So I guess so have finished the ARR content of the original game in a bit of an anticlimactic way by coming years late to the party. The last 3 main story quests happen in 8 man dungeons (aside: funny that at Level 49 you finally get an explanation why a 4 man dungeon group is called Light Party) which are a little heavy on the cutscenes (not a problem) but are made really, really trivial by apparently not downscaling higher level players (enough or at all). The groups I had didn’t have anyone say hi, explain tactics or do anything other than focus DPS the boss down with maybe the offtank grabbing some adds. Or not, or just doing a bad job, couldn’t really tell. The evil Garleans set up for all these levels definitely felt a bit like cannon fodder and kinda wasted, but maybe those were epic battles when the content was current.
All in all a bit of wasted time, for example like sending a 6x group in TBC equipment into UBRS. Smash and grab, just without any loot. I guess it’s good the higher level players get poetics as a reward so us newbies don’t get blocked on the quest, I only had to queue for ~33min as a DPS, on a weekday in the early evening just after work.
Also maybe it was me or maybe the game, but after that I found myself wandering aimlessly for the first time. Sure, I did continue the MSQ, but I saw these “unlock quests” with the partially blue symbol at 50 everywhere and tried to follow a few, but they didn’t all seem to end up in something meaningful. In the progress I unlocked more beast tribe quests and dungeons, sure. But why do all these quests only pop up at 50 despite being high 40s. I don’t believe I missed ALL of them earlier, or maybe I did?
Also the amount of XP I got for all this running around seemed a bit low on Level 50/51 but maybe it was just a lot of breadcrumb ones and I was playing lower jobs too much in the last two weeks. Or maybe Heavensward does start a bit slow and it’s not me, we’ll see.
This may sound overly negative so maybe I just had a bad day, but the anticipation was kinda spoiled. The Praetorium definitely felt worse than the 2 8mans before it, which I did in the last days. Oh, and while it’s nice to know I am already eligible to start the quest for an epic purple bow I’m 90% sure it’s only good as a transmog now, if at all, but researching so far has proved inconclusive if it can later be upgraded or stays at 50.
Welcome to the slog of post-release ARR! As much as I like the game, the content forthcoming in your path is…not great, to put it lightly. There will be a lot of running around and bits of story that set things into motion for Heavensward (and some of Stormblood, and some of Shadowbringers), but it is rough gameplay for a while. Once Heavensward is clearly the focus, the quests get better, mainly in story, but it is the part I burned out on originally. The last few 8 mans can be pretty cool, done properly, but these days something is a little off in the scaling and so when you get a group they will smash the content to pieces through brute force (especially Praetorium, which is loathed for removing the ability to skip cinematics back shortly after Stormblood launched, when it used to be a 3 minute squash, newbies be damned).
The unlock quests are usually nothing special, just a bit of lore to explain how you’re fighting a primal again but harder or why the dungeon you previously did is a threat again (it is actually really refreshing to me coming from WoW to have the higher difficulties be canon in the lore), but they add some fun – the Wanderer’s Palace Hard unlock quest is particularly funny.
Heavensward content sets a much higher bar, so as someone who stuck in the post-launch ARR rut years ago, I’ll say that toughing it out is worth it for what comes after, but it will be tedious for a while, sadly.
Thanks for the explanation. I continued a bit yesterday, it is indeed a lot of running around but I didn’t have time yet to commit to continue with the dungeons. But I did unlock like 5 hard modes already, also just need to run them now. I think the main difference to WoW is that in FFXIV the “end of expansion content” is not moot and obsolete the minute the new expansion launches. So if you ding with an alt you just grab the one breadcrumb “go to next expansion starting zone quest” and that’s it – whereas here you’re supposed to just continue the MSQ and also unlock some stuff because Hard Mode 50 dungeons are exactly not moot and obsolete just because the max level is now 70. But I guess *some* of those quests could still be skipped but as a newbie I just don’t know and also don’t want to research every single one. It’s quicker to just do them. Well, apart from the Weapon quest 😛
A lot of those problems is how Square-Enix handled things. That ~33 minute queue as DPS is because those dungeons aren’t as popular to queue anymore. Like Kaylriene said above before Stormblood you could skip all the cutscenes in those dungeons and people did that making it a very fast run. So it was an easy way to get some poetics and move on to the next queue.
Unfortunatelly for people who liked to watch the cutscenes that would mean they would be left behind while the rest of the group just rushed along the dungeon. Square-Enix then tried to “fix” the problem by making it so we can’t skip the cutscenes anymore. Now a dungeon that could take 3 minutes to rush through it can take up to 30 minutes just because of the unskipabble cutscenes. They did try to increase the amount of poetics we gain to compensate for that but it still wasn’t enough to make it a very unpopular choice for roulettes nowadays due to the amount of time it takes. The end result: less people doing it, longer queue times.
As for the amount of quest popping up after that. You didn’t miss all those quests after level 40. It is just that the team still hadn’t figure out how to do post-content yet so I guess they just threw a bunch of quests. Samething for the patches storyline. A lot of the post ARR storyline feels pretty much filler. It isn’t until you get closer to Heavensward that it gets better.
And yeah, the weapon quest isn’t worth it unless you want it for glamour or bragging rights.
Yeah, I think they handled it a lot better than a lot of other games did, but of course it could always be better.
On the one hand skipping the cutscenes would be nice for the high level people, on the other hand.. is it really good if you don’t see the fights because everyone else skipped and already killed everything? I prefer to see it once, properly (with very quick fights) than not see the cutscenes at all.