Being a long-running MMO, Final Fantasy XIV is no stranger to having some frustrating mechanics.
- Line of sight determines whether or not you can use your abilities on a target. If your target suddenly runs behind an object or changes elevation, you can no longer "see" them and your ability gets canceled if you were trying to use it on the target. Naturally, the AI will see you at all times, even through solid objects.
- Teleportation fees. Every time you use the Teleport spell, it costs you some gil. The farther away your destination is, the more gil it costs. And the main quest just loves to send you all over the place. It's not realistically likely to break the bank, especially when you get into Stormblood and find that the devs added a Cap of 999 gil before applying discounts, but it's just present enough that the urge to waste time minmaxing your fees never quite goes away. At least you can save a bit with use of the Return spell (which bypasses the fee, but is on a 15-minute cooldown and always goes to whichever aetheryte you designated as your home beacon in return) and by marking a handful of Aetherytes as favorites (which gives you a slight discount on them). Once you have access to the Hunt you can also save on teleportation fees by grinding out seals to buy Aetheryte Tickets, which are good for a single teleport no matter the cost.
- Any FATE. On the one hand, it can be a good way to level up while you are waiting to join a dungeon, and once you join a Grand Company participating in them - even if it fails - grants you Company Seals. On the other hand, you are required to complete some groups of FATEs in order to do some quests (like the ones to unlock the Crystal Tower and the one you need to complete a tribal quest), and sometimes you will waste a lot of time doing absolutely nothing while waiting for the FATE to happen. Not to mention the Odin and Behemoth's events, which were basically unplayable for PS3 players due to the overload of people participating at the same time to those (and even if you are able to play, chances are you won't be able to actually see the boss). To top it off, many of the beastmen quests and a good chunk of the relic steps (both 2.0 and 3.0 relics) require players to clear specific FATEs, which means a long time just idling and waiting for that one FATE to pop up. On the other other hand, FATEs also have an alarming tendency to spawn in the path of or right on top of objectives from quests, particularly the main story. Quite annoying for gamepad players, since even with a custom targeting filter to only allow targeting enemies that are required for the current quest, FATE targets still qualify, thus requiring vigilance to ensure you don't accidentally hit a FATE enemy while trying to target a quest enemy and aggro more than you can deal with.
- The quest that can boost your Infinity +1 Sword to even higher levels of power requires players to take part in any FATE they want in specific regions in order to get 12 Atma items. Sounds easy, right? Doing the FATEs is easy enough, but good luck trying to endure the super low drop rates for the items you need to get. Because the drop rate of the Atmas are extremely low and are subjected to RNG, you have people who have either gotten all the items fairly quickly or people that have spent hours/days trying to get the items to drop and have no luck at all. What's even worse is getting all 12 Atmas isn't enough to power up your relic weapon; all it does is change the weapon's appearance slightly. To get the weapon to its full glory, you have to grind for several books and each book originally cost 1500 mythology tomes. Each book also contains challenges you have to complete in order to power up your weapon (beat the final bosses in dungeons, kill specific enemies, etc). While the grind for books is FAR more bearable than the RNG drops of the Atmas, you'd still be spending a lot of time grinding. The outcome was apparently so bad that the developers delayed the patch containing the Novus relics due to the fact that not enough people had their Animus relics at the time. Patch 2.4 made the Atma grind easier by increasing the drop rates and changed the costs of the books to 500 soldiery tomes each.
- The Atma styled grind returned in patch 2.45 for the Zodiac weapons by having the player run dungeons, beat the final boss, and pray that RNG is kind to them by dropping the quest items they need. Unlike the FATE system that has you waste just a few minutes each time, dungeons can take 30 minutes or more to complete and it can easily wear out players who are caught on a huge unlucky streak. Fortunately Patch 3.1 removed the RNG and made the quest items guaranteed drops.
- The Atma grind returns in full force for the 3.0 Anima relic weapons. You can skip the first step if you maxed out your ARR relic weapon; if you didn't, have fun collecting six sets of three elemental crystals from FATEs in each of the Heavensward zones. After turning in all 18 crystals in Mor Dhona, you'll go back to Azys Lla for your weapon. Next step is to run ten dungeons in a specific order on the job you're getting the weapon for. It helps that you can run the six ARR dungeons unsynced, but if you have to queue, expect a long wait. Then the real fun begins: you will need four special items that can only be obtained by trading with an NPC in Mor Dhona. To get all four items she requires Unidentified Bone, Shells, Ore, and Seeds—20 of each—that will have to be purchased one at a time with 13-18 beast tribe quest tokens (each from a specific tribe, of course), 680 Tomestones of Poetics or Esoterics, 1000 Allied Seals, 10 different tokens from the Alexander raid, or if you're really lucky, a treasure map. You will also have to give her four each of four different HQ crafted items. Don't have a Level 60 Master Blacksmith, Alchemist, Carpenter AND Culinarian? Hope you've been saving your gil, because buying everything on the market board is going to cost of a serious chunk of change. And after all of that, you get your shiny new iLevel 210 weapon, yay! Now, time to start grinding more tomes for the next two phases to get the anima weapon to 240. By patch 3.38, this was heavily nerfed to the ground.
- Enemies' range of territory. In order to prevent possible griefing and server strains, all enemies (except those found in dungeons) are programmed to start wandering back to their territory/spawn point if they chase the player too far. However, once an enemy starts to retreat, they not only become immune to all damage and debuffs while they retreat, but they'll also fully recover their HP once they get back there. This means that you can't kite foes too far or they'll "reset". The mechanic is doubly painful when fighting boss characters found in a FATE due to their sky-high HP, especially when the area for the FATE is unreasonably small (either from a small radius or right next to a town crowded with buildings) or packed with far more subordinate enemies than is reasonable.
- The Random rule for Triple Triad. Against another player, it can bring some excitement and new strategies on the fly, but when you play against an NPC, their version of "random" is having 4 to 6 different cards that are all powerful while you're possibly forced to use weaker cards from your collection. Whatever cards you claimed stays with you forever and that includes the starter deck that the Triple Triad Master gives you as an introduction to the game. To make matters worse, the new NPC opponents introduced for Heavensward use the Random rule almost exclusively while using other rules on top it that makes Random even worse, such as Chaos and Roulette. Thankfully this was changed in 3.5 that no NPC uses the Random rule anymore. Random will only exist between players.
- The rare cards limit rule. You can have just one rare card in your deck and no more than that. NPCs gleefully ignore the rare cards limit rule as they pummel your deck with a deck that has nothing but rare cards.note
- Sudden Death in Triple Triad. While it can keep things interesting, it gets extremely annoying when both players have nearly even decks and skills, causing multiple sudden deaths in a row. Up to 5 sudden deaths can be played before the game finally declares a draw.
- Getting new cards via Random Drop. Playing in certain dungeons, raids, or fighting against primals gives you a slight chance of getting their cards. Beating an NPC might get you a random card. Buying the booster pack at the Gold Saucer will also give you a random card. The path to getting 30 cards so you can make the rare card rule less annoying borderlines Early Game Hell thanks to RNG determining what cards you get or if you even get a card to begin with.
- The Machinist's Gauss Barrel and the Bard's Wanderer's Minuet skills were widely hated due to lots of drawbacks with little benefits. Initially, the two skills would give a small boost in the player's DPS in exchange for disabling their auto-attack and adding a charge time to certain skills while the player had to wait a bit to disable Gauss Barrel/Wanderer's Minuet. In a following patch, the two skills were given a much larger boost to the player's DPS, charge times for skills were reduced, and disabling Gauss Barrel/Wanderer's Minuet can be done a lot sooner. While Machinist players were overall happy for their skill being boosted, some Bard players were still sour over their play style being changed and some are refusing to use Wanderer's Minuet out of sheer spite and don't care if their overall DPS output is worse because of it, yet won't forgo playing Bard altogether for another job instead. Stormblood changed the skills by making them no longer disabling auto attacks and charge times were also removed; Shadowbringers would later remove the Gauss Barrel entirely, modifying the heat-management mechanics and integrating them with the class's basic rotation (primarily improving it by not forcing you to precisely micromanage when you completely fill the gauge).
- Aether Currents, a mechanic introduced in Heavensward. Attune to all 15 (or 5 in Azys Lla, the expansion's final area) Currents, 10 of which are found in the map itself and 5 of which are obtained by quests (again, aside from Azys Lla, as the map-based Currents are removed) and you can fly in the area. The 10 map-found Currents can be rather tricky to find, though, as the Aether Compass you are given to find them with doesn't include a Z-axis. In addition, some quests can only be completed by being able to fly. But surely these sidequests that require flying can't be too important. They're only there for experience, right? One of the sidequests that requires flying is the quest to access Neverreap, one of the (as of patch 3.05) two end-game optional dungeons required for obtaining currency for end-game gear. Needless to say, people were not amused. Later patches made the currents easier to obtain. The larger zones themselves can be quite aggravating before you can finally fly, which is much faster. Stormblood and Shadowbringers make it worse with areas that are split in half: you visit one part of the area early on in the story (The Fringes and The Peaks of Ala Mhigo in Stormblood, Amh Araeng and Kholusia in Shadowbringers), but are blocked from visiting the other half (and acquiring its related Aether Currents) until near the end of the story. It's even worse because these are some of the largest zones in the game and Shadowbringers removed mount-speed increases related to story progression (requiring you to grind out FATEs in a zone to unlock the ability to buy them), making navigating even one half of these areas a massive chore.
- The Palace of the Dead has received mixed reviews. In addition to the grinding to boost your weapon stats mentioned above, there's the fine print in the much-touted save your progress feature: you can only save every ten levels, after defeating the boss for that section of floors. If your party wipes, the duty fails, and you get to start all over at the first level in the set, regardless of where you were when you wiped. You lose all progress you'd made. The Palace also has its own internal leveling system. Normal game XP is awarded after defeating the boss—so if you fail to clear the section, you get NO XP. Essentially, you've just wasted up to an hour.
- The mechanics for progression towards floor 101 and beyond in the Palace of the Dead are widely hated. First, you have to make the attempt in a fixed party, which means you can't use random players like a typical duty finder run. Second, to even reach floor 101, you have to reach floor 100 without ever failing the duty, whether due to wiping, abandoning, or letting the time expire. If your group has a Total Party Wipe just once, you're out of luck and have to start over back from floor 51. This also includes the floors beyond 100. Nothing like reaching floor 199 and then your party gets wiped due to mishaps or just bad luck. What makes this even worse is if a single player leaves the instance via quitting or disconnecting, even if you succeed in clearing the current set of 10 floors, your fixed party is no longer complete and cannot be continued, thus ending your run by default. Each set of 10 floors (starting point to the boss) can take about an hour and the trek to the 200th floor is going to be a very long one. Unless your party has plenty of free time and knows that they won't suffer any outside distractions, reaching floor 200 may as well be a pipe dream. The only saving grace in all this is you can start at floor 51 instead of floor 1. Also that everything beyond floor 100 is just bonus, the storyline ends at floor 100. The spiritual successor, Heaven On High, only has 100 floors and can be started from floor 21 so that retries won't take an eternity.
- Leveling in a party within Eureka is widely hated due to how restrictive it is. In general, how much EXP you gain from killing monsters depends on your level VS their level. If you fight something stronger than you, you'll gain more EXP. Likewise, fighting weaker enemies yields less EXP. Most parties that are chain grinding will usually fight enemies five levels above their own. Anyone in the party who is below that threshold will have the whole party gain no EXP. This means that friends or free company members can't help out if the level of their friends are too low.
- Aether grinding in Eureka: Pagos is widely hated due to how luck based it is. Aether can be obtained by simply killing enemies, but it's purely random on whether or not you'll even get any to begin with. Notorious monsters always give aether, but they don't spawn frequently enough to make it worth the time. While patches have made the amount of aether obtained much larger, it's still RNG on whether or not you'll get anything. It also doesn't help that people still haven't figured out how to gain aether consistently, something the developers teased about.
- Mid-dungeon cutscenes are always reviled, even very short ones. Even if you enable the option to autoskip cutscenes you've already seen once, the game will still force you through a Loading Screen for the cutscene that isn't even going to play. As for long ones, while there's an unspoken agreement to let first-time players watch most of them, three major exceptions stand out. Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are the climax of the A Realm Reborn launch content, and are absolutely packed with cutscenes, to the point that, as gear creep makes battles shorter, they eventually became more cutscene than gameplay. They were also given a roulette all to themselves, partly due to being the only 8-player dungeons in the entire game and partly to ensure first-timers could always assemble a party quickly. The end result of this is that endgame players invariably left first-time players in the dust, giving them the choice of skipping the cutscenes and losing track of the plot, or watching cutscenes and being left out of the battle, neither of which was particularly satisfying. 4.2 tried to resolve this by making these cutscenes unskippable (doubling the roulette's rewards to make up for the extra time investment), which wasn't widely liked but was accepted as the only solution that even approached plausibility. The third exception is the Stone Vigil, which has a single unusually lengthy cutscene just before the final boss — short enough that most first-timers won't be pushed to skip it, but long enough that it stands out enough to grate on players there to grind.
- Farming spells for Blue Mage. Finding them is already a challenge, since other than the name of the spell itself, the spell book's only hints are telling you what zone or dungeon the enemy you get that spell from spawns in. You also have to actually see the spell being used before you can learn it. Learning spells are also fully dependent on RNG, with the more powerful or useful spells generally having a lower chance. Certain spells can only be learned in dungeons and by primals, which means you need to bring friends along to do it unsynced since Blue Mage can't use the duty finder. If you don't learn the spell, you'll have to enter the instance again and start over. As well, being knocked out means you won't learn anything. There's also the problem with players griefing, as it is quite easy for players to quickly murder certain monsters before their spell goes off, doubly so if they summoned a Chocobo to fight with them, and even moreso since several Blue Mage spells are tied to unique versions of existing enemies (e.g. one source of Peculiar Light is from the single Lentic Mudpuppy that spawns near the regular group of Mudpuppies in Mor Dhona) rather than just those normal enemies.
- The housing system, as a whole, is one of the most often criticized aspects of the game. The problem boils largely down to the fact that there are a limited number of housing plots, and too many players to accommodate everyone. The problem was exacerbated by the ability for players to purchase multiple personal houses for themselves (it was once reported that two players managed to purchase every plot in one ward between themselves
) which left other players high and dry. This was, thankfully, addressed with an update that limited ownership of houses to one company house and one personal house per player, although the multiple personal houses for players who already had them were grandfathered. Apartments were later added to give players an affordable and more readily available alternative to owning a plot of land, but many still decried them for their tiny size and comparatively limited functionality (outdoor housing items can't be used in apartments, including large gardens), plus apartments cannot have multiple users living in them like a house can, which is one of the main reasons people want a house in game. The housing timer, which was put into place to help players try and get a house, has done little to alleviate the issue because of the steep timer on it that usually goes for hours, incentivizing players to remain up for hours and essentially camp outside so that they always can bid on it before others can, and less scrupulous players still managed to find a way to sell their plots by exploiting company housing. The developers intermittently add more wards, increasing the number of available plots, but this has proven to be little more than a stopgap measure: the new plots tend to be filled up quickly, especially on high-population servers. - The targeting system, especially in wide-open areas with a lot of enemies spread out but still within targeting or especially attacking distance. Short of just using the mouse to directly click on enemies to target them in keyboard and mouse controls, it opens up way too many opportunities to pull more enemies than your group can handle because of the game's odd tendency, no matter what you've set in the options, to respond to you pressing the target-change button by prioritizing an enemy on the far side of the room for no particular reason.
- Most MMORPGs and MMO-Adjacent games have a "Main arc" and every expansion has a series of quests after said main arc. And Final Fantasy XIV is no exception. Unfortunately, many of these will allow you to skip these if you joined later, which Final Fantasy XIV does not. This means that you are forced to undergo tedious arcs in between each expansion - which can take well over thirty plus hours. Newcomers in particular are forced to sit through an arc between the original endgame and Heavensward that even the developers admit took too long, while anyone who wants to play through with them feel like they are forced to purchase skips. While long-time players may not think this is as bad, it's worth pointing out that initially this stuff was released in pieces over the course of months or even years. Therefore, a lot of players were given time to cool down between the tedious filler things, whereas newcomers will go through it all at once. The "fixes" to A Realm Reborn and the 7th Astral Era made some feel this does very little to make the experience better for alts or newcomers, especially since there is no way short of paying to skip this. The "Waking Sands" issue in particular, which requires the player to frequently return to a building which has no quick and easy way to get to it (either teleporting to Horizon and running from there, or teleporting to Limsa Lominsa and taking the ferry from near the Arcanists' Guild). The fix for this was for a few MSQ quests to award consumable items that immediately teleport you to the Waking Sands (since just plopping an Aetheryte Crystal in the town would break one of the main story beats of the 2.1 content).
- The Bozja relic questline will tire quite a few players that attempt to get the best weapons of the game, until Endwalker comes around. These weapons were released several months after the release of the last raiding tier, meaning that people raiding for a while will not need these weapons, that they are mostly for vanity/glamour purposes and for people who join very, very late into raiding. As usual, getting these weapons require grinding items for hours, if not days, depending on the stage you are on, and you will need to progress through the Bozja storyline, otherwise your progression will be locked, adding another barrier to the whole process. Remember Atma farming? It is worse here:
- The very first step is easy enough, as you only need a few poetics to get a shiny ilvl 485 Resistance weapon. Sadly, this is the only easy step, as players will need to face the same plague many faced before for A Realm Reborn relics: Atma farming. Augmenting your weapon to ilvl 500 requires you to farm a total of 60 tokens, either from Bozja Southern Front (where drops are not guaranteed), either from Heavensward FATEs (where drops are, thankfully, guaranteed). Whichever method you prefer, you will spend a few hours going around in circles before getting enough tokens. Transforming your weapon into the Recollection stage, in which your weapon stays at ilvl 500, will require you to get 6 Bitter Memory of the Dying, through Leveling roulette (once per day, guaranteed drop), level 60 dungeons (guaranteed, but only if you run them unsynced), or, once again, fight in Bozja, where the drops are random. A bit tedious, but not that bad. The grind toughens a bit for Law's Order weapons, ilvl 510, as you need 15 Loathsome Memories of the Dying. These can be acquired through Crystal Tower alliance raid (one per run), beating Castrum Lacus Litore's last boss (5 tokens per run thanks to an update), or winning Critical Engagement in Bozja. Thanks to Castrum's upgraded rewards, this grind is actually tolerable, but that peace won't last.
- While you need to do the next step only once, this one is notable for being the first of the really tedious ones: you will need a total of 36 tokens, which can only be acquired through Gyr Abania or Far East FATEs (drops are not guaranteed), or through Shadow of Mhach or Return to Ivalice alliance raids. Considering a single raid run takes 30 minutes on average, most players will prefer farming the FATEs, but the low drop rates are bound to discourage many players.
- Now comes the most abominable part for many. To get your shiny Law's Order ilvl 515 weapon, you need 15 Timeworn Artifacts, that you can only get from two places: Delubrum Reginae, well-known for being a chore to go through because most players are stingy with their lost actions and turn what could be a 20 minutes raid into a 45 minutes slog, with only one guaranteed drop gotten at the end of this ordeal, or Palace of the Dead, an abandoned content that no one runs anymore, which has its own Scrappy Mechanic entry, and whose reward is not guaranteed unless you are running floors 151 to 200, and getting there will require a dedicated team willing to spend hours in this content. You will be stuck on this stage for a while. Thankfully, the farming was made less tedious thanks to a later patch, released after the latest stage was introduced, upping the number of Timeworn Artifacts from Delubrum from 1 to 3 drops per run. While running Delubrum will still take a while, this stage became more tolerable, and has become the best way to complete both this stage and the last one, as long as you manage to do speedruns (with each run taking roughly 15 to 20min). Delubrum Reginae also its own scrappy mechanic where if you get hit by an attack that can be dodged, you'll get slapped with a Twice-Come Ruin debuff that lasts two minutes. Getting hit again while the debuff is still up will hit you with a Doom debuff that lasts 2 seconds and then kills you. Nothing spells frustration than seeing your mettle getting drained for every death due to mistakes, especially for players who are new to the duty and don't know the mechanics.
- Like one of the previous stage, this one only needs to be done once, but buckle up, because you are in for one hell of a grind: you will need a total of 180 tokens, either through, you guessed it, FATEs from the new Bozja area, Zadnor, Critical Engagement from the same area, or through the Heavensward, Stormblood or Shadowbringers 8-player raids, depending on which token you need. Every drop is guaranteed, but the sheer number of items will take you quite a while. By comparison, the final stage, which needs to be repeated for each weapon, is much easier, as you need 15 tokens that you can get from a lot of different sources, including Dalriada (new Bozja raid, which award 3 tokens per run), Delubrum Reginae (2 per run), level 70 dungeons (one per run) or Heaven On High (that almost no one runs anymore). The last stretch is thanksfully merciful, but many players who completed their first weapon decide to abandon making another one because of the aforementioned Delubrum/Palace of the Dead stage.
- The Freecure trait. Obtained on White Mage around/at the same level as getting Cure 2, the trait's function is that using Cure 1 has a 15% chance to make the next cast of Cure 2 free. While it seems innocuous, this trait is infamous among tanks and healers alike for being a complete newb trap, encouraging a playstyle in which a WHM spends all their time spamming a weak heal to fish for a weak and RNG-based synergy. This playstyle gets worse really fast, as WHM gets not only more and more free Cooldown-based spells to use, but gets abilities to make Mana almost a complete non-issue, which most of the dungeons are built around the healers using. Despite all of this, many WHMs even at high levels or the level cap choose to just spam Cure 1(maybe with a Regen cast), and save anything else as a panic button, slowing the pace of a run to a crawl, as well as (quite ironically) making even single pack pulls a lot riskier.
