Had a little discussion on Twitter lately and maybe it’s time that I write down the things that annoy me with FFXIV, as of course not everything can be great. I guess all my posts in the last two months were mostly positive and showed how much I like the game, so here’s a bit of the other side.
First of all, I’m 78.8 ish on White Mage and I don’t see any feasible way to level quickly now until I can do MSQ duty roulette again tomorrow. I guess I could manage the 3 Pixie dailies as well, been doing them on Dancer at the moment. I also did my dungeon “Leveling” roulette today, but there’s no real way to do anything but heal dungeons. Not even for a missing 20%. Mayyybeee FATE spam, but even those are hard to solo. Why o why do those damn side quests not give at least “ok” XP, I’m not even saying they should be good XP. Just enough to be worth doing. But the same is really true for Dancer. I seem incapable of finding activities I like that get me some XP. I don’t like PotD/HoH, I don’t want to spam dungeons. I like dailies, but there are never enough for a given level range, etc.pp.
While I am a fan of the Armoury Chest, it drives me nuts that I can’t filter in there and of course there’s not enough space to separate stuff in the four courners or whatever. I am honestly so annoyed right now, if this was WoW, I’d be writing an addon this weekend to just finally solve this problem.
If there’s a way to cancel a cutscene and be able to restart from the beginning, I’ve not found it (mostly when getting a pop). So either it’s not there or it’s one of those undiscoverable things.
Many people are saying they like how it encourages people to do old content, for example with poetics. But from the other perspective, why is it worth to me running the MSQ duty roulette every day, but only on the role that has the benefit. On my data center it’s feasible to check it every few minutes while playing and always queue as tank or healer, depending on the bonus. So much that it feels not worth doing it with the wrong role, and basically never as a DPS. I could use some variety here.
I’ve had a lot of fun healing for the first 70 or so levels, but the meta seems to have changed and the higher towards “current” content you get, the more tanks are doing the wall-to-wall pulls. Yes, even the tanks you have to absolutely spam heal. Not sure who like this, but it’s completely not enjoyable for me. Also you don’t actually learn to heal because I hardly can use a variety of spells or even dare to try to use them. I need to use the 5 buttons that I know will keep the tank alive, no clue if it’s optimal. No chance to learn, just run and spam. I’d actually say for me there’s currently no middle ground between “terribly boring” and “painfully difficult”. Maybe the only way is to read up more and talk to a White Mage main, but learning by doing with medium difficulty? I don’t see how.
The ingame map. Why does it have to be so horrible? Again, I don’t love the WoW map, but would it have been so difficult to let me zoom out three times via right click? Zooming in via left click works! And I get that not all major zones are connected, but why do I have to select Norvrandt or Othard from the menu every day? Why could I click on the Yanxia map to get to the Doman Enclave a while ago and now I have to use the Teleport menu?
Why are the Gathering Job Quests so horribly boring? Port around 5 times, then collect 10 of some HQ materials. Some are more terrible than others, but only the first one or two were “good” in a sense that they were at least new?
Why is it so hard to deglamour a piece of equipment?
Why am I a Storm Captain of the Maelstrom and the highest 8 ranks have never been put ingame, but also not removed from the GC ranks tab?
So yes, a lot boils down to maybe being spoiled by switching specs and being able to get some XP on Healers and Tank as DPS, like in WoW. But I sometimes like to do solo stuff and still progress. And yes, the last few points were a bit petty, but I didn’t even have to think hard about any of this.
Maybe I shouldn’t be comparing all the things to WoW, because overall I think the systems are implemented in a better way and WoW has structural problems, while FFXIV mostly has annoyances and systems that are badly explained. But many of WoW’s small annoyances can be fixed with addons.
And yes, overall I’m still pretty happy. I think I have one thing to finish for the last quest of Shadowbringers’ 5.55 patch, I’m very close to 3 jobs at 80, I am 90% ready for Endwalker and looking forward. But some things could be so much better, especially if you want to level in bursts and not trickling every day. WoW may waste a lot of my time, but I have the feeling I can optimize a few things a lot better.
Leveling-wise it sounds like you haven’t unlocked Bozja. It’s the most efficient way to level between 71-80, and as healer you get an 80% damage buff in the zone with an essence. To unlock Bozja you have to complete the Return to Ivalice raids once. You also get a free 485 weapon out of it as first step of the Shadowbringers relic quest chain.
I agree that the wall-to-wall stuff is a bit much as healer. I run dungeons as Trust first to learn the healing patterns and Thancred does not do wall to wall, nor does he really need any healing. I am usually panicking a bit in dungeons, but it’s gotten a lot better with gear. Did my first Expert roulette yesterday, woot.
Not sure I follow the roulette stuff. No matter which role, you always get the daily extra reward, even if you’re not the high demand role. You just get a little extra heaped on top of that if you’re tank or healer, or DPS in alliance raids.
If my roulette pops while I am in a cutscene, I click Commence, and then I just get the cut scene again when I return.
As formerly biggest addon junkie ever, I currently do not miss anything in FFXIV other than a better search for bags than /isearch. That’s just a bit clunky, I just want true filters. I should admit however that I use Material UI to make everything look nicer. The hotbars just look so much nicer.
The only thing I find 100% truly superior in WoW is the transmog system. I find the glamour system tedious and. confusing.
I just unlocked it a few days ago, because I wanted the weapons. But I haven’t done anything there because I thought the grind wasn’t really worth it, so close to Endwalker. So yeah, maybe part of the blame is on never having seen it, not being keen on the rewards and arriving very late to the party.
SE is a bit shit at explaining things so even though when you enter Bozja they specifically state you should do stuff there as a leveling character, it’s not very clear. Characters in the level-range 71-80 get sync’d to level 80, with full access to all abilities, so you can even practice if you actually enjoy the level 80 rotation. I only have resistance rank 5 myself, as I did the first memory grind in FATEs in the Ishgard zones.
Yeah, I think that’s a good point. I saw it mostly for the gear grind and the “endgame, something to do” zone when maybe leveling is the more important part – that is definitely not messaged clearly.
But my overall point stands, now we have something for the ShB level range, and we had PotD/HoH for other level ranges before – but it’s not what I want. The only thing I’m really missing from WoW is working my way through a zone and doing quests. Not always, but sometimes. I did ~6m of quest exp with Il Mheg side quests (410k per, so 15 quests) yesterday when I was close to 80. It’s doable, but really only if you need a low single digit amount of XP and you need it NOW and can’t commit to a 20-60min dungeon run.