Okay so I know nothing about Final Fantasy and I haven’t played a single FF game in my life but hey it’s an MMO and I like MMOs, so let’s do it!Let’s face it, the graphics are amazing. It’s the best graphic game I’ve played in my entire life (since I’m used to shitty korean grinders stuck on 10 year old game engines.) The camera movement is smooth, the overall game play is smooth and the race customization is great. You can go from being an ikeman to a burly man to a loli to a catgirl. In my first 10 levels I was ready to hand my money to Squeenix and dump my otome game backlog into a black hole. However, by Saturday night things had changed.
Things that are awesome about this game:
- Fate System – At some point on the map a “Fate Event” starts and you run to the map marker. There will be monsters to kill but the best part is everyone can participate and help each other out without it being considered KSing! How great is that. It’s like having a fake party without the whole bother of getting the right members or waiting around for person #5 to join etc. You also get pretty decent exp, ranging from 1k~2k depending on the level. So in a way it’s like an efficient grinding system.
- Graphics – As I mentioned before the graphics are amazing. I tried to make Alvaro from Wand of Fortune as my character though I couldn’t find the right hair. My husband made Lulu but because she was too far away based on her class, he remade a character and called her Lala (aka Lulu’s daughter xDDD) Needless to say, it was cute though I question the choice of armor for some of the female characters:
- Camera & Control – The camera and controls in this game are great. I’m the kind of person who likes to move with my arrow keys so I swapped them with my wasd to use for camera controls instead. Either way movement was very smooth and there’s a lot of other customization options that I didn’t really touch upon. I also love the switching between walking and running on your character so you could probably make some fun play movies. Additionally there’s an option for your character to “sprint”. It has a cool down but it’s very short so basically you don’t even need a mount when getting across a map. This was extremely handy when you are running back & forth between Fates.
- Battle System – Battle system is pretty smooth. In RO2 it kept saying “you’re not facing the character” which made me want to punch a baby but here, no problem! It faces your character on its own! What a concept Gravity! Also in RO2 I hated how my mage’s attack animations were so stupid. His rod would just sit on his back while he shot fireballs out of his arms but here my healer has a variety of animations (though I think some people complained about them being too flashy but I liked it! :lol:)
- Auto-Loot – This is the best thing since sliced bread. In every game, kill monster, gotta pick up their items blah blah. Here all items are automatically picked up for you! Kill guy, move on to the next guy and not worry that you forgot to pick something up. Seriously I think all games should follow this (or maybe I’ve been playing the wrong ones.)
- Tutorial Windows – Those were really helpful. Whenever you’d encounter something “new” in the game, a little question mark would pop up and give you hints and information about it. This was really helpful to noobs like us but I think there are a lot of things that weren’t covered and there’s a lot of parts of this game I was curious about but never got a chance to learn about.
- The Rest System – If you logout inside an inn for the night, your character generates some exp bonuses which is really cool. Most people logout wherever the hell they ended up beforehand but at least this motivates you to return to a village so you don’t log back in the middle of a Fate or something.
- Inventory – The inventory is pretty cool, you get a lot of space and I barely found myself even filling up the first bag. The gear inventory is totally separate which is great so you don’t have to search through your bags to see if you got any equipment drops. Also because you can switch classes you can “save gear” for a certain class as a template in case you want to switch classes real quick and don’t remember which items go with which class.
- Teleporting – Teleporting within town is free and there’s many markers on the map so you don’t have to run through the whole town if you need to say hand in a quest or talk to some NPCs. Also there’s a teleport feature for your character that lets you teleport to maps where you’ve been and if you save them as a “favorite point” (up to 3) it will actually cost you less. This way if you find yourself teleporting to the same map frequently, save it as a favorite spot and save some money!
- Day & Night System – The game periodically switches between day & night. I was told this is a standard now but hey it never happened in any of the games I played so I think this is pretty cool! It isn’t based on your personal time, it’s just based on a sped up clock within the game.
Things that are not so awesome:
- Potion Cooldown – Okay I can somewhat understand a 1 minute cool down for an HP potion cause after all, healers need something to do. HOWEVER I CANNOT understand a 3 minute cool down for MP potions that only recover about 1/4 of your MP. What the hell?? I found my poor healer on multiple occasions being stuck doing nothing except healing my tank every few seconds because I was pretty much running on my 33 MP regenerating over & over before I used it. This of course got even worse during solo quests (that you HAD to do alone) where I ran out of MP, the potion cool down hadn’t ended and I was pretty much a sitting duck until I died.
- Targeting Sucks – With bad memories of RO2 once more, I’m back to the shitty targetting system. What I mean is, I hit tab to attack a guy in front of me, but instead it tabs to some guy MILES AWAY that is even blatantly “target too far away from you”. It wasn’t bad on the first day, but on the 2nd day of playing it was horrible. I’d be on top of a tree killing vultures and when I hit tab to target one in front of me, it targets some guy many feet below. At some point I gave up using tab and just tried to click names of the monsters -_-.
- Cast Time – Oh my god the cast time for attacks is SO LONG. I know there needs to be a balance and we can’t all have instacast but holy crapamoly does it take forever. I think it took me 10 seconds to cast my only 1 attack spell though things like heal seemed to be faster. I guess they don’t want healers to do damage? But then they throw us into solo quest instances that we get completely owned in.
- Lack of Quests – When I started the game I was overwhelmed with all the quests in the many towns around mine. However once I got to level 14 and I found myself not being able to do the scenario quests, I realized I had NOTHING to do! The quest pacing is terrible and instead of giving a noob like 15 quests at once, you should pace them out! Additionally some of the newb quests gave practically no exp and it was probably faster to just go out in the field and kill low level monsters. I also found that due to this weird pacing, I’d end up doing quests that gave me items that were worse than what I was currently wearing. By the time I got to 16 (with Fate grinding only btw) I ended up just buying equipment from the equipment seller cause I had no equip drops or quests to do to get better items. Also there was this horrible map bug where quest markers would disappear of the map. I’d love to have reported it on the beta tester forums but they made it so you can only post 1 post every 15 minutes. Wow you want me to sit there for an hour posting all the bugs I found? Lol clearly I get the impression they don’t actually want anyone’s feedback and they just want to do things their own way~. Well you can have fun doing that without 2 people who could have potentially bought your game.
- Screencapping – When you take screencaps with Print Screen, there’s a 5 second time lag. If you’re trying to get a bunch of cool angle shots of your character you better use some outside screenshot program cause the built in one sucks! Additionally the built in one won’t allow you to take screenshots of any of the scenario footage. I guess they want people to experience it on their own but the fact that I can use an outside program to take screenshots doesn’t really stop anyone and all it does is make it annoying for players who want to respect rules and have screenshots with the dumb Squeenix logo on them.
- The Separation of Classes – In Ragnarok Online 1 if you chose a different class as your friends, you would have been teleported to a different town to do your class quest. However, eventually when you were all done you just walk your way or teleport your way to Prontera and bam you can meet up with your friends. In FF14, if you’re in a different town with your friends, good luck ever seeing them again. You have to get to level 15, complete some kind of quest and THEN it will let you out of your “area” to go to explore other maps of the world. THIS IS SO STUPID. I can somewhat see the need to “work” to explore the world but in that case don’t put everyone all over the place! It’s like this is an MMO, I want to play with my friends but because I chose a healer and my friend chose the tank, we are now on separate islands and we have to solo our way to 15 until we can finally meet up?? Of course the worst part being that the quest that allows you to leave your area is the impossible one that I couldn’t do solo. Needless to say, I never did meet up with any friends who had characters outside of Gridania so really if I made a healer, the only classes I can then be partying with are archers or lancers. Great. ( ´_ゝ`)
- Monsters Aggro Level – I really don’t know if this is intentional or if it’s a bug but say I’m killing some level 4 guy. I’m only attacking him, suddenly 2 nearby guys who weren’t aggro at all START ATTACKING ME. In fact I can’t even tell the difference between aggressive and non aggressive monsters. The text above all monsters’ heads is yellow so there’s no indicator of whether or not I need to actually be wary of them. In the end I ended up running away by trial & error but it was annoying when the monsters don’t seem aggro but the moment I run by to do some gather item quest, suddenly a mob of angry birds is after me! 😛
- Hand Over Quest Item – When you’d finish a quest you’d have to actually “click on an item” and click “hand over” which is so pointless. Like come on, it’s IN my inventory take it yourself you lazyass NPC 😆 This is such an unnecessary game feature and all it does is make you do extra clicking.
- Map Sucks – The Map is cluttered full of text that’s hard to tell where things are. For example the text may be located in a completely different area than the “exit marker”. I found myself constantly going to the wrong place because I was following the text rather than the marker. You can of course turn OFF the text but then you don’t know where the hell anything is :lol:. The map would never follow you where you went and you were basically constantly manually moving it around and zooming in and out to be able to tell where the hell anything was. This is probably the worst map in any MMO game I’ve encountered.
I’m sure there are other great things in the game that we haven’t discovered yet and I don’t know anything about crafting system or upgrading system (if there is one) but the fact that at level 15 we found ourselves bored of the game with nothing to do but grind Fates tells me this isn’t a game I want to spend money on + monthly subscription. I feel like the game needs some reworking and a lot of suggestions on the (shitty 15 minute/post) forum reflect what I feel but then you have idiots going “shut up the system is fine it should be this hard cause it’s challenging blah blah.” Yea well if you don’t play an archer and play a healer instead you try doing that same quest when you can’t run around in circles shooting your enemy. （ಠ_ಠ） Well my biggest deal breakers were the being forced to do solo quests and the fact that I couldn’t meet up with friends because they were thrown on an island far away and we couldn’t meet up with each other.
I start to wonder, if this game is trying to appeal to the “SOLO NEET CROWD” in Japan. The ones who don’t want to join parties cause they’re asocial, and would rather just grind on their own so they can be 俺ツエええ and in that case yes this is probably a good setup for them. It forces them to make their characters stronger so they can solo these story quests etc. However for those of us outside Japan who just want to play with our friends, we’re stuck constantly breaking up our party cause “oh there’s only this solo quest and nothing else left to do.” The game officially comes out at the end of August so Squeenix has some time to address the issues I mentioned (and as mentioned by others). I’m hoping to see if I can get into anymore betas or to at least see what the status is of all the complaints I brought up. I get the feeling though, a lot of this stuff won’t be changing and as much as I loved a lot of the things in this game, in the end it just frustrated me and not something I wish to invest in.
But maybe this is a good thing cause if god forbid I invest time & money into this game, my otome game backlog will really go to hell. 😆
かわいいじゃなきゃダメなの！ 
one thing I wish the map would do is “move” with you as you go through it.
I know there’s a checkbox for this but it doesn’t work which tells me it’s a bug.
I also hate it how for gathering you can only see it on the mini map which drives me up the wall lol
I agree that the map sucks. This is my first MMO but I have played FF12 as well as Oblivion and Skyrim. So I’m used to all this RPG, quest journal, map, etc. But I strongly prefer Elder Scrolls menus and methods for managing quests, maps, markers, etc. The only thing this has going for it is the music and the Final Fantasy look and feel. I just hope I get used to the controls and the map system gets a major overhaul soon. I also like how in Skyrim you actually have to aim and shoot arrows. In Final Fantasy, everything is automated. Which is fine, but I wanted to practice archery in the archery quild but realized it’s all NPC’s and you can’t target practice.
Ahh I see. I guess that seems legit. Thanks for the tip!
Just a heads up. That mob aggro when fighting… it’s called Linking. A mob links with other mobs when 1. You are a few levels higher than it or 2. You are in a party. It’s like the mobs need help because there are multiple people or you are so much stronger than they are. So if you are solo and killing mobs that are you’re level, you wont get adds.
ah ok I’m actually on Ragnarok with my poor Conjurer lol but I don’t know when the next phase 3 beta’s gonna take place (not this weekend because I think the devs are all going to France)
Yeah it’s as heinsia said, I’m at Hyperion server with my 1.0 character and also have a new character at Cactuar, if you would like to team up 😛 I’m up to creating a new character in any server during this phase just to hangout since new characters and progress is going to get deleted when phase 4 starts anyway
lol thunder thigh lolis hahaha oh tera.
Incorrect. 😛 If I were easily seduced by lolis and shotas, I’d be already playing TERA. 😛
MMORPG of my choice would be The Old Republic, Dark Side, dual-wielding Sith. No shotas and lolis there. ^_^
ah I was playing the PC version so I guess our experiences are a little different?
but yea I eventually grew tired of Fates too since I noticed I was pretty much running with the same cloud of also bored people who had nothing else to do XD
I will also play more of the beta and since it’s a beta maybe I will experiment with a different class next time. a lot of people complained about conjurers on the forums and I’ve yet to see any actual improvements from SquareEnix about this. If they don’t make improvements there will be a serious lack of healers because who wants to grind a class that’s nerfed below everyone else? 😆 (Not me anyway)
I was so surprised when I saw you made a review of this! I’ve been playing the beta as well, and I recognise some things you mention and completely disagree on others xD
The thing I recognised the most was your targetting issue. I play on PS3 so automatic targetting is my only choice, and the game just LOVED to select some random monster in the background.
I agree on most of your good points, except that I grew tired of FATEs pretty fast. They happen all the time, and just repeat themselves over and over again. Most of the lower level ones weren’t that challenging either, and the horrible targetting made them a chore. A did run into a few interesting ones though.
I didn’t mind the solo time in the beginning. I’m an MMO noob, so all that solo time was a welcome way of taking my first few steps.
I never realized how hard the battle at the great tree must be when you are a conjurer… I played as a lancer and cleared it in one go at lvl 14. ….. And then I had other things to attend to so I had to log off before I could really explore the other cities.
Personally I’m going to continue to play the beta for a bit more to get a better taste of the rest of the gameplay.
I don’t care as much about “final fantasy” as I care about a decent MMO so that part doesn’t bother me
Also only you get seduced by lolis and shotas 😛
Oh noes! Do not be seduced the loli-race whatever they are called in this game!
I am still waiting for squeezenix to come up with a proper PC FF since VIII.
oh interesting I did see I had “access to the Japanese server” but I figured if it’s anything like Tartaros, JP players will 1. avoid you if your Japanese is even a little bit off and 2. if you don’t have the strongest weapons they will refuse to party with you. While in the long run it may be more “productive” but as far as MMO game play it’s really offputting for me lol so I stick to English servers.
Players are divided by servers and not by countries, there are server suggestions for JP and NA/EU players based on server location but you can join whatever server you want 😀
I’m an Asian player so all choices are equally bad to me anyway lmao.
oh nice thanks for the tips! I’m guessing since you got 1.0 you also get free items and get into the special beta too right? XD
55000 gil to get off the island??? wtf?? e__e
I think a lot of people complained about this and I hope squeare enix really reconsiders changing this mechanic.
I picked healer honestly cause I liked the outfit lol xDDDD but I also like to heal and my husband was a lancer so I wanted something to balance us I guess?
Maybe I will try arcanist instead though since Conjurer clearly needs some work done on it :s
I ignored the mage but the dragon thing killed me anyway (this was at like level 14/15) so I got better armor at 16 but never got a chance to try it out since the beta had ended. assuming the next phase 3 beta our characters remain in tact maybe I can try it out? though at this point I think I want to try other classes before the official release kicks in! also i didn’t even know about poison until I read a bunch of threads on this. I couldn’t even tell if/when I got poisoned lol.
btw I’m guessing because we’re in different countries we won’t be able to play together on the same server right? well as you said, I’m hoping Squeenix really takes feedback into consideration before the final release.
I’ve been playing FFXIV since 2010 and I have played the beta of thsi version since phase 2 as well, so I can give you some tips, I agree with you on ALL the things you complain about 😛
As for leaving your area, you CAN go walking from Uldah to Gridania and the other way around, however Limsa Lominsa is an island, so you cannot get out walking, but need to get the aiship pass OR get on the ferry that sails to Horizon (which is in the Thanalan area: that means near Uldah). Bad news is that, I don’t know why but , you have to pay 55000 gil to get on that boat… it STUPID, even more because in the previous version it was FREE. I’m hoping it’s only some stupid measure applied to the beta, otherwise its… quite… enraging -_-
Maybe I don’t find the cast time to be long because I am used to it, but I didn’t feel it was hard when I played with a new character in phase 2. Claiming an enemy a problem, however, and that’s why Aero was made instant cast. But yeah, I guess making a healer your first class can be frustrating cuz it’s not as “easy” as with other classes. If you want to progress quickly and don’t mind playing an attack class you may want to level up lancer, it’s quite easy to use and powerful.
Regarding the difficult quest, I myself failed it several times… because I was attacking the MAGE. Just ignore him and he won’t attack you, concentrate on the white mob and when you see you’ve been poisoned use an antidote and it will be fairly easy. Keep it up and eventually Thancred will show up to help you.
I also had trouble trying to figure out how to know if a monster was agressive or not, then I noticed the icon (something like arrows) is usually yellowish, but agressive ones have a red icon, so I guess that’s the key.
Also, as has been said, forum posts were restricted to that because there were people who were spamming too much and didn’t take the time to read if the same thread was already there or try to check the stuff they were talking about instead of “reporting” every single thing. It’s a shame that because of these measures people who weren’t spamming get involved as well.
Anyways I hope SE takes care of all the shitty stuff so we can have a really good MMORPG 😛
lol glad you like ;D I try to be brutally honest 😆
As far as LOTR – unfortunately I’m a vain ho so I prefer graphics/chars that are visually appealing to me (not just clothes but facial features) – Aka I just want some hot ikeman to look at the whole time 😆 Final Fantasy really fills that gap for me which is why I’m really hoping they take everyone’s suggestions into consideration and make it a better game. Honestly though I should really stay away from MMOs it really kills my otome gaming which I think is why most people read this blog XD
As a lurker of your blog I just love your unbiased and hilarious way of ripping on all the problems with a game, especially MMOs. XD Have you ever tried Lord of the Rings Online? The graphics aren’t as pretty as FFXIV but they are decent and let you choose between different races/classes. Plus they have have cosmetic armor (pretty clothes that are just for looks that go over your fugly “real” armor). You can play it for free so if you want to try out another MMO I’d recommend it. ;D
Oh that is a great thread, lots of information and neat ideas.Tbh I’m surprised to see they treated conjurer so badly. I was expecting cnj to have at least the same mp regen ability like thaumaturge, maybe a bit slower but to think there was none, and all then they go and give cnj all those expensive spells, cnj really got the short end of the stick D:
Upvoted the post, hope they’ll listen and fix them!
The fate system wasn’t my favorite point of the game. My favorite point is actually the character designs/races XD Unfortunately Guild Wars isn’t too appealing in that sense and I’m a vain ho so if something isn’t visually appealing to me in an MMO game I have trouble continuing it lol. I heard great things about GW but as you can see my MMO track record, I’m attracted to cute games with systems shittier that a horse stable ( ≖Д≖；)
If you like the Fate system, you really should try out Guild Wars 2. The Dynamic Events (essentially the same thing) are pretty much the meat of the game, and succeeding/failing one opens up different branches of the dynamic event tree. (Fail a fortress defense event, you get another event to take it back, succeed and shops open up and you get an event to escort a caravan to another fortress, etc). It’ll repeat itself in a while if you hang around the same places long enough, but there was a lot of fun in the meantime.
There’s not a lot to do once you reach endgame, but the journey to get there is pretty great. And it has a fantastic map and lots of quests, too. I play caster classes in that game and despite being kind of action-centric, I’ve had a great time.
Btw I did some digging through the Squeenix forums and found a thread listing a detailed list of Conjurer complaints. I can safely say I agree with pretty much all of them. The thread is here if you want to take a look. Glad that others see my point of view on this xD I guess I had a frustrating time simply because I picked a class which has a lot of issues! Well I would hope Squeenix would take this to heart and do some serious tweaking with this class.
Good news for you is Arcanist starts in Limsa which is the island your husband started in xD
Yes I saw that list too but not sure how to find it in the moutain posts now lol. Tbh though the difference in race stat is VERY small, like 2-4 points at most. When you get to level 50 that wouldn’t matter at all, so unless you’re a perfectionist it’s more fun to play with the race you like.
Lol is it? If you can’t find a guide for conjurer it seems like abandoning it is a good idea xD
I might have gotten the screen bug but I probably thought it was intentional? lol
I’m interested in the scholar class so I want to try Arcanist as well. Any idea what town ARcanists will start in? Same as Conjurers? Or maybe not who knows! Also I checked out the link you gave me and
that’s such a lie. I feel like the higher level I got the more I found myself constantly running out of MP 😆
by the way do you know if there’s a list on “which race is better for which class”. I heard something about how Lalafells are better for healers or something?? I couldn’t find anything like that listing anywhere though.
I found this guide on conjurer and found it to be pretty accurate based on my experience with that class:
http://finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Conjurer_%28Final_Fantasy_XIV%29
Except for raise, none of other skills look like it’d take that long to cast? I haven’t seen conjurer attacking yet but Protect is pretty fast to cast.
I played on PC and my friends played on both. I didn’t know about them but I got the bug you mentioned once too. I made it go away but really didn’t know how I did that, just clicking randomly. It’s really an annoying bug +__+ Do you get the bug when the screen sometimes goes darker during cutscene? I’ve seen people reporting it but they havent fixed it yet
There is no date on open beta yet but my guess is somewhere at the end of July. Arcanist looks pretty awesome, I plan to lvl up that class to become a Summoner 😀
Thaumaturge basically has 2 main damage spell: ice and fire. The trick is to spam fire (great damage, costs tons of mp) until you run out of mp and switch to ice (lesser damage, insanely fast recovering mp rate). Conjurer can’t use these 2 spells so it doesn’t really apply to them but I thought there maybe something simlar?
It sucks that you’re getting stuck there. I have a lot of leve quests saved up from last week but didn’t even get a chance to use them because I was running dungeons and doing main quest all weekends. There are too many quests to do and I’m saving many of them for open beta, don’t want to do every quest again xD
the heal conjurer skills are practically instant, I’m referring to the one attack skill conjurers have (Stone? or something) took forever to cast. same for the skill to cast a barrier around your and party members.
oh so I guess the levelquests would make a difference if we had more than 2 days of gameplay lol XD
and damn I guess we can’t swim across the ocean like in RO2! I kinda miss that feature lol. all I know is next time we make classes, we’ll be sure to make ones that start on the same island so at least the 2 of us can be together even if we’re separated from our warrior friends.
as far as bugs were you on the PC or PS3? We both played the PC version. THere was this 1 terrible bug where highlighting over an item displayed the popup for the description which wouldn’t go away. It would just stick there over everything and I had to spaz around other popups to make it go away. Pretty sure someone else in the forums brought it up as an annoying bug.
Thanks for the heads up about the open beta. Any idea when that starts? I was thinking of trying an Arcanist for a change of pace. I heard they can heal but they use their summoned pokemons 😆 I did some google searching and yea I saw a few people complaining that Conjurers lose MP very quickly. I saw the theaumartuge being mentioned also as someone who loses MP a lot. What did you find about them that made your recover MP faster I’m curious? I wonder if this trick would apply to conjurers as well.
I did see people asking for healers for the Tam Tara dungeon a lot but I never did make it that far so I never got a chance to really do any dungeons or try a dungeon finder lol.
About targeting, I remember hearing about an option that can choose from “nearest to farthest” and vice versa but I’m not sure. Will have to check again after we can play.
It’s probably a bug then, I tried a mage class and a warrior class, both have cooldown of 2.5s for the majority of their skills. I also did a quick search and none of conjurer’s skill takes even 5s to cast? The only exception is Raise to revive other player.
Yeah I forgot that they limited leve quests a lot, it’s supposed to fill up during the week, like if you can’t do any on Monday to Friday, they will add up for weekends. The numbers were really low though, I think many want to increase how many you can do too.
You can run between Gridania and Uldah, but Limsa (the island your husband started) required a ship to travel I think. I haven’t seen anyone tried to run from Limsa so I’m not so sure about it. Anyway this game doesn’t let you swim so… lol
I’m surprised that you got so many bugs O__o My friends and I got some hiccups here and there but it’s mostly smooth for us.
Yes you’ll automatically get in open beta after this phase is over. Your character from this phase will be wiped but character from open beta will be kept if you want to play at release.
In the next beta phase there will be one more class, supposedly a healing class so you may want to try it out. I agree that the mp cooldown sucks, it’s just too long.
Have you seen others complain about how mp consuming it is for conjurers? I didn’t pay much attention to them, but the few times I partied with conjuers they didn’t seem to have any trouble spamming healing spells. Maybe there is some tricks to make mp recover faster? I also had trouble with thaumartuge’s mp usage untill I randomly saw a guide on how to use them orz
I think the duty finders is supposed to be working this weekend, and even if it’s not you can still find party quite easily. People always shout to look for groups and conjurers are in high demand 😀
Hey thanks for the tips!
I’d rather someone post this stuff here where I can freely discuss it without being limited to the forum restrictions ^^;
As far as targetting, I played around with it but that doesn’t change the fact that it targets stuff far away. It lets you do filtering between NPCs or aggro or non aggro enemies but it doesn’t give you the option of “only target stuff within a certain radius.” And if it does, I must have missed it! 😆
Maybe cast time for the other mage class was better but for me it was absolutely terrible as a conjurer. Perhaps this is a class bug?
We did Leve quests as you mentioned but we could only really do 2 per day before we were told “oh gotta wait till tomorrow.” THis is ok for say during the week when I’m working, but on the weekend when I want to spend my time playing, this is a huge problem. And yea I guess not being able to get out of Gridania probably limited me which brings me back to the whole “you need to complete quests just to get out of places but the quests are too hard and you’re stuck doing nothing.”
Regarding going to other zones – my husband tried to get out of the island he was on (i think he made some warrior class) but he said that it wouldn’t let him out and told him there was an invisible wall? LIke he couldn’t swim across the ocean? So yea I’m not really sure if this only applies to like Gridania area and that huge island as far as leaving your area.
Yea this is a huge problem lol like how I couldn’t complete story quests other claim as “easy” but I’m a poor healer and my thing is HEALING not really doing damage =s
I think I heard about this after doing some searching after dying 3 times I decided to try to get to level 16 first. Sadly by the time I did it was already night time for me and then the beta ended so I didn’t really get a chance to try this method out xD
The monster aggro has to be bugged though. Ive seen the same guys with the white arrows randomly start attacking me when I attacked something near them. So yea I think this could be a game bug? Still I think it would be clear to make the entire monster’s name red or something more obvious to show that they are aggro.
The map bugs a lot of people have reported on in both the Japanese & English forums so I think I’m good as far as that. It’s just very inconvenient for me and it feels too static, I guess I want a more dynamic map?
By the way do you have any idea if we got into this beta, are we automatically able to play in the next beta? Do we keep our beta chars for all the betas or does it get wiped every time?
I guess my main complaint is, I play the game as is. I didn’t read every forum thread, I didn’t read every single guide, I play as the game is “teaching me” and this being my first time it just felt very frustrating? I realize that some stuff should be challenging but they should really balance it depending on the classes? The MP potion cool down is pretty much a death flag for me right then and there. I love the healer class and now I feel like in the next beta I should go be some class that isn’t a healer because unless I’m some attacker or tanker, I can’t complete basic story quests. Also I read that dungeon finder won’t even work until the next beta so I guess when you need a party of 4 you should be able to find one easily assuming it works?
Hi, long time lurker of your blog here. I’m also playing FF14 and was surprised to see you trying it out so I thought I should make some comments 🙂
– Forum beta: I think that restriction was placed because there was too many spammings, people kept making new threads without checking the old ones. It wasn’t like that in previous phases. They probably wanted to encourage members to upvote relevants issues instead of repeating them.
– Targeting: There are different ways of targeting in the settings menu, I haven’t tinkered with them yet because I haven’t got any problems but you may want to check them out.
– Cast time: I didn’t try to play Conjurer but when I played Thaumaturge which is another mage class, the spell cooldown time is always shorter than animation casting time. This means you can spam spell right after cooldown is over instead of waiting for the animation to finish. Cooldown is only 2.5s so it’s quite alright imo.
– Lack of quests: My progression was smooth so I didn’t pay attention to this, you may want to do leve quests for variety. There are some side quests in the Shroud areas too. But I think your problem with this is because you couldn’t get out of Gridania, there are a lot of quests available after you can get the airship pass.
– The Separation of Classes: I think this was done to make player get used to the zone and pay attention to storyline, I understand why some wouldn’t like it though. Also you can go to other zone actually, you’ll have to run through the wilderness though ^^;;;
About the quest to get airship pass, I heard many mixed review on that, some claimed it was impossible but for some it was really easy. My friend had to run from Uldah to Gridania to get Cure and Protect after so many failed attempts but I did it in 2 tries. This is probably something need adjusting.
Tips: If you care to try again, the common strategy for the battle of you vs demon & the mage is running away from the mage, fight the demon alone, keep yourself alive while sapping demon’s hp to 1/2 bar. At that point reinforcement came and it became easier. Maybe you already knew this but I guess sharing doesn’t hurt :p
– Monster Aggro: Non-aggro mobs have white arrow in front of their names, aggro mobs have red arrow in front of their names.
– Map: I didn’t have problems with the text, probably because I zoomed in quite a lot. Have you tried adjusting that? If you still have that problem it maybe a bug that needs reporting or something they need to improve on.
– Solo vs Party: Actually this game FORCES you to party to do quest. After you get the airship pass you’ll have to do 4 dungeons to progress the main storyline, all of which requires a party of exact 4 peoples. The way I see it, the solo part of the first 15 levels is for players to getting used to playing the games and develope a sense of play style. After that they have to learn to work with other people.
All in all there are some problems that need adjustings, including some you haven’t encountered yet but I think FF14 has potential to be a really fun game. There is still more of beta phase 3 next week and open beta after that. I hope it’ll turn out fine if players keep making and upvoting good suggestions 😀
P/s: Sorry for the wall of texts orz