'll want down the line, are probably as intuitve to someone who's never had any points of contact with scripting as brainfuck is to the average dev.

Maybe you stop using luas and learn to play the game with equipsets and macros, you know, without cheating.

you say that as if replacing pieces of gear was more comfortable or time efficient with the ingame gearsets than gearswap. at least i can open gearsets in a proper editor to search and replace key words. if anything then manually going thru all of your equipsets each time you get a sidegrade is even more of a turn off to a newcommer.

tbh macros aren't exactly the most intuitive thing i ever encountered in gaming either, granted it's not as complicated as what you'd have to learn to edit some lua but it also has some sort of syntax to it. not a single game i've played befor and after ffxi has ever asked anything more than maybe drag and drop some icons around in order to customize stuff.