1.19 - The "Monster Patch"
Quote:
Originally Posted by Yoshi-P
In an earlier letter, I believe I used the word “heavyweight” to describe patch 1.18. Well, patch 1.19 will be a veritable monster. To give you a rough idea of its size, we’re expecting the patch notes to be 3–5 times longer than 1.18’s.
I'll try to summarise the long list of changes as best I can. Firstly the patch is due out late September at the earliest. This is their target date. Also, I'll skip the various "balancing of ___" stuff because that to me is an ongoing thing.
With that out of the way...
- IMPORTANT FOR WHEN READING THIS LIST: Physical levels are being abolished. Ranks will be renamed Levels. Skill Points will be renamed Experience Points.
- Simplified Opening Tutorials.
- Additional quests regarding the danger facing Eorzea.
- Additional supplemental quests.
- Additional Grand Company quests allowing 'full induction' into a Grand Company, including "speeches by the heads of state".
- Another event (predicting it's a Halloween thing)
- Ifrit Battle (and cutscenes) for both level 30 and level 50 characters.
- 'Caravan Escort' quests (level 20).
- Beastmen stronghold raids.
- A low level raid dungeon.
- Treasure chests in field areas (I assume this means 'free for all' chests as opposed to guildleve chests).
- Rental chocobos.
- Personal chocobos.
- Airships linking the three city-states.
- A system where you can accrue guildleve allowance so you can do more leves at the weekend.
- Ability to retry failed leves ("but not without conditions").
- Reorganising of systems such as the leve exchange system.
- Grand Company leves.
- Introduction of Grand Company ranks and exchangeable items.
- Introduction of supply and replenishment objectives.
- Diversification of the beastmen enemy types.
- More Notorious Monsters (for the low level dungeon, notably).
- Battle Regimens to be suspended while the foundations of the battle system are adjusted.
- New class-specific animations/motions for auto-attack.
- 'Link' system for enemies to be introduced, where they will call for reinforcements depending on player strength.
- Experience chain bonus for defeating enemies in quick succession.
- Experience bonus for defeating enemies that have linked.
- Change in formula for experience distribution.
- Classes to be made more unique. Notably, they will ask for player feedback to decide which actions should become unique to classes and which should be useable by multiple classes.
- Development of more unique motions for the various weapon skills etc.
- Addition of new recipes.
- Simplification of recipes.
- Materia system. This involves a large chunk of stuff, but to summarise, you can put materia into weapons/armor to increase their stats. You can remove materia, too, but this will lead to the loss of materia. Weapons and armor with materia in them can be turned into materia when certain criteria are met (ie, you 'level them up').
- Addition of spirit bond attribute to compliment the materia system.
- Stealth ability to be added for Disciples of Land & Hand.
- Config option to change camera movement speed.
- Implementation of a 'toggle function' for macro palettes.
- Ability to hide your primary weapon from view.
- Addition of a targeting mode that allows only engaged enemies to be targeted.
- Addition of new audio configuration options (e.g. muting all audio except BGM).
- Revised config mapping for gamepad and additional keyboard config options.
- New claiming system.
- Direct targeting of aetherytes etc. (for those who don't know, currently you have to select a nearby aetheryte using the menu).
And I think that'll do.
EDIT: It is worth reading over this thread in the offiical FFXIV forums for crafting changes. For the most part, I consider these changes glorious (and I say that as someone who has a weird love for crafting).
