synaesthetic

I'd argue that XIV body types are less exaggerated, tbh. Even when stripped down the miqo'te female body is quite uncurvy (with a very stereotypically Asian build, including the slim hips and flat butt) and the Midlander hyur isn't much different. Both the Highlander hyur and roe female bodies are very stocky builds; my worse half was playing with the character creator on my computer a while back and made an extremely androgynous Highlander. It's also fairly easy to make a both bishonen and rugged/masculine males in just about every race except roe. Even Highlander hyur males can be sparkly-bishies if properly built. This isn't really something you can do in Wildstar. Female chara models have Hartmann hips and Barbie doll waists with the exception of granok, and the breast sizes are fixed. This is more of a style issue than anything since XIV takes a stylized realism approach with slight manga influences, but it's way, way, way more possible to make an androgynous miqo female than an androgynous aurin female.

An update on this: So Clover, K'nahli and a few other people from my FC have been contributing to this morning PST/Europe-friendly timezone PvE group. We don't really have enough interested parties to form a full consistent group yet, but we're actually fairly close! We've been farming the Coil turns 1-4 and have successfully cleared Garuda EX, so the group is now working on Titan EX with the goal to eventually farm Leviathan E for i95 weapons and practice Twintania as well. (Please note that when/if the group reaches Turn 6, I will not be able to participate due to the lockout, as I am a full-time member of my FC static and we are currently working on Second Coil). We've set regular times to run on Tuesday and Thursday at 5PM UTC and we typically run until around 7:30PM UTC. For those in North America, that's 10AM to 12:30PM PDT. When the time changes it'll be an hour earlier for NA timezones. I've organized the group into a linkshell, so if anyone is interested in running at these times, please PM me here or ask me in-game for an invite!

Aeriyn's occupation is a scientist. She's a researcher of magic. This "class" doesn't exist in the game, either. If you have to categorize her via the game mechanics, she's a BLM. ICly, though, she knows black magic but doesn't actually do the things black mages do in lore, like close voidgates and summon and destroy prominent voidsent. She learned black magic to better understand Allagan technology, not to hurl giant fireballs (though she can do that as well).

This is easier with the martial classes simply because the idea that a fighter could know how to use bows, swords, spears, axes and also punch stuff is fairly believable. Many martial experts are trained in the use of multiple weapon types because different weapons are designed to address different combat situations on the battlefield. The magic classes are a bit different since the class or Job doesn't simply determine the type of training they have, but also determines what type of aetheric energy source they use to power their spells. Aeriyn is ICly a scholar of magic, a researcher into the conscious manipulation of aether. She was a thaumaturge; she delved into the allegedly forbidden knowledge of black magic in order to better understand Allagan technology (and by extension, Garlean Magitek). In her effort to bridge the gaps between the various disciplines of magic, Aeri has also studied some conjury (she has not yet examined white magic due to the near-total control the Elementals and the Padjal maintain) and has also studied arcanima in the tradition of Limsa Lominsa, Nym and Allag. She's dabbled in every form of magic that is and/or was recently practiced in Eorzea, as well as both Allagan and Garlean device magic. Her understanding of nearly all of these disciplines is academic at best, with the exception of black magic--for purposes of combat in roleplay, Aeri fights with black magic (and occasionally somewhat poorly with a shortbow) and that's pretty much the extent of it. And here's where the issue comes in--a soldier who can use a sword, swing an axe, pick up a pike and take up a charge and then grab a bow and knock a cavalryman off his horse is a lot more believable (and far less overpowered) than a mage dropping massive explosions while simultaneously curing their own wounds and commanding a summoned primal fragment and a Nymian fairy. So Aeriyn is for all intents and purposes a black mage, even though she knows quite a lot about a lot of different disciplines of magic.

I like Wildstar and it's fun, but I can't afford two subscription fees, and I have a larger social investment into XIV. So... yeah. Maybe if I could play multiple classes on one character and the art direction was more stylized realism than 90s-era Don Bluth... eh. Even then, it just doesn't interest me enough to pull me away from XIV.

Your opinion on the level and gil requirement for housing isn't the issue here, K'ailia. That's simply your opinion, and you're entitled to it! I don't agree with it, personally, because I feel that fluff content should not be arbitrarily restricted since the most common consumers of fluff content are casual players who may not be able to level to 50 before they get too bored to keep paying their subscription fee. There's a large segment of MMO players who I call, for lack of a better word, casual players. This is not the "filthy casual" nonsense you see being spewed by elitist raiders, but actual casual players of the game. They exist. There are many of them in my FC alone. Some of them who started when the game released are just now hitting the level cap on one job. There's a member in my FC who has been playing since Beta 4, was one of the first members of Unity, and he doesn't even have a single combat class at level 50--because he would rather craft and gather. Not to mention pure crafters who don't give a damn about the rest of the game and just want to make things and gather things. These people are now locked out of personal housing unless they choose to play the game in a way they don't like to play it. Square runs the risk of losing these people as subscribers. Fluff content is the "endgame" for casual players, just like Extreme Primals and Coil are the endgame for PvE players and Frontlines/Wolves' Den is endgame for PvP players. These players play in a different way than the other two groups. Lots of them don't even enjoy playing traditional PvE or PvP. And Square wants to force them to do so in order to actually access the content they want. Regarding the "whiteknight" issue, I am only referring to players who believe that everything Square-Enix does is perfect and flawless and will relentlessly make ad hominem attacks against those who do not agree. Whiteknights literally kill games, because they push everyone else out and create a really sticky echo chamber of knob-slobbing. They prevent legitimate and useful criticism from being heard. The official XIV forums are already almost entirely dominated by whiteknights and Square seems more interested in banning the voices of reason and protecting those players who seem to enjoy nothing more than giving Squee the most sensuous and luscious virtual blowjob in the history of fanboyism. This is a problem. Echo chambers are useless because they do not create discussion, debate or allow for the exchange of new ideas. You either fall in line with the popular opinion or you are shouted down, chased out. I was permanently banned from the official forums for daring to question the great Square-Enix and their majesty--likely because a pile of whiteknights decided to report my post (which was politely and eloquently worded, certainly not a violation of the community guidelines!) just so they could remove a voice of dissent tainting their precious echo chamber. I'm a writer. When I ask for feedback from someone, I don't want to hear the positives. I already know my writing's good. I want to hear the negatives. I want to hear what's wrong with it. I want to know how to make it better. Square, on the other hand, doesn't want to make it better--they just want to make it profitable. If whiteknights drown out the voice of those who would keep SE on its toes, how can we expect this game to do achieve anything beyond mediocrity? My opinion is that Square is making some really questionable business decisions here, especially considering the financial trouble the company is in. FFXIV saved Square-Enix from a premature death, but if they really wanted to crank up the profits, they'd stop arbitrarily restricting everything for no obvious reasons. Also they should get better servers because it's painfully obvious to anyone with any knowledge of how MMOs work that all these arbitrary housing restrictions are put in place to drastically limit the number of instance leases open at any given time. This means that they still aren't running the game on sufficient hardware. I'm sorry, but selling something you don't actually have is dishonest. When Comcast oversold bandwidth, people practically rioted in the streets, but when SE oversells server resources to the point they have to severely limit the play experience... nobody seems to care?

That makes no sense at all, though. If you have one person raising money you have a goal of 850,000. If you have two, then you have a goal of twice that... which means that the grinding time the two of you have to spend is... exactly the same. Unless the other person doesn't have any interest in having a house and is totally okay with giving you all their gil... unlikely to say the least.

My Free Company is almost entirely filled with people who defy the gender binary in one way or another. When it comes to RP, the sex and gender of the person behind the character doesn't matter for shit. What matters, obviously, is the character before you. What is their gender? What is their sex? Does their gender and sex "match up" or are they dysphoric? Does the character have gender fluid tendencies? How does that character prefer to be addressed as? If you decide to go with a romance plot, the character's sex and gender in relation to their sexuality and sexual orientation or preferences becomes important. Consider these things in your roleplay because they are important parts of what makes a person.

What does group content have to do with personal housing? That's solo content. They're two completely separate entities.

Classy. You whiteknights do realize that most of us who complain a lot do so because we're unwilling to accept a second-rate experience. If you just take everything a company--which exists purely to generate profit by the way--does or says as the best thing since sliced bread, they're going to keep giving you less and less until they find a point where you won't tolerate less anymore. Then they'll hover right above that tolerance threshold. Square's goal with FFXIV, like any MMO developer, is to spend the least amount of money possible while making the most amount of money possible. That means they spend a considerable amount of effort trying to determine the bare minimum of content and fluff that the players will still pay for. Ya'll are making this real fuckin' easy on them. Be a discerning consumer. Be picky as hell. Don't ever be satisfied. Be as hard to please as possible. Whiteknights kill games.

I don't understand why you have to be level 50 and reach a GC rank to buy a house. Are all the normal people in Eorzea homeless? Why can only demigod badasses buy a friggin' house? Also yeah it's really expensive... those price ranges should have been the ranges for free company housing, with the largest FC houses topping out around two or three million. I'm basically of the opinion that everyone ought to simply get a basic starter house automatically, right from the start, right at level one. If you want bigger and better houses, then you'll have to pay. Or raid. Or do quests. Or engage in the content in another way. I'm fortunate in that I don't really care as much about housing as I used to, so this doesn't bother me so much, but it's still pretty silly. I just really don't get why Square keeps operating out of the How to Build an MMORPG, 2006 Edition.

I play Aeriyn the way I do because it's somewhat important to the plot I have, the story I want to tell and the ways I want to play with the lore. ICly she's a black mage and there's a plot reason why this is important... not just so she can fling Flares around. It's just as plot significant as her knowledge of Allagan tech.

Oh... that works? I never tried that.

I've found that using AM in Leviathan EX to escape the body slam is... well... rather iffy. It's probably due to the game's positional update delay, but a lot of times I've used AM, moved across the field to the upper section next to a healer or something, but I still take the damage from Slam. The upside is I don't get dumped in the ocean, though. So there is that. AM isn't useless, no... I've made some good use of it on Titan EX, Twintania, breezing past briars on Raffy... but I feel it'd be a lot more useful if it were just a forward-firing blink spell. Having to macro it in order for it to be really useful (not to mention the whole positional lag bit) makes it rather silly. Surecast preventing interruptions while moving would make it incredibly useful for basically everybody instead of just marginally useful for healers. I would totally support such a change to Surecast, because right now I use it for... casting Succor when I get targeted by Twintania's fireball. That's pretty much it. I don't use it on BLM at all except when casting Flare without Swiftcast on trash mobs that may be hitting me.

Actually it's fairly bluntly stated during the story of "A Relic Reborn" that your Thyrus, or Stardust Rod, or Bravura or Curtana or any relic weapon is simply a copy of the original design. The Zodiac Weapons questline has already made it clear that a "relic" is simply a type of weapon, a methodology for recreating or mass-producing ancient Super Prototypes and that the old man wants to see if they can be improved via soul infusions. In fact, during the BLM Job questline and again in the BLM Relic quest, it's stated and shown that Ququruka is the mage who actually has the Stardust Rod (the original one that Shattoto wielded). Yours is just a knock-off! So yeah, actually, it's fairly plausible for a zillion relic-wielding adventurers to be running around all over Eorzea.

I see a lot of BLMs start with Thunder III or Thunder II and then move to Fire to build AF charges or using Fire III, but I don't consider this optimal because it reduces the number of Fires you can cram in before you need to enter your recovery phase. With my rotation, by the time Fire III actually casts, my MP has ticked back up to full or nearly so, and I'm casting Fire III at half cost (due to Umbral Ice III) and double speed. Depending on the situation, if I enter my recovery phase with enough MP, I'll refresh Thunder III, but if I happen to go too low, I'll use Thunder I, then Blizzard, then Fire III when MP reaches full. As for using Flare in your single-target rotation, do so only when Convert is available. You can even double Flare with HQ Mega-Ethers. Like so: Blizzard III > Thunder III > Fire III > Fire (repeating/using procs) > at MP >300 Swiftcast Flare > HQ Mega-Ether > Flare > Convert > Fire > Blizzard III > enter normal rotation. This way you actually get to use Flare in such a way that your DPS doesn't crater because you had to use Transpose and your recovery phase lasts two or three times as long as it would if you got UI3 immediately from Blizzard III. I typically save this for when I need burst, like when trying to push the boss into the next phase or when you need to quickly burn an add down.

My single-target rotation: Engage target > Blizzard III > Thunder III > repeat Fire; if Firestarter, Thundercloud proc then use > if MP less than/equal to 800 then Blizzard III > Thunder > goto repeat Fire If you open with Blizzard III, then the MP cost and cast time of Fire III is not an issue, and you can start with Thunder III and get all of your MP back, so you can start repeat-casting Fire with nearly full MP. This parses higher than building AF3 through Fire casts alone and gives the tank a bit of a threat "lead" that opening with a Swiftcast Fire III does not.

As many of you know, I am a black mage. I play a lot of other jobs, too, but BLM's my main and I like chatting with other BLMs, talk shop or whatever. It's always nice to have folks help you with the theorycrafting. So recently we discovered that BLM should be getting some buffs to help with the major disadvantage of the class--watching our damage turn to suck on movement-heavy fights. I'm not entirely sure what Yoshida intends to have his team do to BLM, but buffs that help our loss due to having to dodge would really be great. I thought about what changes I'd actually like to see made to black mage (and thaumaturge, where applicable) even though these things probably won't be done by the XIV dev team. Though it'd be kinda cool if we did end up predicting them. Fellow Fire-spammers, what are your Black Mage changes wishlist? I'd be curious to know what everyone else wants to see the dev team tinker and adjust. My list of desired BLM changes: Firestarter and Thundercloud need to have their duration extended to 20 seconds. They should also be able to stack twice. These changes will give us a bit more tactical flexibility--do you burn your charges right away to maintain higher overall DPS, or save them up to quickly finish off an add, or cast while moving? Apocatastasis desperately needs to not suck and be useful. It's one of our Job abilities and it's completely worthless in its current incarnation. It should simply reduce magic damage taken by the target party member by 20% for 12 seconds--bam, useless cooldown is now useful. Scathe is pretty boring and also terrible for what we use it for. I suggest totally changing its purpose from being a hilariously inadequate way to try (and fail) to keep our DPS from sucking while moving, to being a more useful utility spell. Couple of points here: it should be put back at 120 potency, removed from the global cooldown and given a separate cooldown (4 seconds). The existing proc to double the spell's potency should be replaced with an additional effect that refreshes the duration of either Astral Fire or Umbral Ice. Being removed from the GCD means we can also toss it in while the GCD spins after expending a Firestarter or Thundercloud charge. Aetherial Manipulation is situationally useful, but it's also really fuckin' stupid. It's a clear example of Square trying to be too clever for their own good. Just make it a standard blink: AM should teleport you 15m forward, in the direction your character is facing. FOR REALSIES TELEPORT TOO, not this dumbass sliding-across-the-floor crap. Actual "disappear and reappear" teleporting! Manaward should get a bit of a duration boost; it's way shorter than Manawall's duration and the defensive ability lag in this game is pretty significant so... extending it to 30 seconds would be nice. Thunder line spells also need to get a bit of a rework. Thundercloud works fine, but we have very little reason to cast Thunder III unless we have a Thundercloud charge. I'm not exactly sure how to rework these, since if we were to increase the DoT potency of the higher-ranked spells, the lower-ranked ones would be ignored. Maybe someone else has ideas here, but basically I feel that they're kind of clunky. That's kind of all I can think about now. Would like to hear other folks' thoughts about things that could be done to make BLM better.

If they insist on continuing with heterosexual-only marriages... c'mon Square, you really don't want to go there. You don't realize just how much that'll cost you.

dem character animations @.@

None of the big dawgs are going to do anything but make more of the same. The suits simply won't let them. No publisher is going to bet sixty-plus million on an "unproven" experiment. No, expect to see more of the same from the big triple-A developers. If you want to see where innovation is going to live in regards to the MMO space, look at Kickstarter, look at the indie crowd.

Another ranged class? Yes please.

That is one thing I really do like about Guild Wars 2; because your level is automatically scaled for the zone, you never go through any area feeling like you're so overpowered that you can just pull the whole zone and not die. There is actually a definite feeling of danger and exploration when you wander through the world in GW2. Now if only they could make their attempt to avoid the holy trinity not simply a gigantic zergfest...

A Quick Update on Unity's Endgame Status Updated Event Schedule Astral Shard Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday 6:30PM - 9:30PM PST Umbral Shard Tuesday and Thursday 5:00PM - 8:00PM PST Dawn Shard Tuesday and Thursday 5:00PM - 7:30PM UTC (10:00AM - 12:30PM PST) Currently Unity is seeking the following jobs and/or roles for its raid statics: Astral Shard - 2 slots WAR BLM and/or SMN Umbral Shard - 2 slots WAR BRD Dawn Shard - 6 slots PLD WAR Any DPS BLM and/or SMN SCH and/or WHM Any DPS with a tank as an alternate Job

You're talking about incomparables, but that sort of system takes a lot of work to keep fair and balanced. It's easier to just make the numbers go higher.