Final Fantasy XIV

The patch 4.5 preview site is now live. The Main Story apparently involves The Empire beginning its counterattack to reclaim Ala Mhigo, and potentially that more of the Scions are being "Called", not much else just yet.

We also know where Blue Magic's gonna come from, it's an art that was developed in the New World by a "a mage of questionable character" who's probably gonna come across as a Snake Oil Salesman. Hopefully the bit about him SELLING the soul crystals to the highest bidder is just a cover and the job isn't actually gonna be cash-gated.

I also missed if they ever outright dropped the date, but it's gonna be "early January" closer to the new year, instead of closer to February like 2.5 and 3.5

Edited by NaraNumas on Dec 13th 2018 at 1:09:47 PM

As said, January 8 likely. Normal gap would make the patch fall on January 1, which is a no-go.

But either way, the LL will have the trailer and release date.

Edited by arahman56 on Dec 13th 2018 at 12:15:58 PM

also in the recent ff14 crossover event in ff15 theres a moment where noctis seems to dissapear for a bit and when he comes back he was all "i think i was dreaming"

wouldnt be surprised if the ff14 side of the crossover is soon

That's what I took that to imply as well.

I forgot the event was even a thing

They haven't talked at all about what we're getting on the XIV side of things so it'd been kinda eh, especially with how XV fans are pretty (rightfully) upset the crossover is still happening when the project's getting shuttered and the 3 remaining DLC being canned.

The festive event this year is a lot of fun! Aside from the usual cheer up story, you get to conduct a choir, ala Theatrhythm Final Fantasy.

I hope Thancred, Y'shtola, and Urianger are having a nice Starlight.

I hope BLU has a reallll good one next year :B

BLU's Christmas gift next year is being able to level to 70

January 8th release date confirmed, and getting a pre-Christmas Live-Letter later this morning in the early AM PST.

Fran confirmed

Fran is in the Ivalice raid!

Edited by lycropath on Dec 21st 2018 at 1:29:48 AM

"You will be the capstone of this world, I the anchor and ???" Did anyone else make out that last word clearly? Char? Shar? Chart?

As an aside, these cliffhangers are going to kill me ._.

Edited by LittleMako on Dec 21st 2018 at 3:30:51 AM

Shard I think?

Edited by lycropath on Dec 21st 2018 at 3:47:27 AM

Possible, but it doesn't really fit the architectural metaphor being used there, which is wh I'm leaning towards "chart".

Edited by LittleMako on Dec 21st 2018 at 4:16:32 AM

On a different note, anyone purposely screw up the mini game for this year's seasonal event?

If by purposefully you mean "Try to get the timing of the harder rhythm mini-game and watch as it went significantly faster and with jankier inputs that ignored most of what I was doing the first time", then yes.

So it's a bit late because of the season, but I managed to gather bullet points of all the Blue Mage info from the live letter.

Blue Mages have an assigned spell called "Learning" that they use in combat, they have to turn Learning on and then watch the spell cast to learn it, getting hit isn't necessary, but you need to see it come out. If it's a group with multiple blue mages and one blue mage learns the spell, every blue mage in the party will learn it to encourage BLU playing together.

Spells will have varying percent chances of being learned after witnessing them being cast, which is also part of why grouping with fellow BLU is heavily recommended, as it gives you four/eight dice rolls (Yoshida got every Learn first try in the Live Letter, and had to playfully clarify no, he was not tilting the RNG, just getting lucky).

BLU gets the same XP from FATE farming as any other job, but killing non-fate associated monsters will be more XP in the long term to keep them from neglecting going out to Learn in favor of just train riding to 50.

Mighty Guard is a tank stance that lowers damage taken and damage done, so if they have a frequently usable healing spell, 4-8 man BLU only parties are going to be viable to dip into dungeons, raids and trials to attempt to learn dungeon boss and primal spells.

Masked Carnival is just going to be for bragging rights and getting your feet wet with the class at first, later on with level cap increases they may make new challenges much harder and add mounts/gear/titles from completing it all.

Some spells won't be learnable until 60/70, Level 5 Death was mentioned as needing to wait for the increase to 60 because it comes from Gubal Library.

One of the spells shown is the apkallu fish spit, it does weak damage but has a 5 second silence, probably because the enemy is too flabbergasted to speak because you just beaned them with a tuna. Bad Breath (15 seconds of all status debuff, 30s of a poison around the potency of Miasma), Aqua Shot (high base potency), 1000 needles (LONG 6 second cast to do a fixed 1000 AoE damage, which at 50 without stat inflation is high) and Ice Bow (strong frontal cleave, though the damage was inhibited by Yoshi-P having Might Guardup) were also shown with their potencies and effects.

Some spells will increase the damage done by other spells, and stronger spells cost more MP, so Blue Mage will still need a rotation of some form, but it's more freeform than other jobs in the game, in a way it sounds similar to the Skillchain system from XI where using certain elemental-aspected attacks would make a complimenting element then do more damage.

For all the salt and worry, it sounds like BLU is going to be super fun in its own way, I'm going to be really looking forward to playing it.

Edited by NaraNumas on Dec 26th 2018 at 12:55:33 PM

I was afraid it might just a spattering of buffs with some generic elemental spells but it sounds like the spell selection is going to be diverse enough that you can mix and match to fill at least two different roles at a time to some degree of efficacy.

So I'll give it a shot this January. At least they were up front about the Carnival not being much at first, but that won't stop people from being upset about it.

I don't think you needed extra incentive to have a party of eight BLU killing monsters for magic, but that does make things more convenient.

Yoshida dropped in on the Shinryu server to pug OS12S for New Years, and did a short QA Some highlights for TL:DR purposes:

Q. Any plans on adding character creation options to the current races?

Yoshida: Our hands are currently full with the new race/races lol. (Edited: he said 新種族 and this can be both one or more.)

Q. Any plans on letting us place the glamour wardrobe in our houses?

Yoshida: After we increase the capacity of the wardrobe itself, we'd like to work on adding locations. So Glamour Plate limit increasing, then working on making housing item wardrobes.

Q. Is Y'shtola joining smash bros?

Yoshida: That's up to Sakurai lol. (the proposal's been made? May be reading between lines that aren't there.)

Edited by NaraNumas on Dec 31st 2018 at 1:25:13 PM

So I gotten the 1.0 benchmark and ran it for shits and giggles. My rig got a score of 8000+, which probably would be far lower if I ran the benchmark on the rig I had years ago. That being said, the lighting and effects DO look quite a bit better than what we got now, but the textures don't really seem to be much better than the textures in the game now other than a bit less pixel-like.

New years greetings from FFXIV.

Also, a new passage:

Destinies ordained are not man's to change.

But history's chain may he yet disclaim.

As scion joins with stock of withered bark.

So we, defying doom, embrace the Dark.

-From an anachronistic journal. author unknown

Edited by arahman56 on Dec 31st 2018 at 10:50:03 AM

Sounds like some have joined the Ascians in the past to restore balance.