Honestly DRK has the best class quest plot hands down. It's just... *clenches fist* Also I will get in those discord invites as soon as I'm off mobile. Computer is misbehaving.
And since I have tomorrow off (religious holiday) I'll get discord sorted out so you /can/ invite me.
So I bought the game and got properly into it, and I'm about to run out of play time so it's time to set up my subscription. I figured, since I got into this game because of this thread, does anybody in this thread want to hit me up with a recruitment code for me to redeem?
I already knew that when this game wanted to go hard it goes hard as fuck but the DRK lv 50 quest just. Fuck. I've got internal bleeding for how hard that wrenched my heart around.
@Mercury Spoiler I love that quest and I love thinking about how...the "Fray" you meet probably has bits and pieces of the real Fray but ultimately they are you, your Warrior of Light, and different people's Fray might vary in personality somewhat...I've played with that in RP/fanfic since my WoL is...pretty far from the "stoic badass default wol". Also interestingly, if you play a female character and check your quest log, Fray's pronouns abruptly change to she/her after the first paragraph or so. Which is the first hint that Something is Up, I guess. (I didn't know this until someone else pointed it out to me, since I don't usually reread quest logs.)
Oh, @Socratease : I would recommend spending your Silver Chocobo Feathers on the Ironworks chestpiece/pants and weapon of the class of your choice. The other stuff is easy to get other ways, but having that armor when you hit 50 will give you a bit of a boost until you can start earning the currency to buy the rest of the set.
Spoiler: I didn't have time to reply last night My FC told me about the pronoun thing, that's super cool! I also liked the perspective shifts in the log entries as the delusion that it was a separate person the WoL was talking to blurred and broke down. Experiencing the quests themselves, I noticed the shift in Fray's personality - in retrospect it's clear that what was left of him in the soul crystal that's speaking to the WoL is gradually completely overcome by the WoL's shadow side, as the genuine good advice (like 'you can't save everyone, sometimes the only person you can save is yourself') degrades completely by the lv 58 quest. Iolis is also kind of far from the 'stoic badass' default (bookish, quiet, and wants to help people - read 'anxious people pleaser and doormat') so when I started reading the log entries halfway through the quest chain I was like, "?? He isn't like this at all!" I stopped reading them at that point and went back and read them after the lv 50 quest, and that made those make a lot more sense. Of course, it also kind of works the other way - Iolis's sense of self has hinged on him not being the kind of person that his stuffed down resentment and despair manifested as, and he just got a very nasty awakening. But yeah, I'll have to write something to make it work specifically for him, and how he in particular got to that point. Like, how does a person go from being a white mage to having a fight club style psychotic break with his shadow side puppeting an ACTUAL DEAD BODY? I think in Iolis's case, fact that Fray reverts to a conjurer after he gave him his sword just reinforced Iolis's delusion that everything going on was reasonable. (I love Sidurgu's reaction to that later when you tell him what happened. Poor Sid, on top of everything else he finds out that Eorzea's weirdness magnet puppeted around his best friend's corpse.) On another note, I was really glad to see a game really doing SOMETHING to address the kind of awful burden expected of main characters of epic stories, especially ones sent on endless pointless errands along with the world saving stuff. Not that that's going to stop happening now, but still.
It won't let me upload the pictures here directly because file size, but I got a new sword and put together a new outfit and I want to show them off! http://littlepinkbeast.tumblr.com/post/161055856036/new-sword-new-outfit-inspired-by-agrias-oaks
Cuuute :D And grats on your anima! I'm on my 8th rune...so close... (man I wish tanks got a dyeable version of that breastplate but nooo, only dragoons. *huffs*)
My sibling is very hype for Stormblood and keeps sending me things even though I don't play the game and I felt I had to share this one.
Okay, I've installed the discord app and managed not to set it and its author on fire through incandescent rage. What do I need to connect to for the kintsugi ffxiv discord server?
Just did Haukke Manor for the first time, as a brand new Scholar! Only one person died when we pulled a little more than we intended, and I somehow managed to keep everybody alive through the final boss fight even as it descended into, just, the biggest clusterfuck. I got 3 commendations! I begin to see why people enjoy healing. Also the animation/effect for Adloquium is fantastic. I might look into getting some good-looking level-appropriate gear, even. I look kind of silly right now tbh.
Looking silly is the low level FF14 experience, really. Dyeing stuff helps - if you haven't found it yet, the dye unlock quest is Color Your World, in Vesper Bay.
Spoiler Yeah, and looking back you can see that the NPCs you talk to over the course of the quests...there's no indication they saw anyone else other than you. Implying that everything Fray said, they perceived it as you saying it. I feel like...especially when it comes to Haurchefant, if you main a healer it's extra awful, so there's a certain..."bonus" to that from a storytelling standpoint (not an emotional stability one lol) where you become a tank and the part of you that resents everything switches to the healer role. I will say as HW goes on it does feel like the people around you start to acknowledge how fucking shitty your job is. The remaining Scions and especially Alphinaud (my precious son, sob) definitely move towards more of a "we're here to support you any way we can, we know you're the only person that can do this but the least we can do is make sure you don't have to worry about anything else." That was kind of touching to me. Of course they're only human (Spoken??) and I feel like the end of ARR was the extreme of that--they acted like your life was more important than theirs with no regard for how that would affect you emotionally, which is why it was so devastating. Spoiler: rambling about Imry I honestly had no clue what to expect going into this game initially, Aki convinced me to play solely because I could make a seven foot tall muscle woman. Imry ended up being a mashup of a couple of my old OCs. She's also rather young, (17 in ARR, probably 19ish by the end of HW?) excitable and is kind of hopelessly naive. She also legitimately enjoys helping people, so the likelihood she'd be resentful of being relied on is low. However, taking into account the end of ARR, what would mess with her the most is people throwing themselves in the line of fire for her, because it's HER job to be the meat shield and if other people have to do that then she's failed somehow. So her Fray ends up being...very harsh about that reality ("you're not a shield, you're a weapon, remember") and tries to get her to abandon her duty by convincing her that people are just going to keep sacrificing themselves for her and by the end of it she'll be miserable and alone. It almost works, but y'know. Also she drives Sidurgu nuts by being too perky.
Aaah this is good stuff Spoiler: one thing real quick before I run to bed I'M SO GLAD PEOPLE START ACKNOWLEDING HOW AWFUL THE WoL'S JOB IS. At the end of ARR where Minfilia and everyone keeps sending you on these silly, petty tasks, at one point Rowena says something like, "You need to start learning how to say no, or next they'll have you mucking out the chocobo stables" - it felt like everyone was taking the WoL for granted as the Person Who Can Do Everything... which meant even stupid, petty fetch quest shit. It was weirdly disrespectful from people who consider the WoL a friend. I'll have more to say tomorrow, this is such a chewy topic!
Spoiler: more of that Yeah Imry didn't mind that sort of thing ICly but I, as a player, found it tedious as hell. and im p sure any of my other characters in that position would too so I think...she's just...special. (She dislikes fame because it means people stop treating her as a regular person and being put on a pedestal makes her veeery uncomfortable. She's pretty simple and also very social so being unable to just. hang out with people normally without them going OOOHHH MY GOD ITS THE WARRIOR OF LIGHT is sort of upsetting for her.) I'd say it kind of starts around...Ravana, i think?? When Alphinaud is like "oh, it's ok, our friend here kills primals easy" and Estinien chides him for relying on us too much. And he gets all embarrassed and ashamed and it seems like he really took it to heart. It also comes up in the Warring Triad quests (the trials you get after finishing 3.0) but saying anything more would be kinda spoilery i think. I went and dug up the comic I did after doing the DRK quests myself and the art makes me cry a little now but...there it is... Pages 9 and 12 have some spoilers from the end of 3.0, the rest just deals with the aftermath of the Vault mostly. Pages 1-9 / Pages 10-19 / Pages 20-27 ...Also I should finish my fic and post it maybe but I have not posted a fic anywhere in years and ffff. Nervous. Also it contains Moar OCs, some weird headcanons about Au Ra biology and Fray being a trans dude. (Imry-Fray/Keten is nb/fluid because What is Gender to a Darkness Creature Anyway. I started out writing them w female pronouns at first but it just felt strange.)
