Quite frankly, endgame dungeons, outside of being one of several various Tomestone delivery methods, have very little reason to exist in terms of progression.
I don’t want to talk at length about these here, since I already spent a whole post on them, but they exemplify one of the weirdest things about FFXIV’s endgame better than any other piece of content. I’m also not going to dwell too long on each individual aspect here-I want to talk more in-depth about some of these things later, and I don’t want to retread too much ground when the time comes. It’s worth noting in all cases that rewards that aren’t valuable to one’s main job may still be valuable to alternate jobs, but at least for the purposes of this discussion, I’m focusing on how the endgame is structured for each player’s primary class. Some of the other facets of the endgame have been around since A Realm Reborn, so let’s talk about those first. Most other meaningful content at the level cap serves primarily to prepare players who might want to raid to do so (or, to a lesser degree, help those who are raiding but have ceased to progress to do that instead). In many ways, these two paths are the core of FFXIV’s endgame. In terms of progression, FFXIV more or less offers two paths to the maximum gear during each raid tier: Tomestone gear, which mostly takes time (with the highest gear only being available in the latter half of each tier) and high-end raid (Savage) gear, which is gated both by difficulty and time (though less so on the time front, since you can get the highest raid gear as soon as you can clear the content, even if you only get one set of drops per week).
There are more things to do than all of these, of course, but it’s these activities that form the core of character progression at the level cap in FFXIV, which means some combination of them is going to make up a good part of a level-capped player’s time. So when I talk about the endgame in Heavensward, I’m not thinking solely of Alexander (Savage), but also the normal modes of Alexander, level 60 dungeons, Relic/Anima weapon quest lines, Extreme Trials, Alliance Raids, Hunts, the Deep Dungeon, and Exploratory Missions. The ways you get that gear and progress your character after you can no longer gain experience can loosely be defined as an MMO’s endgame. In the modern MMO space, it’s pretty common for gear upgrades to take the place of experience and levels once a player has reached the cap (though this isn’t ubiquitous). Most MMOs tend to change once you hit the level cap-up to that point, your main focus is on gaining levels, new abilities, and growing more powerful in an organic sort of way.
Really, though, an MMO’s endgame is a lot broader than that-or at least, it should be, if it’s going to keep players entertained (and subscribing or spending money on cash shops) at the level cap. It was World of Warcraft, really, that popularized what we might call raid dungeons (along with a ton of other things that are more or less standard in the MMOs of today). So far, I’ve talked about Anima Weapons, the Diadem, the Main Scenario (spoilers!), and the expansion’s dungeons. On the heels of that last one, I’ve been thinking a lot about the overall shape of the game’s level 60 “endgame,” so I’m going to talk about that in broad strokes today.įor a good part of the last decade or so, when people talk about the “endgame” of an MMO, they’re often thinking of raiding, such as the Coils of Bahamut or Alexander in Final Fantasy XIV, or Molten Core or Sunwell from World of Warcraft. Sporadically over the next couple of months I’m going to collect some of my thoughts on various legs of the game. As Final Fantasy XIV’s first major expansion, Heavensward had a lot to live up to, and carried a pretty heavy burden, as far as solidifying the game’s foundation for the future goes, and now that it’s nearly over, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the expansion did well and what it didn’t.
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