Ohoy mateys

Hi hi, as some of you might have noticed, i haven't been online for a while now.This is because i been too busy with school and stuff, and i cant afford the game right now either. Although im not sure if i would jump right to ff14 or go back to ffxi and wait a while before going to ff14. we'll see how that goes lol.
just wanted to say hello ;p

Hi Haru,

It's ok, we aren't missing you at all.

Joke!

Come back to XI, I won't be getting XIV for a long while yet, I'll be all alone!

Hey thriparu.
lol, well, i'll try to be on both if possible

I'm on both myself Haru, on Melmond server for XIV, look me up there if you get it.

oh, i thought you were gonna wait to get the game? :O

Yea I was, but then they went and brought it out just after my birthday.. and I had to spend my birthday money on something ;P

Besides, my old friend Bailywitch is going to be playing it, and I was wanting to go adventuring with her again.

So far I'm liking it a lot, the crafting system is nice, and the way you can swap most abilities around from any jobs you have levelled is very cool. Got my lancer running around able to self cure with the pugilist's 'Second Wind' (Chakra basically) ability.

Combat system is totally different to XI, with no auto attack just self activated abilities, but I actually find it better paced and more fluid.

oh cool, that sounds good
you're one of the few that told you actually liked the game alot lol, most complain about tons of stuff in the game. i liked the battle system too, though when i played the beta there was some bug that made it hard to fight, cuz somwetimes it wasnt possbile to attack at all, resulting in death lol

I've not had any problems with the combat.
I learnt early on that it's a lot easier to run away from stuff than in XI..no need to zone it, just stay out of range for 20 seconds or so and most of the mobs lose interest.
Only actually had 2 deaths so far because of that, one because I was so target fixated I missed seeing my hp were low, and the other cos I stopped to take a look at a new mob type I hadn't seen before, only to discover it was IT, aggressive, and able to one shot me while I was still thinking 'ohh.. wonder what that thing is'.

Most of the complaints I've seen have been along the lines of 'In XI it worked like this, why can't it work that way in XIV?' type thing.
Personally I went into it treating it as a whole new different game, which it basically is, just with some familiar elements. So haven't been disappointed by anything not being what I'm used to.

yeah, i've seen that sort of complaint too, which makes no sense.. do people think ff14 is supposed to be a copy of ffxi? lol
anyway, sounds good to me =)

I think my main gripe about the game is the fact that it limits you to 8 leve quests every 24 hours. It essentially limits your playing time in terms of quests, and if you wanna level up you have to grind like in 11. I liked doing leve quests, they seemed like FoV on 11, but the limiting of them is annoying.

I liked the crafting system, seemed to use a bit more skill that 11. That said I only really tried fishing, there wasn't any tutorials or anything on how to start the others. I just wish that it gave you a bit more hit detection on it, letting you know how well you were doing.

I didn't like the menu or interface. It seemed very over complicated with all the menu icons so small, and the chat box tiny on the screen.

Combat was okay, much more action oriented, but I wish I just understood what the regime thing was, that seemed interesting, (like an auto-battle thing from 13) but I could never get it to work.

One thing I never got was the damaged equipment. Seems like a big time waster to me. Yes, its more realistic to have your equipment break, but for a casual gamer it's a real put off to have your equipment break half way through adventuring, and then have to search around for someone to fix it. It kinda implies that the game wants you to do everything, battle, craft and harvest.

All in all, I'd give it about 6/10. Not good, it's got a way to go in terms of updates before i'd buy a retail copy.

Well I don't know about the beta, but I get the feeling a few things have changed/been tweaked for the release.
Yes you only get 8 leve quests in a given period, but you also can do 8 crafting leve quests as well, and as crafting gives xp to your main character level this means you will be stronger when you get back to your battle jobs. Plus the idea is that seeing as you can do other people's leve quests when you party up, you alone might have 8 to do, but duo would have 16, trio 24 etc, and with a max party size of 14 you could get to do 112 leve quests total. Which is actually better than FoV in XI, as 8 of those would take you 7-8 hours to do minimum cos of the 1 per game day thing, and that would be regardless of whether you teamed up or not.

Crafting system is not like the fishing system, the gathering types (fishing, mining, botanist) all work one way, with targeting and power meter type things, while the manufacturing crafts work a different way, with you having to chose the best synth method for the current state of the thing you are trying to craft.

The menu I found I got used to very quickly, and now it seems pretty intuitive, once I figured out the best control method was keyboard+mouse, like a FPS setup. Gives a lot smoother movement control, and interacting with stuff is as simple as clicking on the interaction icon when it pops up on the screen. As for the chat box size issue Rix, that can be re-sized/moved to taste. Actually most of the interface elements can be dragged and dropped anywhere on the screen you want them to be.

The combat regime had me scratching my head for a while till I sussed it. It's not really of use in solo play mind. basically when turned on, when you use any combat ability, instead of it being used right away as normal, it gets queued, then when you hit the key/icon for the regime it executes all the queued commands in order. In a party it recorded everyone's actions, so can be used to synchronise the party's attacks, though the mob does need to have been engaged before you can start queuing commands. Looks like it could be very useful in well planned party operations tho.

Equipment damage isn't really too big a factor. With a few levels in the relevent craft, and the right materials, you can repair in the field yourself. fully repaired gear takes a while to get worn down to a level where it is seriously under max efficiency. Each major city has a repair npc in it, and the costs for repai are minimal, don't think I've had a repair cost over 100 gil yet.

While I don't think the game 'wants' you do do everything, there is a distinct advantage to levelling up multiple battle and crafting jobs. Battle because you can switch most abilities from one job to another if you have them levelled (level 4 ability from job 1, can be used by job 2 once it hits level 4), and crafting jobs because 1. makes repairing/acquiring equipment a lot easier, and 2. they level up your main character level, giving you more hps, mps and elemental resistances.

By the time I decided to put a level or 6 into pugilist, I'd got my character level up to about 10 mainly from levelling a few crafts up, and at level 1 my pugilist could take on stuff that would have stuffed my lancer at that level, simply cos of the increased hps and resistances.

All in all I am liking it so far, and find it a lot easier to jump in and out of if I'm low on time, than XI is, and yet still manage to achieve something, even in 30 mins or so.

i like your review fey, makes me want to play the game

Frankly I'm surprised Rix doesn't want to play the game purely on the strength of being able to reside in Limsa, seeing as the place is full of pirates and all

Oh, and the leader of the all female pirate gang...she may be a bad girl, but.... oh my yes...

I played the beta on my brother's computer. I don't know how accuracy works, but there are some battles where I would miss 10 or more hits in a row and that basically made me lose battles. So I capped STR/VIT at 20 and put the rest on DEX, which I thought was ridiculous, but it seemed like I had no other choice if I didn't want to be killed by Easy Prey and miss 10 swings.

The other problem I had was that the menus seem to take longer to load that any other MMO I've played. Setting macros to set abilities seems like a necessary practice if they haven't fixed the menu lag from the beta.

Other than that, the game was pretty good. Lots of eye candy, love the landscapes.

Can't say I've noticed any but very occasional accuracy problems against high evasion opponents, and at level 10 Lancer I'm still using my level 1 weapon, so if anything I should be getting more accuracy issues than I am doing. I've mostly been raising DEX and VIT, with some on STR and MND. I also found that keeping elemental resistances balanced seems to help, and levelling physical level up through levelling other jobs like crafting jobs helps a lot too.
With Lancer 10, and Physical level 15 I found that on one quest yesterday I was able to solo 2-3 mobs of DC-T difficulty. Granted that very much depends on the mob and what it's abilities are, but that's the casein any game.
Also find it a big help to get some sort of cure ability, either through main job, or from levelling another job to get a skill. Lancer has some nice hp absorb attack abilities, and I augment that with the Pugilist ability Second Wind, which is a tp move that gives a chunk of hp back.

Havn't noticed much in the way of menu lag, granted some of the things in game do suffer from having to go through a few too many menus to get to the action, like crafting. but then with crafting there isn't really too big a need to hurry.
In combat everything is running off your combat actions keys/menu anyway, and anyone of us that is used to the way BLU abilities had to be set up in XI shouldn't have any problems with playing with ability sets in XIV.
I do have macros set up for switching jobs, purely as even with super fast menus it would take too much time to swap out equipment and abilities without them. But that's a small price to pay for the freedom of being able to hit one macro, and change to a completely different job instantly, without having to drag my sorry ass all the way to a mog house to do it.

All in all I'm learning new stuff I like every time I play. Sure there are frustrations, but no more than any other game I have played. Plus I'm finding it very forgiving. No exp loss from dying that I have seen, so the only downside being a (very short compared to XI) period of weakness, and having to walk back to where you were from your HP cos nobody has raise yet!

I discovered as well that in a lot of places, especially with some form of run speed augment, you can run through areas of IT++ aggro mobs and out the other side alive. Doesn't always work mind, have been 1 shotted for 4k damage a few times while exploring, but hey. as above no exp loss.. so all is good, and you make it through more often than not to find some cool places.. I know of a couple of choice fishing spots now that nobody else goes to cos of the nasties in the way.

Accuracy may have improved since the beta from the way you described it Fey. In the beta, I was a lvl 15 and rank 12 Marauder. I had an innate hp drain ability and second wind from pugilist. Some EP Dodos would still kill me even though I started with full HP, simply because I missed like 50% of the time or more. I found when I had DEX at 60, I missed alot less, but its really lame if I had to pump out all my attributes to DEX just to get a decent hit ratio.

I saw my friend play XIV today and the menus were still as slow as the beta. Doubt it was his computer because his gameplay was pretty smooth.

Still want to play the game, but with my current work schedule I don't really have alot of free time. With that said, I probably won't be coming back to XI anytime soon. But hey, I finally found a job, lol.