**OFFICIAL** FFXIV:ARR Thread

[PowerYoga]

I'd keep an eye on the atmas. After you farm 12 (takes about 20 hours of game time) you need to farm tomes. I actually recommend getting your atmas asap since you'll have many weeks to fill out tomes and 1500 is not a trivial amount to farm per book. If you go at a leisurely pace you will for sure hit the myth cap multiple times before you get your atmas.

I'm only on my 2nd book now, but I can see this being a huge time sink that'll keep my myth tomes occupied for the coming weeks.

 

[darkewaffle]

I just can't see the point yet. There's too much other stuff I'd rather be doing than farming FATEs with a level 50 class for a non-upgrade lol - even though seals are more useful now, they're not so useful that I really care about them yet either.

Got my Artisan Glasses pretty easily with carpenter. Going to work on nabbing the rest of the Master books, a little disappointed to see Master crafting (or so it seems without actually seeing them all yet) basically 'weighted' so heavily towards the same crafts again - cloth/leather/armor look to be the most applicable, and the other five not particularly useful.

It's subtle, but the game is a lot more fun to look at now with the addition of Glamours, more vanity appearance pieces, new equipment and dyes. I'm examining people all the time, it's neat.

 

[PowerYoga]

Well, I'm looking at it from the point of view of needing to farm 1500 myth per book, which is something you'll be doing on a weekly basis to cap soldiery tomes anyway. If you fill up on myth and its not being used on atmas, you'll just be gearing up secondary and tertiary alts which may or may not be what you want to do.

I'll agree there's a lot more to do and the farming is a chore and mindlessly numbing, so if you're not raiding or bashing heads on the hardest contents it's not really a big deal as they're bound to nerf it eventually in another 2-3 patches.

 

[cbrunny]

Farming atmas is the absolute dumbest and most annoyingly frustrating component of any game i've ever played. Seriously, I don't want to play anymore because of how ridiculously low the drop rate is. I've just capped my GC seals AGAIN trying to get these friggin stones and I have THREE to show for it. 20 hours? no way. I've easily logged well over 20 hours farming atma exclusively and have THREE STONES. It's absolute garbage. Pure and simple, I'm not doing it until they nerf it, and I'll never do anything else that contains RNG again.

 

[darkewaffle]

Got my Artisan LW tool and managed to HQ a saurian leather and then HQ bard boots for myself - it was definitely 'closer' (or had a larger margin of error) than I would have liked. I kind of charged in expecting my progress/quality increases to be similar to those gained on the 'trial' items, but it's not even close - particularly not for progress. I'm quite happy to see that though, I'll have to think about it more going forward. (If I ever solo my dead FC to Rank8 those buffs certainly won't hurt either...)

Also the crafts are a bit more 'equally' useful than I initially thought. ARM needs ingots that only BS can make and WVR/LTW need 'putty' that only alch can make. A little arbitrary but it works in making more crafts practical. Long road to getting all those tools done lol.

Ran a bunch of coil over the weekend - was surprised to see the echo buff applied no matter what, I expected it to work like trials. I kind of wish it did, but I guess it is just farm content now basically.

 

[PowerYoga]

Farming atmas is the absolute dumbest and most annoyingly frustrating component of any game i've ever played. Seriously, I don't want to play anymore because of how ridiculously low the drop rate is. I've just capped my GC seals AGAIN trying to get these friggin stones and I have THREE to show for it. 20 hours? no way. I've easily logged well over 20 hours farming atma exclusively and have THREE STONES. It's absolute garbage. Pure and simple, I'm not doing it until they nerf it, and I'll never do anything else that contains RNG again.

I've had more luck moving around every 45 minutes or so to different grounds until I get one. My LS mates swears by this method and after I started doing it I got the rest of my atma drops (3x) in under 2 hours. Before that I was bashing my head in southern thalanan for about 5 hours with no luck. It may just be confirmation bias, but at least you don't go crazy looking at the same place if you switch every once in a while.

Finished my 3rd book and farming myth for my 4th, now that's a chore as well... at least I got lots of 1 star mats.

 

[darkewaffle]

I can't tell if people are doing poorly at X primals because they're lazy from the echo or the people that know how to do it have simply moved on lol. I've jumped in a couple Ifrit X groups just for the hell of it since I'd like to finish my Cognitome but man it's ugly. Even had a group that failed to kill all the nails in wave 2 with +10/15% echo.

Got my artisan weaver tool as well, two down!

 

[PowerYoga]

there's no reason to do x primals anymore. Most people don't bother since levi weapons are better than the i90 primal weapons and you can get better accessories with the soldier tomes.

 

[cbrunny]

People that know how have moved on. Those that haven't done it yet are the only ones left. Hopefully with 2.28 they add another roulette for it and help out those that are stuck.

 

[tedrodai]

Yeah, hopefully they'll give everyone reasons to revisit them. I figured they would be included in the relic weapons upgrade quests somehow, but I guessed wrong. I might be interested in trying for the mounts when everyone has lv110+ and they can be done quicker and more people can be carried. But few people have the desire to do them atm.

There's no way I'd do a extreme roulette til people have greatly out-geared those fights. Talk about frustrating content for random groups. JP servers DF apparently works though (at least more often than non-JP)

 

[nageov3t]

FF:ARR is on sale for $15 @ NewEgg this week... decided to bite the bullet and buy it.

I've been debating between trying this game or ESO, but the sale clinched it. any suggestions on a newb-friendly starting class/role/whatever?

 

[cbrunny]

The whole game is pretty noob friendly to be honest. It's the only true MMO i've ever played. If you're in the same boat as me, I'd recommend starting as a DPS class. I have played all dps classes and vastly prefer Archer/Bard to the others, with my second preference being Summoner. Many players hate summoner though. The nice thing is you can try them all as you move through the game.

My least favourite class is Thaumaturge/BLM, with Lancer/Dragoon being my second least fav. So I guess it's like this:

1. Archer (Bard)
2. Arcanist (Summoner)
3. Pugilist (Monk)
4. Lancer (Dragoon)
5. Thaumaturge (Black Mage)

But, its important to realize that just as easily as I put this list together, other users could flip it upside down entirely. Or have some random combination. It really is all about preference and none of the DPS classes play alike. But as I said, you get to play them all.

 

[tedrodai]

Yeah dps (and Bard) is probably the most newb friendly role, but there's also more of them and it can sometimes take longer to get in groups. Healers generally find it a little easter to get groups and tanks have it easiest of all.

From the base classes, you have gladiator and marauder ->tanks, conjurer ->healer, and everything else is dps. However, arcanist is the only class that can currently choose from 2 jobs, and one of those is the 2nd healer job (Scholar). Jobs are acquired at level 30.

And your character can switch between any class/job at any time (outside of battle).

 

[darkewaffle]

Got my alchemist tool, that one was kind of a pain since you either have to overpay for HQ materials or deal with a pretty mediocre HQ rate unless you get a lucky good/excellent.

It probably varies by server but aside from making my own bard boots, I haven't done any 3star crafting and have yet to feel really compelled to do so. The profit margin and the sales volume simply isn't that good - I'm actually doing pretty well just selling 2star stuff still whenever I find cheap materials/weapon parts on the AH.

 

[nageov3t]

really enjoying the game so far, just hit level 15 on my archer :thumbsup:

only real major complaint is crafting... kind of annoying that it feels like it's something you have to do *instead* of progressing through your main class, rather while something you do while progressing, like any other game.

 

[darkewaffle]

Far from it. In fact one of the more common complaints with crafting is that crafters primarily only end up making things for other crafters. It's not especially applicable to PvE except at max level (to some extent) and really is only useful to combat classes to 'fill in' gaps where you may not have gotten a drop in a while.

 

[tedrodai]

I did finally decide to work towards the new crafting gear, but I'm not spending gil on it, cause it's a real low priority. So it's going to take a while. I'm getting close to having all the mats needed for my 1st book (alchemy). Here's hoping the unspoiled node mats required for the tools/etc don't make me lose interest again.

 

[PowerYoga]

only real major complaint is crafting... kind of annoying that it feels like it's something you have to do *instead* of progressing through your main class, rather while something you do while progressing, like any other game.

Where did you get that impression? You get free gear for your first main more or less and there's no need to craft anything at all.

 

[darkewaffle]

Haven't gotten to play quite as much lately as I would like but still got into a T5 progression/practice group over the weekend with my Warrior.

I have to say it's impressive people were doing that successfully without the Echo buff, it's not the most mechanically difficult fight but it is tuned extremely tightly. I'm sure my group wasn't exactly super proficient at their classes but TT still deals some intense damage and the DPS check on the big snake is no joke. Definitely a well done fight, evident even now. Made it into twisters a few times, not a bad first experience.

Also myth mats dropping down to ~50-65k each as opposed to 80-90k a few weeks ago, definitely makes 3* crafting much more attractive and I'm finding myself doing more and more of it finally.

 

[PowerYoga]

You'd get an extra conflag cycle prior to the echo buff, nothing extreme about it really. The timer to beat is the enrage timer, which you have plenty of time for even with an extra conflag cycle. The loss of DPS on the big snake is offset by the fact that you'd have LB3 due to all the extra healing/damage, so you can meteor it along with the 2 small snakes. Right now most groups only get LB2 due to how fast twin goes down from the +30% boost.

The dreadknights are a bigger DPS check than the big snake imo.

The most difficult part of t5 is divebombs and twisters and both are fairly mechanical in nature, and its a big "don't fuck up or you'll likely wipe" mechanic prior to the echo buff. The good part about mechanical fights is once you get some practice in, you'll start handling it better and you can make some real progress with fixing rotations, when do pop cooldowns, etc.

 

[tedrodai]

Maybe that's a tank's point of view. But it really it depends on the group as to what is hardest about the fight. In my experience, people have had a harder time getting past the big snake than the dreadknights. And the dps has proved to be a problem more often than divebombs/twisters. Every phase takes some practice though, that's for sure, though the last phase is thankfully not as hard as the several before it.

 

[PowerYoga]

DPS is always a problem when you're learning new phases. You don't know how to manage your rotation, when to put up dots, when to pop CDs, etc. Once you get pass the "learning" part of the phase the DPS will naturally pick up as people figure out rotations and how much they can DPS without getting gibbed. Tanks know when you're not killing stuff fast enough, trust me. (or killing stuff so fast you're skipping phases, for example turn 8)

There would only be a problem with DPS if you don't know when divebombs are coming so you're not dpsing, or if you're screwing up the mechanics of the fight by letting disseminate drop off by killing the small snake too slowly. If you don't have 2 stacks coming out of the 2nd set of divebombs and 4 stacks after LB, you're doing something wrong.

If your DPs is so low that you can't kill the snakes fast enough, you'd have LB3 so you can just meteor the last pack easily. You'd also eat another round of conflags if that's the case.

 

[tedrodai]

I guess I'm tryin to say that a bad DPS player (or at least someone who hasn't done their homework to understand how to maximize their rotation/etc) was hard to carry in t5 pre-echo, even with a full ilv90 group. Same for a tank/healer really, but there's twice as many DPS in the group as any other role, so it showed up a lot when I was attempting t5. It was the top-tier fight, and your DPS needed to be on top of things on conflags/snakes -- generally saw if the group could get past the big snake, DPS wasn't going to be a problem at all--that meant that at least your DPS knew how to maximize dps when they're comfortable.

Anyways, it's a fun fight, as is t6/7 so far...they're definitely a step up in difficulty over the 1st coil.

 

[PowerYoga]

Turn 6 and 7 are both hard dps checks. I don't feel like it's something easily puggable tbh.

 

[darkewaffle]

Ran Stone Vigil twice last night levelling pally, both times me and a black mage ended up duoing Isgebind for like the last 40-50% of her health because everyone else kept dying. Man, what a trip.

Had some groups recently with some serious trouble in Hard Garuda through Duty Roulette Trial too, it's almost unbelievable sometimes lol.