**OFFICIAL** FFXIV:ARR Thread

[PowerYoga]

If you have a bunch of people feeding chocobos it gets dirty real quick. I clean my stables out every other day and we only have 2 people feeding... back when there were 3-4 people feeding our stables were perpetually not-clean, and this is from a very small FC. Combined with the fact glazenuts take about a week to grow if you have seeds (close to 2-3 weeks if you don't) it makes it completely unfeasible to make enough brooms for a clean stable.

Overall the only major ball drop that I've seen is personal housing, the rest were either little tweaks or changes to make the game more streamlined and better for the most part.

also pharos can still be hard if you ignore mechanics. GL with an enraged zu...

 

[pontifex]

I played this shortly after it came out but only for the free month. i tried it again (free trial) and it's still pretty much the same from a lower level standpoint.

Think I got a lance to level 11 this time (played black mage last time). all questing is solo-able so far, no need to group with people yet. not much communication between players that I saw. definitely not going to re-sub (although I can't figure out how I could re-sub under my account. I saw no options on how to do it so I guess my previous account is gone?).

 

[pathos]

I played this shortly after it came out but only for the free month. i tried it again (free trial) and it's still pretty much the same from a lower level standpoint.

Think I got a lance to level 11 this time (played black mage last time). all questing is solo-able so far, no need to group with people yet. not much communication between players that I saw. definitely not going to re-sub (although I can't figure out how I could re-sub under my account. I saw no options on how to do it so I guess my previous account is gone?).

Occasionally the game forces you to group up and hit dungeons. Lowest level one was around 16, as I recall. Other than that, pretty much everything up through end game is soloable. Or, at least it was the last time I played it. Pretty much the only lower level grouping was done by people grinding fate's for raising secondary classes.

I started to come back a couple of different times, to see how much it has changed since I last played, but I have serious trouble with this company's payment page. I finally remembered I was actually using game cards when I was actually playing, to purchase square's crystal money, and paying for it that way

Since I'm pretty much done with what I wanted to do with wow's latest expansion, I think I will come back to this, at least for a few months.

 

[nurturedhate]

I played this shortly after it came out but only for the free month. i tried it again (free trial) and it's still pretty much the same from a lower level standpoint.

Think I got a lance to level 11 this time (played black mage last time). all questing is solo-able so far, no need to group with people yet. not much communication between players that I saw. definitely not going to re-sub (although I can't figure out how I could re-sub under my account. I saw no options on how to do it so I guess my previous account is gone?).

As the person above me stated most of the game is soloable. There are however points where you will need to group up to complete some instances to progress the story.

I did feel that this game did a wonderful job of allowing people to quests together if that is your thing. A lot of MMOs, especially ESO, did not make this a smooth or easy process. The wife and I never ran into an instance where we could not do something together.

 

[PowerYoga]

I played this shortly after it came out but only for the free month. i tried it again (free trial) and it's still pretty much the same from a lower level standpoint.

Think I got a lance to level 11 this time (played black mage last time). all questing is solo-able so far, no need to group with people yet. not much communication between players that I saw. definitely not going to re-sub (although I can't figure out how I could re-sub under my account. I saw no options on how to do it so I guess my previous account is gone?).

1-50 is just a tutorial and getting to lvl 11 takes about an hour or 2 tops. Not sure what you're expecting out of the game when you only have access to about 1% of it.

 

[blake0812]

So does the book just add stats on the weapon everytime I complete a category or when I complete the whole book? Because I'm not seeing much of a change.

 

[PowerYoga]

It adds when you complete the whole book. The categories by themselves do nothing.

 

[LucJoe]

FYI

GMG has 25% off Heavensward digital collector and standard. Need to log in and go to VIP. Was waiting for a deal from them.

 

[darkewaffle]

Probably going to jump on that, I knew GMG would have some sort of 20-25% off deal at some point lol.

 

[cbrunny]

Uprgaded to the latest beta Catalyst drivers with GTA V and this game does not seem to like it at all. Not sure what changed but since the update I've been getting hangs and crashes, DC all over the place. Anyone else having the same? Might not be the driver as I'm not getting any driver errors but not sure what else it could be at this point. Even ehwen on Raidcall, raidcall still functions when it is crashing but no error messages. Just black screen and my peeps telling me I've dc'd. I can ctrl-alt-del though. Very frustrating.

 

[PowerYoga]

i get the occasional ctd but for the most part but I haven't gotten the absolute latest catalyst. Sounds like I shouldn't from what you're seeing...

try rolling back to the previous driver if possible?

 

[cbrunny]

Problem is that I'm switching btwn GTA V and FFXIV. I don't want ot play on bad drivers for GTA V but don't want to crash for FFXIV.

I should roll back though just to test it out I guess.

 

[cbrunny]

I did a bit of poking around last night & trying to force a crash. I was successful in this. Between this, and some internets, I think I have an idea of what is happening.

The problem is drivers. This issue has been reported on both AMD and Nvidia cards, but is far more prevalent on AMD cards due to nvidia's generally better driver support, especially with ffxiv. In this case, I have AMD cards running in CF. FFXIV is currently DX9 as you know, and I guess that AMD and nvidia are only continuing DX9 driver support in what I guess is termed 'legacy support' which means basically no tweaks further. Makes sense to me. it's fn old. So The new drivers are causing some issue in DX9.

To get around this, it was suggested that the tick box for LOD Streaming is ticked. I ticked this box and then went to try to force a game crash, unsucessfully. I need to do more testing but this seems to be the quick-fix until the DX11 version comes out. Logging my system info from Afterburner proved to be not-noteworthy. There was nothing unusual at all about it's output.

So, LOD Streaming active, should be good to go in the short term. Hopefully.

 

[PowerYoga]

I just alt tab out once in a while to clear the vram, it filling up seems to be the cause of the crash. This has been an issue for quite a while and I don't see this getting resolved anytime soon.

 

[Xellos2099]

I did a bit of poking around last night & trying to force a crash. I was successful in this. Between this, and some internets, I think I have an idea of what is happening.

The problem is drivers. This issue has been reported on both AMD and Nvidia cards, but is far more prevalent on AMD cards due to nvidia's generally better driver support, especially with ffxiv. In this case, I have AMD cards running in CF. FFXIV is currently DX9 as you know, and I guess that AMD and nvidia are only continuing DX9 driver support in what I guess is termed 'legacy support' which means basically no tweaks further. Makes sense to me. it's fn old. So The new drivers are causing some issue in DX9.

To get around this, it was suggested that the tick box for LOD Streaming is ticked. I ticked this box and then went to try to force a game crash, unsucessfully. I need to do more testing but this seems to be the quick-fix until the DX11 version comes out. Logging my system info from Afterburner proved to be not-noteworthy. There was nothing unusual at all about it's output.

So, LOD Streaming active, should be good to go in the short term. Hopefully.

I think i did the lod thing back when Hunt was crashign server left and right.

 

[PowerYoga]

T13 is so easy now with 10% echo. Too bad now I need to pray to RNGesus for a freggin drop.

6 runs yesterday, ended up with a twine and caster pants. /sigh

 

[Xellos2099]

I won't call t13 easy... i still got fail pt in pf t10-11 lol

 

[PowerYoga]

my group failed t10 like 5 times the other day then cleared 12 and 13 in 1 shot, it's really relative...

T13 is very easy now that the 2 biggest checks (HP and DPS) have been eased thanks to echo.

 

[pathos]

Well, I'm back playing after taking forever off. My gear was pretty gimp when I quit playing, and it's even more gimp now. Good thing I'm not keeping track

I was putting off working on my immortal flame advancement, and my epic weapon quests, so I basically raised all classes up to 15 right from the start (most were still at level 1). Then I worked on all the quests to open up hard mode dungeons (which I can't enter yet because of gimp gear), and those dance emote quests, heh.

I still have a couple of quests I'm not sure if it's worth doing yet, that level 1 mystery solving quest, and the level 50 quest that sends you all over the word doing fates. I suppose I should look them up on google if only to see what the end result will be, to see if they are worth doing.

After that, I did finally break down and do chimera, which I needed for my epic. Next step is ampdoor keep (or however it's spelled). Only been in that place 1 time ever, and only made it to the first boss.

And, I did clear the sergent to lieutenant promotion quest for the flames, which was arum vale. I've cleared that dungeon a dozen times, feels like, but this was definately the easiest and fastest I've cleared it...and thats with 2 total newbies, apparently. Gear (not mine, since it's gimp...everyone elses) really does make a difference I suppose .

 

[darkewaffle]

Three weeks! I finally caught up with all the 2.52 story content this weekend. I thought Steps of Faith came pretty quickly and at first felt the patch was pretty short... but then the cutscenes lol. I really enjoyed them, so many interesting things happening and I really like that they're not pulling any punches about drama/violence/gravity. It's refreshing - although some of the foreshadowing was quite heavy handed. It was a worthy lead-in imo, it definitely has me looking forward to HW more.

That said, I'm still kind of short on things to do until then lol.

 

[cbrunny]

Q times are getting longer and longer for DPS classes. Since I only play as DPS it's like 25 minutes of waiting for a 30 min instance. Really boring. I stopped playing for a while and picked it back up again not too long ago, so I have to catch up on some grinding tomes, and its just so boring waiting for Qs to pop.... I don't really want to level another class right now haha.

 

[nageov3t]

is there any point in buying Heavensword as a lowbie?

I'm enjoying the game, but haven't managed to get past ~30 in a single job.

 

[darkewaffle]

Probably not actually. Heavensward as far as story goes will require the completion of all existing story content (which goes well past just hitting 50). I think not having it will probably lock you into level 50 and I don't believe you'll be able to access any of the new jobs as they will actually require going to the new areas to unlock. With that said there's still a lot of game for you go play through without taking HW into consideration at all.

And I've actually had decent queues as DPS lately. I only play Monk as a tertiary class after SCH/WAR but the times I have used it (some shiva/lota/ct/wod) my queues haven't been any longer than like 10-15m.

Finally made my pre-order last night, for what it's worth Greenman Gaming still has an active 25% discount coupon.

 

[PowerYoga]

Q times are getting longer and longer for DPS classes. Since I only play as DPS it's like 25 minutes of waiting for a 30 min instance. Really boring. I stopped playing for a while and picked it back up again not too long ago, so I have to catch up on some grinding tomes, and its just so boring waiting for Qs to pop.... I don't really want to level another class right now haha.

That's normal for dps queue. If you queue as melee it's shorter.

is there any point in buying Heavensword as a lowbie?

I'm enjoying the game, but haven't managed to get past ~30 in a single job.

I'm going to say yes, because it's very easy to level to the max level. Heavensward storylines don't open up until you're done with the 2.0 main stroy line but you can get the new gear and buy the new crafted stuff and so forth. As a general rule in MMORPGs, if you don't have the new XPAC you won't be able to play with 99% of the players once you're at the max level.

 

[nageov3t]

thanks for the tips!

I've actually been debating if it's worth it to just start a new character and force myself to focus on one specific job, rather than bouncing between classes and getting bored without storyline quests to level up with. might have made a mistake with my first job being an arcanist, since I got to level 35 only to discover that I didn't like the DoT-based playstyle.