Early access is, bafflingly, not the same thing as owning the game, no. I can't even enter the Steam code to tell them I purchased Shadowbringers yet, for example.
It's different because it's a temporary authorization - it basically is what allows you to enter the First on Friday rather than July 2.
I tried to register my game last night. Game was purchased through the SE Store. I see that I have ShB Early Access, but it does not say that I own the game.
When I'm on their store site and I try to click the button to activate the code for the game itself, nothing seems to happen. So I'm assuming either they won't activate that till next week maybe? Or closer to the time? I dunno.
We're still 4 days out from Early Access, so I'm not super concerned yet. But I'm also super concerned because humans are irrational like that.
Ok I was concerned that I had missed something about registering the game, but seems like everyone is in the same position.
Yeah, the game code will need to be entered on Tuesday to keep playing.
The only issue I have with it is that it's not possible to enter the game unlock code now and just have it.
I personally have to wait until around next Tuesday anyway, since I ordered a physical edition, and the ShadowBringers release code is coming in that. (gonna be checking the shipping tracker soon as I get one.)
Basically, early access will allow you to play starting on Friday, ending a few days after the official launch. The reason you can't put your code in is because only people with Early Access can get access during this weekend.
they jump through a lot of hoops to make early access seem distinct from the "actual" launch because things are absolutely going to break during the first few days
So, brand spankin' new to this (and a WoW refugee, as were so many before me). Up to 15 with my Thaumaturge and messed around a bit with the profession jobs (which look way more interesting than crafting in other games). Any tips a beginner should really know going in? Good youtubers to look up while I'm bored at work?
So, brand spankin' new to this (and a WoW refugee, as were so many before me). Up to 15 with my Thaumaturge and messed around a bit with the profession jobs (which look way more interesting than crafting in other games). Any tips a beginner should really know going in? Good youtubers to look up while I'm bored at work?
Big FFXIV YouTubers are going to be Mizzteq, Work to Game, Mr Happy, Larryzaur, and Speakers Network.
Crafting/gathering is its own beast. If you're not doing it yet, wait for Friday and the changes coming to the system.
So, brand spankin' new to this (and a WoW refugee, as were so many before me). Up to 15 with my Thaumaturge and messed around a bit with the profession jobs (which look way more interesting than crafting in other games). Any tips a beginner should really know going in? Good youtubers to look up while I'm bored at work?
I can't give any tips on crafting (only have a couple classes in the 30s and got bored with them), but I can give some general tips:
This game's lifeblood is DPS. Every job, regardless of role, is expected to pull its weight in the damage department. Indeed, tanks are becoming even more DPS oriented in about a week when the expansion drops.
Because of this, knowing your job is important. With THM/BLM, that means understanding how Umbral Ice and Astral Fire work. Basically, Astral Fire is your nuke stance, Umbral Ice is your MP regen stance. You want to use fire spells while in AF mode until your MP runs low, then shift to UI to gain the MP back in order to go back to AF and nuke things. For whatever reason, most new players bounce back and forth with each spell, which is completely the wrong way to do it. Not saying that's you, but it's such a common theme with new mages it needed to be said.
In dungeons, let the tank pull. There's nothing more annoying than a tank getting ready to pull, and then someone squishy doing it instead. Especially at early levels when a tank doesn't have all of their aggro management abilities.
For YouTubers, I recommend MTQCapture (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5BtIO_vMNvds5sgE-JI6KA). Her guides aren't necessarily 100% tuned, and her older guides suffer from time progression (new abilities, new tactics exist now), but she's got the basics down and her vids are generally short and sweet, with no "Look at me, I'm a wannabe YouTube celebrity!" BS.
In dungeons, let the tank pull. There's nothing more annoying than a tank getting ready to pull, and then someone squishy doing it instead. Especially at early levels when a tank doesn't have all of their aggro management abilities.
omg I love that this wont be true in a week! Getting tank stance at lv 10 is gonna be GUREAT.
This game's lifeblood is DPS. Every job, regardless of role, is expected to pull its weight in the damage department. Indeed, tanks are becoming even more DPS oriented in about a week when the expansion drops.
Don't feel that you need to be fully beholden to this. Toss out some dots when you can if you're healing for instance, but everything outside of the cutting edge raids are tuned to not expect tanks/healers pushing the deeps.
In dungeons, let the tank pull. There's nothing more annoying than a tank getting ready to pull, and then someone squishy doing it instead. Especially at early levels when a tank doesn't have all of their aggro management abilities.
omg I love that this wont be true in a week! Getting tank stance at lv 10 is gonna be GUREAT.
It's still good advice to let the tank pull, however, all tanks have their ranged aggro move by level 15. Using Provoke followed by that is enough to take threat from any overeager dps. Add in a tank's aoe threat move (also by level 15) and there's enough tools to deal with dps running in first and pulling. All that being said, it's just good manners to let the tank take point.
I mention the above as a means of why I personally don't care if a dps does run ahead in the very early dungeons. And to illustrate that tanks do have quite a few of their workhorse aggro tools by 15-18. 2-3 Overpowers is enough to hold mobs to me for the duration of a pull.
Sure, but people new to the game shouldn't be having to contend with over-geared dps pulling groups. Like with the 'everybody dps' comfort with the basic mechanics comes first.
So, brand spankin' new to this (and a WoW refugee, as were so many before me). Up to 15 with my Thaumaturge and messed around a bit with the profession jobs (which look way more interesting than crafting in other games). Any tips a beginner should really know going in? Good youtubers to look up while I'm bored at work?
the best advice I can give is to do whatever you want, since you can do everything on the one character
that said, if you want some direction, the main story quests act like a bottleneck for the rest of the content, and as such should generally be your priority
Blue Quest Markers with a plus sign are usually important sidequests that unlock gameplay features (jobs, chocobos, leves, etc) that you should prioritize tho.
So, brand spankin' new to this (and a WoW refugee, as were so many before me). Up to 15 with my Thaumaturge and messed around a bit with the profession jobs (which look way more interesting than crafting in other games). Any tips a beginner should really know going in? Good youtubers to look up while I'm bored at work?
Look up one of the many WoW refugee guides out there on Youtube, most of them are pretty good for going over the basics.
The number one thing I'd suggest is to treat the game as a single player game that you can play through at your own pace and don't feel like you need to get to max level/completed the main story quest (MSQ) as soon as possible. The patch cycle and systems to keep players doing old content means that you don't have to worry about content becoming dead like you do in WoW or other games. I think my first time through the game, I did the base A Realm Reborn (ARR) plus the post-release patches before the first expansion, Heavensward (HW), over the course of about 1 month. If there were side things that interested me, I went off and did them.
Since you can play all classes on one character, you may want to save sidequests that are not part of the main story quest for helping level up other classes (I did these quests on DPS characters while waiting for dungeon queues). The MSQ itself will give you plenty of experience (XP) and you'll likely end up ahead of the MSQ if you do daily dungeons for fun while leveling. It is common for people to end up switching back and forth leveling two classes up while they go through the MSQ for the first time.
As a side note, gamerescape has a guide to where and how various game systems/special things get unlocked that is worthwhile to use as a reference as a new player and there are quest markers everywhere.
There are links on that page for the HW and Stormblood (SB) level locked content things as well. There are also links to the gearing methods/gear sets for the different expansions. There are ways to bypass the end-game gearing cycles in the previous expansions, but you might want to go after a particular piece of gear for appearance (transmog/glamour) purposes and those can help.
Since we're almost at the start of a new expansion, you might also want to consider giving the PVP a try which normally has more activity at the start of an expansion. You need to be level 30 to unlock PVP and there are several different game modes. You also are stat normalized and can then select which passive traits to use and which special role abilities to load out. There is no such thing as PVP gear and in the smaller group PVP (Feasts) it is much more about team-work and coordination of burst/CC or disruption of burst. It feels a lot more like a skill (personal or team based) system rather than a skill/gearing system. I was never a huge fan of PVP in WoW, but I enjoy the PVP in FFXIV as a side game from time to time. Plus you can unlock some really pretty glamour, so that's a bonus as well.
Edit: A couple of quality of life changes to make things feel a bit more like WoW/understanding of server ticks and latency:
The server ticks are every 3 seconds and the latency compensation is not as smooth or responsive as WoW. This means that as a caster you can "slide cast" where you start running before your spell completes casting. This will be helpful for you as a BLM when dodging AoE markers.
The game snapshots your location based on when the enemy cast bar completes and not when the ground marker goes away or the animation plays. This helps a lot for knowing when you are safe. The longer server tick also means that you normally don't want to rely on waiting until the last minute to dodge something.
You can change the tab targetting from the default left to right on the screen, to the more traditional WoW system which is a radial left to right system in a cone in front of your PC. Go to Character Configuration, Controls, Targetting, choose targetting type 2: cone.
Soooo do they just let everyone play the xpac on the 28th and you then cut off everyone without a key on the second or what?
There's a leeway period of about a week to get your full code active. But yes, if you don't put your code in, you will get cut off.
To clarify since the question wasn't clear on this:
You only get access to SHB content on the 28th IF you have entered a preorder code.
After the 2nd there will be a grace period (typically about a week) for you to enter your full expansion code, otherwise you will no longer be able to access SHB content.
Strictly speaking, no, not everyone will be able to play the expansion on the 28th.
@Bobble I'm a fan of MrHappy's youtube channel. And he recently (about 2 weeks ago) put up videos for all of the classes, detailing what is going to change and what is going to stay the same when 5.0 drops. I know a lot of it will go over your head since you're brand new, but they might still be a fun watch, just to get a general sense of what each class does and what to look forward to as you level.
As far as being a WoW refugee goes, the best advice I can give you is to try to distance yourself from that WoW end-game only mentality that exists in that game. In WoW, the only game is the end game, and all other content is irrelevant. That is not the case in XIV. Content at all stages of the game remains relevant and there is absolutely no rush to get to the top.
Play the game at your own pace, enjoy the story, enjoy trade crafting and socializing and just being in the game world. There's no rush to level cap, there's no rush to the end game. And this is certainly not a case of 'the true game begins at level 80.' That is absolutely not the case.
Just take your time and soak it all in, because pretty much all of it is super great.
I will say this... regarding the story, the A Realm Reborn story from about level 1-40 is a bit rough in places, but persevere. Stay with it. When you get into the mid to late 40's and to 50, the story really picks up and it never really lets off from that point.
Heavensward is (in my opinion) the best singleplayer Final Fantasy experience. Period. Heavensward is amazing. And it rivals any other Final Fantasy game for story, scope, emotional depth, and delivery.
Play the game at your own pace, enjoy the story, enjoy trade crafting and socializing and just being in the game world. There's no rush to level cap, there's no rush to the end game. And this is certainly not a case of 'the true game begins at level 80.' That is absolutely not the case.
one of the things that i always find amusing about people looking forward to wow classic is they talk about how the game was about taking your time and being in the world, and they'll lament how it's all theme park mmos now
and i'm just quietly like "ff14 is the sequel to vanilla wow you're looking for"
yeah, it's easy to burn yourself out but there's a lot of content that isn't necesarily raid/pvp minded. Eureka has to be a pleasant surprise and is one of my favorite things this expansion even tho you can just say it's a FATE/Public Quest train.
Speaking of Eureka... I unlocked it, but I've never been inside of there even once. I didn't know what it was. Your description now has me really curious.
Truth be told, I don't even know how to get there. I looked on the duty page, assuming it was instanced content, and I couldn't find it. Admittedly, I gave up very easily.
With THM/BLM, that means understanding how Umbral Ice and Astral Fire work. Basically, Astral Fire is your nuke stance, Umbral Ice is your MP regen stance. You want to use fire spells while in AF mode until your MP runs low, then shift to UI to gain the MP back in order to go back to AF and nuke things. For whatever reason, most new players bounce back and forth with each spell, which is completely the wrong way to do it. Not saying that's you, but it's such a common theme with new mages it needed to be said.
The hell? Fire goes boom, more fire booms bigger. That went straight to the lizard brain, man.
Was thinking I'm grab gladiator to level with my friend, or grab something from another city since I'll need the airship pass to go get to him. Any jobs I should avoid until I have that armory xp bonus (which the game just explained to me, seems neat) really stacked up?
Do what you think will be fun. All of the jobs have some sort of hook to them (like the way BLMs bounce between pseudo-stances). Tanks more or less have the same gimmick - at some point during progression you unlock a gauge and certain abilities require a portion of that gauge - but the rest are more varied.
So, brand spankin' new to this (and a WoW refugee, as were so many before me). Up to 15 with my Thaumaturge and messed around a bit with the profession jobs (which look way more interesting than crafting in other games). Any tips a beginner should really know going in? Good youtubers to look up while I'm bored at work?
Do the Hall of the Novice missions. Guy with a green leaf icon over his head in the Adventurer’s guild. Teaches basic group stuff and gets you a set of gear that you can stretch out for some while, including a ring you will be wearing until level 40 or so.
Do what you think will be fun. All of the jobs have some sort of hook to them (like the way BLMs bounce between pseudo-stances). Tanks more or less have the same gimmick - at some point during progression you unlock a gauge and certain abilities require a portion of that gauge - but the rest are more varied.
Except if you're paladin and you can pretend the Gauge doesn't exist.
Do what you think will be fun. All of the jobs have some sort of hook to them (like the way BLMs bounce between pseudo-stances). Tanks more or less have the same gimmick - at some point during progression you unlock a gauge and certain abilities require a portion of that gauge - but the rest are more varied.
Except if you're paladin and you can pretend the Gauge doesn't exist.
Haven't played PLD since ARR... Is it really that pointless? At least with DRK, the Blood Gauge matters to a certain extent.
the oath gauge matters not very much in stormblood, it fills slowly and you can do two things with it: auto-block the next attack you take and get some mana back, or give a target a small damage reduction buff that's bigger if you have either of your damage reduction cooldowns running
the oath gauge matters not very much in stormblood, it fills slowly and you can do two things with it: auto-block the next attack you take and get some mana back, or give a target a small damage reduction buff that's bigger if you have either of your damage reduction cooldowns running
The oath gauge is something you'll end up paying attention to in raids where you are the off-tank and trying to balance using Sheltron for personal defense/offense and timing intervention on the main tank. Most of the time it acts as more of a control on how early in the fight you can use Sheltron. If they removed the gauge in SB and just replaced things with a basic cooldown, gameplay wouldn't change all that much.
Posts
It's different because it's a temporary authorization - it basically is what allows you to enter the First on Friday rather than July 2.
When I'm on their store site and I try to click the button to activate the code for the game itself, nothing seems to happen. So I'm assuming either they won't activate that till next week maybe? Or closer to the time? I dunno.
We're still 4 days out from Early Access, so I'm not super concerned yet. But I'm also super concerned because humans are irrational like that.
(Viera, Roegadyn (F) - BRD)
Yeah, the game code will need to be entered on Tuesday to keep playing.
The only issue I have with it is that it's not possible to enter the game unlock code now and just have it.
I personally have to wait until around next Tuesday anyway, since I ordered a physical edition, and the ShadowBringers release code is coming in that. (gonna be checking the shipping tracker soon as I get one.)
choco meteor rocks people.
Agreed. Double red chocobo is undeniably a PITA.
It goes a lot easier if you use your own chocobo as a tank.
There's a leeway period of about a week to get your full code active. But yes, if you don't put your code in, you will get cut off.
Big FFXIV YouTubers are going to be Mizzteq, Work to Game, Mr Happy, Larryzaur, and Speakers Network.
Crafting/gathering is its own beast. If you're not doing it yet, wait for Friday and the changes coming to the system.
I can't give any tips on crafting (only have a couple classes in the 30s and got bored with them), but I can give some general tips:
This game's lifeblood is DPS. Every job, regardless of role, is expected to pull its weight in the damage department. Indeed, tanks are becoming even more DPS oriented in about a week when the expansion drops.
Because of this, knowing your job is important. With THM/BLM, that means understanding how Umbral Ice and Astral Fire work. Basically, Astral Fire is your nuke stance, Umbral Ice is your MP regen stance. You want to use fire spells while in AF mode until your MP runs low, then shift to UI to gain the MP back in order to go back to AF and nuke things. For whatever reason, most new players bounce back and forth with each spell, which is completely the wrong way to do it. Not saying that's you, but it's such a common theme with new mages it needed to be said.
In dungeons, let the tank pull. There's nothing more annoying than a tank getting ready to pull, and then someone squishy doing it instead. Especially at early levels when a tank doesn't have all of their aggro management abilities.
For YouTubers, I recommend MTQCapture (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5BtIO_vMNvds5sgE-JI6KA). Her guides aren't necessarily 100% tuned, and her older guides suffer from time progression (new abilities, new tactics exist now), but she's got the basics down and her vids are generally short and sweet, with no "Look at me, I'm a wannabe YouTube celebrity!" BS.
omg I love that this wont be true in a week! Getting tank stance at lv 10 is gonna be GUREAT.
Don't feel that you need to be fully beholden to this. Toss out some dots when you can if you're healing for instance, but everything outside of the cutting edge raids are tuned to not expect tanks/healers pushing the deeps.
That said, it's v nice for moving things along.
It's still good advice to let the tank pull, however, all tanks have their ranged aggro move by level 15. Using Provoke followed by that is enough to take threat from any overeager dps. Add in a tank's aoe threat move (also by level 15) and there's enough tools to deal with dps running in first and pulling. All that being said, it's just good manners to let the tank take point.
I mention the above as a means of why I personally don't care if a dps does run ahead in the very early dungeons. And to illustrate that tanks do have quite a few of their workhorse aggro tools by 15-18. 2-3 Overpowers is enough to hold mobs to me for the duration of a pull.
the best advice I can give is to do whatever you want, since you can do everything on the one character
that said, if you want some direction, the main story quests act like a bottleneck for the rest of the content, and as such should generally be your priority
Look up one of the many WoW refugee guides out there on Youtube, most of them are pretty good for going over the basics.
The number one thing I'd suggest is to treat the game as a single player game that you can play through at your own pace and don't feel like you need to get to max level/completed the main story quest (MSQ) as soon as possible. The patch cycle and systems to keep players doing old content means that you don't have to worry about content becoming dead like you do in WoW or other games. I think my first time through the game, I did the base A Realm Reborn (ARR) plus the post-release patches before the first expansion, Heavensward (HW), over the course of about 1 month. If there were side things that interested me, I went off and did them.
Since you can play all classes on one character, you may want to save sidequests that are not part of the main story quest for helping level up other classes (I did these quests on DPS characters while waiting for dungeon queues). The MSQ itself will give you plenty of experience (XP) and you'll likely end up ahead of the MSQ if you do daily dungeons for fun while leveling. It is common for people to end up switching back and forth leveling two classes up while they go through the MSQ for the first time.
As a side note, gamerescape has a guide to where and how various game systems/special things get unlocked that is worthwhile to use as a reference as a new player and there are quest markers everywhere.
https://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Guide:Progression_and_Level_Locked_Content
There are links on that page for the HW and Stormblood (SB) level locked content things as well. There are also links to the gearing methods/gear sets for the different expansions. There are ways to bypass the end-game gearing cycles in the previous expansions, but you might want to go after a particular piece of gear for appearance (transmog/glamour) purposes and those can help.
Since we're almost at the start of a new expansion, you might also want to consider giving the PVP a try which normally has more activity at the start of an expansion. You need to be level 30 to unlock PVP and there are several different game modes. You also are stat normalized and can then select which passive traits to use and which special role abilities to load out. There is no such thing as PVP gear and in the smaller group PVP (Feasts) it is much more about team-work and coordination of burst/CC or disruption of burst. It feels a lot more like a skill (personal or team based) system rather than a skill/gearing system. I was never a huge fan of PVP in WoW, but I enjoy the PVP in FFXIV as a side game from time to time. Plus you can unlock some really pretty glamour, so that's a bonus as well.
Edit: A couple of quality of life changes to make things feel a bit more like WoW/understanding of server ticks and latency:
To clarify since the question wasn't clear on this:
You only get access to SHB content on the 28th IF you have entered a preorder code.
After the 2nd there will be a grace period (typically about a week) for you to enter your full expansion code, otherwise you will no longer be able to access SHB content.
Strictly speaking, no, not everyone will be able to play the expansion on the 28th.
As far as being a WoW refugee goes, the best advice I can give you is to try to distance yourself from that WoW end-game only mentality that exists in that game. In WoW, the only game is the end game, and all other content is irrelevant. That is not the case in XIV. Content at all stages of the game remains relevant and there is absolutely no rush to get to the top.
Play the game at your own pace, enjoy the story, enjoy trade crafting and socializing and just being in the game world. There's no rush to level cap, there's no rush to the end game. And this is certainly not a case of 'the true game begins at level 80.' That is absolutely not the case.
Just take your time and soak it all in, because pretty much all of it is super great.
I will say this... regarding the story, the A Realm Reborn story from about level 1-40 is a bit rough in places, but persevere. Stay with it. When you get into the mid to late 40's and to 50, the story really picks up and it never really lets off from that point.
Heavensward is (in my opinion) the best singleplayer Final Fantasy experience. Period. Heavensward is amazing. And it rivals any other Final Fantasy game for story, scope, emotional depth, and delivery.
one of the things that i always find amusing about people looking forward to wow classic is they talk about how the game was about taking your time and being in the world, and they'll lament how it's all theme park mmos now
and i'm just quietly like "ff14 is the sequel to vanilla wow you're looking for"
Truth be told, I don't even know how to get there. I looked on the duty page, assuming it was instanced content, and I couldn't find it. Admittedly, I gave up very easily.
The hell? Fire goes boom, more fire booms bigger. That went straight to the lizard brain, man.
Was thinking I'm grab gladiator to level with my friend, or grab something from another city since I'll need the airship pass to go get to him. Any jobs I should avoid until I have that armory xp bonus (which the game just explained to me, seems neat) really stacked up?
That's one of the best parts of XIV. Literally anything you do on the same character stays with you.
But then, they also get instant queues for dungeons.
Do the Hall of the Novice missions. Guy with a green leaf icon over his head in the Adventurer’s guild. Teaches basic group stuff and gets you a set of gear that you can stretch out for some while, including a ring you will be wearing until level 40 or so.
Except if you're paladin and you can pretend the Gauge doesn't exist.
and it's not a LOT slower
Haven't played PLD since ARR... Is it really that pointless? At least with DRK, the Blood Gauge matters to a certain extent.
The oath gauge is something you'll end up paying attention to in raids where you are the off-tank and trying to balance using Sheltron for personal defense/offense and timing intervention on the main tank. Most of the time it acts as more of a control on how early in the fight you can use Sheltron. If they removed the gauge in SB and just replaced things with a basic cooldown, gameplay wouldn't change all that much.