7:15 About spearfishing: they fully reworked it with the release of Endwalker so it's now a minigame. They also added new actions for it linked to the newly introduced angler's art mechanic. We even got a fisher's intuition on a spearfishing node for the first time ever. It also remains the single most efficient way to farm aethersands for endgame crafting. So it is far from abandoned!

@iPlayOnSpica

6 ай бұрын

You can also abuse spearfishing for Thaliak's Favor to recover gp fast between mining/harvesting collectables.

@TheIvoryDingo

6 ай бұрын

While it isn't abandoned... I certainly wouldn't mind a more "up to date" gig.

@cparle87

6 ай бұрын

Oof. Yes. Was reading a guide for farming skybuilder scrips in the Diadem, read it needed X such and such stats, thought to myself EZPZ I got that on my miner and botanist. Then went in there, wondered where all my stats went, and remembered the fishing offhand tool is completely useless. @@TheIvoryDingo

Having tanks wear lvl 60 accessories for better dps since the lvl 70 accessories had no strength on them is a key memory from early stormblood :)

@scottywalnut

6 ай бұрын

Good old strength melds on tanks

@yumyuum6390

6 ай бұрын

oh yh, when you entered susano farm and tanks get one shoted by tb. those werent fun

"a new lease on life" right as the sparring cutscene on the statue cuts to an extended shot of Lyse, I see what you did there

@nexmeles8023

6 ай бұрын

I am so glad I am not the only one who heard that haha

My friends who were playing at Stormblood launch still joke about "Raubahn Extreme" and "Pippin Savage." It's one of those phenomenology of shared suffering type things where it sucks to be a part of it, but afterwards you can look back and say "yeah that sucked but it's kinda funny to think about now."

@KnightRaymund

6 ай бұрын

I can't believe he left out the community names!

@remigyfgrin8830

6 ай бұрын

Yeah, it's fascinating to see how they've shifted their design of the MSQ to avoid overloading their instance servers again. Specifically how they tend not to have solo-instances before the first dungeon anymore

3:14 The instancing-while-emoting issue was specifically when fighting Susano for MSQ. Stormblood introduced persistent emotes through duties: if you were doing an emote when you queued into a duty, when you came back out you would still be doing that emote. After fighting Susano for MSQ, however, you were immediately moved underwater outside the Isle of Zekki for a cutscene. If you happened to be doing an emote which could not be performed underwater (such as /sit) or riding a mount which couldn't fly/swim (not all mounts were flying mounts back then!) then the game encountered an error, you got null'd and hard locked out of your character.

As someone who started in HW, I was REALLY excited for SB. I remember taking a few days off ahead of the release and setting my alarm super early to jump in right when the servers opened. What I ran into was insane queue times that would often reset because of constant disconnects. When I finally got in, I hit Raubhan extreme and had the cycle repeat itself trying to log back in. Lol. I kept trying throughout the day and eventually gave up for almost a week. Good times. 😂

@fakade2987

6 ай бұрын

Raubahn extreme was rough i remember people lined up from the atheryte for hours waiting turns to get into the fight during the early access.

@Fade2BlackSS

6 ай бұрын

@@fakade2987 Yeah, it was so bad at times that you couldn't even find Raubhan due to the amount of people covering the screen. It was crazy.

@fakade2987

6 ай бұрын

@@Fade2BlackSS I was on Faerie and we ended up waiting in line and letting one person clear at a time so it didn't mess up the instance. Took a couple days but most of us got through it before the early access ended.

@Fade2BlackSS

6 ай бұрын

@@fakade2987 Whaaaat? 😂 That's actually pretty awesome.

@fakade2987

6 ай бұрын

@@Fade2BlackSS The community is 90% of the reason I love this game and will never switch servers.

Regarding FATES.. I wish they would make normal zones work like Bozja. They can have their own regional storylines told that way, with large exploratory sections outside of the MSQ corridor. I know it would be a lot but it would bring the world more to life and they could integrate relics and Deep dungeons into those zone specific stories.

@bamberscher_offiziell7261

6 ай бұрын

Thats sounds like a pretty nice idea

"With Stormblood, as with any expansion, kind of a chance of a new 'lease' on life." I see what you did there, maybe unintentionally, haha

I loved the vibes, story, areas and content of Stormblood. Personally I remember liking the balance too. I definitely feel it's overhated

@Siul_987

6 ай бұрын

I think sadly is really judged by the 4.0 story by most players (luckily the patches stories ended up been way better), but honestly content wise stormblood is still top tier.

17:02~ Magitek Predator. Magitek Reaper is the mount (Maggie) we borrow from the Garleans in Mor Dhona. I farmed that mount for ages under the PF "To Catch A Magitek Predator". Was good times, RNG not-withstanding

I had played since launch 2013 and into 2014, but came back around 3.2 but 4.0 was when I had a whole new friend group and official FC so Stormblood was when me and a ton of friends were REALLY getting into the game and I loved the hell out of it. What an amazing time

I remember the launch of stormblood, it was the first expansion launch I was there for, I got lucky with raubhahn extreme and managed to get through fairly quickly, but some people were waiting for days I heard.

I personally loved Stormblood. Hw story wasnt my thing and I only stuck with it cause I had seen some Shadowbringers stuff. Then I hit Stormblood and I loved it so much! I enjoyed Alisaie and Lyse's interactions through 4.0. Zenos and Yotsuyu were villians that just hit the right notes for me.

I love these videos so much dude! Gives me a look at how the game was and evolved in the years I didn't get to see with my own eyes. Keep 'em coming!

Stormblood was the expac where I feel people cared more about the story while not knowing the content and gameplay out at the time was pure fire 🔥 BA at release is to this day my favorite experience ever, even ahead of ultimates.

thank you Mr Happy. first pass through MSQ, didn't enjoy SB as much, but having played through it a few times now, I like the story much more.

The one issue with job balancing in stormblood was while it was doing relatively well on launch as they adjusted all the other jobs they ignored it so it's selfish dps just kind of fell behind especially for the average player, it started in 4.0 but we spent most of the expansion getting locked out of PF groups because people didn't think the job was good enough on average.

i remember raubahn savage back then , but now when you mention this points, its make me realize the developer teams always try to adjustment what lack in previous expansion and put it on new expansion , its make me appreciate them more. and be honest stormblood is one of the raid i really do enjoy

Thanks for sharing this, it helps put some perspective on the nostalgia.

Thanks for these retrospective videos! I've only been playing for a year, and I find the development history and how the game has changed to be just as interesting as the world and lore of the game itself.

I ve started in i HW so STB was my first time at the start of an expansion and it was great. Never felt the issue with Rabanh extreme and i actually think STB story is great. Pace issues dont destroy my memories of some of the best moments in FFXIV MSQ story up until today🙂. And when it comes to gameplay and content, STB is still the best imo. Eureka included

I still have a T-shirt somewhere that says "I survived Rhaubahn" with a kind of silhouette of him. Someone made shirts at the time and posted the link to Reddit and I picked one up. Still remember that. :D And it wasn't just Cold Steel, EVERY solo instance. So even people leveling Jobs couldn't progress them. And the worst part? Until you got passed Raubahn Ex and Pippin Savage (the follow-up), you couldn't even get to the next zone. ALL you could access was Rhalgar's and the west and north parts of Fringes AND NOTHING ELSE.

I really hope the adjust the Twist of Fate buff to include bicolor gems

Tail end of Stormblood's when I started playing so this'll be an interesting check on my own memory.

Stormblood will always be my absolute favorite expansion I don't care what anyone says.

"New Lyse on life." I see what you did there.

I wouldn't say spearfishing is abandoned. They gave it a neat minigame to farm in EW. Could they do more with it? Yeah for sure, but it's not dead at all

add Ra-La to Dead Ends as a mount!!

It's interesting that Stormblood is considered the pinnacle of content to me. That's the expansion where I played the least. I took a break from just after 4.1 until a little after 4.5. It was a mix of burnout from a lot of HW playtime and the SB content just not grabbing my attention as much

I will say, for people who are playing after the fact, it's very easy to judge an expansion based on the MSQ, because that's the grind everyone tells you to focus on "finish MSQ do side stuff later. So when you're judging each expac you're like "wow, the MSQ in that was great!" or "eh that was kinda mid" and then you forget which expansion the side content you love comes from.

@Scerttle

6 ай бұрын

Basically, I'm saying folks telling new players how to play the game are doing it wrong. I wish when I first played through the game I tackled content by patch instead of just focusing MSQ.

This was not what I hand in mind when we got the Trails of Cold Steel collab in Stormblood.

So so many changes. I remember throwing away my leveling job priorities list when they announced the subjobs removal. Even if it is the expansion that killed Yda (I miss Yda), and that 4.0 ending (urgh), I still like SB a lot.

The whole time i was playing stormblood i kept saying how do people hate this?! Only thing i remember was being a shlog was the ruby sea areas. Playing back through the dungeons recently made me realize the dungeons were actually all thematically cool af. The true 14 lovers love new zones new abilities new gear sets n dungeons new exs...plus eureka...mwah chefs kiss

>new lyse on life I saw what you did there

Stormblood was when I first got to endgame as I spent too much time mucking around with alts

I love Stormblood it was a very good Expansion and Tones of Persimmon fruit Gil woohoo And Yotsuyu and Gosetsu I have realy good memories of it ah and Namazus Yes Yes And Zenos Shinryu good Times

1:10 It's kinda a chance for a new "Lyse" on life heheh

Cold steel made me take a long break. I didn’t get back to playing till Endwalker.

Oh, but I disagree with you on the ques. Healer and Tank were both instant for basically the entire expansion, while DPS ones were...pretty terrible. While Trusts will help with that in DT, that will only help with MSQ ones, not tomestone grinds, 24 mans/8 mans, etc. Sooooo...it may still be a problem.

Goodbye money

endwalker did door bosses badly, Exdeath was so well done and perfect.

Content asside i thought stormblood was the death gnell of FF14 easily my leadt favorite expansion i rate it ut beliw ARR

Nice best expansion time

I loved ala mhigo and everytime i got swept under the rug to focus more on doma the mire mad i got till i eventually unsubbed. To this day i think its dumb you dont set foot in a monk temple except in an optional dungeon. To this day rhalgrs reach us my favorite hub area

I’m not very fond of Zenos as an antagonist, Gaius and even Regular were much more engaging. Hell even Golbez was a better antagonist. The blood knight trope isn’t something I find interesting. They should’ve focused more on ala mhigo and gave Zenos a better, more fleshed out personality. They need to stop giving the main cast huge amounts of plot armor, especially since they killed papalymo

drg being so awful on release is what made me switch to SAM from then onward

I told myself I wouldn't watch these videos because they legitimately make me angry, but I did and now I'm angry again at this logic. How do you convince yourself that Heavensward was somehow almost killing the game yet at the same time wondering how there's connection issues at Stormblood's release? I'm glad that you at least admitted that YOU felt like Heavensward could have killed the game, but you're making a retrospective series: you should stick to actual facts rather than what you felt at the time. Absolutely every piece of data we have shows that during HW player numbers were higher than during ARR, so if the game wasn't dying during ARR, it sure as hell wasn't dying during HW.

I think you mean A new LYSE on life. Haha okay I'll leave now

a lot of ppl dont realize this now, but stormblood while not my favorite story, its similar to endwalker in terms of new stuff they tried. eureka, the role actions, a lot of changes to the structure of the game. also basically the difficulty of normal and savage kinda standardized without so many highs and lows like hw. ultimates added later as well for the first time. and i feel EW in the future going to feel the same way. some ppl will shit on it. but the amount of improvements they did to the core game is really big. criterion/variants, trusts in eeeeevery msq dungeon, rework of a bunch of arr quests. a lot of QoL stuff that doesnt get enough appreciation. to me this whole "endwalker is bad, the game is dying" is just basically bullshit from the new content creators trying to make u click their videos cause they think the game always had all the features since release day 1 appearently, they dont try to understand context.

@cyanmage1

6 ай бұрын

people hate on the current expansion since the game came out even shadowbringers was being dumped on till the wow exodus happened then once we are in at the end of the next expansion people will look back and only recall the good stuff in endwalker just like every expansion before it except stormblood for some reason it still gets hate even though I think it was amazing but I'm a sucker for war stories and how people handle oppression differently

@Bardran1986

6 ай бұрын

@@cyanmage1 yeah. Guess u right. Btw, great name. Guess u really enjoy they used cyan's theme for hien first appearence. Heheh

@cyanmage1

6 ай бұрын

@Bardran1986 honestly it's even lamer then that back in 2000 I played a lot of starcraft and diablo 2 and my friends made a clan called the mages and we all just had color themes I picked cyanmage and just stuck with it all these years I wasn't the most original back in my high school days lol

@cyanmage1

6 ай бұрын

@Bardran1986 but yes I loved his theme when it played the first time sadly I didn't play ff6 till the ps1 port so it was after I already had this name

@Bardran1986

6 ай бұрын

@@cyanmage1 hahahah got u!!

the mere mention of Rhalgar's Reach evokes an involuntary shudder and a sense of nausea - the combination of the story, quests and *Lyse!* around that area were so oppressively long and boring, poorly paced with nails-on-chalkboard Lyse!, it's undoubtedly the worst part in all of FFXIV a reminder of how bad it is, the streamer Asmongold's enthusiasm and hype during his Heavensward playthrough was so monumental it broke population and sales records, causing droves of players to leave WoW for FFXIV... right up until Rhalgar's fucking Reach, whereupon like hitting a brick wall made of shit, he promptly quit the game and never came back

Speaking as 1.x player -> current. It's interesting that you perceive stormblood as the "pinacle" of content. Myself, as well as everyone I played with, consider it to be the inverse, in that it is the worst expansion, by far, and I still feel that way still to this day. Everything from the story, to the double dps release (which made a bunch of ls-mates vacate), to the raid series being a cop-out nostalgia grab, simplifaction of job aquisition, new sub-stats are overall considered a failure are considered negatives by my playgroup. So it's interesting that some of these you callout as positives and have such a glossy view of it. Sort of stating this just to highlight it's not considered pinacle by the entire community, hopefuly provides more texture.

The only real problems with stormblood looking back was class balancing issues at the start (Some serious, but most overblown) and the expansion story actually being terrible (Arguably getting worse with the patch content with some VERY PROBLEMATIC translations. Hi, slave apologist Hein.) but other than that, stormblood arguably has the best content in FFXIV. I still argue that ShB is better, may not have as much but, to me, overall better designed, with the exception of Bozja in the long term. Better fights, better grind, but the implementation of a necessary 24-man really hurt it in the long term imo. (That and Eureka weapons look so much better than the jolly rancher Bozja weapons)

@taco_sensei

6 ай бұрын

I would really like to hear why you (and actually a lot of people) think the expansion story is terrible. Like truly terrible, not meh or mid, TERRIBLE? I personally loved it. It really seems it divides the community

@cyanmage1

6 ай бұрын

@@taco_sensei I loved it as well but I also loved Zenos since they first showed him at fanfest and I was so happy they brought him back in the post msq of stormblood and even more so that we had the team up to save the world so happy I called that way before endwalker, all my friends were convinced Hydaelyn was going to be the big bad at the end

I didnt like stormblood, was trash. Shadow bringer was way better.

@taco_sensei

6 ай бұрын

"Trash" is pretty brutal tbh but I guess I gotta respect your opinion lol

@PedroMcCloud

6 ай бұрын

Opposite for me. Stormblood was way better than Shadowbringner

@carbonide1290

6 ай бұрын

@@taco_senseiyou don’t to respect trash takes like this

@yumyuum6390

6 ай бұрын

no one asked.

@Sparda51

6 ай бұрын

@@yumyuum6390In the video he literally asks everyone who watches the video lol