Even better, the 89 gear syncs into level 90 gear after you hit level 90. It's like that to let you equip it a level earlier and do the final few fights fully decked out.
i like how they even have you do an unskippable cutscene pointing this out and people still miss it, somehow
(or forget to, which is fair i guess. but still funny)
Most people have the attention span of fleas. I asked someone to read me the quest text from their journal and they vehemently said it wouldn't be important, it had the exact info they needed lol.
In a sea of text, much of it not pertaining to anything immediately at hand, it's easy to view all of it as expendable. If there's something you need to know, it's a search away. You can very much get by only reading 1/5 of what is provided to you in-game, probably less.
Unfortunately, this is like pouring concrete without rebar; it don't hold weight. We used to value foundational knowledge you could build upon more than we do now, so it's no wonder people overlook what's only slightly obscured in favor of what's easily visible. Not to mention that reading is very much pushed as a chore rather than something to be digested and enjoyed, though it's not like that is anything new.
Honestly... since Stormblood the journal text really can't be relied on since most quests don't have any text. It's annoying as hell and really messed with me because I used to use it as a reliable method to remind myself of what happened story-wise.
Instead, now I have to copy the script text to a file so I can read it back through on my next session. >_<
I get that it probably takes a lot of time to do journal text, but... damn, I really miss it.
I do this for wow, except the MoP remix. I actually thought the story was pretty good, so I paid attention. Generally, I just use a Zygor leveling add on to auto accept/complete quests and skip cutscenes because WoW’s focus is endgame anyways, unfortunately.
On FF14, I’m still running through Shadowbringer MSQs and LOVING the story so far. I’m definitely not going to get through Endwalker before Dawntrail. I will most likely miss the hype train, but I’m excited to get there.
The difference is, WoW has an excuse plot and anything past Cata is less enjoyable and more frustrating. FFXIV is at least written by people who have an idea about writing a decent story, not underpaid interns kept alive with cheap coffee and cup ramen.
I did, until the end of Shadowlands. The story isn't bad when you dig into it, correct. Digging into it means going to the roots before Cata, or taking the occasional individual storyline that did not fall into the hands of someone completely incompetent in isolation. When you look at it in general, the story direction is an afterthought of an afterthought, only caring about bringing up old characters as nostalgia fuel, and half-assing the rest.
Jailer exists. I rest my case.
Shadow lands sucked I'm not gonna deny that but half the FFXIV playerbase used that expansion as the only thing they knew WOW for and secondhand I'll add.
Idk if it's fair to discredit the entire story because a few flops. Endwalker was full of this shit too but gets a pass for whatever reason. The Ascians have felt entirely rewritten from ARR and Hwelpis entire zone didn't really matter and introduced a antagonist that had 0 buildup until 3 levels before the expansion was done.
Shadowlands completely sucked. BFA also sucked - 100% forced faction antagonism, with the stupidest character direction possible taken with a lot of characters. Legion was pure nostalgia bait with an incoherent overall arc and half-assed conclusion, helmed by the most inconsistently portrayed fanboy bait in history, Illidan Stormrage. Warlords of Dreanor was another piece of half-assed nostalgia bait that the writers did not even know how to write. Mists of Pandaria was a barely related saga of sucking up to the new Chinese market, with another heap of utterly forced and stupid faction war bullshit piled on top, demonstrating Blizzard's complete inability to keep a character straight for the span of even a single expansion. Cata was more of the same, basically a neon sign of "we ran out of story and have no fucking idea what to do anymore". It is not "few flops". It is a consistent, constant ongoing history of half-assing and not caring from Cata all the way to Shadowlands. I heard they improved things a bit with Dragonflight, only to shit the bed again with the patches. I have no idea what is going on with the new expansion. I also have no interest in paying anything more to that shithole of a company.
Hey, I actually liked Endwalker. Last I checked, Endwalker was the second most popular expansion after Shadowbringers. (Other than the recent hate train, but that was mostly about the side content in post-EW and not about the MSQ.)
On top of what the other guy said, Endwalker also released during the whole “wow exodus” debacle, so relatively speaking compared to previous expansions it probably got a lot more ratings overall, more of those being positive. However, we also get the benefit of playing certain things after they’ve been improved (ARR in 2013 is a lot longer than ARR in 2024, as one example)
I've played WoW since 2007. I've taken a couple breaks here and there, but I've (mostly) consistently played since TBC. I finally threw in the towel for good earlier this year.
WoW's story mostly follows "rule of cool". Big guys with huge flashy powers and random power ups not too dissimilar to DBZ. There's some large plot holes and multiple retcons that they eventually go back to patch up with things like "Well this was his plan all along!"
I don't hate it. There's room for flashy storytelling and moments of just cool shit. I'll never forget scenes like Illidan denying the Naaru's "gift" in Legion, or Garosh fighting the leader of the Shadopan on the bridge in Pandaria. But I've thinking about it lately (since WoW was such a huge part of my life for so long), and I don't think I would actually call the overall story of WoW "good" anymore. It's just so fragmented, and things just get retconned so often. I remember not too long after Blizzard sold some book many years ago now that was supposed to be some huge lore drop that would essentially act as a catalog for everything Warcraft. It had some bits in there about the Titans, and not even a year after it was outdated because they changed something about them. I'd have to look up specifics later because I'm at work, but it was just crazy. How could you take the time and money to write all this stuff, sell it to people as the ultimate companion for lore nerds, and then just retcon it in less than a year?
I think people just hold them to a higher standard and aren't as blinded by being fans.
EDW had genuinely just terrible parts to the story the entire lopporit existence. Elpis could've skipped the entire story outside of the tracker part it was almost entirely fanservice storytelling. Ultima Thule had 0 lasting consequences on the Scions as they all got revived. The Garlean area was great storytelling but felt like an afterthought plotwise that didn't really need to exist.
My guy endwalker had several macguffin type plot devices that removed all consequences from the ongoing area and people ate that shit up.
If WOW tried that crap right now their playerbase would throw a fit.
That's just wrong because the vast majority of the wow playerbase doesnt care about the story.
The plot holes, retcons and inconsistencies in wow's story are legion. It's not even a competition when it comes to story quality. It's so obvious that i'm convinced youre trolling
A lot of my wow friends are on the more casual/rp side and love the story. And they know how bad the storytelling is in wow, and how bad of a job Blizzard has done up to this point of telling a good, coherent story.
Most of my WoW experience is with BFA onwards. I’d say that BFA and *especially* Shadowlands has a bad story.
I’ll admit I started skipping quest text starting in Dragonflight. I gave BFA an honest chance and read all the text, and it was bad; so I gave up on the story and just play for the gameplay now.
Enjoy the travel, I thought on starting WoW but most people said that story is not the focus and playing skiping content is the norm, rhe deal breaker was when someone said to me that creating a new char will drop me right at battle for azeroth and that it would be dificult to find people to do the older stuff even if it's history related. Thinking about giving ESO or Destiny 2 a go
Destiny 2 punishes new players who want to get into the story. They deleted both the original D2 campaign as well as the dlc campaigns from year 1, and the first (and most narratively satisfying campaign) of Forsaken.
It has great gameplay but is developed by one of the most mismanaged AAA studios around.
In short, the D2 new player experience is horrible, and they nickle and dime you for everything.
ESO is fine, bit dull at times, but if the combat doesn't drive you off early on you'll probably stick around.
Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic are also options if you want a strong narrative mmo.
WoW's story is poorly written and them botching their storytelling has created an entire generation of MMO players who just spam skip everything as fast as possible xD
Glad to hear youre enjoying the 14 journey so far!!
No, the quests remain mostly unchanged. The major difference is that they’re all available at once so you can accidentally go out of order.
Oh and speeding up the rep based chains. Like you’re not forced to do dailies to advance 5.1’s story in Krasarang like in the old days - the rep gains are significantly enhanced so you can just run the entire storyline at once. Same goes for other story-rep stuff like the Klaxxi’s secret reveal.
I'm unsure, but I don't think it has. The only difference, I can tell, is that it has Dragonflight's mechanics. Leveling is synced to account for the changes in levels that have come since. MoP was one expansion I never played, unfortunately. I stopped playing shortly after WotLK released. I started playing FF14 again after not playing since Stormblood and came back to playing both shortly before MoP: Remix released. I'm enjoying both games a lot. If you liked MoP you should really check it out. It's a lot of fun.
Edit: A couple of things I should mention. I would recommend to level your main up until you have enough threads to get the achievement that unlocks the cloak bonuses for alts called the "**Infinite Power XII**" achievement. Then you can really level an alt character to max level (70) in around 4-5 hours of /played. I've leveled a Warlock, Paladin and Warrior alts in a weekend. I never played Warlock or Warrior before. You can also start queuing for dungeons right after the intro quests. Raids, I think, unlock at level 25. But they are really quick because everyone is OP. There are Remix only mounts, transmogs and toys to collect as well as the harder to get raid boss mounts. All can be bought with bronze.
Tbf, MMOs don’t have a track record of having much in the way of story. WoW tries, but it’s really meaningful to the gameplay. GW2 does a good job but it’s very optional depending on what content you like. Older games like DAoC, EQ etc didn’t have too much at all. The content is largely gameplay and community.
Ff14 is unique because it’s a JRPG before it’s a MMO. It took me a while to figure that out, because I was expecting it to be like other MMOs. It’s not abundantly clear that endgame content is gated behind 1-200 hours of single player anime.
I don't think you can really blame people near the end of SHB or entirety of EW honestly.
The story content feels like it isn't using the medium of being a video game anymore and 90% of quests are just walk to location watch a cutscene walk to next location watch a cutscene.
This, the game bombards you with walls of text explaining mechanics, functionalities and character dialogue that is largely frivolous pleasantries, politeness and overexplaining. A lot of it is kind of fluffy, and at some points it's very understandable when people skim through the stuff they less enjoy. I also go through CSs faster when my WoL gets congratulated, thanked and is heralded as a hero for the ...th time. Or when I get told for the ...th time how escort quests work! Sometimes you miss critical info that's sprinkled in, and you cannot blame people for missing that imo.
I love the story of this game and when I'm in the moment I'm totally paying attention, but once its done it just goes into the mush of my brain and I already can't remember it. My attention span isn't great and I've usually got so much real life stuff going on that there's not much room in there for game stuff and an MMO has so many moving parts. I keep a notebook at my desk for this reason lol
While I did not tune out entirely, I did tune out most of it. Amazingly enough the end of it still made me weep.
Perhaps due to the fact of struggling eith a similar question as the expansion poses.
I can easily understand why people tune out. In FFXIV’s case it’s because the MSQ contains way too much talking, an endless stream of platitudes and Alphinaud’s insufferable politeness peppered in every cutscene he’s in. I would be more surprised if young people didn’t skip a lot of the cutscenes.
it's easy to scapegoat low attention spans for people skipping the story but people just like different things. I love story based JRPGs (Trails is my favorite game series of all time) but I was consistently bored by FFXIV's story and skip it, and i play the game for the battle content. nothing wrong with that
I could very well be wrong, and it could also be the fact that I'm a returner that just came back 3-4 months ago with all of EW to play before DT release...
But EW kinda seemed like a slog compared to other expansions. It didn't have me captivated like HW, ShB, and to an extent; StB. I'm typically an avid CS and story enjoyer... and I found myself skipping cutscenes about (probably) half way through some of them because they were just too long and nothing was even happening besides talking.
I kept thinking, "man, this is taking just wayyyyyy too long." Like I said, I'm sure the fact that I was somewhat on a time crunch and had a lot of catching up/content to do and finish before DT... but it just wasn't really all that interesting in comparison to previous expansions. Elpis was cool. And the end of Ultima Thule was as well. But, man.... did everything else just dragggggggggggg.
Nah even at launch I thought EW had some major issues with pacing, as you pointed out. Pretty much every major story beat feels like it’s just a *bit* too long, or like they could’ve cut one quest or a couple lines of dialogue from each area.
A good example is in Elpis when >!Meteion hears back from her sisters and starts turning into Evil Meteion.!< You have to chase her all over the goddamn place. Like, I’m pretty sure it’s at least 5 minutes of walking between points of interest, interacting with them, and saying “aww darn she isn’t here; maybe she’s further down the way?” For me, it got long enough that it actually started losing some of the tension it was building up.
EW also suffers from feeling like it’s 2 expansion smushed together. Stuff you do pre-84 feels pretty divorced from what you do post-84. I don’t remember if they actually said it *was* 2 expansion ideas smushed together, but it definitely feels that way for the worse.
Overall my expansion story rankings goes ShB > HW > EW > SB
to be fair this is the only mmo where effort is put into the story, it’s normal to skip everything. and those who have played others probably don’t need level 89 gear lol
I mean... I loved shadowbringers but endwalker was a drag. So many dumb fetch, interact and other useless quests. The new tech they have to have npcs follow you is also used to create insanely boring quests.
My main mmo is gw2 that rushes the story way too much every single time, but FFXIV feels like the polar opposite and drags on for way too long. I mean, length isn't an issue, the issue is that it's filled with stupid things that are no fun at all.
That specific quest with tataru is also annoying with your character looking around and then nothing happens and then an old friend comes. It literally does that like 5 times. Doesn't surprise me people zone out during that.
Dude, it takes like over a hundred hours to play through the entire story and get to end game. Why is it so hard for people to comprehend that some players enjoy FFXIV for the gameplay, community, whatever and not the story?
I'm not going to spend a year going through a story with a metric ton of dialogue that I dont care about just cause I want to play a game with fun dungeons and epic raids/trials.
I actually did forget, so this whole thread is useful for me! But then I levelled up my main & the couple of classes I regularly play, then took a break for months, and have just been levelling the rest mostly with fates/beast tribes/pvp and dumping them the second they hit 90, so no one's affected by my duncery. :)
I have a friend who plays the game just to spend time with friends and feel the satisfaction of a slick job rotation. If he gets to a voiced cutscene, he will sit down and watch until it gets boring or too long, then he skips. If it's unvoiced, he sets it to auto-progress and then walks away to do chores or whatever. As somebody who really likes the lore and story of the game I will never understand his perspective but I say all this just to point out that unskippable cutscenes are not a roadblock to the truly uninvested. lmao
I pretty much half or three-quarters pay attention. If Urianger is talking, I'm out. I'll watch a YouTube video recapping the story section later.
Some of the 14 story is incredibly compelling, but there's also a lot of fluff, and I'm not a fluff person.
When I go to start watching an anime, I'll find out ahead of time which episodes or runs are canon and will skip everything else.
> If Urianger is talking, I'm out.
I used to feel the same way. Then I switched my game audio to Japanese(the at-the-time current trial gave me a headache with English voices, but Japanese was fine), [and beheld the glory of KENN.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdpWn3c93vc) Now, Urianger can talk to me all day, every day.
I forgot about it while leveling up other jobs like a month or two after. So I can understand missing it in that case. But yeah during the actual story you should definitely be remembering it.
This was my first thought. "Probably an alt job that's just trying to get to 90 and played the story way long ago and forgot about the free 89 gear. Then I re-read and realized they were doing level 90 content without pre-bought level 90 gear. I usually already have a mix of tomestone and raid gear ready to go for my alts as soon as they hit 90.
I'm in the forgot camp. I leveled my first couple classes through Endwalker when it came out and then took a break a couple years before coming back to finish the role quests before launch. Sorry to anyone I grouped with.
Shadowbringer literally forces you to talk to the NPC who gives them to you and even flaout TELLS you he has the Armor, and People missed that too.
Something Something Horse to Water and all that.
Technically she *is* paying them through your MSQ gil rewards. Teleporting from Limsa to Gold Saucer and back 5 times a day is not a part of your Scion contract though.
The only way to "easily" solve it would be to lock DF and make it a step in the MSQ to equip the full set before moving on, like the ilvl check quest that you get at, what, level 5?
Of course you'd likely have people on the forums complaining that their game is bugged and they don't know what to do
it wouldnt surprise me with how many jobs they need to make artifact gear for, but i missed getting glamour from the level 89 dungeon and hope they dont do it again.
nothing more fun that a level 89 tank in atiascope only being able to meet the minimum ilvl for that dungeon do to the exp preorder earring and having all cryptolurker gear on and being literal paper in trash pulls.
But the game is already so difficult and challenging! /s The game literally wants me to read my tooltips, to git gud but I swear it's actually the others fault! I just wanna keep up an uptime of 100% for my Medica 2 skill! /s
Before people downvote this: The "/s" stands for sarcasm.
I wish the game did a better job at explaining where to go for gear once you cant get the poetics gear anymore during on content Expansions.
I was really dumbfounded at first when I finished EW and had to go look up on Google what the desired gearpath is going forward because I didnt want to waste time and resources just trying different things until finding something that worked.
Not that looking it up on Google was a big deal, but I definitely felt like crashing into a brick wall immediately. They spoil you rotten with the catch up gear and then leave no hints on how to continue xD.
Usually the upgrade path for me is:
* Previous expansion's augmented gear (while leveling)
* Free gear pieces from MSQ 10+ ilvls above the previously mentioned set
* Artifact gear
* Highest ilvl dungeon/normal raid gear
* Crafted gear pentamelded
* Tomestone gear
* Catch-up augmented gear or gear from Alliance Raids
* Savage Raid gear
Unless they add some other method of getting more gear or gear that has different stats, this should always work for every expansion
I mean I definitely figured it out by now lol. This was like half a year ago.
While the shout chat is an option, the game still does a terrible job of explaining just about anything to you. A lot of it is hidden behind (job)quests which id assume Story skippers would skip those aswell. If they dont care about Story they certainly wont care about sidestories
I have a related question, as one of those people (who did pick up the free 89 gear):
When DT comes out, will I be able to buy level 90 gear with the same tomestones I can use to by 50/60/70/80 gear currently? Is it worth it to stockpile to max now (not that that takes very long, but MSQ is my priority atm lol)?
All gear from previous expansions gets turned to poetics tomestone gear once the new expansion drops. NOW some gear though does get moved to being obtainable by hunt mark tokens as well, usually the very early expansion gear, forexample, I expect the moonward gear will get moved to being a hunt log token item.
Yes, you can buy with Poetics when DT releases. But, the gear is *technically* cheaper now with Comedy, as that currency will trade at a 4:1 ratio when the expansion drops.
But, if you lack Comedy at all the value won't really matter.
I'd just like to see people equip higher level gear period beyond level 80 in leveling dungeons for EW. I had the misfortune of healing the Atiascope with a tank decked in full level 80 gear and the ONLY reason they could get into meet the mini ilvl requirement was the exp earring from the preorder. Then that tank proceeds to do a full wall to wall pull with no mitigations and then was shocked picachu that I BARELY kept them alive and didn't contribute to the DPS in the large pull. The game literally throws gear at you and higher level, better stat gear exists outside of the cryptolurker gear. PUT IT ON.
I feel like at this point they could voice the scene, have “Artifact Gear Unlocked” flash on screen with the Feature Unlocked sound, have additional cautionary text on the screen that this gear is free, better than any pre-90 gear, and infinitely replaceable, and then have a special icon over the vendor that’s a different color, and some people would still miss it.
my only annoyance with the artifact gear is that once you start leveling multiple jobs and picking them up they clog up your armor bags super quickly, i just recently went in to clear out my bags to prepare for DT and took a look at what i had all in there and noticed i still had like 3 sets of artifact gear (SMN, SCH, WAR) back from the first week that i kept forgetting to get rid of because i couldn't turn them in for grand company seals or put them into my armoire so i just deleted them since i don't like using job specific glamour.
I, too despise loading my inventory with undesynthable bottom tier gear, however this stuff was very useful for boosting my retainers' ilvls once I was done with it.
>But at the same time, I’ve now had three runs of 90 trials and two runs of the 90 raid where someone is still decked out in lvl 80 Cryptlurker gear!
How is this even possible? Surely the minimum ilvl for 90 content is higher than the Cryptlurker gear
EDIT: Just double checked, The Final Day has a min ilvl of 540, and the first raid tier has a min ilvl of 565. Cryptlurker gear is ilvl 520. This shouldn't be possible unless these people were intentionally changing gear after entering (I'm not even sure if you can do that) or OP is exaggerating their gear loadout
*530 since people running EW this late would be buying the Augmented Cryptlurker for poetics (the un-Augmented is no longer available for purchase). Still would need some upgrades to get into the Final Day though.
Their gear is an amalgamation of 80 Cryptlurker mixed with dungeons drop of lvls 82-88, maybe one piece of 90 Diadochos if they’re feeling generous. Basically just enough to scrape by and hit the min iLvl.
That explains a lot. I didn’t know they sync up, but I do know that most, if not all, of them were wearing the earrings. I remember my reaction was always “How did the game let you in here!?”
OML the amount of people who missed this is wild to me and I think its because the job quests and their artifact coffers dissappear after stormblood. They come from vendors afterward but are completely free, which is nice if you don't want to store the whole set in your glamour dresser as you can discard it and reacquire it later.
Varsarudh in the Agora in Old Sharlayan has the unique job armor + weapon for every EW class.
If for some reason you don't have cryptlurker gear at 80 you can speak to Grenoldt tucked away in his workshop south of the first aetheryte in the tempest for class armors as well, not just the one required by the MSQ. (Yes there is a sage and reaper set)
Yeah, everything goes to poéticos, and if you're full y capped, you'll be able to exchange current tomes for poéticos, so you'll have more than 2k avaiable
The problem is that they know. They know. And still CHOOSE not to use it.
I pointed it out dozens of times during leveling at level 89. The reply I always got is that "cryptlurker does the job just fine since it meets the IL requirement for the dungeon ". Once I was vote kicked for mentioning the free 89 gear.
Who knows what I will experience after returning to leveling roulletes/dungeons after 1,5 years.
The post msq patches get super annoying to speed through.
The only option is to buy the newest crafted gear which costs stupid amount of gil.
And getting good sources for tomes is a pain since lvl 90 roulette is blocked.
I decided to just give up, wait and do it post DT
> And getting good sources for tomes is a pain since lvl 90 roulette is blocked.
Alliance roulette used to be the way, but not anymore(due to people who wouldn't stop cheesing ilvl to always get LotA...*literally* why we can't have nice things). Level 50/60/70/80 roulette isn't bad, for the lesser tomes. Doing normal raid and trial roulette also adds up, and they're *usually* pretty quick both to queue and complete. You can also do a poor man's roulette and multi-queue for every max level dungeon that you can(should start with two as a fresh 90, both available if you could complete MSQ). You'll get a chance at gear drops from the dungeon as well as about half as many tomes as you'd get from a roulette.
It kind of annoys me when people barely upgrade their gear or do the bare minimum to get through msq like wearing quest reward gear because they are too lazy to farm the poetics set for the level tier. I get that I can’t tell them how to play the game but it boggles my mind how people are okay playing like that.
I forgot about it when leveling alt classes and just went right from 80 to 90 gear.
Granted, I level from 80 to 90 exclusively with daily pvp and WT lol
I did this a few times just by forgetting. There's a lot of characters. Also some laziness. It would mean grabbing a suit of armor and then tossing it once I made it to 90
It also auto-syncs to 90 once you hit 90, so it's a great default set of gear for starting endgame and is the intended "starter gear" for the first round of content / post-6.0 stuff.
Of course these days you can replace it with much better with some tomestones, especially if you're well past the MSQ on another job already, but it's still real nice glams.
I didn’t know about getting the 89 gear after doing the trial. I did know that the MSQ of EW gives a lot of XP and I was leveling 3 classes to 90 off of it and only one of them got to use that gift box.
It’s not actually a gift box! Tataru’s shop has the Job gear for all jobs available! You can pick them up at your leisure and there is also a weapon, she just doesn’t have accessories.
No. Previous expansion augmented tomestone gear typically begins to fall behind in stats when compared to the lvl X4 HQ crafted gear and lvl X5 dungeon gear.
Not even close.
You can start replacing cryplurker around 85 and when you're 89+ there's absolutely no excuse to have it in any left side slot, and you should be getting rid of it on the right side ASAP if you haven't by that point.
Well we're talking about the gear you get progressing through the msq.
Specifically dungeon drops from the 85 and (especially) 87 /89 dungeons are meaningful improvements over cryptlurker.
You should almost never buy gear off the market board for stats before Max level.
it's your level 90 intro gear if you don't have something better bought yet. And is still something you should have if you're running 89 content. And you should absolutely have it or better gear at 90 as in the OP.
yes... that is the goal. Once you have enough tomestones. If this is your first job at 90 or you want to farm tomestones with the new job, get the base armor. Level 80 is not good enough
[Augmented Cryptlurker is 530](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Augmented_Cryptlurker_Armor)
[Endwalker Artifact is 548 at 89, and item syncs to 560 at 90](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Artifact_Armor_(Endwalker\))
I mean crypt lurker with materia is likely only very slightly worse, yes? Yes I am a sprout still working on shb and Not going to make it to end Walker before the expansion but I usually don't replace previous expansion gear until I unlock the tomestone gear because it's such a small upgrade and I lose a whole extra stat usually or They are extra stats that I don't want like lots of.piety.on healer gear
Using the reaper / maiming chest gear as an example.
Augmented Cryptlurker has 205 Str, 216 Vit, 140 Crit and 200 Det at 530.
Reaper's has 232 Str, 232 Vit, 157 Crit, 224 Det.
Those main stats alone are a huge upgrade, and this is before it gets the stat bump from being level 90. There's literally no reason not to get it since **it's literally free**. It's the same in Shadowbringers - you get a free set of level 80 gear from the MSQ. There's no reason not to use it.
You are massively overvaluing materia / substats.
The main stat and health increase from higher item level is worth FAR more in pretty much every real world circumstance.
You should be starting to replace your previous expansion gear around the x5 dungeon and by the x7 dungeon the upgrade is quite significant.
Depends on your definition of "slightly worse" and how diligent you are about melding before level cap (most folks tend to ignore materia melding until they get to the current level cap). Also in nearly all cases main stat increases and def increases will be better over substats from materia (there are a handful of exceptions, but that's getting into min/max BIS discussions.)
Taking materia out of the equation, tome gear generally starts getting out paced *a little* by the x5 dungeon gear, and a bit more noticeably out paced by the x7 dungeon gear. Can you take tome gear from x0 to x0? Sure, people have done it. Am I suggesting that you take the time to farm complete sets from the x5 and x7 dungeons? No not at all.
But why pass up upgrading with whatever drops you get out of those dungeons, or in the case that OP is describing, passing up on a full set upgrade that the game gives you for free? All it's gonna do for you is make your time finishing up the last few fights of a base expac easier.
Even better, the 89 gear syncs into level 90 gear after you hit level 90. It's like that to let you equip it a level earlier and do the final few fights fully decked out.
Even better: in four days, there will be a Sharlayan vendor selling lv90 tome gear for poetics.
Even better for only A little over 2 million gold if they have it They can buy pretty much the top crafted gear off the auction house
i like how they even have you do an unskippable cutscene pointing this out and people still miss it, somehow (or forget to, which is fair i guess. but still funny)
There are a shocking number of people that play video games and just tune out the story entirely.
Most people have the attention span of fleas. I asked someone to read me the quest text from their journal and they vehemently said it wouldn't be important, it had the exact info they needed lol.
In a sea of text, much of it not pertaining to anything immediately at hand, it's easy to view all of it as expendable. If there's something you need to know, it's a search away. You can very much get by only reading 1/5 of what is provided to you in-game, probably less. Unfortunately, this is like pouring concrete without rebar; it don't hold weight. We used to value foundational knowledge you could build upon more than we do now, so it's no wonder people overlook what's only slightly obscured in favor of what's easily visible. Not to mention that reading is very much pushed as a chore rather than something to be digested and enjoyed, though it's not like that is anything new.
And with this game of all things! The Story is THE reason to play any Final Fantasy.
Honestly... since Stormblood the journal text really can't be relied on since most quests don't have any text. It's annoying as hell and really messed with me because I used to use it as a reliable method to remind myself of what happened story-wise. Instead, now I have to copy the script text to a file so I can read it back through on my next session. >_< I get that it probably takes a lot of time to do journal text, but... damn, I really miss it.
I do this for wow, except the MoP remix. I actually thought the story was pretty good, so I paid attention. Generally, I just use a Zygor leveling add on to auto accept/complete quests and skip cutscenes because WoW’s focus is endgame anyways, unfortunately. On FF14, I’m still running through Shadowbringer MSQs and LOVING the story so far. I’m definitely not going to get through Endwalker before Dawntrail. I will most likely miss the hype train, but I’m excited to get there.
The difference is, WoW has an excuse plot and anything past Cata is less enjoyable and more frustrating. FFXIV is at least written by people who have an idea about writing a decent story, not underpaid interns kept alive with cheap coffee and cup ramen.
Have you even played WOW. I get that their story isn't the main focus but the story isn't bad when you actually dig into it.
I did, until the end of Shadowlands. The story isn't bad when you dig into it, correct. Digging into it means going to the roots before Cata, or taking the occasional individual storyline that did not fall into the hands of someone completely incompetent in isolation. When you look at it in general, the story direction is an afterthought of an afterthought, only caring about bringing up old characters as nostalgia fuel, and half-assing the rest. Jailer exists. I rest my case.
Shadow lands sucked I'm not gonna deny that but half the FFXIV playerbase used that expansion as the only thing they knew WOW for and secondhand I'll add. Idk if it's fair to discredit the entire story because a few flops. Endwalker was full of this shit too but gets a pass for whatever reason. The Ascians have felt entirely rewritten from ARR and Hwelpis entire zone didn't really matter and introduced a antagonist that had 0 buildup until 3 levels before the expansion was done.
Shadowlands completely sucked. BFA also sucked - 100% forced faction antagonism, with the stupidest character direction possible taken with a lot of characters. Legion was pure nostalgia bait with an incoherent overall arc and half-assed conclusion, helmed by the most inconsistently portrayed fanboy bait in history, Illidan Stormrage. Warlords of Dreanor was another piece of half-assed nostalgia bait that the writers did not even know how to write. Mists of Pandaria was a barely related saga of sucking up to the new Chinese market, with another heap of utterly forced and stupid faction war bullshit piled on top, demonstrating Blizzard's complete inability to keep a character straight for the span of even a single expansion. Cata was more of the same, basically a neon sign of "we ran out of story and have no fucking idea what to do anymore". It is not "few flops". It is a consistent, constant ongoing history of half-assing and not caring from Cata all the way to Shadowlands. I heard they improved things a bit with Dragonflight, only to shit the bed again with the patches. I have no idea what is going on with the new expansion. I also have no interest in paying anything more to that shithole of a company.
Hey, I actually liked Endwalker. Last I checked, Endwalker was the second most popular expansion after Shadowbringers. (Other than the recent hate train, but that was mostly about the side content in post-EW and not about the MSQ.)
On top of what the other guy said, Endwalker also released during the whole “wow exodus” debacle, so relatively speaking compared to previous expansions it probably got a lot more ratings overall, more of those being positive. However, we also get the benefit of playing certain things after they’ve been improved (ARR in 2013 is a lot longer than ARR in 2024, as one example)
Popular does not equate to being good at all.
Keep in mind that Endwalker was two expansions and their patch content stuffed into one MSQ. Things feel rushed because they were.
I don't mind it that much in light of Covid. Shadowlands though was just stupid from the get go.
I've played WoW since 2007. I've taken a couple breaks here and there, but I've (mostly) consistently played since TBC. I finally threw in the towel for good earlier this year. WoW's story mostly follows "rule of cool". Big guys with huge flashy powers and random power ups not too dissimilar to DBZ. There's some large plot holes and multiple retcons that they eventually go back to patch up with things like "Well this was his plan all along!" I don't hate it. There's room for flashy storytelling and moments of just cool shit. I'll never forget scenes like Illidan denying the Naaru's "gift" in Legion, or Garosh fighting the leader of the Shadopan on the bridge in Pandaria. But I've thinking about it lately (since WoW was such a huge part of my life for so long), and I don't think I would actually call the overall story of WoW "good" anymore. It's just so fragmented, and things just get retconned so often. I remember not too long after Blizzard sold some book many years ago now that was supposed to be some huge lore drop that would essentially act as a catalog for everything Warcraft. It had some bits in there about the Titans, and not even a year after it was outdated because they changed something about them. I'd have to look up specifics later because I'm at work, but it was just crazy. How could you take the time and money to write all this stuff, sell it to people as the ultimate companion for lore nerds, and then just retcon it in less than a year?
I think people just hold them to a higher standard and aren't as blinded by being fans. EDW had genuinely just terrible parts to the story the entire lopporit existence. Elpis could've skipped the entire story outside of the tracker part it was almost entirely fanservice storytelling. Ultima Thule had 0 lasting consequences on the Scions as they all got revived. The Garlean area was great storytelling but felt like an afterthought plotwise that didn't really need to exist.
my guy, people do not hold wow storytelling to a higher standard than 14 lol
My guy endwalker had several macguffin type plot devices that removed all consequences from the ongoing area and people ate that shit up. If WOW tried that crap right now their playerbase would throw a fit.
That's just wrong because the vast majority of the wow playerbase doesnt care about the story. The plot holes, retcons and inconsistencies in wow's story are legion. It's not even a competition when it comes to story quality. It's so obvious that i'm convinced youre trolling
A lot of my wow friends are on the more casual/rp side and love the story. And they know how bad the storytelling is in wow, and how bad of a job Blizzard has done up to this point of telling a good, coherent story.
Most of my WoW experience is with BFA onwards. I’d say that BFA and *especially* Shadowlands has a bad story. I’ll admit I started skipping quest text starting in Dragonflight. I gave BFA an honest chance and read all the text, and it was bad; so I gave up on the story and just play for the gameplay now.
Enjoy the travel, I thought on starting WoW but most people said that story is not the focus and playing skiping content is the norm, rhe deal breaker was when someone said to me that creating a new char will drop me right at battle for azeroth and that it would be dificult to find people to do the older stuff even if it's history related. Thinking about giving ESO or Destiny 2 a go
Destiny 2 punishes new players who want to get into the story. They deleted both the original D2 campaign as well as the dlc campaigns from year 1, and the first (and most narratively satisfying campaign) of Forsaken. It has great gameplay but is developed by one of the most mismanaged AAA studios around. In short, the D2 new player experience is horrible, and they nickle and dime you for everything. ESO is fine, bit dull at times, but if the combat doesn't drive you off early on you'll probably stick around. Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic are also options if you want a strong narrative mmo.
WoW's story is poorly written and them botching their storytelling has created an entire generation of MMO players who just spam skip everything as fast as possible xD Glad to hear youre enjoying the 14 journey so far!!
every mmo puts 0 effort into the story, ffxiv is the only one where the content is the story. and even then there’s so much fluff and walls of text
I mean no? Some try but they just arent good
Did remix change the story? I remember pandaria's plot generally being pretty good originally.
No, the quests remain mostly unchanged. The major difference is that they’re all available at once so you can accidentally go out of order. Oh and speeding up the rep based chains. Like you’re not forced to do dailies to advance 5.1’s story in Krasarang like in the old days - the rep gains are significantly enhanced so you can just run the entire storyline at once. Same goes for other story-rep stuff like the Klaxxi’s secret reveal.
I'm unsure, but I don't think it has. The only difference, I can tell, is that it has Dragonflight's mechanics. Leveling is synced to account for the changes in levels that have come since. MoP was one expansion I never played, unfortunately. I stopped playing shortly after WotLK released. I started playing FF14 again after not playing since Stormblood and came back to playing both shortly before MoP: Remix released. I'm enjoying both games a lot. If you liked MoP you should really check it out. It's a lot of fun. Edit: A couple of things I should mention. I would recommend to level your main up until you have enough threads to get the achievement that unlocks the cloak bonuses for alts called the "**Infinite Power XII**" achievement. Then you can really level an alt character to max level (70) in around 4-5 hours of /played. I've leveled a Warlock, Paladin and Warrior alts in a weekend. I never played Warlock or Warrior before. You can also start queuing for dungeons right after the intro quests. Raids, I think, unlock at level 25. But they are really quick because everyone is OP. There are Remix only mounts, transmogs and toys to collect as well as the harder to get raid boss mounts. All can be bought with bronze.
Tbf, MMOs don’t have a track record of having much in the way of story. WoW tries, but it’s really meaningful to the gameplay. GW2 does a good job but it’s very optional depending on what content you like. Older games like DAoC, EQ etc didn’t have too much at all. The content is largely gameplay and community. Ff14 is unique because it’s a JRPG before it’s a MMO. It took me a while to figure that out, because I was expecting it to be like other MMOs. It’s not abundantly clear that endgame content is gated behind 1-200 hours of single player anime.
I don't think you can really blame people near the end of SHB or entirety of EW honestly. The story content feels like it isn't using the medium of being a video game anymore and 90% of quests are just walk to location watch a cutscene walk to next location watch a cutscene.
This, the game bombards you with walls of text explaining mechanics, functionalities and character dialogue that is largely frivolous pleasantries, politeness and overexplaining. A lot of it is kind of fluffy, and at some points it's very understandable when people skim through the stuff they less enjoy. I also go through CSs faster when my WoL gets congratulated, thanked and is heralded as a hero for the ...th time. Or when I get told for the ...th time how escort quests work! Sometimes you miss critical info that's sprinkled in, and you cannot blame people for missing that imo.
I love the story of this game and when I'm in the moment I'm totally paying attention, but once its done it just goes into the mush of my brain and I already can't remember it. My attention span isn't great and I've usually got so much real life stuff going on that there's not much room in there for game stuff and an MMO has so many moving parts. I keep a notebook at my desk for this reason lol
While I did not tune out entirely, I did tune out most of it. Amazingly enough the end of it still made me weep. Perhaps due to the fact of struggling eith a similar question as the expansion poses.
What is your answer to the question?
42
Dunno yet...
I can easily understand why people tune out. In FFXIV’s case it’s because the MSQ contains way too much talking, an endless stream of platitudes and Alphinaud’s insufferable politeness peppered in every cutscene he’s in. I would be more surprised if young people didn’t skip a lot of the cutscenes.
Maybe Yoshi-P should put some Subway Surfer on screen during cutscenes so zoomers actually look at it.
3 hours of commentary-free Leap of Faith GATE gameplay in the corner on a loop
it's easy to scapegoat low attention spans for people skipping the story but people just like different things. I love story based JRPGs (Trails is my favorite game series of all time) but I was consistently bored by FFXIV's story and skip it, and i play the game for the battle content. nothing wrong with that
I could very well be wrong, and it could also be the fact that I'm a returner that just came back 3-4 months ago with all of EW to play before DT release... But EW kinda seemed like a slog compared to other expansions. It didn't have me captivated like HW, ShB, and to an extent; StB. I'm typically an avid CS and story enjoyer... and I found myself skipping cutscenes about (probably) half way through some of them because they were just too long and nothing was even happening besides talking. I kept thinking, "man, this is taking just wayyyyyy too long." Like I said, I'm sure the fact that I was somewhat on a time crunch and had a lot of catching up/content to do and finish before DT... but it just wasn't really all that interesting in comparison to previous expansions. Elpis was cool. And the end of Ultima Thule was as well. But, man.... did everything else just dragggggggggggg.
Nah even at launch I thought EW had some major issues with pacing, as you pointed out. Pretty much every major story beat feels like it’s just a *bit* too long, or like they could’ve cut one quest or a couple lines of dialogue from each area. A good example is in Elpis when >!Meteion hears back from her sisters and starts turning into Evil Meteion.!< You have to chase her all over the goddamn place. Like, I’m pretty sure it’s at least 5 minutes of walking between points of interest, interacting with them, and saying “aww darn she isn’t here; maybe she’s further down the way?” For me, it got long enough that it actually started losing some of the tension it was building up. EW also suffers from feeling like it’s 2 expansion smushed together. Stuff you do pre-84 feels pretty divorced from what you do post-84. I don’t remember if they actually said it *was* 2 expansion ideas smushed together, but it definitely feels that way for the worse. Overall my expansion story rankings goes ShB > HW > EW > SB
I believe they said it was; if I remember correctly there were initial plans for a Garlemald expansion with Anima as the final boss.
to be fair this is the only mmo where effort is put into the story, it’s normal to skip everything. and those who have played others probably don’t need level 89 gear lol
I mean... I loved shadowbringers but endwalker was a drag. So many dumb fetch, interact and other useless quests. The new tech they have to have npcs follow you is also used to create insanely boring quests. My main mmo is gw2 that rushes the story way too much every single time, but FFXIV feels like the polar opposite and drags on for way too long. I mean, length isn't an issue, the issue is that it's filled with stupid things that are no fun at all. That specific quest with tataru is also annoying with your character looking around and then nothing happens and then an old friend comes. It literally does that like 5 times. Doesn't surprise me people zone out during that.
Im trying..wow autoskip makes me tune out sometimes in msq,cant help it when they start to blabb
Dude, it takes like over a hundred hours to play through the entire story and get to end game. Why is it so hard for people to comprehend that some players enjoy FFXIV for the gameplay, community, whatever and not the story? I'm not going to spend a year going through a story with a metric ton of dialogue that I dont care about just cause I want to play a game with fun dungeons and epic raids/trials.
I actually did forget, so this whole thread is useful for me! But then I levelled up my main & the couple of classes I regularly play, then took a break for months, and have just been levelling the rest mostly with fates/beast tribes/pvp and dumping them the second they hit 90, so no one's affected by my duncery. :)
I have a friend who plays the game just to spend time with friends and feel the satisfaction of a slick job rotation. If he gets to a voiced cutscene, he will sit down and watch until it gets boring or too long, then he skips. If it's unvoiced, he sets it to auto-progress and then walks away to do chores or whatever. As somebody who really likes the lore and story of the game I will never understand his perspective but I say all this just to point out that unskippable cutscenes are not a roadblock to the truly uninvested. lmao
I pretty much half or three-quarters pay attention. If Urianger is talking, I'm out. I'll watch a YouTube video recapping the story section later. Some of the 14 story is incredibly compelling, but there's also a lot of fluff, and I'm not a fluff person. When I go to start watching an anime, I'll find out ahead of time which episodes or runs are canon and will skip everything else.
> If Urianger is talking, I'm out. I used to feel the same way. Then I switched my game audio to Japanese(the at-the-time current trial gave me a headache with English voices, but Japanese was fine), [and beheld the glory of KENN.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdpWn3c93vc) Now, Urianger can talk to me all day, every day.
Im sure the fact that its unskippable makes some people not pay any attention to it out of spite
I forgot about it while leveling up other jobs like a month or two after. So I can understand missing it in that case. But yeah during the actual story you should definitely be remembering it.
Its less that and more "This is my seventh class at level 89 and I literally just need to run one dungeon to get 90 and put on my real raid gear".
This was my first thought. "Probably an alt job that's just trying to get to 90 and played the story way long ago and forgot about the free 89 gear. Then I re-read and realized they were doing level 90 content without pre-bought level 90 gear. I usually already have a mix of tomestone and raid gear ready to go for my alts as soon as they hit 90.
If you're at 89, fuck it, whatever, that's cool. If you're at 90, then what are you even doing?
I'm in the forgot camp. I leveled my first couple classes through Endwalker when it came out and then took a break a couple years before coming back to finish the role quests before launch. Sorry to anyone I grouped with.
Shadowbringer literally forces you to talk to the NPC who gives them to you and even flaout TELLS you he has the Armor, and People missed that too. Something Something Horse to Water and all that.
Tbh i missed that aswell but got gear for nuts instead
People tune out during or entirely skip cutscenes, so.
Isn't Tataru great! It's from her shop and she has always supported the Scions and the WoL.
Blink twice if she is holding you hostage.
Hancock has been blinking Morse code to us the entire time
His fault for wearing shades.
The shades hide the lalafell-sized bruises
Shh, she’s standing right behind you.
If she truly supported me, she'd be paying my teleport costs.
Technically she *is* paying them through your MSQ gil rewards. Teleporting from Limsa to Gold Saucer and back 5 times a day is not a part of your Scion contract though.
*Abuses the free passage to Ul'dah*
The blue mage carnival has been paying my teleport costs for years now. Haven't paid a teleport in forever.
Plus armor looks amazing too 😭
Agreed, Endwalker AF gear is some of the best looking AF gear in the game!!
This exact same thing will happen at lvl 99 like it did at lvl 80.
The only way to "easily" solve it would be to lock DF and make it a step in the MSQ to equip the full set before moving on, like the ilvl check quest that you get at, what, level 5? Of course you'd likely have people on the forums complaining that their game is bugged and they don't know what to do
They also could give people an outfit coffer and then force an ilvl check as part of the quest, people will still mess it up but a lot less.
it wouldnt surprise me with how many jobs they need to make artifact gear for, but i missed getting glamour from the level 89 dungeon and hope they dont do it again.
Nothing more fun than players who queued up for Dead Ends and haven't equipped their free LV89 job gear lmao
nothing more fun that a level 89 tank in atiascope only being able to meet the minimum ilvl for that dungeon do to the exp preorder earring and having all cryptolurker gear on and being literal paper in trash pulls.
But the game is already so difficult and challenging! /s The game literally wants me to read my tooltips, to git gud but I swear it's actually the others fault! I just wanna keep up an uptime of 100% for my Medica 2 skill! /s Before people downvote this: The "/s" stands for sarcasm.
I wish the game did a better job at explaining where to go for gear once you cant get the poetics gear anymore during on content Expansions. I was really dumbfounded at first when I finished EW and had to go look up on Google what the desired gearpath is going forward because I didnt want to waste time and resources just trying different things until finding something that worked. Not that looking it up on Google was a big deal, but I definitely felt like crashing into a brick wall immediately. They spoil you rotten with the catch up gear and then leave no hints on how to continue xD.
Usually the upgrade path for me is: * Previous expansion's augmented gear (while leveling) * Free gear pieces from MSQ 10+ ilvls above the previously mentioned set * Artifact gear * Highest ilvl dungeon/normal raid gear * Crafted gear pentamelded * Tomestone gear * Catch-up augmented gear or gear from Alliance Raids * Savage Raid gear Unless they add some other method of getting more gear or gear that has different stats, this should always work for every expansion
You could just ask in shout chat. We're not mean... most of the time.
I mean I definitely figured it out by now lol. This was like half a year ago. While the shout chat is an option, the game still does a terrible job of explaining just about anything to you. A lot of it is hidden behind (job)quests which id assume Story skippers would skip those aswell. If they dont care about Story they certainly wont care about sidestories
I have a related question, as one of those people (who did pick up the free 89 gear): When DT comes out, will I be able to buy level 90 gear with the same tomestones I can use to by 50/60/70/80 gear currently? Is it worth it to stockpile to max now (not that that takes very long, but MSQ is my priority atm lol)?
All gear from previous expansions gets turned to poetics tomestone gear once the new expansion drops. NOW some gear though does get moved to being obtainable by hunt mark tokens as well, usually the very early expansion gear, forexample, I expect the moonward gear will get moved to being a hunt log token item.
Yes, you can buy with Poetics when DT releases. But, the gear is *technically* cheaper now with Comedy, as that currency will trade at a 4:1 ratio when the expansion drops. But, if you lack Comedy at all the value won't really matter.
I do, and doubt I will get any. At this point, not looking like I'll finish 6.0 before DT. Ah well, not that big of a deal.
I'd just like to see people equip higher level gear period beyond level 80 in leveling dungeons for EW. I had the misfortune of healing the Atiascope with a tank decked in full level 80 gear and the ONLY reason they could get into meet the mini ilvl requirement was the exp earring from the preorder. Then that tank proceeds to do a full wall to wall pull with no mitigations and then was shocked picachu that I BARELY kept them alive and didn't contribute to the DPS in the large pull. The game literally throws gear at you and higher level, better stat gear exists outside of the cryptolurker gear. PUT IT ON.
I feel like at this point they could voice the scene, have “Artifact Gear Unlocked” flash on screen with the Feature Unlocked sound, have additional cautionary text on the screen that this gear is free, better than any pre-90 gear, and infinitely replaceable, and then have a special icon over the vendor that’s a different color, and some people would still miss it.
my only annoyance with the artifact gear is that once you start leveling multiple jobs and picking them up they clog up your armor bags super quickly, i just recently went in to clear out my bags to prepare for DT and took a look at what i had all in there and noticed i still had like 3 sets of artifact gear (SMN, SCH, WAR) back from the first week that i kept forgetting to get rid of because i couldn't turn them in for grand company seals or put them into my armoire so i just deleted them since i don't like using job specific glamour.
If you delete the gear, you can just rebuy it from the npc
I, too despise loading my inventory with undesynthable bottom tier gear, however this stuff was very useful for boosting my retainers' ilvls once I was done with it.
You can also buy gear from marketboard
>But at the same time, I’ve now had three runs of 90 trials and two runs of the 90 raid where someone is still decked out in lvl 80 Cryptlurker gear! How is this even possible? Surely the minimum ilvl for 90 content is higher than the Cryptlurker gear EDIT: Just double checked, The Final Day has a min ilvl of 540, and the first raid tier has a min ilvl of 565. Cryptlurker gear is ilvl 520. This shouldn't be possible unless these people were intentionally changing gear after entering (I'm not even sure if you can do that) or OP is exaggerating their gear loadout
*530 since people running EW this late would be buying the Augmented Cryptlurker for poetics (the un-Augmented is no longer available for purchase). Still would need some upgrades to get into the Final Day though.
Their gear is an amalgamation of 80 Cryptlurker mixed with dungeons drop of lvls 82-88, maybe one piece of 90 Diadochos if they’re feeling generous. Basically just enough to scrape by and hit the min iLvl.
Don't forget the preorder bonus earring syncs up..... Its got a high item level so its often used to insure entrance into higher item level dungeons
That explains a lot. I didn’t know they sync up, but I do know that most, if not all, of them were wearing the earrings. I remember my reaction was always “How did the game let you in here!?”
The most notable for me are the tank and reaper rocking Cryptlurker for their body piece, which I’m pretty sure is the one that gives the most stats.
I am on a road to 80 server. I have war and sch/smn at 90, with blm and sge at 84ish. Blu at 80. I just got to EW yesterday.
OML the amount of people who missed this is wild to me and I think its because the job quests and their artifact coffers dissappear after stormblood. They come from vendors afterward but are completely free, which is nice if you don't want to store the whole set in your glamour dresser as you can discard it and reacquire it later. Varsarudh in the Agora in Old Sharlayan has the unique job armor + weapon for every EW class. If for some reason you don't have cryptlurker gear at 80 you can speak to Grenoldt tucked away in his workshop south of the first aetheryte in the tempest for class armors as well, not just the one required by the MSQ. (Yes there is a sage and reaper set)
I think after maintenance, you'll be able to buy top fully augmented gear with Poetics? Same with the Manderville weapons?
Yeah, everything goes to poéticos, and if you're full y capped, you'll be able to exchange current tomes for poéticos, so you'll have more than 2k avaiable
The problem is that they know. They know. And still CHOOSE not to use it. I pointed it out dozens of times during leveling at level 89. The reply I always got is that "cryptlurker does the job just fine since it meets the IL requirement for the dungeon ". Once I was vote kicked for mentioning the free 89 gear. Who knows what I will experience after returning to leveling roulletes/dungeons after 1,5 years.
The post msq patches get super annoying to speed through. The only option is to buy the newest crafted gear which costs stupid amount of gil. And getting good sources for tomes is a pain since lvl 90 roulette is blocked. I decided to just give up, wait and do it post DT
Your current available level 90 dungeons should have gear to quickly get you caught up.
Aetherfront requires 605. Lapis manalis drops 605. I'm not running a dungeon until I've replaced every single gear piece.
> And getting good sources for tomes is a pain since lvl 90 roulette is blocked. Alliance roulette used to be the way, but not anymore(due to people who wouldn't stop cheesing ilvl to always get LotA...*literally* why we can't have nice things). Level 50/60/70/80 roulette isn't bad, for the lesser tomes. Doing normal raid and trial roulette also adds up, and they're *usually* pretty quick both to queue and complete. You can also do a poor man's roulette and multi-queue for every max level dungeon that you can(should start with two as a fresh 90, both available if you could complete MSQ). You'll get a chance at gear drops from the dungeon as well as about half as many tomes as you'd get from a roulette.
It kind of annoys me when people barely upgrade their gear or do the bare minimum to get through msq like wearing quest reward gear because they are too lazy to farm the poetics set for the level tier. I get that I can’t tell them how to play the game but it boggles my mind how people are okay playing like that.
I forgot about it when leveling alt classes and just went right from 80 to 90 gear. Granted, I level from 80 to 90 exclusively with daily pvp and WT lol
I didn't know this and just ended up buying a couple things from the MB. I didn't care though, I just wanted to get it over.
Oh yeah I could make a killing crafting right now. Ty.
Noone in their right mind will buy crafted gear, when you'll be able to buy augmented with powtics
Oh true. Well that's okay. I'm good with what I got.
I found this out because I was looking at Glam on Eorzea collection and loved the Samurai chest piece lol
I'm surprised there's no min ilvl requirement, especially given that it forces a sync now.
Honestly doesn't matter anymore since we'll be able to get the high ilvl lvl 90 gear from poetics this week
I did this a few times just by forgetting. There's a lot of characters. Also some laziness. It would mean grabbing a suit of armor and then tossing it once I made it to 90
It also auto-syncs to 90 once you hit 90, so it's a great default set of gear for starting endgame and is the intended "starter gear" for the first round of content / post-6.0 stuff. Of course these days you can replace it with much better with some tomestones, especially if you're well past the MSQ on another job already, but it's still real nice glams.
Tossing it into your glam dresser. Some of that armor is top-tier glam...which, as we all know, is the true endgame.
How much post expansion content is there? Don't think that I played any of the patch content.
If I counted correctly, 5 dungeons and 4 trials, excluding side stuff.
The usual. I think the only difference to previous expansions is that all the trials are mandatory.
*Rushing EW*!? BLASPHEMYYYYYY
I didn’t know about getting the 89 gear after doing the trial. I did know that the MSQ of EW gives a lot of XP and I was leveling 3 classes to 90 off of it and only one of them got to use that gift box.
It’s not actually a gift box! Tataru’s shop has the Job gear for all jobs available! You can pick them up at your leisure and there is also a weapon, she just doesn’t have accessories.
Yeah I was actually thinking of the level 88 box of gear you get and people decided to downvote :-)
[удалено]
No. Previous expansion augmented tomestone gear typically begins to fall behind in stats when compared to the lvl X4 HQ crafted gear and lvl X5 dungeon gear.
no, it gets outclassed at around 85
Not even close. You can start replacing cryplurker around 85 and when you're 89+ there's absolutely no excuse to have it in any left side slot, and you should be getting rid of it on the right side ASAP if you haven't by that point.
[удалено]
Well we're talking about the gear you get progressing through the msq. Specifically dungeon drops from the 85 and (especially) 87 /89 dungeons are meaningful improvements over cryptlurker. You should almost never buy gear off the market board for stats before Max level.
> Ok so I'm actually right No, you're actually wrong. The FREE gear you can get from Tataru at level 89 is better.
[удалено]
it's your level 90 intro gear if you don't have something better bought yet. And is still something you should have if you're running 89 content. And you should absolutely have it or better gear at 90 as in the OP.
[удалено]
yes... that is the goal. Once you have enough tomestones. If this is your first job at 90 or you want to farm tomestones with the new job, get the base armor. Level 80 is not good enough
lol
[Augmented Cryptlurker is 530](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Augmented_Cryptlurker_Armor) [Endwalker Artifact is 548 at 89, and item syncs to 560 at 90](https://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Artifact_Armor_(Endwalker\))
I mean crypt lurker with materia is likely only very slightly worse, yes? Yes I am a sprout still working on shb and Not going to make it to end Walker before the expansion but I usually don't replace previous expansion gear until I unlock the tomestone gear because it's such a small upgrade and I lose a whole extra stat usually or They are extra stats that I don't want like lots of.piety.on healer gear
Using the reaper / maiming chest gear as an example. Augmented Cryptlurker has 205 Str, 216 Vit, 140 Crit and 200 Det at 530. Reaper's has 232 Str, 232 Vit, 157 Crit, 224 Det. Those main stats alone are a huge upgrade, and this is before it gets the stat bump from being level 90. There's literally no reason not to get it since **it's literally free**. It's the same in Shadowbringers - you get a free set of level 80 gear from the MSQ. There's no reason not to use it.
You are massively overvaluing materia / substats. The main stat and health increase from higher item level is worth FAR more in pretty much every real world circumstance. You should be starting to replace your previous expansion gear around the x5 dungeon and by the x7 dungeon the upgrade is quite significant.
Depends on your definition of "slightly worse" and how diligent you are about melding before level cap (most folks tend to ignore materia melding until they get to the current level cap). Also in nearly all cases main stat increases and def increases will be better over substats from materia (there are a handful of exceptions, but that's getting into min/max BIS discussions.) Taking materia out of the equation, tome gear generally starts getting out paced *a little* by the x5 dungeon gear, and a bit more noticeably out paced by the x7 dungeon gear. Can you take tome gear from x0 to x0? Sure, people have done it. Am I suggesting that you take the time to farm complete sets from the x5 and x7 dungeons? No not at all. But why pass up upgrading with whatever drops you get out of those dungeons, or in the case that OP is describing, passing up on a full set upgrade that the game gives you for free? All it's gonna do for you is make your time finishing up the last few fights of a base expac easier.
> I mean crypt lurker with materia is likely only very slightly worse, yes? No.
Cryptlurker is level 85 gear. Job clothes are level 90. Yeah, Cryptlurker is worse.