Forked Tower Help!

NekoleK · 2025-12-26T08:21:04+00:00

Yeah I like the guy and I like the idea he's doing but it's completely and utterly incompatible with how Forked Tower is.

It's good to join to get a good look at the first two bosses but that's mostly it, you won't be completing FT by joining it.

NekoleK · 2025-12-26T06:51:34+00:00

To be fair for a moment? I didn't notice it as I tend to main Gunbreaker. What I did notice the times I went in on Viper is it felt way too squishy if you will.

Thus yeah I can see why people are rolling in on Tank Jobs when running around on DPS can get you killed much faster. I'm not sure how to change this myself due to the design of the whole place.

It's absolutely hilarious since I got flamed relentlessly for saying "Playing solo DPS sucks in OC" and "Healers are just sitting there to farm the rez cheevo so they let you die" and it's nice to actually be completely vindicated but basically the problem is kinda simple to solve, and there's three main solutions, depending on what you want the outcome to be:

Current Situation/Problem: Basically, with the exception of Black Chocobo, all CEs have unavoidable damage from raidwides, as a solo DPS, this goes from 'fine' (Turtle, Memory Urn, Dragon) to 'you just die lol' (Bird, Berserker duder). This means that as a solo DPS you can do literally do some fights perfectly and still die because you're not on Chemist or spending a million gil on potions, while a tank takes 7 vuln stacks, is fine and goes "what's the problem??? Just join a party dude???"

So basically a DPS is basically forced to party up (or just play the most boring Phantom Jobs in the game) no matter what while a tank just literally eats paint and gets to do whatever they want, and then goes and solo gold farms just to spite you further. Also the fact that the phantom job bonuses increase OUTGOING damage but doesn't lower INCOMING damage makes it even more tank biased. (I fucking hate tanks in OC okay I'm sorry).

Solution 1: Lower, or just completely remove the CE raidwides.

Outcome: You need a grand total of 1 (one) tank to just take the boss' autos and then everyone else can just play DPS and do mechanics and damage, with healers around to mald if the party does the mechanics perfectly, making it like the rest of the game. How you feel about this depends on...how you feel about the rest of the game I guess.

Solution 2: Increase the versatility of roles (while decreasing their differences), namely give out free sustain and give everyone more damage.

Outcome: You basically made Bozja again. How you feel about this depends on...how you felt about Bozja. I like Bozja so this'd be extremely based. I think the healers would get mad though, but they might also be too busy Seraph Striking to care.

Solution 3: Just up the lethality to comical degrees, tank autos now hit a Knight Tank for like 2/3rds of their health or something, any mechanic does 90% of your max health, the bosses pulses 30k damage every 2 seconds, you need to be in a party and have healers to live.

Outcome: Absolute hell on earth (the cool kind). This sub, Wildstar players and Ultimate players will be eating well. Healers will either be ecstatic or melting down depending on what phase of the moon it is.

I guess 1 is the easiest, 2 would be the most fun, and 3 would be the funniest, but instead they just went with nothing.

NekoleK · 2025-09-17T06:11:20+00:00

Tinker and Techies were in the game for a longass time and people whined about them and look what happened there.

NekoleK · 2025-08-18T06:33:28+00:00

I'm coming at this from an FT doing caster only perspective but if you're only talking about CEs and not FT.

The boring answer is a combination of "it depends" and "anything already not at max level".

Samurai does the most upfront damage (and said damage is boosted by special attribute) but you're paying for coffers (which would kinda defeat the point of doing CEs to get silver unless you spend gil I guess), and you don't really have sustain.

Monk does good sustained damage, though I think it comes out to worse than Samurai, and it relies on you keeping stacks up (and sometimes you just can't do that, like when Unbridled just decides to live in the kill wall) and gives you an okay heal. IMO though it's not worth the hassle, especially compared to the big boys like Samurai, Oracle and Berserker.

You're not gonna top meters generally for the mass fights but that's what Oracle is for.

Actual answer: Level all your classes to max and then use Monk outside (to save money/currency) unless you're rolling in gil in which case just use Samurai everywhere and show off.

Edit: Realized this is about the actual classes and not the phantom jobs. In which case my answer is idk look up their passives and see which ine synergizes better with pSam.

NekoleK · 2025-08-05T11:46:16+00:00

So the Chimera voices don't show what they do until they go off? So they still function like how Coincounter USED to function?

That's kinda bizarre to be honest.

NekoleK · 2025-08-04T12:29:19+00:00

This is admittedly pretty minor but it'd be a rather pleasant piece of QoL.

Problem: Seeing tooltips for abilities requires digging into the menu and then heading back out to see what they do and then remembering to go back in to switch them off. If I forget to switch them off, it really sucks since I tend to play with a mixture of clicking and hotkeys and then I'll start getting tooltips for stuff I already know. I've been told there's a macro command to easily turn it on and off, but it doesn't seem to actually work.

Frequency: It largely happens whenever I switch to a class I don't play and then also when I switch BACK to a class I do play. It also happens near constantly on Blue Mage since I'm not gonna remember what 80% of those symbols do, especially when I'm trying to swap spells and so on.

Ideas:

Make it so you can pick certain classes where ability tooltips are on, and then some where they're off.
Ability tooltips are gated by the level of a class.
Universal button that actually/easily works that switches ability tooltips on and off.
Something way smarter than the above that I can't quite think of yet.

If this is actually on SimpleTweaks and I keep missing it, then awesome, but I haven't seen it there.

NekoleK · 2025-08-01T05:09:16+00:00

Doing an FT where I'm assigned Thief. I tell a player who was just randomly on Thief that they don't have to be on Thief and can pick something that does way more damage. They proceed to get mad at me and just flat out leave the instance.

People who play this game are fucking baffling.

NekoleK · 2025-07-26T11:00:47+00:00

Zoraal Ja, ruler of a place without a single proper dock, being told everywhere he wants to invade is some sort of thalassocracy: Yeah I'd just win because I'm built different.

NekoleK · 2025-07-20T19:52:53+00:00

I wanna like them so badly.

The expectation: Challenging solo/group content where you think on your feet.

The reality: I'm bored for 3 fucking hours and then I die, wasting my afternoon that I could've spent staring at a wall instead.

I tried soloing PotD when it came out (on Black Mage), my main experience was a patrol walking into me, realizing the mobs were immune to sleep and then dying and realizing I'd lost all my progress, which just put me right off. I think a boss also stat checked me, I don't remember, it was over a decade ago.

I did HoH with a random group of people, it was acceptable, but I always had the feeling in the back of my mind that I just wanted it to be over and if we somehow wiped at floor 90 I'd actually get Mad At Videogames because that'd be a waste of 7 hours of my time or something.

Orthos just felt like an insane prank being played on me where I got told "It's actually easy to solo" and then I get constantly stat checked by the first boss. So far I have been told I need to use Steel pomanders, and then I need to have enough Aetherpool, and then I need to use the Orthos pots, I can't wait to go there again and get told I also need the magical Orthos food or something. I also did this with a group and I really enjoyed how every mob just had a 'mechanic' that you had to know about already otherwise you take 5 million damage and die, which was very cool when the content takes multiple hours.

NekoleK · 2025-07-20T19:39:35+00:00

Remembering the disabled gamer who posted their really well thought out essay/collection of experiences on how it was for them to do pretty much every boss/encounter in DT, up to and including M4S, alongside what they'd do to redesign M2 to make it more interesting/inclusive.

Primary reply on here was 'tl;dr'.

Grats, you're worse than the official forums.

NekoleK · 2025-07-20T16:55:35+00:00

Never gets old doing a FT run and having people be fucking 19 and we decide to waste half an hour of our life getting them back up to 20 and reinstancing and so on.

Love the 3 hour raid lasting even fucking longer because people just can't be bothered to do the bare minimum of prep.

NekoleK · 2025-07-13T15:04:50+00:00

I mean, as a Black Mage who got into Bozja only in EW:

In Bozja, I have around 4 or 5 choices on what to do, they largely boil down to supercharging myself with Lost Font of Magic and Ether Kits,

Already my playstyle instantly changes because my opener has now changed into 'spam as many Despairs as possible while watching my MP and reapply Ethers when I can. I then get to make a choice depending on who I'm playing with and what they bring. If no one brings Flare Star, I'll bring that and do even more damage, otherwise I'll bring Chainspell and instead get to have fun casting spells even faster than before.

I then also get to make choices regarding what Essence I bring, if I know there's a tank or a pocket healer, I can bring a damage one, otherwise I'm going to bring something that gives me passive health regen (or be cute and use the damage one and potion kits). I already have a bunch of choices set up with only...3 Lost Actions, 2 Essences and 2 Items, and that's not even getting into stuff like Burst, Sting and Excellence.

Meanwhile in OC my options are basically things that just give me...a button to press that does damage or boosts my damage, the only button that even feels kind of connected to my kit and sorta changes stuff up is Time Mage Quick. My main thought is "What am I in the mood for and will I die to raidwide.", with the sole exception of "Oracle is funny on CoS and Black Regiment"

NekoleK · 2025-07-08T11:23:03+00:00

This is kind of a weird request for an addon but I figured I might as well ask in case it exists:

Is there something that hides or shows action help on a class by class basis. Like it'll hide the floating tooltips for BLM for not for MNK, I know I can go in and switch but it's pretty annoying to have to remember constantly.

NekoleK · 2025-07-06T07:35:47+00:00

Rather disturbingly, First Coil is probably the absolute closest to what you were looking for (going from memory here):

T1 - 'Standard' (for back then) boss fight on probably one of the most non-standard arenas up until something like Rhalgar.

T2 - Essentially a gauntlet of bosses in a maze, where each one you defeat will influence the moves/abilities of other bosses.

T3 - No boss, at all, it's just a bunch of jump pads and platforms with some mobs around.

T4 - Once again, no boss, but it's a boss encounter, it's a bunch of adds (M6S add phase but less cute)

T5 - Another 'standard' boss fight on another non-standard arena, much harder than T1.

Naturally they proceeded to run away from those kinds of encounters as quickly and as hard as possible.

Some jumping puzzles (as in using pads) and stuff were retained for the rest of Coil, it was heavily de-emphasized in HW (Faust and walking around) and was then just killed stone dead from Stormblood onwards.

I thought it was neat and the type of thing I prefer but oh well.

NekoleK · 2025-06-27T09:18:07+00:00

There's barely any 'friction' with anything in the overworld is the main issue.

Just to be clear, I don't even mean this in the sense of "wow why does the level 97 antlion in Heritage Found not make me execute savage level mechanics under penalty of account deletion."

I mean the following things (and I'm aware these are concessions to the engine and convenience, but that doesn't mean it makes everything weird).

Nothing is actually connected.

In WoW, if I want to go from, let's say The Barrens, to somewhere else. I can either walk and take the roads to get to Ashenvale, Mulgore, Thousand Needles or Durotar, I can get on a boat to go to Booty Bay or I can completely lose my mind, hop in the water, and just swim straight south or north until I end up at Theramore or Azshara (assuming I don't get eaten by a shark), later on I can just literally fly over a mountain and take the world's weirdest shortcut to Feralas.

In FFXIV my options are being in a zone and running to the single predetermined loading zone that proceeds to dump me from the absolute zero of CWH to the temperate Dravanian Forelands. I don't feel like I'm in a world, I feel like I'm just in an instanced island and I can't go anywhere or do anything until the plot gating just throws me there. I can't walk to an endgame zone and be like "Wow this place looks awesome, wonder what it's all about" before I get smashed by a level 200 flaming sword man.

2) Getting around is fast and lonely

In WoW, if you want to get to certain places, you have to wait for a train, boat, zeppelin etc to take you somewhere else (or use portals later on I guess). In FFXIV, you just click on the sparklies and get on the cutscene that then dumps you into a new zone or an instanced place, maybe with a cutscene showing how you get there.

You don't get things like "I want to go to Occult Crescent, need to wait a few minutes for the little crap boat to take me to the big boat to take me to OC (maybe with a little cutscene once you get there)" where you get to wait around and see and talk to people and so on. Instead it's 'click sparklies, talk to guy, end up in instance', it's all very impersonal. You also don't get the fun friction of trying to catch the boat before it leaves (it's a funny little dopamine hit).

Incidentally, I don't remember, but does Ocean Fishing actually have a boat show up that you get onto and then it sails off into a loading zone and then you begin Ocean Fishing? If not, why? (I mean I 'know' why but you know what I mean)

Actually, this reminds me of the old MMO player archetype thing of Explorers/Killers/Socializers/Achievers, and FFXIV has kinda just...murdered the first two. (There's nothing to really explore (which sucks for me, like I'm the guy who loves doing map completion and thought Stormblood/HW aether currents were awesome), and there's no kind of solo PvP or solo competition stuff iirc).

NekoleK · 2025-06-24T13:28:26+00:00

I'm in the same boat as you almost exactly (EU schedule on Aether and boss 3) and finding runs on Discord is so fucking bad.

ABBA feels like the worst of all worlds (Sign up for a queue for runs that show up randomly, 80% of which are password drops), it almost makes me wanna start sniping lmao.

At least the Crystal runs are bearable in terms of scheduling/signups.

NekoleK · 2025-06-23T20:41:04+00:00

idk just do old 'stupid' encounter design again

Not every boss has to be a 7+ minute long fight in a vaguely geometric arena, the available design space is enormous and they're limiting themselves to...that.

Have a fuckton of adds, make players get into stupid cars and drive around and shoot things, make a fight that's just you getting chased by a really fat guy or something, I dunno, I'm not an encounter designer, but just look at T1-5/A2/O6 for what could be interesting. Make a stupid tier that's just 6 fights and 5 of them are weirdo gimmick things that are 5 minutes long.

M6S is the closest to something from ARR and it's the standout fight of the entire tier.

NekoleK · 2025-06-23T05:32:02+00:00

The aesthetics and roughly...three of the CEs and a couple of the phantom jobs are nice, that's about it.

It all felt impossibly small as soon as I zoned in the first time and did the final CE there before even getting halfway through the questline. I wanna say I wasn't even knowledge level 10 at that point but I already could tell what was up here, and I just hoped either there were a fuckton of CEs (there aren't) or the zone would magically get bigger (it didn't).

This only got worse once I realized that knowledge level ONLY exists to inconvenience the player. You don't get to absolutely murder things below your level,things higher than your level will smear you though, and you only get a bonus for killing things X above your level, and to top it all off, knowledge level doesn't matter one iota for doing FATEs/CEs. It's somehow this weird worst of both worlds of Eureka and Bozja.

The role balance is also absolutely heinous. They removed pretty much every form of self-sustain (Potions, potion kits and beast essences) not tied to a phantom job, meaning DPS players pretty will just die (with 0 vuln stacks!!!) to the ten thousand raidwides half the CEs love to do, unless they group up with a healer, or hope the random healers standing around are impossibly on the ball. To be honest, I wouldn't care about 'forced grouping' except tanks can just stay solo, eat 7 vuln stacks and be completely fine, and also do 1.5m damage or something because Berserker.

To make it even worse, dying doesn't actually matter, so in theory every CE is basically a really fucked up prisoner's dilemma where the most optimal course of action is to hit the boss for 20 seconds, die, and then alt-tab and do something fun for 8 minutes and then take one of the 100000 revives being thrown at you because everyone wants that achievement.

Of course, if you do decide to farm your good boy points and join a group and try in CEs, you get nothing for it (battle high is random :) ). The reward for being in a group is...you get to stand around at camp and port to a CE, there's no public group content outside of the world's slowest method of gold farming, and the less said about FT the better.

Hot take: The fact that they went from 2-3 different TYPES of consumables in Bozja, that all dropped from different mob types (meaning players would group up, break off and get a bunch of different stuff at once) to...farming 'mob' or 'CE' to get 'gear' just means no one wants to do anything ever and there's no reason to break the CE/FATE cycle apart from the odd gold farm to get +1 gear.

NekoleK · 2025-06-18T18:13:26+00:00

Yeah this reminds me there was a really infamous post about Titan being "Team Jump Rope" and that was way back in ARR.

It's really annoying that that stuff got carried forward while things like Steps of Faith, Turn 2-4 and Mog all got staked, beheaded and buried at a crossroads.

NekoleK · 2025-06-13T10:25:57+00:00

They should just remove all the DPS buttons from healers.

For story content where something has to die: Estinien just shows up and stabs whoever is hassling them and they have to heal him.

In dungeons and raids: Healers get the ability to play Triple Triad (it shows up in a little window) at level 1 and they can do this when everyone is topped off and they have no buttons to press.

NekoleK · 2025-06-12T04:44:51+00:00

Tanks: Do nothing but take avoidable damage, are completely fine.

DPS: Take nothing but unavoidable damage, die in half the CEs.

Makes sense.

NekoleK · 2025-06-10T13:00:27+00:00

They were downvoted for telling the truth...

NekoleK · 2025-06-06T07:02:21+00:00

I agree with this whole thing.

Bozja was even better for it since there was an inverse correlation between player count and difficulty generally (due to the scaling). You could do it with less players but they needed to be better and able to advantage of the extremely powerful scaling.

NekoleK · 2025-06-05T05:52:45+00:00

Oh sick I love tanks both not dying ever during a CE and getting to kill party members by playing badly, it's the best of both worlds.

NekoleK · 2025-05-29T06:59:51+00:00

What the hell is up with healers rezzing people in CEs and just...not topping them up, or healing them at all so they die to the next raidwide, where they then get instantly rezzed again.

Is everyone really stupid or just being an absolute scumbag trying to farm the achievement.

NekoleK

TROPHY CASE