synaesthetic

It's unfortunate to see Square-Enix foundering so badly. Sen no Kiseki was a better version of this game before this game even came close to coming out. SE's shitting the bed so hard that Japanese developers are starting to make Western RPGs (i.e. Dark Souls) and doing better as a result... And yet the big publishers keep paying attention to this crap. Why can't some enterprising moneybags go infuse XSEED with funding so we can see the rest of the Liberl and all of the Crossbell and Erebonia games?! *grinds teeth*

I never micromanaged my pet on SCH except on certain fights. When silencing ADS in Turn 2, or healing single tank Twintania and the offtank during Melusine's melee adds (using the physick+embrace macro). It's not usually necessary. SMN is a different story, of course.

Scholar is annoying to heal with before lustrate. Don't hesitate to use your aetherflow charges on Energy Drain if you're running low on MP. You should not be spamming adloquium. It is very, very expensive. I would normally use adloquium only if I wanted to give the tank some more effective HP (it does get spammy in endgame content, but I never had MP problems on scholar in Coil or EX primals).

Join a static. I mean, really, that's all it takes. XIV's community has it set up so most Coil statics are run out of linkshells, so you shouldn't have to sacrifice your FC membership for the chance to participate in endgame content. You're going to have to get over the performance anxiety if you ever wanna get anywhere in endgame. IIRC, I offered you a spot in the static I was building at the time and you waffled on joining. So I dunno what else to tell you, really. I'm not playing XIV right now because my financial situation is still shitty and I can't afford my sub, but I will be coming back eventually when I can. There are plenty of other statics that need people and aren't run/populated by total jackasses. Seriously, if you want to avoid PF idiots, then join a static.

Good game-playin' for cheap: Find a used quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU cheap on eBay or craigslist. The Core i5 2400 is a good one. Try to avoid the ones with the "K" at the end because they're overclock-capable, and used OC chips on eBay might be something extreme overclockers have cooked out and are trying to foist off on some unsuspecting rube. So stick to the non-OC variants; you'll have a good chance of getting 10+ years of use out of. You can find them cheap, usually winning auctions around $80-100. Maybe a little higher. Be frugal! Find a used GTX 570. Again, these are a few generations old so you'll find them on eBay/craigslist for under 100 bucks or maybe a little more. A lot of gamers will be trying to trade up for something newer; take advantage of that. Pretty much any brand is okay, just make sure the card looks to be in good shape. Jump on Amazon and find an LGA 1155 microATX mobo. Something from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, all these are usually good. Aim for something in the 75 dollar range; it'll be good enough for what you're doing. I don't like buying used motherboards because they're a mite more delicate than CPU and GPU. Again from Amazon, pick up 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM in a pair of 4GB modules. Should only run you about 75-80. If your used CPU didn't come with the stock Intel cooler, find a new cooler on Amazon. Don't bother with crazy-expensive OC setups; just get a $20 one. It'll probably be better than the stock one, anyway. Get a 500W power supply from Amazon. This is something else you definitely don't want to buy used. You can get a decent enough non-modular one from Corsair or Sentey for $35-50. Sure won't be as good as a SeaSonic, but it also won't cost $150+. Time to pick out a case! Rosewill makes good cases cheap. Look for a microATX mini-tower, sans power supply. Rosewill has a nice-looking mini tower for about $37. Also pick up a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue HDD. They're cheap ($60-ish), reliable and decently fast. Next up is a monitor. eBay once again is your friend. You can easily find a 24/25" 1920x1080 LCD on eBay for $70-100. It might be a bit scratched and dinged up but who cares if it works and has no dead pixels? Craigslist, too--check it. The GTX 570 should be able to run basically anything at native resolution with most of the shinies enabled. If you aren't thrilled about the prospect of a used monitor (maybe fear of dead pixels) you can get an okay-ish full HD LCD (but it'll probably be 21/22") from Amazon for $130-150. Keyboard should be easy enough. On a budget but still want something fantastic for gaming and will last longer than you will? Check eBay for a used mechanical switch keyboard with Cherry MX Browns or Blacks. Browns are more utilitarian (they have a soft tactile click, two-stage) and Blacks are best for pure gaming (they bottom straight out, single-stage, no tactile click). If you don't fancy spending money on a keyboard, just get a generic dome keyboard for $10-15. Mouse? Sentey Nebulus on Amazon for $24. It's a good gaming mouse and a great deal for the price. Adjustable weight, bifurcated front with separate L and R buttons (so holding one down won't impede the function of the other), some extra buttons for added functionality, looks nice not too blingy like a lot of gaming mice. It's USB and corded so no need to worry about batteries. For sound? Speakers are lame, good ones are super-pricey. Go for a pair of headphones, and the ones I'd suggest are the JVC HA-RX700. They're $30-40 on Amazon and they sound like $200 Audio-Technica ATH-A900s. Seriously. Build quality is so-so, but I had a pair last three and a half years of intense use and abuse before the physical structure failed. Fantastic gaming headphones with nice boomy bass for explosions, good mids and highs for watching movies and listening to music. Super budget cans! Grab a Zalman clip-on mic for $12 to go with it and attach it to the headphone cable. Boom, you have a fantastic headset for under $50! You'll need an operating system, too, and since this is a starving-student gaming rig, you have to go with Windows. No Linux for you, QQ. Pick up a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 OEM copy from Amazon for $100. Sometimes you can find extra sealed/unopened OEM copies on eBay or Craigslist for less than that, so keep an eye out if you need to shave some extra dollars off the total cost. There you go, a fantastic(ally cheap) gaming rig that'll rip through FFXIV and pretty much anything else you throw at it for a price far under a grand.

I've spent the past year trying to find people interested in roleplaying a plot more serious than tavern talk. :dodgy:

Since miqo'te intellectually appear to be equal to, well, every other race, it's unlikely that they actually have senses being considerably more sensitive than the human baseline. Additional sensory input requires more brain space dedicated to processing it. Miqo'te brain size is pretty much identical to hyur, so if they actually had a sense of smell that was considerably greater than that of hyur, they would have to lose something somewhere else. Either in their other senses or in their cognitive abilities. Unless we get into my own personal headcanon about the existence of "chimeric" forms in Hydaelyn, where accidental or intentional aetheric-induced evolution resulted in all the other races originating from the hyur ancestral stock. I can definitely see miqo'te as being a created race, a magically-engineered offshoot of Midlander hyur (or their ancestors) stock designed by A Wizard (probably more likely to be a whole mess o' wizards) to serve a specific role such as hunters, assassins, scouts. It wouldn't even surprise me that much if the Allagan Empire, or another precursor civilization, was responsible for the creation of all non-hyur races. In that case, it would be entirely possible for miqo'te to have magically-amplified senses that don't have to follow the rules of mundane biology. Considering how high-magic the XIV setting is, this really doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to me.

Impressive work there! What's even more impressive is that SE hasn't sent you a cease & desist letter, though...

Hi there! Most of ya'll here know me as Aeriyn Ashley, leader of Unity in A Realm Reborn. Well, there's more to me than just being an aggro-stealing black mage, among other things. One of the things that's pretty major about me is that I'm an aspiring author and that I'm working my butt off to make a career out of it. My name is Corinn and I'm a thirty year old queer trans woman living in Oakland within easy walking distance of Lake Merritt. Ever since I was a child, single-digits old, I've been writing stories. I've always loved reading science fiction and fantasy; while the other kids were roughhousing on the playgrounds during recess, I was reading thick fantasy and sci-fi novels. I wanted to write my own stories and be like the authors I loved to read. My first science-fiction story was written at the age of eleven, and ever since I've been completely hooked! Nineteen years later, I've come a long way with my writing and have completed the rough draft of my first novel-length work set in an original far-future setting. Now I'm trying to further my career as an author by completing the rewrites to my novel and do what needs to be done to get it published and write more books! As a queer trans woman, my stories often feature a female lead, queer characters, POC characters and transgender characters. I love writing especially about artificial intelligence and synthetic life, their struggles with their status and how society views them, either as machines that think or true people in their own right. My first full novel-length work, Binary System, explores the relationship between a queer human starfighter pilot and her artificial intelligence partner during a devastating war against an implacable enemy. Writing, especially something as huge and complex as a novel, is both a labor of love and intensely difficult, time-consuming work. It requires a great deal of time spent on plotting, character design, outlining story elements, working with design and talking to all different sorts of people to figure out the best way to proceed with the story. I would never give it up for anything in the world; no matter what my situation is, I will never stop writing. However, I am currently in a financial crisis. I'm finding myself spending far less time working on furthering my career and far more time spent engaged in trying to simply survive. I am a "starving artist" in the sense that I often wonder how I'm going to afford to buy groceries, how I'm going to be able to pay my bills and make rent. Making ends meet in a post-Great Recession world is very difficult. I spent almost two years after the crash homeless, living either on the streets or in a homeless shelter. I'm no longer homeless now, but like many transgender people in America, I've always been on the edge ever since I was disowned by my family. Much of my time has been dedicated to finding regular employment, but as I am one of the millions of Americans who are long-term unemployed, I've been finding it increasingly difficult to attract the interest of potential employers. To help ameliorate the immediate basic needs and to further my career as an author, I've decided to reach out to the wider community for aid. I'm trying to raise money not just to help with food, housing and basic life necessities, but also to further my career as an author of queer science fiction and fantasy. Click here to help me out~

For Ifrit sure, but you can actually obtain Titan and Garuda-egi before completing the Titan and Garuda story mode encounters.

The problem isn't only that certain defensive buffs take 1-2 seconds to apply, but also no ability in the game activates exactly when its cast finishes. It always waits for the animation to complete. It's easy to see this on WAR since Butcher Block has such a long animation. Whack something with it and then run away. You'l see your chara continue to swing wildly at the air and then when you're already about ten meters out, the damage number will appear over the enemy.

People are overcomplicating this. Tanking, like basically everything in XIV, is incredibly simple compared to other MMOs. You do not have to actively block. You don't have to avoid showing your back to bosses or risk being instagibbed by a crit/crushing blow. You don't have to juggle perfect parry, defense and block ratings to achieve critical hit immunity. You also don't have 38 different abilities that you commonly use while tanking. You don't have to constantly dodge massive spams of ever-shifting AE telegraphs with odd shapes. Basically tanking as a WAR goes like this: Use your damage cooldowns. Do your threat combo. Do your debuffing combo. Rotate defensive cooldowns as damage comes in. Keep Inner Beast on standby if you know you're going to need to eat a big hit, or use it for extra DPS/threat if you know the damage won't be spiky. If the boss hits like a semi truck, keep Storm's Path up. Don't forget to use Fracture for extra threat and DPS (don't listen to people who say DoTs don't generate threat, ask any good geared SMN how close they get to pulling hate at any time on raid bosses). Make sure you use Holmgang a moment before things really start going south. Because apparently in XIV, panic buttons are not actually panic buttons and the defensive buff takes a couple of seconds to actually register. Use Vengeance in conjunction with Bloodbath and Berserk, especially if you're tanking a bunch of trash; you can kinda just throw out Overpowers and the healing helps mitigate the damage you take. Use your other cooldowns whenever you know you might need to weather some massive damage... pop Convalescence after taking massive damage to help get healed up fast. Save Thrill of Battle for when you get low on HP--it'll give you a bit of a boost, drop Inner Beast right after it, and while it's up lustrates will heal you for more than usual. It's helpful to use to crawl back from low HP. On raid bosses I usually just use Foresight and Featherfoot between my better cooldowns and Inner Beast, just to make things a little easier on the healers. The hardest part of warrior tanking for me was learning when (and when not) to use Inner Beast. There are two problems with Inner Beast--one is that it's not an off-GCD skill, so you can't treat it like a panic button unless you are just not attacking, which should be never unless there's some mechanic that requires you to not attack. The other problem is the damage mitigation it provides only lasts six seconds. So. You sort of have to know when and where you're going to use it, which means you won't use it very effectively on a fight you don't have lots of experience with. On Twintania I save Inner Beast for death sentence. It's regular, I know when it comes, it announces itself with a cast bar, so... yeah. Easy. Not all bosses are as polite as the Allagan Empire's pet guard wyvern, so you definitely need to get used to the boss before you can start really using your mitigation tools to their greatest effect. Practice, practice, practice. Try running dungeons and pulling several trash packs at once; it's good practice on learning how to stay alive when taking lots of damage, but without having the risk of making your raid members upset with you since you're just in a 4-player dungeon with friends.

There are ways you can make Summoner work. The lore states that summoning magic was a legacy of the Allagan Empire. Finding some records of summoning magic in functional tomestones probably wouldn't be too unlikely, considering how Eorzea is essentially covered in the contents of every Allagan dumpster and wastebin ever. XIV's lore regarding magic is pretty clear--the modern, "accepted" schools of magic are conjury, thaumaturgy and arcanima. The lost/"forbidden" schools of black and white magic are also a thing, but arcanist magic extends to the "style" of arcanima used by different lost civilizations. Arcanist - uses Limsa Lominsa ("modern") style arcanima Scholar - uses Nymian style arcanima Summoner - uses Allagan style arcanima It's very probable that even though the Allagans killed a lot of primals for various reasons, one would assume that it wasn't something your average Allagan could do since they went to all the trouble to build the Ultima Weapon in order to, y'know, deal with the primal threat.

Clearly we haven't been arguing enough then.

Logical consistency is necessary in any story, not just contemporary fiction. You can't throw logic out the window in fantasy or science fiction. Logically it makes more sense to handwave the difference between the races and sexes with magic than it does to ignore the differences and pretend they don't exist. Yeah, it's a bit of a cop-out, but it's better than not explaining things at all. And it's vastly superior to race restricting classes or giving major stat penalties. It would suck a lot for lalafell players if all they could be was THM, ACN and CNJ.

This is a fallacious rationalization and proves you know nothing about actual combat. There's an old axiom in boxing, it goes a little like this: "A good big guy will always beat a good small guy." Reach matters. I don't care how good you are, if the other guy's got longer arms and a longer weapon he's going to have all kinds of advantages over you. "Waif-Fu" is a TV Trope, ya'll. It's not real life. In real close-quarters combat, size does not directly correlate to speed or dodging ability. There are tons of really huge fighters who can move like lightning--the US military has quite a few of them, for example. The only possible way Papashan could be "heroic," then, is if he only fought people who were less skilled at fighting than him. Which doesn't make him very heroic since he would thus only fight battles he knows he can win. Look at it this way--a nine-year-old female martial arts student might be able to beat up an untrained, but otherwise average adult male. Maybe. If he was taken by surprise, perhaps. However, if the adult was trained, she would have no chance whatsoever. It would simply be no contest. So, viewing this in the light of reality of combat, the use of magic to "amp up" a martial fighter makes all kinds of sense in the universe FFXIV is set in. Pretty much every physical weaponskill has flashy animations with colored lights and explosions--that would suggest that our attacks are "charged up" with aether. Because magic is magic, that would mean that actual physical qualities would fall to the wayside and the story goes out of its way to suggest that most Eorzeans have a similar capacity for aether (with the exception of some folks, such as Cid, who is Garlean, and that one THM questline lala). Let's not even get into the fact that you've got a tiny little lalafell, the size of a very young human child (perhaps a bit pudgier) who can block castle-crushing attacks from a ten-meter-tall giant. Or a huge magitek mecha. Or a full-size dragon. Or any other number of equally monstrous and huge enemies that would, if combat was handled realistically, require full armies to actually take down, meanwhile it's shredding big male roe after big male roe with single snaps of its jaws. Neither of the handwaves are especially "believable," but I consider the "magically amped up warriors" to be much easier to swallow than completely disregarding the basics of melee combat. In fantasy stories like these, which are fairly high-magic, not very dark thematically and have a strong action element, I always assume that magic is being used for far more than simply casting spells, but also to reinforce the strikes of melee fighters and help everyone take way more damage than a humanoid body should ever be capable of absorbing. I consider FFXIV to fall in the same category as RWBY, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha and possibly even the Fate/Nasuverse, where all player characters are essentially on par with Servants in terms of how much ridiculous punishment they can take and just laugh it off.

The fact that bare female chests would even be shameful or embarrassing at all makes me despair for humanity's future. I don't, and will never, understand why a shirtless guy is just fine and dandy but the moment a girl's boob is visible it's PANIC PANIC MORAL PANIC HIDE THE CHILDREN AVERT YOUR EYES!

The difference is if you join up with an actual raid LS, you won't have to worry about the things you would in a PF. Like idiots, impatient idiots, incompetent idiots, lazy idiots, people who can't complete a sentence without a homophobic or misogynist slur and people who blame everything they do poorly on other people. Since my sub fell off I lost a few of the people I had gathered for Radiant. Right now it's pretty much just me, a PLD and a SCH. We're still trying to find people, and while we are progression-minded, c'mon, I run an FC that's entirely dedicated to making sure its members feel comfortable and at ease.

You should consider wearing a long petticoat underneath the robe to give it the appropriate poof.

Hi there! Aeri-kitty is back in Eorzea! I managed to get my sub taken care of, at least for now, and I'm putting all of my effort into expanding our happy little family. Unity is recruiting again! Our direction as a Free Company has changed somewhat in the intervening months since our inception, but we're still alive and thriving! Despite that, we're looking to expand! Balmung may have a lot of LGBT-friendly Free Companies, but Unity goes one step further and our leadership strive to provide a safe-space for LGBT members. Even if you're not lesbian, gay, bisexual or trans*, but you're a good person and interested in joining a great social company with a focus on PvE content, we'd love to have you.

"I'm totally surprised a whole bunch of random strangers suck at organization and can't listen to instructions or follow orders!" Said nobody ever. Maybe one day I'll find an MMO that actually has PvP that doesn't feel like either an utterly demoralizing curbstomp when you lose, or an utterly boring curbstomp when you win. Wildstar's kinda close. Not quite, but it's certainly a bit better.

Clearly you should join my raid group. Well, assuming I can get my sub reactivated.

Raffy sucks for BLM. Switch to SMN, watch yourself shoot up to #1 on the parse. Oh and 460 accuracy is more than fine. T6-T8 of 2nd Coil requires only a little more accuracy than T5. I'm not sure if T9 requires more, but I never missed once on BLM at 457 accuracy on Melusine. The piety thing seems to only be an issue if you aren't a moonkitty, because I'm at 251 piety with scholar contribution with 30 points into int. btw you can still use manawall to cheese divebombs, just have to be more careful about when to use it. I use it in T5 still on the 2nd set so I can sit there and blast the asclepius while everybody else is dodging, or to free someone from conflag because the phases push awkwardly now with 20% echo.

I seem to accumulate gil over time simply by playing. Since there's nothing really worth buying outside of food, repairs, teleports and glamour prisms, I seem to be doing okay as my balance keeps going up.

what. WHAT. are you serious, Square? are you trolling me? are you trololololling me and every other FC leader?