FFXIV Major Win: Main Scenario Completion! (No Spoilers)
Syn and I successfully completed all of the FFXIV 2.55 main scenario story this weekend. I want to start out by saying, it has been many years since I’ve played a Final Fantasy game that really felt like a Final Fantasy game. I think FFIX was the last single player FF I was able to really get into… so it’s pretty crazy that a MMO has story and characters that are far more compelling than most of the single player FFs that have come out over the last decade. (This guy seems to agree…)
I have a lot to say about the story, so I’ve decided to make that a post to itself (tomorrow). First, I wanted to write about the progression of actually getting to the end of the Main Scenario (it had end credits and everything).
Last week I wrote about trouble with impatient tanks and our fail at Chrysalis. We continued to have these issues in the 8-man party progression instances until we really lucked out to find a team that would stick with it.
Chrysalis Win
Our second try at Chrysalis was again met with people new to the encounter, trying hard to learn. While Syn and I were hardly veterans at this fight, we did what we could to offer suggestions (Bard, please sing MP song… Scholar, please use shields after orb phase, etc), and the party really did improve with each attempt. After the third wipe, someone did try to vote abandon the party, but there were enough of us there who really needed it for story progressions, so the vote failed.
Lucky for us, because that’s the attempt we actually won. Man, that felt really good after struggling and failing so many times! I was super proud of our little team for keeping it together, not getting frustrated and seeing it through.
Steps of Pain Faith
The next big bottleneck for use was the Steps of Faith instance. This is a new instance, so there are a lot of new people playing and learning it. The mechanics in this fight are nothing like your standard boss battles, and it just doesn’t seem that people get that at this point.
I can’t tell you how many times we failed this with the duty finder. Before we went in, we watched the guides, so after the first wipe, I got the idea of what we needed to do. The problem was, no one else in the group was listening when Syn and I tried to explain that the cannons and the Dragon Killers are the most important element of getting the boss down. When we did get people to use the cannons, they didn’t understand the idea of having to snare the boss so we couldn’t hit it with the Dragon Killer.
Again, we were at the mercy of impatient tanks who would drop group after a wipe, forcing us to have to abandon the duty and re-queue. Luckily, the queues were fast, and sometimes we even got in groups with the same people again, who somewhat knew what to do after the first fail.
We eventually got in a team with two very high level tanks who were patient enough to allow us to fail and learn. One of the tanks knew how to work the cannons, so I eventually took the other cannon slot (the other DPS couldn’t get the snare concept) and Syn took on Dragon Killer duty. Once we coordinated all of that, we actually beat the boss down even before he came anywhere near the gates for a massive victory. It only took us what felt like a million fails. XD
By that time, it was after midnight, but I was too pumped to go to sleep. So we did the dumb thing and opted to continue the story, not knowing we were in for close to two heart-wrenching hours of cut scenes to reach the end. It was so, so well worth it, though.
This is the first time that I’ve ever actually been caught up with the FFXIV story line ever. And seeing how the story transitions into Heavensward, I’m really stoked about the expansion.
Now… I just have to do all this over again on Zuri. *ugh*