With all eight of my characters now through the Dawntrail main quest, I guess it’s time to post about it.
As far as the storyline goes the first half of the game is mostly good. There’s is a bit of a hiccup in the third area when one of the other throne claimants does a complete personality reversal out of nowhere, but otherwise it’s pretty damn solid. Only one quest to say something dumb in chat and only a couple that require forced emote usage. The second half though… the second half is just a near-constant stream of cringe-inducing nonsense. They even add a child as a major secondary character toward the end (replete with a ‘follow the idiot child through a ruined cityscape’ quest).
Sidequests are on the whole mostly better than Endwalker I think, with not all that many being purposely wasteful with your time. The role quests meanwhile are also pretty solid and even better can be rushed through pretty easily on secondary characters since now only the last quest in a line features a single-player duty.
As for the new classes, Pictomancer has a pretty unique playstyle and just unloads tons of damage to both single targets and groups. Once you get accustomed to when to re-cast the painting spells it ends up pretty fun. Viper meanwhile is basically just a cross between Reaper and Monk, more the latter than the former after they got rid of its damage debuff. If you want a faster Reaper or a less fiddly Monk, this is your class.
As for class changes:
- Warrior and Paladin haven’t notably changed.
- Dark Knight and Gunbreaker losing their damage dash is annoying, but otherwise they’re basically the same.
- White Mage, Scholar, and Sage haven’t notably changed.
- Astrologian is… pretty weird now. I liked the previous Card Draw system better, but this one isn’t terrible.
- I don’t like what they did to Dragoon. Separating Fang and Claw and Wheeling Thrust just creates a hassle.
- The new Monk is a bit of a shock, but I think it’s ultimately a slight improvement since there’s now less to keep track of.
- Ninja is a bit better I think without having to worry about keeping up the speed buff.
- Haven’t played much of Samurai, but it didn’t seem to have notably changed.
- Reaper is unchanged.
- Bard, Machinist, and Dancer are all essentially unchanged.
- Black Mage has been simplified a bit, and I love the changes made to Umbral Soul… but it definitely takes some getting used to.
- Red Mage is a bit more fiddly in the burst phase, which I’m not thrilled about.
- Summoner is unchanged.
