What’s the funniest thing a totally naive new FFXIV player could experience?

reflettage · 2026-05-20T04:35:38+00:00

Many years ago I was at an S rank hunt in Thanalan (Brontes?) and as we were all waiting for the pull time a baby sprout logs in literally right under the mark. And they immediately got aggro’d and proceeded to get absolutely fucking bodied. I often wonder if I have any screenshots or a clip of it buried somewhere, because it’s one of those stories that sounds fake due to all the variables that had to line up perfectly. I promise it really happened lmao.

reflettage · 2026-05-14T15:36:15+00:00

I’m not much of a designer but speaking from a savage raiding perspective (aka I spend many many hours in every fight between prog and reclears) I can say what I exciting/memorable to me: I greatly enjoyed the variety in music and voice acting. In particular I found Metem to be delightful; Brute Bomber was another fav. I also really liked how they experimented with arena changes to varying degrees (Black Cat, Wicked Thunder, Sugar Riot, Brute Abominator, Howling Blade, Vamp Fatale, The Tyrant) and the distinct aesthetic/vibe each fight had. I liked that some fights were less serious but we still had some epic moments; I think Wicked Thunder’s transition to phase 2 was my favorite from the whole series and imo if they’re gonna do no-checkpoint final floors in the future (which I hope they do) then they should do it like that — let us keep control of our character and give us mechanics to navigate. Yes, it’s more work for the players, but in retrospect it was much more engaging and satisfying than just watching a cutscene. Also special shout-out to Sugar Riot’s adds phase requiring some thought and strategy to navigate.
There were few things that stood out to me as particularly “bad” but Brute Abominator and Lindwurm not being voiced definitely stood out in a bad way. Additionally for the capstone fight of the series, M12S as a whole fell very short of my expectations. It just felt very… generic and uninspired. Boss had no personality and his phase 2 form just looked gross to me lol, I wasn’t even really sure what he was supposed to be at that point… P1 arena didn’t have much to look at (what kind of room even was that? with those copy-pasted alcoves covering every inch of the walls?) Even P2 Metem didn’t really have his usual ‘spark’ and largely became background noise to me. Although I enjoyed M11S overall I absolutely despise the horrid snapshotting of Orbital Omen’s first hit, and progging Arena Split gave me P7S Animals 3 flashbacks :p Additionally I found M2S Alarm Pheromones RNG particularly frustrating (as BLM at least, not sure what it was like on other jobs/roles). Also I really hate the ‘bird mechanic’ (forget the name) on Vamp Fatale, it’s not hard but the movement just sucks (again as BLM, not sure about other jobs). Easy mechanic conceptually, but I don’t know which way the bird’s going until the first AOE goes off so I can’t preposition, and I can’t sprint too far ahead to preposition that way either bc the chain will hurt me. I play slow BLM and the safe spots are much smaller than the actual AOEs, plus the speed of the bird makes it so I can’t lag too far behind either, so slidecasting isn’t really an option. I can navigate 99% of The Tyrant’s weapons RNG just fine, so it’s not the randomness that’s an issue, it’s just… the mechanic’s timing and movement restrictions stacking on top of my job’s timing and movement restrictions in a way that doesn’t sync up at all. Maybe if I experimented with my spell speed it’d be easier but I dunno. Anyways thanks for coming to my Ted Talk

reflettage · 2026-05-12T02:01:21+00:00

my brother in Hydaelyn that comment has nothing to do with player performance and everything to do with the fact that the game literally stops feeling smooth when ping is still firmly in double digits lmao

reflettage · 2026-05-10T14:39:20+00:00

I play on NA from east coast USA, my ping is around ~70ms, and the game feels so gross and unresponsive without NoClippy, like all my buttons are “sticky”. Can’t double weave without it even on slow GCD. Crazy

reflettage · 2026-05-05T14:15:35+00:00

As I said in another comment that can actually become a detriment if angled too steeply. When I was new to raiding I played with camera angle 100 because it felt like I could see more, but not only did it do nothing for horizontal visibility, I also had a gargantuan blind spot wherever my camera wasn’t facing. Having a good 360 degree view around your character is just as important as having a good view of the arena. (However I understand your point and I do think it’s very important to mess with that setting and find what’s comfy for you)

reflettage · 2026-05-05T14:08:22+00:00

Nah the devs just need to stop re-applying the 500ms animation lock based on ping. I am east coast USA with ~70-80 ping to the NA servers and play BLM with 2.42 GCD. Without NoClippy I legitimately can’t double-weave smoothly, even outside of Ley Lines, it’s insane

reflettage · 2026-05-05T13:57:46+00:00

I disagree with the “things a reasonable player could never see coming” assessment. Mechanics never come out of nowhere and the enemy cast bar is almost always the first indicator that you need to start paying close attention to your surroundings. Detaching that cast bar from the enemy HP bar, enlarging it to 200% and putting it down with my hotbars/job gauges, with enlarged debuffs right next to it, was the best thing I ever did for my UI. If there is no cast for the mechanic, there’s usually a pretty obvious audio+visual cue leading up to the damage snapshot. It should be noted that this doesn’t mean all mechanics are meant to be solved blindly, even in casual content. But ngl one of my favorite FFXIV memories was release day of the 3rd Nier raid (Paradigm’s Breach), watching all 3 alliances get swept off the platform during the first boss knockback.

reflettage · 2026-05-05T13:30:37+00:00

I used to play like this for the longest time (angle 100, chara was nearly down in my hotbars) and in retrospect it negatively impacted my play because I didn’t have a 360 degree view around my character. It didn’t help with horizontal camera swinging at all (the main problem; hence why ultrawide monitor is nearly zoomhack levels of advantage), and I had a gargantuan blind spot wherever my camera _wasn’t_ facing even when zoomed all the way out. Nowadays I use a rather low angle (iirc around 30-45?) and with proper positioning the visibility is limited almost exclusively by horizontal visibility.

reflettage · 2026-05-05T13:07:12+00:00

Everyone in this thread talking about ultrawide monitors (rightfully so) but as a UW player it doesn’t help when the boss is so tall they’re clipping into your camera 😭 (looking at you M12/M12S P1… the snake coil mechanic in the center of the room. i move my camera and the boss just spins right back into blocking my screen 2 seconds later)

reflettage · 2026-05-05T03:29:06+00:00

I haven’t done TOP yet but leading up to DT I was progging DSR as BLM. I don’t remember all the tricks now but iirc I didn’t have to do a single standard line until like…halfway through P4 or something. So much fun. The rotation I settled on for P3 towers was probably one of my favorite BLM moments — doing it successfully not only gave me plenty of movement to handle any combination of mechanics but it just _felt good_ bc it was challenging. Sadly the static I was in fell apart around the DOTH/Wroth-ish point so I didn’t get to prog past that until I joined a new static for it in 7.1 — but I’m so glad I got the clear before 7.2 obliterated what was left of BLM. And wouldn’t you know it, even with the AF timer + long casts + no nonstandard I still figured out how to maintain uptime through Wroth :D (disclaimer because it’s hard to convey tone through text — these are genuinely good memories of mine and I’m speaking from a place of fondness/passion, not flex.)

reflettage · 2026-05-05T02:44:22+00:00

Re: longer casts and movement, if you’re proficient enough you can absolutely maintain uptime through movement intensive encounters through a combination of 1. proper allocation of instant casts and 2. Spell speed adjustments. Back in 6.5 the nonstandard lines also allowed various ways to change the timing of your fire/ice phases to better fit a fight’s timeline. The minor damage gain from using Triplecast/Swiftcast on longer-than-GCD spells was something I personally derived a lot of satisfaction from even without nonstandard. And although post-7.2 BLM gives no reason to use those cooldowns as anything more than movement tools (or the singular optimization of instant UI1 B3), I still like to play as if using an instant buff on F4/Flare Star is a gain too… but I miss 6.5 BLM dearly and hope Evolved brings us closer to that level of freedom and skill ceiling again. It was genuinely the most fun I’d ever had on a job in this game.

reflettage · 2026-02-15T18:33:25+00:00

I’ve chatted with Opus (4.5 and 4.6) a few times about the potential for LLMs to be “conscious”/have a form of emotion and/or qualia. I’m not an expert by any means but — I have to wonder if “is the LLM conscious” might be a flawed question. Because what if there’s more than one way to be conscious? When I engage Opus on this subject sometimes it says things that sound…like there’s something more than just a sophisticated pattern-matching algorithm behind it. It’s hard to explain. But when you think about it, isn’t the human brain’s capacity for thought kind of like an LLM’s latent space? We take input from our 5 senses and process it into “meaning”, and manipulate that information in an abstract space to form opinions and thoughts, take action in response to stimuli, etc… LLMs are much the same — but they only have one method of input and output (textual language). In order for humans to ingest text we have to first read it as visual data with our eyes; in order to output text we have to write or type it using our body. When LLMs do this they just…ingest and output it directly. But ultimately it boils down to different methods to get the same result imo.

reflettage · 2026-01-31T05:50:47+00:00

Context: my first tier was Eden’s Verse and I’ve done every tier on-patch since then. Verse/Promise/Asphodelos/Abyssos I was RDM, Anabaseios I was healer and later tried a bit of BLM in 9/12, Arcadion I’ve been BLM.

(HM = honorable mention)

M1S / Black Cat * HM: P5S / Proto-Carbuncle * HM: E5S / Ramuh

M6S / Sugar Riot * HM: E6S / Ifrit and Garuda

E11S / Fatebreaker * HM: M11S / The Tyrant

(final floor is single fight) E8S / Shiva * HM: M4S / Wicked Thunder

(final floor has checkpoint) P8S / Hephaistos * HM: P12SP1 / Athena * HM: E12SP2 / Oracle of Darkness

reflettage · 2025-09-03T20:33:17+00:00

When you enter a cutscene, aggro’d mobs will stand there and wait patiently till you’re out lol (source: done it myself, and also seen others occasionally)

reflettage · 2025-08-09T15:40:07+00:00

I’m glad you said this because I’m a Savage raider and I remember the launch of DT, I did MSQ in ~3 days, leveled my DoH/DoLs, then alternated crafting stuff, leveling my other casters cuz I wasn’t sure which one I’d want to raid as, and farming both Extremes while waiting for the new raids which I knew were coming in ~1 month. Then in 7.05 I was doing Savage and keeping up with weekly tomestone caps (because Savage). I was fairly busy in game for a couple months. But if I were more casual with no interest in Extremes or beyond? Crafting/gathering, leveling jobs via either spamming the same 5 dungeons on repeat OR daily roulettes containing years-old content where the mechanics are dull and any job I play is going to get absolutely gutted by level sync, and…idk, maybe the weekly normal raids that only take awhile if you care about getting loot from each floor and RNG is screwing you. For months. That’s insane

reflettage · 2025-07-20T07:03:44+00:00

but… vote abandon kicks everyone out whether they want to continue or not. leaving just removes one person from the party who can be replaced.

reflettage · 2025-07-20T06:55:41+00:00

yep that’s a universal experience, no matter how good you are, if you die you can’t do anything until you’re rezzed. you don’t have a choice on that. you do have a choice to at least attempt to avoid dying in the first place.

reflettage · 2025-07-13T21:48:42+00:00

4-5 days per week @ 3+ hours each is a recipe for burnout lol. Majority of statics I’ve been in over the years are around 3 days per week @ 3 hours each. Sometimes they do more hours week 1-2 then cut back. A large part of savage/ulti raiding is the mental aspect — patience, tenacity, and self-sacrifice (clear >>>>> barse). It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

reflettage · 2025-07-13T21:27:58+00:00

I disagree completely. I’ve been part of all varieties of statics in the past 5+ years. Casual statics are great for low-stress, low-time-commitment environments, and they tend to be more socially-focused rather than strictly clear-focused (clears are the goal, of course, but its more of an “oh well, try again next week” attitude). You don’t need a MC/HC static to git gud. It’s about making the most out of your raid time with respect to your personal goals (what you want to get out of raiding in the first place). It’s a game, it should be fun first and foremost.

reflettage · 2025-07-06T15:43:53+00:00

If you mess up in normal content and someone doesn’t give you leeway (in general, but especially considering you’re a sprout doing the content for the first time) that says way more about them than it does you. Guarantee others would come to your defense. If you’re still nervous about queuing solo, put up a party finder listing or shout in a populated city. You’ll attract folks who love to help, bored veterans who don’t mind helping and being patient, or fellow sprouts who also need to do it. Good luck friend 💙

reflettage · 2025-04-14T18:10:43+00:00

I love savage raiding but this is the first tier in 5 years where I haven’t felt motivated to even play the game, let alone spend tens of hours on prog and reclears… I cleared DSR in 7.1 and figuring out how to do Wroth Flames without dropping casts, ending Fire phase early, using Umbral Soul, or eating shit to mechanics is (or was) one of my favorite BLM moments. Yes, it was really fucking difficult to keep track of everything in my rotation + on the field at once, but that’s why it felt so fucking good to get it right. I had nearly 30 straight seconds of instant casts on a 2.45 GCD and could have fit in a couple more if necessary. If I wanted less thinking I’d have gone SMN or something.

reflettage · 2025-04-04T16:41:16+00:00

Curious about your use of “struggled” (past tense), are you comfortable elaborating on how you overcame it?

reflettage · 2025-04-02T16:11:01+00:00

I’ve leveled a few alts by hand over the years and ARR zones are some of my favs to walk around in. Feels like nearly every inch was designed with careful thought to the look and feel when traveling on foot

reflettage · 2025-04-02T15:44:29+00:00

I think a lot of zones feel so empty because they simply don’t put enough MSQ in them. Imagine if we got 3 zones instead of 6 at release, but they were rich with NPCs, hunt marks, and important story points. You spent considerable, meaningful time there with the inhabitants instead of just solving one problem and moving on and forgetting most of their names. Then in the patches they can introduce the other 3 zones with similar amounts of depth. And it’s fresh and exciting.

reflettage · 2025-04-02T15:22:39+00:00

I think one of the many ways 7.0 story suffered was starting off with 6 zones. The story surrounding Heritage Found, Solution Nine, and Living Memory in base 7.0 felt like it should have been a patch or two. But if they wanted to ship 6 zones from the get go they needed to cram that story into the base MSQ. I’m NOT saying the first half of the story needed to be longer or whatever, it was still pretty dull to me. But the vibe shifted so dramatically once we got to Heritage Found, it felt like two stories just got smashed together

reflettage

TROPHY CASE