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| Scott Clay |
The new stage of the Anima weapon starts today!
03.29.16 - 5:20 PM
This past weekend, Final Fantasy XIV's Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida released some new info about the new content heading to the game during his recent Letter From the Producer Live Part XXVIII. As is common for most Letters From the Producers following a major patch, not a whole lot of major content was showcased, but enough was shown to wet the whistle of the playerbase.
First off Yoshi-P wanted to address a few concerns of the playerbase on the current state of the game. For one, healers were noticing that they were having accuracy problems when running the two new level 60 dungeons. It's pretty common for healers to miss attack spells in raid situations due to lack of accuracy, but never before has it happened in a normal 4 man dungeon. The team is going to look into this, as well as the possible addition of giving Astrologian the party mind buff instead of the party piety buff they currently give. They are still looking on feedback for these changes so be sure to speak up about it. Also for those who enjoy tanking, you will be happy to know that the dev team is also going to finally rework the parry stat into a more useful stat. Mitigation that relies on RNG is never a good stat, and it doesn't help that stacking parry barely helps the odds of it activating. Be on the lookout for the change at the earliest in the 3.4 patch, but it will likely come in the next expansion.
The team is also hard at work implementing a Raid Finder to be released for Patch 3.3. The reasoning behind this is that due to the difficulty of the end game raids, many players are transferring to higher population servers in order to find players to raid with. This has lead to a pretty one-sided server populations which the team is not fond of. The raid finder will allow you to make it clear if you are practicing, clearing, or working on certain phases of the fight in order to put a party together around your skill level. This will also eventually lead into the implementation of a cross-server party finder for all content some time down the road.
Speaking of the raids, the new 24 man raid was showcased in a few pictures, and like most of these raids it looks fantastic. You can check out the pictures of it below.
As for the end game raid Alexander Midas, the dev team feels the world first progression of the raid went as they expected. They feel that the difficulty of A6S was far more difficult then A7S, and as such it might be adjusted. In the short-term players will be happy to note that patch 3.25 launches on March 29th, and with it comes reduction to PvP wait times, lowering Machinist PvP burst damage, as well as the next step in the Anima weapon quest. This will be the first new step for the weapon, with another step following in the 3.3 patch later this spring. You can check out concept art for the the Dark Knight and White Mage weapon below, but you won't have to wait long to check out the other weapons as well.
Side stories were also touched on a bit during the live letter, in particular how short the new Hildabrand quest line was compared to previous ones. Hildabrand will be seeing a release with every major patch, and the length of the story will be significantly longer then the previous one. The new scholasticate quests will also continue in patch 3.4. The Warring Triad story is due to continue with every major patch, and the dev team wanted to make sure the players understood that it will remain outside of the main story quests, but is a major part of the main story quests. This was in effort to allow players to enjoy the new primal fights without a need for rushing though the main story quests each patch.
Finally toward the end of the live letter, lead UI artist Hiroshi Minagawa joined the show in order to talk a bit about UI elements. He had good news and bad news. The good news was that he wanted to show off the double cross hotbar that the team has been working on, which will allow players on controllers an easier way to keep track of all their abilities. Unfortunately he also has some bad news for those players looking forward to add-ons. Add-ons will not be coming anytime soon due to inequalities between PC and PlayStation users. This is something a lot of players were promised shortly after A Realm Reborn launched, and it doesn't look like we will ever see them implemented. You can check out the sample of the double cross hotbar below.
Final Fantasy XIV patch 3.25 releases on March 29th, and for the full official translation of the live letter you can head over to the official forums here.
