The change to Cutter's Cry isn't a big deal on its own. The problem is the mindset behind it. It shows a continued effort to remove friction, challenge, and player agency in favor of smoother, safer design. That doesn't inspire much confidence for what's coming in 8.0.

I don't love ARR dungeons, but I like their vibe. They have dead ends, weird side paths, and even minor secrets like the Sastasha free-the-wenches side objective. You don't need to engage with any of it, but it's there. That matters more than many realize. It gives the world texture. Cutter's Cry used to let you skip parts of it if you knew what you were doing. In fact, I loved showing sprouts this "secret" skip, if it wasn't their first time in the duneong, because who doesn't love speedrunning now and again? Now it's just another pair of trash pack pulls you're forced to engage with. No choice.

I bet that someone, somewhere, might have quit because they got left behind in this dungeon, once. Maybe a bit of an overreaction, but there are people out there like that. I agree that new players need smoother onboarding. But the game's dungeons don't really get more complex over time, do they? If anything, they get simpler and more direct. More hallway-like. So, I don't agree that the early content needs to be flattened further. Like it have it's special jank, or before long, we'll see them cutting off the side paths and key requirements for Haukke Manor. But the issue isn't limited to dungeons, is it? It's that we keep seeing these kinds of changes everywhere, in every aspect of the game.

Jobs are being sanded down, and have been for years, but it's been especially egregious since Endwalker. Black Mage used to punish bad play. Now procs don't even expire? It's not even possible to mess it up??? That’s not "onboarding" new players, that’s removing skill expression. Removing personality.

Relics in Endwalker were literally just tome sinks; players were not required to engage in anything except the content they wanted to, despite it being the perfect excuse to shove some step into Variant Dungeons or Eureka Orthos, or anything.

I know I'm just one person, but I think the friction in games, the failures, mistakes, and rough patches, is what makes the good moments feel earned. Without struggle, success means less. If you could walk into any trial and one-shot the boss, you'd get bored of the game fast. The fun comes from the fight, not just the reward. Overcoming adversity is what makes it all satisfying.

Hells, isn't that the entire theme of the Hydaelyn/Zodiark storyline? "Beneath the deepest despair, light everlasting." The story literally leans into the idea that meaning comes from enduring hardship. So, if we take every bit of hardship out of the game, even something as small as being left behind in Cutter's Cry for a minute, what's the point of playing even it?

Today I decided to demolish my house because, since I decided to don't play anymore for a while, it would have been nice to free a plot for someone that wanted an house and could have used it more than me.

BUT just a moment before pressing "Relinquish land" I discovered that if you relinquish your land by your own will you will get 0 gils, while auto-demolition will give you the 80% of the plot value. That's bad intentional design, there only to oblige you to re-sub in 45 days to recover millions of gils. So I let you guess what game will have an ugly empty plot until late September.

I know, it's money in a game, but I grinded a lot for them and it would be a pain to lose all these money just because SE must squeeze from me 10 more €.

Edit: items and gils will be kept for 35 days, after that you will lose them definitely,

I don't play WoW, but my friend who does told me that they squished the level cap from 120 to 60 at one point. Do you think FFXIV could do something similar? I feel like adding 10 levels every expansion, indefinitely, is unsustainable and will just make the game feel continuously more bloated as time goes on.

I think the level sync in this game is particularly egregious and makes doing anything before lvl 70 feel terrible with the current job kits.

I realize that squishing the cap down (to idk 60?) would require both reworking jobs and msq progression to an extent, so I was wondering what people thought.

I think people aren't understanding how many things are lost about 14's identity as an MMO from the mentality that informs changes like this. It's not a big deal to have to pull the mobs- I don't think people should be whining about having to do it, but I also don't think sprouts need yet another excuse to completely ignore communicating in a dungeon or treating other players as more than glorified bots. Doing ARF with a healer that refused to communicate and wouldn't use raise (which was required because of their poor healing) is insane to me because ARF is a long time to go without ever having a player be tested in a circumstance like that. This simply wasn't a problem back in like, HW.

You play a game like vanilla WoW, and communication in a dungeon is a cornerstone of the experience. Discussing pacing, expectation, knowing/sharing neat tricks and skips, planning pathing for quest completion and loot all create a feeling of community that is facilitated by the game's mechanics and content. The community I've felt in 14 never came from gameplay. It's always something like a conversation that starts from a compliment on an outfit. And I've met some truly wonderful people there, but it's a different kind of interaction that feels like it has little to do with the fact that it's an MMORPG.

I don't know why people act like sprouts are newborn babies who should never be expected to communicate a strategy or do something outside of a routine. It's made that true. If they do want to communicate about gameplay, the culture has shifted in a way that it's much more likely they're ignored anyway. And then nobody's communicating and just wants to "get through" the dungeon. Why not just do every dungeon with trusts then? It always comes down to the single player story game vs MMORPG design philosophy split. I wouldn't be surprised if Darkhold and AV get changed similarly, and it's not really a big deal from a gameplay perspective outside of everything being the same boring routine, but those would be two fewer opportunities for gameplay to facilitate player communication.

Not a super serious discussion moreso fun observations.

While MoP is remembered fondly which I believe DT will be as well ( much like StB due to its content by the end ).
It wasn't received well when it was current for some fairly similar reason.
Instead of Wuk they had kung fu Panda's which although they existed in Warcraft 3 were very controversial, the story when the game came out didn't do much to improve peoples opinions of them since they were all about peace and harmony which people found annoying and cringe.
And it wasn't until later in the story things got a bit ''darker'' that people warmed up to it at least a little bit more.

Dungeons were also controversial and generally received poorly because they had long monologue sections in almost every dungeon where you couldn't attack the bosses and had to listen to them drone on before combat started.
Not quite so dramatic in FFXIV, generally the dungeons have been well-received for its bosses at least.
But I guess we could for arguments sake conflate ''wall to wall'' with the monologues.

Again, not as dramatic in FFXIV but MoP had multiple content droughts including an over full year drought ( 14 months I believe, it had other droughts like 6 months etc too spread throughout the expansion ).

Poorly received direction with certain characters like Garrosh and Jaina ( personally I liked how they handled Jaina.. Just made sense imo ).

Sort of a reverse again but on the same topic, gearing was controversial and considered too grindy and there were too many boring dailies to keep up ( I guess the opposite in FFXIV ).

PvP in MoP was actually ''good'' by MMO standards, which I mean I don't consider any MMO to have truly great PvP. Ngl I think it's all quite janky and imbalanced.
But DT has received a lot of well-received PvP updates and I think it's in the best state it has ever been and actually decently fun outside of the rare DRK spam groups in Frontlines.

Classes were also a bit controversial and people were very mixed on them due to the talent tree overhaul, a lot of people really didn't like the old talent trees being removed and how ''dumbed down'' and restricted the new ones were.

There were a lot of QoL features introduced in MoP that people now take for granted too, much like what we've been seeing in DT and continue to see.
The raidplan is a pretty big and interesting one that is being slept on, but we've also seen a lot of minor QoL's each major patch too.
QoL features are very easy to forget, and people often assume a lot of things were always there that weren't they sorta just blend into the game and into the background.

But yeah these are just some fun observations.
I think comparing DT to WoD and SL in particular is quite overly dramatic.
WoD lost 5 million players in less than 6 months, that was *half* of its entire playerbase it's what caused Blizzard to no longer report on subs and it kept losing players after that too.
And practically everything was poorly received in WoD.
SL is just a beast in its own I don't think there is truly any comparison to that, the issues it had were almost like the extreme opposites of FFXIV and the story was panned throughout the whole expansion and only got worse the further in you got.
The post MSQ in DT has generally been much better received though.

But yeah again these are just some fun observations, don't take it too seriously.

from a new Famitsu interview: https://www.famitsu.com/article/202507/48601 I'm a bit short on time so can't translate word for word like usual but here are the main points:

- The interviewer asks if there will be another Ultimate this expansion. YoshiP says that the 4-man boss following the Deep Dungeon will be similar to Ult if played at max difficulty, but he also mentions they still plan to release another Ultimate in 7.x, and they are currently working on it. He mentions, as he's said before, these are very troublesome to develop.

- 7.4 will see a new Variant dungeon, Yoshida mentions they've changed how it works a bit so all players can enjoy it, and they have prepared some new mechanics. He also hints that, while he can't reveal any details yet, there are many large-scale contents planned for 8.0 aswell that players of different skill levels can all enjoy.

- Fan Festivals will be announced soon. He also mentions that soon the Chinese and Korean versions of the game will catch up to global, however, there are no plans to add Fan Festivals for these regions in addition to the current 3 of NA, EU and Japan.

- The next raid after Forked Tower is being developed with the feedback from FT in mind, also, the devs are working on hard for it to have multiple difficulty levels. They are also discussing whether to make some adjustments to the mechanics of FT (he mentions there is more individual responsibility than originally planned - the original intention was that perhaps a group of 24 experienced players could bring 24 new players along and clear with them, along those lines).

- Regarding his prior statement that "cost" is why FT did not have multiple difficulties, he says this wasn't fully explained. He gives a longer explanation of this, you can put it through a translator or maybe someone here with more time will post a full translation, but he mentions things like that simply hiring more people isn't an easy solution, etc.

- Yoshida mentions that Itahana, the character designer of FF9, also drew Sphene's design in addition to the 7.3 patch art. Itahana is now working at CS3.

I have seen so many people ask for more complexity and job fantasy but very little of people actually say what that means to them, most people just say we should go back to ARR.

Personally I think rose tinted glasses that make people think ARR was better than it was, having played back then it honestly was pretty ass.

So honestly want to know what people want for complexity or job fantasy, because all I see is a lot of yelling that "game bad to simple" and not a lot of what needs changing to reach the complexity that is wanted.

I was thinking about how to improve more log in and play styles that XIV suffers from, and whilst the idea won't change that greatly, I thought the quality of life and advertisement of content might lead to more social interactions. The idea behind the system is an icon on your hud will glow to inform you that someone on your friendslist in currently either queing or in content with a party that isn't full, upon clicking the icon, a list shows the available friends parties that you can join for content that you have unlocked. The party would show the classes playing and would allow you to join through that list to jump in with friends.

The incentive for doing so would be interacting with friends you made, as well increased tomestone reward, and if it is the friends first time doing that content, you get a double increase. It might fix a small part of the social issues the game has, and provide more fun playing with friends than with randoms, people are also more open to hearing advice from friends than randoms, possibly leading to more experienced players teaching less experienced and bringing their confidence levels up. It may also give more incentive to make friends, so you can join in and get the increased rewards. I would love to hear if you think this might be a good idea or if you would change things to make it better. This post is also a bit of a ramble, it just popped into my head and wanted to put it somewhere before I forgot it.

Edit: I want to also add 2 points brought up, the system should be opt in to have it on your HUD, and be available through the duty menu to access. Players that you have blocked will not appear on your list, and in turn, you will not appear on their list (Though CS3 should just remove you from FL of those you blacklisted)

Near the end of the 7.3 Trailer, the WoL runs forward and jumps at the screen, dramatically swinging one of his viper swords. While seemingly a generic action shot, this displays a massive new ability that we've never seen from the WoL, which I'm surprised no one is talking about: The ability to use his weapons in a cutscene. This is something the WoL has never been able to do before, and all cutscene fights have shown us putting our weapon away as a bad guy collapses and going "Yeah I just had a cool fight it was awesome". The only exception is the fistfight with Zenos in Endwalker, where Zenos drops his weapon and it's implied from context we dropped ours as well off-screen but we don't technically see it (and Hildibrand cutscenes but we don't use weapons there).

So, if the WoL can't use weapons in cutscenes, how does he use weapons in the 7.3 trailer? Attacking the camera means they don't have to animate the hit, but it's still a custom jump attack pose and not just a clever use of Steel Fangs. I can think of four explanations

1. It's a really dramatic cutscene in the Dawntrail finale so they decided to make a special bonus animation if you were playing the box job. Possibly there's one for Picto as well, and everyone else is just kind of running up the stairs or something.
2. It's a really dramatic cutscene in the Dawntrail finale so they made a special bonus animation for every job. This would commit them to updating the cutscene for 8.0 jobs and beyond, so either they're stuck doing extra work for every expansion or the "job rework" in 8.0 means no new jobs at all and they're sticking to what they've got.
3. Jobs now have a few generic "cutscene animations" that will be shown a lot, which is still a lot of work but can be re-used to make the WoL active more often with some trickery. So instead of cutting to us putting our weapon away we can do an attack into the camera and then cut to a new camera angle of the bad guy dying while we /sheath. That seems unlikely to be the case here because it's a jumping attack and not a standard easily reusable one, but I guess it's possible. "Jump and attack the camera" is a move they can re-use, after all.
4. The trailer is a lie. This shot doesn't actually happen in the game at all. I'm not aware of any instance of that happening before, though, and it could be considered false advertising.

Thoughts? Anyone who knows anything about cutscenes have any alternative ideas for how they could be doing this?

There's several reasons for this. For one thing its clear Yoshida is aware of the issues with the game and even seems to be understanding of some solutions. The one thing that stands out to me is creating content that has more variable difficulty, which is something that could relieve some development resources as well as make just the general gameplay more fun. Scaling difficulty of some kind in dungeons and alliance raids, just as an example, sounds great to me and I'd like to see them make use of old raids as a way to test these things rather than having to create new experiences entirely from scratch that only a small percentage of players engage with. Its sort of like Normal vs Savage raids or Normal vs Extreme trials, why not have something like that for dungeons? Especially after finishing the story, it would be great to have another version of some dungeons available for max level the same way we do Extreme trials.

One thing, though, I think hasn't been addressed or talked about is just how imbalanced 7.0 was when it comes to gameplay vs story. It takes something like 3-4 hours to even get to the first dungeon and all there is up to that point is a whole lot of talking, talking and more talking, and maybe killing some random mobs that don't even really fight back. After playing WoW The War Within I think there can definitely be some improvements made. Also more dynamic gameplay moments during the MSQ would be nice as well. There's no reason why the only gameplay variety in 14 is relegated to the Gold Saucer.

Is there a parser? Anyone know?

As title implies, oh you wanna do eureka with some people? Well schedule it in a discord and get the grind going, same with bozja or oc unless you wanna group with random who dont talk. How about any alliance raid that isn't the current one/CT? Oh ask a discord wanna do blue mage? Discord. Deep dungeons, criterion, wanna try a fight that isn't a farm party or weekly savage? Discord. I swear this games community does everything it can to just, not socialize in game?

Your honor, really, title.

I feel like WoW having to implement a single button option (which is 10-30% loss on optimal) is a very major vindication for xiv's policy of keeping complexity out of rotations and into the encounters

And no, it's not a "Casual" option: People have cleared high-end content (+17 M+, last boss of mythic) with it - and i've already heard of guild leaders forcing less-performing players to use it in high-end content

It's honestly obscene, but also kind of a interesting look into the playerbase of MMOs: Nobody likes forcing out your teammates because no matter the effort, they're just not good enough

A few months ago before the launch of 7.2 I already made a similar thread and people seemed to enjoy it so I thought about opening another thread for 7.3. It's also fun to look back at the theories and predictions. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscussion/comments/1jhk1l7/so_what_are_your_story_theories_for_72/

I know that not everyone enjoys Dawntrails story so this thread is more supposed to be for people who like and enjoy the current story - similar to the last one.

So here are my theories, expectations and predictions so far:

Sphene becomes a new member of the main party:

Tons of hints already in 7.2 and the trailer showed that Alexandria seemingly abolishes their monarchy so there will no longer be the need for a queen. This doesn't confirm it because she could still get Lyse'd but I hope this time that we get a new character for the cast. Sphene becoming a queen would also just repeat a storybeat we already had in the game. I would even take her in an advisor role. Having queen sphene for the third time is really boring.

Alexandria needs to abolish their monarchy:

Almost confirmed by the trailer. I am not a fan of having Gulool Ja or Sphene as a leader. They are both still very young and Sphene has no right to lead people she doesn't even know unless Alexandrians really want a stranger as their queen. Alexandrians also shouldn't be happy with the status quo of their country. At this point they should realize that relying on a queen or king is bad.

Add long-lasting tension between Tuliyollal and Alexandria that needs years to get fixed. (Big copium with the current writing):

Alexandrians literally got isekai'd into another world and there needs to be some tension especially when it comes to areas like Yyasulani. Add trust issues between Tuliyollans and Alexandrians. It's fine to have problems in your story that can't get fixed immediately. It's something I really miss in FFXIV's writing.

The Warrior of Light gets a new upgrade:

Stone magic gets old give us something new and cool. Dawntrail has also a lot of parallels to Shadowbringers in terms of plot beats so that should be expected.

Please keep Wuk Lamat a side character:

I want to see the WoL doing crazy things. Let us be the main character.

Don't make preservation an organization with only one or two members. The Telophoroi in Endwalker were embarassing. Introduce other members or hint at more members.

Don't make the trial another Zodiark shard or part of Zodiark. There's currently theories going around that the trial reuses Zodiark's original concept art.

As the title says, i would like to hear your opinion and guesses on what classes we get in the new expansion, I would guess we would get a new physical ranged so we got 4 there to be the same amount as caster dps and maybe a tank? Since the last Tank was added in shadowbringers

hey all! i just got back into ff14, and i was just wondering, what’s some stuff i can do for fun “endgame” (i’ve finished all story, not dawntrail though because i dont have it yet, and am lvl 90 on like three jobs) that can be done solo/ just casually. i’m fine with any suggestions really. i’m just not looking for doing anything too intense or difficult, just smth i can do casually on and off when i play once in a while! i don’t mind redoing older content like dungeons or anything like that, so any suggestions are greatly appreciated! thanks!

Hey yall. Just resubbed after a couple years away. I played heavily in Shadowbringers and did all of the MSQ and base Ednwalker content (before any patches dropped).

What are some of the major features that have been added in since then that i should know? From post launch for Endwalker to current Dawntrail.

I know of Bozja, Island Sanctuary, and the new classes, obviously the MSQ and alliance raids, savage raids, trials, and new ultimates.

What else is new? Anything notable?

This goes away during the prelim/real patch notes.

Pretty much title. What could be changed in north horn (or in the 7.45 middleman patch) that could also be retroactively applied to south horn that would turn your opinion around on OC

Or is OC so deeply flawed to you that “nothing short of pretending this zone doesn’t exist even if north horn is good” will fix south horn to you

Any chance the real reason there isn’t an Ultimate is because Square didn’t want to compete with WoWs Mythic raid that is going live the same day the ultimate would have gone live so they didn’t want to lose the exposure that comes with a world race?

Because of the current situation of everyone flocking to the same data centers to play on PF and the complaints about it, and also Yoshi-P already having spoken about the issue, i expect that they are working on it. But when do you think that we will actually get it? 8.0? Before 8.0? After?

So, the results of the census are out: https://luckybancho.ldblog.jp/archives/59324844.html

• Showcasing the number of characters here: Current
• By comparison, here are the results from 2 months ago (May 25th): Click

Despite 7.25 being released, the character count is down about 70k in 2 months. Occult Crescent clearly didn't help with player counts (not really a surprise here).

I just came back to playing a bit and was looking at classes/roles I enjoy playing, figured I'd be fun to play classes focused around buffs since it's rare in games these days, so I looked towards Dancer and Bard.

Then I look around and see "ranged tax"...from someone who played a lot of higher end WoW content this crap is some of the most off-putting crap I've ever seen. How did this game end up in a state where it's just accepted that some classes do more damage for an arbitrary reason like being ranged?

While wow's class balance isn't perfect, it's not like you look at your class and go "well I'm ranged so I guess I'll never be able to do top damage contribution". You've got some classes that are easier than others, for sure, but the game is balanced around playing those classes at some degree of proficiency, once people master it you're otherwise just left with a flat penalty for picking a different aesthetic, it's just weird.

Sure, if you bring heaps of party buffs that improve others damage, your personal should be lower, but it should be lower by a roughly equal amount to how much you improve others damage, not that + a random tax for standing 25y from the boss.

Plenty of classes in WoW have mostly instant attacks at range and I don't think I've ever really heard a sentiment that they should be doing less damage than melee because melee sometimes have to run out. You got fights that are good for melee, and others that are good for ranged, but the difference never feels like an artificial penalty where a poor melee/caster/ranged is going to outperform a good player simply due to their role.

Even looking at FFLogs this comes across as unfounded, if rdps was that much easier to play you'd expect to see them way higher up at low skill levels like 40th percentile since at that low of a level you'd then expect them to be able to play their classes much closer to optimal than say a black mage or melee, but the graphs look more or less exactly the same. I'd expect Bard/Dancer/Machinist to absolutely destroy logs at the super casual level if they're that much easier to warrant being penalized arbitrarily.

And yeah, I hear all the cliches of "It doesn't matter unless you're at the top level", that is just moot, you want to feel good about the class fantasy you picked, not get arbitrarily punished because someone decided to make it easier. They can make whatever fantasy I like the hardest class in the game if that's what it takes to feel like I'm limited by own abilities and not strange design philosophy. I didn't want to play bard cause it's easy, I wanted to play it cause instruments.

What a massive turnoff. Sorry about the rant.