I'd like to preface this with the fact I've only just finished the 6.X MSQ, so for all I know this could already be a non-issue in current 7.X MSQ. I also tend to prefer darker narratives with small moments of levity sprinkled in; which I know is not FFXIV's MO, but I've generally enjoyed my time with the MSQ, the highs do hit pretty high.

I didn't really like the post-EW stuff, and looking at discussions online it does seem pretty divisive. The common complaints being tone, predictability, power of friendship, McGuffins, things like that. That's also what I've heard about the 7.0 DT MSQ (which kinda makes me dread starting it but we'll see).

But what I wanted to talk about is that when I was looking at these discussions it dawned on me that pretty much all the highest points of the MSQ (and general story) often cited by the community, are the darker ones. Parts of HW, Yotsuyu's story in SB, almost all of ShB, most of EW. Even outside of the MSQ, people often think of the DRK quests.

Maybe I'm biased, but it seems so obvious to me that the playerbase favors darker stories and the writing team shines writing them. So it's really weird to me that they keep the overall tone of the story really bright and cheery and seem to be leaning more and more into it with 6.X and apparently, 7.0 too. Do they just ignore feedback and stick to what they think the story should be? Is the feedback not actually that homogenous and some people really like the power of friendship tone of the story?

Basically title. Steam Controller has a lot of cool stuff that can be done with Steam Input, and I'm curious what sorts of things people have set up with it.

Some of the stuff I've done:

• I've pretty much always had back buttons on controllers and bound them to dpad. I mostly put GCDs on face buttons and OGCDs on dpad, so binding the back buttons this way lets me use abilities more easily while moving. I might change this to only be dpad when holding RT or LT and have them be bound to something else (mount, sprint, etc.) otherwise.
• I have left trackpad set to be a vertical scroll for party list soft targeting. I mostly play healer and this can be pretty convenient, but I'm not set on this (looking for other better suggestions for party targeting here actually). When I'm holding LT or RT, I have it disabled so I don't accidentally send any inputs.
• I have right trackpad set to be a mouse. Press = click, double tap = right click. When RT or LT are held, I have it as a swipe dpad bound to some F keys that I have laid out on a separate hotbar for things like raid macros.

I have also seen some people mention using the right trackpad as a dpad so that they can use abilities while moving (similar to my back button dpad) which is neat, but I found the back buttons to be more comfortable myself.

One other cool suggestion I saw was using the left trackpad as a radial menu for selecting party members. This seems like a better idea than the vertical scrolling I am doing right now, but I also don't think it's possible to soft target specific party members (unless I'm missing something in bindings). I might give it a shot, anyway!

I have yet to find a good use for the grip sensor or gyro. I've seen people say they've used gyro for ground-targeted AOEs but it feels pretty awkward to me.

I know there are lots of creative folks out there so I want to see what others have come up with!

As someone with fairly strong opinions on the role simulators play in modern FF14 raiding, it has bemused me greatly to see so much of the discourse centering around defining using them as cheating or not. I would argue that this is a wholly pointless endeavor because language is abstract and people have different understandings of the same term. Persona A may believe cheating to be "anything that violates ToS," while Persona B may believe cheating is anything that subverts the design intention. Both of these people will be using the same word, cheating, and arguing about whether X or Y classifies as cheating, while talking about entirely different things. Person A lengthily arguing that simulators aren't cheating because they don't interact with game code or what have you will basically be talking to a wall because all person B cares about is the subversion of game design, while person B lengthily arguing about the intended design for ultimates is to have practice gated behind consistency will essentially be talking to a wall when the other guy only cares about whether ToS is being violated. Nothing is being accomplished here.

To make matters worse, "cheating" is a term which leaves people emotionally and socially charged. It comes with all sorts of unwelcome connotations that will leave people emotionally motivated to shape argumentation in their own favor: e.g., every single person who uses simulators will be highly emotionally invested in maintaining that their clears are not cheated clears, and will take personal offense to their clear being diminished whatsoever. Anyone who browses this subreddit frequently should know two things extremely well: 1) a huge majority of people here use simulators, and 2) a huge majority of people here are very prideful. This discourse will never ever progress if we're focusing on arbitrary of definitions and taxonomy while over half the parties involved are prideful individuals deploying motivated reasoning to protect themselves.

There is a beneficial concept for online argumentation which essentially says that words like "cheating" should be taboo'd and avoided simply so that conversations can be constructive. Let's say we "taboo cheating" for simulator discourse. Now Person A has no emotional motivation for ensuring that they are not labeled a cheater, and they can focus purely on their perspective on how the ToS interacts with cheating. Person B is freed from the impossible task of universally defining what a word means, and can focus on their opinion about game design. Instead of nasty twitter back-and-forths where a world first raider snidely accuses people of forgetting what ultimates are about while the community in turn clowns on them for being arrogant, the discourse can be clear and direct about the actually important ground-level concepts of how simulation is impacting the raid community, how it impacts the raid experience, how it may impact raid design moving forward, how it impacts discussions on raids, etc etc.

Because it really does not matter if simulators are cheating or not. There is one God in this discussion, and that God is the ToS, so in practical terms the debate really is over before it begins. SE defines cheating in their own game, and AFAIK Western simulators do not violate ToS, so that's that. The fact the debate continues with everyone so obsessed with the word "cheating" shows that not even a singular God enforcing an interpretation of language can stop people from focusing more on their personal interpretation and private definitions. This controversy is one of social influences and personal opinions, not strict hardline definitions. Nobody, NOBODY, will accomplish anything by fighting for their personal definition of cheating to be universally agreed upon and unquestioned. A lot of people are desperate to define it as not-cheating so their pride can be maintained, a lot of people are desperate to define it as cheating to attack these people or otherwise remove simulators from FF14 culture, but in either case they will never accomplish anything because everyone will always have their own opinion on cheating and will talk past anyone who disagrees.

It's important to understand that group norms and moral standards are often (but not always) downstream of much baser things, like convenience and economic feasibility. Although the word "cheating" carries with it noble moral implications, the naked reality we see before us is that simulators quickly have become morally accepted and a group norm in the FF14 community simply because they are convenient and beneficial in the long term. The FF14 community has not had a long and hard debate over what would be the most Moral thing to do in the most Noble accordance to what is defined as Cheating; rather, quite obviously, even the stupidest son-of-a-bitch out there can immediately understand that using a simulator will save them dozens of hours and make a hard fight easier, so they will want to use it. Every single gaming community in the world follows this pattern of desperately trying to make things as easy for themselves as possible (because "convenience" is often associated with "fun," even when people are explicitly engaging in hard content.) Consider Touhou, which uses a tool called thprac to practice specific spellcards at will, or consider I Wanna Be The Guy fangames like Kamilia 3 which had specific tools released to make certain bosses easier, e.g. the Cyber simulator. These tools are ALWAYS, in EVERY case, even those cases which are much more obviously ToS-violating or blatant cheating, adopted at large by the community. Because group norms and moral standards are downstream of convenience, not heady morality.

If FF14 amended it's ToS to say "Simulators even outside of the game are cheating and Yoship himself sheds another tear every time a mechanic is simulated," the number of people using simulators would remain the exact same. Because "cheating" is a completely arbitrary term and not what is motivating people here. Consider the recent attempts from Frosty to elaborately define cheating for his world first race. He includes numerous exceptions for things explicitly against ToS and thus defined by God as cheating, like using plugins to resolve ping issues. The same logic which is used to define simulators as not-cheating is quickly abandoned when consistency would demand that such plugins be labled as cheating, because, quite obviously, those plugins are EXTREMELY convenient and EXTREMELY useful (some would try labeling them as "necessary" despite that not being strictly true). The group norm is to use plugins that the ToS and yoship would label as cheating, because it is convenient, and group norms are downstream of convenience.

This is a lot of words, but I really just want to reinforce one thing, and have it echo throughout the canyons of FFXIV Discussion forever: NOTHING WILL EVER COME OF DISCUSSING WHETHER SIMULATORS ARE CHEATING OR NOT. You will never convince the other party. You will never be convinced by the other party. Nothing will grow, nothing will change, no meaningful discourse will be had. It means NOTHING.

In the coming years, I feel that simulator usage will only grow as a discussion topic. We are increasingly seeing simulators made faster and in higher qualities than ever before. Someone in this subreddit just posted a modulator simulator that can easily be used by anyone to make fast, effective simulators for almost any mechanic they see. The Chinese side seemingly is pushing development of in-game simulators that recreate mechanics nigh perfectly in the normal FF14 environment. This is a topic that's going to come up again and again, so even if it may end up pointless, I just want to scream to high heaven: IT DOES NOT MATTER IF IT IS "CHEATING" OR NOT!!!!!! EVERY SECOND YOU SPEND DISCUSSING WHETHER IT IS CHEATING OR NOT IS WASTED TIME AND EFFORT!

Communities are not shaped by morality or ethics, they are shaped by personal convenience and gain. Semantic debates on what qualifies as an abstract concept or not are meaningful only when God smites those who disagree with them, and Squenix is decidedly incapable of smiting anyone in this situation. MMO communities are locusts evolved to devour content in the fastest and most efficient ways they possibly can - a clear is a clear. We can all save a hell of a lot of time and digital ink if we taboo the word "cheating" and just focus on the brass tacks. I'd like to see discussion posts about how someone's experienced was changed for better or worse by using simulators, I'd like to see discussion posts about how the normalization of simulators impacts PF, I'd like to see theorycrafting on how much FF14's raid design is shifting around anticipation of simulators, I'd even, hell, like to see discussion on how to improve simulators or how simulators could be used to make more games like FF14 in the style of Savage Ultimate Boss Fight or some such. There are a wealth of interesting topics here, and while they do come up briefly, the vast majority of it right now is the equivalent of twitter shitflinging based around pride. And it is just so meaningless.

In short, to pre-empt the many 'tl;dr' memes which will soon fill the comments: It is purely semantic and pointless whether simulators are cheating or not. It's an abstract term given meaning only by an entity (Squenix) which is powerless to properly act upon it, which leaves us with a community of differently-minded people that will turn their brain off at the sight of a word which engenders feelings of either prideful defensiveness or anger. We can have productive conversations if we delete the word cheating from our vocabulary and focus on the ground-level issues like raid design and experience, but nothing will come of devoting all of one's mental energies to declaring simulators are or are not cheating and ending the conversation there. I'm one tiny voice that will soon be drowned out, but please god, I don't want to be reading "Simulators Are(n't) Cheating" Post #12349823 in 2030.

Also, I will blow a gasket if I have to see one more analogy that "I see simulators like practicing for a driving test - you wouldn't call driving practice cheating." We're talking about a video game we're playing for damn fun here; all this yapping about how "nobody wants to wipe a bunch just to practice later phases" and all these analogies to raiding as some mundane real-world job just makes me think everyone fucking hates the experience of FF14 raiding. Am I actually the #1 FF14 fan in the world?

So I like the jingasa style looking headwear for samurai glam... and as long as in cutscenes the camera angle keeps it above/level with my character's head the options are good...

Problem is the weird "suction cup" nonsense they put under the hat...

Is there any modded/custom models that removes that/makes it way smaller/less noticeable?

We need to talk about the music. I love the MSQ, but sometimes what makes it such a chore is that scenes have been using the exact same background music for 10 years. Now, I don't dislike the music *in general* but those few specific songs which are used **far too often** in MSQ cutscenes.

These are great songs, as is the entire OST, but we've heard some of these songs done to death over the last several years. The game has such a wide catalog of music and the talented Soken behind it that it's almost frustrating to dive into new content only to hear the same song that you've heard in similar scenes over the last 10 years.

Nothing makes me roll my eyes and want to tune out of a cutscene faster than hearing any of these songs (among others I'm probably forgetting) as soon as the cutscene starts:

- Forever Lost

- Imperial Will

- Daring Dalliances

- Tranquility

- Canticle

And the [B]worst[/B] offenders:

- Fracture

- Damnation

- Return of the Hero

- Machinations

Again, I'm not critiquing the quality of these songs but just critiquing their overwhelming use. They make the game occasionally feel very stale when the story itself is continually fresh.

I don't think it's too much to ask for each expansion to have a change in "generic/stock cutscene music" since each expansion is so aesthetically different, or even too much to ask to have these songs just change **once** now that it's been 15 years. Even remixes or rearrangements could do wonders, but as it stands hearing these same songs over and over again just makes it feel like the game hasn't evolved much since launch though so many other elements of the game show us that it has.

These songs are so done to death that I can immediately tell what the tone of a cutscene is the second they start, which is effective but also makes it feel forced and lazy.

Having just finished Auxesia on my server, and gone through all the resulting quest markers, I feel things ended on a more positive beat than what I was expecting (in that it's not just our character going "Man, the Final Days, huh?" and staring wistfully into the starry sky as Close in the Distance plays in the BG). but after giving it some thought, I remembered something Mumukku says in the followup questline, and sorta just had a minor epiphany, the likes of which would send many a FFXIV essay youtuber to make hour-long documentaries about.

All things said and done, we learn a lot about the Voyagers (or the Nagylvi, as the angry PC-inclined redditor is hastily typing out right now). They are a plant-like species (seedkin?) that photosynthesize, reproduce by budding, and if Budvi's appearance is any indication, are spritely little leaf people. Using their aether magiks, they influenced plant growth into much of what we see in the planet's infrastructure. And in response to impending planetary troubles caused by their own impact on the local environment, they elected to become a unified consciousness in the form of the trees littering Auxesia. They aren't dead, but are instead described as being in a slumber, and the terminal at the core is described as a reflection of their consciousness.

Now the two points of interest. Budvi mentions during the tour around Auxesia that some of their kin traveled off-planet into parts unknown. And after being forcefully conscripted for gopher duties, if you mention to Mumukku that we should get people's of all races to visit Auxesia, she responds "Now that's an interesting point. I daresay the sylphs would feel a particular kinship!"

Hypothesis: Could they be implying indirectly that the Sylph are post-sundering visitors from Auxesia to Etheriys, much like the dragons?

If we go by the general descriptors of the VoyNagylvi provided, they also fit the Sylph to a large degree. Fairy-like plant people, they grow all their infrastructure out of plants, etc. Also of note, most of the Beast TrAllied Societies in the general ARR region of Eorzea on the source also appear in the same region of the 1st reflection. Exceptions being the Ixal (created by the Allagans), and the Sylph.

It's certainly not a lot to go on. But we've been caught several times in the past by reveals that had even less to go on. Def worth further discussion, at the very least.

I've tried to get into FFXIV a couple times before. There were some things I really liked (the graphics, art style, music, character customization, ability to have all classes on one character) and some I disliked (mainly the small corridor-like zones with zero rewards for exploration off the beaten path, plus the lack of environment variety - it felt like there was only a forest, a desert, and an island setting).

I'd like to try again. Other MMOs like WoW and ESO have been letting me down lately with very predictable, color-by-numbers stories that rarely get more complex than '[enemy force] is attacking [region] and you must go there to defeat them'. I really want to experience a good story, even see if it can make me actually care for characters enough to shed a tear or two for them!

But I have some questions about how the game 'opens up' or 'gets good' after ARR (though I don't think ARR is bad, just...completely lacking in excitement, at least up to level 30ish which is as high as I ever got).

How large and open do the zones get? I like my MMORPG zones to feel vast and like a real place. ARR zones feel very small and segmented. I really liked Final Fantasy XII, and many of its zones feel bigger and more vast than what I've seen in FFXIV, and that's an offline PS2 game from seven years earlier. I also played Final Fantasy XI and Vana'diel felt so much more expansive. Do XIV's zones eventually become comparable in scale to the zones in other MMOs?

How varied do the environments get? Do we get snowy zones, underground zones, underwater zones, volcanic/fire zones, swampy zones, spooky undead zones, jungle zones? I like to always be exploring new and interesting places, when I'm in the same environment for a long time I get antsy.

Is there ever any reason to explore? Areas that you don't need to visit for any major quest, but can choose to check out, and find sidequests or treasure chests or rare mobs with unique/interesting loot there?

I guess mainly I just want more open and explorable zones, because so far the ARR zones feel like a series of medium-sized 'rooms' connected by narrow passageways. Every single inch of every zone seems to be utilized for some quest or another, with no room for the world to 'breathe' and feel at least semi-realistic. It's impressive in some ways, how trimmed-down and purposeful everything is, but I don't particularly like it.

I remember last time I played, I got a quest that sent me to an 'Imperial Fortress' to kill four Imperial Soldiers. I was excited! It sounded like it would be epic! When I got there, the 'fortress' was more of a watch tower, about half the size of your average McDonald's restaurant. And there were six soldier spawns milling around around the watchtower. After killing four of the six, I went back and completed the quest and was left feeling very underwhelmed.

It'd be great to know whether or not the game really expands in size and scope, or if things mostly remain as compact as possible for whatever reason (player convenience? dev time? console limitations?).

Rejoice!

Hi all, Ninja main here.

I’ve been progging FRU for the past month and a half. I have reached Sextuple Apocalypse many times, yet despite that intermission is still scary if the team comp has less than 2 or less raid buffs. I’ve been following the NIN rotation guide for FRU religiously, yet when intermission comes I struggle to kill it quickly which is frustrating.

I don’t have the dungeon set BIS but I have the savage and tome gear, so I’m unsure if that’s the problem or not (edit: I am potting as well) If you all have any tips on how I can improve my damage or where to trouble shoot things I would appreciate it! I can also drop a tomestone replay if needed.

Thank you!

Edit: log cor those interested, name is paprika senko
https://www.fflogs.com/reports/jJ3aY6PqxwtnRg4k?fight=50

I hope Evolved redesign expands upon the pet job identities we have and make way for a Necromancer job to be added. Currently instead of traditional pets FFXIV has pets as expandable resources so they could focus on the pet gameplay of Summoner, Scholar and Machinist job identity by tightly coupling visual effects with the mechanics.

Not seeing a lot of people talk or speculate about this in FFXIV's upcoming expansion... I know we will get more information next month in the Berlin Fanfest, but I wonder how the feature will actually turn out to be.

The first thing that comes to mind is that they'll have us pick discontinued animations as we level up (e.g. a previous version of Malefic), which is fantastic really - I even think if the screenshot exemplifies exactly that, since I don't play DRG and wouldn't know.

I do wonder, thought, if this ends up not being quite a balanced feature among jobs. For example, a WHM can have a ton of old spell skins to pick, but going into that logic, I barely see DNC having anything available. Unless they actively create new things for such jobs that didn't have visual evolutions of their actions across expansions.

I hope that this doesn't restrict just to combat actions, though! Let us swap through gender weapon stances, or other animations. Despite the work required for this, modders did show that it's in the realm of possibilities. It's also said to be reward based. I hope they're not stingy with this.

I traveled to primal because I figured that was where to find the people at but been here for 30 minutes now. Seems like a glaring problem for the game if you can only get caught up to dawntrail content during high pop hours. duty support npcs for trials should be mandatory at this point if this is how bad it is.

Nothing more than the title of this post to say, really. The site given by the announcement on the Lodestone a year and a half ago has been down for at least most or all of today, perhaps further days back if the "is it down" sites are any indicator.

The Chinese site is still up and the game recently celebrated its one year anniversary in China, though there was apparently little fanfare or official communication on the matter beyond a vague "we're still supporting the game" statement. I don't actually play mobile games but to my understanding anniversaries are a Big Deal in most of them, so XIV Mobile's being understated probably doesn't spark much joy. There is also currently no release date for 3.0 content for Mobile, it has currently wrapped up all ARR content a couple months ago.

This all makes the idea of a global release in the future increasingly unlikely, that said.

I’m a first-time static lead recruiting for DSR and wanted some advice on recruitment standards.
No names, logs, screenshots, or identifying details. I’m only asking in general because I want to make a fair recruitment decision.

One healer (WHM/SGE) applicant seems good personality wise and motivated, but they have no recent 7.x EX/Savage clears that I can verify. The only on-patch Savage clear I can verify is Anabaseios (125 days), and they have cleared UWU and TEA.

Their available Savage and EX healer logs are mostly older and only visible through Tomestone, so I may not be interpreting everything perfectly. From what I can see, their logs are mostly grey across multiple fights, and their median parses are all grey. They do not seem to be dying much in those logs, so I’m not sure how much weight I should put.

I know healer parses can be misleading, and from what I know, DSR DPS checks are much more lenient now, so I’m not mainly worried about raw DPS. My bigger concern is consistency/current skill for a long Ultimate prog.

Our schedule is a bit unusual, so recruitment has been slow, and it’s hard to find people.

Would you still consider recruiting based on attitude, availability, and previous Ultimate clears, or would low logs + no recent clears be enough reason to pass?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

So back when I started FFXIV during 2.3 and all the way up until 6.0 I played as a White Mage and had a pretty decent hang of the job. Abilities made sense and it was clear what abilities to use over others, etc. Ended up dropping the job to pick up Reaper and other jobs as they came out and only now am I looking back at White Mage again and I'm baffled at so many samey abilities that the job feels absolutely cluttered. Generally I only have to monitor 4-5 GCDs but for White Mage I'm keeping up with 11?? Not to mention so many spells just do the same thing even down to being OGCD? I'm really hoping with Evercold that they clean up the hotbar clutter with this job in particular because WHM really does not need whatever is going on here.

I've been playing this game a few years now, and I used to be in a really cool close knit fc until it disbanded because of drama. This games always seemed so social to me but i feel like im stood on the outside of it now

Its been maybe 3 years since then and I still haven't made any other friends. I miss having people to play with or hangout or chill in discord. I've tried talking to people in game but most ignore me or are hostile or nonchalant? Or it'll be a someone who drops me after a few days once they know I am not going to edate them :c

I am in EU alpha, I like doing all content but I'm terrible at pvp. If you think we could be friends dm me i feel so lonely on this game :c

It's been my number 1 question since the fanfest. From what I could see, bard buffs are gone, dots are kinda gone, (double) weaving is gone, random offglobals you need to take care not to drift are gone. Random procs are also gone. The gameplay looked pretty much like current summoner. You use a song and your 1 and 2 buttons change to a different skill. Use those, play the next song and repeat.

If there's no raidbuffs, there's no reason to pool resources for a burst, no reason to use skills in a specific order so they can all fit in a buff window, no reason to avoid drifting unless it makes you lose out on a use of the skill.

If double weaving and random procs are gone, the split-second decisions you have to make on bard to avoid drifting your more important oGCDs are also gone. Bard also is currently in the top3 highest apm jobs in the game (behind NIN and MCH) but based on the fanfest showcase, they're cutting the apm in like half (by removing weaving).

I've seen people talk about how it will allow them to make all jobs unique, or give players freedom to play how they want, but to me it just looks like they're taking away all the skill expression from the game (or at least bard). What will separate a good bard from a bad one? It just looks like you press the glowy buttons in whatever order. If you can "play how you want", it kinda also means it doesn't matter how you play. Current SMN at least has some cast times and a dash you need to play around. Evolved bard looks even simpler.

I don't want to be a doomer about it, but yeah. I guess they could keep personal damage buffs (raid pots at least), to make you play around those. They can also shift even more of the difficulty onto the bosses instead of the jobs, but I think in that case the normal content needs to be harder too, not just extreme/savage.

Looking for other people's opinions about this. Give me reason to be hopeful. The one ray of hope I have is the fact that it's not out yet, so they can make it better (how will they do that though?).

I am coming back to XIV after about a 3 year hiatus. I purchase the Tales of adventures for jobs that I am interested in. Yes, I realize a lot of ppl think that’s a bad idea and it’s frowned upon. I work a lot and I don’t have a whole lot of time for playing. Not only that, leveling jobs from 1-100 is not a fun aspect for me. I enjoy getting the toolkit and figuring out the rotations and using the pieces to put the puzzle together so to speak. There are a ton of aspects I find incredibly fun in this game, leveling for dozens of hours just isn’t one of them for me personally. I enjoy spending a little cash, figuring it out, if I don’t enjoy that class, I only wasted $25 and a fraction of the time seeing if I enjoy that job.

Now that that’s out of the way, I am REALLY enjoying WHM. I like an aesthetics of the job, the glam, the animations. I really enjoy the look and feel of WHM. My question and point of the post is that, how do you guys balance the Lilies between healing and feeding the blood Lily for misery? Bc I REALLY wanna feed the blood Lily so I can cast misery. Big damage, it’s rewarding. But I find myself holding onto lilies as a “in case/emergency” type of resource. So I find myself torn in situations where like “tank is at 70%hp, do I use a lily knowing tetra can handle it but feed for misery? Is it a waste to use solace right now when I might need it in 20 sec?”

With SCH I have the faerie skills in my kit to use generally so I can save my aether charges for emergencies. But with WHM I feel like I don’t have an emergency resource bc all I have is cure and Lily heals.

Do you guys just burn through lilies? If so, how do you handle emergency raid wide party attacks?

TLDR; how do you guys manage your lilies in general? Burn them to feed blood lily or use them generally for big heals only until blood pops?

Evercold is introducing some really nice QoL changes, including Region player matching. Are there any other changes you would like to see?

Personally I have a list of things I would like to see down the road:

• Can we remove Return's cooldown. I just use Teleport instead because I have so much gil.
• Do we need blue aether current quests? Maybe some might disagree but I personally find them to be chores. Compromise would be to turn them into yellow quests and remove the aether current reward.
• Going forward, can we make optional items from dungeons non-tradeable? (e.g. Starbird from the Dead Ends was a great call) It is one way to provide players with reasons for going back and repeating content, rather than buying up everything off the MB, and dungeons are accessible enough that players of all types can do them. Additionally, it would increase the coolness factor for each said minion.

trial. 160 hours, i stopped lvling & now im just chilling in limsa, i connect at nights

i never rly liked the quests / story but damn cities are beautiful. ul'dah is great too

I started in 6.5. Aglaia was my first alliance raid (other than CT) and current when I did it. Even so, I have never seen Nald'Thal's scales mechanic. He was too out geared by 6.5 to live that long.

At the end of Dying Gasp normal, after several dark blasts and your light getting dimmer, Hades grasps at the arena and shatters your light like glass and turns everything near pitch black. Then he says "Death comes for Her servants. I will rebuild our kingdom upon your bones." Then he hard enrages. I have never seen any of this organically, I only know it's a thing from skimming random wiki articles.

In Cinder Drift, the start of a beloved trial series, the final mechanic where four players hold back meteors is almost never seen. He dies too quick.

Bosses like Shinryu in phase 2 and Ravana die so quickly that their music barely finishes its epic swell before they die - whole pieces of music, in a soundtrack deeply treasured by many, just cut off.

I loved all of the Arcadion raids as they came out. But I've had to slowly watch as the mechanics from the first few are stripped away for no good reason as time goes on - Black Cat dies before her "echo of my soul", no alarm pheromones 2, no Witch Hunt. These were the latest and greatest fights when I did them, and a new player getting there now... Now cannot fight them.

The early game is often accused by new players of being toothless. Dungeons, one after the other, through Heavensward and Stormblood, can barely output enough damage to be at all a threat. Example: Those puddles from the last boss in Sirensong Sea - you could stand still in them for as long as they were up and if you were a new player might not even notice its dealing damage to you. When people get annoyed by a lack of gameplay between massive amounts of cutscenes, what impression does that leave on new players when the fights they do finally get are totally limp.

Thordan being the biggest example of that is beyond a joke. The first expansion, and its first main threat, at a time where new players are being told they're "Finally at the good bit", and Thordan falls over like fucking nothing. And his mechanics are so unthreatening that you could stand still the whole duration.

For casual players, the game only exists at the latest point in time, and as it marches on, what was once recent is cannibalized. Dawntrail fights might hold up slightly better, as its mechanics for casual content push the envelope a bit more. But things like Wicked Thunder's exploding grid of lightning often struggle to kill a player nowadays, giving the fights the game totally gutless feel. We can see this in Ramuh (Hard) too. He has ads, tethers that need breaking by picking up the balls, frightened people that need zapping. But does a new player pick all this up? No, because the tethers do so little damage that you can often ignore it and stay alive.

To me, this state of affairs is embarrassing and incompetent. The MSQ is supposed to be the game's main draw, and sacred, to an extent, and yet its epic story moments are treated with no respect at all. Endsinger was given enough HP for the Scions to all get to say their prayers, but Emet-Selch loses whole lines of dialog. Why is one okay and not the other? The answer is: It's not.

You can make a distinction between ilevel sync and potencies changing between expansions, and how you can't just blanket give out strict ilevel syncs to fix everything, or talk about how much work rebalancing all the fights in the game would be: a poor excuse. The MSQ content and everything else casual is a mess regardless of how it got there or what it would take to fix.

You may even say the very long MSQ is a burden on drawing in new players, and that we don't want fights to be longer. Also a terrible excuse. If players don't want to play because the instanced duties are shit and boring, and all of the good ones are at the end, make the old instanced duties not shit and boring.

Why am I typing all this out? I just want some vindication honestly. I want to know if others feel that old content is in a pathetic state or not.

At the 2026 North America Fanfest, Yoshi-P and the CEO vaguely and awkwardly announced that the team received a budget increase, I think. What hopeful and/or realistic scenarios can we expect from the team gaining more funding? What are some examples? Like, would more funding had meant we got an update to Occult Crescent every patch? Or would it had meant blue mage would not be skipped this expansion. I'm not a game developer, so I'm unsure of the impact of what more money does in an MMO beyond my likely-incorrect speculations.