Patch 1.17: Grand Companies, 20 new Notorious Monsters, etc.

A pretty solid patch, really.

- New sidequests.
- Balancing of guildleve rewards.
- Adjustments to party system (max party size down from 15 to 8, etc) and thus party battle content.
- Adjustments to environment collision detection.
- Adjustments to enemy distribution.
- Addition of new notorious monsters.
- Implementation of new equiment/items.
- Reduction in randomness affectiong approach phase in gathering (ie, less extreme RNG, yay).
- Adjustments and additions to active icons.
- And mentioned in a later update on Lodestone, Grand Company-related content.

Decent. Still awaiting the bigger changes being mentioned around the forums - particularly to do with the job system and crafting - the exact words being used to do with crafting by the dev team are "materia system", I :bou::bou::bou::bou: you not. But all the same, I'm quite happy with 1.17 from the looks of it. Still waiting on the finer details to be put onto Lodestone, though, I'm just going by the 'preview' post.

Can you tell us more about the concept of Grand Company?

FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone

Hmm, sounds good. My understanding is that they have something really big up their sleeves too?

For this specific patch? Nothing I know about. I do know there is an egg hunting event due soon, mind you, for Easter. Or at least an "egg hu---" event. Which could be egg hurling or egg hurting or egg hugging for all I know. But it's probably egg hunting.

I mean in the next few months, I thought there was talk about some big stuff coming?

The job system is due to change and I expect improved travel options (ie, chocobos) around the same kind of time. A 'materia system' is also being looked at for crafting. No idea how far away these things are though.

I noticed that the reduction in max party size means a reduction in the max amount of volunteers in a Behest quest. Soooo, now you have to be super fast in order to even accept a quest from a Battlewarden in a camp near Ul'Dah. I thought this might force people to be more active in other camps, but I haven't seen that yet...in Gridania, at least. I really like that area, so I wish more people hung out there.

They probably will after the redesign of the Black Shroud. That may take a little while, though. But yeah, the main issue is that people for the most part just don't like navigating the region. I like it to some extent, but in the end I must concede that I do all my leves in La Noscea and Thanalan now. Hopefully that redesign will be done soon enough and we'll see a lot of people walking back that way to check things out.