I Love Sprouts

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community, ffxiv, ffxiv community, final fantasy, final fantasy xiv, MMO, mmorpg, new arrival, new player, new players, sprout, welcome to eorzea, xiv, xiv community

Once again I’m going to talk about Final Fantasy XIV. And once again I’m going to stand on the shoulders of giants here — specifically, Eliot Lefebvre’s newest Wisdom of Nym column where he offers some advice to new players and veterans alike. That said, this topic was also on my mind pretty recently, both in terms of Discord chatting, Twitter scrolling, and the overall conversation topic of the FFXIV community:

Sprouts.

Finding Fun Despite the Doldrums

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actiblizz, activision-blizzard, blizzard, community, ffxiv, final fantasy, final fantasy xiv, mmo community, mmorpg community, square enix, warcraft, world of warcraft, WoW

Honestly, I was kind of hoping to avoid any topic related to the hellscape that is Activision-Blizzard’s treatment of its employees. Mostly because far smarter and better people have written about the matter than I have and I don’t have anything of worth to really say on the subject without just standing on the shoulders of those giants. However, a recent event today spurred this post. Specifically, a tweet from someone I follow which read that, despite their best efforts, they couldn’t really get invested into Final Fantasy XIV and decided to return to WoW.

This is in spite of some best efforts and some found delight by this person, I should point out. I’ll not go into detail but this player really did try to dig in. Of course, this attempt was spurred on by the aforementioned issues, and I suspect that this particular WoW player wrestled mightily with their long-standing love of the game and the unveiled misery many of its developers have had to suffer through — something that I’ve written about before on this blog. And despite my feelings about Blizzard and its games, I get it.

Latent Friendship is Magic

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community, ffxiv, ffxiv community, final fantasy, final fantasy 14, final fantasy xiv, friendship, MMO, mmo community, mmorpg, roleplay, roleplayer, roleplaying, xiv

Recently I’ve gotten back into Final Fantasy XIV a lot more than I had previously. This wasn’t kicked off by recent awful events, by the way, and it wasn’t necessarily spurred on by the larger Endwalker expansion reveals (though that did have a small part to play in things). Mostly, my return was fueled by friends. Friends that I sometimes play with and people that I’m not necessarily friends with.

Allow me to explain

Stormblood Squee Week: Hopes for the Stormblood MSQ

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ffxiv, final fantasy, final fantasy xiv, main scenario quest, MMO, msq, patch 3.5, patch 4.0, quest, stormblood squee week, story, storyline

SPOILER WARNING: This post will absolutely be talking about plot points from questlines that are recent as of this writing, February 23rd. Ye be warned!

For this entry, I decided to gush over, cross my fingers for, and otherwise wiggle excitedly about the upcoming story for the Main Scenario Quest of the Stormblood expansion. While MMO narratives are pretty throwaway on many occasions, Final Fantasy XIV is one of the few games that has a fun story. Not a particularly deep one, and sometimes a disappointing one, but a fun story nonetheless.

Excluding Minfilia. She’s a mistake.

Stormblood Squee Week: My Personal Combat Refresh

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abilities, classes, combat, expansion, ffxiv, final fantasy, final fantasy xiv, jobs, MMO, mmo combat, mmorpg, skills, stormblood, stormblood squee week

With the arrival of Stormblood to Final Fantasy XIV, we’re also going to be seeing a “combat refresh” – a rebalancing of skills for every class in the game, with apparent special attention being paid to the existing tank and healer classes.

According to the information I’ve seen, the team is shooting for classes to have a similar number of skills available to them even though we’re seeing a level cap raise from 60 to 70. This is meant to ease the complexity of certain jobs while also removing useless skills. And boy howdy, are there some useless skills.

I’m lookin’ at you, Chevy Noir.

So for this entry, I’d like to talk about what I’d like to see from this new combat refresh and what skills I’d like to see edited or culled entirely.

Stormblood Squee Week: A Recap of Bold, Stupid Predictions for Final Fantasy XIV

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expansion, ffxiv, final fantasy, final fantasy xiv, final fantasy xiv stormblood, MMO, mmorpg, stormblood, stormblood squee week, xiv

SPOILER ALERT: The following post is going to touch on topics associated with the MSQ of patch 3.5, which is recent as of this post’s creation, Feb 19th. If you’ve not finished that content, you might not want to read on.

So back in June of last year, I made a blog post offering up my thoughts on what would be coming for the next expansion of Final Fantasy XIV. We now stand near the end of the final Fanfest, and I thought it’d be fun to run back to that post and see where I went horribly wrong while salvaging the thoughts that were nearly close to the mark.

Like a Lalafell Archer, my aim is a bit short.