Ah, another live letter, another lack of official translation despite a lot of important information being conveyed that way, and another round of people defending this as fine because the slides have a translation. Seriously wish we’d move on from that, but that’s the reality of parsing out information ahead of a patch for Final Fantasy XIV. At least this one had a bit more in the way of information to actually parse out!
That extant (and still unaddressed) frustration aside, one of the things that I found interesting from this particular letter was just how much we learned about job changes coming up. We don’t generally seem to hear as much about changes before they’ve happened, at least not within memory; usually there’s just vague language about what’s being shifted and a promise that it will be addressed in the patch notes. This time, though, we got at least the broadest strokes of what several changes will be. That’s different.
A rewrite of Ninja
While the Ninja changes are hardly the only big change that’s arriving to a job, they are the one that’s most emphatically changing something about how the job has worked since it was introduced during the original patch cycle. That whole time, we’ve been working with a setup expecting us to weave combos between weaponskills, and it seems odd to me that we’ve never taken a moment to realize just how badly that has always worked.
Don’t get me wrong, my muscle memory for Ninja is strong and has been tempered by ages of playing it, but weaving Mudra has never quite worked. Even disregarding latency, it’s always been a bit of a jumbled solution in which you are functionally performing the work of double or triple-weaving in the midst of your combo, and as potencies have been tweaked it’s wound up less as a matter of fixing that issue and more landing on “you deal enough damage that clipping is fine.”
It’s never been perfectly elegant, in other words, and I feel like the change to have it on charges in in some ways an admission of that fact. Of course, it’s also such a fundamental rewriting of how the job works based on things we don’t yet know that I find myself a bit adrift. Add to that the fact that Shadow Fang will now be completely separate from weapon combos and there’s going to be a fair amount of relearning going on.
People have also been speculating about Armor Crush going away since we’ve got a different Ninjutsu system, but without knowing what that system is yet that may be premature. One of the things suggested in the past by the developers is that it will be a system of doing a melee combo and then unleashing a Ninjutsu attack, which would certainly work; give it a maximum of two charges and have one charge added via combo. It’d definitely get that feeling of being the melee spellcaster (inverse of Red Mage’s spellcaster with melee).
It’s going to be a bit complex to learn, of course, especially in the wake of changed potencies. But that’s ultimately a good thing. While the number tuning on the job definitely helped, so long as we had Ninja trying to weave in combos between weaponskills (when one of its signature abilities speeds up weaponskills), problems were going to be there. Best to tweak it now.
This will indeed continue
First and foremost, I didn’t really see anyone sharing a theory that the NieR raid would take place in Kholusia before we saw those first screenshots with the dwarves, so I’m kind of proud to say at this point that I called it. Yes, I had three theories, but that was one of them and that’s what we got. Go me! It’s nice to get predictions right.
We’re definitely still getting fairly well teased about what’s going to actually be in the raid at this point. Unlike previous installments, there’s been no preview of the gear rewarded from inside or even much of a picture of the bosses contained therein. There’s the tank that’s fought in the amusement park and the long-armed fellow up above, but that isn’t necessarily a boss. Indeed, it’s ambiguous what the bosses might be, even from a thematic standpoint, aside from the fact that I doubt we’d be dealing with any of the major figures from the game just yet.
Some people are wondering if the melee DPS designed gear might be the rewards, but I tend to agree with the idea that it’s for PvP rewards; after all, that’d fit roughly into the design timeline, and while it happens to have a similar theming to the whole NieR aesthetic that’s a bit more coincidental. Of course, that also means it’s difficult to guess what we’ll be getting from this raid, since I don’t expect us to start off with iconic outfits like the B-type gear.
Also, that Weight of the World remix really is an earbug, but I am actually going to be upset if Birth of a Wish isn’t in there. I’m sure I’ve said that before, but it remains true.
And the rest!
Honestly, I sort of wish we weren’t going to be dealing with Kai-Shirr. I get the why, he’s a logical point for a new delivery client and these are the sorts of stories that they generally like to relegate to delivery quests. All well and good. But my personal reaction to him was that he was kind of a whiny little brat, and while he does get some development in the MSQ there was no real need to see more of him from my point of view. He accomplished what he needed, we can move on.
Alas, it was not to be, and now he’ll want things. They can’t all be Zhloe.
The addition of more Pixies quests and a whole new Pixie area is interesting to me, especially as the things that we see keep being in Lakeland rather than Il Mheg. Obviously, there’s long been a fairy presence in the region (witness our travel to the final point of the MSQ), but it seems like the sort of thing that would make residents of Lakeland and the Crystarium more than a little nervous.
I’m actually hoping that we learn more about the fall of Voeburt and what let to the fair folk taking over, as well. We know that they didn’t cause it, but most of them did profit from it, and given what we know of the Nu Mou’s ethos it would make sense for them to have a hand in addressing it. Of course, it’s also possible that we’ll have a later line of quests with the Nu Mou addressing that and the Pixies are going to be much more about these perpetually childlike creatures investigating what brought Feo Ul into a relationship with the Crystarium.
It helps that we actually, like… have a Nu Mou showing up, doesn’t it?
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, let’s do our usual pre-patch rundown ahead of Tuesday’s drop, along with the last bits of information we’ll likely get over the course of the week.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
