Final Fantasy XIV - Goodbye Ishgard, Hello Stormblood - MMORPG.com

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Final Fantasy XIV - Goodbye Ishgard, Hello Stormblood - MMORPG.com

So, farewell then, Ishgard, and goodbye Heavensward. It’s been fun. I’ve played a hell of a lot of MMORPGs in my time, and this expansion has been one of the best.

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kanechart

Great write up. What class is everyone playing? They enjoying their class changes?

angerbeaver

Heavensward had cap 60 right? What is Bloodstorm cap at?

Hengist

angerbeaver said:

Heavensward had cap 60 right? What is Bloodstorm cap at?

70

angerbeaver

Came back after 4 years off. I just got my ninja to 45 and my main Bard/White Mage still at 50. I have SO MUCH to do. Love it

Dragnelus

Raubahn, why wont you accept me?!! Lemme finish my mainstory quest pls!!! 

Sinaku

kanechart said:

Great write up. What class is everyone playing? They enjoying their class changes?

Bard to main to 70, then going to check our SAM and RDM before leveling my AST and DRK to 70 as well. Quite enjoying bard so far. Feels different, and familiar.

Stevon

Unless they've improved the combat to make it more dynamic (and less boring) I have no interest. The game was good but Heavensward really turned me off with the progression design and the complete lack of housing availability (and fooling people as to what the "apartments" were pretty much turned me off to SEs games.

LeGrosGamer

Stopped playing at the end of HW last year, too bad this ain't a stand alone single player FF because it would of been the BEST. But the constant dungeon rinse / repeat to level up is agonizing. Unless they changed FATE's exp, I remember farming FATE's with a crap load of other people in those mines. Dungeon bosses where you need to "know" the fight is so boring after a while. New classes? Doesn't the game have enough classes? I'm guessing half the classes are useless to play now and everyone will be playing the same OP classes? Crafting ... oh man if there's one RNG system that will bring your blood to a boil, FF14 will be that game. 98% quality fail to HQ, 14% quality HQ success ... rage quit'd so hard. Those that are enjoying it, that's great, but I won't be trying this one out. As of May 2017 FF14 barely has 500K active users worldwide, out of the 10mil+ worldwide customers who purchased the game, so that's a pretty huge drop off after a 3 year release. I'm guessing those that left the game thought like me, too much is often "not enough", in the sense that if you keep bombarding a million new content along side being pretty technical about everything, you'll drive people away, and in this case, drive them away in MASSES. Especially the EU servers that are doing piss poor and still dipping.

Hengist

drivendawn said:

Yes they did change fates and many other things as well. The game has sold 6mil + world wide not 10. I would like to see your source for that 500k figure as well. 

I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I suspect the answer came from FFXIV Census: https://ffxivcensus.com/

zanfire

Kind of surprised the headline said " I’ve played a hell of a lot of MMORPGs in my time, and this expansion has been one of the best." From the few people i know who still play this expansion was mostly a negative compared to ARR (the story was comparable) and as someone who was looking for HW to really get me back in...it got me to drop pretty quickly.

JeroKane

zanfire said:

Kind of surprised the headline said " I’ve played a hell of a lot of MMORPGs in my time, and this expansion has been one of the best." From the few people i know who still play this expansion was mostly a negative compared to ARR (the story was comparable) and as someone who was looking for HW to really get me back in...it got me to drop pretty quickly.

Heavensward is hands down one of the best expacs I have played in a long long time!

The story was amazing! The music scores one of the best if not the best of any game! I went from 47 to 60 in past 4 or so weeks and had a blast!
I am actually gonna miss Heavensward and will have to see how Stormblood is going to pan out. It will be hard for SE to surpass the excellence of Heavensward.

Kothoses

Although I enjoyed Heavansward and thought its story, bosses and dungeons were great, there were things I did not appreciate about it.

The drop down to 2 dungeons rather than 3, meant the roulettes felt stale, only having 2 dungeons in expert meant it got old fast and towards the end I spent more time as a transient player than I ever did in ARR.

The Bard changes, I had the foresight to level a few other classes before HW and I am glad I did.

The Hidelbrand stories, I loved those in ARR but in HW they were just not of the same standard.

While the HW main story was amazing and the way they handled Alexander was far better than BCOB I felt overall that in a lot of ways outside the main story HW was treading water, but that could be because of the amount of content I skipped (Diadem, Vermillion, Grand company platoons)

Overall though, HW remains my favourite expansion of any MMO, and I was there for TBC and LK in wow, Revan in swtor and many others.

FFXIV has found its place, I just hope they shake up the content delivery a bit and put a bit more experimental stuff that actually grabs me, because my worry with SB is their patch system of 2 dungeons, 1 primal and a raid of some sort will become too familiar.

All of that being said, looking back since FFXIV came out, as a player with 1200 days sub time and many optional purchases and 8 retainers I still feel I got more than good value for my money and I will continue to give this game my cash, even when I dont play it because I want to see it continue to grow.

FFXIV is for me and has been since 2.2 the benchmark of a themepark mmo and I hope with SB They push the boat out even more.

zanfire

Kothoses said:

FFXIV has found its place, I just hope they shake up the content delivery a bit and put a bit more experimental stuff that actually grabs me, because my worry with SB is their patch system of 2 dungeons, 1 primal and a raid of some sort will become too familiar.

This was the biggest killer for me personally. I guess i was spoiled with FFXI where every expansion came out with different endgame events while keeping most of the old ones relevant (which is why it felt like it had so much to do). I saw that pattern midway through ARR and was hoping HW would change it up, but they just churned out basically less of the same thing: linear 1-2-3 dungeons, a small arena Primal and a rotation of tower/coil (in layout). They do try stuff in between but they either end up just plain bad or give such worthless drops that they are abandoned pretty quick.

They already said that the pattern was going to be the main focus again with the excuse that people expect it. After i heard that my desire to try SB sank to the ground.

tirwen

Well, so far it's been a mess from what I've seen. I was able to get in initially when servers came up and did a small amount of wandering before work. Since I've gotten home, I've managed to accomplish next to nothing because of random disconnects followed by queues of 2 & 3 k. The have a couple (set) instances of what they call field areas (The Peaks for example) but your party doesn't stay together. You have to cross a zone line on foot to be able to choose an instance. My FC has had a total of 1 person get past the Raubahn instance thanks to the congestion. Oh, and now I got a lobby server error.

JeffSpicoli

Great write up MMORPG, This website has been bouncing back lately with good articles. Thx for posting where to find the intial story quest for stormblood.

JeffSpicoli

tirwen said:

Well, so far it's been a mess from what I've seen. I was able to get in initially when servers came up and did a small amount of wandering before work. Since I've gotten home, I've managed to accomplish next to nothing because of random disconnects followed by queues of 2 & 3 k. The have a couple (set) instances of what they call field areas (The Peaks for example) but your party doesn't stay together. You have to cross a zone line on foot to be able to choose an instance. My FC has had a total of 1 person get past the Raubahn instance thanks to the congestion. Oh, and now I got a lobby server error.

Im not even going to bother tonight, Ill probably try to hop on for a few hours tommorow and if its a mess wait till Sunday, Im in no rush i love taking my time leveling in FFARR

Senden

Right now it's more like goodbye Ishgard, hello Stormblood. Oh Hey Raubahn, hello Raubahn, howdy Raubahn, ahoy hoy Raubahn, Bonjour Raubahn, Konnichiwa Raubahn..

MrMelGibson

I cant wait to see the new expansion. I'll probably give it a go at the beginning of August or September. Atm playing Morrowwind and also looking forward to trying Secret World Legends. In between I'm trying to finish Fallout 4 lol. So no time atm for SB.

Dragnelus

kanechart said:

Great write up. What class is everyone playing? They enjoying their class changes?

AST main, tried samurai for funs wanted red mage or ninja. But must say im in love with the samurai!

MaxBacon

After playing GW2 for years hardly get myself to pay the sub of FF to keep playing, not buying stormblood attm, RIP

tirwen

kanechart said:

Great write up. What class is everyone playing? They enjoying their class changes?

Class changes have mostly been good, especially given what I've heard from others. Only negative I've heard is two of the warrior skills became a single skill with which one up being dependent on your stance. Bards and machinists are justifiably ecstatic, and people seem to be really liking the new classes. Now if only you could get past several MSQ roadblocks... Well, and being able to stay connected. Yes, the instances (including dungeons) can be flaky and kick you out where you wind up back in a queue that can be in excess of 4000. The first primal fight can disconnect you and lock you out of your character until someone is able to actually fix it (response was it could take 'several days' to get the characters back).

Solar_Prophet

When they stop linking a sizable chunk of game content to a hopelessly broken and poorly designed housing system, maybe I'll consider coming back. Of course, that means I'll have to slog through over a year's worth of story content, since I never even finished the story the expack shipped with.

I took a break before Heavensward, and returning to the game to prepare for it was one of the most unfriendly and confusing experiences I've ever had in any game as a returning player. I did return for a bit to participate in that event which was themed around super sentai / power rangers, and tried to do some story content, but couldn't even find out where I was supposed to go because the quest log is utterly useless. Having a lot of stuff to do is nice, but the presentation is absolutely horrible and unintuitive.

angerbeaver

Solar_Prophet said:

....but couldn't even find out where I was supposed to go because the quest log is utterly useless. Having a lot of stuff to do is nice, but the presentation is absolutely horrible and unintuitive.

I think you just need to look on the top left of your screen and it tells you the quest for the Main Story that you're on now. Just click it and read.

Kyleran

I think they need to try harder on these names. Ishgard.....Isengard? Stormblood...Stormwind? (or Bloodstorm?) Heavensward....Heaven Sword? (or Heavenly Sword?)

Should be able to better than just munge a few letters of existing names.  

Maybe it's a translation thing?

JudgeUK

Heavensward - an excellent expansion.
Who could forget that cutscene moment after the Vault, and many others throughout the main story.

Think they've created a few bumps in the road with the new class changes, but onward we go.