Live Letter XII Dated and New Dungeon Confirmed

[Andromeda]

Square Enix has released the date and talking points for the Letter from the Producer LIVE XII, which is going to be in Osaka. The letter will be on January 25th at 7am EST. They specifically state that this is part one of a two part letter for Patch 2.2. While Patch 2.2 has no specific date or time frame yet beyond the 2-3 months after the last major patch, it is very possible 2.2 could see release in very late February or early March, since the March letter will likely not cover 2.2 content.

The new announcement out of the post is the name of the new dungeon to appear in 2.2. Yoshida confirmed in previous letters that the plan for all patches would be a release of 2 hard mode dungeons and 1 new dungeon. The new dungeon is called Ruins of Amdapor, which is likely going to be related to Amdapor Keep, an existing dungeon.

Additionally, Leviathan has been confirmed for the letter as well the new turns for the Binding Coil of Bahamut. They also confirmed that there will be new quests involving Hildibrand, which made his return in 2.1. There will be more talking points for the letter, but have not been reveal yet.

Source: FINAL FANTASY XIV, The Lodestone | Letter from the Producer LIVE Part XII (01/14/2014)

[loaf]

The XII made me think they were making a new Dungeon based off of Pharos. OMG

[Kurt Zisa]

Yeah I thought they were going to do some really cool XII tie-in, like the Pharos or the Zertian Caverns or something. It may just happen in the future though.

[loaf]

Could be, since they did the Crystal Tower from FFIII in this game. I could totally see them making another dungeon based off of a previous FF title. I mean they would have to start from scratch but hey, jobs for their people! Hell even a Dungeon on Taejin's Tower even! So many they can do!

[Andromeda]

Well Patch 2.1 did have Pharos Sirius added to the dungeons. >.> Sort of the same thing right. ;p

[loaf]

Not even close!

[Andromeda]

Pharos was the massive tower/lighthouse structure right? It's been a long time since I've played FFXII. Pharos Sirius is a lighthouse as well. >.>

But, you actually already getting XII content in the form of the Judges, their likeness shows up as the Garlean head military figures in the Eorzea campaign that they have. It is one of the reasons that the Garleans actually look really cool, because they very much like the Judges. Both happen to come from technologically advanced and large countries from a far-a-way land.

[Treize]

There are a few things that I'm wondering about that I hope they answer even though they aren't all covered in their discussion topics.

What kind of new gear will they add?
Will they just add gear for the new coil drops or will there also be new tome gear? If there is new tome gear, will it be bought with myth tomes or will they add another currency in 2.2 like they did say they would do at some point? I really like the i90 drops from the Ex primals. It's nice to have something that you can try to work for than just the give me myth gear and the completely random coil drops. But they haven't really announced much difficult content besides coil, so I don't know if they are planning to implement more of this.

How will they fix housing?
Houses are still way too expensive. Most FCs can't even afford a small house, which is so small that I can't even see why anyone would want it. Having expensive houses isn't really a problem, but it becomes a problem when it is just so hard to make that much money. This leads in to my next question.

How will they try or will they even try to fix the market?
It's way too easy to max out crafting classes and make everything. The demand is also decreasing every day for almost all the craftable items. This has led to basically the entire market crashing. They really killed the high end stuff too by making it so easy to get tomestones. It's getting to the point where pretty soon we'll have to pay to get people to take the philosophy tome items from us. The materia is pretty much a joke too. It costs way too much gil to overmeld gear that doesn't even compete with myth gear which is so easy to get by just waiting a week for each piece.

Will there be some kind of decent story behind the new dungeon?
Basically there is no decent story behind any of the level 50 dungeons. I'm not expecting anything from the HM dungeons, but they should at least attempt to make a decent story behind these dungeons and why we're in them. Pharos Sirius is a lot of fun, but the story is definitely far from stellar.

Will Leviathan be the only new "boss"?
I keep hearing that there will be a surprise primal in 2.2, but I haven't really seen any confirmation from official sources. Honestly, only 1 new boss isn't much at all. Leviathan HM will likely be a joke because pretty much everyone will be full i90 from just myth by the time 2.2 hits. Leviathan Ex(this is confirmed right?) and Moogle Mog EX should hopefully provide at least some kind of challenge, but I'm really doubting it'll be anything like the current Ex primal difficulty.

Anyone else have questions about 2.2 or expectations for the answers for my questions?

[Andromeda]

There will be a new tome type that they will be adding. It's not clear when they will be adding it, but they have confirmed there will be a third type in one of the upcoming patches. I imagine that the new turns in coil will have higher ilvl gear probably 95 or 100.

They said at the end of January that they would be doing a re-evaluation of housing prices, most specifically for the legacy servers, but it is possible the other servers might see this as well. I don't expect it to be massive changes, maybe a 10 or 20 percent price slash. The plan they wanted was people to get a house in 3 months, not immediately. Considering how few FCs have them, it is currently working as intended.

The market is a different matter. Once housing becomes a more common occurrence things will improve some. Whenever they include airship building, I'm guessing that the resources for that will be massive. So that'll end up putting a huge demand on the marketplace and crafters in general. Both should help to improve the market situation. However, part of the problem right now is people are in a huge save mode to buy their house. So more people are less willing to pay more and prices are going to be drop as a result as well.

There will be quests for unlocking the new dungeons. It will very likely handle just like with Pharos Sirius. I can't imagine there being a massive build up to the dungeon unlock. While it would be cool to spend ten quests fighting related enemies and teasing or talking about the big bad of the dungeon, it's likely not going to happen because people will want to unlock it quickly rather than waste an hour or two running through all of it. But then again, 2.1 was massive and delayed due to a number of issues. This patch looks to be smaller, so they might have more time to focus on each thing this time.

Leviathan will have both the HM and EM version and maybe even a normal mode as well. So you'll get two fights, which will both be very different. The EM will be very hard just like the other EM primals, which are still good challenges even for well geared players. And you can't assume everyone's going to be myth'd-out by 2.2. A good example is our FC. I'm probably the highest ilvl in the FC and it'll still be a month before I own all of the myth. And that's only me. Everyone else is around Darklight or just completing their first 50. So Leviathan won't be a breeze for them.

[Treize]

Yes, I imagine coil will have at least ilvl100 equipment, but the developers seem very adamant about keeping it so that the casual players can get just as high of equipment from tome purchases as the people who run coil. So I'm sure there will be another equipment set besides the new coil gear, but the real question on my mind is whether or not it will be new gear bought with myth tomes. I've seen a lot of people who already have full i90 gear and are buying myth gear for their alt jobs. I bet they will be pretty upset wasting tomes on alt jobs if they'll need those tomes for new gear in 2.2 for their main class (not like it would take all that long to save up again, but still) Also on the topic of new equipment, I wonder what we'll get from the new dungeons. The same ilvl as the current end game dungeons or higher? I can only really see them go to ilvl65 or they'll make Darklight more or less skippable or make the CT gear not worth much for the lock that they currently have on them.

Also, when I said full i90 from myth, I mainly meant the left side because the right side can be upgraded in other ways and isn't nearly as important as the left side. The overmelded i70 accessories are debatably better than the i90 ones anyway. As of 2.1, it only takes 10 weeks to get the entire left side in myth. So if people don't have full myth by 2.2, they've really been slacking on trying to reach the weekly cap or reached level 50 fairly late. As of this week, I only need one more myth item on the left side for my main job, which I'll be able to get next week. That leaves me maybe 8 weeks of myth before 2.2 that I won't need for my main job, which is almost enough for another job. And it's not like I speed leveled to 50 to start getting myth tomes. I got to level 50 about 3-4 weeks after most of the people in my fc. Needless to say, they all have full myth on the left side already.

Now with the housing prices, it seems like they are making radical changes with patch 2.15 on small houses. They announced that the prices of these will drop by 25% after patch 2.15, about 3 days from now, and will drop another 25% by late February. Dropping the price by 50% over the course of a month is beyond substantial. I wonder what they will end up doing with medium and large houses. Could these also decrease drastically in 2.2?

For the new dungeon, I'm hoping that they make it some kind of ongoing subplot. Random offshot dungeons are nice once in a while like Pharos Sirius, but I think it's generally better to have the reason for doing the dungeon be part of some larger plot. I'm not expecting anything massive, but it would be nice to have a few quests leading up to it instead of just a quest going to the place to unlock it. But more importantly, I'd like to see future quests relating to whatever happens in the dungeon or some kind of continuation in a future patch. The result from Pharos Sirius is so bad that it's funny in my opinion.

For future primals, I'm pretty sure they said that there would only be HM and Ex modes because the quests will all be level 50 (or higher if they raise the level cap at some point). But if the HM will only be around the difficulty of Titan HM, it shouldn't be that challenging at all unless you've just reached level 50 and have no i90 gear. Honestly, if you have no i90 gear now, you could probably get full i90 left side myth by the time 2.2 hits if you max myth every week, which isn't hard at all. High level duty roulette gives an extra 40 myth tomes/day if you run it. Saying you get 70/day, the minimum you can get from the use of this roulette, you'd max myth in 7 runs, but most level 50 dungeons give more than 30 myth tomes, CT gives 50 myth tomes, and the you can get 18 myth from the upper level beastman quests/day. This doesn't even include the myth you get from running coil, which is 50/turn iirc. I generally max myth every week from just running coil and running CT to get a drop from there.

Leviathan Ex and Moogle Mog Ex should clearly be difficult even with high level equipment, though, which will be nice, but I'm wondering how they will handle the drops. It would be nice to have the same ilvl drops from these as from the new coil turns.

[Andromeda]

It's generally accepted that if you want to make a BiS character you're going to need a mix of myth and allagan, generally you can get the best out of your character with only myth. If they make a new tomestone for this patch then it would be new gear as well. It matched the pattern. Philo gets you Darklight and Myth gets you AF2, so tomes tier 3 will get you something else, matching the new Turns would make sense ilvl wise. I would guess that the new dungeons will probably be more horizontal progression or visually different. They might do 65, but I'd see it more likely that they'll make some new gear that has some secondary stat swaps and will look quite a bit different. Since AK's gear is now ilvl55 along with WP's gear. So that's just horizontal progression there while the new stuff is all around ilvl60. They might just knock it down to ilvl55 and make new ilvl60 gear.

Yeah, tomorrow I'll be buying my last left piece of gear. But everyone works at different speeds and some people are very casual and don't try to hit their myth caps. If they introduce new gear to buy it'll be through new tomes not myth. So people won't have wasted their myth. And it's not like they'll be able to get all of their new gear away, so the myth gear won't be immediately pointless. It'll still be a stepping stone people take to the next ilvl.

The price drop on the small houses is probably to try to get people to start jumping into them and get people crafting furniture. But a lot of FCs want the larger houses. So I don't know. We're going for the large house, so we're still waiting 3 months anyway until it is down to 50 million, even though it's unlikely we'll have 50 million in that time frame anyway. Best guess is that they'll start dropping the price on those in time, but they probably still want them to be costly as they are bigger properties and fewer in number.

The new dungeon is related to AK most likely. So you already have a continuing story from AK to the Ruins.

Leviathan HM will be higher than Titan HM, I'm pretty sure about that. I would imagine that each new Primal will be harder than the last. They all have an increasing difficulty, that pattern will remain. It will be the top Primal for both, it only makes sense. We'll also see Ultima EM in this or the next patch as well, which will set it above all of them most likely.