Ever since the realm was reborn in 2.0, Final Fantasy XIV has taken steps to make things less frustrating for its playerbase. Whether the changes were a response to angry players or positive fan feedback, XIV changes itself up to prevent players from tearing their hair out any more than they have to.
General
- Failing a solo Duty gives you the option of a choice of difficulty settings if you decide to try again without logging out. The difficulty setting you choose may give you a buff which increases your maximum HP, healing potency, and attack power for the quest. There's "Easy" for a small buff, "Very Easy" for a large buff, and "Normal" for no buff (in case you want to retry without taking the help). But regardless of which difficulty you choose to complete the Duty on, there's no penalty or restrictions applied to the quest; you always get the same rewards and see all of the same content as if you cleared it in one try.
- After an enemy is defeated, there's a grace period of about half a second where your attacks will still land and give any appropriate buffs for landing the hits, even though your target is down. That way, you're free to chain together combos without needing to worry about whether the hit will count or not. This grace period also applies to enemy players in all of the game's Player Versus Player modes.
- Holding down the CTRL key when looking at your map will make any aetherytes come to the front so they're much easier to click on. Considering how busy some maps can get with quest markers, this is very helpful.
- A buff effect kicks in for storyline raids requiring a party of eight players, and the effects will stack every time the party wipes out so that people aren't tempted to Rage Quit. The buff can stack up to five times, increasing all of the party's parameters by ten percent on each stack, up to a maximum of fifty percent. While there's no option to refuse this buff (unlike the solo duties, although it is possible to remove the buff for yourself), it prevents players from getting stuck in the story's progression if they got a bad party composition or they need to learn the mechanics through trial and error.
- It's possible to play a duty "unsynced", which is where you ignore the level lock for job levels and item levels. The Damager, Healer, Tank requirements for a party are also ignored, letting you go in with as few players as you want in any jobs, including the ability to run a dungeon all by yourself. After the stat squish in Shadowbringers, doing lower level content unsynced also increases your maximum HP and damage by up to 300% depending on your level difference to the duty, to simulate the pre-squish difference in power level. This is useful if you and/or your friends need to complete a dungeon you've completed before in order to finish a quest without waiting for other people, or even if you just want a collectible that drops from an older high difficulty duty. However, you don't earn any experience points or spirit-bonding with your items in an unsynced dungeon in order to prevent Peninsula of Power Leveling.
- If your character is at level 10 or lower, repairing your gear is free, which is perfect for new players who probably don't have much money to begin with.
- If you are KO'd in a duty and leave said duty in that state, you'll automatically be revived to full health. Originally, this was not the case.
- During particularly busy times where server queues happen, a player can reclaim their spot in the queue regardless of its length if they end up disconnected from the server for whatever reason. However, the window to do this is only about five minutes.
- If turning in a quest would hit the cap for some kind of rare currency (such as tomestones or Grand Company seals), the game will warn you that you won't get the full benefit of turning in the quest, then ask if you sure that want to turn the quest in anyway.
- If you accidentally sold an item to an NPC vendor, you can buy it right back at the same price you sold it for as long as you didn't leave the area or log off. This also extends to your retainers, whom you can also use to sell your unwanted items — the game makes you confirm that you don't want to buy the items back before letting your retainer leave, and only after you confirm this are the items sold and gone for good.
- Some enemies are naturally aggressive, marked with a yellow and red icon, which will make them attack you as soon as you cross their line of sight. However, if you're at least ten levels higher than the enemy in question, they won't attack you as a form of Encounter Repellant. This is so you don't have to waste time fighting a Curb-Stomp Battle that would net you no rewards, as enemies outright stop giving you XP past a certain threshold of level difference.
- Ordinarily, ending an encounter with any enemy in the overworld has to be done by running away. This lasts until the enemy gets far enough away from its spawn point and/or the distance between you and the enemy gets so extreme that they stop chasing you. However, getting into a "fight" with a Striking Dummy can be manually ended at any time by selecting the Reset Enmity option in a sub-menu. It's the only 'enemy' that such an option appears for, as the striking dummy can't die (it has a life bar, but instantly revives after reaching 0 health).
- Internet connections aren't always stable. If a player is in a dungeon with a party and they get disconnected, they can jump back in without any progression lost, assuming that the party hasn't kicked you out or left the dungeon yet.
- If you use a potion or eat food in the middle of combat, the animations of rummaging in your pack and eating the meal respectively will be replaced with a much quicker gesture.
- Many abilities have a cast time during which you cannot move without causing the ability to stop casting. However, you can start moving with around half a second left on the cast timer, and it will still go off. Doing this intentionally is known as "slide casting" by the community.
- A host of features are made for dungeons groups that are completed with the Duty Finder.
- The game offers bonus XP and tomestones upon clearing a Duty if it's completed quickly with someone that's playing that dungeon for the first time. This bonus applies to the entire group, not just the newbie, and the game makes it clear before the dungeon starts that there's a newbie in the party with on-screen text. This incentivizes veterans to not only keep that newbie, but to also have them aid the new player in understanding the encounters and mechanics in that dungeon.
- Kicking someone from a Duty out of spite isn't just bad manners, it's punishable via suspension or ban according to the game's Terms of Service. Such activity is a known problem in some other MMOs where simple screw-ups results in being instakicked before a player can even blink. In short, you need to have a really good reason for kicking someone out of your group, as you could potentially be locked out of your account if you just randomly kick people for no reason at all.
- Related to the above, in order to avoid vote-kicking someone for no good reason, the vote kick is disabled for the first few minutes of joining a new duty as well as during loot distribution. This also served to close a loophole players used: Get a duty they didn't like, ask to be vote dismissed, then be able to queue right back in without getting the "Abandonment" penalty.
- After the players get the attention of a boss enemy in dungeons and raids (or just about any enemy in an Alliance Raid), the room will be sealed off fifteen seconds later, and anyone who dies has to either wait to be revived by another player or respawn at the beginning of the dungeon so they can't just come back into the fray. However, if a player doesn't make it to the enemy's room in time before it's sealed off, they're allowed to just instantly teleport into the room from wherever they are. Players who teleport into battle this way are also given a few seconds of invincibility so they can get their bearings and read the battlefield without being damaged by an attack that they couldn't possibly have seen coming.
- Some raid bosses send the players to new areas, such as the first boss of the Deltascape raids having a mechanic where every player is sent their own room where they have to fight an enemy one-on-one before they're allowed to go back and continue the fight. Similar to teleporting into a boss room in dungeons, you'll be invincible for a few seconds after switching between rooms so you can't be caught off-guard.
- Many encounters feature enemies that do not move or turn, which can become a problem for melee jobs (which all have Back Stab-esque abilities known as 'positionals'). In order to keep melee jobs from missing out on the bonuses for correctly executing a positional, any Stationary Enemy is not considered to have a flank or rear at all, and any positional used on them will always gain the bonus. Enemies for whom this applies even have an altered targeting ring that's a full closed circle, allowing them to be easily identified.
- After being revived from KO by an ally's resurrection spell, you're given a "Transcendence" buff which makes you invincible for five seconds or when you use an ability (whichever comes first) to avoid being cheap-shotted while you're getting your bearings. This effect wasn't visible to players until Patch 5.3 turned it into a Status Buff.
- Some trials or raids with a second phase will have a checkpoint after clearing the transition phase, to avoid having to re-clear the entire fight from the beginning if the party wipes. If the trial or raid has two distinct bosses, the first one is called the "door boss" by the community.
- Furniture placement in housing can get very cramped and leave little room to move. If you keep running into a piece of furniture, you will eventually be able to move through it so that you can get out if you're stuck. It's also possible to teleport to the entrance of the housing from the menu.
- Gear obtained from seasonal or special events can either be stored in an armoire (which has unlimited space), or can be bought back through the calamity salvagers found in each city (which give you back things you only ever get once if you got rid of them, such as the armor sets from completing a job quest storyline). Patch 6.5 also made any items you buy from the Online Store capable of being stored in the armoire.
- If your Free Company has a house in a district you do not currently have access to, you'll still be allowed to teleport to the ward where your company house is located. For instance, you can teleport to your Free Company's housing ward in Ishgard even if your character hasn't reached Heavensward yet.
- The Armory Bonus system makes leveling your alternate classes a lot easier. Whenever you play as a class that isn't your highest-leveled one, you receive double the experience for everything, effectively halving the time needed to level other classes.
- A very early-game quest emphasizes the necessity of wearing level-appropriate attire to survive by requiring you to present yourself to an NPC while wearing a hat, shirt, pants, gloves and shoes that each have an item level of at least 5. Owing to how difficult it can be for first-time players to get the necessary clothing to pass this quest, a character's starting chest, pants, gloves, and boots are already at the requisite level - even if you don't know about this and never end up choosing a hat from a quest reward, you just need to buy one from the merchant right next to this NPC.
- Some debuffs or negative status effects can be cured with a healer's Esuna, the Bard's "Warden's Paean" ability, or the appropriate items; others can't be removed. To help differentiate between the two, debuffs which can be removed have a white line on the top of their icons which indicates them as such.
- Command Missions are a feature that allows players to enter specific instanced dungeons with three members of their Squadron from their Free Company. These three members are all controlled by AI, and while the AI for these squad members is pretty good, the AI simply can't react to everything the same way a human player would. This includes not getting out of the way of environmental hazard AOEs, only following you as opposed to moving independently, and only being restricted to the base forms of jobs (such as a Conjurer instead of a White Mage). To compensate for this, squadmates all get a buff that increases their stats, most environmental hazards don't affect them, their skills don't use any MP, and some dungeon mechanics (such as the timers in the Dzemael Darkhold) are altered so that only the human player has to take care of them.
- Falling damage can't kill you as long as you're not in combat. A really long fall in a sanctuary or town will leave you with a Last Chance Hit Point, and your health regen in a sanctuary is insanely strong anyways. In dungeons and raids where you have to fall down, you simply don't take falling damage at all. (Note that in Player Versus Player modes, you're always considered to be "in combat" whether you're fighting anyone or not, and falling damage will always kill you even if you use a Paladin or Dark Knight Limit Break, which normally make you Nigh-Invulnerable.)
- While Final Fantasy XIV has a number of Anti-Trolling Features, the odd Troll or Internet Jerk can still slip through. For this reason, Square Enix employs people called Game Masters, who have a similar function to their tabletop RPG counterparts. GM players will handle reports, serve as customer support when things break in-game, or people get harassed/stalked by bad players. Submitting a ticket with the problem you're facing will eventually have a GM respond, and the GM will potentially suspend/ban people if the complaint is deemed valid. GM players can also remain hidden from view of normal players, teleport anywhere, and break the game's rules in the name of keeping everything fair.
- You have the option of turning off the attack effects for everyone but yourself, in case you find that your screen is getting too cluttered in multiplayer content. You also have the option to leave some effects from party members on if they grant a positive AOE buff (like a White Mage's Asylum) so that you can properly utilize them.
- In order to put a piece of gear in a glamour dresser, it has to be at 100% condition first. Every inn contains a glamour dresser in your room, and an independent repairman can always be found right outside the inn so you don't have to go hunting for someone to fix your gear.
- The Ceremony of Eternal Bonding allows two characters to get married to each other in-game. When you buy a package from the Online Store, you'll schedule a set time for when this ceremony will happen. However, should the ceremony have to be delayed through no fault of your own (such as emergency maintenance), you're allowed to reschedule the ceremony for free. Considering that the higher-end packages cost real-world money in order to perform, this ensures that your money wasn't wasted.
- A lot of restrictions are placed on free-trial accounts to prevent trolls and bots from simply being able to make a new account and be on their merry way. For instance, they cannot send anything over the yell or shout channels (which can cover large sections or the entire map), can't send anyone private messages via tells, can't form parties or Free Companies, can't participate in PvP content, and can't trade on the market board.
- Player-provided Barriers have a fairly smart system for their order of application, with the general rule of thumb being the more important it is that the barrier gets broken, the higher on priority it is.
- Dark Knight gets a unique defensive ability called The Blackest Night, which creates a barrier around the Dark Knight or an ally. If this barrier is broken from taking too much damage, it allows the Dark Knight to use one of their unique abilities with no MP cost. To cull any potential frustration, the game is programmed so that the Blackest Night is always the highest priority barrier on a target. So if the Dark Knight or an ally receives another shield (such as from a Sage or a Scholar's healing magics), the Dark Knight can still make use of the Blackest Night without having to worry about any other barriers.
- Reapers have Arcane Crest, which is a fairly weak barrier that gives a respectably strong party regen when it breaks. Since the barrier has a short duration and the regen is the main draw of using it, it's only superseded by The Blackest Night.
- Sage is the only other one with priority barriers; while their barriers are stronger and last significantly longer than the above two (which have timers of less than 5 seconds), Sage gains a resource called Addersting which lets them use a respectably powerful attack called Toxicon whenever their barriers break to help their Combat Medic playstyle, so a Sage's barriers will come first, unless The Blackest Night is on the target or a Reaper is using Arcane Crest.
- Whenever a patch introduces a new kind of tomestone, other tomestones might end up becoming useless because of their value falling off and leaving them unable to be exchanged for gear. To make sure that you still get your time and money's worth, whenever a patch devalues a tomestone in such a manner, there will always be an NPC in Mor Dhona where you can exchange devalued tomestones for current ones.
- In the weeks before a major patch is released, the game introduces a Moogle Treasure Trove Event, where you get Irregular Tomestones that can be exchanged for mounts, emotes, Triple Triad cards, hairstyles, and other items that would normally require beating Superboss content. (For instance, a common kind of item in these Treasure Troves is the various Kamui mounts normally dropped from Stormblood Extreme trials.) If you've got any Irregular Tomestones left after the patch comes out, the moogle who vends these items will still accept them so you aren't left with tomes that you can't trade in. This belated trade-in period lasts several months, so you have plenty of time to turn your tomes in. There's even a few items worth only one Irregular Tomestone (usually an item that causes a minor particle effect upon use) so you can at least get something for all of your tomes. And should you somehow miss this trade-in period or just completely forget about your stash, you can always turn the Irregular Tomestones into an NPC at Mor Dhona for more current ones.
- There is an option that lets abilities with a lengthy cooldown have their cooldown timer be displayed on their button instead of having to hover over the button and seeing the remaining time in the pop up window.
- The game has a few accessibility options to let players with impairments to be able to enjoy the game without being hindered:
- Almost every UI element can be scaled and moved to the player's liking so they can create a heads-up display that suits their playstyle. This also applies to the pop-up menus
- The game's colors can be adjusted for those that are color blind.
- There are a few Trials that have the boss monster use a Total Party Kill attack, such as the Seat of Sacrifice in Shadowbringers and The Final Day in Endwalker. These attacks can only be survived by a Tank using their Level 3 Limit Break to reduce the damage taken to a survivable level. In every fight that requires a Tank to do this, there will either be a Mook that will cause the Limit Break meter to reach its maximum level once defeated, or the meter will charge up to full all on its own. There will also be no targetable enemies during this moment so a DPS class can't accidentally use it, and there will usually be some kind of hint about "transcending your limits to survive" as a floating message.
- Leaving an instance early by Rage Quitting has punishments built in to discourage players from doing it. Quitting early earns a player a penalty from queueing up for anything else for thirty minutes, with this timer starting all over again every time a player does it before it moves to the next real-world day. This same penalty also applies if a player's Duty Queue pops, but they either decline to join or don't respond fast enough three times in the same day. This is done to prevent players who intend to stay from getting paired up with people who go "fishing" for certain duties or look for ones in progress.
- For Mentors, the same rules for quitting early apply, but the time penalty lasts three hours instead of thirty minutes. The reason is twofold: (A) Mentors have agreed to be the gold standard of good player behavior, and (B) becoming a Mentor requires a significant investment of playtime in the game. So any player who's played long enough to be a Mentor is penalized more harshly; the logic is that the game is telling the Mentor that they really should know better than to act like that.
- In most solo duties, you'll always have an NPC or two that can heal you so that you don't need to worry about trying to heal with limited resources if you aren't playing as a healer. Likewise, you'll have the Brilliant Conviction buff that constantly heals you over time and gets stronger if your HP is low.
- When Extreme duties have been out for a certain number of patches, not only do they become easier with the addition of the party wipe buff, but the drop rate for their unique mounts (which have a low chance of appearing from Extreme trials to begin with) is increased, and if you somehow cleared the trial enough times to collect 99 totems (the clear reward for trials), you can exchange them for a mount.
Introduced in Heavensward (3.x)
- With the addition of Wondrous Tails to earn random end-game trinkets, it adds another newbie helping incentive. Wondrous Tails has 16 requirements that involves running a duty (e.g., a level 50/60 Dungeon, a Primal, etc.) and you can complete up to 9. Completing one puts a sticker on a bingo-like board in a random position, with further rewards if you can make one, two, or three full lines of them. Helping someone who is new to a duty earns you Second Chance points, which can be spent retrying a duty slot (so you can farm a low-level dungeon if you want) or shuffling the placement of the stickers in hopes of arranging them into a line. You still get Second Chance points even if the dungeon you help the newbie through is not one of the ones your journal needs, or even if you've already turned in your journal for that week.
- A mentor system was created in 3.2 to help new players with the game from Mentors, who are veteran players that have agreed to help new players. Mentors can help newbies using the Novice Network chat channel, and novices can party up with mentors for bonus EXP. To qualify to be a Mentor, a player has to complete a laundry list of requirements, ranging from accumulating 1,500 player commendations, completing at least one thousand duties, and reaching the level cap on all three kinds of the Damager, Healer, Tank roles. Even then, a player has to apply to be a Mentor in the first place, so only people who want to help newbies are the ones who do it.
- To curtail players buying plots of land in housing districts and never actually using them, an auto-demolition system was implemented in late 2015. Players who purchase a plot of land and do not build a house on it or access that house in 45 days will have their houses automatically demolished, and the housing plot will be relinquished for other players to buy. However, Square Enix will pause the auto-demolition timer under extreme circumstances that leave a significant amount of players unable to play and keep their claim on their property, such as for most of 2020's COVID-19 pandemic or a 2023 earthquake that left the country of Turkey devastated.
- Real Money Trade exists for the game through third-party websites, which Square Enix does not want players to use — it's not only against the Terms of Service, but Bribing Your Way to Victory would make the game unfair. When the game launched, reporting RMT spam involved writing the trader's name, the message they sent, and the server name into a support form that was in the Support Desk window. Many players didn't know that it was even possible to report such activity, and those that did know rarely bothered since filling out the form was tedious; it often took so long to report an RMT bot that you'd get more spam messages from other bots while you were typing everything out. While most players learned to just ignore it, RMT spam was still a headache. Patch 3.4 added a quick "Report for RMT" option accessed by right-clicking the offending character's name in the chat log, which caused bots to be flagged instantly. This made RMT spam basically nonexistent outside of the three starting cities in A Realm Reborn, as it's all but impossible to automate the bots going anywhere else. On top of that, the Anti-Trolling Features that prevent free accounts from contacting a large number of people or using in-game private messaging means that these bots are stuck using the "say" command, so a very small number of players will even see them. As a result of all these features, while RMT spam still exists, the amount of spambots and number of players annoyed by them have both plummeted.
- Were you with a party in a dungeon that you want to get in touch with but you left the dungeon before you could get their names? The Contacts List, added in Patch 3.5, shows the character and world name of the last fifty players you formed a party with via the Duty Finder or Party Finder.
Introduced in Stormblood (4.x)
- During A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, getting knocked out of the arena by bosses like Leviathan and Titan would remove a player from the rest of the battle. Starting from Stormblood, ring outs place the dead character in the middle of the arena, allowing them to be revived.
- The Sprint action used to consume all of a player's remaining TP, with the duration of the buff determined by how much TP was consumed. This was probably meant to be an action for running away from battles, but it's really useful in boss fights and Raids to avoid mechanics at the last second. However, it also caused players to stop moving once their TP ran out, so it was more useful as a "do or die" option. As of Stormblood, Sprint stopped consuming TP; it now has a ten-second duration if used in battle and a twenty-second duration if used outside of it, with a flat one minute cooldown. This duration was regardless of the amount of TP remaining (before Shadowbringers removed TP entirely).
- Facing enemies was a bit unwieldy when it came to spellcasting. It was quite common for casters and healers to have their casts interrupted if their target moved to the side or behind them. By Stormblood, you now automatically keep track of the target so your attacks don't get canceled out unless your target is dragged out of range or behind an obstacle to break line of sight.
- This expansion introduced individual Duty quests where you play as someone other than the Warrior of Light. The first of these is as Alphinaud, and the quest starts in an area with no enemies and no time limit so you can get a hang of his abilities before enemies show up. This is especially useful for any non-caster quest, since Alphinaud relies on long-range magic.
- In 4.3, the dev team added a new Duty Roulette - the Normal Raid Roulette. This ensures that players trying to play the patch raid content are no longer locked out of ever completing them, like they were originally with the Binding Coil of Bahamut. In general, the massive rewards for the Duty Roulette also ensure that older content will always be played, so that players will never get stuck on the story or have a chance to miss out on any of the dungeons or Trials.
- Alphascape 1.0 (Savage) has a mechanic where the DPS have to drop to zero HP within a certain time period while the healers and tanks have to heal to max HP in that same time period. To make this more feasible, the DPS cannot be healed so long as their debuff is up.
- The crafting and gathering questlines were made less aggravating with regards to the turn-ins.
- The crafting questlines prior to Stormblood required the player to craft something with their own ingredients pool. As higher level quests required high-quality items, this could be annoying as heck if gathering said mats to craft the item takes a long time and you still get an normal quality even though the chance to get a high quality one was in the high 90%. Now the quest giver gives you the mats and will give you as many as you need until you make a high quality version of the item in question.
- Similarly for gatherers, it required items from the gathering log. Higher levels required HQ and sometimes items from unspoiled nodes, which spawn every 36 or 72 minutes in real time. For Stormblood, you only need to gather HQ versions of the item and they're from common gathering points.
- To further ease the frustrations over housing, developers implemented measures in 4.2 pertaining to the housing system (which also added several new housing plots). Namely, players were limited to having only one personal house and one Free Company house at a time, so as to prevent incidents such as when two players bought out a whole ward between themselves
and allow more players access to plots. Additionally, once the new plots were added, access to purchasing them was limited to Free Companies initially: purchases for individual players were suspended for a few weeks to ensure Free Companies were able to access them. Finally, once a plot's house is demolished (either due to no Free Company members accessing the house for 45 days, or from the players choosing to leave on their own), the plot would be unavailable for purchase for a randomly determined amount of time. This time can end up ranging from thirty minutes to twenty-four hours, so as to curtail the practice of players selling their plots for exorbitant prices. - Blue Mage has several restrictions placed on it so that they can't use their Purposely Overpowered blue magic to farm for EXP and other goodies in dungeons and trials. To compensate, Blue Mages gain a massive amount of EXP when slaying enemies in the overworld.
- At various points in the MSQ, the player takes control of a major NPC instead of their own character. While the NPCs can use jobs like the player can, the player themselves might not have dabbled in certain jobs and might not know how said job plays out. In these instances, the NPC the player controls will have a very simplified form of their job so that they can quickly learn the ropes and not have to worry about studying every singe skill.
- In 4.0 an aethernet shard was added to the Ul'dah market area, the Sapphire Avenue Exchange. Before this was added, you had to select either the Weaver's Guild or Adventurer's Guild shard and walk a good distance to the market. This added shard removed the need for a long walk by allowing you to just instantly go to the market.
Introduced in Shadowbringers (5.x)
- Arcanists, Summoners, and Scholars' pets can no longer be harmed, so you don't need to worry about them getting removed from battle.
- Tank Stances were changed in Shadowbringers to be both more straightforward Draw Aggro abilities, and made generally less frustrating.
- Tanks used to have a DPS stance when they wanted to deal damage. With the advent of 5.0, the Tank Stance only generates enmity at an absurd rate for the Tank's attacks instead. While the Tank Stance has a different name for each class, the abilities are functionally identical to one another.
- Initially, as long as a Dark Knight had Darkside active, their MP would tick down. This meant that pauses in battles (generally from a boss switching mechanics) forced the player to watch their MP grind away while they just stood there.note Stormblood changed it so that instead of gradually losing MP, the Dark Knight simply lost their MP regeneration in battle, before Shadowbringers changed Darkside from a stance to a temporary damage boost granted from using certain attacks.
- MP management was a headache, with different jobs having different totals at different levels, and ability costs scaling in weird ways. With Shadowbringers, the MP for all classes was normalized to 10,000. Regardless of your race, class, level, gear, et cetera, you'll always have 10,000 max MP, no more and no less. Ability costs were also normalized to match this new cap. This made MP management much easier for players to figure out, since there was no longer any guesswork about what any ability was going to cost. It resulted in the hilarious side effect of low-level players having HP in the low triple digits, and 10,000 MP. But it was largely agreed by the fanbase to be a solution that made MP much more straightforward for everyone.
- TP was removed entirely in Shadowbringers, probably to avoid TP management in protracted fights as TP consumption outpaces natural regeneration. If TP recovery was paramount, the team needed either a Bard or a Machinist, which could limit party compositions.
- While the crafting questlines in Shadowbringers brings a return to the bring-your-own-mats approach to crafting the item, there's only three main questlines and multiple jobs share the questline.
- Defeating the last boss in leveling dungeonsnote is guaranteed to reward you with a piece of equipment that you don't have for your current class, helping lessen the need to run a specific dungeon more than once to get certain loot.
- The crafting overhaul culled a lot of rarely- or never-used skills, and brought some quality of life changes.
- The crafting window will now show you exactly how much a 100% skill will increase your progress or quality (though you will have to do the math yourself for skills that increase by more than 100%). A later update introduced an exhaustive list of calculations for every Synthesis and Touch skill, relieving the need to do the math guesswork entirely. The actions can also be added to a Favorites list, so you have a quick reference for the ones you use on a regular basis.
- Crafters now have "Trained Eye", an ability that instantly brings the high-quality percentage chance to 100%, as long as whatever you're crafting is at least ten levels below your crafter's job level. This is to save time since you can easily bring the chance to 100% anyway for said items, but with far more button presses, which just wastes time.
- 5.1 introduced "Final Appraisal", an ability that takes 1 CP and doesn't pass turns for buff alignment. This ability makes it so for the next five turns, progress will be stopped at one point below completion, allowing crafters to focus on crafting for quality without accidentally completing a project while trying to make a safety net.
- Along with the changes made to crafting in 5.1, there were a few QoL changes with Collectable crafting.
- It's now harder to accidentally make (or not make) collectables out of things you didn't mean to. Items that have zero use as a collectable (like crafted materials) won't be collectables when you complete the craft even with collectable crafting toggled on and items that only exist to be collectables (such as custom deliveries) will always turn into collectables when completed.
- Gathering collectables in 5.4 was overhauled for a lot of quality of life improvements. The first is that there are now specific collectable items to gather for The House of Splendor turn-ins, instead of popping a "Collectable gathering" stance and gathering from an unspoiled node. The second is that the abilities to increase the item's collectability has been simplified to moves that do a flat rate, a 100% better/50% worse gamble, and a 25% worse but a chance to not use an attempt. Additionally, Perception now factors into bonuses to improve collectability.
- The second boss of Aurum Vale, Coin Counter, used to do its attacks without the orange AOE tell. You had to know how to dodge it via its "wind-up" animation and/or attack name. However, this was fixed to show the orange AOE tells. Given how hard the dungeon is for most newcomers, this was seen as a welcome change.
- One common complaint about the 2.0 content was that its MSQ was long and, at times, too grindy. Patch 5.3 alleviates this by cutting the number of quests in the 2.0 MSQ by approximately 13% and streamlining those that remain to minimize pointless steps, in addition to increasing the EXP rewards for MSQ quests, so players can get to the expansions' content more quickly. In addition, the sidequest "My Little Chocobo" and the Crystal Tower raid questline are rolled into the ARR MSQ: the former so players can unlock mounts more easily, and the latter because it ties heavily into the MSQ of Shadowbringers.
- Certain enemy skills can be interrupted, but it was originally never made clear which ones could be interrupted. Player skills that caused Silence were assumed to only affect magical attacks, but certain physical attacks could be interrupted as well and it wasn't obvious either. A patch update made the skills that inflicted Silence to be a general interruption ability and enemy attacks that can be stopped will have their casting bars pulsate.
- Originally, Astrologian was difficult to play in any way other than just dumping healing on teammates. The cards which the class can draw each had their own unique effects, like increasing a party member's critical hit rate or refreshing their MP faster. It was difficult to memorize which card did what, much less keep track of where to use the card properly in the middle of a hectic fight. Shadowbringers changed the system so that the Astrologian only has two kinds of cards. One type of card provides a large damage boost for Tanks and melee DPS, while providing a small damage boost to Healers and ranged DPS; the other type of card does the reverse. It's also much easier to tell the difference between the two in a pinch — cards with a purple border are for Healers/Ranged DPS, and cards with a blue border are for Tank/Melee DPS.note
- As an example of Gameplay and Story Integration, as a Gunbreaker Trust Thancred is incapable of using his Cartridge combo unless Minfillia is also in the party with him to charge the shells. For the sake of not forcing you to have Minfillia taking up a slot every time you bring Thancred along (since he is the only Trust NPC available for the tank role in most of the Shadowbringers dungeons), his Cartridge and Solid Barrel combos have the same potency, so it's only flavor and not actively reducing his ability to do damage or hold enmity.
- 5.5 added an arrow in front of and to the flank of an enemy's target ring so that you can always tell what direction it's facing. This was added specifically because the more abstract bosses like machines without obvious faces were getting too hard to track their forward-facing position to tell when the boss might whirl around to try to hit the party with something. This is especially a boon in content where there's no positional requirements like Deep Dungeons or Relic Zones where the target ring is completely solid.
- It used to be when purchasing end-game gear, you would get the base version and buy a token to augment it. However this led to some annoyance as there were three tokens that could only upgrade specific pieces of equipment. As of Patch 5.3, this changed so that any end-game gear purchasable with Tomestones of Poetics was the augmented version. Also, there are vendors in the major cities that sell the gear so you don't have to constantly backtrack to three specific settlements to get them.
- Though Leveling Roulette offers a lucrative amount of EXP, there is the frustration in being thrown into a low-level dungeon with hardly any skills to play with. For players that are partying up for such, the party leader has the option to turn on the "Limited Leveling Roulette" option to ensure the group gets into a dungeon that's close to the lowest-leveled job in the party.
- In 5.0, the Tank role action Provoke changed from putting the tank just barely at the top of the aggro list to putting the tank at the top of the list with a massive enmity bump. The former required the provoking tank to immediately generate enmity as they were only one point above the next person in the aggro list Tanks without their stance generate little enmity compared to other classes, meaning they would lose aggro quickly. Adding a ton of enmity on top of putting the tank on top of the aggro list not only helps prevent this, but it also makes tank swapping easier as a mistimed tank swap (Shirk then Provoke) meant the new off tank had to do something to stop generating enmity. As another side effect, this also allows the main tank to pull with Provoke without worry of losing aggro of the enemy as some DPS classes can launch an initial burst phase that can strip the tank of aggro temporarily.
Introduced in Endwalker (6.x)
- If a melee job (Tank or DPS) is in the middle of their combo, using a ranged attack no longer breaks it. This is mostly a source of frustration in higher end content with tight DPS checks, where you want to keep attacking, but you're forced to move away from the enemy. Then you either break the combo with a ranged attack or stop attacking to keep the combo, and either case may result in DPS loss.
- The damage mitigation abilities Feint and Addle focus on reducing physical and magical damage respectively by 10% of their primary type and 5% of the other. Formerly, they would only reduce their primary type, making them completely useless for the other purpose. Normally Feint would be used to mitigate tank buster damage which 9 times out of 10 were physical and Addle would mitigate party wide damage which 9 times out of 10 was magical. But there was that one occasion where only one ability was useful, such as in Floor 9 in the Eden raids where both the tank buster and party wide damage were magical.
- To help distinguish between what type of damage an attack does, patch 6.3 added icons next to damage numbers. A blue sword indicates physical damage, a purple wand icon indicates magical damage, and a green star indicates special damage (which almost always can't be reduced or blocked).
- Paladin, being the only combat class with two pieces of equipment for weaponry, has to deal with the hassle of two drops from dungeons to get geared up, having to trade tomestones for the sword and shield separately (albeit at the standard weaponry cost when added up), or crafting the sword and shield separately. Most of that has been addressed by giving the entire set in one purchase, and in the case of glowing versions of Trial encounters, are packaged in a "Paladin's (boss name) Arms" that compiles the total material cost for the entire set into one recipe.
- Warriors got two major changes that help streamlined their abilities. The first is their gap closer no longer requires using their Beast Gauge. The second is their AOE combo can also give them the offensive buff that one of their single target combos can, fixing the issue that Warriors had to use that single target combo at some point to acquire the buff.
- For a tank, Gunbreaker has a vast set of abilities, which made it difficult to find a place for all of the job's hotbar actions. The most notable among these was the "Gnashing Fang" combo, which were three attacks that you could only use at a certain point in your attack rotation and all have to be used in a certain order or else the combo would outright stop. Endwalker condensed this combo into a single button, with both the combo and its respective follow-up changing to be context-sensitive.
- Actions that require targeting the ground has an option to keep the targeting cursor within the maximum range of the ability.
- When using the Aethernet teleportation system in cities, instead of choosing from a flat list of locations, a map shows up telling you where the destination Aetheryte is. This is particular useful some cities like Ul'dah, which is a maze in its own right.
- Trust avatars, like the player, accumulate experience from dungeon runs and must level up to enter dungeons. However, as of patch 6.0, they skip level 80 entirely, allowing players who'd maxed out their Trust avatars' levels during Shadowbringers to jump right into leveling them through Endwalker content without needing to grind out that last extra level first.
- The level 89 trial can be done with the Scions as a Trust battle. Normally in Trust content, the player character dying causes a reset, even if anyone who could revive you is still alive. Because this Trial is a Climax Boss, and trust AI can sometimes fall victim to Artificial Stupidity, you're given three stacks of a buff that serves as a 1-Up so you have more than one chance to get downed before the Trial resets.
- While the existence of Roulettes have always helped to downplay the queue times for lower-leveled players, there could still be egregious wait times for certain dungeons. 6.1 added "Content Supporters" as a natural evolution of the Trust system to help alleviate this, allowing players to do every story-related dungeon in ARR content with a party of AI companions, including the 4-man normal mode Primals, who took an especially long time to queue for.
- The Praetorium was perhaps the game's most infamous Marathon Level, taking at least 45 minutes even with a group who knows where they're going moving at full steam. While the excessive amounts of experience for doing it on roulette helped with the queue times, it didn't change the fact that the dungeon was a significant time sink. 6.1 drastically changed this by cutting the Praetorium in half length-wise by having it end at Gaius on the elevator. The same patch also split the two phases of the Ultima Weapon boss fight into its own trial called Porta Decumana, and changed the Post-Final Boss fight with Lahabrea into a solo duty after beating the Ultima Weapon for the first time. This makes the Praetorium similar in length to the preceding dungeon of Castrum Meridianum. In addition, all three pieces of content were reduced from 8-man to 4-man, meaning there's fewer people to worry about and fewer positions to fill in the queue.
- Starting with patch 6.1, various bosses were reworked to make their mechanics more friendly to the Trust system, in addition to making them less obtuse.
- All markers were reworked to fit with what the known concept of them would come to be in later content. In particular, Stack Markers, Tank Buster icons and Party Spread indicators were extremely inconsistent up until about mid-Heavensward. Duty Support gave them an excuse to give these dungeons a pass to make the respective markers universal, so players can learn what they do much earlier and learn how to counter them before they start getting properly dangerous.
- Each of the three bosses in Copperbell Mines Normal were rewritten, both to be Duty Support-friendly and to give new players training in the idea of tankbusters and more complex AOE patterns. This also made the fights more engaging—before, Kottos was notable only for the long stream of popcorn enemies preceding him; the Ichorous Ire was an Asteroids Monster which didn't give the DPS classes much to do before the final split; and Gyges is no longer so reliant on summoning allies (which barely get to do anything before he's felled).
- The Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak:
- The map was re-worked to remove the gimmick where you needed to find glowing orbs to feed into a device. It was all too easy to miss these orbs, making the dungeon take too long if you forgot to grab one.
- The floor slime in the last third of the dungeon removed. Players had long complained that the slime only slowed down movement, which offered no real gameplay value and only made the dungeon unnecessarily longer.
- Haukke Manor:
- The Void Lamps mechanic of Lady Amandine was removed and her escort summons were spaced out, making her more of a Flunky Boss. The fight also serves as an introduction to the "look-away" mechanic whenever she summons a Manor Sentry by making it a room-wide attack with a glowing eye over Lady Amandine, so a player has no choice but to look away from her if they want to avoid the attack, with the giant eye serving as a visual cue/hint.
- A warp point appears at the end of the second boss battle to go back to the start of the dungeon, which is where the party needs to go anyway. Veterans used to use the "Return" ability to go back to the start of the dungeon before this portal was added, leaving newbies stranded and confused since using "Return" this way is never explained by the game.
- Aiatar, the final boss of Brayflox's Longstop, was changed to have more straight-forward mechanics. Before the change, Aiatar would vomit poison pools on players, which would damage players but restore Aiatar's health. This required the tank to "kite" the boss, which is using their enmity to make the boss move where the tank wants them to move. Kiting is relatively unclear in early levels, and it's never used again as a core boss mechanic in the MSQ. Also, it'd be a lot of effort to program AI Tanks to kite the boss correctly all for the sake of a single fight.
- In the fight against Titan, people who fall off or get knocked off the ever-decreasing platform no longer remain out for the rest of the battle. This lines up with how getting knocked out works from Stormblood onwards.
- In Snowcloak, the Yeti boss used to require baiting the Yeti into freezing its minions to turn them into snow balls, then rolling the snow balls into the Yeti to interrupt a certain attack. This was replaced with a more straightforward fight, where the Yeti now freezes snowballs on his own without any minions interrupting it, and you have to avoid the biggest snowball in order to dodge an AOE attack.
- Number XXIV in Castrum Abania was reworked to be more of a fight where you dodge a bunch of AOE attacks. Originally, the boss would set up pools that granted characters an elemental attribute, then the boss would put up a reflect shield of two of three elements, requiring players to go into the one element he wasn't using to augment their attacks to get past the barrier. While this was quite appropriate for a Barrier Change Boss from Final Fantasy VI (where Number XXIV first appeared), it was rather unintuitive for XIV players doing it for the first time, since barriers like this hadn't been used before.
- One of the annoyances which healers had to deal with in dungeons is their healing-over-time effects generating enmity with every tick of healing. This meant that abilities like the White Mage's Regen or the Astrologian's Aspected Benefic were only cast when the tanks had pulled all of the enemies, lest the enemies go straight after the healer as soon as they got pulled, causing instant party-wide panic to protect the Squishy Wizard. Patch 6.2 changed this so that healing-over-time effects only generate enmity when the spell is cast, freeing up healers to keep regen effects going out of battle.
- The Island Sanctuary has several features in place to make the player's experience more smooth:
- To mitigate the potential slog of exploration, Sprint and Return both have cooldowns of only five seconds while you're on your island, so you can effectively sprint as much as you want and you don't have to wait long if you need to go back to your home base.
- Animals you captured will always leave behind crafting items everyday, even if you never feed them at all. This guarantees that you'll always get something to help with your crafting in the event you have no ingredients to make animal feed with. Feeding your animals just has them give you extra items.
- Like gardens in player housing, your island garden needs to be watered so your crops can grow. But unlike housing crops that can wilt and die if you forget to water them enough, your island crops will never die, no matter how long they aren't watered.
- When crafting or making renovations/upgrades to your structures, the game will warn you about any material deficits if your workshops are currently using materials you're about to use and are low on. This wasn't the case when the Island Sanctuary was first implemented in Patch 6.2, but was introduced later in patch 6.4.
- Patch 6.3 introduced the ability to collect all leavings or gathered crops from your mammets at once, instead of having to click each one in the list manually. This saves a lot of time when you have twenty crops or animals.
Introduced in Dawntrail (7.x)
- Before Dawntrail was released, glasses were either headgear or a fashion accessory, depending on the item in question. Either way, it wasn't possible to wear both glasses and headgear at the same time, since glasses either took up your helmet slot or were a Fashion Accessory that couldn't be used in dungeons or raids. Dawntrail changed this so that glasses can be equipped in their own, purely aesthetic slot, so that players didn't have to choose between the two.
- For the longest time, the blacklist was a Scrappy Mechanic because of how startlingly ineffective it was for a block feature. It prevented a character from contacting you, but the block applied to just that character; it was easy to just create an alt to get around this, and you could still see their character model for the player to annoy you in ways other than the chat box. Dawntrail updated the blacklist's Anti-Trolling Features to be more thorough. After 7.0, blacklisting someone prevents all characters on that player's account from contacting you in any way, and also hides their character models from you at the same time. Alternatively, a "mute list" was added that functioned as the old blacklist did, which prevents you from seeing their messages but doesn't block them completely. It also enhanced the Estate Expulsion feature to automatically include anyone from your blacklist for your Free Company's house as long as you're the Free Company master, the property owner, or are designated as a trusted member. Additionally, blacklisting someone (or having them already on your list) kicks that person out of the Free Company property immediately, and like the enhanced blacklist, applies account-wide so a player's alts can't get in. Finally, Dawntrail also allowed enhanced control over who can see your profile on the Lodestone, including blocking specific people or taking yourself out of Lodestone character searches altogether. With all of these changes added to the blacklist, harassing specific people was made much harder and gave players much more peace of mind.note
- In addition to expanding the blacklisting features, Dawntrail also added a term filter to most forms of chat, which applied across all characters on your account. This helped prevent a rather common annoyance of seeing people advertising their clubs and/or RP spaces in large population areas, or otherwise saying things in public that you didn't want to see. While these messages were ultimately harmless, they had a tendency to fill up your chatlogs very quickly and become a nuisance. Thankfully, this also got some Developer's Foresight, as the filter won't apply in party chat, linkshells, or Free Company chat, because it can be assumed that you'd want to hear what your allies and/or friends are saying, even if it happens to trip a filter.
Palace of the Dead
- Normally, a run through the Palace of the Dead starts you at level 1. If you queue for a matched group for Palace of the Dead and end up placed with a group that's already in progress, your level will be boosted to match theirs.
- The Mom Bomb boss encountered in the Palace of the Dead has an attack that is guaranteed to wipe the party unless you can stun her. There's a lesser bomb monster whose explosion can stun the boss, which helps parties that don't have a stun skill.
Player-Versus-Player
General
- PVP modes have multiple forms of Anti-Rage Quitting involved should a player choose to leave Crystaline Conflict, Frontlines, or Rival Wings before the match ends. If someone leaves early, the match counts as a loss on their record, they get no rewards of any kind (whereas staying until the end of a match always grants you something even if you lose), and they get a penalty which prevents that player from queueing up for anything else for thirty minutes. Players also can't leave a PVP match if they're in combat without completely closing the game. The only exception to the time penalty is if someone gets vote-kicked from a match, since players have no control over that and other players can't use it to troll people they don't personally like.
- If someone does nothing at all for two minutes in Crystaline Conflict, Frontlines, or Rival Wings, they're automatically kicked out of the game, which gives all the same penalties as leaving the match early. Similarly, in Triple Triad, players are only given so long to make their moves; should this timer expire, the CPU will place one of a player's cards at random so a player can't just waste their opponent's time.
- Patch 6.5 added more visual indicators to objects spawned by players in PVP modes so they could be more easily seen, like a Machinist's turret or a Summoner's pets having rings around them. These, along with the Dragoon's Limit Break landing spot, were also made to change color depending on who used them; an ally's attacks are always blue, and an enemy's attacks are always red. Before this change, there was no way to tell which team had used which move, with more chaotic modes like Frontlines and Rival Wings potentially having multiple clashing elements appear all in the same spot. The moves changing color make it much more clear which team is using the attack, letting you know if you could charge forward or retreat.
- Purify cleanses most debuffs while also giving you immunity to any further debuffs for five seconds. But until patch 6.55, this immunity only applied if you cleansed any debuffs with your initial use. If you didn't cleanse anything, you didn't get the immunity, which resulted in a wasted skill that can mean life or death. The aforesaid patch changed this so that the immunity applies in all cases whenever Purify is used, so you at least got something from using it, and also allowed you to preemptively use it to charge into the fray without being worried about getting stunned if you so chose.
- In PVP modes, Sprint has a cooldown of only 1.5 seconds and lasts forever, effectively turning it into an ability that you can toggle on or off. That way, you won't encounter a situation where you could have gotten away if you were sprinting but couldn't because it was on cooldown.
- When you use Guard in PVP, there's a three-second grace window where pushing the Guard key again does nothing. Because of this grace window, you can panic-press the Guard key when you need to use it without worrying about accidentally causing Guard to drop.
Crystalline Conflict
- The only way to communicate with your teammates in Crystalline Conflict is by using a few pre-built messages. These have a relatively wide array of messages to choose from, and always play some kind of noise when used in chat so players know to look there. It's also used to discourage trolling and/or abuse, since you can't type anything out manually. However, as explained by Yoshi-P, repeatedly spamming these messages to annoy other players will earn you a penalty on your account if you use such messages sarcastically or abuse the sounds.
- The HUD for the mode puts Team Astra on the left, and Team Umbra on the right. However, if this is too confusing, you can change it so whichever team you're on is always on the left in the HUD options menu.
Frontlines
- Frontlines is a three-team PVP match where each team consists of three teams of 24 players each, for a total of 72 players. If lots of players are queueing up but haven't quite hit 72 people for long enough, a match will start with slightly fewer than 72 players while the system tries to fill in the empty slots as the match goes on; that way, players aren't waiting for numbers that might not be coming. And even then, the system will stop looking for new players after enough time passes in the match (even if there are open slots), because joining a match that could very well be almost over would be frustrating.
- Players are invincible while in their team's home base and for ten seconds after they leave it, so trying to spawn camp will just get a player/team on the receiving end of a Curb-Stomp Battle. By the same token, every base is elevated in such a way that a player can't get back into the base once they leave it, so this invincibility can't be abused.
- On the Seal Rock (Seize) map, once an occupied tomelith is turned from an occupied node to a neutral one, it takes a few seconds before any team can try and capture it again. That way, teams have a chance to battle it out for the tomelith's control without getting it stolen from them with no chance to fight back.
- You can ride your mounts in Frontlines, which let you move across the map faster. Originally, getting attacked while on your mount would cause you to instantly dismount and be momentarily stunned. This was quite frustrating, as it lent itself to getting stunned before you could reach an enemy team and being left unable to act, which almost always meant an instant KO. Patch 6.2 changed this so that getting attacked while riding a mount still makes you dismount, but gives a debuff called "Hoofing It" that prevents you from getting back on a mount for five seconds instead of stunning you.
- After halftime in Seal Rock (Seize) and Onsal Hakair (Danshig Naadam), the number of simultaneous tomeliths or ovoos that spawn will be reduced, and the ones that do spawn will be A or S-rank objectives, which give the most points. This is done to prevent the winning team camping in their base and just running out the clock by forcing the team that's winning to constantly defend their lead.
Rival Wings
- The Rival Wings mode has a "Soaring" buff which increases damage dealt, HP restored, and Limit Break gauge fill speed. Stacks are granted when you KO an opponent or when an enemy tower is destroyed. In the latter case, the Soaring stacks are granted even if you never attacked the enemy tower, so you can still earn Soaring buffs while taking out enemy players or completing other objectives. Also, unlike Battle High in Frontlines, Soaring stacks can never decrease until the match ends, so you're encouraged to play more aggressively.
Triple Triad
- The "Sudden Death" modifier makes you and your opponent swap cards and replay another duel if your match ends in a tie. However, if you still haven't decided a winner after five rounds of Sudden Death, the game ends in a draw to prevent you from being stuck playing the same opponent for too long.
- When Triple Triad matches are played against computer-controlled opponents, there's a match entry fee of MGP which is slightly higher than the amount you earn if you lose, so there's some inherent risk. However, there's no entry fee for playing a human opponent, so you still earn a profit even if you lose. Even then, when someone challenges you to a game, you can always opt to decline their challenge if you don't want to play.
