Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

[Dotsudoku]

I appreciate all the spoilery explanations, but I'd be curious if anyone has any commentary on the ending that would perhaps make me hate it less.

Spoiler: show

Maybe I'm just tired of sickly-sweet happy endings. You join with Ardbert and suddenly your soul is suddenly fine, despite previously being "nearly broken", and "your light vs the ascian's darkness cancelled each other out" and now you're 100% back to normal?

Do I have that right? I guess it makes sense in the context of a fantasy world with magic and shit (and frankly, a pretty common trope in JRPGs now that I think about it), but ughhhh it's all so convenient and boring. You weren't fighting the Ascian with the intent to fix your light problem, but suddenly you're fixed anyway? Am I the only one that finds that utterly unsatisfying? It was so vanilla, it left a bad taste in my mouth about the story as a whole. I hope whatever they come up with for the rest of the expansion is more interesting.

Spoiler: show

totally understand what you mean, because superficially it does seem very deus ex. But bear in mind that what was actually happening was Emet was testing the strength of your soul, allowing you to contain the light of all the wardens. You fail, and continue to spiral(your soul continues to crack), which ultimately would have resulted in you becoming a warden. Ardbert joins with you, making your soul one fraction more complete, which is just enough for you to contain the light i.e. passing the "test". At this point you're in control and just absurdly overpowered, so from a storytelling perspective it only makes sense for you to rid yourself of the light somehow-- enter magicite creation, and Ascian soul destruction

[Elcura]

I think there's a lot of avenues they could have explored to make the story much darker and hopeless, but a satisfying ending was always going to be the conclusion no matter how things played out. I'm fine with how things turned out in the end because I enjoyed getting there and basically never wanted to stop experiencing the story.

Spoiler: show

Turning into a monster could have had more gameplay/physical impact. I know the idea of changing your carefully designed character is risky but I would have liked some (at least temporary) flourishes to your character to indicate how fucked up you were. Or something a bit more long term where people/cities you visit help eventually go mad or worship you to the detriment of others etc. I feel like the ending was a bit rushed after you fight Innocence and I think more player agency here would've made the heroic ending go down better.

Being unable to contain the light was a bit disappointing, I was hoping something would come out of that but I was also hoping we would just do it and then the story would focus more on Emet Selch's plan and why he hoped we could contain it. This ties into the Zodiark vs Hydaelyn and what it means to be tempered.

Finally I would've loved some more on the Ascian city and definitely more side quests to explore the lore, but the little we got was extremely fascinating. I think the last thing on my mind was the origin of the disaster.

So there are definitely things I would've liked to see, but that doesn't mean we won't eventually see them in later patches or expansions because they got so much right.

Spoiler: show

The story was well written and fun to experience, Emet's involvement with your party and story gives much needed depth to the Ascians...overwhelmingly so, the concept of light and dark's stasis vs progress is very interesting.

Does that mean that Hydaelyn is an agent of progress and Zodiark is the agent of stasis? That would make a bit of sense if the Ascians just wanted to maintain their perfect status quo. So in the First light (=dark/stasis) and dark (=light/progress) are concepts that are flipped?

These beings as Primals is also very interesting, going through the story I thought the implications were massive. What if the entirety of the game was not our own will but only due to tempering? We never refuse or back down from the darkness because we can't? Though ultimately it seems like you just wanna fight to save people and help out, so it never seems so nefarious and when Rocl suggests her tempering is merely "hear think feel" then basically it's a lot less sinister than I thought.

The Ascian disease I have no doubt we'll get more into, but I definitely was intrigued by the whole thing and wanted so much more. If they can make an actual city like Amourot I'll be impressed.

As for the "warrior of darkness" I knew that was a red herring when they basically said the first's concept of light and dark are flipped, they're essentially still calling you the warrior of light, though I suppose now they could rename you the warrior of progress. There was no way you were suddenly going to become dark without a good reason, but I think there's still time to have light vs light with upcoming patches.

As for the resolution to your light problem, I always understood it as Ardbert carrying some of the burden and helping you master the new amount of light you have (now level 80!), when you manage to form the axe you've basically mastered a stronger form of light because your vessel got a lot stronger too. It just seemed like because you were forced to wield the light against the darkness, you just got good at it. It's probably 50% I used it and 50% I got better at it.

Final areas and dungeons were also amazing. I have a lot of thoughts about this expansion story wise, so much so that it retroactively makes me more interested in FFXIV lore.

Easily my favourite expansion so far, and I really liked the initial part of HW (the rest of the patches got less interesting, whereas SB got more interesting in order to lead up to this).

Now if only they didn't fuck up AST I would be great.

[Alkar]

Yeah, the only things I didn't enjoy at all this expansion are the SCH and AST changes. Those need to be adressed eventually and the pet abilities also need to be fixed. As soon as you can't instacast on SMN they're clunky as hell to use, SCH is just as bad especially if you're healing.
The rest was incredible all around, hope they can keep it up with the patches.

[Shenrien]

Tanking feels awful, square got it wrong to put mitigation on 100% of the time. It doesn't feel good at all having taken all 4 tanks to 80. They all feel the same with their toolkit mostly, TBN being the highlight of tanking difficulty to get the most out of. Thanks for killing my interest in an entire job category.

[Boyiee]

Tanking feels awful, square got it wrong to put mitigation on 100% of the time. It doesn't feel good at all having taken all 4 tanks to 80. They all feel the same with their toolkit mostly, TBN being the highlight of tanking difficulty to get the most out of. Thanks for killing my interest in an entire job category.

Which do you hate the most and least? Was going to bring something up next.

[Shenrien]

DRK and PLD are the only two to me that I enjoyed myself with playing in Titania and Innocense, they also felt the least squishy when doing dungeon pulls. GNB does the most damage of all 4 tanks from what I'm seeing and WAR is just the most painful thing to play, at least you can move with holmgang now? That's cool I guess.. not worth everything they stripped of the job tho.

[Prothescar]

TBN is probably the single strongest mitigation tool in the game. Aside from that tho I have felt like DRK lacks a lot of the satisfying oomph that it used to have. Idk if it's the animations lacking weight or what but it just feels bad. Even Bloodspiller feels pretty meh. Wish they had just let us keep Power Slash and nixed Souleater. Dark Passenger was also way cooler than Flood of Shadow.

The novelty of Frey has also already worn off. He's basically an uncontrollable 2 minute cooldown burst DoT that makes a lot of noise. Kind of wish he did something else.

Overall wish that Blood Weapon didn't feel so lame as well. It's so anemic. They shouldn't have taken away the Haste.

The overall tank dps nerf is probably fair but that doesn't mean I have to like it or feel good about it.

[Dotsudoku]

Bloodspiller always felt like garbage to me for reasons I couldn't articulate

Quietus made me feel like god tho

[Dotsudoku]

but paladin is actually perfect now

[Prothescar]

MCN feels beast as fuck now though can't wait to lvl it to 80

Been wasting so much time with crafting but have doubled my gil and got my gear all sorted now so I can finally focus on lvling combat jobs and trusts. Need to get that Amaro

[Dotsudoku]

retainers are making me so much fucking money atm

gotta love overpriced gathering mats

[Alkar]

Oh, that's another thing to add to the bad stuff: trusts. More specifically trusts after the MSQ because I can't use them past the first dungeon anymore without grinding and two of them are gone for whatever reason...

[Kaslo]

TBN is probably the single strongest mitigation tool in the game. Aside from that tho I have felt like DRK lacks a lot of the satisfying oomph that it used to have. Idk if it's the animations lacking weight or what but it just feels bad. Even Bloodspiller feels pretty meh. Wish they had just let us keep Power Slash and nixed Souleater. Dark Passenger was also way cooler than Flood of Shadow.

The novelty of Frey has also already worn off. He's basically an uncontrollable 2 minute cooldown burst DoT that makes a lot of noise. Kind of wish he did something else.

Overall wish that Blood Weapon didn't feel so lame as well. It's so anemic. They shouldn't have taken away the Haste.

The overall tank dps nerf is probably fair but that doesn't mean I have to like it or feel good about it.

Strange, I actually feel like I enjoy DRK now. I don't know if its just the balancing of keeping Darkside up or what. :/

[Gokulo]

Oh, that's another thing to add to the bad stuff: trusts. More specifically trusts after the MSQ because I can't use them past the first dungeon anymore without grinding and two of them are gone for whatever reason...

And then there are people who already levelled them to 80 X.x

[Dotsudoku]

I mean if you level 1-2 jobs exclusively with trusts you're gonna cap em

[Gokulo]

I mean if you level 1-2 jobs exclusively with trusts you're gonna cap em

I don't see one, two maybe. Still, it's pretty mindnumbing, considering how slow the runs are with them.

[Kaslo]

I don't see one, two maybe. Still, it's pretty mindnumbing, considering how slow the runs are with them.

I watch Mr. Happy doing Trust grinding and he found ways to make them make bigger pulls and which dungeons are better than others. Basically Malikah's is the fastest, QR isn't bad either. Those would be the two to really grind. As far as pulls go, you basically go FFXI puller mode.

[Gokulo]

Biggers pull don't really matter that much when they don't use Aoe skills. Some of them do a little bit though, so it depends on your setup.

[Kaslo]

Biggers pull don't really matter that much when they don't use Aoe skills. Some of them do a little bit though, so it depends on your setup.

Yeah but you should be AOEing which bigger pulls helps. Also, apparently NPCs don't do well with narrow corridors, where they will likely stay in telegraphed AOE damage instead of moving

[Eleven19]

GNB reminds me a lot of HW DRK, might be worth lookin into if you miss that busy playstyle for a tank. The mp management isnt there but its lots of cooldowns and lots of things to do in general.

Got it to 77 so far. I've enjoyed it tbh. I haven't played WAR on anything other than striking dummy, but that was my old 'main' tank job so I'm a bit concerned.