Color Me Impressed....Follow

I've made mention on ZAM forums before that I played WoW (and I used to post there, before it died off), so I'm no stranger to the Fly vs No-Fly debate that has plauged WoW O-boards for years, ever since Wrath of the Lich King where you'd have players on both sides of the pool.

Some players wanted absolutely no flight, but many players wanted at least flight at the very end, if not flight earlier. Some players, like myself, wanted flight right from the beginning, because face it, I got crap to do.

Well, I just unlocked Flight in Heavensward for the first zone yesterday and wow.

Color me impressed.

FFXIV managed to do what WoW couldn't: Come up with a reasonable middle-ground compromise. You gotta see the sights, and do enough MSQ to collect all the Aether Currents, but yet you get to fly well before max level and completion of the whole expansion, just... only in certain areas.

This is far better than WoW has managed to do (well, I dunno what they did in Legion, but last I read they were considering No Flight like Warlords).

Also, the flight mechanics in XIV... I prefer them vastly to WoW's. For those of you who never played WoW, WoW allows a full 360-degree movement range on both pitch and yaw. On paper, this sounds awesome... until you learn that you are forced to steer with the mouse (which I always hated, I always used arrow keys) because Current Pitch is always tied to camera angle until you reset by landing and taking off.

Since a lot of times while you're on the ground you'd have the camera tilted down slightly so you can see around you, this means when you take off, your mount wants to pitch down as soon as you start to fly forward. It was annoying as a crap and wholly unnecessary and despite my attempts at posting suggestions to fix it, they never did as of March '15 when I quit WoW.

I was ever so glad to discover that this is not an issue whatsoever in XIV. I am so very happy that my mount isn't diving into the ground as soon as I take off. Fact is, Pitch Neutral (not up or down) seems to be default at all times unless you hold down the spacebar.

Only weird thing I don't get is why the down button forces your mount to stop and drop straight down instead of acting opposite of the space bar... but I can live with that, considering that the flight mechanics are far better otherwise.

Edited, Apr 9th 2017 6:10pm by Lyrailis

Oh, right, you reminded me that they DID add flying to Warlords... but I remember reading through the ridiculous list of crap you have to do to unlock it and going "Oi...." because it sounded like it would take hours of grinding stuff, some of which sounded entirely optional on your way up to 110 or whatever the level max was in Warlords, I forget. 100? 110? I can't remember.

Either way, it sounded like it was way too much work.

With XIV/Heavensward, it's more reasonable: Visit 10 random locations scattered about on the map and progress the MSQ far enough to do 5 side-quests in each area, and these are things that a player would do anyways on their way through the expansion.

Nothing like... "Get Sahagin, Ixals, Amaljaa, and Sylphs to max reputation" or some-crap like that.



I..... REALLY.... don't like steering with the mouse.

I've had this conversation countless times in WoW forums, but I started MMOs with FFXI, and keyboard movement was kinda like... hard-coded in me. It feels so awkward to steer with the mouse, but yet still try to use ability keys and WASD simultaneously. This works in a game like Terraria or Starbound because you hit said ability keys once every so often to switch what item you are using... but in an MMO where you got a 1.5s GCD.... yeah that's not going to work for me. I've tried it, it feels incredibly awkward and I can't do it. Especially when you need to hold down the right mouse button fulltime to do it (whereas in a game like Warframe, you don't). My finger would get tired holding the button down constantly, lol.

Edited, Apr 9th 2017 7:50pm by Lyrailis

I don't pivot-turn in battle.

I learned a neat little trick that allows me to get around Pivot-turning, lol.

Basically, what you can do, is you can do a simultaneous Strafe+Turn at the same time, and instead of standing still while pivoting, you will move and turn at the same time. I've never had issues dodging any AoEs whatsoever with one exception (which I will explain in a moment), in both WoW and FFXIV.

You can do this while strafing either way, you can turn the same way you're strafing, or turn the opposite way you're strafing (this is how I circle-strafe, such as stepping in behind an enemy to nail it with Aeolian Edge while it's casting something lol).

I play NIN and I can easily circle-strafe nearly anything fast enough to hit it with Aeolian Edge while it's charging an attack.

I'm not saying I disagree with you in how that moving with the mouse can potentially make you react faster, I'm just saying that I've tried it, many times, and I just can't get it to work in my brain. I fumble all over the place with hotkeys like crazy. Stuff I have programmed in me just won't work, I forget what key is for what when I'm trying to use mouse-moving and I perform far worse. There's just something about it that does not agree with my brain lol.

Anyways, the only problem I run into, is XIV's annoying tendency to make you auto-face whatever you're casting on. I have eaten AoEs because I was trying to circle-strafe, but the camera yanks me towards whoever I was last casting a heal on and I end up getting tripped up.

I've always wondered, is there a way to turn that off, or modify that kind of behavior? I find that VERY annoying.

I could sometime record video of me doing this... I know it's hard to explain what exactly I'm doing, lol.

Edited, Apr 9th 2017 8:35pm by Lyrailis

Well, one of these days I'll get around to throwing up some video of how I managed to get around the problem in XIV/WoW.

I like to think that my reactions are almost as good as a mouse-turner's. Almost.

Fact is, someday I'd like to do some tests against some mouse-turners, basically, both of us would stand in the same spot, and a third person would stand in a random spot (behind or off to the side) and then blow a whistle in party chat (which would simulate the sudden need to move to a safe spot) and see who can arrive at that spot the fastest and how much difference there actually is between the two. I'd be interested in doing such tests, because if the tests proved that my method is almost as good, then maybe some keyboard turners out there won't be forced into mouse-turning and we can get rid of this.... stigma.... behind using keyboard for movement, because some people just aren't that good with a mouse.

Might ask peeps in my own FC see if they can help with this.



WoW has taught me to absolutely LOATHE open world PvP in MMOs. I played on a PvE server, but it took them until freaking warlords to get rid of the accidental PvP flagging because of mis-targeting flagged players, which causes you to get flagged yourself unintentinoally.

But.....

The PvP Griefer Tears when they announced that... were well worth the wait.

One of the #1 reasons why I think XIV is better than WoW, is because of a lack of open-world PvP. XIV's PvP is limited to a few areas/instances, which is where PvP belongs. That, and I've heard my FC talking about PvP and it seems that PvP is not really affected all that hugely by your gear, and that's another mistake that WoW did... the gear gaps are ridiculous, where a few item-level is enough to make someone absolutely invincible to your attacks. It's so horribly unbalanced in WoW.

EDIT: Or at least that's how it was up until March '15, as previously stated I've not played WoW since, but I've heard nobody speaking about any huge sweeping changes to PvP, so I bet they maintained the status quo.

Edited, Apr 10th 2017 11:53am by Lyrailis

It's weird for me. After many years of WoW, XIV made me better at mouse movement, and by extension a better WoW player.

I also came to WoW from XI many years ago, and for a long time I was a stereotypical "keyboard-turner." Mouse movement never really clicked for me. For some reason though, I had no problems with mouse movement at all in XIV. Maybe it's the slower battle system, I don't know, but all of a sudden I could use the mouse properly. That skill transferred back over into WoW and now I can do it there too.

(I'm still not any kind of amazing WoW player, but that's not the mouse or keyboard's fault.)