Final Fantasy XIV

I'm late on the Valens thing, but I recently played through the Werlyt quests and the thing that came to my mind were those manga where the protagonist unleashes bloody vengeance on everyone who wronged him. In those manga the primary reason you can even root for the protagonist is that literally every other person in the story is worse.

Basically, yeah. I've already hammered it enough, but it's just, ugh. I understand wanting to step away from the whole "meet me in my quarters later" Gaius they presented him as in ARR - new writer, new and better direction - but framing it as "what, don't be silly, Gaius doesn't abuse war orphans! This guy abuses Gaius's war orphans!" makes the saving throw feel very obvious.

If they had included some lines earlier on, when Alphinaud meets him in the Burn, asking Maxima for updates or maybe hearing from Lancer Guy that they couldn't get in contact, it would have felt less sudden for Gaius to suddenly have a loving family for the sole purpose of killing them off for pathos.

That's one of the reasons it is hard to include main characters in side arcs, especially on a large story with multiple writers.

I often see ARR as a beta, in which some things were kept, and others, such as Gaius bedding Livia, were ditched (plus it makes both of them look more interesting). With that in mind, Werlyt is fine, and Valens is a very good foil to show Gaius that he has to own his past and cannot brush it away without consequences or responsibilities.

Plus honestly Gaius is not really the kind of dude to overly share his personal history, doubly so if he's ashamed of it (even if he does not admit it).

Edited by Bexlerfu on Sep 12th 2022 at 9:30:24 PM

And after checking, the only haircut with a hairband is 2B's, and you can't change the ribbon color anyway.

Boo Squeenix, Boo!

One of the default hairstyled have a hairband. I know because I created a lala alt with that hairstyle. The hairband stays white regardless of hair color, though.

My headcanon is the scene where Gaius tells Livia to meet him in his chambers is so he can take his helmet off and talk with her one on one.

I think this is Lala-only. Default hairstyles vary from race to race.

giving her a debriefing, nudge nudge wink wink

{No thanks.}

https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/nkd2w5/prae_for_her_sanity/

This was my take for what Gaius did to her.

P8S is getting nerfed

PLD and WAR also got a ton of potency buffs, but from what I've been told it's apparently still not enough to close the DPS gap between them and the other tanks. And MCH continues to suffer for no reason on top of that.

Everything else is bug fixes.

Edited by Karxrida on Sep 12th 2022 at 7:48:30 AM

Man, investing in classes is always going to be a cluster fuck.

I guess Gunbreaker is safe for the foreseeable future.

The dynamic resolution option got fixed it seems.

Invest in WHM, SAM, and DRK and you'll never be sad.

Edited by Silentedge89 on Sep 12th 2022 at 11:08:12 AM

Until Stormblood happens, you lose your single mechanic tied to bar management, or... whatever DRK mains get salty about happens, I guess.

I think I have heard complaints from all jobs except NIN and GNB at some point regarding balance. Maybe AST too?

There always are balance issues. This time it probably was a bit more notable since they quickfixed it.

But some people mentioned that since huge hitbox bosses are common now, melee DPS are having a great time compared to ranged.

Oh yeah that is true. Maybe during Sh B you'll be sad if you play melee DPS lol.

Scholar is an especially weird one, because every time a new expansion happens, Scholar mains bitch SO MUCH but when the dust settles it's pretty consistently the strongest healer in the game

I swear there were memes about Scholar "just" being able to make everyone run faster at level 90.

Even though by now from what I heard it's pretty much agreed it's the best lv 90 healer spell due to the excellent mitigation it provides. It's just not as flashy as Litany of the Bell (which admittedly is growing on me).

Scholar's "problem" is that Eos' existence means they have a much more complete kit than other healers since level 30. So they don't get shiny new toys, because they don't need them. It's like a kid who got five years worth of presents on the same Christmas, and who complains the next year because it didn't get anything.

Edited by Bexlerfu on Sep 13th 2022 at 11:04:09 AM

I did the level 90 trial/solo duty as a Scholar (I did most of the MSQ as a Summoner, but switched over cuz the group I was in needed a healer)

and they couldn't even hurt me, it was insane

I also remember Expedience getting nerfed IMMEDIATELY because that's how powerful it was at release.

When Expedience was revealed and people were bitching about it I was in my corner like "wait this is great why are people complaining".

DRK is in a great place right now. Only change I'd make is having Unmend be a weaponskill instead of a spell so the different GCD cooldowns don't fuck with your rotation. Also maybe alter the cooldown for Salted Earth because 90 seconds is awkward.

Edited by Karxrida on Sep 13th 2022 at 6:30:29 AM

Currently, the jobs that are completely justified in their complaints are Paladin and Machinist

The main problems with Scholar are

1. Much of the job's power is tied to a pet whose controls have always been, to use the academic phrase, jank as all fuck, and only in the current expansion pack has this been meaningfully addressed (by making the fairy's abilities "originate" from the player themselves, fully reducing the fairy to a dumb Regen).

2. Major parts of the job's kit actively conflict with one another. Here's Dissipation: three Aetherflow charges and a buff to your casted heals (ignore the fact that you're not supposed to be casting anything but damage spells unless you are a Bad Healer Who Should Feel Bad) in return for completely locking out your fairy! Oh, and here's Fey Union, which obviously you can't use at the same time as Dissipation, but also you can't charge the gauge if you actually spend any of those charges that Dissipation gave you until your fairy comes back! Still not happy? Fine, here's Summon Seraph, which... locks you out of both of those things!

For most of the job's life, it was powerful enough and engaging enough for this to not really matter, but then Shadowbringers came along and stripped out the second part of Difficult, but Awesome, making the pet controls even worse (here, we turned the Whispering Dawn button into an oGCD ability that orders your fairy to do Whispering Dawn, which it hopefully WILL do within the next 30 seconds, and will go on cooldown either way, no need to thank us), and overall turning it into a healer who has to be played absolutely perfectly in order to outperform a WHM who's mashing keys at random while their eyes are fixed to whatever they're watching on their second monitor.

Obviously, the job is better now than it was in 5.x, but that's still a pretty low bar to clear.

(also, the loss of out-of-combat Aetherflow was, and remains, the unkindest cut of them all)

Edited by Reflextion on Sep 13th 2022 at 10:48:04 AM

I've spent literal years arguing that the pet controls in this game are awful, and it's really telling that Summoner's big rework involved killing the pet as an entity at all and Scholar is well on its way to doing the same.