SPEAKER_03 0:09

Hello and welcome to the AU Eastern Update, a behind-the-scenes discussion podcast about Final Fantasy XIV online for the HJP Podcast Network.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

I'll be your host, Violet, a definitely not completely crazed Vieira from the you don't need to know where and you don't need to know when.

SPEAKER_03 0:33

And I'm also your host, Hoka, a definitely not a void creature that is in the reality of Final Fantasy XIV, a 7-2 Allison Klamazon with a slight taste of the movie Red.

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Today we're gonna be discussing the 7.4 live letter that came out. And oh so uh so honestly, hookah, like how you how you been? How you been? I'm gonna tell you how I've been.

SPEAKER_03 1:05

Uh I'm just getting getting over a cold, uh, if you cannot tell uh from my voice or whatnot. But I'm I'm I'm trying to uh get through this, but you know, we're here excited about this live letter.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

Me, me, honestly, we had to take a break because I've been sick AF, you know, sort of like this live letter. Oh my god, oh my god. Oh my goodness. What coolness came down? Okay, okay, okay. So let's start at the top. We got a nice little recap of all the things. This is gonna be, and I'm not kidding, probably one of the biggest quality of life content drops of the last like what six years I have been playing this game.

SPEAKER_04 1:55

Something like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

It it holy. It's so much. Okay, so of course, we're gonna get new MSQ, and we are moving on from the Alexandria. We're not gonna go into any more details on what it is, but we're gonna be moving on from the storyline that we have been on, and we're gonna be moving on to the next part of the storyline that's gonna be headed into 8.0, which you know, we're gonna be starting to see the story build up into the next expansion. We are in full post patches for our MSQ right now.

SPEAKER_03 2:33

Oh, if you could see me right now, I'm just like giddying like a little right now.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Like, oh my god, I cannot, oh, we are heading towards it. The things, the things I want to talk about, but I can't because this is a behind the scenes. So let's get more behind the scenes. Yes. So we're gonna the we're not gonna mention the new trial. We're gonna skip over that because quite frankly, the new trial is uh is related to the story, and but I will mention a few things. Um get your memory going. If you are unmedicated of your ADHD and you don't have a working memory, get it going. Get your pot of coffee because that trial has gonna be 100% apparently memory, memory stuff all the way down. It's it's it's very much in the same line as Doom Train. So, you know, if you remember Doom Train, only now with more memory mechanics. Hooray!

SPEAKER_03 3:40

That sounds so much fun.

SPEAKER_00 3:43

It actually does, but at the same time, it also sounds terrifying. So um we'll get into that. The the gear from the new dungeon is I mean, we have got my three favorite genres of glam coming down the pike, like three or four, because we've got um the raid series. Let's talk about Arcadian real quest, because we've also got the final storyline of the Arcadian raid series is coming out. 7.4. That's gonna be our full drop, December 16th, and we're getting just full cyberpunk. Like they've kind of been hinting at cyberpunk or or like you know, that sort of thing with some of the gear that's been coming out of it. We got wrestling in the first series, it was very like leather pleather, you know, wrestling stuff. It was very circa 1980s wrestling gear, not like 90s, right? You you recognize it, you know what I'm talking about.

SPEAKER_02 4:49

Yeah, I do.

SPEAKER_00 4:50

Okay. The next series was a little bit more, I don't, I want to call it like revolutionary chic. It was very pulled from like some of the storm blood, like maybe dressed up a little bit more, had a little bit more chicness to it. But the ones that are coming out of this are just full on, like dialing up everything you could have gotten out of um one of the cyberpunk dungeons in the end of Dawn Trail, plus some other cyberpunk ideas all thrown together into some of the coolest, coolest glams I've ever seen. I'm excited. Um beyond that, and here okay, so I have to take a full. I'm gonna try not to make this the entire podcast. I'm gonna be honest with you, but this story we can blew my mind. I'm just like right, okay. So I'm old and I also like um the hard-hitting things. And um, okay, so basically I'm a huge rage against the machine fan. Like I'm massive, love it. And so Soaken and Yoshi P and Foxclon wound up dropping the biggest bomb ever. Apparently, Tom Morello. Get this shit. Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, guitarist for Audio Slade. Yep, that Tom Morello has created a song, Everything Burns with Bear Tooth for Final Fantasy 14. It's so excited.

SPEAKER_03 6:36

I'm so okay. So, like, I watched I have to watch the live letter later, like later on because I was at work by the time I knew what's going on. And then when you told me, I'm like, I'm sorry, what?

SPEAKER_00 6:51

I know, okay, so hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, hype, hype. I am so hyped for this. Okay, so there's if you go to the special site, by the way, okay, I'm gonna calm down a little bit. Okay, okay, okay. So if you go to the special site, you can actually see a special intro from Tom Morello talking about the song a little bit, and then they play like a little snippet of it. It is going to be the theme of the last four of the like, we're gonna get it in the Arcadian series. They're not telling us about it now, like how it's gonna play in, because apparently it ties in with the story. Okay, okay, nope, back to hype, back to hype. Okay, okay, so Soaking comes on, Soaking comes on wearing a rage against the machine shirt, cause um, icon legend anyway. Um, so apparently, uh, because like they're all friends, like I you know the the oh god, I can't remember his name. Why am I so bad at names? Um, the lead singer that came on to do the guest spot for Close in the Distance and in Walker.

SPEAKER_03 8:11

Uh, I know his name is associated with Chris. Um yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. Okay, so apparently he is um in the band with Tom Morillo and therefore is like good friends, and they got to talking about Final Fantasy XIV and Soakin. And so Tom Morillo basically just sat down and wrote a song.

SPEAKER_03 8:36

Oh, Jason Miller, isn't it? Jason Miller. Yeah, yeah. Jason Miller.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Yeah, just completely, completely just wrote a song, and then through his agent, got in touch with Soakin and was like, okay, um, just so you know, I wrote this song, and if you want to use it in your video game, please do, because that would be awesome, right? He's like, I don't care about getting paid, I don't care about any of that. I just care that I just want you to use this song because I think it would be awesome. And Sogan was like, you could see when they were talking about it on the live letter, he he held up his hand and his hand started. She was like, I was reaching to to click on the email. My hand was shaking. I was like, this cannot be real. This cannot be real. Somebody is pranking me. And he clicked on it, and sure enough, it was from Tom Borello's agent, and it was just like, oh my god, he apparently sat there and listened to it, shaking the entire time. Like just shaking like a leaf. They listened to this song apparently, like straight for six months, just on a loop, constantly. It was so banger. They were like, We want to use this song, but we don't know where. And now we gotta work out all the details of how to get this like completely free. Like, we can't afford a Tom Marillo's. What are you talking about? We can't afford this song, and Tom's like, no, no, no, it's fine, man. I'll play, I'll I'll sign whatever. It's cool. I just want you to use the song, and they're just like, Really? So, so we are gonna get one of the coolest crossovers of all time. Like, we all know that one of the things that makes Final Fantasy XIV like a banger, like an absolute fucking joy. Sorry, I'm using the you're gonna have to bleep me. Um it's just a joy to play, um, is because it is just auditory, it's just musically beautiful, it's amazing, it's spectacular. Like the music in this game is so good. Okay, so now we get this, and I'm fully losing my mind. Over it. Um, so yeah, like you know that scene of that kid on on Kyoshi Island in in Avatar, the last airbender, who like goes frothing at the mouth is like the name probably past 48 hours fully.

SPEAKER_05 11:27

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

So excited. Um the best part about it is that the song is actually gonna be hitting all of the streaming services the next day after the patch drops. Oh so if you want to sit down and listen to it on loop, guess what?

SPEAKER_03 11:50

Well, that that's gonna be part of my uh that's gonna be part of my road trip song uh on the way down.

SPEAKER_00 11:55

So hell yeah. Hell yeah. Nice, nice, nice, nice, nice. I'm so unbelievably hype for that. Um I I am gonna go day one. I am all about getting into all of those raids. I want to see all that go down. They actually showed some details of the first boss, which is actually gonna be a split boss. So it's a it's a surfer theme.

SPEAKER_02 12:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:24

So like you go to a water park, but it's like a a fire and water uh sort of theme, and you have um sort of they've done this before. There are lots of other bosses in the game that that have like that split mechanic. Um, and basically their health bar is kind of like split over the two bosses. So um, but they'll switch out at various times, and then uh apparently there are a few scenes we can see in the trailer, which by the way, if y'all get a chance to see the trailer, we're gonna go ahead and link that in the description. Please go watch it. I've watched it like four times already. It is probably one of the best patch trailers I have ever seen for Final Fantasy XIV, and most of them are pretty dang good. So that just yeah, go do yourself a favor, go check it out. It's amazing. Um, the editing, the editor they got on this one, oh, they did such a good job. And it uses the the everything burns as as the song on the the background for um part of the Arcadian series. Oh my god, so good, so good.

SPEAKER_03 13:42

So, like with the the split bosses and whatnot, is it like similar to like one of the uh the Eden verse um fights that we did uh back in Shadowbringers? Is it like similar, similar like that when you have two separate bosses that you face one-on-one at the same almost almost at the same time?

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Well, it's like okay, so um uh there's a dungeon in Shadowbringer uh near the end that has two shark bosses. Um it's it's the second boss of the the dungeon. Um, and what happens is that one will leave the platform for a period of time, and so you're only fighting one boss, and then they'll switch out at one point. Mechanics will change, and then at another point, you'll have both of them for a short period of time. Um, it's going to be a similar format, but the mechanics are much faster and they are much higher level. Um yeah, and it's all like and it's so weird, but it is um, in fact, surfer summer like theme park idea. And then apparently one of the other bosses is it's like is a gladiator from like a a uh because we see a sand-based arena where it's all like sandstone and um block stones that have been carved together to put uh create the platform. There's um and then there's another boss that is a demon-like boss, and then one of them is a complete mystery. No idea. So we'll see how that goes.

SPEAKER_03 15:26

Well, hopefully it's my uh my pipe dream of a certain character that's sitting on the bench in uh solution nine.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

So that would be very cool. We will see how that goes. Um but yeah, I'm I'm very much looking forward to the Arcadian um the music. I don't know how in the world I'm gonna pay attention to those fights because the music is gonna be so good.

SPEAKER_03 15:52

I don't know how I'm gonna because a lot of the time when whenever I'm fighting, I'm like in my like I'm like also air drumming at the same time, and I'm like, okay, I should not be doing this at all.

SPEAKER_00 16:02

So right trying not to headbang so hard you can't see what's coming up.

SPEAKER_03 16:07

I mean, if I'm gonna be headbanging that hard, I might be hitting my keyboard at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 16:12

So getting into it anyway. All right, so uh we're also gonna have um getting away from Arcadian. As exciting as that is, I don't want to like spend all the time on it, but oh my god, Tom Morello. Anyway, um everybody's favorite Stormblood trial boss is now the new Unreal that's dropping uh for 7.4, and that's gonna be Sukiyomi's pain. Oh I personally love this fight. I think it's a really well done fight. I have always enjoyed it. It's both story-wise incredible, it is visually beautiful, but there let's just say there are a few people that are a little like this about um some of the mechanics because uh there's there's a few doom moments.

SPEAKER_03 17:11

Just only a few. I mean, there's nothing too bad. Well, it's just a few.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

So, but yeah, we'll see how that gets tuned for level 100. I am I am excited. I'm excited to do that. I think that's gonna be a lot of fun. Um the the next thing I want to kind of talk about is some of the uh um the the quick overviews of things that I know that people are not gonna be like super excited, but they're there. Go check out the the live letter if you um there's a translation for those who don't speak or read Japanese um that's available, and we'll link that in the description as well, so that if you have the it was it was a four-hour live letter. It was a very long live letter. Um, if you have the time to go and dedicate to getting through all of it yourself, go right ahead. I suggest it, especially to kind of keep up to date on the new stuff, but we're gonna go over like our reactions to some of this. The next thing we're gonna talk about is PvP. I am looking I understand that PvP is the thing I care about, and not a lot of other people care, especially frontlines. For some reason, frontlines people don't like like a lot. I like it. I like the chaos, I like it.

SPEAKER_03 18:36

I think it's a lot of fun, but so so truth be told, I'm I've been playing a lot more PvP this time around, and I've been slowly liking myself um doing frontlines almost on the daily. Uh, granted, I'm I have to switch data center to do it, but uh I've been finding myself enjoying it, enjoying the KS as well.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

So yeah, it's it's actually not bad. Um, I enjoy Crystal and Conflict too. Uh, they are doing some pretty big updates, uh, one of which is gonna be that we're getting a whole new map for frontlines, and it's actually based on um Warcore Charte Triumph, which this one's kind of cool because they've changed things up. Normally, the way that you have to kind of strategize is that when you're going to take points, you your team has to essentially protect like the one person who can get through to go over and click the point and try to grab the point. Um, and then so you have all of the people who are protecting that person who's going and taking the point. Um, and of course, everybody else uh on the other team, their their plan is to try and interrupt the one person who's taking the point. The way they've changed it up this time is rather than it being a single um person having to click on something to take the point, instead, you just have to occupy a circle um that's around a flag so that you can either take a full or portion of the flag. So instead, it's more of like having mini sumo rings. Your idea is that you want to knock people out of the rings so that your team can take uh take the fly, which that's gonna add a whole new strategic point of view. The other thing that's being added to it is that we're now getting weather effects.

SPEAKER_02 20:38

Ooh.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

So I don't know whether or not we're gonna get more than the two weather effects that they talked about in the live letter, but the two weather effects that we do have specifically mentioned is um there's a snow effect. The snow effect will give you white AoE circles on the ground. If you stand in them, you actually get a barrier buff that will make it harder for people to kill you. Um, but there will also be uh orange AoEs on the ground that you'll have to avoid. And many times those can overlap, especially with the circles that you need to stand in or with the um buff AoEs. So it's kind of like a strategic, you want to grab that. There's also a bunch of snowmen or or snow spirits that will show up on the ground that can break line of sight. So you get extra line of sight breaking during the snow period. And then we have the northern lights that will happen. So when we go through the northern lights, the for the Aurora, then what happens is your LB will actually fill up faster. So we're gonna see people going absolutely nuts on throwing LBs in PvP left and right in that framework. Front line. And then on top of it is that is when all of the S ranks come out. So that's when you're going to be really trying to buy for those those points to grab.

SPEAKER_03 22:13

Oh, this is going to be so much fun. It is going to be fun. I really cannot wait. It's going to be awesome.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

It's going to be fun. I think we should get people together, and I think we should definitely go and uh grab some people for Frontline and see if we can get, you know, get some teams together to go and try it out. Because I think it'll be I think it'll be fun. Um the the next like content drop thing is of course we get new Hildebrand. I will not talk about it. They have not mentioned much about it, but we will get new Hildebrand, which I'm look, I'm gonna be fully honest with you. The Hildebrand in Dawn Trail is peak. It is it is completely peak. I think that you should definitely, definitely, if you haven't gotten a chance to, if you're in Dawn Trail and you haven't gotten through it yet, please, for the love of all that is holy, go do it. It is so great. Um, and one of the things they talked about that's so great about Hildebrand is that it's where the dev team gets to try out all of their custom animations. And so there has been some truly hilarious uh animation creation. We are also getting some some iconic Japanese anime references in uh in this older print.

SPEAKER_03 23:34

Oh, it's definitely I I I messaged you when I first saw it. I'm like, yes! They added it in there. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna spoil it if you're not seeing the trailer or anything like that.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

You won't get it. But if you are a fan of anime, especially classic, iconic anime, you will definitely recognize the reference for the animation, and you'll get very hype. So um look forward to that.

SPEAKER_03 24:07

No, no, no, I agree with you. This this questline for Hildebrand has been really amazing, and I I keep on looking forward to that next one. And since since I'm gonna be on vacation, like literally three days before you know, before oh no, right, three days after the patch comes out, I may save the Hildebrand stuff until after I get back, but that means I'm gonna be, you know, on vacation, just thinking about I want to do the Hildebrand crest so badly right now. And like this time, yeah. But like I I know at the same time though, I was like, I need to spend time, you know, not speed through everything and be done within a week or whatnot. I need to take my time and slow down and enjoy some of the content that that's they're gonna be releasing uh real soon. And I I cannot wait.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

Oh yeah. Um, one of the things that people have already been talking about is that there's actually I expected that there would be a lot more pushback than there has been um from the rating community uh about how there's gonna be a much longer like patch cycle for the normal drop because all we're getting on 7.4 is the Arcadian normal. Savage isn't coming until January. So this is the longest wait between a normal and a savage drop that we've ever had, and people are actually hyped for it. And you know what? It makes sense because we're gonna have time for people to actually craft sets, we're gonna have time for people to get their gear in order, we're gonna have time for people to actually get through the series because we're gonna have all of the normal gear limitations that come with a new, you know, normal series dropping. But previously, the whole reason why there's been such a heavy emphasis on people trying to get crafted sets and mixed in with their their um series sets is because trying to get enough gear to be properly like savage tuned to be able to deal with the savage drop was really hard. Like it was super frustrating. It was like, okay, you're giving us two weeks, or way back in the day, it used to drop the same day.

SPEAKER_04 26:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

Right. Um, is you're now talking about a week of people basically making themselves insane to try and get geared up enough to get into uh Savage and actually have gear that was appropriate for doing, you know, that level of content. And now people are gonna have four weeks, four to six weeks to get gear together. Like people are gonna be able to walk into this series or this like final savage grouping actually well geared.

SPEAKER_03 27:15

Oh no, and and it you know, it's right around Christmas, and so it it you know it gives people a break and whatnot, but it also gives a lot of the lot of the raiders prep time. Oh yeah, oh yeah, some relaxation, not not to rush it and actually enjoy some of the content and prep themselves for the savage fight, which is like I think they need to do that a little bit more instead of just oh yeah rushing the content out there, give give us some a little bit of breathing room and prep time so that we can go into these fight a little bit more prepared than we have been in the past.

SPEAKER_00 27:55

Okay, so and I agree, I think I think it's a great move forward, and quite frankly, if this goes well, I know they're using the excuse of the holiday this time around. I would like to see maybe them try to keep this for the patch cycle going forward and like get give people four whole weeks to actually like not have to take it on as a second job to get enough gear to do Savage for goodness sake.

SPEAKER_01 28:26

All right, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:28

All right, so then we're gonna go into a few other things really quickly as far as because I want to hit content before we hit quality of life, because I'm gonna spend way too much time on the quality of life updates. There's a lot of them and they are really good. Okay, so content, we're getting more occult crescent. I okay, so here's my little conspiracy theory for this. They haven't been spending a lot of time talking about occult crescent or dropping a lot of information about it. We are gonna get the new phantom jobs, we are gonna get new accessories to go along with our gear sets, and we are going to get, of course, upgrades to the Dawn Trail relics, but we're not getting a lot of details about them. And of course, they did say that we are getting both a normal and a uh savage version of the new fork tower. Um, whatever that's gonna be for the next series or for the next set of stuff for the occult crescent expansion. But I think with the the flubbing, what there was there was a little bit of a flub, just a little little flubby, little flubby flubby with uh the way that they decided to do things in Occult Crescent when it first initially dropped. And I think at this point they're hoping that they can kind of like I don't know, patch it together, like put it, put it like it's fine, it's fine, but we're not gonna put a lot of focus on it just in case, just in case it doesn't resonate with people, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_03 29:59

Yeah. I so I don't know. I pretty much abandon abandon abandoned it uh almost completely. Like I I just want to get one relic weapon, and that's all I want to do, but it's like the grind, I do not have that much time to grind out the stones right now. I really don't.

SPEAKER_00 30:20

Yeah, I got lucky enough that I was on part of I was like in that that first couple of weeks of hype on getting the stones, so I got mine relatively quickly, and so I have now been on more of the uh gathering stuff in the beginning, and then it's the tombstone grind, but even with the tombstone grind, even with the everything else, I and and yes, I'm down to I only need one more tombstone grind of 1500. I think I've I think actually I'm up to 500, so I need a thousand tombstones, and I will have had gotten all of my relic upgrades for this grouping, but it is a dedicated every single day login and grind. And at the beginning, it was I was logging in and I was grinding for like 17 hours a day to get all of those pieces, and while they have increased the drop rate apparently a little bit, um, it's it's not significant. And I have heard from people who have tried to pick it up and put it down and pick it up and put it down. It's one of the reasons why I think they gave us the um uh why they they decided to tune the monster hunter rewards the way they did was because they realized that it it was so difficult for some people to get the demiama and actually get them functioning. Uh so yeah, I'm I think that's pretty much all there really is to say about a cult crescent. I'm really hoping that the story picks up with it or that they have actually like uh attended to, but honestly, at this point, I think that um it was one of those things where like we tried some stuff and it didn't work the way we wanted it to. So now we're gonna be like, hey, look over here. Isn't this cool? And don't get me wrong, there's a lot of other stuff to look at, and it is very cool. Um, the next cosmic exploration star we're gonna get it is uh Oisius uh or Osius. Um I don't I don't know how to pronounce it. Uh it depends. But it looks cool. I don't have a lot of details about it. The last star, Fayana, was you know, it was what it was. People enjoyed it, who enjoyed it.

SPEAKER_03 32:57

I haven't even gotten to I I can't even react to it because honestly, I spent less time I spent less time in that uh in that planet than the first time around.

SPEAKER_00 33:09

Um I'm gonna be honest with you, the exploration zones, it's weird because there's content that has been dropping this time around, which was unexpectedly good. Yeah, I cannot stop talking about Pilgrim's Traverse. Pilgrims Pilgrim's Traverse is possibly the best deep dungeon that has ever been created in this game. It is so good. Like I could spend so much time in there, and I like Palace of the Dead, I like Heaven on High. I spend a lot of time in this place. Uh, granted, um, Eureka Orthos was not my deal because I did not like the way it was tuned. I don't feel as though it tuned very well, but it was it was okay. I like Deep Dungeons as content, right? But it's always kind of been that content that was kind of thrown out there, and people are like who are into it are into it, and people who are not are kind of not. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 34:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:20

But Pilgrim's Traverse is just it's innovative, it's fun, it's it's literally everything you would expect from a roguelike. It is exciting to do, it never feels stale, it never feels boring. I I love the aesthetics of it, I love the mechanics that you were interact with, the fact that the the bosses do uh actually just the mobs actually have real consequences to them as you start going up through the levels. The fact that there are more checkpoints, the checkpoints are meaningful, uh, all of that. I'm sorry, but that that was an out-of-nowhere spectacular content drop.

SPEAKER_03 35:09

I'm glad you enjoyed it. Uh I haven't experienced it yet, so I'm like, well, I mean, yeah, I'll get there one day.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

Okay, to be fair, we just got you through Palace of the Dead, which is a requirement. And I do kind of wish that they would remove that having to get through floor 50 requirement from the deep dungeons. Um, because having to do that in Palace of the Dead, because they and I know why they're doing it, is because they want to introduce you to the concept of how a deep dungeon works, but quite frankly, 30 floors is more than enough. You don't need 50 to really understand.

SPEAKER_03 35:49

I'm actually glad you uh got me through the all 50 floors just to understand the story slight story that was going on in there.

SPEAKER_00 35:57

Yeah, well, yeah, because it it is as far as like uh for being able to piece together bits of story, the it is fun. It is fun for that. And and don't get me wrong, uh, I've also really enjoyed this Pilgrim's Traverse story. Um, I'm very disappointed that things have happened the way they have in my life, that I haven't gotten a chance to hit up Pilgrim's Traverse enough to actually get to the quantum and to the the top level stuff because I was really looking forward to I'll get there eventually, but I haven't been able to get there yet.

SPEAKER_03 36:30

I mean, we have time, it's not really.

SPEAKER_00 36:32

Yeah, it's not like the content's going anywhere, but um okay, so next content I do want to talk about though, uh the new variant dungeon that is coming out, and I cannot tell you how unbelievably hyped for this I am. Like I thought I was gonna be so hype for the the like exploration zone stuff, and it's I won't say it's bad, but I will not say that it has been something that has captured my interest anywhere near as much as things like the deep dungeon, the raids. The raids have been a triumph. I'm gonna be honest with you. The Arcadian series, chef's kiss, absolute perfection. Um, the variant dungeon that's coming up, I from what they did some gameplay, uh like walkthroughs of how this is going to work, the updates. It feels like they've taken the concepts of the variant dungeon, which I could kind of tell in when it dropped in Endwalker that what they were going for. They wanted something where it was, you know, here's the same dungeon but somewhat different, right?

SPEAKER_04 37:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:51

Um, but it didn't ever feel like the changes from one thing to the next were like really significant. It was more like trying to just go through and figure out what thing didn't I mess with last time to open up this new thing, you know? So of course that became it just became one of those things of content where like we have a bunch of people who've created guides and different matrices, and you just sort of like go through and it becomes kind of rote as like here you go, this thing, that thing, the other thing. And the rewards were I mean, they were decent, they were okay, um, but quite frankly, the one time that I tried to do the criterion was insane. Like it was, I'm sure if you had like a dedicated group of people who are all very high level, and like you got together and you were like a content creator and you knew these people and you all like were were top-tier raiders, then the criterion dungeon would be frustrating, but it wouldn't be the impossible task that it is for someone like myself, yeah. Right? Because the the original way that variant dungeons work, so of course you have the three different pathways, you follow an NPC, there's kind of a story behind it. The first one is the um is the you go into uh pathways underneath old Da and you learn a lot about um old Daw's history. Okay, so that's cool. And then you've got the second one, which was Mount Rokon, which is you get taken back to Kugane, and there's a haunted mountain that you that has a um uh like uh where monks live, whatever, and you're you're going through to see if you can find artifacts that can be sold back to rich people in Ulda.

SPEAKER_05 39:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Exciting. And then the last one is a dude from from a village wants to find the most special fish that ever did fish in the fishiness to give to the pretty lady that he wants to marry, but she won't marry him because he's not good enough unless he shows up with a fish. Not kidding, that's the story.

SPEAKER_01 40:26

Anyway, um the fish of the fishes to the fish to give out to the fishies uh to marry. Like something like that.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

I might be exaggerating a little bit, but it's it that's kind of that's kind of the deal. Um, apologies for any spoilers, but I mean, you don't know whether I'm lying or not. I'm probably lying. Or at the very least, exaggerating. Um just a tag, just a tag. Just a little, just a little, just a little. So anyway, you you got your split-off different versions, you change one or two different interactable points, and that changes the bosses that you have to fight. Da da. Da da. Like that's that's it. And and I could understand, like, I've done all of the variant dungeons. That was one of the ways that me and my wife spend a lot of time together, is both in deep dungeons and in variant dungeons. And part of the reason why is because, excuse me, my voice is kind of going out a little bit, is because it is scalable content. So that means that when it's just me and her, we can go do this content without having to have like a full team of four to go and do stuff, right? So, and that's very nice. It's nice to have that kind of content to go and do. But uh, I will fully admit that after you've done all 12 of the pathways, you might want to go and do it a few times over and over again. But I mean, it's honestly the pathways are so similar. Just trying to remember the one or two little interactions that are different is not that exciting. And then for you to go, okay, I want to do something a little bit more difficult. And the next difficulty level is okay, now you have a full roguelike where your trash mobs have gone from ooh, they tickle a little, and to this thing will fully look at you and murder your entire family. It will take you out, it will take you out. Um, and now you have to get through like very difficult trash packs, and then you have to get through bosses with insane savage level mechanics. You can only raise so many times. What I'm saying is that the power leveling was way the F off. Like it was, it was there was a lot of difference between the end boss of one of these pathways and the the criterion, just the first criterion boss, and it wasn't just one, you had to do all four of the bosses in a row, in order, get through all of their crazy talk mechanics to be able to get to the end to get your rewards. Jeez, yeah, it was a lot, it was a lot, and then let's not even talk about like what it was like then then to do the savage version was still having to do all four of them. Um crazy talk gauntlet, uh, but now it's it's like worse, it's it's all that, but worse. And I'm like, this is this is a lot. Like I wanted something that was scalable and that like it would I was like why if the this is soloable then why can't we go to the next level up is just you take two people right and then like the the last level up you have to actually have a full party. Well guess what? That's what they did. That's what they did this time around. We're gonna get if you want to do all the pathways, do the the choose your path, choose choose the the different choices down the different storyline. Um then you can do that solo or you can do it with three other friends, you can get up to four people, any party comp. You can don't have to take Keeler, don't have to take any DPS, you can go do do whatever you want, just have fun, go stupid, go crazy. It's great. Okay. Um, and then get your rewards and have a good time. If you want to go for something a little bit spicier, they have changed it so that now they've removed all of the trash packs, and it's just you go directly to a boss, you choose a pathway, you go right to the straight and straight to the last boss, tuned up a little bit, a little bit more difficult. You get your special rewards, don't have to do them in order. You can do them in any pathway, any order you want, and you get your stuff, you go, you're all cool. The Sav or the Criterion version now, which is like the top tier savage version, well, now you have to have a party of four. Um, they suggest a party comp of tank healer and two DPS. And if you get a mixed party, uh i.e. a matched party through the matching system, it has to be tank healer two DPS. But you will have to follow a gauntlet of the bosses in a particular order to be able to get your final rewards. I like this. I like this plan. This plan sounds great. I'm down for it. I'm excited for it. And then when we're to talk about aesthetics, let's talk about aesthetics here for a second. Arabian Knights.

SPEAKER_04 46:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 46:18

This is 1001 Arabian Knights, top to bottom. We're dealing with Ishtola's family, apparently. This is a story from her clan's history, so that's fun. Um, we'll of course get into the the details of it. They've already told us that part of what we are doing now. Before we had actually like gone to a location, we had gone to a place to kind of walk through different storylines. This time they've decided to take the meta and make it literal. So in this point, we are going into a storybook, and I like that.

SPEAKER_04 46:59

It's so cool.

SPEAKER_00 47:01

I think it makes the story so much better. I think it makes it so much cooler for all of that. Um, I saw some of these bosses though. Okay, so um uh one of the things, whoo, okay, we gotta discuss something real fast. So um, about the way that the the variant dungeons work now is if you've done a lot of them, especially with the new uh the Moogle event that's going on right now, you might be used to okay, we we have the the first boss, which is kind of the blih boss, and then we have the main boss of each like pathway, right? Yeah, and the first boss that you come across is pretty much the same boss for all of the pathways. The only thing that changes is there might be some slight differences in mechanics, but for the most part, most mechanics work exactly the same. It's the same boss. There's not a lot of differentiation, right? Oh, that is not so. That is not so. And this went from what they showed from the um only bosses that that uh that Yoshi P got through in the live letter this time around was um was the first boss because he couldn't clear it. He could not clear the boss on any of them. Take that what you will. I know what I'm gonna take from it. Oh my goodness. So anyway, um uh yeah, so uh, but we've got De Jin, and then we've got uh an Eagle, and then we have like we've got different bosses that have different types of mechanics. And um they're they look so fun, and I'm really excited to be able to try those out. You did kind of get a glimpse of at least one of the final bosses, one of the the variant lines or whatever. And that is going to be uh a uh De Genie um that is is very recognizable if you ever read like a thousand and one Arabian Nights, or if it was ever like a story thing that you you participated in as a child, yeah. Um, or whatever. Uh, but yeah, she's very cool. Apparently, one of her mechanics is that she has a uh a carpet ride mechanic, and I ooh, it looks fun.

SPEAKER_03 49:39

Um I'm like, oh, that's uh that's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 49:45

I know, right? Like trying to figure that out. That's gonna be so cool. Um, but yeah, that uh but those bosses, they're all different. They're the the platforms are different, the arenas are different, everything feels very different. The story feels like they did a little a much better job of actually reconstructing storylines, actually being different, and the choices that you're making do actually kind of have more impact on how the story's gonna go. So I am very excited for this. Also, if you love that um like uh Aladdin like aesthetic for glam or whatever, or if you've ever been wondering, like, hey, I want to put together an Aladdin style glam, oh, you're gonna get to do it this time around because the glams from this that you can buy, oh, they are peak. They are absolutely peak. And apparently the new mount is going to we already technically have a flying carpet mount that you can get off of the MOG station, but we're gonna get a prettier, much more updated um flying carpet mount, and I'm super excited.

SPEAKER_03 51:08

Oh, it's gonna be so good. I cannot wait. Like, I oh my god, I've always enjoyed the variant dungeons. Like they're different, they they feel like you have a choice that you can do, go different paths and whatnot, just like you said, and everything. And cannot wait to like actually get a group together and just run through this and and everything. I think it'd be it's gonna be so much fun to to learn more of the story of Stola and her family and and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 51:35

Oh, yeah. And and it also feels like they really are starting to address a lot of the because when I talk about accessibility and being able to get into like different things, what I mean is, for instance, I would not consider I would consider the rating as a whole in Final Fantasy XIV as being tremendously more accessible to the average player than um, say, trying to get into raiding in World of Warcraft or even trying to access high-level rating type activities in Guild Wars and a lot of other MMOs, especially, um, it can be really hard to get together the right kind of group, to find people who are at the right levels, um, to get people who have all keyed properly or who have had to go through, jump through all the hoops and do all the things to be able to get into it. And while those games have like other methodologies, I'll be honest with you, I find a lot of those things very confusing. One of the things I've always appreciated about Final Fantasy XIV is it feels much more direct, it feels much more accessible, and it was one of the reasons why I had such a deep, like like I was I was kind of upset in in Walker because when they finally when I got the explanation of how the variant dungeons and the criterion and all that worked, I was I was upset because I was like, what happened to the accessibility? I don't know what happened to something that we could do without having to dedicate three hours of our lives to just finishing the stupid thing. I don't I got very irritated by all of that. So I feel like this is a big step in the right direction, and I am super excited for it. So a few other quick things about content. We're gonna have a new um gold saucer. Uh, Air Force One is getting a new path. Um I it looks so cool. It looks so cool. I'm so excited for that one. Pirate themes, pirate themes, LIMSA, Air Force One, let's go. Um, we're also going to get uh, let's see, as far as like other things. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you are a duty support fan, which, you know, no shade if you are, uh, we all love a duty support. Um, Xamil Darkhold and Aurum Vale are finally going to get duty support. So honestly, I'm excited because maybe it means for once I will finally not have this stuff show up in my roulettes.

SPEAKER_03 54:37

Uh because you know it's uh it's not painful or anything like that if you don't get the right people to know what they're doing and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 54:47

So Oh, those okay, so both the the reason for my pain for those people who might be familiar, I don't hate the dungeons or anything. Like I'm not that kind of hater. But the problem is that those were two semi-experimental dungeons that had a lot of content that was pulled over from 1.0. So they have very particular strategies that are used for solving the the problems of the mobs within them, and they're very difficult to explain to random people, basically. So, like most dungeons, I'm used to, I come in, I'm tanking, I can pretty much be like, hey, everyone. I put up my tank stance, I hit my sprint, and I start running, and we're all good, right? We're off to the races, and we're off to the races. No, R and Vale, you zone in and you're just like, okay. So huddle up, guys. We gotta chat, we gotta talk. I'm gonna do this very particular thing, and I need you to all be on board, or else we're gonna be here forever. Do you understand? Um as it is, yeah, this is gonna suck. Uh so here we go. Um, and then Xamuel Darkhold, and the the reason why these were particularly frustrating is because Xamiel Darkhold and Aram Vale are two dungeons that are required for a certain bit of content uh called um that's uh attached to your grand company. So if you want to be able to buy a house, for instance, you have to do Xamiel Darkhold and Arim Vale to buy a house. It's crazy talk, y'all. It's it is a lot.

SPEAKER_03 56:45

The funny thing is though, like the first time I played the game, I did not realize you had to go through both of them. And I'm like, uh, you know, I I got them done because it was it was on there and it was part of the dungeon and just got it done and whatnot. I did not realize that you have to add both of them done to get to buy a house. I'm thinking, are you kidding me?

SPEAKER_00 57:02

Yep, yep, yep. And it's technically uh I think it's considered to be oh, um, secondary content. So it's not even like direct inline content until you start doing your your grand company stuff. Yeah, so that's if you've ever wondered why it shows up so much in your roulettes, that's why is because people want to buy a house and they suddenly realized, oh wait, I didn't have to do this dungeon.

unknown 57:36

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 57:37

Um, okay, so and then like a couple of other quick updates, and then we'll get we'll get to the UI stuff because I know UI is not normally exciting. Not normally exciting, but hold on for a second. Okay, so deep dungeon update for all those people who've been enjoying the Pilgrim's Traverse, but who had a disconnect because we've been having a lot of DA DOS attacks. Um the uh deep dungeons no longer will basically list it as a death um foreshortening your your run if you are disconnected in the middle of a dungeon, provided that when you come back in, nobody dies. So um it's still kind of touch or go, uh touch and go with it, but they are trying to fix the issue of people DDoSing and getting disconnected in the middle of a um a deep dungeon run and then getting messed up. So you've got a 10-minute window to get back in and get everybody back on track to get your your run through a deep dungeon all squared way. So I'm happy they made that update. We got caught in that a couple of times. We had members of our deep dungeon team that got caught in DDoSes, and uh yeah, we had to restart a couple of runs. It was it's not great. It's uh it's kind of held us back a little bit, but uh that's okay. We will get there. We've been having fun with it anyway.

SPEAKER_03 59:13

So my question is this, though, right? Let's say everyone's everyone's alive and a DDoS happens. What happens if they're getting attacked while the DDoS is happening? Does that count as a KO or or not?

SPEAKER_00 59:34

I would think that so long as when you get disconnected, everybody had health bars that were up, then when you come back in, your health you you you'll be fine, right? Because it will reset. But if you um if you disconnect as someone is dying, then unfortunately um the internet gods hate you and you will have to start over.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:07

Oh that that would still suck, even though like you have that 10-minute period and everything, but that yeah, that's the that's the tricky part, is like, okay, if everyone's alive and yet the servers are still quote unquote still going and the enemies are attacking you while you're DDoSing, and you come back and you can't oh, does that mean you have to start all over? Because that's just that's just rude.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:28

That's just that's that's just that's just uh mean. Yeah, it is. It's just one of those things where I don't know, it's not always fun, but seeing as how the the these um these particular uh attacks uh seem to have eased up, but um, I don't know, it's it's one of those things where I just sort of take it as a matter of it's it's just like the nature of the beast. Like doing that content is um has always been one of those things where you're just like, okay, this is acceptable losses, I can deal with it. Partially be okay, so I say that, and I say that specifically for Pilgrims Traverse, Heaven's on Heaven on High, and um Eureka Orthos. If it happens in Palace of the Dead, yes, I cry because you have to do twice as many floors in Palace of the Dead as you have to do in any of the other deep dungeons. It is twice the pain of all of the others, so yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:43

Because the save points are so far in between.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:47

Right. And now I'm really hoping that they've seen the popularity, and not just the popularity, but the just unbelievable quality of life increase that has happened from the checkpoint additions that were added into Pilgrim's Traverse, that we see that retroactively applied to Heaven on the High and to Palace of the Dead. Because quite frankly, um, and of course Eureka Orthos, because I think that quite frankly, it's needed. It's just so needed. It is just so needed. It makes the quality of the experience so much better. So much better to just have those checkpoints. You don't feel as rushed, you don't feel sick to your stomach of having to like, you know, push through. Um, it it makes the overall video game experience for it much, much better. So I'm a huge proponent of and I'm proud, and I've I've already kind of like on the forums been like, this is good, please go do more. Um so we'll we'll see how that goes. All right, so so let's move on to our quality of life updates. So we're gonna start with the small ones first. We're gonna get some new UI colors. So for people who are bored with our standard dark or standard brown class or and then our blue classic Final Fantasy, we are now getting crystal white and crystal green. So um, if that if you're into that and you like having the customization, yay! I'm I'm gonna be honest with you, white and green are not colors that excite me. So I was kind of like, yay. Yeah, joy, more, more customization. All right, cool. Um, the next thing I want to talk about is sort of a general thing, is the command panel. Do you do you check that thing out? Yeah, I'm gonna be honest with you. This excites me just because some little part of me that has been super envious of all of those people who had the time and patience to learn how to do those really complicated. Like, I have macro panels that I have macroed to be able to like pop out all of my, you know, like changing and switching between all of my gear sets and everything. Um, but I am I feel as though I'm probably mid, like I'm mid-tier. I'm not crazy with it. I'm just like, I took a couple of hot bars and I just added a few things, little bell, little whistle, just a little bit, right? There are some people who who have you seen eight bits set up? Have you seen some of these people's setup? Like, it is nothing except for one button and then they click it, and then it's like that. Oh my god, like flip, flip, flip, flip, flip, fold UI, and then they click another button, and like down to a button. It's crazy. Like, it's a lot, it's a lot, and I am not on that level.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:12

No, I I am not even in the beginning area. I had to had someone teach me how to do like a simple uh you know button just to target like the tank and have it on the screens just so healer, just just so as a healer I can see it in in my window facility so that way, oh the heat uh the the tanks health uh health is getting down. Let me yield heal them. But otherwise it's like I don't even mess with that at all.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:41

Okay, okay. All right.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:42

So this is the nope.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:45

This is the UI for for you. Okay, so here you go. The command panel is gonna give us a hundred slots, 25 slots per page. It's basically like its own inventory type window. Of what is essentially a 25 uh spot hotbar. And each one of the pages has its own individual button that can basically be put on a hotbar. So if you're someone who does like to occasionally role play or more than occasionally role play, or maybe you just like to show off the fact that you've been collecting all of the emotes in the game. Not talking about anyone specific at all. Or if you're somebody who perhaps at one time created entire Magic Girl transformations for all of your jobs, but then stopped doing that because you ran out of hot bar space. Well, guess what? This is the update for you. Okay, so this is called the command panel. This command panel is going to give you all of these new buttons. It's accessible by um mouse and keyboard as well as um through your controller. I'm a hybrid user. I am a PC player, but I and I have a mouse and keyboard uh obviously, but I also play with a controller. So being able to can you know get to it through the controller setup is incredible. Um the fact that you can literally put any button on it saves you all kinds of space. And as we know, this game has so much customization to it. There are hundreds of emotes. Um there are hundreds of minions and mounts, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, so many things that people want to have access to. But um, like one of the things that I struggle with is having to have enough slots for things like potions. Because I do so many deep dungeons, I do actually keep a plethora of things like echo drops and spine drops and things like that, uh, antidotes uh to take with me because um they are immensely helpful in doing deep dungeons. Also, if you do any high-level like unreals or savage fights or anything like that, having pots, having raid food, but having to find somewhere not buried on a hot bar somewhere to get to it um in the middle of a fight, because sometimes you need to access these things during the fight. Uh, having the command bar so that you can just pop it open, get to it, and then close uh close it is just uh an absolute dream. Just so great. Um I'm actually quite excited for how this is gonna work. Uh and the fact that they have it set up so that it's either gonna open at your cursor, or it's uh they have it set up uh an option so that it will auto-close after you use something. So if you do set it up primarily for using pots and potions, that it won't hang out on your screen taking up a ton of space. Um, if you use it for gear sets, it will also auto-close, or you can have it just stay up if you're someone who's mainly using it for roleplay. It's just an awesome little quality of life extra uh four pages of what is the equivalent of another 10 hot bars, essentially.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:52

Nice. And I I I I have taken a look at you know, during that, uh during this part of the live letter. And the one thing that does success like me is that I get to sit there now, instead of you know playing the game or whatnot, I'm I'm gonna actually gonna you know see if I can customize my my game a little bit more than what I currently have at the moment. So that that way, because I have if you ever see my hotbar, I I I'm so embarrassed by it because I have like all my jobs in one one like two hotbars, all my uh crafting and gathering in another uh set of hotbars, and then I have like emotes every way. Mainly because it's like I don't want to type it out, I just want to hit the button, but I like I have like tons of emotes, all my mouse, my chocobo uh stuff on there. It it it I it's a mess. I I'm I'm embarrassed by showing it. Uh I did take a picture of like uh a screenshot of like uh what happened to a glitch that I experienced in frontline and like I and I blur and I blurred out my hotbar. I'm like, I am I'm not showing this.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:08

I will I'll admit I have a very I have I have the firm belief that your hotbar setup is very, very personal to you. I spend absolutely I spent I have spent hours. I cannot tell you how much time I've spent customize my hot bars, and I am very precious about them because they make sense to me. Yes, I and I don't expect them to make sense to anybody else. I do not expect it to be something that anybody else will appreciate. It is something that is fully for me. And so when people come on and go, your hot bars are a mess, I'm like, you're a mess. Well, because like okay, I spent I spent hours on mine too, like every single job.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:51

It's so it doesn't matter, so it doesn't matter what job I pick, I know the layout of every single job. Yeah, because it's like the first, you know, I have one row for this particular set of skills, next row for this particular set of skills, and then I I even have like the third one on there for those oh crap, just in case emergency, I need to press that.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:16

Yeah, I have uh I have a particular setup, like I put all of my AoE skills for the most part in like one area of my hotbar setups so that I know that if I have this lit up, that those are AoE skills versus these are single targets, and you know, it's not a perfect system, like but I have limit break in the same place on every single bar, I have sprint on the same place on every single bar. I have, you know, all of those things. So yeah, bar setup is very, very personal, but having extra spots now, especially if you're someone who doesn't have like to have all of the hot bars out and open, or if you're someone who's always felt like you were you were short of the hot bars that you needed to be able to actually um deal with all of your skills, uh we're we're gonna get more of that. And honestly, I'm always for like that kind of UA UI quality of life upgrade is huge. I am I am hugely, hugely happy for it. Now we're gonna talk about the thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:26

Yeah, no, especially for me having an MMO mouse, it makes things so much easier for me to navigate through and everything.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:33

So oh yeah. So um let's go ahead and move on to uh the next UI thing really quick. Uh this one is um uh I I know they'd spent a lot of time talking about command panel. Let's let's talk about the next one that I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm I'm kind of switching the order of the way that they talked about things in the live letter, but I want to talk about the strategy board next because I am excited for it cautiously.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:10

Yes, uh I am the same way, cautiously excited. I'm the same way because it's like this could work out really, really well, or a lot of people are not going to know what's gonna happen.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:23

Right. Well, okay, so it feels like it's one of those things that they have spent a huge amount of time working on, and as I am a person who is big on accessibility, having something like keep in mind this is a game that crosses many platforms. And so while, yes, I am a person of privilege living that playing on a computer with double monitor life, I know that that's not every person that I play with. A lot of the people that I play with are just console players, a lot of them are playing on a small TV. Um, a lot of other people are playing on laptops, they don't have extra mint monitors that they're working with. Um, a lot of people don't have a lot of screen real estate estate, even. Um, so while a lot of raiders are people who have invested in a certain type of setup, there are a lot of other people who are raiding with systems that are not anything like that. And I love anything that bridges the gap between what people consider to be the optimal and people who are working with what people don't consider to be optimal because I believe everybody who has access to play this game should be able to play every part of it equally. So this strategy board setup being able to convey um the strategies that we're using for high-end rating or for trials and things like that, um, the fact that it's shareable in the party live, huge, huge. The fact that you can keep it open while you're going through the fight and you can flip through it, huge. Love that. Um, the thing that I will admit that I'm a little bit cautious of is the amount of storage for it.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

Yeah, that's that's my thing too.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:36

Because, like, okay, so if we take, for instance, the boards that I've seen some people using for the ultimate bytes for ST uh for um sprout to ultimate for HJP, a lot of those like links are leading to boards that are some that can be like 30 panels long. That's a lot, especially since one folder um for the strategy board is only 10 boards.

SPEAKER_04 1:17:08

I'm sorry, that's what only 10.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:11

Yeah, it's only 10. So you get 10 purfold, now you get a total of 50 saved, right? But let's think about how many mechanics, especially like even if you were to just shorten it down to the big mechanics that you had to explain. For uh, you did Necron or you did uh DT uh EX5 with us, right? Tried it once.

SPEAKER_05 1:17:41

Which one was that?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:42

The latest one. The latest one that came up. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Um, and we can even go back to Omega Rates. All right, so let's let's talk about because I know you've done a lot of those. Let's talk about Kevka.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:55

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:17:57

Let's talk about Kevka. Okay, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:59

We can go okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:02

So I know that y'all spent a lot of time in uh the Buccaneers dealing with uh dealing with Kevka, working through those mechanics, and that is fine. Yep, and Clan Nutsy. Clan Nutsy worked through a lot of the the fight there too. Um how many panels can you imagine that you would have to go through to explain just phase one of the kefka fight? Would would you be able to fit it on one? No, absolutely not. Um just to hit the highlights. Yeah, how many panels?

SPEAKER_03 1:18:38

15?

SPEAKER_00 1:18:40

At least. At least yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:45

So it might be less than that, actually. Hold on. Okay. We'll see how to do that. I'll say I'll say ten to fifteen.

SPEAKER_00 1:18:55

Yeah, yeah. So here's the thing. They weren't entirely clear to my understanding of whether or not a board is consisting of how many panels, but the word board and panel started to be used fairly interchangeably. So I'm a little worried that um a board is one mechanic description or only like two or three, as opposed to the what we would need be like 10 to 20.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:31

Uh yeah, see, in in the the screenshot that they show in the live letter, you see 15, and it goes a little bit beyond that. So I'm guessing it can go up to 20, maybe more than that. But yeah, I'm I'm really cautious about um.

SPEAKER_00 1:19:48

What that implementation is gonna look like.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:51

Because okay, so like we're currently going through U right now and whatnot. Right. And so just that by itself, there's someone put up a website on like just to get through Garuda, and that was like 30 something odd slides of explaining what to do. So if you're gonna take that and then put the into the strategy board in the game, I'm assuming you're gonna need more than just 10 or or or whatnot, because that that just seems way too low for, especially for a complex fight to try to explain it and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:29

And don't be wrong, it's one of those things where it's like we haven't seen it fully in action. They didn't like go through it in detail, they were trying to give a quick overview. Um now, but I will say the sharing feature looks very interesting.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:49

The fact that it can be shared real time to show people how to get through mechanics that you're talking about. I am excited to see that. The fact that there will be presets that you can just very quickly kind of click through to create something and throw together very fast to show people how to do stuff. Very excited for that. Um, I I am actually cautiously interested in this because I think that um one of the reasons why I have in particular shied away from well, part of it is Fight Club, the the Sprout to Ultimate group, that I am the ray leader for. My job feels to me more like it's getting people used to things, right? Like I'm just there to work on group tactics and explain how mechanics work and just sort of give people like the the setup, right? And then getting into the Buccaneers and Clan Nutsy is joining a raid team where you're going to specifically work on how your team solves the problems specifically and what strategies that you're using to get through each fight. So I'm more generalities, so I wanted to focus more on people being able to figure things out on the fly, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:22:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:15

So using pre-made boards was not something I was ever super focused on. I have, of course, used, you know, strategies and we've gone to read things off websites. Once we try them enough times that we're like, okay, these things are not super easily understood immediately. So let's go see how other people have tried uh have solved them and see how we would solve them in the meantime, sort of thing. Um, but yeah, as far as like high-end rating, I know that most of the people who have seen it who are raiders are like, okay, okay, this looks good. This looks good. Especially for those people who like to party finder for their their EX and their um their savage rating. Exactly. Right? But especially having something where you don't have to because one of the things that does wind up happening is that a lot of times people will we've got like a few people in the community who are very good about creating guides, who are very good about giving breakdowns. One of them is um Hector uh is oftentimes referred to. We've got Mr. Happy when um he's working on those things. We've got a lot of other uh people whose names slip my mind right now. Um, and a lot of times those those strats are referenced in Party Finder and so forth. But a lot of times people will take those strategies and modify them a little bit for how they like to use them, but don't have a good way to explain what they mean by how they are changing them. In and this giving a visual explanation, I think is gonna it's gonna cut through a lot of the the verbal confusion, a lot of the language barrier, a lot the fact that they even went to the detailed part of it of understanding the difference between in Japan, they don't use melee versus range, they just number your DPS 1, 2, 3, 4. Oh, whereas and in uh EU and North America, we actually make a differentiation between what we consider to be melee versus ranged.

SPEAKER_02 1:24:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:55

Um, because that we need the or we like to have the extra explanation of placement. But for Japan strats, they just use one, two, three, four, and then they just place one, two, three, four where it needs to be on the arena. And I'll be honest with you, I almost would rather go to the Japanese way of doing things because it feels more streamlined, but at the same time, I can also see where if it's not something you're used to, um, it can feel confusing. Yeah. So I can see that. The fact that they were they were sensitive enough to that in creation of the strategy board to actually give and here's the great thing about it. Okay, so the strategy board works in layers. Just like if you've ever worked in like Photoshop or any other image manipulation program, um, as you lay things down on the board, it actually creates layers of different mechanics, and you can do that to even differentiate between which mechanics are gonna go off first, which is very cool. Quite quite cool, actually. Um, the other thing is that you can switch between just numbering your melee, one, two, three, four, and then switching to the melee versus ranged um symbols without changing the strat or having to reset anything on the board. So you can literally just click a single option and it flips between those two different styles.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:35

Nice. I like that a lot.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:37

I do too. I do too. I I think that there has been an incredible amount of attention to detail. Again, I think the only issue is going to be seeing how well in practice it is, how easy it is to put a board together, how quickly it can be thrown into to describe strategy, and whether or not it's something that people will actually use. And I think that pre-made boards, I think people are gonna use a lot of. I think we're gonna start to see a lot of um party finders with codes attached to them that people can download, and the fact that you can even like create a share code of boards that you've created and then share them to your whole team is cool. That is very cool. All right, so no more having to go to a website that's outside of the game, no more having to deal with ads on those websites, no more having to deal with um JavaScript or or CSS or any of those things. Instead, you have something that is functionally in the game, you can make it as small or as big as you need it to be, so that you can see what's on your. Your strat while you're going through the fight. That's you know, you can leave it on the page where you need the reminder of where you need to be for the one mechanic that like you're having struggles with, right? I think I honestly I think it's gonna be really good. I think it's gonna be really good. I think it's gonna help a lot more people get to access uh to access and have um experiences in a lot of these high-end raids. And I think that that's gonna be a lot more fun had for people.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:33

I don't know. I mean, I I I do want the the slash pizza command to come back and so that it opens up the website to Pizza Hut and I can place an order for pizza and stuff like that. So I mean can we bring that back? Oh no, I'm sorry, that was for wow. Never mind.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:48

Yeah, oh my god. Do you remember that? Anyway, I do remember that. I do remember that. Oh my god. Oh, I thought it was Papa John's, though, not Pizza's. Was it Papa John's?

SPEAKER_03 1:29:01

Oh, no, it could have been Papa John's. Yeah, but it was it was it was it was it was fun, it was unique. It was like, hey, I want to order pizza slash pizza and it opens up the website for you.

SPEAKER_00 1:29:13

So weird. Anyway, the internet used to be such it's such a weird, weird place, the internet. All right, so now we've talked about seriously. Oh okay, so the strategy board looks looks good. Looks good. We're gonna see we're we'll see. We'll see.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:32

I'm excited. I'm excited, but also at the same time, like you, very cautious about it as well. Like everything you explain. Right, I completely agree with you. Uh it hopefully it will make things a little easier for like someone like myself who don't who does not use party fighter for raiding and whatnot, because I prefer to do raiding with friends, especially with the HCP community, because it's a lot more fun that way. Um, we don't really take it too seriously. And I know our end goal is to down the boss and whatnot, but at the same time, though, like having this in our disposal now should make things easier as opposed to just like explain it, try to explain it and try to understand it at the same time, that where we can actually now showcase what we need to do and pinpoint what you know what went wrong, what and what and whatnot on the strategy board. So I I I think that's gonna be really, really nice and cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:30:29

I think I think it will. I I know that Marky's gonna have a lot of fun with it. Um, I know that our raid leaders in HJP are gonna have to play around with it and see how it comes out. I I look forward to uh to playing with it and seeing how it goes. But um again, accessibility, very good. Uh beyond that, um uh as as far as I'll I do participate a little bit in the in the party finder myself, but uh we'll see, we'll see how it goes. Um now let's talk about okay, so let's end this with a bang. Let's end this with the big bang. All right, so something that has been holding Final Fantasy 14 players from their ultimate form of creation back for a long time has been how both spectacular and extremely limited the glam system is.

SPEAKER_04 1:31:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:35

Um, to give a little bit of a recap for people who might be not be entirely familiar, the way that the system works as of right this second, which we are speaking at least a few weeks in the future to the 7.4 uh patch drop, is um there the way that glam works currently is that of course you have to have glamour prisms to be able to add um your uh items into a glamour chest. Those items have to be at um a hundred percent durability. They will have all dyes, all um modifications that are done to the armor will be stripped out of them, including any mater that you've added um to be then put into your glamour chest. They can be pulled back out of your glamour chest and restored to their previous form if you want to actually wear the gear as gear. Um the there is a new system that was added recently, which is uh turns a set of gear into what is called an outfit glamour. Um the outfit glamour currently requires you to have all of the pieces of the outfit to convert it to an outfit glamour. The update will remove that limitation, and in fact, it will remove all limitations from gear. So no longer will we be limited by level, by stats, by anything for what kind of gear we can wear with what. This the exception to this is tools and weapons because tools and weapons are what determine what job you are using at the time that you are um equipped with that item. So if you want to be a dark knight, you have to have a double-handed sword equipped. And that also means that even though the restrictions for level will have been removed, so if you are a level 100 paladin player who goes to pick up level 30 dark knight, um you can glam your level, you know, 80 uh double-handed sword you picked up from, you know, whatever Dawn Trail or Shadowbringer Dungeon that you went into, you can now put that double-handed sword over onto your level 30 sword, and you're no longer limited by that limitation, you still have to do double-handed sword to double-handed sword. You cannot, in fact, go, well, I want to put my gladiator sword on as my dark knight. That's not how that works. It's still tied to your weapon and tool. Um, but all of the other limitations, specifically the level limitation. Let me tell you, as somebody who was in the process of leveling all of my jobs up, the absolute frustration of I am level 100 this or I am level 90 this, and yet I can't take level 90 gear I've gotten from the 90 dungeons I've done, or from the 80 dungeons I've done, and put them on my lower level. It having to match the levels has been frustrating. And then when you come across a piece that um you go, man, this would be so gorgeous if I were to put it on my warrior, and then you come to find out that it's a monk piece.

SPEAKER_02 1:35:51

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:35:52

And that you can only wear it on your monk, and you're just like, What? So all of those limitations gone. And this has been a little bit more mind-blowing than like I fully expected, because one of the things that they're starting with is level 99 job gear. Oh. So I want you to take that's one of the things that they demonstrated in the live letter was Yoshi P taking um his level 100 uh uh black mage, right? And putting the job gear for warrior onto his black mage.

SPEAKER_04 1:36:38

Huh.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:40

Yeah. Wild. Very wild. So it actually looked really good. It was cute. Um now, of course, they're not addressing the glam plate issue right now, but with the changes to um glam uh to the outfit glamours, right? Because all of the job gear is now an outfit glamour.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:06

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:08

Um all of the uh a lot of apparently the older crafting and gathering sets are now becoming outfit glamours. A lot of um a lot of sets, I think they said that uh there was a mention that it was gonna be um stuff from definitely Heaven's Word, possibly Stormblood, that will also become sets. So what we may get is that rather than them increasing the size of our glamour chest, we're just going to be able to reclaim a huge amount of that space back from individual pieces because they will be able to be converted into outfit glamours.

SPEAKER_04 1:37:50

Nice. I like that actually, yeah, I like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:55

So I'm excited about that. I think that's gonna be great. Um, I am especially excited about because some of the um the crafting and gathering gear from previous expansions has been so good. Um, I know that uh one of the the the model sets that they used for crafting and gathering in Shadowbringer was actually the exact same Plague Bringer set that you find in St. Mosien's in level 60 gear. And the thing that has always sucked about that gear from level 60 is uh that it is so awesome. It's such a lovely, like double-breasted tailed jacket, but it was undyable.

SPEAKER_04 1:38:48

I know.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:49

I think I know the color set, and people would constantly be like, oh my god, I want this so badly, but I want to dye it. There is a dyeable version in the game, but it has been locked to crafting for Shadowbringer. So now that crafting set has been completely unlocked, and we now have a dable set using that exact same 3D model that you can now get put on your your your anything. Your anything. And I'm just that idea, just so excited, just just absolutely outrageously excited by this. Um, add to it the gear sets that were getting dropped in seven point. Oh my god, we are getting a full set of amazing steampunk gear, just absolutely gorgeous stuff. All right, jade steampunk, amazing, so excited for it. But more than that, oh my god, okay, so did you did you see did you see the reaper weapon that was featured when they started talking about gear in the live letter? I I highly suggest everyone go find it. It is a pink shoju magical girl reaper weapon, giant metallic heart shape. Amazing, absolutely spectacular. 10 out of 10, a billion out of ten. It is so good, full on magic girl outfits.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:41

And I oddly enough, I do like a lot of the weapons that they were uh showcasing uh in this live letter. Like the the red mage one, I thought uh was really cool.

SPEAKER_05 1:40:52

Oh, it's so cute.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:53

But I agree with you, the the Reaper one, oh such such beauty, beauty. I think I think in the later on they they showcased, they they missed one and they uh didn't showcase the gunbreaker one, and I thought that was a yeah, that was a good one too.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:11

We'll get a lot of that released over the next few weeks to the special site again. That'll be linked in the description. Um, but the uh but yeah, so we'll you'll get to see more details of all that that gear that's coming out. The way that they're doing that now, I'll be honest with you. I have some questions. I have some questions. So my questions are since gear is very important still to the game, like they haven't removed the restrictions from gear as it's necessitation to being able to eye-level get into fights, right? Yeah, and we still want to try and have the correct, you know, gear stats to be able to optimize for our, you know, uh, for our jobs. So the question comes up with are we just now down to a system of having to look out for stats on gear rather than being able to like one of the things for a while that was very nice was that if you were like if you were a tank aficionado, then all of your tanks you knew the correct gear set to put on them because it was the fending set, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:42:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:35

I'm kind of hoping that they keep that designation, even though technically it can be glammed on any class and any job, because it was really nice to just have a shorthand in the naming convention to know what gear set goes on what job.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:54

No, I agree with you there. Uh we don't need to have everything be all mismatched and whatnot. We can keep some things uh relatively the same. Right. Because that'd be nice just to be like, hey, I still am a dark knight. Here's my dark knight weapon. Uh I think someone like posted uh made a video about that, like what would happen uh after 744. And I I still watched it because it's still absolutely hilarious.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:25

Uh it is, it's oh yeah. You're not gonna be able to tell what anyone is except by except by weapon now, and it's gonna be wild. I mean, as it is, we'd already had like the you know, the bikini tank, and we had the you know, special dressy, like princess dress tank or something, whatever. Like we had gear sets that didn't necessarily match the job that somebody was was you know playing, but this is like taking that times a million, and it's both going to be, I think, great, and at the same time, there's a lot of potential for bad here.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:11

Oh one hundred percent. You know, in this community, one hundred percent.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:18

Ooh, that leads, ooh, there's gonna be a lot of potential for people to do. Oh, ooh, oh, I don't know. Please be careful if people are prepared.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:29

Please be careful. If you're listening to this, please be careful with your glam and don't get yourself in trouble.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:37

Can can you imagine how what limps is gonna look like?

SPEAKER_03 1:44:42

Oh my god.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:43

I could imagine already. Okay, the sessi glams, the sessie glams are gonna get sussy. I'm just saying.

SPEAKER_03 1:44:54

The sussy glams are gonna get even sussier. I know, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:45:00

The the ses. It's gonna get it's gonna be a lot. But I am so excited. The creativity levels for it, and to be honest, this leads me into um a lot of what has been said in a lot of interviews recently. Uh, Yoshi B has been talking about um in a lot of interviews recently that he wants to basically recreate the game. Have it be focused on player creativity, player accessibility, player um inclusion in that uh there's just as much stuff for as many different types of players as possible. And of course, that means not ignoring your housing enthusiasts, not ignoring your glam enthusiasts, not ignoring your your fishing enthusiasts, like actually fully paying attention to the fact that this game has so many branching styles of play and how much overlap a lot of those styles have.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:11

So, can we talk about you mentioned housing and whatnot? Can we talk about like the elephant in the room and how they can uh do a much better job with housing at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 1:46:21

Okay, yeah, let's let's go ahead and kind of discuss this. Is where we're gonna get into a little speculation. There was discussion in the last live letter that uh one of the reasons why removing restrictions from glam was something that they were 100% willing to do at this point and that they're excited to do, but that the improvements to the glam chest and to the glamour plate system was gonna have to be put off till later, and that is because they are in the middle of trying to um build up the um the housing system and make it more robust robust. And one of those things in the housing system that they're trying to look into doing is maybe just making the glitch system an actual system rather than it being just something people can do to work around the system. Oh God, I cannot even express how much I am okay. So I love housing. I love the things that people can do with housing. I when I get started on a design in housing, this is how I feel. Happy, excited, hooray! I have such a good idea. About an hour or two into doing said idea, this is where I'm at. This is where I'm at, full rage, full, full rage, burn it down. I hate it, make it dead, I hate it so much.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:04

Yeah, well, that's me too. I mean, you the the amount of days that I spent on my current house, and I'm so glad I the only thing I've been doing now is just making small additions and not any major changes or whatnot. But the frustrating part is just the the the glitching. Like I do not do it myself because it's so frustrating to try to get it right. You can only do it at a certain height, but like even even like I like one of my uh one of my buddies from uh Excalibur, she she has things stacked up like towards the ceiling, and I'm like, how did you get the patience to do all this? Like, I'm I'm like, I would draw myself nuts just by one item, and she's got five items up there. I'm like, I I I don't get it. People have patience of the gods more than than me, and it's like at the at that point, I'm like, please make that as a feature or an actual part of the game where it's not so frustrating anymore, and we can have see a lot more creativity in the housing uh uh part of the game.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:17

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Um, the the thing is is the creativity that exists in this game for the housing system is incredible, but the dirty little secret, okay, so here we go. I'm gonna spill some tea. The full people live out here in this world um loving Final Fantasy XIV, loving the housing system, the fact that it is a neighborhood based system that allows people to actually travel from house to house. And while there are a lot of housing designers who do not use any. Any add-on tools or any, you know, that they fully do the glitches, they do all of the hard work within the system that they're given, which is basic AF. There are just as many people, if not more, who have just given in because the system is not good enough. And here's the thing that's so wild about it is that this is one of those little things. It's not even so much a secret. Like we know that there are people who would never even dream of using third-party tools to do anything in this game. No, nothing to do with raids, nothing to do with cameras, nothing to do with any of those things, but will fully, fully outfit their system with a third-party setup just so they can do housing. Because the housing system is just that rancid. The actual glitching, the fact that glitching, and it is fully taking advantage of how broken the system is. It is not at all intended to work that way. It is fully just um people taking advantage of the 3D system and how jank it is, and the fact that it is so overlooked that there are houses that fully, fully use and have to use the third-party tools to make certain effects happen, and they have been featured on Square Enix's site, is how hard they are not looking for this third-party tool because they know that it is making up for the lack of development that they have done on this feature.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:56

And like, I want to give a shout-out to uh uh Maple, our resident FC uh house uh remodeler and whatnot. She spent a lot of time uh remodeling the basement of the FC house uh during different events, uh switching from how it was before to Halloween, and now she's switched it over to Christmas. So she's been spending spending a lot of time uh remodeling down there and having to do all the glitching and and all that stuff. So shout out to Maple to do all that.

SPEAKER_00 1:52:29

Fully, fully, all the kudos. Absolutely. Maple has done an incredible job of um updating the FC house for uh Kraken's Call. Um I, of course, my my characters are for the most part in another FC. I maintained the FC house over there, and I set that FC house up a year and a half ago, and it has not significantly changed since, and it will not. I don't have the time, I don't have the energy. It was a lot. The amount of work that I put into it as it is, like I I and I am such a housing enthusiast. I have an entire apartment that is just a storage facility for all of my overflow housing stuff. I have an FC room that is literally nothing more than storage for my my housing items. I have two retainers that I pay real money for that do nothing but hold housing items for me. I do a like I have spent a lot of time and a lot of focus on doing housing. And my enthusiasm for it after putting together a medium-sized FC house, I have not had any interest in changing it in over a year because it is just so much work. So, yeah, absolutely all the kudos out to Maple for doing all of that, um, especially on the season. Uh, the the next thing apparently that they've got in the works is actually increasing the amount of outdoor items. And the amount of indoor items is coming at some point. The thing is, is that the only thing they're willing to say is in the future, there will be a time when the limitations will be more, but we can say no more about this thing. And I'm just like 3000, right? In the year 205. If man is still alive, if 14 still survives, we shall find. Yeah, it's gonna be, yeah, it's one of those things where I'm just like, mm-hmm, okay, sure. Uh to to also kind of, I know we're not gonna necessarily get into all to to comparisons, but WoW just dropped their housing update. So WoW has now finally expanded after 20 20 years, 20 years of WoW. Um they now have full housing communities, and they have housing available to their player base now that is very similar to what we have in Final Fantasy XIV, but because they've had the time, I guess, to really kind of put it together, they've got um, let me tell you, like, one of the things that was very cool about uh getting involved in the like Final Fantasy XIV YouTube community was seeing all of the videos, like there's an entire FF 14 HGTV like YouTube channel where they talk about glitches and they they showcase homes and they um their entire creators, which their focus is going to doing housing tours and stuff like that. It is housing is a big, big deal in 14.

SPEAKER_04 1:56:22

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:56:23

And now I am seeing World of Warcraft housing tours, and I'm kind of losing my mind a little bit because I'm like, this is so weird to to have like this aspect of players that we knew was there, like we know they're there. We know that there are people who play World of Warcraft for role play. We know that there are people who play World of Warcraft and other MMOs for access to their housing and their all of their other like secondary things, but MMOs have for so long been entirely focused upon rating or upon a certain type of uh competitive and or collaborative gameplay that the interactive role-playing style has been always sort of a secondary, tertiary, left behind sort of thing. And for WoW to finally acknowledge that after 20 years is just wild.

SPEAKER_03 1:57:31

I mean, it is, and uh I think I don't remember if it was like when I was still playing it or whatnot, that we we wanted like our own space in the game just to feel like we we're part of the uh the world and and whatnot. And the closest thing, the closest thing that we got was our own barrack. That was my that was the closest thing that we had was was that, and you you could build your barrack around it and whatnot. And so now after 20 some odd years, yeah, yeah, they they finally got housing, and they're doing a much better job than Final Fantasy 14 is currently right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:58:10

So far as consistent as it's it's one of those things where like I'm genuinely hoping that that Final Fantasy XIV does, in fact, take this as a note of hey, these people pay their sub just like the people like because here's the thing I know that people don't want to go on about it, but in Final Fantasy XIV in particular, Raiders eat good. Like, Raiders eat real good. We have some of um Mr. Ozma make sure that all them fights are excellent. Um and especially I would say in Dawn Trail, the fights have been well tuned, they've been incredible to play through, they've been a lot of fun. Um the uh in general, since I would say, especially since Omega. Like, and and then the advent of we have Savage rating and we have ultimate rating. Um everything that has a uh a raid like feel to it, right? Yeah, even with Deep Dungeons, they added that layer of um of rating to it with the new quantum boss, right? But one of the things that really maintains, especially in in MMO RPG, is the RPG side of it, not just the story, because once you play through the story, you've played through the story. It's the people who want to inhabit that story and inhabit that world with their friends. And RPP elements in Final Fantasy XIV, what's like they've always been supported through things like items and glam, and yes, the housing is actually very cool. And the fact that it is neighborhood-based, the fact that you can do things like literally have block parties in Final Fantasy XIV, that you can have a place that's uh a venue that is legitimately a club you can go to with your friends is incredibly cool.

SPEAKER_02 2:00:36

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:00:37

And especially from an accessibility standpoint, that is amazing. But the fact that they have not spent the same amount of time and effort in building out game systems for those people who enjoy those aspects in the same way that they've get uh they've worked on like fight mechanics is extremely disappointing.

SPEAKER_01 2:01:03

Just a little bit.

SPEAKER_00 2:01:05

Yeah, just like that. And the whole thing is that that kind of like sucks about it is that while there are some people who are very into the rating for Final Fantasy XIV, and that's all they do, they don't do housing, they don't care about glam, they don't care about you know any of these other aspects, they just want to get into the fight and they just want to solve the fight. Yes, but there are a lot of other people for which they touch all of these things. Like I like doing the top-end fights, I like doing the housing, I like the glam, I like the deep dungeons, I like the explored, like there's so many aspects of this game that I enjoy and that I touch, and I want to see all of it equally developed.

SPEAKER_03 2:01:51

Oh no, I I agree with you. As someone who spends a lot of my time, like when I log in, I'm like in my house and and whatnot. Like, I would like to to do more with it, uh but I'm not going to do a lot of the glitching because of how frustrating it is at the current time. But uh a lot of this, you know, I also enjoyed most recently uh with raiding, uh, especially spending like many years in World of Warcraft and and raiding there and whatnot. Uh just getting back into raiding in in Final Fantasy 14 has been a joy and everything, but that's not my sole purpose when I log into the game. Uh I I like to enjoy the other aspects of the game as well, and it's so vast and so different and whatnot. But a lot, a lot of the other stuff, aside from the raids, aside from the dungeon and and MSQ and whatnot, like the gl like the I'm glad we're getting the quality of life with the Glam system. We need a major quality of life with the housing system right now, too. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:02:59

Yep, yep, yep, yep. Hell if nothing else, I will always love Final Fantasy XIV for giving me the dream of being able to go to a casino and not come out broke.

SPEAKER_03 2:03:12

100% with you there, especially with like a personal a little personal note of like my mom used to yell at me all the time about wasting my money on video games and whatnot, and then I find out that she likes to gamble, and I'm like, But you do that. You're the one that yells at me about wasting my time on spending on video games slash toys or other things. And here you are, you like to gamble. Uh, excuse me, ma'am. Uh we need to talk about this.

SPEAKER_00 2:03:48

See, I'm my money actually sp yeah, no, that's that, yeah, that's that's some that's some audacity right there. Anyway, I think that we've probably talked to death about it. I am so hype, like I can't even. Here's the other thing I want to get hype for. That was live letter 90. We are so close to a hundred live letters. This is so cool to me because that means that we've got um a hundred different shows of this development team being dedicated to bringing more and more content, more and more information to their player base. And um I I I can't, I mean, this is bit this is gonna be such a huge drop. I'm so hyped for it. And I I it really does speak well to me of where we're gonna be going from there because I know that the next things that we're going to be looking at is yes, we've got 7.5. Okay, so one quick thing though. Normally on the 7.4 or on the 0.4 patch, you know the thing we're missing though, right? No. No blue mage. I would be the I would be the one to bring it up. So, of course, we don't get our blue mage. I, you know what, uh, somebody had brought up in a video. Um, a a few creators have have brought this up, and I'm I'm I'm I'm hesitant to agree with them because, of course, I still want to huff the copium. I want more blue mage stuff, but I'm pretty sure that we're gonna skip blue mage for Dawn Trail, and then we're just gonna go straight to Beastmaster because of course Beastmaster is coming in the last few patches right before the new expansion drop. We have um many members from our team that are gonna be or from our group uh from Heather Just Play that are gonna be going to the um Anaheim Fan Fest in April.

SPEAKER_02 2:06:00

Yay!

SPEAKER_00 2:06:01

And I heard that you're one of those special people.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:05

I am.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:06

Yay! So excited you get to rip us.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:12

Uh I so needless to say, um, one of our members bought a second ticket and uh offered it over to me. Uh like I joined in in one of the the groups or whatnot. Right. They heard I was I was gonna be in the area uh regardless. So I'm like, yeah, I'm just gonna be there, just being around the area, just you know, hang out with HAP and all that stuff. So they they heard I was gonna be there. So they're like, well, it's sort of pointless if you're gonna be there and not gonna be actually parting attending the fan fest. So you know, they offered to me and I instantly accepted it and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:46

So yeah.

SPEAKER_03 2:06:48

I'll be there.

SPEAKER_00 2:06:49

Yay! Oh my god, I'm so excited for everyone who uh got their lottery and who was able to get. I know that um there's so many people in our group who um are going to be able to go. I know that Heather and Tom are gonna be able to go. So it's it's going to be a massive meetup. It's going to be super exciting. Um I cannot wait to see all the pictures and everything because, of course, I sadly have to stay home. Um, but that's okay. My void is warm and cozy. I will get pictures, it will be fine. Um, I'm not I'm not at at all disappointed or upset about it. No, no, not uh, not a not not even the slightest bit. Why why would I be going through any of the stages of grief over this at all? No, I'm I'm so happy for all of you. Yay!

SPEAKER_03 2:07:52

Yay, you know, yes, uh uh will be representing us uh out there and whatnot. So um, you know, just still gotta deal with Christmas frozen. Then I can I can start planning planning on on whole fan fest. Four months is uh quite a short period of time.

SPEAKER_00 2:08:10

Uh you'd think it's you'd think it's a lot of time. It's not. It's so not, especially not when you've got Christmas between now and then. Um, and then going into the new year, it's gonna be, yeah, it's gonna be crazy. But um best of luck to all the HJP people. I'm gonna be looking forward to all of the the videos that Heather and Tom are gonna make. And I hope that um everybody takes lots and lots of pictures, shares it on the Discord. Speaking of the Discord, if you're listening and you would like to join our community, you can go to Heatherjustplay.org and there are links to our Discord. Uh, there's a short um uh application process where you just tell us about, you know, where you learned about Heather Just Play and who you've been listening to, perhaps even a mildly feral bunny girl talking about things, and perhaps even an Elizin slash void scent that uh like to talk about the 14s, and uh just tell them that we sent you, and uh you can come and join our group and play with us. So I think that is awesome.

SPEAKER_03 2:09:27

It is awesome. Uh this group has been amazing to be with and be around with and and everything. So come join us, and uh, you won't be disappointed. I mean, we don't just play just 14, we play other games as well. Uh currently, right now, you know, there's stuff talks about uh playing uh Warframe and uh we have occasional repo and um other games like that throughout the week, uh in everything. So yeah, just stop on by.

SPEAKER_00 2:09:55

We have a Minecraft group, we have an Ender Ember Knights group, we have lots and lots of multiplayer group uh groups playing lots of games, um, lots of people uh wanting to play with other people about things. It's a wonderful supportive group. Honestly, I'm deeply thankful for finding it myself, and I hope that uh you will come and join us. All right, everyone. I'm gonna go back to the void because I need a very long nap.

SPEAKER_03 2:10:25

And uh I need to get something to eat because uh yeah, I'm starving right now, but I will be in game sometime soon-ish while I'm doing other things at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 2:10:36

So all right, see you in the void. Bye.