Burrowowl

Multi-classing in Final Fantasy XIV is a lot more wide-open than I had initially expected. Having a sub-job is one thing, but being able to pick and choose between most of the abilities of all of your disciplines is something else entirely. I don’t expect to have the time to sink into mastering all the disciplines that have skills that are beneficial to playing as a Gladiator, I hope to be able to get up to level 10 or so in a handful of them before too terribly long. You can only stack up so many “action points” worth of skills at any one time, so that should help me pace myself a bit.

At 1st level you’ve only got 6 action points, but frankly I don’t anticipate spending a lot of time down there. At 4th level I’ll have 6 AC worth of Gladiator skills, Red Lotus and Rampart, but will have 9 action points available to me. Clearly the designers want me to spread my wings a little and dabble elsewhere. What should I go for first?

Some thoughts on picking & choosing skills follow.
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There’s been a lot of talk about the American public’s rate of taxation, much of it from the perspective that we are currently overtaxed and that raising taxes would place onerous burdens on our individual liberty and collective prosperity. The following is a quick list of sitting legislators that want your taxes to go up this year, broken down by legislative body.

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Regarding Final Fantasy XIV:

I’m a little worried about the rate at which my character’s underwear is being damaged by routine timber harvesting and mining activities. None of my other starting gear got this ragged this quickly.

A few days ago I got myself the Final Fantasy XIV open beta client and brewed up a little Lalafell Gladiator to give it a whirl. I’ve found it to be rather sluggish on my old-timey Radeon 3400 graphics card, and a lot of folks have complained about frequent server downtime, but I’m seeing a lot here that reminds me pleasantly of Final Fantasy XI.

• Job Switching: You aren’t tied down to what you started your character as. If you originally made a Thaumaturge and would like to try your hand as a Gladiator, just get a sword and equip it. Voila, you’re a Gladiator. This is an improvement over FFXI where switching jobs was a bit of a chore, and a damn sight better than most other multiplayer games, which force you to create a whole new character.
• Crafting: FFXIV treats harvesting raw materials and crafting them into usable items as a series of minigames, providing a bit of interactivity to the process. Instead of telling the interface to turn a Willow Log into Willow Chips and waiting to see if it succeeds or fails, you have multiple opportunities to affect the quality and durability of your end-product. Success and failure at resource harvesting is partly reliant on skill and timing.

  Supposedly user-crafted items will be an integral part of the in-game economy, by which I mean that most of your good gear will be stuff you or another player created, as opposed to quest rewards or loot taken from fallen monsters. I seem to recall hearing this about most online games. Right now it looks like they’re living up to this pledge, but this may be a symptom of Square-Enix not having put out all the content yet. I’m taking this with a gain of salt, but the fact that harvesting and crafting skills are presented as full character classes is promising.

• Group Dynamics: This is part of the game that I really need to dig into further. I haven’t had a chance to explore the Battle Regimen system, but I understand it is at least superficially similar to the skillchain system in FFXI.
• Macros: I used macros a lot in Anarchy Online and Final Fantasy XI, and I expect to get some use out of them in Final Fantasy XIV as well. I currently use macros in the beta to switch between jobs. I currently have one macro for Gladiator, one for Miner, one for Botanist, and one for Carpenter. I’ll be brewing up another for Blacksmith next time I play. The following is what I use to switch from whatever I currently have equipped over to my mining gear:
  

  /equip main "Weathered Pickaxe"
  /equip sub "Bronze Sledgehammer"
  /equipaction 2 "Lay of the Land"
  /equipaction 3 Prospect
  /equipaction 4 "Wrist Flick"

  Some things I’ve found are that capitalization seems to count when writing macros, and any time you are selecting an item or action with a multiple-word name you’ll need to enclose the name in double-quotes (note that Prospect did not need the quotes in my example). Also, you cannot switch your gear when you are in “active” mode. If you have a weapon in your hand, you cannot switch jobs.

Obviously a lot of how a game like this will work depends on the release of full content, opening up all the playable areas, and the player community developing. This means I cannot make a strong prediction one way or the other, but my nostalgia for FFXI and the overall strength of the Final Fantasy brand has me quite optimistic.