FF14 is basically unplayable at resolutions below 1080p. There’s simply not enough pixels to display all the detail needed for serious play e.g. hotbars, buff/debuff bars, target/focus target, party list, castbars and enough empty screen space to see the boss. It’s also complete ass trying to raid at below 50-60fps. If your framerate is low enough it starts to become a dps loss since the time you can queue your next skill is delayed until the next frame is drawn, effectively increasing your global cooldown. On top of that no access to 3rd party programs on PC that would help alleviate these issues e.g. framerate locking, zoomhacks. Only way this works out is that the new nintendo switch is a 1080p+ 60fps+ capable machine with specs equivalent to a midrange PC from 3-4 years ago. Or Yoshida is talking out of his ass giving a japanese PR response, which is pretty typical

Windows is malware and deserves to be treated as such

The 500 cigarettes adapter is so funny to me

My understanding is that captchas were never supposed to be impenetrable, just difficult enough that to have bots (or mechanical turks) solve them at scale is expensive enough to deter that kind of automation. It’s probably getting a lot easier for a computer to solve nowadays though.

basically, instead of nerfing picto they buffed everything else. The biggest changes are:

VPR: removed their boss side debuff that causes more 10% damage, and baked extra potency into the regular abilities (sorta like leaden fist / monk stuff).

BLM: Buffs via enochian, f4, despair and some aoe stuff, re-addition of ice paradox, and a QOL change to Umbral Soul that pauses the eno timer indefinitely after you press it.

SAM: Basically got a mini rework, tsubame is no longer tied to a Meikyo or Tsubame-gaeshi timer, you literally just hit Kaeshi Setsugekka after every single midare. This screws with the loop, you have to do 1 more gcd per minute which means no filler at 2.14/2.15. Ad hoc play unaffected. This also single handedly makes speed samurai viable as this is a pretty massive buff to the basic 10 (previously 9) gcd loop of building up 3 sen and doing your double midare.

Feels weird to review an expansion before 90% of the content has been released. We have the main story, main story dungeons, and 2 “hard mode” trials so far? And one of the EX is hot garbage, probably the worst fight released in the past 4 years or ever (subject to personal opinion). There’s still 12 raid bosses, 5 more EX trials, large scale field content, a deep dungeon i think, and an ultimate raid or two on the way. Still remains to be seem whether they are going to continue with good fight design, or endwalker fight design. Music has some good points for sure, and story as always is a non-factor. It’s really nothing special as far as JRPGs or even previous final fantasy games are concerned.

I’m a bit disappointed that SE is continuing to enforce the God-given correct way to play these jobs (monk, pictomancer) rather than allow us to do jank tech for a 1% or sub-1% gain. For samurai tendo, I must be the only person on the planet who likes the long recast (double weave after iaijutsu, triple weave after tsubame). I like the two extra weave slots during burst. Also curious where the potencies will end up, I would expect BLM to get a sizeable buff, and I’m also not sure if Picto is meant to be on par with melee DPS but its numbers are really high rn.

Midrange systems from 3-4 years ago are the ones that are struggling a little bit. It’s playable but noticeably slower. It can mostly be mitigated by turning all the bells and whistles off though, and I guess if we really wanted the extra frames we could turn down the resolution. But playing the game at 720p for instance is a serious disadvantage, theres not enough pixels to see your hud elements and the fight mechanics without a super ultrawide monitor or a zoom hack. 1080p is ok but 1440p or 4k are ideal

The progression is absolutely time gated, and they definitely calculate the travel time to make each zone take some given amount of time to complete. When they need to pad out the zone a bit longer they add one of the trailing quests (autoscroller). It’s the business model and the same reasoning for why they don’t increase the weekly tome cap and also why there’s a weekly loot lockout during the raid tier, if players could grind out all the gear they need for a patch in 1 week, they would. That said if all you want to do is the msq and normal content, you can probably beat that in 30-40 hours watching cutscenes if you can dedicate a weekend to it and unsub until the next patch. I finished the msq + all aether currents in about 16 hours after launch with a couple friends, skipping all cutscenes, and the leading edge progression groups were probably done in closer to 10-12 hours so they could hit the EX trials.

Gonna make some rice and curry… Meal prep is important.

I will definitely starve if I do not prepare meals in advance. Not to death, but I would still starve

Some old friends had an inside joke that whenever we were getting called one by one (to receive a distinction or something) that the best was always saved for last. Then one of them would get called up and you could hear the hushed “Dang it!” coupled with a giggle of victory. Anyway that’s basically how i feel every time my main goes without being featured another day. #1 is probably viper to complete the bookends (since #21 was picto) but i’ll be pretty happy if my job makes the top 5

I just realized monk ROF/ROW are now getting new ranged GCDs (right?) Basically mudras except fewer of them so it doesn’t feel like cheating. That’s kinda huge, it feels like it will give just enough leeway for a good melee to keep uptime, and we all know how much the fight designers like to put big mechanics and movement/downtime during burst windows. Monk will probably be my 3rd job to level and gear up after samurai and dark knight

Direct Critical Hit!!

word of advice for anyone thinking of buying soda for the promo event

Dont

Instead, consider waiting a couple years for when all the rewards are gonna get put on the mogstation. And it’ll probably be cheaper than however much mountain dew you would be pouring down the sink. Really, think about what you’re missing? “Mountain Zu”? Think of your favorite mount, is some random zu any better? Zu is a regular enemy, you can go out and fight one anywhere, its not some Bajamut Blast or anything, the mount is just a fuckin regular green bird. If you don’t participate in the promo then you aren’t missing anything spectacular.

This has been a cynical XIV PSA

No, they just removed any gain from playing nonstandard BLM by forcing 6f4 standard line in order to get your high potency finisher in astral fire and forcing you to do GCDs to recover MP in ice. Also kneecapping font of magic+flare star use in Bozja. Unless the potency of the fire spells is royally screwed up, BLM is going to be a completely static rotation with no skill expression other than optimizing your movement so you can put 5x xenoglossy in buffs

The guitar for bard is pretty awesome, i love it when classes get an alternate take on their weapon type e.g. warrior hammers. The samurai and summoner top look good on the Au Ra ladies.

what was it called, todorn pachi or something? a timeless CAVE classic

Pretty crazy for a program to have that egregious a vulnerability, but also the version of the emulator with the ACE exploit (1.6) is more than 12 years old at this point. As the video states, the modern releases are freeware-nagware anyway so everyone is better off switching to a different (+open source) emulator entirely. I like the “virus” shown off at the end of the video too, that was fun

こんにちは - “Hello”