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| Scott Clay |
Raiders rejoice, cooldown reset on raid wipe is coming!
08.27.16 - 12:19 PM
While celebrating 3 years since the launch of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn, Director, and Producer Yoshi-P kicked off this year's celebration with the new Letter from the Producer Live Part XXXI. Wasting no time, Yoshi-P announced that patch 3.4 named Soul Surrender will release on September 27th. Since the story of Heavensward has officially ended in patch 3.3, the story quests this time around will now switch focus toward the Warriors of Darkness and start to lead up to the next expansion. The only teaser pic of the story we have seen so far is a hurt Alisaie who has been absent for most of the main story since her introduction. If you attempted the Coil of Bahamut raid then you know what she has been up to and as a nice Easter Egg, she will reference your participation in bringing down Bahamut. There will also be new story quests for the Scholasticate story, Hildibrand, and the Anima Weapon.
Huge battle system updates are also planned for patch 3.4. The biggest of these is that cooldowns will finally be reset on raid wipe. This is a huge change for all raiders as most of the time that is wasted in a raid is waiting for cooldowns that take 3-5 minutes to reset. When you have 8 players all waiting on long cooldowns, a lot of time gets wasted and since raid time is precious, this change will help so many groups clear content at a much quicker pace. Auto-attacks will also be changed with this patch and will no longer require melee DPS to have to be facing the target to do auto attack damage. A nice quality of life adjustment for players to help keep the damage up while moving. And finally, a new countdown feature will be added for group content so that players will no longer need to create a pull macro in order to maximize opening damage for a raid. All of these are fantastic quality of life changes that help players in the upcoming new raid, Alexander: The Creator. Alexander: The Creator will conclude the Alexander series and according to recent interviews with Yoshi-P, will have its difficulty adjusted to be more in line with Second and Final Coil from the 2.0 patches.
That's not the only new content coming in 3.4: A new primal featuring the second installment of the Warring Triad series will be added. Named Containment bay P1T6, it will feature one of the two remaining Triad members: Sophia, the Goddess. And of course, 2 new dungeons will be added, the all-new Xelphatol and The Great Gubal Library (Hard). Deep Dungeon floors 51-200, however, will not be added until patch 3.45 but promises to incorporate all the feedback that has been given about the initial 50 floors so far. There will be a story that continues to unfold up to floor 100. Between floors 101-200, it sounds like the difficulty will increase dramatically, and feature new settings as you progress.
PvP is also getting updates in the upcoming patch. PvP will now have a dueling arena for some sweet 1v1 action and a Custom Match mode for teams of 4 players. A spectator mode will also allow you to spectate your favorite matches for a more competitive environment.
Grand Company updates are also coming in 3.4. Grand Companies have not been updated since the initial launch of A Realm Reborn (3 years ago this month), so it's exciting to see them finally get some love. A new Platoon system will be introduced which will allow players to form groups in their Grand Companies and do special missions.
And finally, to round off the new patch, updates to the Gold Saucer, Housing and a new type of feature are planned. The Gold Saucer will finally see instanced Triple Triad and Lord of Verminion matches, which, along with squashing match fixing, means it will be possible to play against players across your entire data center, instead of being limited to only your own server. Housing will be expanded with a new option to buy an apartment for those that can't afford a house. With housing plots being many millions of gil, apartments will be much more affordable at 500,000 gil. Finally, an all-new feature will debut, called Wondrous Tails. All that is known about Wondrous Tails is that it will feature that adorable lonely Miqo'te child NPC in Idyllshire who will send us on various quests via the adorable journal seen below. Hopefully, we can cheer her up somehow.
Final Fantasy XIV patch 3.4 is set for release on September 27th. Make sure to check back with RPGFan as we learn more about the patch as the release date approaches, with more information set to come from Tokyo Game Show in September.
