Heavensward Thoughts

So I've done these for each of the first two parts of FFXIV, so I figured I might as well continue with impressions and thoughts of Heavensward.

For those that maybe haven't read anything I've done (or poked into my stream!), I've been playing through the game as a White Mage Lalafel. It just generally suits my playstyle and I like it a lot.

Storywise, it's a remarkable improvement from even the second half of ARR. I said it at the end of ARR but it felt like the only real character you'd 100% miss was Thancred. I can't say I really missed Yda, Daphne (Minfillia) or the rest of them. It's not that the characters were irredeemable, just that they really didn't have a great impact on the rest of the story. Alphinaud is still great (he's probably the character that would be the protagonist if this were a more traditional FF), Tataru is likable and grounds the story and Y'shtola... is in a fighting game. I dunno, I don't feel particularly strongly about her although having her be blind and see through magic does at least elevate her coolness factor.

The new characters though really help the expansion shine. Estinien and Iceheart's dynamic is probably the best part of the new story - honestly my only major complaint is that I don't think Iceheart needed to die. I did half expect some kind of romance plot between them which honestly would have been a cool way to end the storyline for now - Iceheart now being a good guy and Estinien being basically the reincarnation of Nidhogg, essentially switching sides. Aymeric and Lucia are also more than adequate replacements for the "authority" side, Lucia being related to probably the only villain in ARR that has an active role also works well I feel - easily something I'd like to see them build on in the future. The additional gap between ARR and Heavensward shows here and honestly it's better for it.

The way the Ul'dah storyline "wraps" is also an interesting take. I guess by the necessity of being an MMO, they can't really have a major city state in a "civil war" unless it were to be a server wide special event, since you can't lock people out of a major city in game for an extended period of time (I can only imagine the frustration if you wanted to turn in for a job quest in the city as well), but it still would have been super cool to have a dungeon that's just you running through the city taking down rebels to get to rescue Nanamo or something. I'm sure there's more to come and I will give them credit - these are probably some of the most realistic politics I've seen in a video game. It feels 2020 in an almost eerie way.

Dungeon wise... I feel like there should have been more of them given the time gap? Base Heavensward has 5 dungeons and 3 trials, which is about half the base game on Dungeon count in the MSQs. Granted, I think the dungeon quality is better than it was which counts for something and difficulty is a weird thing to approach with MSQ dungeons as well - there's like a level where it needs to be completable by everyone that plays it but you don't want to make it easy either. Of them, I'd say The Vault was my favorite since it's the most unique flavor-wise. I'm still not a huge fan of trials overall. I think it's partially due to playing as a healer in them being a bit of an unfortunate experience. To make a boss, they basically have to throw a lot of one shots or easy ways to kill you in them or the boss gets shredded. There's not a lot of in between - either the healer dies and the party wipes or the fight is won. The game sorely needs Phoenix Downs as an in combat item too - putting the burden of revival solely on healers or *maybe* a summoner just kinda puts even more pressure on them. Especially since there's a pretty standard 7.5 second cast time, you wouldn't see the tank able to use them consistently. I dunno, I just feel like it'd lead to fewer bad feels moments for the healer which is already a stressful role.

Deeper into combat and gameplay, this is also when they started trying to diversify and make classes more interesting and honestly, it couldn't have come soon enough. Admittedly, I don't think the Lily system is perfect - time in combat isn't really a great metric since I feel like ideally, you'd want a system that rewards a player for playing well and reinforcing smart gameplay. Rewarding combat time specifically means you're rewarding them not adding DPS rotations or bad teammates? I'd tie it to either offensive spell casts or healing spell casts as essentially a refund mechanic. But regardless, adding another resource to manage, especially with the option to add more uses in the future was a good thing and a good way to up the skill expression in the class - especially given how simple the damage rotation is for WHM.

The one thing I don't know how to feel about is both the biggest boon to the class and arguably it's biggest weakness. Assize is... a spell. It does literally everything. It's the classes's biggest nuke, it's instant cast, it heals, it probably gets you a significant other if you don't already have one. About the only downside is the fact it's centered on the character which forces the WHM in theory to run in occasionally - smart game design actually, making the class that needs to play safe play somewhat risky to contribute damage is great. It's also incredibly overloaded. It feels a lot like they thought WHM came out of ARR undertuned relative to the other classes but because ARR wasn't tuned for large redistribution of the power budget, they kinda threw it all onto 1 attack. It's kinda a similar flaw I'd argue to Holy, which is also a huge amount of the WHM power budget, as an AOE nuke with upside where the downside is the inability to cast at range. I dunno. It's strong but also doesn't feel as rewarding as I think it's capable of doing and also should 100% have been tied to the lily system.

As far as the rest of things go, I'm still not, like 250 hours in, sold on MMO style combat fully although I can see how it developed. I'm sure people that listen to me stream have said I'm not a huge fan of most MMO combat because combat and positioning don't really matter - kiting tends to be awkward and low if any reward. At this point I can say that positioning does matter but not necessarily in the way I'd expect a 3D action focused game to work. Essentially, what the autoattack system does is it guarantees damage onto PCs in a specific way. And that damage is unavoidable, cannot be outplayed and can only be mitigated. Thus, it makes sense to have a tank be closest, mitigate the damage and specialize in absorbing the unmitigatable damage. This isn't possible in traditional JRPGs either - if a character is incapable of taking a hit, they're not going to see any play whatsoever. Naturally if one person is taking damage, someone else is best off optimizing to heal and remove the damage, leading the other characters free to pummel. I will say the arbitrary "I'm the tank and I hit you so you have to hit me" thing isn't my favorite way to enforce it but it's effective enough and the game does have specific aggro patterns designed to target healers if possible because again, the healer dying or failiing is the only way the PC party really ever loses. Ironically, I'd say that if it were a game of League, the Healer is the closest thing to the ADC as the character that gives the team inevitability if they don't die.

One last thing - I ended up picking up lots of other jobs to fill time since I wasn't really sure if I wanted to or should click the "go live" button but also didn't want to play MSQs off stream. And I really really liked Astrologian so I ended up leveling it to 50 over the course of a few days. There's some good and bad to this. The worst thing, by far, is that you unlock this cool class with new abilities... and then to level it you immediately get forced down to level 16, 20, 27 etc where none of the things that separate you from the other classes exist. Astrologian at level 23 has differently named spells and a slightly different accelerant on spell casting. That's literally the entirety of the differences between it and Conjurer/WHM. And this was probably 80% of the Leveling duties I rolled with it. The weird problem this ends up creating then is that I'm leveling a class and not really learning how it plays well. I'm not developing the muscle memory and Astrologian feels like a high skill ceiling class that I wasn't even seeing the basics of. And this would be a universal problem - no job shows up below level 30. If I wanted to level, say Dark Knight, there would be a huge number of levels that would be nearly indistinguishable from playing as a Paladin I imagine. Maybe it's a problem unique to healers but I think that between levels 30 and 50, it'd be nice to try to make players only do duties that help them learn the new class and avoid awkward situations where they're level 42 and having to do Aurum Vale with minimal experience on their new class.

All that aside, Astrologian rules. Not sure if the swap will be permanent or not but the card gimmick is actually really involved in a good way. It also enforces what I call Window of Power gameplay which I absolutely love - essentially managing periods of time where your character is strong and weak and exploiting the former while minimizing the latter. See - stance change or morphing characters, install supers etc. It's funny because I think the flavor/lore around it is much less interesting but that aside, it's a cool class that I'm glad to have as an option. I think the only other thing is I have absolutely no idea how to use shields effectively in FFXIV but they do represent a cool gameplay option and alternative so I'm excited to be able to mess with them.

So that's that. Lots more to do, not sure if I should or if there would be interest in streaming the rest of Heavensward or the rest of the game but if you read this far, thanks for listening to a nerd ramble for way too long about random bs that comes to his mind that he's not remotely qualified to talk about.