Final Fantasy XIV really is the game that keeps on giving. I'm about 80 hours in at this point and the game just gets better and better. One of the things that really impresses me is how accessible the game is. It's the perfect game for complete beginners and veterans of the MMO genre alike.
As you play the game teaches you everything you need to know from how to target enemies to using the in-game chat. Literally everything har a short well explained tutorial. The game does a good way of easing new players into dungeons and raids as well. Before you're even allowed to enter a dungeon you have to go through a set of simple training exercises that teach you the basics of how dungeons work.
You'll learn about the different roles like tanking, healers and damage dealers. Depending on which class you play you'll have different tasks in these trials. Gladiators who are natural tanks will learn to hold enmity, or aggro as it's known as in most MMOs, and healers will learn how to heal. Damage dealers get the worst of it as the game expects damage dealers to deal with most fight mechanics like environment interactions and extra enemies that may be spawning.
One way the game tests players skill is trials that you'll stumble upon through the game. These come at regular intervals throughout the main story quest and usually in the form of fighting a Primal. Primals are basically the gods of different beast tribes that inhabit Eorzea. They act as a mini dungeon and a skill check for players as they progress through the game. Let's take a look at the three you fight during the main story quest.
Irfit is the first Primal we end up fighting. This is early on in the story and really quite a bit before we become the big hero of the story. We're just a simple adventurer at this point who're investigating what the beast tribe og the Amal'jaa are up to when we end up getting captured. As they prepare to sacrifice us to Ifrit we find out that we are immune to the influence of the primals. And such the fight ensues.
This fight was quite simple and really just functions as a simple skill check to see if players have picked up on simple dungeon and boss mechanics. There's not really much more to it than moving out of the way of attacks when they show up on the ground and killing a sort of totem that end up spawning. If the totem doesn't get killed in time it will wipe the party so that acts like a DPS (damage per second) check.
For me as a tank there wasn't really that much to the fight. Keeping enmity up was quite easy and as long as I faced the boss away from the rest of the party they weren't in any danger from his attacks. I just stood there dodging attacks as the party dealt with the totem then moved the boss to the center of the arena as it started to fill up with fire.
Not long after dealing with Ifrit the realm is once again threatened. This time by the Primal known as Titan. Where Ifrit was obviously the Primal of Fire, Titan is the Primal of Stone, revered by the kobolds who live mostly underground. We have to undertake a long and relatively tedious quest line consisting of mostly fetch quests before dealing with him.
This fight has a little more to it. Where the fight with Ifrit functioned as a skill check of simple boss mechanics this one also deal with correct positioning. At regular intervals the boss will jump into the air to smash down in the middle of the arena. If you stand to close to him you will take to much damage and die and if you stand to far away from him you risk getting blasted off the arena. You need to find that middle ground.
When this happens the outer part of the arena also smolders, making the arena smaller. This in return makes his next jump harder to deal with as the sweet spot between life and death is smaller. As with the Ifrit fight Titan will also spawn an object that we need to take down before in wipes the party, acting as another DPS check.
For the tank (me) this fight was even easier than the Ifrit fight. I only had to worry about the positioning during the jump and move out of the way of some simple attacks. The damage dealers dealt with the spawning heart.
I didn't take a picture during the fight so here's one of my pet Baby Goobbue:
Garuda was definitely the coolest Primal we got to fight. She was also the last one as part of the main story and therefore the most powerful one. She was also the one with the biggest tiddies but let's leave that out of this.
This fight dealt mostly with positioning while being quite a strain on the healer. The boss deals a ton of AoE (area of effect) damage that can't be dodged while also dealing some big damage to the tank. I did my best to keep the boss away from the party while rotating defensive cooldowns to ease the strain on the healer. This let the healer focus most of his or her time on the rest of the party while throwing me the occasional sustain heal.
There's also a mechanic involving some pillars around the arena. Occasionally the boss will become invulnerable and start dishing out a ton of damage to the party. If you don't hide behind one of those pillars you're pretty much dead. Part of my job was also to keep the boss away from those pillars as she could damage them and eventually destroy them, resulting in a party wipe.
With Garuda down the last of the Primals were dealt with. At least for now. As far as I've gathered there are still some Primals to take down in raids as part of the endgame content, as well as these mentioned Primals returning as hard mode bosses. It'll be cool to see how the fight will change from the original story fight. It'll probably be a while before I'm ready to raid but I'll get there eventually.
I've now finished the main story of A Realm Reborn, the base game, and have started working on post game content before moving on to the Heavensward expansion. I'll be back with a post on the story once I've digested it for a bit. I've also finished both of the class quest lines for the Paladin and the Dragoon which were quite cool. Expect a post on those classes as well.
Enjoy the view of my awesome new Paladin armor. Puse Katten out!
All images in this post are screenshots taken by me.
