More Final Fantasy

[RifleAvenger]

Sullla's website, specifically his FF5 reports, were what led me to RealmsBeyond, and being a fan of the series myself I wanted to contribute to this thread.  However, I don't think I would have anything interesting to add on the NES and SNES titles, particularly considering the only one I've replayed is 5 (and only twice at that).

So, instead, I want to try a report from a more recent and entirely different Final Fantasy game:



FF14, being a tab targeting, hotbar ability, WoW style MMO plays very differently than traditional turn based FF games.  Though there is quite of bit of solo content, instanced dungeons, raids, and trials (aka singular boss fights) balanced around group coordination abound and many are required as part of the main story.  So... how far can one get into FF14 playing solo before they have to get help?

Now, one big problem I have here is that FF14 takes a lot of time to make new characters, and I don't have that time.  This means I'll be playing on my main account.  On the plus side, the job system means I can test a variety of jobs on a single character.  The downside is that I only have three options of how to run the dungeons: at my full level (godmode for any early content), at minimum level and gear level for the content, or at slightly boosted level and gear (1-3 levels above the content's minimum).

Well, the first few dungeons are renowned as being rather brain dead, essentially tutorial missions meant to ease new players into group content.  So hopefully they can be done at the "slightly above minimum" option?  For my first attempt at Satasha Seagrot, the first group dungeons new players gain access to, I'm going with that while playing one of the jobs likely to be best equipped for the challenge...



The Bard.

Now, before people have flashbacks to Spoony, Bard in FF14 is actually a strong class!  It has more and better varied raid utility than any other job in game, being able to buff party members in myriad ways.  In my opinion, it is even a high tier solo class too...



...Because it's fused into Hunter/Ranger.  This happened because the game's director really loves Bards and insisted it be a playable job, but FF14 follows the World of Warcraft role trinity of Tank/Healer/DPS and therefore there is no dedicated Support role for Bard to fill.  In fact, a new character actually levels as the Archer job which evolves into Bard at level 30.  As a result, so long as I'm taking this on sync'd to level 18, I actually won't have any Bard songs yet (not unlike Spoony really).  I do have an advantage over an actual level 18 Archer in that I retain the base stat increase Bard has (but those higher growths still scale down in level, it's not a flat bonus).

So why is Archer/Bard such a good choice for trying to solo in FF14?  It all comes down to one special strategy...



Running away! 

Once again, cowardice is a Bard's best friend.  Only instead of merely hiding, in FF14 the name of the game is kiting.  Bard can use its weaponskills and abilities on the run, unlike jobs like Black Mage that must stand still while casting.  In these early dungeons, most enemies exclusively use melee ranged attacks, so by shooting while backpedaling Bard can put out damage while avoiding it entirely.  Where enemies are too fast/numerous or the area too constrained to do this, Bard also packs quite a few useful crowd control abilities to manage.  These include:

Foot Graze (a 10s bind), Leg Graze (slows enemy movement by 40% for 10s), Arm Graze (stuns for 2s), and Head Graze (Silence for 1s, useful for interrupting casters and magic). 

These skills have relatively short cooldowns, making it so they cannot be spammed yet are available several times a fight.  For healing what does hit me, I have the ability Second Wind and a supply of 99 potions (all potions/ethers heal by percentage in this game and the only difference between them is the maximum static cap they heal, even Elixirs).   To no surprise, my spoony avatar took out the initial packs of bats, jellyfish, and crabs without trouble using this strategy.  However, kiting and crowd control was already a necessity.  Even two of these weak enemies would empty my health bar first if I didn't drink potions and tried to sit still and take their hits.  Three without being kited and cc'd would kill me before my potion came back off cooldown (all medicines in this game share a cooldown, a high quality potion has a cooldown of 22 seconds).



After around 4 encounters, I began facing giant clams protected by fire shooting wisps.  The idea here is that the clams infinitely spawn wisps until killed, but close up and become invulnerable if there are no living wisps nearby.  I dealt this this encounter by focusing the clams first, healing through the wisp's damage.  Once the clam died, I would begin using the skill Quick Nock, which hits all foes in a cone before the player.  The wisps have very low HP, and were quickly dispatched.  Notably this is a skill I would lack at minimum level for this dungeon, and these encounters would be far harder without it given the number of wisps.  More crabs and jellyfish join in later on, but these can just be bound or heavied and then kited.  At the end of this cave, there are three large, glowing coral formation.  To proceed, you need to choose the one indicated on a note you can find earlier in the dungeon (failing forces you to fight jellyfish and gives you a long duration poison).




However, Chopper the coeurl attacks you shortly after touching the right coral!  This is a miniboss, and the arena is sealed off (this is standard for all midboss and boss fight in FF14).  The smaller arena means I can't kite Chopper through the entire length of the cave.  Furthermore, he does A LOT of damage, 94 damage ~every 2 seconds.  More if he crits.  In other words, enough to kill me in 10 seconds or less from full health.  Despite this, he CAN be bound and heavied, meaning that this battle is no different than any previous one besides a lesser margin of error.  The battle begins with me using venomous shot to poison Chopper, then immediately using Foot Graze in the oGCD (off global cooldown) period before my next GCD attack.  Being attacked breaks bind, but being hurt by previously inflicted damage over time spells or ailments does not.  Foot graze also stops my autoattack to avoid breaking the bind early.  I would then reposition myself at the other end of arena, and attack as my bind wore off.  When Chopper grew near again, I would Leg Graze to heavy him and kite him around the edge of the arena (fortunately just wide and round enough to stay out of Chopper's reach).  When that wore off, I would use the universal ability Sprint to move faster for 10 more seconds, staying out of his range, attacking him all the while. 

Unfortunately for me, this strategy will not work in perpetuity, enemies build resistance to status over time, reducing the duration of my binds/heavies/stuns over time until the enemy is fully immune.  As Chopper was designed with four people attacking him in mind, he has a lot of HP, and eventually I can no longer reapply my status ailments to him.  Fortunately, Chopper would usually only catch me in attack range at corners of the arena, and at lower HP sometimes uses an AoE called charged whisker than is easy to avoid and stops his movement.  Ultimately, the duration of the fight where Chopper was immune to crowd control was short enough that Second Wind and three potions kept me alive until he died.



Moving on, I run into the root cause of the strange happenings in Satasha: pirates.



These replace the wildlife enemies for the rest of the dungeon, and are a fair deal stronger.  Most annoying are the ones wielding bows, which I need to focus down first because they have a longer range than I do and ignore the need for line of sight (making them impossible to properly kite).  I rapidly encounter a second miniboss in Captain Madison and two random pirates.  I deal with this encounter by CC'ing Madison and one pirate while I kill the other, then kill the second trash enemy, and finally Madison who does little damage on his own.  Once he loses a chunk of health he becomes invincible and runs away.  The dungeon then becomes a key hunt, going from place to place, until I recover the final key from Madison's personal quarters.



Past the last locked door, Madison awaits again with two more bodyguards.  Unfortunately, the battle is not so easy this time.  Madison now uses powerful attacks constantly, and worst of all naturally moves faster than the player.  I died quite a few times, struggling to stay alive after Madison became immune to bind and heavy.  Very often I was just a move or two away from having my potions be usable again when Madison would floor me.  I tried staggering out my crowd controls more, letting Madison hit me for short whiles earlier in the fight so that I'd still be able to CC him further into the fight, but it didn't grant enough time.  Instances have a time limit of 90 minutes for dungeons and trials (120 minutes for raids), and I was burning a lot of that being killed by Madison.  I stopped taking screenshots from here on, as taking them on PS4 took too long and often got me killed (all further screenshots are from a breezy lvl 52 run later).  Finally, I found a solution in a skill I'd been forgetting to use: repelling shot.



Repelling shot is an oGCD ability that causes the Bard to leap back a significant distance.  I often forget to use it these days because its damage was removed at the beginning to the new expansion (the damage in the image is an autoattack), it now only serves as an escape.  But an escape is what I needed; even with his super speed Madison took several seconds to reach me after my jump back, buying me precious time for being able to use another potion.  The fight broke open again when Madison's health was further depleted.  He ran to a cage in a corner of the arena, and let loose four "Scurvy Dog" enemies.  Thankfully, by this point his bind and heavy immunity had worn off, so I bound him, killed one dog en route (the scurvy dogs have very low HP), and the other three were dispatched with Quick Nock (all four dogs together actually do less damage than Madison does alone).  I then went back to the dance with Madison, who thankfully didn't take much more punishment before running away again.



The final stretch of dungeon was filled with more pirates, many of whom can thankfully be snuck past (I had ~24 minutes left on the clock after all the deaths against Madison), several of whom unfortunately have bows.  Usual strategies for trash, nothing special.  After that, I finally arrived at the boss fight proper just in time to see Madison having failed his sahagin master, Denn the Orcatoothed, for the last time.  RIP speed racer.



The idea behind this boss is that, on his own, he's just a tank'n'spank with nothing special or threatening (to a full party).  However, there are four trapdoors in the room that will occasionally bubble.  If not sealed off by a player in time, they spawn an additional enemy.  At certain phases of Denn's HP, the rate at which bubbles appear/adds spawn increases.  However, most full parties ignore this mechanic because lowering Denn's HP fast enough actually causes the currently queued add spawns to reset.  By the time anything actually comes out Denn will be nearly dead.



Our solo Bard does not have that option, and so must defuse every spawn or neutralize any adds that do appear.  Even worse, Denn moves just as fast as Cpt. Madison did (and so do any reinforcements that appear!) and hits even harder.  It may be obvious at this point, but this fight wasn't doable at level 18.  Denn alone is hard enough to survive, on top of the fact that I need to save a CC for when I go to seal a trapdoor (if Denn strikes you during the sealing action, it fails).  Essentially, the fight becomes unwinnable (at least to me) once Denn builds up full status immunity.  At that point, his damage output can no longer be mitigated by keeping him away, and it becomes almost impossible to seal trapdoors.  This leads to a boss whose damage output cannot be outhealed being reinforced by still more super fast enemies adding even more damage.  I never got Denn below 40% HP, which is when he begins to summon three reinforcements at once; I was pulling everything I had and often failing to disarm just two trapdoors!


I redid the dungeon at the only option I had remaining, unsync'd at level 52, with more than 10x the health, 5x or more the damage output, and far more abilities including my songs and other buffs.  Obviously it was an unsatisfying steamroll.  I really wish that Square Enix let me select what level I sync to, so that I could figure out where the breakpoint is that this fight becomes numerically possible.  Sadly, that option does not exist short of rolling and grinding up an entirely new character.



A solo run is thus possible for FF14, but sadly doing it in a satisfying way seems to elude me for now.  Of the jobs I have leveled, I'd only put Dark Knight with odds to actually clear while sync'd because of its higher HP, superior armor, and mitigation cooldowns.  White Mage may be able to survive if it gets lucky (doesn't get casts frequently interrupted), but the damage output would be so low I'm not sure it could beat the 90 minute time limit. Astrologian is just a worse White Mage below level 30.  Black Mage would destroy trash mobs with sleep and binds, but would get pasted by the bosses.  Red Mage could do it... if it wasn't a DLC job not balanced for low levels (you begin RDM at level 50) and therefore lacks any healing white magic spells at level 18.

If people are at all interested in further FF14 reports, I could always try working from the other end instead, such as level 50+ content that may still be challenging to lvl 60+ characters.  Or I could see how far TWO players can get in the game at minimum ilvl, which seems a more possible endeavor given that the big issue here was being unable to make outgoing healing break even with incoming damage.

[System Error]

Huh. Swear I posted in this, but I guess I forgot. Do like that FF14 challenge idea.


Anyway, here's another of my own, that took a while to compile together but is up on my journal. It's Mystic Quest again, and this time, the flavor is Low%, something that was suggested to me a long while back. In this playthrough whose closest counterpart is my FF1 Capitalists, I pick up only the mandatory items, with the additional stipulation of not opening regular treasure chests either. Full access to grinding is on the table...but with most of the primary damage in this game coming from magic and bombs outclassing most weapons for most of the game, it's only good for boosting HP. Check it out.

[Iainuki]

It's been a long time since I first mentioned the possibility of FF5 solo hardcore or posted here.  I was working on solo hardcore even before T-Hawk posted his report, and unlike T-Hawk, I stuck to the rules he laid out in FF1: no party deaths, no resets, and no grinding.  No grinding turned out to not be quite possible, or at least not within my patience, but I could cut out most of the grinding.  However, my early attempts were plagued by emulator crashes, bugs in FF5 that were new to me at least, and a lot of dumb mistakes on my part.  I never actually managed to complete a run, my real life got busy, and I put it aside until this year.  When I dusted off my old notes and half-written reports, two things were clear to me.  First, my old route had a lot of unnecessary grinding, and if I was going to do this challenge, I ought to really strip out all the remaining grinding I could.  Second, I was going to have to route and practice this thing like a speedrun, with notes.  When I was making dumb mistakes before, it was because I forgot small details, and in solo hardcore, attention to detail is everything.

I rerouted, discovered that there were many more ways I could be clever than I was being in the past, and spent some time practicing World 3 to make sure I'd remember what the hell I was doing when I got there again.  My approach to the game is quite different from T-Hawk's, so in my humble opinion, it makes an interesting contrast.  I do intend to write up a report if and when I can finish this thing, but I want to mention I'm planning to stream it at twitch.tv/iainuki over the next couple of weeks, probably mostly on Saturday because that's when I'm awake enough to pay attention.  The early parts may not be that interesting because it's going to be me dying to Karlabos a lot and maybe a little to Siren.  After that, I expect it will pick up, because I think it's possible to do the rest of the game without any random luck at all, or at least not any of the kind that doesn't involve cosmic rays flipping bits in my computer's memory.  I can't guarantee I won't make mistakes though.  If anyone wants to me blunder my way through FF5, though, you're welcome to join me.

[T-hawk]

I did it with no deaths or resets, although yes I did do grinding and farming, notably for Chemist ingredients. What exactly do you mean by "route" since the game is fairly linear - you mean the jobs?

I'll read along here with any commentary, but I'm pretty full up busy the next several Saturdays.

[Iainuki]

I did it with no deaths or resets, although yes I did do grinding and farming, notably for Chemist ingredients.  What exactly do you mean by "route" since the game is fairly linear - you mean the jobs?

I'll read along here with any commentary, but I'm pretty full up busy the next several Saturdays.

I didn't mean to imply you didn't!  You totally did.  I'm just trying to do it without grinding, particularly for mixing ingredients, at least as much because I hate grinding as for additional challenge.

[Iainuki]

I started yesterday.  Brief highlights and lowlights of the first part of world 1:

1. I expected to take more than a few attempts to make it past Karlabos.  Instead, on the very first time I made it to Karlabos, I won.  I hadn't bothered to practice this early section specifically because I expected to get much more practice than I wanted to.  My biggest mistake was wasting 320 gil worth of potions from the pirate.
   
2. The first video doesn't have audio .  Sorry about that.  I should know better than to ever trust that a setting will do what it's supposed to do rather than, say, arbitrarily disabling the game audio.
   
3. I got a very lucky elixir drop in the Ship Graveyard.
   
4. Siren was pretty nice to me, she only cast Sleep on her first AI cycle and Slow on the third.  I was far enough ahead in damage I didn't need the Elixir.
   
5. I made a subtle, potentially-fatal mistake against Magisa, using !Observe when I was at 182 HP and her Aero/Drain/Specialty cycle was coming up.  She didn't punish me for it with a max-damage Drain.
   
6. Karnak Castle went very smoothly, with no back attacks or any of the other things that can go horribly wrong there.  I screwed up by not switching to Blue Mage as soon as I hit level 19, so I wasted some AP on Summoner.  I also screwed up by not realizing that i should switch to Thief for the Iron Claw battle, but that was a routing mistake.
   
7. I had the worst Ancient Library I have ever seen.  I ended up having to fight a bunch of extra battles at the end because I never saw a Page 256.  That's the first time that's ever happened to me.
   

I will probably stream a bit more this afternoon.

[Iainuki]

After that bad Ancient Library, everything went smoothly: Crayclaw is a non-threat if you have enough speed and the ability to heal yourself, I got really lucky with Adamant Turtle when I landed Demi and Slow on the first turn, I got Flame Guns and Rockets in the expected positions so that went smoothly, Sol Cannon is predictable, I didn't make any mistakes in the Lanka Ruins, and nothing went horribly wrong with ArchaeoAvis.  However, I made a critical mistake when I was doing the meteorite bosses: I had the meteorites mismarked in my notes, so I went into the Puroborous as a Chemist, which ended in the expected death by Exploder.

I miraculuously passed Karlabos on the first try again on another attempt, only to die to Siren even with an elixir drop.  She used the deadly first turn Slow and followed it up with a few too many Hastes and Sleeps, and I got overwhelmed.  I can actually win against the first turn Slow, just not with that AI sequence.  I died to Karlabos like three times after screwing up the opening multiple times, accidentally getting too much experience so not being able to get Aero at level 5.  I finally made it past Karlabos again, Siren opened with Haste which is fine, and then never Slowed me so it was an easy fight.  However, I died to what is possibly the worst luck against Magisa I've seen: she cast Drain four times in a row, which is a one-third odds chance each time.  Note that Drain has a 75% base hit chance, I'm higher level than Magisa at that point in the  game so it's down another 5% from the level penalty, and I also have 18% magic evade from gear.  I can genuinely say that's never happened before.  Anyway, I'm going to eat lunch and then grind on Karlabos some more .

[Sullla]

I did a playthrough and writeup for the FF5 solo Necromancer on my website. For those of you who remember when T-Hawk did the same thing a number of years ago, there's no significant differences in this report but hopefully it's an entertaining read regardless.

[English Language]

Any plans to do Oracle? I'm interested to see if there's a better method for Necrophobia and NED than just farming 30 something Staves of Light that I overlooked.

[Sullla]

Yes, definitely. I have to finish out the full set of classes. No idea what that will entail since I'm only vaguely familiar with the Predict mechanics. It should be fun experimenting though.