FFXIV: Patch 5.3

This post contains spoilers for Patch 5.3 for Final Fantasy XIV.

FFXIV's latest patch came out last week. The MSQ was the finale of the Shadowbringers story.

Truthfully, I am not the biggest fan of Shadowbringers. It was quite good, but I didn't love it. And honestly, this patch was for the people who loved it. There were long goodbyes, as you go around to all the new zones and say farewells, having many of the story NPCs show up again.

The final fight was quite good, though, with a superb unexpected cameo. The only issue I have with the fight is that there is one of those active time events where you have to rapidly press a button. The problem is that all eight members of the party have to pass the event. I think it should have been 6 of 8 or so, to allow a little carrying of people who might have trouble with that.

The Nier 24-man raid story also continued. There were so many deaths during that raid. I think we had one healer healing and the other constantly ressing. Several times our group got wiped out and the other groups had to come save us. Heh, one time, our healer managed to use Limit Break 3, ressing everyone in the group, right into a mechanic which killed most of us. He was very upset.

However, it is one of those raids where it will be much better when people get used to the new mechanics.

The final bit of the patch is the Sapphire Weapon story. Here the game went full Gundam with piloting a giant robot and everything. I think the entire thing, including a lot of the dialogue, was a Gundam reference, but I'm not very familar with the franchise.

 There was also a season summer event which was pretty weird. There was a FATE where you had to dance to encourage a bomb to blow up and defeat a giant shark with arms and legs.

The problem I'm having with FFXIV is that there doesn't seem to be much to work on. Too much story, not enough grind, if that makes sense. This expansion is really missing something like Eureka, where you can just log in and work on something at a light pace. Admittedly, though, it's been very crafter-centric, and I haven't really leveled any crafting jobs. And unfortunately, I'm really not fond of max-level dungeon gameplay, wall-to-wall AOE, which is the main gearing grind.