Last night I finally managed to finish the last MSQ of the original .0 patch, aptly named “Shadowbringers”. The story is actually good, but my final verdict is still that I don’t understand why people would say it is so much better than the original ARR MSQ. I found them both excellent, Stormblood was a little worse and for me Heavensward was the weakest of the four, but that one was still ok! I guess tastes are different. Also I didn’t say that the MSQ was fun at all times or perfect. But compared to WoW, everything has been kinda excellent.
I was pretty annoyed with the Shadowbringers “role quest” though, in my case ranged physical DPS. The story was a good one, but the implementation was kinda horrible, although I am partly to blame by doing it all in one sitting at 80. But it was literally “port all over the Norvrandt map, then fly/ride to your quest spot, and after a minute port back to the Crystarium”. It wouldn’t have been half as bad if it had been close to an Aetheryte Crystal but this was like 15 minutes just wasted on flying and porting. I am not used to this level of inconvenience in FFXIV. And what I already lamented on Discord, the final solo duty seemed bugged for me. You have one NPC aiding you, but in my case he didn’t really. First try on normal difficulty, very late in the fight I got one of these “gather together” markers after being stunned (and I didn’t notice standing in anything), he didn’t run to me, we died. Second try, very easy, as I didn’t enjoy it the first time already, he simply died a minute into the fight and there’s nothing I could have done to prevent it. Third try everything finally worked, I was stunned at the exact same moment, but this time he ran to me and we lived.
Anyway, another peculiarity. You unlock a quest giver in the last zone and he just hands out 430 gear after you finished this role quest. I missed this at first and couldn’t queue for the last duty until I went to research and found this out pretty quickly. I then remembered I was actually told he’d have gear for me, but I thought this was just the game telling me where to hand in future currency that I don’t have yet, not that I would’ve just had to click on him and grab my stuff…
So the next logical quests would be the so-called Post-Shadowbringers MSQ, but not sure I need to rush those like I just did. I actually want to look at a few other things first, mostly Beast Tribe dailies and pushing Machinist and Dancer.
Also I am at a point where I am completely out of ideas on what to spend my poetics on. Bard, White Mage, Warrior have 70 gear (so that’s ranged physical, healer, tank), every class I play has their 70 weapon (in use or pre-bought). I even started stocking up on some 70 gear for jobs I don’t have an immediate plan of leveling. Also I think I have the 60 Tank gear, and for the Machinist I definitely don’t need it. Or maybe I missed the forest for the trees and I can actually buy something useful at 80, that’s a thing I need to research.