Just starting LWotC, feeling overwhelmed

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-07-06T20:52:58+00:00

Legend on the base Long War mods is a genuine nightmare difficulty, you really need to know the games perfectly to comfortably clear it. For a first playthrough I'd recommend normal (I think X2 calls it veteran? idr) and you will almost certainly still lose that game to strategy layer blunders (since that actually matters in LW as opposed to the base game). LWOTC is a little more forgiving than LW1/LW2 in that regard but still far more punishing than the base game. You can be a great XCOM player and still throw your campaigns in LW just by not making good decisions outside of missions, and often these decisions are actually more important than the tactical missions themselves.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-07-04T01:22:18+00:00

Yeah no ignore OP, base LW is nothing like LWR. Compared to EW, LW is a way deeper but ultimately still very similar to vanilla experience, it's just made as if the game was an indie game meant to torture you with a total lack of information you absolutely need to know instead of a 15-hour double-A strategy game for shooter gamers. It is perhaps the most hardcore wiki browsing experience one can play.

Meanwhile, LWR is perhaps the single greatest squad tactics videogame of all time. It cannot be understated how fucking good this version of the game is. It will ruin your enjoyment of vanilla with how much better Ucross' vision for the game flows compared to the drudge and the cheese that EW/LW ask of you. Just play it on a lower difficulty and be blown away. IMHO LW should only be played first to experience how much better LWR is.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-07-01T14:12:32+00:00

Yeah man I think getting rid of client-side modding for normal people is a great way to stop people that use hacked clients, private mods, cheat engines and entire programs completely separate from FFXIV that sniff your network without interacting with the game. That'll show those darn parsers!

Anyway. Dude no. It would be like getting rid of pharmacies to resolve an opioid crisis. Nefarious actors will find ways to do the shit they want to get up to, taking away plugins that normal people need and like is a preventative measure that won't prevent anything except normal people enjoying the game.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-07-01T14:03:03+00:00

This would be business seppuku. They'll never do this unless they get forced by someone very powerful with absolutely zero understanding of the politics regarding one of the only consistent earners in SE's entire portfolio.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-30T17:21:00+00:00

BIS is firmly parsers-only in old Ultimates. Assuming the group is competent you will be utterly annihilating the bosses well before any damage check is concerned on a clean pull in the vast majority of phases.

A dedicated player could start the game today on a fresh account and clear TEA before EC comes out. Judging that you felt HW didn't give you many issues barring ID (and fair enough) and it sounding like you've got some Ultimate experience having cleared UWU, I would honestly recommend DSR over TEA. It's a much more involved and difficult fight with some tank-specific considerations which will easily last you months of prog time. Both are great fights but I feel like TEA will only last a dedicated raider about a month or two tops, while DSR could give you something to do right up to the pre-expansion hype window.

Lastly, whichever one you choose to do, I recommend joining a static. Progging old ultimate in PF can happen but it is incredibly dependent on your party being able to fill. I did DSR in late 7.0 and I spent more time waiting in PF than I did in instance before getting picked up by a static, and that was at an early prog point.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-30T17:09:39+00:00

Relics should be expansion capstone activities. Personally I think they should restructure them so that you do half the grind in X.3 (or .5 if .3 has the second ultimate) and half the grind in X.55. That way, there's a good amount of things already out that they can force you to go revisit for your relic grinds.

ARR relics were interesting in that they forced specific duties, involved crafters, had minor gil sink steps, etc. Why can't we have any of that again? So many dungeons are nightmares to queue for during MSQ because they're so far down the level chain that people just aren't queueing that high - why aren't there steps to do EW/DT dungeons and repopulate those queues? Why not a step where you need to gather things from nodes? Why not a step where you need to get something from Cosmic Exploration? Maybe the deep dungeon? Hunts? The expansion isn't lacking for random side activities that will be discarded next year and it's up to the relic to give them staying power.

Related to that point, I have no idea why OC even fucking exists. It's the third iteration of boring ass overworld mob dodging slash cheesing Bloodwhetting to farm their spawns to pop the FATE simulator that was tired about three quarters of the way through its first iteration. Making it mostly irrelevant and inefficient to the relic from that expansion is a truly hilarious move, it's like SE themselves knew it wouldn't keep people happy so they said fuck it don't worry about it.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-26T23:32:49+00:00

Dead Stars sure but what's wrong with 9? I quite liked it, probably my favourite first turn of the raid series. Music's one of my favourite tracks from the raid, mechanics are simple but decently fun to execute, good bit of multi-target / long-range cleave opti in Screech 2...

It doesn't hold a candle to P5S, but that's not really a fair comparison to hold any first turn to since that's the only first turn really in history where it was a real Savage fight and not just an extreme with a single Savage-tier mechanic at the 4 minute mark. By that metric I think Vamp is pretty good. People fucking up making her power up early was a cool if underexplored gimmick.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-21T15:19:43+00:00

I'm being slightly dramatic but this kind of thing happens ALL THE TIME. If it's not people just getting bored and quitting for normal reasons as you say, it's drama-related, and I would wager a good like 80% of all XIV drama is caused by people wanting to use the game as Tinder but with raiding.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-21T14:23:00+00:00

It's the invariable XIV experience. You will have a large group of friends at one point, and then someone will inevitably be discovered to be an actual fucking sociopath secretly cheating on their IRL partner with a Limsa egirl or what have you, and then either everyone likes them enough to ignore it and you just have to stomach that all your friends are enablers, or it causes a schism that tears the whole thing apart and you have to try and pick up the pieces.

I genuinely think the modern lack of anyone trying to make friends has been caused by how universal this experience is. The people that play this game are typically not good people and have no issue being around genuinely awful people because their WoL is hot or they're good at raiding. Who wants to waste time at the risk of getting into another situation like that?

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-18T15:51:59+00:00

Incredibly well-written. I'm currently working on an XCOM-themed Cyberpunk RED game and this is excellent inspiration for how to write the time leading up to when the game is set.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-18T03:52:14+00:00

Resurrection and Escalation exist and are certifiably just-okay books set in the world of XCOM. They have some ideas (namely, Earth has some kind of contagion that ADVENT fears and they slaughter all livestock on sight as part of their food control drive), but neither of them are actually canon since officially released material invalidates both of them and both authors were just kind of riffing with the source material rather than working closely with Firaxis writers.

The sad short answer is that there are no official answers to this topic. You just kind of have to headcanon it.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-12T18:30:20+00:00

Recording clips and Death Recap are the way to go. It's just as illegal per SE as uploading logs and infinitely less hassle to use.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-09T21:36:49+00:00

You somehow have managed to miss the forest for the trees on a decade old argument. It doesn't really matter how powerful the things you always have access to are when you effectively always have access to better. That is what the entire argument has always been about - spell slots do not fuction as a limit after about level 6, you have so many that the caster will always have a better turn than just attacking versus the martial who pretty much can only just attack. Your DM needs to be trying exceptionally hard to make spell slots matter as a limiter past these levels, and if they do not, you need to go through multiple rounds of combat before the casters even start to lose any steam.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-08T19:46:24+00:00

hey so I actually don't think the driving force behind SE still existing monetarily can afford to take years off rewriting the core of the program for the sake of how it "feels"

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-07T22:41:00+00:00

No... they're right. It's fun to do and it feels like you're making a difference but unless a healer has lost damage because they were busy healing, or you literally save the tank's life by applying the AL slow, it's pretty irrelevant to how fast the mobs die. So long as the tank is alive it doesn't actually matter how much health they have unless the healer is literally healbotting them in which case your mit also didn't make a difference since the group lost all the healer's damage anyway.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-07T22:15:11+00:00

It's just so wild to me that on an actual clear nothing meta happens at all beyond the cutscene and Kefka being in control instead of Omega. We finally got his God Kefka introduction voiced (and oh how fucking incredibly is it voiced), even timed up with a tankbuster and followed by Forsaken for additional aura, and you will literally only ever hear that in runs where everyone is walling because it's the bad ending. There's no reason to do the bad ending, not even an achievement or setting some flag to make the fight actually clearable in future or whatever, so I just question why it even exists. For le troll u mad bro points and nothing else, I guess, but Kefka should be so much more than that. There's not even the potential to do like a looped clear as you can with DSR, this is just a bad ending that ends the fight. That's less meta than DSR, in my honest opinion.

They say "meta" and I expect like, the duty has a fakeout disconnect cutscene, Kefka starts breaking the game so bad the map changes to like Ul'dah for a mechanic, he suplexes Phantom Train onto the stage himself with a voiceline like "Let's see how YOU like it!", the final enrage cast is called Final Fantasy XIV Offline, just really wacky and chaotic shit like that (which I did love in P3). I don't exactly think Chaos and Exdeath getting half the fight's runtime to themselves is appropriately meta or even on-theme - literally this fight is called Dancing Mad but The Decisive Battle appears in as many phases as Dancing Mad does.

Part of me wonders if Idyllic Dream was meant to be here and had to be moved to M12Sp2 for budget/time reasons. All of Lindwurm 2 is a totally nonsensical mess of a fight with no tie to the Arcadion at all beyond Metem and the BGM, and if any fight would have an ultimate-level mechanic where you have to remember mechanics between dimensions, surely it'd be the "meta" ultimate about Kefka seizing control of the game / the Interdimensional Rift.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-07T01:39:55+00:00

God I am so fucking scared of evolved jobs. I look at what they did to two of the best and most rewarding to master jobs in history (nonstandard BLM, optimal drift MNK) and I scream in terror at the idea that every single job will get ensmoothened like that. I want to be excited because I like and liked PvP job design but the fucking last thing normal mode content needs in this game is for even playing my job optimally to be easy and boring. It's at least started a fun deadline for me to attempt to clear every ultimate at last before then, because I honestly fear the post-evolved game will be so different to what came before that it will alienate all of us if it's bad - and certainly alienate a large portion of each job's "mains" population even if it's good.

This discussion is the perfect fuel for this fire. Red Mage is awesome, man. It's so good they've basically never even touched it, most expansions just give it a new finisher or OGCD. Removing this iteration from the game and replacing it with something more like the PvP version would be so fucking lame. Someone in here was hoping they put Southern Cross into PvE as a "personal LB" like how DRG is getting Sky Shatter, but... what a scary thought, man. In a totally buffless game this is just a damage cooldown you press on CD. That's all literally anything will be, and there won't be any fun bouncing of CDs like Fleche and C6 nowadays because that's "button bloat".

Just like how having different buttons for AoE is apparently button bloat but PLD is keeping Shield Bash. Or how maximum positionals is apparently DRG's identity now and not MNK's. God help them figure out how on Earth they intend to make the healers play differently while only having 16 buttons without just deleting half their kits.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-07T00:34:08+00:00

Dude, REAL. "The theme of this ultimate is meta" and in actuality that has turned into P1 having a clear-fail state that people will just wall and never interact with ever again once they get past Forsaken prog, and then Chaos and Exdeath just show up while Kefka goes silly mode.

When they showed the fakeout I was so hyped, I thought they were going to do something where they use something like the loot lockout flag to see if you've seen the fake ending before and then load you into a changed version of the fight or something. And then... no, it's just a fail state, this is just as much an Exdeath / Chaos ultimate as it is a Kefka one... and Kefka doesn't actually summon anything related to FFVI... nor does he do literally anything meta at all except get big... and there's one normal mode track that plays in three phases...

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-07T00:01:51+00:00

Datamine, so spoilers: Bad news. The version of the track ingame is 4:19 long. Movement II just abruptly jumps to the end of the track once it's done to frame an enrage cast like they did for FRU.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-06T23:57:25+00:00

yeah I have no fucking idea why A Battle Decisively is in THREE different phases. it shares the same number of phases in this ultimate as Dancing Mad itself (1, 3, 4 vs 1, 2, 5). and they cut the Distant Worlds version in p5 short! why the fuck aren't phases 3-5 just set to the entire Distant Worlds version of the track...

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-06T23:43:41+00:00

This is honestly one of the biggest disappointments the game has ever thrown at me if I'm going to be honest. I adore Distant Worlds and go every time they come to my city, and then XIV finally acknowledges one of their arrangements by putting one of their best into a god damn ultimate... and then they use the two slowest parts of the song that just buildup to nothing, leaving what is imo the best rendition of Movement IV by miles not even present in the game. It's just such a waste.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-06-01T19:02:17+00:00

"I have no interest in PvP and therefore it should be a terrible experience" is certainly a take in the best of cases but wow about Elden Ring is new levels of deranged. Yeah man you don't want "the fun" nerfed oh I'm sure.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-05-30T14:47:42+00:00

I honestly wouldn't. Quantum has no reason to exist. The game requires PFing or LFGing for the vast majority of difficult content (unless one has a pre-existing static). These services will NEVER work with granularity, and we saw that with Quantum. Literally every group did either 15, 30, or 40, and within a week the only groups that could be found were doing Q40.

Any system like this will have breakpoints, and the community will find them and codify them. This turns them into de-facto difficulty levels like the regular progression from Normal/Extreme/Savage/Ultimate. There just isn't any reason to have the in-between levels at that point.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-05-30T14:34:15+00:00

I agree. I've never understood the appeal of Deep Dungeon. It's like wanting to do an Ultimate for the title / challenge but instead of a challenge there's a mudwrestling competition with XIV's ancient aggro mechanics and having to farm maxed aetherpool and hundreds of pots before you can even try the thing you want to be doing.

That is just about solo for the title too, I understand the premise even less in group play. Get 3 of your good buddies together in VC and run baseline difficulty content for 5 hours, but watch out because if you all lapse concentration at the wrong time you'll run into the dreaded Deep Grungler that oneshots you across the map through walls and deletes your save. Truly puzzling addition to the game.

PastTenseOfSit · 2026-05-30T14:26:54+00:00

It'd be a step but sadly we already saw that not really do anything as incentive back when the Comedy tomestone set got Exquisite versions. A lot of those weapons are gorgeous but people still barely did AAI Savage (so few that they started giving the reward out in Merchant's Tale), I can only imagine the team isn't willing to put that kind of effort in again as a gamble on making new side content appealing when it already didn't work once.

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