Yay, you reached the Ninja questline, probably one of the best job quests series imo. It's just a really enjoyable comedy romp that actually does it's part in making you feel like a ninja (you mentioned the level 50 badass ninja moment but I'm more partial to the part where you sidestep Karasu's shuriken without taking your eyes off him).

The animation jump during Karasu's introduction scene is due to them using mocap or so I've heard (since Rogue/Ninja was introduced after 2.0 which let them splurge a bit). It never fails to make me smile.

Karasu even does the ol FF14 fakeout death well here due to various reasons. For one, he outright states that when he choose to serve the Empire because he disliked dying only to seemingly contradict himself with an apparent suicide bombing. Then given the dramatic over the top way he faked his death (aerial explosion that left no trace), it's a lot easier to speculate foul play. Also it seems such a waste to have such a character die so soon.

I kinda wanna switch gears here to take about Milala's fakeout death in the rouge quests. I don't feel it was her time to die yet but the main issue there is that they wanted to have their cake and eat it too by shotting it like a death scene only to backtrack. Plus, like you mentioned, surviving an axe to the face is hard to swallow. That's actually a major issue about some of FF14's fakeout deaths that I don't see people talk about, which is the way said scenes are shot and presented; for example, in Stormblood, would it have killed them to have shown Y'shtola to be somewhat conscious after being sliced by Zenos rather than out cold and possibly dead? Also Alisaie's fakeout after Castrum Abania. Those scenes should've been shot differently.

Good god, that Lotr mmo graph looks horrifying.

Karasu was the all-star of this quest. Major Nero vibes.
Well they are both gay people I do not respect, so it's inevitable that they'd be compared.

It's worse with FF14 for me due to it's nature as a pay to play MMO, which makes a day I don't play while the subscription is active feel wasted.

I'm in the same predicament. I kinda wanna renew my FF14 sub but I also wanna start playing all the games I have left on the burner for so long. Rn the PS4 is in rest mode downloading Dishonored and Alien Isolation, and this is after I finally redownloaded RDR2 after neglecting it since July. And that's not even counting the numerous games I got from PS Plus (which I also need to resub to).

And before you ask why I don't simply multitask, you must know how much FF14 enthralls me once I resub. It's an evil twisted little MMO.

Alliance raids in general are very long, the old ones feel shorter cause everyone's overgeared for them. I'd say that doing the Nier raids is easier (then again I haven't done the savage eden raids myself) because more people on average know how to do them properly than Eden 5-8 savage.

Have you managed to finish Return to Ivalice yet?

IIRC doing the Nier alliance raids in Kholusia will give you coins that can be exchanged for stuff that augments your Crystarium gear to ilevel 500, though the second Nier Alliance raid only gives you one coin per week cause it's still the newest alliance raid.

Looking at your lodestone it seems you're fully geared to the do the last 4 Eden normal raids and finish the MSQ (the last Eden raids are accessible after beating 5.3 MSQ) but the current savage tier requires an item level gear of 510 to complete.

I grinded out Emerald EX last night before my sub ran out and got the Emerald RDM weapon via 10 Emerald totems (it never dropped in loot, sob).



When I resubscribe later this month (I wanna finish Nier Automata first), I'll give the new savage raids a shot. Doing PF for emerald ex gave me the confidence to start PF learning groups.

Catching up on my catalog would be nice. Also finishing Nier Automata (currently I'm right after svtugvat Nqnz va gur Pbcvrq Pvgl). I'm also interested in playing Dragon Ball Fighterz more seriously again when Super Baby 2 drops at Jan 15th.

It reminds me of Twitter suspending users for using the words kill or die regardless of context yet doing little to stop bigots from harrassing minorities or conservative politicians openly posting propaganda. "Unspoiled" is probably a better term than "blind" in terms of playthroughs. I don't believe that we should be giving Twitch credit for making this rule because they are a massive streaming site which, as far as I know, pulls the same nonsense that I've described Twitter doing.

Do you mean all the to 5.4 or just 5.0? Either way congrats.

It's actually really fun if you get into the mindest of improving during prog which really helped allieviate frustrations during times when we almost cinched victory but didn't.

I spent some time preparing before starting prog by getting as much high level gear I could while making sure said gear was best suited for Red Mage. From what I could find out, RDM stats should go Critical Hit>Direct Hit>Determination>Spell Speed so I spent the last few weeks finding the best gear that suited said hierarchy. Then I went to the Stone, Sea and Sky practice guy near Eulmore who puts you up against Striking dolls tuned to the HP of the raid I was targetting and made sure to practice my rotation as best as I could.

Once I was conifident enough I joined and set up learning PFs so I could learn as much about the fight as I could. There was a constant refrain I heard from raiders is that the hard endgame raids become easier due to the fact that the success groups are highly organized and the fights themselves are very predictable compared to Normal fights. This became true for me when I started recognizing exactly what the fight was gonna throw at me next and thus making adjustments to my rotation came naturally.