I’m flabbergasted that there isn’t a thread for FFXIV players yet. The WoW thread is long-running and fairly well-populated, but nobody here plays in Eorzea?!
I started about a month ago and just started a paid subscription. My main is a Miqo’te Archer/Bard on Exodus, but I’ve been taking advantage of the other 7 available slots on the basic sub and have a few other race/class combinations on other servers.
So, anyone else playing? I’m an old WoW hand, and I still like WoW, but I’m bored with it, and FFXIV really seems like a deeper game (you can be ANY class, including crafting classes, just by changing your weapon/tool). I’ve seen opinions that it’s “easier” than WoW, but I don’t see that, really.
I started playing close to two months ago because a friend who is a big Final Fantasy fan started playing.
I’m still hanging on for the moment, but only because my friend’s still interested. She leaves, I’m out, and I may well be out somewhat soon anyway, because it just isn’t all that good.
The biggest problem I have with it is that there just isn’t anything it does better than any other game on the market. That is, when I played Rift, the open-world stuff there was better than anything else you could find at the time. SW:TOR had the full voice acting and stories as the draw, etc. FF:ARR is in many ways just a paint-by-numbers generic MMO where the big “draw” is that your mounts are called Chocobos, one of the towns has a bar called the Seventh Heaven, and people named Biggs, Wedge and Cid show up in the storyline.
Things like being able to be any class on one character and not needing alts sounds good in theory, but the problem is you have to level each class individually. And you can only take quests once. So I have a melee DPS class at 50 now, if I want to start levelling one of the ranged classes or healer classes or whatever, I’m either constantly queuing for the same dungeons over and over again or grinding. Also, the inventory management for all the different armor/clothing sets becomes very annoying very fast.
Gathering and crafting are considered “classes,” so you can’t, for example, level up your mining just on nodes you find while off adventuring. You have to switch class to Miner and then go find the nodes. Mind you, the economy is rather dodgy, as it suffers the general issue of theme-park MMOs where gear from endgame instances is better than raid gear. There might be some profit in low-mid range gear since anyone levelling a second class won’t have quests to give them new levelling gear.
If you’re the type that really, really likes endgame instances/raiding and you’re killing time waiting for the next WoW expansion or something, I guess getting to endgame here might be something new for a bit, that’s about as far as I could recommend it.
Forced into it last summer and haven’t stopped since. Love the game, play it every night.
Being very familiar with the history of this game and SquareEnix’s previous MMO in the FF series, this game is basically more of a stripped down and simplified version. You can solo a lot in this game and can max out your level pretty much not talking to another person. SE took a lot of complaints about their old MMO, and the first version of FFXIV and streamlined it. Things move much faster now so people are constantly on the move.
If you play hours a day and grind to the end game, you’ll be done with this game pretty quick. But if you take your time and enjoy yourself, this game is a gem. If you’re really slow and play at your own pace, then this game lets you do that too. Yes, there needs to be more content at the end game instead of doing the same dungeons and battles over and over again, but I haven’t seen an MMO without that problem.
What I like about it is that you can switch classes so easily, and its no big issue for people to quickly have multiple level 50’s running around. Even the relic quest isn’t too bad if you get some luck and a good group or two. This isn’t like FFXI where it takes months to get to the end game and then literally years to get the best weapons. It took me about 3 months from getting the game and knowing nothing about it to having one pretty good job that’s near maxed out.
Well, I had thought about starting a thread back in late August/early September, when it relaunched, but I got distracted crafting and gathering. Seriously, it’s probably a sad statement that my main toon (Winsome Losesome on Phoenix) has spent FAR more time in gathering (42 Miner, 41 Botanist, no clue Fishing–seriously, what is with MMO’s and boring fishi…oh wait, I get it) and crafting (all but armorer are at least level 25…I think) than he has in his primary class/job (Conjurer/White Mage). Not that Conjurer/WM stinks, but the crafting is oh so gambling-esque addicting (thus why JayRx doesn’t gamble, IRL).
As for easier than WoW…well, unless the tank was asleep or was just plain terrible, I rarely pull aggro as a healer in WoW (at least since the BC days). With FFXIV, on the other hand, I can pull multi-mob aggro by casting Cure less than 10 seconds into a fight, if the tank isn’t on their game (gods save you if you cast Medica or Cure II or III, even well into a fight), which doesn’t account for the mid-boss-battle spawn enemies all almost immediately zeroing in on me with one friggin’ spellcast. Not to mention that WoW, and it’s myriad addon’s, really does make for a much easier game (hell, mouseover macros barely work in FFXIV) than healing in FFXIV.
Fishing is supposed to reflect real life: boring and frustrating.
That reminds me, I need to attach more Perception materia onto my fishing gear. It takes forever to HQ a fish and those double moocher could take me a whole day for one fish. Trying to get all fish for completion is going to be a nightmare