My thoughts on Crystalline Conflict.

 Hi Everyone,

I've been meaning to write my thoughts about Crystalline Conflict, the new PvP mode introduced to FFXIV in Patch 6.1 (I think?) and PvP in general since Endwalker launched. However, I wanted to give it a fair chance before doing so but also admittingly forgot.

Like many Feast/PvP Players, I was both looking forward to it's release, but at the same time, also somewhat sad to see the end of Feast. Although I did not play a lot of Feast in Shadowbringers, I've made so many friends and had so many nice opportunities, such as attending fanfest, and being a part of several successful community tournaments. I will not miss 5.0 Feast but will look back on 4.0 Feast with great memories.

I will be basing my thoughts on Crystalline Conflict, which I will refer to as CC for the remainder of this post on that it's a mode designed to get more/new people into PvP. This was supposedly the main reason behind the decision to replace Feast, which was a competitive mode. Which is a little strange is my opinion. As Feast was very active during a season, and they could have kept it going easily.

 It was really nice to see Wolves Den so populated when it was implemented, and this was a thing for a while, however it seems that it did not last long...

So let's start off with some positives. Here are some things I like about the nchanges to both CC, and PvP in general:

1: The mode is fun.

In season one, I had a great time trying out all the jobs and playing it in general. I even got 3 characters to Crystal and I think it's the most fun I've had playing PvP since Stormblood. in ranked at the moment there isn't as much pressure to perform as there's no real top 100 reward. So It was nice to just relax and play without stressing out over a leaderboard.

2: Jobs have their own identities again.

One of my main criticisms of 5.0 Feast was that all of the roles pretty much felt the same. All the LB's were the same, tanks were all pretty much the same, each having a stun and a shield, It got pretty boring after a while especially since 4.0 had a bit more identity in it's jobs. Each job has it's own thing it can bring to the table in CC and I think this was a great change.

3: The objective is a lot better than medals and each player has their responsibility for it.

There was nothing worse in feast than practically winning a game for 80% of the game then having someone die at the last minute, resulting in a loss when you had more kills. Getting a kill in CC now puts you at an advantage, as it increases your chance of getting follow ups and being able to push the payload further. It feels like more of a team effort than praying that one person on you team is able to stay alive with their medals

4: There is no set role requirements anymore. Healers have less responsibility and can contribute to damage a lot more

You can queue into a game and have 5 dps, 3 healers a tank and a DPS, or anything as long as there's not two of the same jobs on the same team (at least to my knowledge).I also like that each player has their own defensives and healing to manage rather than most of the pressure being on a healer, which there was a severe lack of in The Feast. It makes it so the burden is shared equally on the team which is a great change in my opinion.

5: Casual matches actually happen.

The training mode for The Feast was dead. However for CC, it's popping every day to my knowledge without the need for this to be arranged by the community. This is great not only for new players to try their hand at the mode, but for more experienced players who want to try out a new job without the pressures of ranked, or who just want to chill and play for a bit without the risk of an impact on their rating.

6: The PvP seasons, or battle pass, was a great idea.

I was an advocate for this during feast and it's great that SE thought the same and implemeted it. I like how you can work towards something regardless if you win or lose, and it's something nice like a armor set or a mount.This also eliminates the FOMO of feast and it's top 100 rewards, which in my opinion, is a good and a bad thing (more on this later). progress for this can also be earned through any PvP mode, so it's got people trying out frontlines as well.

That's about everything i can think of positive wise. Now let's move on to things I'm not so fond of:

1: There's very little reason to continue playing after one season if you hit crystal, as the rewards are severely lacking for the ranked playlist.

This somewhat contradicts what I just said, but hear me out. Most people reading this will already know, but if you achieve crystal rank in a season, you obtain all of the rewards for the tier below. This include titles, adventurer plates etc. Once you have those, the only things left to compete for are the same things but with a different number to what you just received. Sure you can grind out some titles or challenge for a higher rank, but a lot of people are satisfied with just making the top 100 and receiving the rewards that come with it. This has shown over seasons, as activity has dwindled to the point where ranked doesn't pop on some days, and the leaderboard floor is so low that it's really easy to get T100. As the T100 reward has seemingly been moved to the battlepass, it leaves you with very little reason to continue playing. Even some of the most hardcore people I know from both 4.0 and 5.0 feast have stopped playing because of this. The ranked mode needs more of an incentive to play after your first crystal season, or the mode is simply going to die. SE have said they are looking at this, but what they will decide to change, who knows, as they have been very vague about it.

2: For a mode designed to be new player friendly, it's not actually that easy to learn.

With jobs getting their identities back, the amount of unique skills and effects in CC and PvP in general has gone through the roof compared to Feast. Knowing what a skill does and how to react to it is crucial in PvP, which in my opinion, makes it harder for new players to learn the ropes. Hell I even got to crystal on 3 characters and still didn't learn what everything did. I think this sort of defeats the point in replacing feast, something that SE deemed to difficult to new players to be able to get into.

3: It replaced the wrong mode.

In my personal opinion, CC should have replaced rival wings instead of feast. The mode is dead, and only pops when community discords arrange dates and tiems for it to pop. I think they could have easily have continued feast, which always had potential but was seemingly abandoned in 5.0 by SE and replaced a mode that has very little interest from the community (sorry to hose who love rival wings!)

4: Team based gameplay is still dead, when it's really fun.

This is a tricky thing to be critical of, as there have been many problems and accusations with teams wintrading or cheating in the past with team seasons, however when it works, playing in a team is some of the best times I've had with PvP. Being able to work on your own strategies and communicate for efficiently is such a game changer. I hope SE finds a way to bring it back, which Ithink could be done easily if

Honestly, that's about all I have the say about it in a critical way. CC has huge potential. It just needs more of an incentive to play, similar to the old T100 rewards. I think it's a lot better than 5.0 Feast, and is close to 4.0 feast in terms of my personal enjoyment, and if they bought back a similar system to the Feast T100 rewards I would actively play it.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with what they have done with PvP this expansion, and I hope they continue. but until then, I am just raid logging and playing single player games for now.

Until next time,

Aud/Dom.

Sick And Tired Of FFXIV.

 I've been wanting to make this post for a while to get things off my chest.

At the moment, I'm fucking sick of playing FFXIV. I'm not enjoying it, and I think I'm long overdue a break.

Endwalker got off to a fantastic start. The story was fantastic, there was minimal issues apart from expected congestion due to the influx of new players, and my group cleared the first savage tier week one with ease. Things were looking great, I was pumped for the new ultimate, and I was really happy to finally get a week 1 clear without having to resort to hardcore hours.

Then something somewhat unexpected happened.

We disbanded.

A long story short, the group was very split in opinion on how much we wanted to raid after savage was dead. Half the group wanted to go back and improve our strat/do speed kills or log runs, where as the other half wanted to just clear for the week and chill.

I personally was firmly in camp chill. I have no interest in spamming the same fights over and over for the sake of swinging my dick around on FFLogs. If I can clear a fight, and my DPS/performance was good. I was more than satisfied, and I would rather go and play other stuff until new content arrives.

Despite trying to compromise, one of our members who wanted to raid more decided to leave. This then triggered a chain reaction of 2 other people leaving as university was starting for them soon, and at this point it was not worth replacing 3 core members of a successful group. So we called it a day.

To this day, I'm still sad/pissed off about this. This group was easily the most successful one I have been in. Everyone was capable, got along and it was genuinely a pleasure to raid. We got a lot of shit done, Well over 50 TEA/UwU/UCoB clears and week 1/2 savage tier clears over the course of over 2 years. For this to disband over FFLogs in my opinion will always be ridiculous.

At this point, I contemplated just quitting. But I decided to have a look to see if there were any groups recruiting for ultimate and go from there. I had zero luck on the recruitment discord, every group of light was seemingly still progging savage on week 10, which is way behind my expectations, or the few groups that were wanted to do FFLogs in the long run.

Honestly, fuck that website. It's created a ridiculous culture in this game and if I won the lottery, I would buy the site from the owner and delete it.

I was on the verge of giving up, when I was invited to raid on Chaos by Piz, After some discussion, I transferred to Chaos to prepare. I geared up NIN as I wanted to go back to it, and into ultimate we went.

We are currently on a two week break at the time of writing this, due to members going on holiday. But I have to say I haven't enjoyed raiding at all since my old group disbanded. I've logged in twice since our break, once to play PvP for a couple of hours, and another for the make it rain event.It's nothing against this group. They're a nice bunch of lads and very capable.

It could be that it's different to what I'm used to.

It could be that I'm just horrifically burnt out after raiding nearly non stop for 9 years.

It could be that I'm 31 years old this month, and I'm getting too old for this shit.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'm leaning towards a burn out. I haven't had a decent break from this game since 2.0 launch. If I wasn't raiding, I was tryharding in Feast and this has been a thing for 9 years.

It's getting to a point where I dread going to raid. Most days I just want to play something else and forget about FFXIV, and what has happened since Endwalker launch, but I reluctantly attend, and do my best. some days I just want to some time myself to relax after a hard day at work.

DSR got off to a rocky start, but after talking it out and adjusting our mindset, we have made really good progress. We have reached the beginning of Phase 6, and are edging towards a kill. We also agreed to cut down our days and hours, as I wasn't the only one who was going insane from raiding 5-6 days a week for 4-6 hours at a time.

At this point, I just want to kill DSR, and go on a long break. I'm hopeful that once Memento and Kat are ready, we can reform our old group with a few new additions. I think a lot of what's causing me to feel this way is because I enjoy raiding with my friends, and it's just not the same without them.

My plan of action is as follows:

If the next ultimate is in 6.3, I will take a break for the rest of the expansion, and see how things are for 7.0

If ultimate is delayed until 6.5, I will take a break during 6.2 and 6.3, and return to the game in 6.4 to gear for the new ultimate, providing I can find the right group.

If ultimate is delayed beyond this point, then happy fucking days.

If I can't reform my old group or find one that's similar. Then it's game over for me and this game. My account is valuable, and I don't intend on wasting it's potential.

People might ask, why don't I just play casually? I have tried this before, and it's not for me. It just frustrates me knowing that I am capable of raiding at a very high level, but not being able to do so. I would rather just not do it at all.

Since our break, I've been chilling either playing single player games, or some FFXI with some of my old group. Mentally, I feel so much better, and if my UCOB prog from 4.1 taught me anything, is that pushing myself when I'm clearly burnt out is not good for me.

I've said it many times before, and I will say it again. Video games are supposed to be fun. If you're not having fun, you should play something else.

I'm in far too deep to drop out of ultimate now, and it would be very disrespectful to my new group for me to do so at this point, so I will see this fight out until the end. But after this is done, I have some serious decisions to make.

Thanks for reading my rant. I want to type out some thoughts about the new PvP at some point. but that will have to wait for another day.

Until next time,

Dom/Aud.

P.S: FFXI is still the best MMO, and if you haven't tried it, you should.

Something a bit different...

 Hello everyone,

This blog has been almost exclusively for documenting my FFXIV journey and experience, however I undertook and completed something a bit different a few days ago which I'm quite proud of, and wanted to put it here so I can look back on it in the future.

 

On Saturday the 5th of March, I took part in the Vow Of The Disciple day 1 contest mode in Destiny 2, and managed to complete it. Earning myself a rare emblem and bragging rights in the process.

I've played Destiny on and off since the launch of Destiny 1, but always fairly casually. I've cleared plenty of raids in the past, but never even close to day 1. I always used to play it with some real life friends for a few hours on release, and then we would go back in when contest mode was finished, and when it was a lot easier to get the clear and loot.

During a quiet time in FFXIV, I decided to get back into the game again, and managed to find a clan called EXG (Excelcius Gaming) I quickly found myself to like the clan, as many of their members also played FFXIV, and therefore we shared common interests and got on well.

I managed to clear Deep Stone Crypt and Vault of glass with relative ease, including farming VoG for several weeks with a set group of people. Bungie then announced The Witch Queen Expansion, which looked fantastic, and while we vaguely discussed the possibility of a day 1 clear in our group, we never really finalised these plans.

I was then asked by Creative, who was part of this VoG group if I wanted to form a group to try and tackle the upcoming raid in day one. This would be with 2 others in our clan who weren't in our VoG group, but either had previous day 1 experience or were competant players, and wanted to raid until it was cleared, or until the 24 hours had passed.

I was at first fairly reluctant. I am nowhere near as good at D2 than I am at FFXIV, and I was essentially going in with very experienced and capable players. I was reassured by Ciphaz that if I was capable of clearing ultimates in FFXIV, that I could do this, and that they had faith that I could do it based on what i had accomplished since coming back to the game. So I agreed. I was told how to prepare for the raid in terms of weapons, loadouts and materials, and so I farmed for about 60 hours from the start of the expansion until the raid was made available about 10 days after expansion release.

Our other 2 members we recruited from LFG, both of which had previous day 1 clears, and seemed to be capable players. We initially planned to do master VoG to have a chance to get to know each other, and check that everyone was capable of clearing the raid, however Creative had a power cut during the storms that the UK was hit with and we had to call it off. We agreed to just prepare as much as possible leading up to the raid and it would be fine.

Our 5th member Zero, was a very good player. He knows how to play the game very well, pumps out good damage, and was pretty quiet, but that's a good thing when you need comms clear for mechanics.

Our 6th player however, who I will not name (it's not the guy in the screenshot, I will explain in a bit) was the exact opposite.

We got through the intial add clear with no issues and quickly got to the first puzzle encounter. It then became quite apparent that this 6th member was not as we expected. We essentially had to split into 3 groups of two, and he was paired with me. I did the majority of the mechanics for our side of the room, and what little I left for him to do he was messing up a fair bit. It took us a few hours to clear the first encounter, so we didn't think much of it, so moved on to the first boss encounter.

This was when the problems started. This guy:

-Kept dying to adds, when the other two people doing add clear and stunning the boss were doing so very consistently.
-Was doing absolutely awful DPS. Being beaten by two titans using a banner shield, which meant they couldn't DPS for a third of the DPS phase, when he could, and doing a third of the damage that Me, Ciphaz, and Zero were doing
-Either kept going AFK, or asking for time to change his build after nearly every attempt, even though we had barely made any progress that would warrant changes needing to be made and wasting valuable time.
-Kept talking or complaining during mechanics where Me and Ciphaz needed to call out to each other and Creative, making it very difficult to do so, and resulting in wipes.
-Refused to listen to any advice that we would give him to improve his DPS or performance. He came across as quite a knowledgable player leading up to the raid, suggesting weapons and builds for us to use, but seemingly could not execute this himself.

We put up with the above for about 6 hours, and eventually got fed up. We told the guy that it wasn't working and he clearly wasn't capable of performing, and kicked him out of the raid and discord. We then went to the LFG discord and found another guy to replace him, and a couple of hours later. We made good progress and killed the boss.

We then got to the gauntlet part of the raid, it was fairly tough, with a lot going on and a lot to figure out, but about 4-5 hours later we got it done. The mood had improved dramatically at this point now we had 6 good players, so we were in hgih spirits despite being quite tired.

After going through the jump puzzle and reaching the final boss. We had about 10 hours left to complete the raid day 1. The contest mode had been extended by 24 hours as the launch of the raid was riddled with errors which thankfully we managed to avoid. But we wanted to clear it day 1 so we wouldn't have to come back, and we couldn't really delay it, as some people had to go to work on Monday morning. So we made the decision to push on and get it done.

At this point, we had been playing for about 14-15 hours, and we were starting to tire mentally. To add to this, the last boss was incredibly buggy. Mechanics weren't registering despite us doing them correctly, the boss had a mechanics where it would shoot out beams in multiple directions, and often it would shoot one where it was not supposed to, hitting people and killing them, which would cause us to need to wipe as the DPS check was so tight.

This was causing a few of us to become very frustrated, and we were expressing this verbally, this seemingly caused our replacement member to become fed up and he left the raid and discord at around the 20 hour mark. We debated taking a break to get a bit of sleep before returning as the emblem was available for a further 24 hours, but we were hungry for a day 1 clear, so again, we found a LFG and carried on.

In came Motorolaphone. the guy had also been at it since release with several LFG groups, and was frustrated, but he fitted in well with us at this point, He was a lot more consistent than our previous guy, and did better damage. We came so close to killing the boss about 3-4 times, and arguably, it should have died twice but it did not due to seemingly being bugged.

We decided to change our dps strat a bit, opting for a titan bubble to increase damage a bit more. and finally, after 23 hours and 8 minutes in total. The final boss died and the raid was over. We all shouted in relief. It was rough as hell. but we finally did it. and could go and get some well earned sleep.

Adrenaline had kicked in for most of us, so we hung around to chat until the 24 hours was up, and to see how many teams had managed to clear it, and the final number was 902 teams day 1. Which was quite a low number compared to the previous raid.

At this point, my back was killing me, and my legs were numb from being sat at my desk on and off for a full day straight. So I went to bed at about 6PM, and woke up a 8AM the next day for work. Which was about 14 hours. I also went back to bed after work had finished as I was still tired. fuck I'm getting old...

If you had asked me after we had killed the final boss, if I would do this again, I would have answered no, however after catching up on sleep, recovering, and processing the experience. It was a lot of fun, and it wouldn't have been so time consuming had we had a competant 6th member from the beginning.

Another raid is going to be released in about 6 months. So I will likely be going again for that. But a huge thanks to Creative, Ciphaz, Thear, and Zero. Despite the struggle, we never gave up, never once snapped at each other, and our determination and perseverance bought us home the win, also thanks to Motorolaphone for coming in during the dying stages and helping us get it. hopefully we can all stay together for the next raid.

A lot has happened in XIV since my last blog post, some good, some bad. I will make a post about it at some point. But until then. stay safe, and see you in game!

-Aud/Dom.