FF XIV: Shadowbringers announcement

Just saw the trailer. I'll admit its a pretty good guitar track. I hope someone makes a version with the Dark Arts 'quack quack' sound at the very end. I heard Rorie is trying ff xiv again lately and even Jeff expressed interest in giving it a go on the extra life stream.

I'm probably going to dive back in. How about you?

i haven't played any of the story post-stormblood, but what i'm seeing here is extremely in line with my head canon for my WoL and i'm going to spend my entire summer playing this hoooooo boy.

FFXIV is an amazing MMO and in my opinion up there with Everquest and GW1 (I know it’s not technically an MMO but whatever).

Which is why I’m hesitant to jump back in because I know what it will do to me, and I don’t want that. Well part of me does, but also no.

I’m happy it’s doing so well though.

I think FFXIV just isn't for me and isn't trying to be anymore and that's okay. It is what it is. The most exciting thing to me was that we get to rebuild Ishgard, but I've never been big into crafting or gathering so I don't see myself participating in that.

I was praying for something, anything to get announced that would make me want to keep playing. I would've been okay with a cool race, but instead we get Viera. Like...okay...say what you will about WoW, lord knows they deserve the shit they get, but goddamn you gotta give Blizzard credit for their races. They coulda saw how overwhelmingly popular Night Elves, Blood Elves, and Dranei were and just made every future race similar to those, but no, they added shit like Goblins and Pandaren knowing full goddamn well that they were going to be niche races.

The crazy thing I love Viera. I've said it half a billion times, but XII and Tactics Advance are two of my favorite FF games. It's just that fucking everything in XIV is stupid attractive except for Roegadyn. Yeah, I know they're the least played race. Yes, I know people prefer attractive races. But it's just...what the addition of Viera represent that bothers me so much: they're still playing it safe after all these years. So far, Shadowbringers is once again looking like more of the same with a few bells and whistles on the periphery that will at best serve as an occasional distraction, but don't shake up the game in any meaningful way.

I don;'t want to be a downer, but hey, that's just what I felt :/

Gotta say I'm not super high on the name after the likes of Heavensward and Stormblood but god damn if the rest of it is not as though someone asked me personally what I would like to see in the next expansion.

Absolutely can't wait and I hope the servers are at least a little better or barring that they don't have the first mission be an instance..

In the meantime I'm very intrigued about whatever weird way they're implementing Blue Mage, and in the next patch at that.

I'll probably check it out. I haven't played in months and months, yet I continue to pay, which is exactly why they love people like me.

Really cool that Blue Mage is coming at all, and nice surprise doing it so soon in a patch. I'll probably jump on to mess with it a bit.

But yea, I think the best way to play this game at this point is to log in and catch up/mess around every like 6 months to see the new content, but not waste your time grinding for gear. Check out the music, new dungeons, new visuals, some new story elements and then put it down til the next big update or expansion.

I played XIV right when it came out for the free month than stopped, not because it was bad or I didn’t like it but it just wasn’t the right time I guess. I always wanted to jump back in but there has been what 3 expansions now? If I wanted to play from the beginning are people still doing the raids and dungeons from the beginning or would I have to skip them because nobody is playing them.

I’ve been a WoW player for ever but don’t like the new expansion at all so I canceled my sub. Does XIV have similar system like WoW where there is scaling and you can do them at higher levels?

@bongchilla: Plenty of people do dungeons due to the way the party roulette works, higher level players have incentive to do that stuff. The old raids are probably another matter, they recently added a better roulette for that stuff but if you mean to do those it'll probably require a pre made party of people.

Almost all dungeons have a maximum level associated with them so anyone doing those in a group higher than that will be synced down to that level. You can avoid this with custom parties if you need to crush old level content for whatever reason.

So is there a time-jump at some point in the post-Stormblood stuff? Watching that teaser again, it sounds like Alphinaud talking, and Thancred is clearly older, unless that's just a CG thing.

Oh my god I'm so ready to play the fuck out of this. Blue Mage too? Learn Shiva's skills (and other monsters)?! It's too perfect, I cannot deal. Gettin real tempted to just dive back in now.

It looks great, the prospect of big crafting projects makes me want to get back into crafting, I could see the Gunblade and Blue Mage jobs being a lot of fun, seems like it's gonna involve going to Garlemald and enabling replay of old story segments is a nice touch. Don't much care about the Viera but the rest is exactly what I would want from an expansion.

I've been waiting to come back until they added both Dark Knight and Blue Mage. Now that it's coming I'll have to come back. I hope they make it easier to access the newer content though, I got stonewalled at the run up to Heavensward content. Too many boxes to check.

@redphoenix122: I'll not lie and say it's the most compelling content in the game but the stuff leading into Heavensward is more or less a straight line of main quests that by this point anyone who reaches level 50 will instantly outgear the whole run of content.

So it's relatively quick now but about 3/4s of that post ARR stuff is super boring.

I don't expect any further steps taken to make it easier since they sell content skips.

@efesell: My problem is there's a fair amount of instance running that has to be done, and I'm not super thrilled playing a Dragoon.

FYI to anyone looking forward to blue mage, don't get your hopes up that high. It might be fun, but they are releasing it soon(january, patch 4.5) but it will be a "limited job", their wording. Sounds like solo content to go through, level 50 cap, NO duty finder but you can/maybe? go into stuff with premade groups if you want.

Personally, I like what they're talking about and the general theme of the expansion, but I have no fondness for blue mage. If it was another full class, cool I'll level it. Since it's not going to be that, so far(maybe ever?), it'll also just be a cool thing for me to do on the side still.

Their reasoning is that I think they said it has 49 skills by level 50 and to keep blue mage feeling how it should while giving it tons of variety, it is not really made to do regular grouped content. Of course there are conversations everywhere; I mean you could make it able to do regular content with changes or caveats in how you made it but so far, this is what they're saying.

Also if you're already playing, they're splitting up data centers. A data center holds a cluster of servers. Duty finder, LFG, works between your entire data center. Patches from this expansion have made it so you can also do some cross server stuff with people. They are expanding that to let you literally visit other worlds and do quests/content with people there(handful of important things you can't do in other servers), but they are also splitting NA and EU data centers from 2 to 3 and 1 to 2 respectively. It's weirdly going to break up a lot of cross server groups that do content together because some servers are staying on their data center some are moving to the new one and so far, there is no mingling of data centers. They will be offering free world transfers though.