FFXIV: Looking Back at...Patch 2.3 (ARR 10th Anniversary)

foreign Mr Happy here and welcome back to another one of my retro Final Fantasy 14 videos a romerborn turns 10 this year and so I've been looking back at old jobs old raids and even old patches which is what we're doing in this video for this one we're going to be taking a look at patch 2.3 the halfway mark through that miraculous re-release of A Realm Reborn and a lot different than our usual halfway marks that we've seen up to and through everything except for n Walker but 2.3 is kind of a packed one so I think we should just get right to it alright patch 2.3 Defenders of aorzia so I wrote out a list for this one ahead just to make sure I got all the important stuff and Patch 2.3 was kind of a loaded patch there's a lot of brand new ideas features and quality of life here that are defining to things that I still engage with today or were precursors to content that we have today of course we have the main scenario real Quest again I don't know why I even bother saying it every video because of course it has main scenario quests literally every Patch's main scenario Quest every major patch in terms of side quest though it of course had the continuation of Hildebrand no trial like in patch 2.2 but it was still an okay Hildebrand patch overall oh and it also had the delivery Moogle side quests those are ones that were actually kind of interesting they're still in the game and they offer a lot of insight into some of the side characters so I would definitely uh recommend going out of your way to do those if you haven't done them yet especially if you've enjoyed other things like tataru's Grand Endeavor or any of the other various side quests that we've gotten in the recent end Walker patches then we get into Dungeons and once again we had three dungeons back in all of our Realm Reborn patches we had Tim Tara hard mode and that one's actually one of the most interesting hard mode dungeons we've ever had you see temptara actually has this kind of little side dialogue and Quest that's going on alongside the main scenario and it is something that you engage with as part of the main scenario but there's a character who loses her loved one her party disbands and they're supposed to just be an amateur party and they ended up fleshing out her story a lot here in temtara hard mode as well as in the eventual Palace of the dead so that one holds a special place in a lot of people's hearts we also had Stone vigil hard mode which a little bit less liked but it does have some stuff that will be relevant in later patches specifically Mechanics for the final boss and for other bosses as a whole and then you have hole breaker Isle I don't really remember how people felt about that one it's a pretty unique dungeon in that there's a lot of environmental traps and ways to abuse the enemies that are attacking you there's traps that if you step on them they're really bad for you however you can also lure enemies over them and then it can trap them and they can take bonus damage on top of that it has some pretty gimmicky bosses especially the final boss which is again a love it or hated kind of situation but it was definitely representative of the more experimental kind of dungeons we used to have and less of the straightforward stuff we have now now speaking of dungeons there's a major feature that they added in patch 2.3 the item level SYNC feature yeah we didn't really have enough item level to Warrant a sync feature yet so they Incorporated it here in patch 2.3 however it actually wasn't used in any of those dungeons it was used in PvP specifically I think in front lines in the fold in order to item level sync people so that everyone was on equal footing regardless of the gear that they had and then on top of that they also added our first large-scale PvP map at this point we only had the fold which is basically Deathmatch 4v4 but they added the secure mode for front lines in patch 2.3 and that was a pretty major thing initially it was actually it was fairly well received but Final Fantasy 14 PVP has always been fighting an uphill battle and the actual game systems in PvP that were Incorporated in patch 2.2 weren't entirely sitting well with everyone so front lines had a surge of popularity that then waned and that's kind of been the pattern for Final Fantasy 14 PVP ever since doing a lot better in end Walker overall though oh man you know what's a feature that was added in patch 2.3 the hunt this is a feature that I spend countless hours on the very little amount of time I play during the off season of Final Fantasy 14 The Hunt is almost always something I'm doing it's basically a bunch of monsters out in the Overworld bosses out in the Overworld that Grant rewards that to this day are still incredibly valuable back then it was a little bit worse of an era so we currently have b-ranks a ranks and S ranks and even double s ranks are S Plus depending on you know how people want to classify them but the B ranks right now whenever they're killed they respawn five seconds later and those are used for weekly marks so people can just get some easy access to hunt currency however when it was first released in 2.3 it was a like a two hour respawn so if you weren't there to find it and attack it and get enough credit for it for your weekly it would take another two hours before you'd have another chance and the biggest meme was null because everyone had the same b-rank hunt in the first week and null was it so everyone would go around Court this just like no no no no and it was just an awful awful experience I don't remember when they fixed that I feel like they fixed the respawn times for that within probably about a month or two but it was a really really rough start not to mention figuring out all the conditions for the S ranks which are hilarious conditions I've got a whole video on that if you want to check that out now for other content we had circus Tower the 24-man raid the second one that's part of the uh Crystal Tower raid series of course way more important nowadays but that was actually a really really good 24-man when it released there's a lot of mechanics we don't see nowadays in Circus Tower especially with the second boss that made it a decent bit challenging back then let's just say my alliance raid guides were much more useful back in the day than they are are now given how the raid bosses are designed now we also had ramu and ramu extreme which was another really interesting one see ramu had a tank mechanic or pass a tank mechanic where it'll you basically have to get stacks of lightning from these orbs that spawn all around the arena and your tanks need to take turns collecting those and if there's too many on the field then Ramos attacks it harder but people struggled with that a lot in fact they probably still would if you were to do it synced so what ended up happening is Summoners could actually tank ramu with their Titan eggy and completely ignore all of those mechanics so you'd see Summoners stacking a bunch of Vitality material melds and just getting as much health as they could and then just using sustain in order to keep the little nugget up and then on top of that you would have you know the actual healers providing a shield to him occasionally and stuff like that but it was like you know zero tanks it was Zero tanks and like two healers so you would just destroy the boss with all the extra DPS that you would have and uh yeah Square Enix didn't like that they fixed that pretty quickly but it's a fun little error to remember and then we had the one that started it all when it comes to difficult raids now let me be clear the coils were designed to be what would be our modern day equivalent of savage but we didn't have a Savage difficulty or a story difficulty even back then it was one difficulty the end game raid and if you wanted to do the story for quail you had to go through that however in patch 2.3 we got our first experimental raid in that of second coil Savage now it's the only one of the initial coils that had any sort of savage difficulty first and final both didn't have it and the rewards were the same except that you would get an achievement and a title upon clearing it for each individual fight as for the actual fight design they largely just fixed up exploits that people had found with the original encounters for a second coil and then multiplied a lot of mechanics so they appear two to four times more frequently the did add new mechanics as well to some of them but that's the general gist it was also scaled to be done in the best possible item level that you had available at the time while it's labeled Savage it's much closer to something like ultimate and as such it's actually very challenging even to this day if you go back and do it synced maybe even cut your gear back a little bit so it's a little more difficult even synced gears I'd say way too strong for a second coil Savage right now it can be a very very enlightening time when it comes to how the game worked back then and what kind of bosses we were up against at the time now the rest of the features or additions were either quality of life or things that they were absolutely important features but what I say they were as influential as some of the other things like the hunt or or front lines or even Savage no but still very important like we had the introduction of the first time tomestone bonus that was apparently added in patch 2.3 and also interestingly a apparently before patch 2.3 if you made a tomestone purchase at the NPC it just gave you the item without a confirmation window so if you bought the wrong thing it didn't pop up and say are you sure you wish to buy this for this amount of tomestones it just ended up in your inventory so it's not like it was super easy to grief yourself back then we also had augmented artifact armor essentially it was just your artifact armor but you could do a side quest to make it dyable and uh yeah they've had all sorts of weird solutions to diable artifact armor over every expansion and that is definitely one of the weirder ones we had Chocobo raising slash the Chocobo stable and even the ability to reset the skill tree on your Chocobo I remember us expecting that was going to be something really interesting but what it boiled down to is you stable your Chocobo you feed it and it gets some experience points whoop-dee-doo now fortunately with gardening and the thevenarian onion which I don't remember which patch that was actually added in I didn't see it in these notes so it might be something later that would become more influential being able to get over Rank 10 for your Chocobo but for here it was you know nice if you just didn't want to actually go out and grind your Chocobo levels but it's not like the Chocobo mattered that much I guess spirit bond people used it that's a whole thing but yeah that was another feature that was added we also have D synthesis now D synthesis right now is a super accessible and easy thing but for most of its lifespan including when it was introduced in 2.3 it was kind of a headache to use desynthesis you could only get a certain amount of total levels between every craft which meant that you had to basically pick three of them you wanted to max out and then you could kind of work a little bit on another one you also could only decent items within a certain range of your desynthesis skill but what the exchange for that was while it was harder to get into it was harder to level it also meant there was more money in it in fact one of the Relic steps in patch 2.3 which yes patch 2.3 did have the next steps of The Relic quest line in I believe both 2.3 and 2.35 uh you actually needed to desynth items from an NPC in order to get the item that you needed which meant that people who went out of their way to level D synthesis not that you needed much level to descent these items you needed almost none I actually made a decent amount of money from that so that was the big thing you just make so much more money off desensis until they made that change you know just not too many years ago what else do we have here we have housing stuff they added another Ward to the existing housing areas oh and also private Chambers yeah the ability to rent your own room within the free company house that was added in patch 2.3 as well that's pretty nice oh one thing I actually missed in the 2.2 video in 2.28 they added the sightseeing log which right now most people would just associate it with getting a little bit of extra exp the lore entry is nice and there's some minions tied behind it but back then it was a whole ordeal they've nerfed a lot of the older realm reborn one since and obviously we have flying now so that of course makes it easier to some capacity but oh boy that was a time and in 2.3 I believe they started making significant Nerfs to the really annoying ones for sightseeing logs but it was not great and then we have a bunch of other little things here The Toy Chest in your in room the ability to summon the esthetician at the Crystal Bell in your in-room was here apparently the gear preview window didn't show actual weapon effects up until this patch that's an interesting one oh my goodness the ability to interact with NPCs while on a mount was added in 2.3 before then you had to get off a mount anytime you wanted to talk to an NPC now it gets us off the mount automatically but you couldn't even do that back then you had to manually get off the mount every time and on top of that mount actions were added you know how like you can sometimes like shoot fireworks or a laser beam or whatever out of your Mount yeah we couldn't do that until 2.3 I think they just added it for the magitek mount the one that you get at the end of the aroma born story but obviously we have tons of Mount actions nowadays so things have come a long way since there's also the side quest series The Greatest Story never told now this was a set of side quests that didn't have Quest objectives you were you would be given information about how to solve the riddle within the quest itself and then it was on you to figure out where to go nowadays you could just Google all the results but obviously when it first came out and people were trying to do it without being told what to do it was a lot more exciting and you could still do that now as long as you just don't Google where all those things are so that's a Nifty little thing that was added in 2.3 we also had unhidden treasure maps now bear in mind we didn't have treasure dungeons yet in A Realm Reborn but unhidden treasure maps were basically bonus treasure maps that you could find in the loot for the regular treasure maps which were added I believe in patch 2.1 we covered that in the first video so it was just an extra layer of Loot and money to be made which was great a lot of people really liked that system and then it returned in some capacity in storm blood in an enhanced form and I'm not gonna lie I've kind of been waiting for something similar to happen again because while I think the layered RNG can be quite frustrating given that I can't even get through the regular RNG sometimes it's just that nice little bit to keep the party going to keep the activity engaged given that you're limited to how many treasure maps you can gather in a set period of time and then if you really want to keep going you either need to have stored them away for a while or buy more maps so I just like this as a system to get more out of whatever party you had formed oh and the last thing on my list I'm again I'm sure this isn't everything but the ability to toggle HP percent display on monsters we could not do that until 2.3 and you might be thinking to yourself wait happy but if raid bosses had had percentage based transitions how did you know well you didn't people did of course use a certain uh Advanced tracker that you may be familiar with to get that kind of information prior to this but if you were a vanilla player then you just didn't find that out you had to eyeball it and uh that wasn't great let me tell you it wasn't great either way as you can see 2.3 has so many things that we just kind of take for granted nowadays or we don't see as much nowadays especially like those unhidden treasure maps it's a lot more influential of a patch than I had remembered it being but I mean you can't deny things like the hunt our first large-scale PVP Savage D synthesis like there's so many things here that are genuinely impressive and this is why I'm doing this series to remind myself and everyone watching you know that we didn't always have a lot of the things that we have so when we do get stuff that we're excited to have or expansions on these systems or updates to them uh just know that they had to start somewhere and apparently for a lot of them it was 2.3 anyway that's going to be a wrap at our retro look back at patch 2.3 thank you for watching this video be sure to like favorite subscribe and share go discuss these types of things in your discords and make sure you share the video as well because well it supports the channel and I enjoy doing this and I'm sure a lot of people would love to know more about the history three of Final Fantasy 14. anyway thanks for watching I'll see you all in the next one and until then take care [Music]

Channel: Mrhappy1227

Views: 11,884

Keywords: Square, Enix, Mrhappy, Game, Games, Gaming, MMO, RPG, MMORPG, FF, Final, Fantasy, Final Fantasy, FF14, FFXIV, Final Fantasy 14, Final Fantasy XIV, Guide, Tips, Tricks, How To, Lets, Play, Lets Play

Id: kpsItg2tYyE

Length: 16min 47sec (1007 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023