2.1 was the first major content patch we got after 2.0, it added a many a new things for us to do in Eorzea, so much that it was actually quite shocking. 2.1 was possibly the biggest patch of all the content ever released in one go. One of the main reasons why was because most of this content was actually pretty much finished around the time 2.0 launched. Which is evident if you look at what was added, and the fact the PvP trophy for the PS3 users at the time was unobtainable until that point. Yes, PvP was an afterthought not shipped with the game, but rightfully so since its first incarnation was rather lacking, and was later polished up with future updates. So just like last time, were here to recap what the average life of a player was from day to day, and the most memorable things from the patch. I myself was busy with Binding Coil, and trying to help my FC raise money for an FC house. So without further adeu:

2.1, The Realm Awakens

So as the video above helps explain, this sizable expansion had a bit for everyone. We got two new hardmode dungeons and one brand new one, we got the Extreme versions of Primals, The story continuation of 2.0 introducing a brand new primal in itself, the Crystal Tower 24 man raid, PvP, FC Housing and more. Almost about all of the content introduced in this patch was met with backlash more often than actual praise, yet even though I had my own qualms with the patch I still have to hand it to them for making it a pretty wild experience, so naturally here's what you were most likely doing when the patch dropped:

• Story content is just going to be a bunch of fetch quests and old dungeons, huh.
• The OG Primals have one last hurrah... for a good eight months
• Summoners are fucking broken
• 30 million gil for a small house?!
• Its the end of the week, get your Crystal Tower drop yet?
• Let's look for Treasure!
• The peak and inevitable collapse of the challenging Dungeon
• Hildibrand should have been the main story

I'm probably missing a few things but honestly on top of the stuff you were already doing to get gear for Coil, you had a lot on your plate for a good while. To top it off with the introduction of things like the Crystal Tower you could get an ilvl 80 piece of gear on top of your regular piece of Darklight and your biweekly piece of Myth gear. The game was slowly learning how to improve the quality of life for the average player, which was fantastic if you weren't getting your drops in Coil... you know if the piece you were looking for did indeed drop, but we'll give CT its time to shine later for now we'll take a look on one of the more fun additions to the game... even if it was hidden behind a pretty bad chain of quests.

2.1 Story: A Realm Awoken

A Realm Awoken was the next chapter in the A Realm Reborn storyline, where we pick up at the point we left off after defeating the Garlean Empire to asses possible Primal threats in Eorzea, along with the story NPC Group, the Scions of the Seventh Dawn and their future as protectors of the realm. The story itself was actually pretty decent even if they didn't decide to do voice work for most, if not all of it. It also ended the era of going to the Waking Sands to continue the future story beats. The Scions would eventually move to Mor Dhona where the Seventh Heaven currently is. What ended up being a big disappointment was the amount of work... or lack of work was put into the quests leading up to the inevitable climax of the story. It was nothing but fetch quests, and a forced trip into an optional low level dungeon known as the Sunken Temple of Qarn, one of the infamous lowbie dungeons where low level players new to MMOs would have no idea what to do. Which was an attempt to make more high level players who had been through it before to help those players.

What ended up happening though was a bunch of disgruntled 50s getting angry at new players who didn't quite grasp the mechanics of the dungeon. There was nothing wrong with this practice as it was a thing they continued to expand on, but the first iteration of it was executed very poorly. When you were finished with that long line of crap you were eventually told that the Moogles have stared getting a bit hostile. A group of Moogles known as the Moogleguard would get their hands on a bunch of crystals and somehow magically summon a Moogle known as... The Good King Moggle Mog IIX

Now because this was a Story mode boss he wasn't really all that challenging to the high geared people coming in to finish the 2.1 story. In fact my first time through we had about 8 or 9 deaths without wiping just because we were too geared to wipe. Yet Moggle Mog was something interesting, he was a boss that was completely random. Yes he had a bunch of hard hitting moves and raid wide damage, but unless you could see the tells of the Moogleguard beforehand, which at this point nobody knew about, you didn't know what was coming next. Moggle Mog doesn't have a set pattern of abilities, which made him an actual challenge to the people who were fresh coming into the game, but for the rest of us he was just a fun little encounter to figure out, and to later farm him later because he dropped Moogle themed weapons for each class. The best one being the Grimoires, instead of being the same textures as the rest of the books... they were popup books. This would not be the last time we hear from The Good King, he would eventually go onto having one of the biggest clusterfucks of an Extreme mode in 2.2, and is still to this day one of the more fun Primal encounters.

Two Dungeons... and then there's Pharos

So along with the story content we were introduced to the new format of how we were going to be introduced to Dungeons per patch. We were to receive two remixes of previously released dungeons known as the Hard Modes, and one entirely new dungeon never before seen in the game. The dungeons we got were Haukke Manor Hard, Copperbell Hard, and... Pharos Sirius. Haukke Manor and Copperbell were actually two really fun ideas for what they were, two dungeons we've seen before with either some twists on some bosses or something completely new all together. For example in Copperbell, the second boss in both the level 15, and Hard Mode encounters, share similar mechanics but are handled very differently, where as both the first bosses were completely different from one another in terms of mechanics. Haukke was the preferred dungeon to run for your Myth and Philo tomes, as it was the fastest to complete... And then theres Pharos Sirius. Now you may remember from the 2.0 recap and how I mentioned Amdapor Keep was the hardest dungeon in the game to that date. It really seemed Square wanted to keep a trend of challenging dungeons going. Pharos Sirius was a four boss dungeon, the only one in the game still, and it was known as the hardest dungeon in the history of the game. Pharos Sirius in the duty finder was labeled as a entry level 50 dungeon that new players could clear within the time limit. Unfortunately about 90 percent of those attempts ended up in failure... at the first boss.

While still a fun challenge, and a wonderful idea, it would seem that Square did not scale this dungeon correctly for the audience it wanted. The first boss would usually be all that new players ever saw after their group wiped five times and just decided it would be faster to just find another group to hopefully clear it... or move onto Haukke for the day. What the first boss did was not really that hard at all by any means, at certain health intervals he would summon Zombie Dogs, if left up too long they would spit out an instant AoE attack that would put a stacking debuff on you. If you hit three of that debuff, you would explode, cause damage to everyone around you, and get a vulnerability debuff that also stacked. What made this boss so difficult was the lack of people who knew that these things had to die fast, and back before the nerfs happened to the place the adds had way more health than they had any right to. If your group managed to get past that one difficult spike, you were golden... until the final boss, Siren.

Siren was a boss that pretty much showed whether or not a healer was good enough to go do bigger and better things. Siren after 50 percent health would put a group wide debuff that weakened healing potency by a huge margin, like if you were to be healing in Cleric stance is the best example I could come up with. Along with that she randomly put a party member under her charm, in order to stop the charm from going off the healer needed to top off said player before the debuff goes away, if not the player was now under her control and started attacking the closest party member for a while. If the healer was the one charmed and failed to get it of themselves, then it was more than likely bad news for you. On top of that she had adds that could stun you until they were killed and dealt with.

The outcry for this dungeon was off the charts, it quickly built up a reputation, alot of people still see it as the reason why most of the dungeons we got afterwards were not nearly as challenging ever again. Luckily around 2.5 we started seeing a bit more interesting and deathly mechanics again in some of the dungeons we got, but it nearly took a year for Square to get over this phobia. Will a dungeon like Pharos ever exist again? Hopefully, it would be a shame if there wasn't.

Wrath of the Primals

One of the bigger parts of this patch for the playerbase looking for something to do in their offtime from raiding, was the introduction of what we know as the Extreme Primal. Usually nowadays when a new primal is introduced he normally has a Story Mode encounter with light mechanics that might transfer over, and an EX encounter that represents the actual power of what the primal has to offer. Arguably these fights were originally, probably, supposed to be in the game along with PvP, with the possibility of holding onto this content to help tide over the wait for 2.2. Which wasn't a bad thing, if you really put it into perspective the Extreme primals did their job, and if you were able to conquer all three you got a pretty nice weapon in return.

Garuda was the most popular primal to run because most classes wanted a second ring to go with their other i90 ring, if they weren't seeing their class ring out of Coil anytime soon. Garuda was also for the longest time regarded as the easiest and fastest to run, yet one day during a hotfix something horrible changed with the fight that never really got noticed by anyone except people tanking the fight. One of her tank killer moves, Wicked Wheel, usually dealt with a minor cooldown, and some healer mitigation like stoneskin, usually did the trick. After this hotfix, she was suddenly shredding i90 tanks to pieces. Suddenly your 10k health warrior couldn't even take a single one of these, as they would fall to the floor dead. Paladins once again became the prime candidates to tank it, even with the changes done to Warrior this patch alot of people didn't grasp what they were meant to do just yet. Even with this change Garuda was still the fastest to clear, and most people decided to farm it hours on end for the hopes they'd get a ring, or the fabled Nightmare mount. Which is a Black Unicorn with a flaming gold horn that gallops on the wind.

Of course this picture does not represent my character, but I did manage to get this mount while it was out during this time, before they started giving every primal their own colorful horse. This started the trend of pony farming we see today in the Party Finder. Now this time, unlike the Relic Quest, the Gatekeeper wasn't to be found at his spot on the top of the Primal Tower. Oh no, for you see, he was "ranked" second of the three, and the legacy we came to know in fear... grew astronomically larger.

The King Ascends to Godhood

Titan Extreme, was the second primal you had to fight in order to finish the Primal Focus quest. Now I wrote a whole part of the last recap on how Hard Mode terrorized an entire playerbase for the entirety of 2.0. What makes you think that the guy deserves another? Well the fight became so infamous, Square themselves decided to poke a little fun over the whole thing and recreate the fight using the old Final Fantasy style, which even people not even playing the game at the time enjoyed. Yes, Titan once again ravaged the player pool with what is probably regarded as the hardest fight to ever exist in the game in its prime. It retained all of the unforgiving mechanics as Hard Mode, added even more bullshit on top of it, all the while the servers around this time were at its WORST.

What suddenly changed from a weeks long adventure for a Relic Weapon, to a couple months battle just to clear a fucking quest out of your log became a phenomenon. This fight singlehandedly funded FC houses for all of the Hardcore raiding Free Companies, some of them used it as a recruitment tool. Hell, there were some people who were unable to clear this fight that they just gave up, some people still have the stupid pun titled quest on their active log just because the fight scarred them for life. At the time, this was only to finish a questline that led to nothing but an i90 weapon that was either usable to you or just didn't have the viable stats. Did the difficulty spike truly warrant this? Eventually we would find out that Titan Extreme would be the requirement to actually do the other Extreme Primals such as Leviathan and King Moggle Mog. Even considering that you still had to fight Ifrit Extreme mode to even get to them, Ifrit Extreme was a child compared to the lumbering adult that was Titan. He would go on to lock people out of content until the end of 2.2, when 2.3 was introduced even Square deemed the encounter too hard and removed Titan, along with his two buddies Garuda and Ifrit, out of the requirements to do Leviathan and Mog, cause at that point only like 5 percent of the population was ever going to see Ramuh... Which at the time of 2.3 seemed like it was going to happen anyway, but that's two recaps away and this is Titan's last hurrah. Titan Extreme is no longer the hard fight it used to be now that we're geared up past the point we only need one tank and one healer to speed through it. Yet let it be known, there has never been anything in the realm of Eorzea that caused the same amount of Havoc as him. In fact because of him you could argue none of the Primals except for maybe Ramuh ever posed a threat to a group. On behalf of all the people I carried through the fight over the course of Vanilla, Fuck you Titan.

The Crystal Tower

Now while the EX Primals were the hardcore raiders funtime, the actual bread and butter of A Realm Awoken was the introduction of the 24 man raid, The Crystal Tower. The first wing, Labyrinth of the Ancients opened up... but not without some really REALLY dumb attunement quest. In fact unless you were dedicated like the rest of the server to sit in an area for two hours waiting for a certian FATE to pop up, you were not running Crystal Tower on the first day. Yes, they fucking walled it behind four FATEs you needed to get Golds on, in order to get four crystals to complete a quest to open it up. Square has not done this since to any other part of the tower, this was a very stupid idea, and luckily for us they learn quick on most of the stupid ideas they have, otherwise they wouldn't of kept so many players. Yet still for new players to this day they still have to do the FATEs, on the first day of the patch they eventually hotfixed the spawn timer on those certain FATEs in their respected areas so now its just a minor inconvenience.

Was the hassle really worth the wait? In retrospect no, you see the Crystal Tower is pretty much like the Looking for Raid in WoW, its an entrance raid that drops i80 gear, which isn't even on par with the Mythology set for most of the pieces, and has some very simple mechanics that nowadays actually wipe raids because everyone is too overgeared to do them properly. So in a very odd way Square future proofed the whole place. For the time being though in 2.1 it was a massive undertaking that was very fun to do when all thee of the alliance groups were working together. Sometimes you got a jokester that wasted your time, sometimes it was someone you knew... from your own FC... because he was an asshole.

Regardless Crystal Tower was a very warm welcome to many adventurers looking for gear to bide the time for their other needed pieces. The way the loot worked was simple, you could run the place as much as you want, and you could roll and win one piece of gear a week. While this process works on alot of levels, sometimes it doesn't. All the bosses only drop one piece of gear a piece... and theres about 9 classes worth of sets that could possibly drop. Sometimes certain sets would just not show up, and you'd end up running the whole week only seeing the Dragoon gear. Eventually you'd just give up and take a piece of loot for a class you don't even have leveled up because hey, reset is like in an hour and it'd just be a waste at this point not to take it. As time moved on Crystal Tower eventually evolved into something completely different with its later wings, it helped become a staple in the quality of life for the average player. Which is a good thing, it helped players catch up into Coil, which was one of its main intents, along with serving as the casual's content, the people who just don't like to be in high stress situations.

The Great Housing Debacle

Player housing was actually one of the big features of the patch, as well as the game. I mean like this was the big MMO feature of the year kind of, Wildstar visited this idea, and then Garrisons were introduced into WoW. It was something alot of players of the game were looking forward to. Alot of FCs were saving up a couple million gil just to be able to get prime real estate, mine included. What transpired was probably one of the most misunderstood things we've seen in the game.

As the patch details came out about the housing, everyone got excited to see what kind of plots were available to us... that is until we saw the price. The price of a small house was nearly in the 30 million gil range on Leviathan. Even more on other servers, nobody could even believe seeing Large Houses going for hundreds of millions of gil. People were shocked and outraged, even with them mentioning a declining rate of the properties over time, shit was still expensive! How could this possibly have happened? Well, Square while doing these prices did a census of the actual gil per player on the servers, while their numbers were indeed correct to assume these prices were fair... They didn't actually stop to think if any of this gil on these rich "players" were related to Real Money Transaction or not. Most of the gil in the game, not to be a surprise to anyone, was in the hands of gil sellers, bots. Not even the rich crafters of many FCs had the pocket the RMT market had.

So as time went on, some of the early Large Housing plots were literally purchased in Primal Blood Money. Our FC eventually got the 40 million scratch for a medium house, which in retrospect was a fine specimen of a house. Things have changed ever since they introduced the individual housing, which started its own debacle in itself. Houses are definitely not as expensive as they used to be, but it was a bad time for Square, a very bad not fun at all time.

The Greatest Story Ever Told

Unfortunately for me, or fortunately, whatever you want to call it, I didn't jump into 1.0. Apparently from what I am to understand is that's where the Hildibrand Story originally came from. Which would make sense considering how the 2.1 entry for Hidlibrand begins, as his longtime assistant Nashu is grieving his death and wondering how she could ever fill his shoes as Eorzea's top investigator. Hildibrand is not only the most fun you'll ever have in XIV, but its also serving as the actual bulk of where the fan service comes from. To not spoil future recaps on the storybeats of these, since a new chapter was released with every patch as well, I can atleast reveal that Gilgamesh was the first character in a pretty tight guest star roster the Hildibrand questline had. As he becomes a prime suspect in the case that Hildibrand is investigating.

Eventually to get more people on board with doing this side story quest, as if they were not fun people to skip out on it in the first place, they eventually made these characters into boss encounters and tied them up behind the trial roulette. So if you wanted to get a little extra tomes on the side you actually ended up having to do the quests eventually, but not like it needs an incentive to do in the first place, they're pretty great cutscenes:

The Final Bits, PvP and Mor Dhona, and Treasure!

Unfortunately, you can even check my trophy data on this one, I have yet to do a single game of PvP of any kind. Its just not my thing, it never has been my thing in MMOs to prove myself among other players against other players. In WoW it eventually turned into a rock paper scissors thing. There were classes I could deal with and classes I could not. This aspect of PvP always bothered me and this is why I chose to never delve with it. Also the fact that in 2.1, because of all the horror stories I heard, Summoners were complete bullshit. I would see XIV streams on Twitch with summoners boasting a 90 percent win rate in The Wolves Den. Which I can believe, their kit comes with a multitude of crap that could honestly stop any of the classes from even touching it. I'm just not the right person to ask about this stuff. Yet it was a major addition to 2.1 and it has been a mainstay since with the introduction of the Frontlines. Also the gear looks MAD sick for some of the classes, one day I'll have to do it for the Black Mage set.

Square also added a tiny little questline for a thing we know as Treasure Hunting. The way treasure hunting worked was that you actually had to level up one of the gathering professions in order to get a map. Then you had to use said map, look at the little crumpled .jpeg they gave you in order to track it down, and then go to the exact spot in the area and dig it up. This feature would eventually be used to serve as a step in the Relic questline, but in its introduction was used to get some extra gil, and also offer some of the rarest pets we know today. The infamous Blue Bird still sells for millions just because its so rare to find it from the maps. It is the only way to obtain it too besides buying it from some lucky fellow who's probably found like three of them so far. More types of maps have been added to the game as well as more things related to other stuff you need for certain end game crafting. An even rarer map can drop from the first map, which that map even has a chance of revealing an even more rarer minion than the Blue Bird. For such a tiny addition to the game it gave another way for gil to be generated, which we desperately needed, we couldn't rely on the 200k or so the new players generated everytime they got their first 50.

And last but not least, Mor Dhona. In 2.1 we saw the place grow a bit as more roads and walls were built, some of the tents were moved around, and the introduction of the Seventh Heaven, which served throughout all the patches as normally the go to place for your main story after 2.1 and any dungeons you needed to get the quests for to unlock them. It wouldn't be till later people could actually use the summoning bells to call their retainers without going to a major city... or being a rich FC with a house. Hey, atleast the dirt patch with all the dying crops were gone, that's fine in my book.

2.1 recap done!

Of course, honorable mention to the thing that didn't make it, Ultima Hard Mode, which is now a long forgotten thing nobody really does anymore because... there really isn't a point. Everything you can get from it you can get in better places. It was a cool re-imagining of the original Ultima fight from the end of 2.0's story, but again nowadays people only really do it for specific reasons, it was never used as a pre-requisite for anything. Still cool though!

Thanks to everyone who reads this gigantic wall of blog, I had a little trouble writing it up throughout yesterday and it took me a while to get it up. I missed the deadline I set up, and I'm sorry. What I can say though is the 2.2 recap should be coming with in the next day or two, as we revisit the Whorl, the nerfing of Binding Coil, Second Coils, Fucking Mirrors, and more. Again, thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.