Anyone want to help me finish the Ultimate Weapon team mission this evening? I'll probably be on around 6-630 tonight PST.
I'm raiding with some friends tonight at that time, otherwise I would 
You could see if any of the folks in Discord will be around then.
I might also be on Sunday - tomorrow I’m doing emerald city comic-con so going to be busy.
I could probably do Sunday evening around 6 or 7 Pacific.
Sorry guys got back late from ComicCon on Sunday. Might try to do it on Tuesday early evening.
I went ahead and knocked it out during lunch so I’ve finished the main ARR story. I won’t clear that title off the “pile” till I reach Heavensward but I’m officially hooked on the story.
If you're hooked on the story from ARR, I can't wait to hear your thoughts on the expansions. 
If you're hooked on the story from ARR, I can't wait to hear your thoughts on the expansions. :D
Like a dummy I decided to go back and level summoner since I’m a bit burned out on Black mage. When I’m 50 again and can continue the MSQ I will let you know. 
merphle wrote:If you're hooked on the story from ARR, I can't wait to hear your thoughts on the expansions. :D
Like a dummy I decided to go back and level summoner since I’m a bit burned out on Black mage. When I’m 50 again and can continue the MSQ I will let you know. :)
That's being smart, not being a dummy. Summoner is the best job.
I speak from the experience of exclusively playing Summoner.
The benchmark’s out. I play on a Mac, so I had to run it under CrossOver. There are some bugs, but it mostly worked. I imported my character into the creator. I needed to make a few tweaks (eye color and eyeliner on female viera), but it could be worse.
Edit: I imported an elezen preset I was working on recently. She looks quite pretty. eyes stack of fantasias
I'm on PS5, so I remade myself for the benchmark, and, yep, while I couldn't really point to anything specific to say "This has been improved," (beyond overall expressiveness) my Duskwight glamazon looks great.
Loving how my thighlander looks
I’m going to amend my comments on my viera. The more I look at the eyes, the more wrong they are. Veena are supposed to have bigger pupils than Rava. The nose is also too dark.
I do like that they added combat sounds to the character creator. It was annoying having to make a test character to try out different combat voices. There is apparently a daily limit on how many you can make ….
An Update on the Dawntrail Official Benchmark
I’m glad they said something. This kind of responsiveness is one of my favorite things about the FFXIV devs.
Still probably going mooncat for Dawntrail though.
So, I'm very tempted to start a new character on the new data servers this week and in a few months transfer them back after the Dawntrail launch has died down. Does anyone have experience getting the bonuses on a new server? I admit extra XP and a million gil is very tempting.
I made an alt on one of the most recent data center servers, and just got those bonuses. Seems they're character, not account specific.
You'll be able to log in to other servers and even data centers during Dawntrail's launch, so if you are only wanting to create an alt for lower queue times, I don't think that's necessary.
The other thing to remember is that your level doesn't matter as much as your progress in the main story, since everything is gated behind it. It doesn't matter if you're playing a level 50 job but you're only doing level 30 main quests.
Yeah, as a result, most people who play with the exp bonus end up leveling two or three jobs at a time as they go through the story. Which can be nice if you want that. Otherwise as beanman said, you end up overleveled and maybe even wasting exp.
The million gil can be helpful to get you started but gil isn’t all that much in the long run.
You'll be able to log in to other servers and even data centers during Dawntrail's launch, so if you are only wanting to create an alt for lower queue times, I don't think that's necessary.
The other thing to remember is that your level doesn't matter as much as your progress in the main story, since everything is gated behind it. It doesn't matter if you're playing a level 50 job but you're only doing level 30 main quests.
Good point. I may just continue with my BM - tried restarting and while lancer is cool I'm not sure I want to play through the rest.
Regarding data center and world travel, they have released some info about how that will work starting next Friday.
Regarding Congestion During Dawntrail's Launch
The big takeaways are that there will actually be some limitations on data center and server travel. You won't be able to visit between the Aether, Primal, and Crystal data centers, nor will you be able to travel between servers on those data centers.
What they want you to do, instead, is travel to either the Dynamis (NA) or Oceania (Australia) data centers given that those are relatively unpopulated and will basically act as a buffer for the other data centers. You'll be able to travel to those from the login screen before you attempt to log in, in case you don't want to try queuing for your home worlds first. You'll also be able to travel between the various servers on those data centers.
Endwalker's queue times were pretty awful, so I'm hopeful they'll be better this time around. It's too bad "normal" world visit won't be working, but hopefully folks will be able to hook up with each other via the other data centers if necessary.
48 hour maintenance has begun, and you can begin preloading the patch now. It was over 50GB for me on PC. Depends on the platform you're on, though. I'm not sure if there will be multiple patches to download or if there will be just one.
Also start keeping an eye out on your emails for the Dawntrail registration codes to appear so you can redeem them.
Meanwhile, a very delightful rendering of the music of the outgoing expansion:
I must say, as exciting as other aspects of a new expansion are, probably the thing I'm most thrilled by is the prospect of a whole new batch of music (and maybe more importantly, sound direction) by Masayoshi Soken.
There are so many reasons why this game is the best modern Final Fantasy, and quite a few of them are related to Soken's work. Like so many of the other people in design leadership of this game, it's clear at every moment that he fundamentally understands the core nature of what we loved about the "golden era" of the series, and lets himself be deeply informed and reverent of it without being slavishly devoted to the past. He and his team are creating new, beautiful, meaningful work expressing from their hearts something new and interesting about the world around them, but letting their hearts be shaped by the shared cultural context created by some of the most inspired artistic minds of the previous generation.
Anyway, I can hardly contain myself waiting to see (and of course, hear) what this amazing creative team does next.
(I still regularly find myself reflecting back to the amazing narrative work done by the way "Close in the Distance" was rolled out as the story progressed through the Ultima Thule sequence in Endwalker. There was a nearly impossible storytelling challenge happening in that sequence, and I just can't even begin to conceive of a way it could have worked without that remarkable feat of sound direction. Of course, I certainly don't anticipate something that miraculous to happen again with Dawntrail, but that moment was just such an emphatic exclamation point on the thing that has been clear for several expansions now -- Soken and company have truly taken the torch from Uemetsu's generation and are carrying it to even more amazing places.)
New icon on the PS5. New art on the login screen.
Now let me in dammit!
Every once in a while the YouTube suggestion algorithms actually do a good thing. Yesterday was one of those days, as it fed me two previous collaborations by the same group of musicians, and so today I give you more to listen to while waiting for maintenance to complete:
Make sure to Retrieve Character Data when you want to use a Fantasia. You also have to do that to see how much time is left on your Fantasia after using it. I’m pretty sure I wasted a Fantasia not realizing I still had time left on the previous one I’d used ….
I got up at 2am on Friday and have been playing a lot of Dawntrail since then. Real life interfered in a lot of ways, but I've still made decent progress.
The game is beautiful. The graphics update has made a huge improvements in lighting, and the gear that's been designed with high resolution textures is beautiful. I was able to get a new barding for my Chocobo from the Hunts vendor in the new city and it's colorful and detailed, and I love it. The older content that's been updated has also been a treat. I got the Syrcus Tower raid in a roulette and it's gorgeous.
As for story, I'm about to enter the third zone, and have flying unlocked in the first two. The first two dungeons are very pretty. The first Trial is a wild spectacle. I've been taking my time, savoring the new zones, doing side quests, and being really impressed with the zone layouts this time around. A lot of areas feel like real places instead of just MMO zones. The colors and sight lines and layout are really impressive.
As for the story itself, it hasn't really grabbed me so far. The music and presentation are fantastic, but the plot itself and characters aren't doing anything for me. I'm hoping that as things inevitable escalate there will be more for me to latch on to. But this may be an expansion where the world and vibes outweigh the story for me, similar to Stormblood.
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