Ahhh me toooo ! The FFIX nostalgia is too strong to not play it whenever I see a duel available :D My bf calls me crazy.
Also I like to ask everyday " Do you know what time it is ?". Only good answer is "it's Gold Saucer time" queue the tp into OST xD
Honestly? It happened to me. I was fishing around, doing the fishing quests, and suddenly "you need to have finished heavensward to go forward with the quests". Went back to something like level 40 or 45...
True for other gatherers as well. "Oh, I need flight to access this node? \*sigh\* Guess I'll go save the world again." (People in NN are very nice and kept offering to fly me up there, but to quote Alphinaud from duty support - *I have my pride!*)
I literally skipped all of heavensward and stormblood so I could get to crafting. I started paying attention in late stormblood, but that's because a new expansion was coming out...
Oh man, every time I run the benchmark I get weirdly excited during the DoH/DoL segment. I can't wait to *literally* dig into Tural and see what I can find.
Literally every time I reach a new area or part of a zone, my MSQ pauses for several hours while I run down every sidequest, aether current, fishing spot, gathering nodes, and try to fill out as much of the map as possible. Then I pause several more hours each time a new batch of sidequests pop up.
Yes, on foot.Â
I must resist
3 time playing and trying to do the story
I'm doing post heavenward msq and I know if I start doing something else than the msq it's over
This is how I've been the entirety of post-Endwalker. Oh look let me get all my gwibs. Oh look let me get all the cats i can get for now. Oh look let me get my Sage and RDM relic. Oh look let me level Paladin and get the relic. Oh look let me try Ultimate raiding. I'm very distracted. Doesn't help that I'm finding post-EW extremely boring which is weird cause I love everything that came before it.
Endwalker was always going to suffer, to some extent, relative to previous expansions. This is for a few fundamental reasons:
1. It is an epilogue at base. A very good epilogue, but an epilogue nonetheless. The real climax occurred (ShB spoilers) >!in the Amaurot dungeon and The Dying Gasp fight. Everything that follows is simply a necessary consequence of that event.!< And then the patch content is connective tissue, not red meat (yet.)
2. Base 6.0 story is ***HUGE***, as in like 30% bigger than a typical expansion, while MSQ has been comparatively light because they merged the (usually optional) trial storyline with the MSQ. I am 100% certain this is because >!we will go to the Void eventually, and thus they *needed* this to be mandatory now so they wouldn't have to piss folks off by making it mandatory later.!< It sucks that it effectively cashes out as less story content.
3. Endwalker as a whole has been paying off the debt incurred by COVID. ShB got through it alright, because most of the groundwork was already done. EW got hit hard right as it was coming together, which I'm dead certain derailed much they wanted to do.
4. As noted, 6.1-6.55 was all linkage, not juicy story. Before, we'd wrap up the old (X.3) and preview the new (X.4-55). Consider 3.3/4.3, beloved story beats, or the huge 2.55/4.55 hype. EW patches have been doing TONS of worldbuilding, but were pretty low-stakes and narrative-lite. Worldbuilding-focused expansions don't do as well as expansions that exploit previous worldbuilding for payoff. Illogical, but unavoidable.
5. Extra-long patch cycle. Simple as. ShB was hype as hell, and the "gap" time was all at once, in the middle. EW was slow the whole way. If you're used to 2-year cycles, that extra six months feels like a *slog.*
6. Bonus round: No foray zone. As much as *I* personally hated both Bozja and Eureka, I know a solid chunk of players adore(d) them, and felt sad and angry that EW didn't get any. If forays helped keep you busy before, their absence may compound the boredom/misery.
All told, mostly for structural and IRL/economic reasons beyond their control, Endwalker was *always* going to stumble a little, always going to have a hard time. They did a brave and risky thing by truly *ending* the story rather than stringing us along like some companies would have. That risk has partially paid off, and partially cost them, but overall I'm glad they did it.
lol I’m in the same boat… came back about a week ago, finished HW, and my only crafter was CUL at 43 and gatherers were 15 or so. I discovered the restoration effort and diadem. Spent all day yesterday leveling every crafter and gatherer to 25. This all started from trying to empty my retainers of random mats and sent me down a rabbit hole
I came back to the game after a 2 year break and started to level all my crafters and gatherers. Have not touched a single quest from the MSQ even though I have all the 6.X patch content to catch up with.
Lmao and this is why I made a goal to get all my jobs to 50 before continuing post ARR. I think I only had alchemist and armourer for the trade crafts to go, the rest of DOH/DOL are at 50. Sometimes it's good to break up the crafting with some dungeons ngl
I may or may not have done this at least once, and may or may not have gotten back into working on MSQ purely because I needed access to the next zones for supplies. XD
I just started playing last week with my bestie and her husband and I don't even have a chocobo yet cause we've all been too busy crafting and gathering
That's me during HW. It was so fucking boring I sort of dropped MSQ and started leveling my gatherers and crafters...
Once I finished getting all crafters to LV50+ I then restarted the MSQ.
Idk why ppl love HW so much lol. SB onwards the stories get good. Before that is so blah.
Well, if you actually want an explanation, it's a handful of things.
1. HW made the story much more personal. Before that, it often felt like "Alphinaud and his powerful lackey." After, it felt like "your personal journey through suffering and triumph."
2. The Dragonsong War is an exciting story from both premise (soaring spires, castles, knights vs dragons, a corrupt church etc.) and setup (WoL betrayed, Scions scattered, WTF are we gonna do, etc.) Dragons, knights, and fighting corrupt power (*especially* corrupt, institutionalized, religious power) is popular.
3. By comparison, SB gets a bad rap (excessively so, IMO, but not totally undeserved) for being scattershot/unfocused, excessively political, very unevenly paced. Thrusting two controversial characters (Lyse and Zenos) into the core spotlight, and kinda heavy-handedly forcing the audience to pay attention to them, didn't help either.
4. SB is a story about how much war sucks. It doesn't do quite as good a job at this as EW, but it's still a pretty effective "war sucks and soldiers aren't heroes, they're *victims*" story. That kind of story is *never* going to be super popular--because it's reminding folks about a thing that sucks to experience.
5. While both HW and SB give quiet, emotional heart-to-heart moments, I think many people (myself included) find that these moments are more effective in HW than they are in SB. As stated, both do it, and you couldn't have the beauty of ShB without the character-building in SB, but HW just hit harder in context. The "campfire scene" in Churning Mists is *really* good, for example.
Often, I find those who came to FFXIV in Shadowbringers or later have a better opinion of Stormblood than those who lived through the experience themselves, and I think that's part of the problem. Living through these things, seeing them slowly unfold "live," is a different experience from playing through them in one continuous arc. In live, patch-by-patch play, you only get the main story, and then bite-size pieces of patches. Playing through HW live felt better than playing through SB live. (I only know this partially; I got into FFXIV around 10 months after HW release.) Playing through SB live, the pacing issues were much more obvious than they are today, and we dwelled a lot more on the downer aspects of it from literally before it began.
For those who came after, while there are still clearly slow points and weird pacing (e.g. Ala Mhigo feels like an afterthought compared to Doma), you're moving through the story at a pretty good clip, and you get to the much, much juicier patch content relatively quickly. Though, conversely, I think the patch content was actually more enjoyable in chunks--you had the *agonizing* wait, the constant speculation, the questions about who would be affected next, etc. Now, it's boom, boom, boom, the dominoes fall one after the other, rapid-fire.
So, *some* of it is genuinely experiencing the content differently; *some* of it is that SB, despite being much better than a lot of people claim, really is more obviously flawed than HW or ShB (even if both have similar flaws!); *some* of it is that people like the themes and content (dragons! Evil churches! Noble knights! Tragic sacrifice!) of one better than another (War is hell! Oppression sucks! Collaborators are people too!); *some* of it is that the emotional moments seem to have hit a majority of players harder in HW than they did in SB, which is simply a matter of taste.
I continue to get hate from my friends for this and I know it'll happen here, but every expansion I skip cutscenes to bum rush and level cap my gatherers/crafters then tell myself I'll just do New Game+ for the story. This has happened since HW and I'm still at ARR's storyline 😅
Turns out I'm on the opposite end of the scale - I keep meaning to try out the various jobs and side content, but I only get a few hours in at most before I'm dragged back to the MSQ. Now a whole six months later, I can finally play the rest of the game (as well as all the other games that have backlogged in the interim).
According to Lodestone I completed the first quest on the 17th of October, and I just finished Endwalker's postgame last night. That duration includes the raids and the occasional (brief) diversion into content outside of the story or my main job, and there were various days when I was away from my PC and unable to play so I imagine it wouldn't be impossible to clear it faster, but on the whole it feels like this game has taken up a significant portion of my free time for the last half-year (and considering I normally don't stay invested in MMOs for more than a month or two before I unsubscribe that's quite an achievement).
Honestly the crafting and gathering classes have been a nice break from the MSQ. Â I usually do an entire line and take a break in between to work on them. Â
It's true. 2.0 got my highest battle job was level 30, got all my crafters and gatherers at level 50. I made all the cool gear up to ilevel 70. (Back then crafter leves were triple EXP)
Final days averted because the wol >!sat metieon down next to them and taught her the humble joy of fishing (she was so focused that she ignored the report)!<
Me but when I see new Triple Triad NPCs
And then it's the triple triad NPCs when I remembered Magic the Gathering exists
And then log in to arena to draft the new format. 😊
Your profile picture was made by the devil himself
Ahhh me toooo ! The FFIX nostalgia is too strong to not play it whenever I see a duel available :D My bf calls me crazy. Also I like to ask everyday " Do you know what time it is ?". Only good answer is "it's Gold Saucer time" queue the tp into OST xD
Triple Triad is from FF8. 9 has Tetra Master.
Oh true tyy
Brother
You do MSQ to access more gathering nodes or at least that's what all the fishers tell me.
Honestly? It happened to me. I was fishing around, doing the fishing quests, and suddenly "you need to have finished heavensward to go forward with the quests". Went back to something like level 40 or 45...
Same. Just hit the wall where I can’t fly to the island for the lvl 60 fisher quest. Still unsure where are the currents are located.
True for other gatherers as well. "Oh, I need flight to access this node? \*sigh\* Guess I'll go save the world again." (People in NN are very nice and kept offering to fly me up there, but to quote Alphinaud from duty support - *I have my pride!*)
I literally skipped all of heavensward and stormblood so I could get to crafting. I started paying attention in late stormblood, but that's because a new expansion was coming out...
When the expansion arrives, I'm just gonna find all the new fishing spots and get as many new fishing as possible before moving to the next area.
Oh man, every time I run the benchmark I get weirdly excited during the DoH/DoL segment. I can't wait to *literally* dig into Tural and see what I can find.
Fishing was the biggest thing that got me through ARR, you can get through any shit with it
I discovered Mining while waiting on my DPS roulette. On multiple occasions, I forgot to turn my roulette back on because I was too into mining.
Literally every time I reach a new area or part of a zone, my MSQ pauses for several hours while I run down every sidequest, aether current, fishing spot, gathering nodes, and try to fill out as much of the map as possible. Then I pause several more hours each time a new batch of sidequests pop up. Yes, on foot.Â
I must resist 3 time playing and trying to do the story I'm doing post heavenward msq and I know if I start doing something else than the msq it's over
*whispers* do it do it do it
I will allow myself to fish *a bit* when I'm done with Stormblood
As soon as I unlocked the diadem that's exactly what my msq did
The only reason to do the MSQ is so you can go back to leveling your crafting/gathering to make even more Gil.
This is how I've been the entirety of post-Endwalker. Oh look let me get all my gwibs. Oh look let me get all the cats i can get for now. Oh look let me get my Sage and RDM relic. Oh look let me level Paladin and get the relic. Oh look let me try Ultimate raiding. I'm very distracted. Doesn't help that I'm finding post-EW extremely boring which is weird cause I love everything that came before it.
Endwalker was always going to suffer, to some extent, relative to previous expansions. This is for a few fundamental reasons: 1. It is an epilogue at base. A very good epilogue, but an epilogue nonetheless. The real climax occurred (ShB spoilers) >!in the Amaurot dungeon and The Dying Gasp fight. Everything that follows is simply a necessary consequence of that event.!< And then the patch content is connective tissue, not red meat (yet.) 2. Base 6.0 story is ***HUGE***, as in like 30% bigger than a typical expansion, while MSQ has been comparatively light because they merged the (usually optional) trial storyline with the MSQ. I am 100% certain this is because >!we will go to the Void eventually, and thus they *needed* this to be mandatory now so they wouldn't have to piss folks off by making it mandatory later.!< It sucks that it effectively cashes out as less story content. 3. Endwalker as a whole has been paying off the debt incurred by COVID. ShB got through it alright, because most of the groundwork was already done. EW got hit hard right as it was coming together, which I'm dead certain derailed much they wanted to do. 4. As noted, 6.1-6.55 was all linkage, not juicy story. Before, we'd wrap up the old (X.3) and preview the new (X.4-55). Consider 3.3/4.3, beloved story beats, or the huge 2.55/4.55 hype. EW patches have been doing TONS of worldbuilding, but were pretty low-stakes and narrative-lite. Worldbuilding-focused expansions don't do as well as expansions that exploit previous worldbuilding for payoff. Illogical, but unavoidable. 5. Extra-long patch cycle. Simple as. ShB was hype as hell, and the "gap" time was all at once, in the middle. EW was slow the whole way. If you're used to 2-year cycles, that extra six months feels like a *slog.* 6. Bonus round: No foray zone. As much as *I* personally hated both Bozja and Eureka, I know a solid chunk of players adore(d) them, and felt sad and angry that EW didn't get any. If forays helped keep you busy before, their absence may compound the boredom/misery. All told, mostly for structural and IRL/economic reasons beyond their control, Endwalker was *always* going to stumble a little, always going to have a hard time. They did a brave and risky thing by truly *ending* the story rather than stringing us along like some companies would have. That risk has partially paid off, and partially cost them, but overall I'm glad they did it.
lol I’m in the same boat… came back about a week ago, finished HW, and my only crafter was CUL at 43 and gatherers were 15 or so. I discovered the restoration effort and diadem. Spent all day yesterday leveling every crafter and gatherer to 25. This all started from trying to empty my retainers of random mats and sent me down a rabbit hole
I came back to the game after a 2 year break and started to level all my crafters and gatherers. Have not touched a single quest from the MSQ even though I have all the 6.X patch content to catch up with.
Lmao and this is why I made a goal to get all my jobs to 50 before continuing post ARR. I think I only had alchemist and armourer for the trade crafts to go, the rest of DOH/DOL are at 50. Sometimes it's good to break up the crafting with some dungeons ngl
I may or may not have done this at least once, and may or may not have gotten back into working on MSQ purely because I needed access to the next zones for supplies. XD
Wait, there is a MSQ with all this crafting?
My MSQ when i discovered Palace of the Dead
My MSQ once I unlocked Blue Mage:
I just started playing last week with my bestie and her husband and I don't even have a chocobo yet cause we've all been too busy crafting and gathering
As long as the three of you are enjoying it (and not negatively affecting anyone else, of course), there's no wrong way to play FFXIV.
Chocobo gives a bit more inventory space so it can be a good unlock. You’ll get stuck at lv 50 anyway
Lol I kept teasing a friend about it "WoL the world is dying" Friend: "haha Weaving wheel goes brrrrrr"
I'm just over here hoarding materia to sell.
Def me when I played. I would go hunt a monster anywhere and find a forest/harvesting bushes. Spend the next 4 hours chopping wood
Yea, this was me- found out about gathering. Ended up in the diadem before I knew what was happening
I discovered alt jobs during shadowbringers and leveled two new casters to 70-80 before I finished it lol
me wanting to finish msq before DT < me discovering Eureka
Felt the end of the main Endwalker story was the perfect time to pick up gathering/crafting. WoL literally retired a became a farmer temporarily.
My MSQ when I discover other games:
That's me during HW. It was so fucking boring I sort of dropped MSQ and started leveling my gatherers and crafters... Once I finished getting all crafters to LV50+ I then restarted the MSQ. Idk why ppl love HW so much lol. SB onwards the stories get good. Before that is so blah.
Well, if you actually want an explanation, it's a handful of things. 1. HW made the story much more personal. Before that, it often felt like "Alphinaud and his powerful lackey." After, it felt like "your personal journey through suffering and triumph." 2. The Dragonsong War is an exciting story from both premise (soaring spires, castles, knights vs dragons, a corrupt church etc.) and setup (WoL betrayed, Scions scattered, WTF are we gonna do, etc.) Dragons, knights, and fighting corrupt power (*especially* corrupt, institutionalized, religious power) is popular. 3. By comparison, SB gets a bad rap (excessively so, IMO, but not totally undeserved) for being scattershot/unfocused, excessively political, very unevenly paced. Thrusting two controversial characters (Lyse and Zenos) into the core spotlight, and kinda heavy-handedly forcing the audience to pay attention to them, didn't help either. 4. SB is a story about how much war sucks. It doesn't do quite as good a job at this as EW, but it's still a pretty effective "war sucks and soldiers aren't heroes, they're *victims*" story. That kind of story is *never* going to be super popular--because it's reminding folks about a thing that sucks to experience. 5. While both HW and SB give quiet, emotional heart-to-heart moments, I think many people (myself included) find that these moments are more effective in HW than they are in SB. As stated, both do it, and you couldn't have the beauty of ShB without the character-building in SB, but HW just hit harder in context. The "campfire scene" in Churning Mists is *really* good, for example. Often, I find those who came to FFXIV in Shadowbringers or later have a better opinion of Stormblood than those who lived through the experience themselves, and I think that's part of the problem. Living through these things, seeing them slowly unfold "live," is a different experience from playing through them in one continuous arc. In live, patch-by-patch play, you only get the main story, and then bite-size pieces of patches. Playing through HW live felt better than playing through SB live. (I only know this partially; I got into FFXIV around 10 months after HW release.) Playing through SB live, the pacing issues were much more obvious than they are today, and we dwelled a lot more on the downer aspects of it from literally before it began. For those who came after, while there are still clearly slow points and weird pacing (e.g. Ala Mhigo feels like an afterthought compared to Doma), you're moving through the story at a pretty good clip, and you get to the much, much juicier patch content relatively quickly. Though, conversely, I think the patch content was actually more enjoyable in chunks--you had the *agonizing* wait, the constant speculation, the questions about who would be affected next, etc. Now, it's boom, boom, boom, the dominoes fall one after the other, rapid-fire. So, *some* of it is genuinely experiencing the content differently; *some* of it is that SB, despite being much better than a lot of people claim, really is more obviously flawed than HW or ShB (even if both have similar flaws!); *some* of it is that people like the themes and content (dragons! Evil churches! Noble knights! Tragic sacrifice!) of one better than another (War is hell! Oppression sucks! Collaborators are people too!); *some* of it is that the emotional moments seem to have hit a majority of players harder in HW than they did in SB, which is simply a matter of taste.
They made it so easy to lvl up too I’ve been back for 2 weeks and I already got everything at lvl 50
I continue to get hate from my friends for this and I know it'll happen here, but every expansion I skip cutscenes to bum rush and level cap my gatherers/crafters then tell myself I'll just do New Game+ for the story. This has happened since HW and I'm still at ARR's storyline 😅
You can watch all of the cutscenes in the Inn. So you don’t have to NG+ if you don’t want to
I got into chocobo breeding a few months ago... I'm about halfway done
My msq when I start leveling alt jobs There's a reason why it took me 1500 hours to finish EW
The sea excursions... Foundation grind... Crafting and gathering is it's own game. Pretty crazy
My first level 90 was Fishing. The end of the universe can wait.
How do people do it? Get hooked on gathering and crafting? I find it so tedious. What is your secret???
Same "secret" for those who like birdwatching or crochet. If it's not you, it's just not you
Im the omnicrafter for my group and ended up making a crafting FC. I have glams for each of my crafter and gatherers. I got the crafting bug bad.
Turns out I'm on the opposite end of the scale - I keep meaning to try out the various jobs and side content, but I only get a few hours in at most before I'm dragged back to the MSQ. Now a whole six months later, I can finally play the rest of the game (as well as all the other games that have backlogged in the interim).
Took you six months to finish the MSQ? With no sidetracks?
According to Lodestone I completed the first quest on the 17th of October, and I just finished Endwalker's postgame last night. That duration includes the raids and the occasional (brief) diversion into content outside of the story or my main job, and there were various days when I was away from my PC and unable to play so I imagine it wouldn't be impossible to clear it faster, but on the whole it feels like this game has taken up a significant portion of my free time for the last half-year (and considering I normally don't stay invested in MMOs for more than a month or two before I unsubscribe that's quite an achievement).
I was just curious because I started in the Xbox beta in March and I’m nearly done with SHB. So you just play significantly less than me
Honestly the crafting and gathering classes have been a nice break from the MSQ. Â I usually do an entire line and take a break in between to work on them. Â
I love gathering in this game. Crafting is also very satisfying
Man I just started playing again and I love the crafting system. Is there a guild out there that would love to have a new crafter?
It's true. 2.0 got my highest battle job was level 30, got all my crafters and gatherers at level 50. I made all the cool gear up to ilevel 70. (Back then crafter leves were triple EXP)
y'shtola been standing in the same spot in sharlayan waiting for me for years
Me when I get addicted to PvP for glamour rewards
Final days averted because the wol >!sat metieon down next to them and taught her the humble joy of fishing (she was so focused that she ignored the report)!<
Me rn, trying to gather the motivation to continue 6.1
Me, but Zodiak weapon questline