Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward
Ok, I finally finished the main story of Heavensward. Let's talk.
This is Final Fantasy XIV's first expansion and for me it's a mixed bag. There's both good and bad.
First, The Bad. I hated leveling through this expansion. Heavensward increased the level cap from 50 to 60. The first 5 levels weren't too bad, but the xp curve after level 55 drove me crazy. The story no longer gave enough experience to keep leveling up and I had to do a ton of grinding. I nearly gave up on this expansion at level 57, 58, and 59. I would finish literally every quest available to me and still have half a level of experience points left that I needed. It was infuriating.
But the reason it was so infuriating was because the story was level gated... and the story was fantastic.
So, let's talk The Good. The story is amazing. It is easily the best story in an MMO expansion that I've ever experienced. It builds on the story from Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. This may sound like nothing, but it's actually huge. Most expansions tend to throw away the old plot lines or at least ignore them. Final Fantasy XIV embraces it's story and continues to build on it masterfully.
The story is the shining highlight of Heavensward.
It would also be horrible of me to skip over the music. Heavensward has my favorite MMO music of all time. Hands down. It's amazing. I really hope they release a soundtrack for it soon, because I want it. The music is so good.
I don't know how I feel about this expansion overall. I'm level 60, I've finished the story, now I'm kinda waiting for the future content patches. Speaking of those content patches, they should be good if history shows anything with Final Fantasy XIV. The content patches for A Realm Reborn were great.
I don't know if I would recommend this expansion to people in it's current state. If you want to see the continuing story of Final Fantasy XIV... it's probably worth it. But, I can't understate how bad the experience curve is in this game. Be warned. But also be warned that the story is fantastic.
As noted in a prior post, I had no problems at all while leveling. I was 57.98% when I ran out of content in the HW zones and had to run 3 leve quests from Foundation to hit 58 to un-gate from a level 58 quest, and then I was 59.98% when I ran out of quests and had to run 2 more leve quests to hit 60 to ungate the final portion of the story.
ReplyDeleteAnd I missed a quest series in Mor Dhona that opens at 54 that would have been enough to cover both of those.
I did no dungeon running to get additional xp, though I did run the Vault 1 time with an FC-mate. I mostly skipped FATE's becuz the onesin in CWH gave next to no xp, so I assumed all the later ones were the same.
As a result, I have no idea what to tell you as to why your leveling experience differed so radically from mine. I found the xp to be "just enough" where you found it to be "totally insufficient." Makes no sense to me.