After the three introductory dungeons, FF14 throws us up against Ifrit, the first of the Primals (basically gods for the beastmen) we get to crush in Eorzea. Ring of fire, anyone?
A quick note on those first three dungeons:
They’re required to progress through the main story, and I can’t decide whether it’s archaic or weirdly charming. In WoW, some of the main quest chains in zones will lead up to the dungeons, but they don’t require yuo to tunr them for story progression. You can skip right over them if you want! But some of the dungeons in FF14, like so much of its other content, are slotted into the backbone of the main story. It seems old school, but I kind of like it.
I would like it MORE if the first dungeon you run wasn’t this incredibly boring pirate-themed cave, but at least you only have to run it once. The second and third introduce much more interesting boss mechanics to break up the tank-n-spank, the environments are better, and I think they’re actually shorter too. The Tam Taru Deepcroft was my favorite of the three, with vertical construction and a crazy squid-head final boss. Didn’t take any screenshots of that, sorry!
But back on topic: IFRIT.
I’m leveling up as a gladiator first so I queued as a tank, my friend joined up as a DPS thaumaturge, and we were only in the duty finder for a minute before we had our last two party members. It’s a pretty straightforward fight, mostly tank-n-spank for me, but he does have a few mechanics to watch out for.
- Big ol’ fire AOE. Whenever you see swirly fire patterns on the ground beneath you, move or you’re getting hot feet. He does two different bursts. One directly beneath him, which I think the tank just has to take. Melee DPS might have to move out to keep pressure off the healer. I’m not sure. he also does a ring of bursts around the outside of the arena, so ranged DPS and healers have to watch out for that.
- Kill the nail. At some point he’ll summon a big red nail. I don’t know if he can do it multiple times, but we only ran into it once. DPS need to kill that ASAP, because he’ll do a massive AOE soon and if the Nail is still up he will kill everyone. Not cool!
But we didn’t run into any problems and I knocked him out on the first try! No loot reward, but the following cut scene offered some more info on the overarching Big Bads I haven’t really encountered yet.
I like tanking as a gladiator okay, but I really don’t have that many options. Right now it feels a lot more passive than what I’ve been doing in TSW, but I’m guessing that will change as I get further into the main story and mechanics advance. I’m looking forward to hitting 30 and unlocking the Paladin job, and I might switch up and do some tanking as a marauder too.
Has anyone else been running dungeons in FF14? How do you like the gameplay as a tank, healer, or DPS compared to that in other games?
MEGADIRGE 