Terraheart's Profile
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I had a good long playtime yesterday, first one ever, lol. The severs are much more stable but far from being perfect. On an ATI HD 4850 I was getting pretty good frame rates and minmal lag on medium settings. Atleast the login's almost sorted. Right, what's the purpose of this post? Well, I'll give a summary of the game so far and my personal points on topics like tanking to playing mages. It will probably end up as a very, very long post as I have a really bad habit of waffling when I type <.<. As such, I will split the post into sections for your reading convenience and you can just skip sections you don't feel like reading.
The Client
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Well its about 3.5GB in size at the moment (obvious decompresses out into a larger file on you HDD). You click on the client and then the dreaded updater patch comes up, once the game's upto date you get a login screen where you put your details. Then once you click ok the game lauches and you get a SE logo then a nice white screen with the FFXIV logo in the background (the one we've all seen) with 2 options, start and quit. Click start and hey you're away. At the moment there's no long intro's a la WAR or what have you.
Character Creation
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There are currently 3 slots in beta to make characters, just select one empty slot and we're away. I'm not going into detail about detail character creation as there are numerous vids on the web that I'm sure we've all seen. Needless to say, there are only a limited amount of choices in beta with regards to things like hair styles but I like it at the moment. You get to choose your server here as well. Also, the name you choose only has to be unique when combining the 2 names i.e. you could have two Tonkas: One Tonka Nutella and one Tonka Lalafail - and I know Tonka, there's only one 'real' Tonka.
In the Beginning
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The tutorials are pretty crap, monotonous and far from being streamlined. There's a key you need to press to swicth between active and passive mode and if you're not in active mode, you can't do any fighting. I'm not going to put any spoilers in here but in a nutshell, you get off the ship are told about different stuff and get to do a few 'tutorial' guild leves. All pretty straight forward. Limsa Lominasa is HUGE, it'll take 3-4mins rl running to get from one end to the other. Its also on 2 floors (map wise) so can be difficult to locate things at first.
++Classes++
Apologies in advance, I haven't played lancer, marauder or thaumaturge yet.
Gladiator
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My main class and I love it. You start the game with a sword only but can pick up your first shield for 1k in thundersticks place at rank 5. Initially when you start it's like any game. With gladiator you get access to two moves (light stab and light slash, the latter taking slightly more of the action gauge (AG)). All classes in general get 2 melee moves at level except mage classes which get one. I can't remember the exact levels at which you gain moves but its something like:
Level 2 = Red Lotus Blade - craptastic move... average dd, uses 10mp!, long cast time and just not worth my time ;p
Level 4 = Rampart - inc def and mag def
Level 6 = Circle Slash - aoe attack. At this time of the game, aoe moves simply hit mobs which you are engaged to/ fighting, they do not hit strays, thank goodness as goats have happen to walk past me on numerous occasions <.<.
Level 8 = Phalanx - enmity builder + decent dd after blocking. Short AG timer.
Level 10 = Provoke - enmity builder + temporary instant aggro move
You also get guard at level 5 i.e. as soon as you get a shield.
After you get a few more moves, and especially when you get a shield, you can start to see this class really flourish. Rampart is nice but has a 5min cd and lasts for only a min. When you get your shield at rank 5 the fun begins. First off, you can mitigate between 50-100% of the damage of the mob when you get GUARD which is freakin awesome.
The way guard works is quite unique and you may have been watching the videos and seeing the glad fight a mob, lose hate and then run after and fight them but still keep guard up - WHEN THEY DON'T have the mobs attention. I was like wtf, drop your guard and spam attack moves. My oh my was I wrong. Basically, you run into a fight, hit a mob then hit guard. As soon as guard comes up, it will STAY UP even if you use another attack like light stab. Its not like Aion where once you press an attack move whilst you were guarding your guard comes down. In FF XIV, your guard STAYS UP even when you attack. As such, you can do multiple attacks behind the safety of your shield. Guard only stays up for approx 7 seconds (I count lol) and then it says something like, your shield arm failed. It's at this time you hit the guard button again to put your shield back up (it costs nothing to use). So its kinda like utsusemi, you gotta keep an eye on the guard function and as soon as its about to go down be ready to click the button again.
Phalanx is nice because it inc enmity AND has a very short cast section on the gauge. Only down is you need block to execute.
Provoke - rank 10. Tanking reallystarts when you get this bad boy
.Typical fights are like this for me, I run in lgiht stab then put guard up and I keep it up the whole fight -whilst guard is up every new time I count to 5. Meanwhile, I alternate between light stab and slash, wait for my tp to build up and use tp moves esp phalanx. As soon as 5 is up I make damn sure there is enough in my AG to cast guard again as I know its about to fail, if I have surpluss then I fire in another attack before it fails. As soon as guard goes down, I recast. Don't worry about hitting guard too early, it just says your shield arm is already up, it doesn't waste any of your ap guage and guard has a 0cd timer anyways. And no, repressing guard when its already up DOES NOT cause you to bring your shield arm down.
**My Gladiator**
As I wanted to test out other moves, I've grabbed a few healing spells from other classes, namely second wind from PUG (rank 6 move) and Cure from Conj (Rank 4 move).
Second wind is a nice move which need 250 to and heals me for around 55hp (my max hp is 250 ish). Its on a 60 sec CD but its a very good move none the less. On my PUG it heals for around 80.
Cure is a nice 12mp costing spell that's healing amount seems to depend on INT. I tried healing my self with 15int and got healed for 25hp, pumped 6 int points in and now I can heal myself for 56hp
. The only thing broke about this is healing in general is very difficult without macros as its very hard to target people once people are engaged, see conj section below for more info.That being said, my Rank 10 Glad rolls with 2 healing spells and is a beast to take down. I can solo DC-Toughs, but its hard. I can see myself stealing lots of hp and def inc moves like aspir and so forth. I also see myself raising int as one of my stats. At the moment I've being doing this: VIT > STR > DEX
Archer
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My archer is still quite low but a few things. Like I said before, you get 2 base bow moves (Light shot and close shot, the latter can cause bind). The first thing is the range, oh my, your max shooting range is like 15 feet -.-. Also, this is the key message for all you archers there, its JUST LIKE FF XI in terms of arrow management. You need lots of gil/ enthusiastic crafter as you will need LOTS of arrows. See definition of replenish below.
Rank 1: Replenish - this move costs like 10mp, but it DOES NOT give you arrows. The way it works is, you can only have 99 arrows in your quiver at this point, but I always stock like another 500 in my inv. As we know, you can not change gear during battles. So if you run out of arrows during battle, you just use replenish and it MOVES arrows from your inv into your quiver but only if you have spare arrows. This move, though not as good as some people thought is essential, as without arrows, you do 1dmg on ANY mob.
Rank 2: Puncture - decent damage and good acc ws
I'm only rank 3 as arrows got expensive but now have 500 arrows so will level soon.
On the whole, pretty fun job, when soloing its just shoot and point. But this class can easily be biggest melee dd, why? because you can spam arrows (to an extent). I can fire 5ish arrows off one full gauge in about 5 secs. And I can see at the move list barrage is back <3.
Pugilist
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A beast of a dd. Not much spike damage but consistent DoT and fast hitters, good hp pool, awesome healing spell (second wind) and nice ws. Very fun class to play and for any noobies, this is the beginners solo class. Hard to kill, good soloer and good dd. They could even top dd charts if they get access to haste gear (like MNK's did in FF XI). And again, I hear Asuran Fists is making a come back <3.
Rank 1: Light Punch + Heavy Punch = basic moves. I think heavy punch also has something else on it.
Rank 2: Concussive Blow: Decent ws, stacks up to 3 times and causes dec acc.
Rank 4: Haymaker = post evade counter (you have to press button, its not a passive sorry), I hate it as its hard to tell when you evade an attack.
Rank 6: Second Wind = nice hp healing (prolly around 40% hp heal) move that has a 1min cd and costs only 250 tp.
Summary: Fun job, fast dd's and very good survivability.
Conjurer
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Actually quite fun to play but difficult to solo. At level 1 you get access to 5 spells but only have enough action points (AP) to equip 2 of them - don't pick fire, earth mobs are resistant to them in Limsa, also don't pick thunder lol (I went with wind + water). MP management is a apin and you'll find yourself frequently running back to aertherytes. That being said, the rank 1 melee (which has a decent atk rng) does ok damage *then again I pumped lots into str as I'm a gald so who knows).
Rank 1: Spirit Attack = basic 0mp melee with decent rng.
Rank 1 Spells: Fire I, Water I, Stone I, Blizzard I, Thunder I
Rank 4: Cure I
I've talked about conjurer's in the conjurer thread so go there for more info. In a nutshell, your typical mage class. MP management needs to be sorted but I quite liked pew pewing the mobs from a far.
Botanist + Miner
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These 2 classes work (game mechanics wise) in virtually the same way. You get a primary tool and a secondary tool. The seconday tool is for going to sparkly (that;'s what they look like!) spots, in mining they're caves and in botany there' bushes for gathering. Using your secondary tool you simply click and gather. When you gather using your primary tool, its like a mini-game.
Example (its easier with one!)
If you wanted to log somewhere as a botanist. You find a tree that's loggable (I know that's not a word) then run up to it, do not go to active mode otherwise al you can do is throw stones at the tree <.<. Open up the menu then a new interaction is there called logging. Press it then the mingame satrts. There are 2 parts. The first is easy, you get a vertical slider (horizontal in mining I thnik) where you simply move it and press ok - the slider is suppose to represent what angle you wish to log/ mine at but I just pick it randomly for now, by default it starts in the middle. The second part is where the minigame starts, you have to find the loot from your spot as soon as possible. You get 1-4 swings (I'll explain everything in a sec) to get your loot.
Now in botany, imagin an arc with an arrow swing up and down on it (bit like a speedometer in a car, but in ff xiv the arc is on its side). The arrow goes up and down pretty fast and you have to click the arrow when to stop - I believe this arrow represents how hard you are striking and thus harder strikes = less goes as your target site has its own hp. I always click right at the start - thus minimising dmg and the loot may well be near the surface. The game then gives you instruction to say if you are near or far from the right site. If you're near you just click back (timing is important) to that same/ similar spot and hope for the best. If you take too many swings to hit the spot, you simply get nothing and have another go. This whole process repats its self for around 5 times per logging site.
Mining works in almost the same way but rather having an arc, it has a circle with a smaller circle inside it exp-anding its diameter up and down.
Rank 1 = Stone throw - Beware's OP@D move <.<. lol. That's sarcasm if you guys didn;t pick it up ;p
Rank 2 (could be 1)= Move that allows you to look for nearby deposits to gather. Tells you if a) there are any and b) roughly how close they are. 10sec cd. Good move, only problem is it will tell you about sites you've already gathered from/ are unable to gather from again.
Rank 4: Triangulate = Favourite gathering move. A move that tells you about multiple possible gathering locations and if the site is far away inc your movement speed for like 15 secs! On 1 min cd.
So in summary, much funner to play than I thought. There are 2 kinds of gathers possible, the minigame one is for things like ores, logs etc, the ones from samller sites using your secondary tool is for other stuff like seeds etc.
Synthesis
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Getting tired so will fill this in later. Needless to say, changed considerably from ff xi. Most bannoying thing is getting recipes!
Summary
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The game looks great so far, loving every min of beta. All the classes are cool and fun to play. There are a few pointers though:
1. Gil isn't that easy to come by except from leves - and its still not that great. The economy will heavily be dependent on crafters.
2. When armour goes to 0 (as its worn out) your def is really crap, and for your weapons (when they fall to 0%), dmg is reduced by 50%.
3. Crafting is tricky at the moment as you're left to your own devices for the most of it.
4. Crystals (for synthesis e.g. fire, wind etc) are easy to come by - both from fights and gathering
5. Healing characters at the moment is very difficult as you have to target people individually and the AoE range of cure spells is very low. Also self curing while engaging an enemy is hard
6. MP management very hard at low levels
7. FF XIV plays quite well with a game pad (I'm using an x-box 360 one).
8. Virtually any move (including weapon skills, but obviously some can't e.g. shield moves) can be mixed and match and the efficacy of that move can be improved if you improve your stats for it. The allocation of these moves does not depend on rank so I can put cure (rank 4 move) on my rank 1 THM... BUT it says in description that the efficacy of the move is best at rank 4 or above.
9. The limit to prevent OP charcaters is doing what BLU did in FF XI where you have a finitie number of points to spend to buy moves.
10. You can only undo your last 2 levels of stat allocation in the beta.
11. Physical rank is very easy to level as virtually everything levels it, thus you can be a max crafter and have max phys level without having to fight.
12 FF XIV world is HUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE
That's all for now guys!
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