Thread: FFXIV Patch 2.1 Press Interviews with Yoshida    

Originally Posted by gaogaostegosaurus

Ahahahahaha

It's like the title screen for a early nineties fighting game

wasn't that what he said he wanted lol? something reminiscent of the 80s/90s?

Another new interview on a website onlinegamer.jp with a few new points... translation's done, here's the new info (again this is only new info, if something was repeated from the interviews I previously translated, it's not below):

General Patch Info

• They hope to deliver patch 2.2 more quickly than the time between 2.0 and 2.1 (which is about four weeks behind the originally planned schedule).
• They aren't implementing it yet, but they are planning to implement a resume function for downloading client and patch data in the future. The size of patch 2.1 is expected to be several GB. They are trying to keep it as small as possible, but housing takes up a large amount of resources.
• Patch notes will be published the day before the update. More information about the job adjustments (including the ability that bards are losing access to) will be included in the notes.

Endgame

• Only about 10% of players are participating in the Binding Coil. That's actually higher than they anticipated, though.
• People have gotten through turns 1 through 4 more easily than they expected, and they are saying this is because Paladin turned out to be a more powerful tank than they had planned for.
• The current turns of Binding Coil won't be made easier in 2.1, but there will be some difficulty relaxation in 2.2 when more turns are added.
• Yoshida acknowledges that there feels like a stagnation for end-game at the moment. He's saying that top tier players should hold out for the coil expansion in 2.2 and in the meantime he hopes that Wolves' Den in 2.1 will keep these people interested. The goal for this patch is to bolster the amount of starter end-game content (e.g. having five different hard level 50 dungeons) to get more people into the end-game scene.

Player Housing, Furniture

• Dungeon-specific furniture will be added to encourage people to go back and retry old dungeons. A few of these parts already dropped before player housing was added, but most will be added in 2.1.
• Gathered materials like ore and lumber will play a large role in housing construction - some directly gathered, some will require crafting first.
• Crafted furniture will be biased towards carpenter in 2.1, but they plan to even it out in the future. Alchemy and cooking will play a larger role in PvP.
• They don't plan to add furniture items acquired from tomestones, stuff will just come straight from dungeons and other content.
• The crafter level required to make furniture will be related to the item level which corresponds to the dungeon where the material comes from.

Instanced Dungeons

• Duty Roulette is broken up into four playlists:
  
  • Low Level: Sastasha, Tam Tara Deepcroft, Copperbell Mines, Bowl of Embers, Halatali, Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak, Haukke Manor, Brayflox's Longstop, Temple of Qarn, Cutter's Cry, Stone Vigil, The Navel, Dzemael Darkhold, Aurum Vale, Howling Eye, Cape Westwind
  • High Level: Wanderer's Palace, Amdapor Keep, Copperbell Mines (Hard), Haukke Manor (Hard), Pharos Sirius
  • Guildhests: All of the guildhests, basic training through Solemn Trinity
  • Main Scenario: Castrum Meridanum, The Praetorium
• Hard mode dungeons will have different progression routes (certain areas blocked off, etc.), and the mid- and end bosses will have different battle strategies.
• Sounds like they're adding a vote-kick feature to be used "for emergencies only." They didn't want to implement it from the start because there were a lot of players new to MMOs. Three of the four party members will need to approve for the vote to pass, and it will be highly restricted (once every four hours).
• MIP should be thought of as an achievement-like system. For example, if you get chosen as the MIP 10 times, you'll receive a certain title and item reward.

Treasure Hunts

• Gatherers obtain treasure maps and they can be sold until they are deciphered, at which point they can no longer be sold.
• When you go to open a treasure chest, trap monsters appear. The plan is for a grade 5 treasure chest to take about four adventurers at level 50 to complete the battle to open. The planned difficulty is solo at levels 30, 35, and 40 for grades 1, 2, and 3, solo at level 50 for grade 4, and in a party at level 50 for grade 5.

PvP

• PvP party configuration is the same as instanced dungeons (2x DPS, healer, tank) if you use duty finder for random matching.
• PvP points/rank are recorded personally, there are no plans to make any kind of "team points."
• You don't have to use PvP-exclusive equipment, but it will eventually be important to performing well.
• PvP-exclusive equipment will be obtained in exchange for points. There will be exclusive recipes and materia as well for crafters.
• They'll be adding new TP recovery items that can only be used in PvP.

Other Stuff

• Bunch of UI adjustments coming in 2.1. Some of the mentioned ones are camera improvements and displaying the zone name on the teleportation list.
• The maximum IL of 70 for crafters is intentional since optimal materia melding/overmelding puts the gear close to, but just short of, the performance of IL90. This relationship between the highest crafted gear and the highest available IL gear will be maintained moving forward as the highest IL increases.

Originally Posted by Alkar

If you're spending myths/getting Coil loot for one job you can lot CT gear for another. That said 1 week is still way too long imo and I don't understand why relics/moogle weapons have no limitations in place while gear is getting locked like this.

Actually, I think it'd be more efficient if you use CT gear to bump up any ilvl70 slots you have on your main job, then once your main is covered, you can do the same for your secondary. 1 week lockout really kills gearing your secondaries in conjuction to your main.

Originally Posted by Slycer

Another new interview on a website onlinegamer.jp with a few new points... working on translation now, here's what I got so far, I'll keep updating:

Another new interview on a website onlinegamer.jp with a few new points:

i fucking love you and the treasure/housing shit was all i was really looking forward to since I figured CT would be a bust (but not nearly as big a bust as it is)

Originally Posted by Therin

That's still at most 4 hours of content. (excluding Beastman dailies, which I doubt most people will do)

I'm also interested in the hybrid concept, but they'd need to add a lot of jobs to make that work.

And that's also assuming you have a coil static. Don't have one? Sucks to be you.

Originally Posted by Kincard

Re: Hybrid Classes. I honestly thought they got hybrid classes in XI right for the most part but only from a single-player RPG perspective, and when you're balancing an MMO you have to take a totally different approach, because people will always be playing one class. Well, it varied with which patch they were on, it's completely possible that the ones they got right were just ones they stumbled into, lolidunno. DPS/Healer for example- Dancer filled that pretty well.

The jobs in XI I considered hybrid were:
RDM PLD DRK NIN DRG SMN BLU COR PUP DNC SCH GEO RUN

Of those the only ones I'd say got screwed really hard (depending on the patch) were NIN, DRG, PUP, and SMN. Honestly not that bad.

Even in the days when RDM, for example, has little unique to offer, if you look at it purely from how gameplay works the way it got balanced made sense to me. The fact that players didn't invite them was only because dedicated jobs were better at healing/nuking/meleeing than RDM was, and that's how it's supposed to be with hybrid classes. The important thing is to balance content correctly so that you don't have crazy one-shot moves, for instance, that can't be mitigated somehow by a hybrid healer class. Which brings me to the question of why Yoshi is acting like a Hybrid is supposed to take up its own unique slot- the whole point is that it can fill multiple roles. >_>

Every job in XI had some level of flexibility, even WAR which was an all-out DD job (subjobs like /NIN and /SAM really helped spread out it's versatility). That said the only jobs I consider hybrids are RDM, DNC, SCH, BLU, and COR. All other jobs has a "primary" function and a dedicated role to fill. If they couldn't fill that role then they were frankly screwed out of a party.

Out of all the hybrids, I still only consider DNC and BLU to be well-designed. RDM always teetered on the edge of being broken and SCH had serious issues with stepping on other job's toes until the level cap raise when it started getting more unique spells. I've never played though COR so I can't comment on that.

Originally Posted by Voyage1970

So even though End-game feels stagnant right now, we should wait until 2.2 when they'll introduce 5 more turns of Coil....and then have 6 months to wait until Coil update again since they already stated it will go Coil > CT > Coil > CT. I fail to see how 2.2 is going to be any different if all they plan on adding for the highest tier is more Coil turns.

Maybe, maybe not. They could fix it moving forward by always keeping the new one ahead of the other. For example, next coil turns IL95 equip, next CT IL100, next coil after that IL105, etc. I mean, CT was supposed to be in there from the start, I think? It would be kind of half-assed if they keep going forwards and backwards with the endgame content in every other update.

FYI, I'm still tacking onto that translation above (post #44), I'll post another reply when it's done.

Originally Posted by Slycer

Maybe, maybe not. They could fix it moving forward by always keeping the new one ahead of the other. For example, next coil turns IL95 equip, next CT IL100, next coil after that IL105, etc. I mean, CT was supposed to be in there from the start, I think? It would be kind of half-assed if they keep going forwards and backwards with the endgame content in every other update.

FYI, I'm still tacking onto that translation above (post #44), I'll post another reply when it's done.

I can't find the quote right now but I'm pretty sure they have stated the hardest content will always be 8man, so I don't think backwards progression is going anywhere.

My best hope is for Coil #2 to have 10 turns minimum and at least 4-5 Twintania-like encounters. That should keep most players busy for a while. Not holding my breath though.

OK translation's done, all the info is there now.

Edit: Organized it by topic.

Originally Posted by Elcura

The problem with hybrid jobs is that they need to be unique in order to be worth using. Even if you have a tank/healer or dps/tank if they bring nothing special to the table there really is no reason to use them.

I was just assuming in my head that "hybrid" was terrible SE language for "support" or "DPS/utility", of which for current jobs you could throw BRD in there I guess and SMN if you're from the OF and believe SMNs are all awful. Having hybrids be some actual halfway between 2 of the holy trinity would require exceptional fine-tuning in terms of new jobs, and I can already imagine OFtards calling SMN a hybrid because it can heal (badly) and DPS (the highest potentially) and tank (sort of).

A hybrid "healer/anything" or "tank/anything" would also be exceptionally pointless seeing as all current 4man content is designed to be cleared with 1 tank and 1 healer anyways.

So much for gearing my other jobs in CT lol. What a godfuckin stupid lock out. I have seen people geared faster for 2nd/3rd jobs in Coil than this 1 item a week bullshit.

Even if this content is 'fun', what the fuck makes Yoshida think we going at this shit for months for gear that is at best a stepping stone? And as pointed out, I can make a lv80 weapon pretty much the same evening I get a new lv50 job, but getting 1 piece of lv80 gear more than once a week is a no-no?

I already don't see myself clearing this content more than once, good job SE.