Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy XIV, Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood, Square Enix

Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood's First Patch Brings Raids Back

We've finally made it to Final Fantasy XIV: Stormblood's first patch. Today's update adds the first raid of Stormblood, which will take 8 players through a series of fights involving Allagan artifact known as Omega. Players who enjoyed Heavensward's Alexander raids will find these pretty familiar in concept and difficulty. Unlike the Coils of Bahamut, your average player should be able to clear these without too many headaches, although I'd recommend not taking these on with a party matched in the Duty Finder just yet. Give it a week or so before people get used to how things work, and until then, pick up the Omega raids with your friends or Free Company.

As the maintenance period to implement patch 4.01 has just finished, I haven't gotten a chance to test out the Omega raids just yet, but they are absolutely on my immediate log-in to-do list for the morning. Because there is nothing to mark the birth of a country quite like dying in an 8-player full party raid, and I'm just that patriotic.

With the Omega raid and quest line likely to take up to 12 stages to complete, we'll be seeing a whole lot more of Omega as we go on – including a savage mode for those of us who just love to die a lot. We got the first four stages of the Omega raids today, so that's plenty of content to sink your teeth into. There was no minimum item level entry requirement given for the first set of Omega raids, you just have to be a disciple of war or magic at level 70 and complete the quest "The Hunt for Omega" to get started facing down the raid bosses in the Interdimensional Rift. That quest is going to unlock the Omega storyline, so it being an entry requirement isn't much of a surprise. The Omega stages, rather, the Omega: Deltascape, looks pretty damn awesome.

However, with Omega finally in play, we have now completed the Final Fantasy end-game trifecta. Ultima was one of the major fights that brought about the end of patch 2.0 A Realm Reborn, and Stormblood has now given us both Shinryuu and Omega. Naturally, this is the usual progression for those bosses, so that's pretty much true to form. What will be interesting is to see where we go next, now that we've gotten the usual recurring big bads out of the way.

Personally, I'm hoping we actually end up fighting Bahamut one of these days because I really want to punch Bahamut in the face a few times, but that just might be some lingering FFXV resentment rearing its head. And also my fondness for Upheaval's animation.

We also got a number of bug fixes and quality of life improvements alongside patch 4.01. One of the things I am very, very pleased to see are a number of enmity generation improvements to tank classes major enmity rotation. One of my main issues with Stormblood's battle system changes was just how difficult it got trying to tank things while being slightly less well-geared than the rest of your party – sometimes even when geared as well as your party. While the enmity generation problem was noticable by the time we hit the final patch of Heavensward, it wasn't anywhere near as bad as it was all through Stormblood.

The problem most likely arose from the fact that, as everyone else's DPS and healing increased with the jump in item levels and level cap, while tanks enmity generation stayed about the same, we ended up with tanks being less effective at getting and holding hate. It was mostly an indirect nerf. Which is not ideal. So, seeing that tweaked with has really made my morning. Although I am still somewhat bitter about the loss of my Foresight and Bloodbath cooldowns, I'll live. At least I won't be provoking adds off of Bards any more because I ran out of TP by spamming Overpower.

Bard and Ninja also got a bit of tweaking, but mostly the skill changes were based around the tanks. Which is exactly how they should be. More class and job ability tweaks will be coming in patch 4.05, but things should have time to level-off after this.

So the full list of class action changes are:

Gladiator/Paladin

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