In celebration of Final Fantasy XIV’s second anniversary, the development team held a 14 hour live broadcast, which included the Live Letter from the Producer Part XXIV. For those who don’t know, the Live Letter from the Producer is where Yoshi-P and friends announce all the upcoming features and fixes that the team can confirm for the game, giving us a list of things to look forward to.
A small part of the Live Letter covered updates that have already been released in the newest patch, 3.07. Many of these were buffs to jobs and quality of life updates, all which were quite welcome. Now that the raid, Alexander, has been out for a while, the devs have taken the data they gathered from these raids and doled out buffs accordingly.
To start, the Astrologian job got a lot of much-needed improvements. While I don’t play a healer main in game, and haven’t tried the Astrologian job yet, I’ve heard that people felt it lagged behind White Mage and Scholar when it came to raw healing output. Whether that is true or not, devs must have agreed the job needed some love, as patch 3.07 saw an overall increase to Astrologian healing potency and an increase in overall buff times.
Monks also got some attention, with an increase of duration of Greased Lightning. Again, I don’t main Monk, but I do understand how important this buff is, and all the Monks I know were extremely happy to get any little bit of help they could in keeping it going.
Machinists were visited with what seemed like a small, but very useful decrease in recast time for Quick Reload. I do play Machinist on the side, and I like this change quite a bit. However, I still feel that Machinist and Bard could use a bit more oomph overall. Whether these jobs will get that love remains to be seen.
Patch 3.07 also introduced visible TP bars in the party window. For the longest time, party members could see other party members’ MP usage, but not TP usage. For jobs like Ninja, Bard, and Machinist, who can restore this all important TP, it was a guessing game when their TP skills were needed… until now. This was a super-important change for the support classes, and the Warriors in particular are thankful, I’m sure.
There are hints of changes to personal housing in future patches, but the information we’ve been given is somewhat nebulous. Housing is one feature that many players feel FFXIV could have planned and implemented better, so any changes to housing is a very welcome.
What do we know for certain? We know that the team has confirmed a future shared housing system. At this point, if you purchase a personal home, you are the only one that can interact and decorate that home, which is kinda a bummer. This is true even if you’ve got an in-game partner through Eternal Bonding.
The shared housing feature will allow you to give five other players furnishing and gardening rights to your house. Five players isn’t a lot, and there’s no word on if this includes any alts you have, but it’s a start. I definitely can see sharing my house with my best friend, who doesn’t own a house and probably has no chance in getting one at this point.
The team has also confirmed that they’re looking into a way to remove houses of players who have been inactive for a while. I’m a little concerned about this change. On one hand, I understand with the shortage of housing that recycling houses from inactive players is a good thing. However, on the other hand, I paid over 2.5 million gil for my personal house, having saved up for half a year to get it, and to lose it would be crushing.
The devs, however, state that there will be specific criteria that must be met before housing is considered inactive. We don’t know what this criteria is just yet, but I’ll have to trust they will do this carefully considering the expensive consequences to the players.
There were a few other housing changes that were mentioned, but that I’m less clear on. They state that they may make housing available in Ishgard, which would be cool! I could imagine how neat an Ishgard-themed neighborhood would be. They also state that they will implement some sort of moving feature, which I guess means we can move our housing plot to another open spot (to Ishgard, for example). Again, this is somewhat speculation based off the little information we’ve heard.
Heavensward introduced a new feature that allowed Free Companies who owned a FC house to build a workshop basement. In that basement, crafters of the FC could fabricate an airship, which you can launch to distant lands. These are similar to retainer ventures, as the ships bring back crafting materials.
The ships level up over time, and you can upgrade their parts to voyage further to more profitable areas. You can also have numerous ships doing many things, which is what my FC is doing (we have some very dedicated crafters and gatherers).
One new upcoming feature announced was that FC members will be able to ride on these airships to islands. There, parties can battle monsters to clear the island and gatherers and reap the rewards for the FC. We don’t know a whole lot about this feature yet, but I know our FC crafters will be excited to use our airships for more than just voyages!
There’s new things coming for the Gold Saucer as well. They’ve announced further expansion of the Triple Triad card games with new cards and NPC opponents. They also are considering making adjustments to chocobo racing and increasing the overall payout of MGP for these activities, which would be very, very nice.
The biggest announcement for the Gold Saucer is the upcoming mini game Lords of Verminion. This originally started as an April Fools joke on the FFXIV dev blog. It’s even a play on the name of Lord of Virmilion, an old Square arcade game. But something happened, and someone decided to make it a real thing.
We don’t know much about this mini-game other than it will play like a RTS using the FFXIV minions you have collected. Thankfully, I’m a minion collector, so I’ve been gathering up what I can before they start jumping in price on the auction house!
And finally, the new 24-man alliance raid has been announced. The tentative name is the Void Ark. This bad boy has been sighted since the release of Heavensward as it flies through some of the new zones, often concealed within the cover of clouds. I haven’t seen this ship myself, but the artwork looks pretty awesome. I know that my Free Company is looking forward to doing some larger group content like this again – we miss the Crystal Tower runs!
And, of course, a major patch always means new main scenario quests. After finishing Heavensward’s excellent storyline, I’m eager to see how future story patches will unravel. We still have some old friends to locate and a new friend to save… so there’s plenty of different directions the plot can take us. Not to mention new dungeons and primal fights, of course.
We don’t have a release date for this content yet, but given FFXIV’s track record on content releases, hopefully we’ll have something solid soon!
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