Final Fantasy is such a different experience, that a bit more than a week in, I’m still not sure how I feel about it. I do LIKE it… but… wait, a little background.
I’ve had this sudden insight lately that what I like best about MMOs is the leveling up. The max level grind doesn’t interest me at all. It used to, back in the EverQuest days. Back then, I loved seeing dungeons and raids again and again because each time, I’d be better at them.
Neverwinter recently raised their level cap to 70. I happily logged in and got my main character up to 70 as quickly as I could. But the new high end game was just the old high end game, just made a little tougher. And grinding to replace all my old gear so I could be ready to grind for more gear later on just was so uninteresting to me, that I stopped logging in except for Foundry Night. And now, not even then.
Final Fantasy XIV is a game that is pretty much all about the leveling. With a huge number of jobs and subjobs, all of which must be leveled from level 1 (leveling boosts aside), means there’s an immense amount of gameplay inherent in just the leveling process, especially since the story quests that lead you through the process the first time don’t seem to be around the next times. That means going further afield for levels.
My FFXIV character is a Gladiator, not too different from my Neverwinter Guardian Fighter. The Gladiator job leads naturally into the Paladin subjob. That requires fifteen levels in Conjurer, a kind of healing mage (and also a requirement for the iconic White Mage subjob). Once I had my airship license on my Gladiator job, Kasul and I went on a whirlwind (airship, wind…) tour of Eorza and picked up all the jobs in the two other cities, pausing in Gridania to level up Conjurer.
But I’m still eager to get more familiar with the Gladiator, and this is where the trouble starts. I’m playing with a controller, and I’m having trouble doing my job. I like playing guildhests, random battle instances. My job, as tank, is to keep aggro and let the DPS do their work. Problem is targeting. I just am not able to target correctly in the heat of battle, and it’s really affecting my enjoyment of the game.
Last night went so poorly that I felt like apologizing to my group. Nobody died – we’re all still doing very basic guildhests, so there’s not a lot of danger – but I was not controlling the fight at all. The Protect spell I got from my Conjurer job makes me pretty resilient, but if stuff isn’t hitting me, it’s not doing anyone any good.
More disappointment in myself than anything in the game. I’m still very much liking the differences. I just feel that I am fighting the UI to some extent.
The mouse/keyboard combo may be better. I’ll have to take a careful look at the key bindings.