Scrappy Mechanic / Final Fantasy XIV

Being one of the biggest MMORPGs on the market, as well as being part of the keyboard-breakingly popular Final Fantasy series, Final Fantasy XIV is no stranger to mechanics that frustrate, annoy, or irk players. While some of these features have been patched out or changed later to appease angry players, some have been bugging the playerbase since the realm was reborn.

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Combat and Job Mechanics

Combat in General

• Line of sight determines whether or not you can use your abilities on a target. If your target suddenly runs behind an object or changes elevation, you can no longer "see" them and your ability gets canceled if you were trying to use it on the target. Naturally, the AI will see you at all times, even through solid objects.
• Enemies' range of territory. In order to prevent possible griefing and server strains, all enemies (except those found in dungeons) are programmed to start wandering back to their territory/spawn point if they chase the player too far. However, once an enemy starts to retreat, they not only become invincible while they retreat, but they'll also fully recover their HP once they get back there. This means that you can't kite foes too far or they'll "reset". The mechanic is doubly painful when fighting boss characters found in a FATE due to their sky-high HP, especially when the area for the FATE is unreasonably small (either from a small radius or right next to a town crowded with buildings) or packed with far more subordinate enemies than is reasonable.
• The targeting system, especially in wide-open areas with a lot of enemies spread out but still within targeting or especially attacking distance. Short of just using the mouse to directly click on enemies to target them in keyboard and mouse controls, it opens up way too many opportunities to pull more enemies than your group can handle because of the game's odd tendency, no matter what you've set in the options, to respond to you pressing the target-change button by prioritizing an enemy on the far side of the room for no particular reason.
  • This can even correspond with the line of sight problem above, as certain areas and dungeons will inexplicably let you auto-target enemies you cannot even see or attack through a nearby wall, instead of the mobs standing directly in front of you.
• The Transcendence buff that players get upon being resurrected lasts for eight seconds and makes the resurrected player invulnerable, This way, they can get their bearings and aren't just immediately KO'd again. However, there are some issues with the system; mainly, it doesn't protect the revived player from mechanics that don't outright involve damage right away. For example: the player can end up, as they are reviving, being targeted by AOE markers, which is almost always another death because of the damage inflicted, while mechanics involving avoiding standing in things can result in a vulnerability stacks because the game spawned you in it. Worst of all, it does nothing to stop knockback effects. It's entirely possible to get freshly rezzed and then immediately knocked off the platform and die again if you accept the rez at the wrong time.
• Vote-kicking a player has plenty of Anti-Frustration Features, which are intended to keep a group of unruly players from simply ganging up on a player. But players cannot be kicked until a few minutes have passed, and you cannot initiate a votekick during loot distribution, which takes five minutes. This can be very annoying if a player disconnects or goes AFK right after a boss fight, as you are unable to evict them from the group until the loot roll has finished. Thus, it can sometimes be harder to evict a player who is AFK or disconnected than it should be.
• FATEs, which stand for Full Active Time Events. Said events are randomly generated everywhere and are usually "kill all monsters" or "gather items for this NPC". The better you perform in the events, the more experience points, gil, and company seals you can earn. FATEs are good for low level characters, but are a pain for high level players that need the events to level grind due to the RNG of the events popping up. Some quests and objectives may require a specific FATE to appear, which means a lot of waiting around if you're unlucky. It also doesn't help that many seasonal events are also based around the FATE mechanic.
  • Superboss FATEs such as King Behemoth and Odin require a lot of people to come together to take the bosses down. It is not unusual to see hundreds of players trying to fight the super bosses all at once, which can cause massive slowdown for many people. The problem was so bad that the boss characters would sometime fail to appear on many peoples' screens, making it impossible to attack them. Square did attempt to alleviate the issue by giving the bosses higher priority for character rendering, but the zerg rushes that follow can still cause issues. One such issue is attacks not rendering as they go off, making it possible to get blasted dead by something you couldn't see until it's too late.
  • There's a few Superboss FATEs that are tied to a chain, Formidable and Archaeotania to name a couple. The problem is that attempting to clear the FATE chain could fail to continue for whatever reason, even if you successfully clear part of the chain. It gets even worse when, at the final step of the FATE chain, the associated FATE for the boss doesn't appear at all. Spawning these bosses cause a significant amount of headaches, especially since these bosses drop tokens to trade in for unique items.
• Trusts for the dungeons in Shadowbringers are a good alternative when you either can't get a group going or want to play alone. Trusts are AI-controlled party members, and each one acts differently from one another. Trusts aren't perfect and have quite a number of shortcomings, however. Trusts don't react as quickly as players, so they will feel slow at times. Trusts also don't output damage as fast or heavy as a typical player, so a dungeon run can take quite a while. If there's a mechanic where you have to stack, you have to move the marker to the trusts since they won't go to you. Trusts can only be used when alone and not with other players. Using trusts also reduces the amount of loot you can get in a dungeon. Lastly, upon completing the main story of Shadowbringers, unique trust allies will no longer be available as party members and the remaining trusts now have to be leveled up in order to be used in higher level dungeons. Be prepared to grind a lot if you want to use trusts in this way, since it can take around four to six runs of the same dungeon just to have a trust level up once due to the absurd amount of experience required. A later patch would rectify the EXP issue by having trusts gain a lot more than before, but the issues with the AI remain.

Job Abilities

• The Freecure trait. Obtained on White Mage around/at the same level as getting Cure 2, the trait's function is that using Cure 1 has a 15% chance to make the next cast of Cure 2 free. While it seems innocuous, this trait is infamous among tanks and healers alike for being a complete newb trap, encouraging a playstyle in which a WHM spends all their time spamming a weak heal to fish for a weak and RNG-based synergy. This playstyle gets worse really fast, as WHM gets not only more and more free Cooldown-based spells to use, but gets abilities to make Mana almost a complete non-issue, which most of the dungeons are built around the healers using. Despite all of this, many WHMs even at high levels or the level cap choose to just spam Cure 1 (maybe with a Regen cast), and save anything else as a panic button, slowing the pace of a run to a crawl, as well as (ironically) making even single-pack pulls a lot riskier.
• The White Mage's lily mechanic in Stormblood is considered to be one of the most reviled class mechanics to grace the game. The class flow was considered disruptive and counter-intuitive to how it should be played in endgame content. The intention was to reward the player with a shortened cooldown on an Off-Global Cooldown ability for using their healing spells. The problem lies in two major flaws: you got your lilies for casting Cure I and II, which, in its conception, was not a guarantee for Cure II. This got accusations of developing bad habits, such as forgoing Regen in lieu of Cure, because the latter granted lilies. The second is the application of lilies. Each lily would reduce an Ability's cooldown by 4%/10%/20%, depending on the lily count. Except it doesn't include Benediction or Presence of Mind, two abilities where the cooldown would be an immense boon. It only worked on Assize, Tetragrammaton, and Asylum, three abilities that won't benefit much from the reduced cooldown. Additionally, lilies were required for Divine Benison, until the requirement was removed at the tail-end of Stormblood. This makes the return next to nothing, and even with all the changes to make it practical, players ignored the lilies entirely because there was no impact. The entire mechanic got reworked in Shadowbringers, where every lily is a resource for a no-MP-cost healing spell, you get one lily every twenty seconds that you're in combat, and using three of them gives you a very powerful AOE attack called Afflatus Misery. This new version was received so well, especially given how hated the old system was, that practically nobody missed the old incarnation.
• Greased Lightning is a job mechanic for Monks that boosts the player's attack power and reduces cooldown on weapon skills every time the player does a full attack rotation. Greased Lighting could be stacked three times (four stacks by the time of the Shadowbringers expansion) and the stacks were lost if the timer expired. This meant that players had to always be attacking and any screw ups would lead to a pretty big DPS loss. Since many raid and trial bosses always have a "I'll hide off screen while the next phase comes up/perform my ultimate attack" gimmick, Monks would be guaranteed to lose their Greased Lightning stacks and had to build them up again. It wasn't until patch 5.3 where Greased Lightning was made into a passive trait that was always on, improving upon reaching certain levels.
• Farming spells for Blue Mage. Finding them is already a challenge, since other than the name of the spell itself, the spell book's only hints are telling you what zone or dungeon the enemy you get that spell from spawns in. You also have to actually see the spell being used before you can learn it. Learning spells are also fully dependent on RNG, with the more powerful or useful spells generally having a lower chance. Certain spells can only be learned in dungeons and by primals, which means you need to bring friends along to do it unsynced since Blue Mage can't use the duty finder. If you don't learn the spell, you'll have to enter the instance again and start over. As well, being knocked out means you won't learn anything. There's also the problem with players griefing, as it is quite easy for players to quickly murder certain monsters before their spell goes off, doubly so if they summoned a Chocobo to fight with them, and even moreso since several Blue Mage spells are tied to unique versions of existing enemies (e.g. one source of Peculiar Light is from the single Lentic Mudpuppy that spawns near the regular group of Mudpuppies in Mor Dhona) rather than just those normal enemies.
• Cross class skills were a nightmare for most of its inception since the start of the game. During A Realm Reborn and Heavensward, players could use certain skills obtained from certain classes and use them with other classes. Some skills like Swiftcast (makes the next spell instant cast) and Raging Strikes (boosts damage for a few seconds) while not mandatory, were absolutely needed if you wanted your class to be optimized. For most players, this meant having to level up a different class that they may not play or even like and having to get gear for said classes so they aren't gimped while leveling up. Stormblood would overhaul the cross class system by giving each role their own set of skills they could slot. The main issue was there was only 5 slots available and too many skills that were needed to have each role perform optimally. The developers doubled the amount of slots and by Shadowbringers, they overhauled the system again where each role would naturally acquire the necessary skills via leveling up.
• The Dark Knight's invulnerability move, Living Dead, was initially quite reviled. When activated, Living Dead makes it so your HP cannot fall below 1. But if you do fall to 1 HP, you also receive a debuff requiring the healer(s) to heal you to full health in only ten seconds, or else you immediately die anyways. This meant the healers had to stop whatever they were doing and dump healing on the Dark Knight in ten seconds, lest the Tank die and probably cause a Total Party Kill. And Scholar and Sage don't heal as much as the White Mage or Astrologian in favor of creating shields, which wouldn't help a Dark Knight under this effect. All of this meant that for the longest time, Living Dead was the bane of Dark Knights everywhere, and healer mains weren't exactly fond of it either. Patch 6.1 changed this so that Living Dead now heals the Dark Knight for a potency of 1,500 for each weaponskill or spell the Dark Knight lands on enemies if their HP goes to 1. It was also changed so that you have to recover an amount equal to your max HP instead of getting back to full, and your HP still can't go below 1 for the rest of the duration if this happens. While you still die if you don't recover an amount equal to your max HP, these changes make Living Dead much less of a pain in the neck for everyone by making the Dark Knight have a way to sustain themselves without relying on panic healing.
• The healer's Cleric Stance ability was the developer's way of giving healers the means to deal reasonable amounts of damage back when magic damage was tied to Intelligence in A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. When the healer was in Cleric Stance mode, the user's Mind and Intelligence stats were swapped so they can do more damage while severely gimping their healing output. While a skilled player could easily master the stance dancing of Cleric Stance (pump out damage and then turn the skill off when healing was needed), a lot of people struggled with it in a few ways; using Cleric Stance puts the skill on a five second cooldown, which meant that if used at the wrong time, the party could eat a lot of damage or outright die since the healer's healing is completely gimped until they can turn the skill back off. Healers who were too focused on dealing damage would notice far too late that their party needed healing. Healers who didn't feel comfortable with stance dancing would stick with healing only and do no damage at all, which created a huge divide between those who think healers should do damage in between healing and others who insist healers should focus on just healing (which is still debated to this day). It wasn't until Stormblood that the developers changed the healer's damage to be scaled from Mind and changed Cleric Stance to give a flat damage boost for a few seconds. Cleric Stance was removed entirely by Shadowbringers.

Exploration

• Sprint and Peloton are pretty much essential to navigating any areas on-foot in any reasonable amount of time, as everyone's default running speeds are otherwise more of a leisurely jog. While Ranged DPS jobs can abuse Peloton and it has the obvious balancing act of being disabled if targeted by enemies or hurt by an attack, Sprint only lasts 20 seconds by default and then requires 40 more seconds to let you sprint again; it's reduced to lasting 10 seconds if in a combat situation. This means whether you're running around a city you don't have an Aethernet established in yet or are in between the Aetherytes, where you can't use mounts, or you're trying to get through a dungeon just a smidge faster, the Sprint blatantly feels gimped to be sub-optimal and inefficient. And this is after Shadowbringers removed TP — previously how long you could sprint was based on how much TP you had left, and it took all of your TP as a result, making it a self-crippling tool if misused in battle.
• Teleportation fees. Every time you use the Teleport spell, it costs you some gil. The farther away your destination is, the more gil it costs. And the main quest just loves to send you all over the place. It's not realistically likely to break the bank, but it's just present enough that the urge to waste time minmaxing your fees never quite goes away. At least you can save a bit with use of the Return spell which bypasses the fee, but is on a 15-minute cooldown and always goes to whichever aetheryte you designated as your home beacon. You can also mark a handful of Aetherytes as favorites which cuts the teleport costs for them in half, including one free Aetheryte if you've set up two-factor authentication. Once you have access to the Hunt, you can also save on teleportation fees by grinding out seals to buy Aetheryte Tickets, which make teleporting to a location free of charge when used. And for those with enough patience to grind out Blue Mage, the Masked Carnivale has weekly missions that award massive amounts of seals, enough to purchase dozens of tickets.
• Aether Currents, a mechanic introduced in Heavensward. Attune to all of the currents — four of which are found in the map itself, and five of which are obtained by quests — and your mounts can fly in the area. The map currents can be rather tricky to find, as the Aether Compass you're given to find them with only includes a vague direction such as "500 yalms to the west". It also doesn't include a Z-axis, which makes finding the currents in areas with mountains or tunnels an additional headache. In addition, some quests can only be completed by being able to fly. One of the sidequests that requires flying is the quest to access Neverreap, one of the two end-game optional dungeons required for obtaining currency for end-game gear in 3.x. Stormblood and Shadowbringers make it worse with areas that are split in half: you visit one part of the area early on in the story (The Fringes and The Peaks of Ala Mhigo in Stormblood, Amh Araeng and Kholusia in Shadowbringers), but are blocked from visiting the other half and acquiring its related Aether Currents until near the end of the story. These are some of the largest zones in the game, and Shadowbringers removed mount-speed increases related to story progression, instead requiring you to grind out FATEs in a zone to unlock the ability to buy them. This ends up making navigating even one half of these areas a massive chore. The quests you get Aether Currents for are marked with a green diamond so you know which ones you need to do, but it's guaranteed that at least one quest in the MSQ will have one of these diamonds, meaning it's a sure bet that you'll need to complete the story quests for any area before you can fly there. Before Endwalker, it was even worse, as you had to find ten currents instead of four in an area.

Eureka

The Eureka mode, introduced post-Stormblood, is designed to be intentionally grindy as a throwback to more old-school MMO games. However, that also means that it can be frustrating to deal with some of the darker sides of playing the mode.

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• Leveling in a party within Eureka is widely hated due to how restrictive it is. In general, how much experience you gain from killing monsters depends on your level VS their level. Fight something stronger than you, gain more XP; fight something weaker than you, gain less XP. Most parties that are chain grinding will usually fight enemies five levels above their own. But the trouble is that if anyone in the party is below that threshold, then the entire party gains no XP at all. This means that friends or Free Company members can't help you if your level is too low, because not only will you get nothing for your efforts, neither will they. The only ways to reach the level you need are to find a like-leveled group of random people, or do it all on your own. There are "Forbidden [Element]" achievements you can go through in the Challenge Log which provide large amounts of XP upon completing them, but you can only get these once per real-world week, and you still have to grind up to sixty enemies that are no more than two levels below you. All of this means that progress towards gaining levels at any stage of Eureka is going to be very slow.
• Eureka: Anemos turned out to be one big scrappy mechanic. Any mob stronger than a few levels above you will immediately murder you. The only decent way to make any EXP gains is to farm Notorious Monsters (a throwback to Final Fantasy XI), which are basically FATEs, the scrappy mechanic that will not die. The only way to gain levels is to join the "zerg train", which is a large group of players that go from FATE to FATE. But if you're under the recommended level for a FATE, you'll get less EXP and none of the drops you need to upgrade gear, meaning lower level players are left in the dust. Likewise, if you are planning to farm regular monsters while in a party, any level difference between party members will reduce the amount of EXP everyone gets per kill. If the level difference is big, EXP gains are severely reduced or even outright eliminated.
• Eureka: Pagos takes everything that people hated about Anemos and adds even more hated mechanics on top of it.
  • Just getting anywhere in Pagos is a pain. The map design spaces everything far apart, which means Aetherytes and other important locations can take a few minutes to reach while you're trying to avoid every high leveled monster. And unlike Anemos, you can't ride your mounts until you hit the level cap of Elemental Level 35.
  • Dragons are placed in choke points where people would frequently travel, and these dragons are at Elemental Level 40. Said dragons are always sleeping, but running past them or riding a mount near them wakes them up, and they will one-shot you unless you're at the Elemental Level cap. The only way to get past dragons without waking them up is to walk past them instead of running, but there's no indication as to how far away from the dragons is far enough before you can start running again.
  • XP in Pagos is so slow that it was faster to level up by chain killing mobs instead of farming FATEs, leading many to speculate that the slow XP gain was done as a response to how quickly people leveled up in Anemos. Later patches would buff the XP gains, but it's still very slow.
  • Pagos has Happy Bunnies, which have to be saved during certain FATEs. Completing them gives you no rewards since you're expected to get said rewards from a hidden treasure coffer. However, it's completely up to chance if you actually get a Happy Bunny if you beat the FATE and if you do get one, you lose out on the coffer if you or the bunny dies (later patches would give you EXP if you saved the Happy Bunnies).
  • Once you do actually start your relic in Pagos, the method of doing it is abysmal. You have to wait until you hit level 25 before you can do anything about it. Once you're there, you need to collect several frosted crystals, which can only be obtained by collecting aether from monster kills. Aether fills up a bar, and a full bar gives you one crystal. These crystals then have to be taken to a forge to be smelted into materials for Gerolt, but the path to the forge is a one-way trip that's guarded by a dragon, and the forge itself is surrounded by monsters too. The grind for aether is reliant on luck, since you will not always gain aether from each kill, and the amount you do get is completely random. The grind for aether was so ill-received that many players gave up on their relic and abandoned Pagos entirely. While patches have made the amount of aether obtained much larger, and Notorious Monsters also guarantee aether drops, it's completely random as to how much you'll get. Even after multiple years of the content being released, the method to gain aether consistently in Pagos is so obtuse that the playerbase still hasn't figured it out.
• Eureka: Pyros made an attempt to improve some things, such as a denser monster intensity and a better map design to get around enemies more easily if you didn't want to fight a certain mob. However, Pyros also retains the same mechanics from the previous iterations of Eureka (FATE grinding, level grinding, and crystal grinding), as well as adding even more annoying mechanics.
  • Powering up your relic requires unlocking Logos Actions from logograms. Said logograms can be earned from completing a FATE or finding them in coffers from Happy Bunnies, but they are subjected to RNG and you may never get the ones you want. There are fifty Logos Actions total, but you only need thirty to upgrade your relic. Getting all fifty grants you the right to buy pretty neat-looking armor, but good luck trying to figure out which logogram combos unlock new actions.
  • Even after you get your relic upgraded to the final stage, you can choose to upgrade it further by increasing a few stats, but doing so removes all of your weapon's substats. To get them back or get something better than what you had, you have to grind for aether in the same way you did for Pagos. Luckily, you only need two crystals to get a shot of getting better stats for your relic. Unfortunately, you can't choose what stats you get; it's purely up to luck. Don't like the result? Go back in and grind aether for another shot.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon for Eureka is The Baldesion Arsenal, and getting through it is a pain. When the game gives you a warning about how brutally unfair the dungeon is going to be before you so much as set foot in the place, you know it's going to be rough. The Arsenal is a 56-man dungeon where you have to clear multiple bosses with your allies in order to successfully complete Eureka. Beyond the enemies just being hard to fight, the main gimmick of the Arsenal (and the main mechanic that adds to the frustration of the dungeon) is that you can't be revived for any reason. If you die at any point in the dungeon, you have to leave the instance and start all over again. That would be bad enough, but multiple bosses have One-Hit Kill moves on top of being punishingly hard, meaning messing up even a single mechanic a single time will mean starting all over again. It's telling that the community has set up multiple walkthroughs, groups, and resources to help players clear the Baldesion Arsenal for the first time, and it's still going to take a few tries even with all this help.

Bozja

If Eureka was the first attempt at the Field Operations kind of duty, Bozja in Shadowbringers was effectively developers' second try at it. For all of the things that the development learned and changed for the better, there were also some steps back and other frustrations involved.

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• Eureka's logograms return in the form of Forgotten Fragments. While these are more merciful in that all you had to do was redeem them for their abilities rather than the complicated crafting system for Nmemes, the RNG was still present for them. Not to mention that some of them dropped at exceedingly low rates, leaving their super powerful abilities as Too Awesome to Use.
• In place of Eureka's FATE-like Notorious Monsters came Skirmishes and Critical Engagements. Skirmishes either spawned randomly or when enough Magitek-based enemies were killed in the area. The latter spawns Skirmishes that also give Critical Engagements, which multiple players can queue up for. While a large amount of people can undertake these at once, only a certain number of people can enter, either being 24 or 48. If there are too many people, some might be denied entry on an RNG basis. If there are too little, you might not be able to clear it at all, resulting in a complete wipe. Patch 5.5 gave players increased health, HP gain, and damage dealt if there were too few players in their Engagement to clear it properly, while also giving a buff that reduced the amount of damage Skirmish enemies took if there weren't enough players in range.
  • For some reason, there are certain Skirmishes which spawn two separate Critical Engagements. Usually people would flock to one, and the other would have barely anybody in it, leading to the aforementioned issue of wiping. Alongside giving the low participant compensation buff, Patch 5.5 fixed this issue as well by having any dual-Critical Engagements spawn one after the other.
• Castrum Lacus Litore (CLL) in its early stages. Originally, there was an extremely negligible Mettle reward, alongside the fact that Bozjan Coins dropped at a considerably low rate. These coins could be used to create gear augmentation materials that increased your attack speed when applied to certain gear. But in Bozja, their drop rate was considerably low, and there was no reason to even go into CLL in the first place, leaving it woefully underpopulated and impeding required progress for many players. A later patch eventually increased the amount of mettle gained from CLL, while also giving a buff to players in the instance if there are few players inside.
  • The health of the enemies present is partially dependent on how many players joined the battle. If any players leave, the boss health will not be adjusted.
  • The first boss, Brionac and 4th Legion Helldiver, are unfathomably difficult to get through, even for a first boss. Players have to split into two groups to scale the wall to fight Brionac, while others will have to go below and support the drill piercing through the wall for the Castrum. If one side doesn't have the right amount or if there is a role imbalance, especially too few healers on one boss, the fight may take too long, wiping the entire raid with an enrage timer. Players fighting Brionac will need to resolve magnetic-based attacks, and in some cases players may end up taking an extremely high amount of damage if they get something wrong. Players fighting the 4th Legion Helldiver need to take forced damage to "stack" with the drill, soaking attacks and reducing the damage taken from the drill in the process. If the drill is destroyed, the entire raid will wipe. Needless to say, this battle is incredibly punishing and caused many players distress when this content was new.
  • The final boss, Lyon and Dawon, require the entire raid to designate 8 people to fight Lyon, while the rest are stuck with fighting Dawon. If the 8 players fail to deal sufficient damage to Lyon, or if they all fail to survive, Dawon will slowly wipe the entire raid with increased damage and near-invulnerability. Dawon himself will also occasionally fire out directional-based attacks depending on which way it is facing during the attack, which can throw some players off when it's jumping around the arena like a wild animal. Or it may use a donut-shaped attack requiring you to be inside of its hitbox. Whichever attack it is using, you must memorize.
• Duels were a new type of battle content which effectively served as some of the hardest kind of content in Bozja overall. There were 3 subsections in the Bozja areas. Each subsection has a special Critical Engagement that features multiple avoidable attacks. While they may have the occasional "everyone takes damage" attacks and tank busters, their mechanics can be tricky to resolve and avoid at first glance. Should you manage to avoid all of these mechanics and clear the Critical Engagement without dying, you'll be eligible for a duel, which the game is sure to tell you that it isn't for the faint of heart.
  • However, you're not the only one eligible, and it's a lottery draw as of if you can enter. Don't get to enter? Tough, wait about over an hour for the next time that Engagement spawns and watch someone else do it. Patch 5.5 also fixed this issue, adding a Notoriety counter that increased every time you were rejected for a duel, which would increase your chances of entering a duel. If you are selected for one, however, your Notoriety drops to 0.
  • The reason why they probably restricted it to people who clear the Engagement flawlessly is probably because of how hard these duels are. Many of them contain One-Hit Kill moves and damage checks to make sure you aren't constantly trying to raise. Much like the Savage and Extreme difficulties of the game, a guide might help to brief you, but in reality you may get bodied within the first few seconds, requiring multiple retries, which once again loops back to the issue of having to wait with a lottery-based system, gaining more notoriety if you don't get accepted, then waiting for even longer.
  • Many of these fights have knockback-based attacks that can send you flying into a death wall. If you die in this wall or in a puddle of damage, your reraisers won't save you. Menenius sas Lanatus is a Damage-Sponge Boss, so tanks and healers will have immense difficulty chipping away at his health pool while dodging attack after attack. You should definitely have a good memory, because one wrong move and you may end up walking into that one landmine you forgot he planted 2 minutes ago. Lyon rem Helsos requires you to pack certain Lost Actions in your kit to avoid him just one-shotting you the moment the fight starts. The second time around you fight him, if you get KO'd and resurrect, he'll make sure that you won't get a third chance.
• Bozja was directly tied to the relic weapons for Shadowbringers, just as Eureka was for Stormblood. While this is supposed to give players multiple ways to grind for what they want, either by entering Bozja or clearing dungeons and FATEs in the normal game, nobody had expected that this content was actually obligatory. When the Delubrum Reginae content was released, many players were shocked to find that it was required to progress in the relic, who at the time had mostly decided to use methods outside of Bozja to get the materials needed for relics.
• Delubrum Reginae also suffered the same issue as Castrum Lacus Litore's underpopulation issue. While players could enter it any time they liked, there were 24 slots to fill, and no guarantee that all of those slots would fill up. If they didn't, then you can't enter. It was only when Endwalker released when a maximum wait time of 10 minutes would be added. And as a mercy, the same HP and Damage buffs that were given for CLL were also give to Delubrum if it had fewer players than the maximum of 24.

Player vs. Player

• Triple Triad-related:
  • The Random rule for Triple Triad. Against another player, it can bring some excitement and new strategies on the fly, but when you play against an NPC, their version of "random" is having 4 to 6 different cards that are all powerful while you're possibly forced to use weaker cards from your collection. Whatever cards you claimed stays with you forever and that includes the starter deck that the Triple Triad Master gives you as an introduction to the game. To make matters worse, the new NPC opponents introduced for Heavensward use the Random rule almost exclusively while using other rules on top it that makes Random even worse, such as Chaos and Roulette. Thankfully this was changed in 3.5 that no NPC uses the Random rule anymore. Random will only exist between players.
  • The rare cards limit rule. You can have just one rare card in your deck and no more than that. NPCs gleefully ignore the rare cards limit rule as they pummel your deck with a deck that has nothing but rare cards. As a result, four-star cards were essentially rendered useless, as they would always count toward the same limit as five-star cards while being less powerful. This was finally loosened a bit in 5.4 and 5.5; first the limit was changed to only count four- and five-star cards no matter how small your collection is, then the limit of "one four- or five-star card per deck" was changed to "two four-or-more-stars cards, of which only one can be five-star", making four-star cards actually useful for the first time since the launch of Triple Triad.
  • Sudden Death in Triple Triad. While it can keep things interesting, it gets extremely annoying when both players have nearly even decks and skills, causing multiple sudden deaths in a row. Up to 5 sudden deaths can be played before the game finally declares a draw.
  • Getting new cards via Random Drop. Playing in certain dungeons, raids, or fighting against primals gives you a slight chance of getting their cards. Beating an NPC might get you a random card. Buying the booster pack at the Gold Saucer will also give you a random card. The path to getting 30 cards so you can make the rare card rule less annoying borderlines Early Game Hell thanks to RNG determining what cards you get or if you even get a card to begin with.
• In the Patch 6.1 PvP rework, Machinist's "Chainsaw" ability was given a 3% chance to instantly kill anyone it hits. This was quickly rebuked by the competitive community, a non-conditional instant kill decided on a coin flip felt antithetical to notions of player skill. This effect was later bumped down to "just" 99% of the victim's HP, and was later bumped down again in Patch 6.4 to be a damage boost against weakened targets.
• Stunning is a central mechanic of PvP — various abilities either stop a target dead in its tracks or otherwise render them unable to do anything. Sneaky groups of players, however, have figured out how to group up pre-made teams in Frontlines, and when a coordinated team is on the field, even team pinches are utterly annihilated thanks to being able to chain-stun lines of players and sweep them down within seconds. With the mode's design for uncontrolled anarchy unless teams strategize with Alliance chat, exploitative players have completely dominated Frontlines as a result.
• The Dark Knight is in an odd position of being a Low-Tier Letdown in player-versus-enemy content, but a High-Tier Scrappy in player-versus-player content. The reason for this comes down to two abilities: Salted Earth, and the Limit Break Eventide. The former is an area-of-effect attack that drags any enemy players towards the center of it. Not only does Salted Earth have a very generous range in this respect, but there's no way to not be dragged into it if you're within range. The only way to avoid being pulled in by Salted Earth is to not get hit by it in the first place. While Salted Earth doesn't do any damage on its own, the fact that a player can pull multiple enemies in close means that other classes can fire off AOE attacks to devastating effect on a helpless group. Eventide, meanwhile, deals line AOE damage, reduces the Dark Knight's HP to 1, deals more damage based on how high their HP was when it was used, and prevents anything from taking their HP below 1 for ten seconds. While it's possible to stun the Dark Knight into being unable to fight back while Eventide is up, this will mean that all of a team's attention will be focused on one player who can't be killed while the rest of the team is free to do whatever they want. There have been numerous calls to nerf Salted Earth and Eventide, but they have by-and-large gone ignored. As such, a Dark Knight's strategy involves "use Salted Earth, pull enemies in, use Eventide, let my allies rain death" pretty much exclusively, especially in Frontlines, simply because it's so absurdly effective that a Dark Knight doesn't need to do anything else.
• The crossover event with Fall Guys consists of running through three different rounds of challenges. If you're eliminated in the first or second round, you can either spectate (continue to run the remaining rounds as a ghost, unable to be hit by anything but also unable to earn any more rewards), or just quit the show and go back to Blunderville. The annoyance comes from the fact that you have to wait until the remaining players are loading into the next round before the option to quit comes up, meaning it could be up to thirty seconds after you're eliminated before you're allowed to back out of the show.

Relic Weapons

Every expansion has Relic Weapons, which are designed to be the Infinity +1 Sword-level weaponry until the next expansion comes out. As such, earning a Relic Weapon at full power is designed to take a lot of time. And while it's perfectly acceptable to make the best gear take the longest to obtain, it still means that the mechanics associated with getting them can be hair-pullingly frustrating.

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• The entirety of the "A Relic Reborn" quest line that powers up your Infinity +1 Sword to higher levels is a nightmare of RNG and grind. Finishing the initial leg of the quest required some effort, but was doable within a reasonable amount of time - you acquired the original, broken weapon, collected a few materials through event fights, fought a few open world monsters, and finally capped it off with easily-obtainable items purchased with end-game dungeon currency. It's after obtaining that weapon when things start to get mind-numbingly grindy.
  • The "Up in Arms" quest requires players to take part in any FATE they want in specific regions in order to get 12 Atma items, which is used to further power their A Relic Reborn weapon. Sounds easy, right? Doing the FATEs is easy enough, but good luck trying to endure the super low drop rates for the items you need to get. Because the drop rate of the Atmas are extremely low and are subjected to RNG, you have people who have either got all the items fairly quickly or people that have spent hours or even days trying to get the items to drop and have no luck at all. The Atmas themselves were also inventory clutter that took up inventory like equipment, and careless players could accidentally throw them away when trying to do inventory cleanup. What's even worse is getting all 12 Atmas isn't enough to power up your relic weapon; all it does is change the weapon's appearance slightly. 2.4 would eventually alleviate the grind by increasing its drop rate and made them stackable, but due to it happening so late in the A Realm Reborn's lifecycle, it may as well be moot.
  • Worse still is the next step, "Trials of the Braves". To restore the Relic Weapon to its full glory, it demanded you collect 9 books to give your weapon its true power and every book carried an original price tag of 1500 mythology tomes to purchase, out of a 2000 tome cap. While the books were, fortunately, a quest item and located in your key items inventory unlike the Atma crystals, you could only work on one of them at a time. The tasks in the books may not have the RNG, but it's a tedious laundry list of challenges that had throttled players to a halt, which caused the next step to get delayed because there were so few players that have an Animus-stage weapon. 2.4 would relax the cost of the books to 500 soldiery.
  • "Star Light, Star Bright", the Novus portion of the relic quest line cuts out the RNG in exchange for materia farming. You need 75 pieces of Alexandrite and 75 pieces of materia to power up your relic. Said materia are easy to obtain or buy from other players until you start using the higher grade materia, which are a lot more difficult to come by, involves some RNG in terms of what kind of materia you get, and you forking over a ton of gil on the market board if you want to buy high level materia from someone.^note Due to the ever changing player economy and the introduction of grade 5 and 6 materia in future expansion packs, materia costs for grade 4 and below sunk and many side quests now give materia as well. Assuming one did manage to obtain all the materia and Alexandrite, the very next step, involved "Light" farming - tasked with obtaining 2000 Light to power up the weapon, at a time when completing the entirety of a 24-player raid would only yield 8 points, and most other activities granting perhaps 1 or 2 at most.
  • "Wherefore Art Thou, Zodiac", which is the transformation of your relic weapon into a Zodiac Weapon, is even more absurd by combining everything hated from the previous relic quests into one ball of "we enjoy watching players suffer." Hope you loved farming for the low drop rate Atmas because now you get to do it again for sixteen items needed for your Zodiac weapon and they can only be acquired by running the very lengthy dungeons. You'll also need several hundred thousand gil just to purchase a few key items needed for the quest, over 6000 Soldiery Tomestones for another item, and 60,000 grand company seals for a different item. Hope you also took up some crafting classes because now you'll need to get items that can only be obtained through crafting and desynthesis! If not, better hope you can afford to buy the crafted items from other players, or have some friends that can do the handiwork for you. 3.0 would make the required items in dungeons always drop and the crafted materials no longer have to be high quality, as well as cutting down the costs of the items in general.
• The Anima Weapons may have learned a little from the pain in obtaining a Zodiac weapon, but there's still pain points in achieving completion.
  • You can skip the first step "Soul without Life" if you have a completed Zodiac Zeta weapon, but if you didn't, have fun collecting six sets of three elemental crystals from FATEs in each of the Heavensward zones. While the droprate is a little better, it still has the same issue of RNG hating you and not giving you a thing for days at a time. You are at least allowed to use any class you want to get the crystals, so you could multitask and level a second class during the grind. 3.57 would greatly boost its drop rate, making its search trivial.
  • After turning in all 18 crystals in Mor Dhona, you'll go back to Azys Lla for your weapon. Next step is to run ten dungeons in a specific order on the job you're getting the weapon for to awaken it. It helps that you can run the six ARR dungeons unsynced, but if you have to queue, expect a long wait.
  • Then the real fun begins: "Coming into Its Own". You will need four special items that can only be obtained by trading with an NPC in Mor Dhona. To get all four items she requires Unidentified Bone, Shells, Ore, and Seeds—20 of each—that will have to be purchased one at a time with 13-18 beast tribe quest tokens (each from a specific tribe, of course), 680 Tomestones of Poetics or Esoterics, 1000 Allied Seals, 10 different tokens from the Alexander raid, or if you're really lucky, a treasure map. You will also have to give her four each of four different HQ crafted items. Don't have a Level 60 Master Blacksmith, Alchemist, Carpenter AND Culinarian? Hope you've been saving your gil, because buying everything on the market board is going to cost of a serious chunk of change. And after all of that, you get your shiny new iLevel 210 weapon, yay! Now, time to start grinding more tomes for the next two phases to get the anima weapon to 240. By patch 3.38, this was heavily nerfed to the ground.
• The Manderville relics in Endwalker had attempted to mitigate the grind issue by having the relic progress be directly tied to only two things: the Endwalker Hildibrand questline, and the Endwalker tomestones. While this resolved the problems of having to be tied down to a pre-set group of instances and duties (compared to Eureka and Bozja for Stormblood and Shadowbringers respectively), this effectively turned the formerly-optional Hildibrand questline into a requirement for endgame weapons. While some players may enjoy the comedic nature of the Manderville family's antics, others just wanted a strong weapon, and had to play through many quests to get to it. At least you could skip the cutscenes, but if you hadn't been doing Hildibrand until Endwalker, it was still going to take hours of your time to progress far enough to get the relics. Moreover, those who enjoyed the grind for the content may find the relic progress itself very underwhelming, as tomestones can be earned passively with little investment. Every single stage only required 1,500 tomestones to get it to the next step, which is anticlimactic compared to the joy of a dedicated grinder's hard work paying off.invoked

Other

• Cutscenes in general are seen as acceptable, but particularly long ones can get grating.
  • Mid-dungeon cutscenes are always reviled. Even if you enable the option to autoskip cutscenes you've already seen once, the game will still force you through a Loading Screen for the cutscene that isn't going to play. As for long ones, there's an unspoken agreement to let first-time players watch most of them. The one exception is the Stone Vigil, which has an unusually lengthy cutscene just before the final boss — short enough that most first-timers won't be pushed to skip it, but long enough that it stands out enough to grate on players there to grind. Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are the climax of the A Realm Reborn launch content, and are absolutely packed with cutscenes, to the point that, as gear creep makes battles shorter, they eventually became more cutscene than gameplay, encouraging veterans to skip them but leaving newbies in the dust. 4.2 resolved this by making the cutscenes in those two dungeons unskippable (doubling the roulette's rewards to make up for the extra time investment), which wasn't widely liked but was accepted as the only solution that even approached being plausible.
  • The game gives you a warning that you should set aside time to view long story cutscenes in their entirety when you encounter these (which usually means something big is about to happen). Unfortunately, without prior knowledge, you have no idea just how much time is "sufficient". While their length is variable due to the toggleable "Click/Press to advance" setting as well as a player caring about hearing voicework, the sheer length of some cutscenes (especially the ones at the end of Patch 2.55 of A Realm Reborn) can be quite a shock to some players. You might think a "long" cutscene might last twenty minutes, and you're treated to a series of cutscenes that lasts for almost an hour.
• The housing system is one of the most criticized aspects of the game. The problem boils largely down to scarcity — there's about four hundred thousand housing spaces, in a game with over three million users. So naturally, not everybody is going to get one. The developers intermittently add more wards, increasing the number of available plots, but this has proven to be little more than a stopgap measure: the new plots tend to be filled up quickly, especially on high-population servers. Before players were limited to one personal and one company property per account, players could purchase multiple personal houses for themselves (it was once reported that two players managed to purchase every plot in one ward between themselves) which left other players high and dry. Apartments were later added to give players an affordable and more readily available alternative to owning a plot of land, but many still decried them for their tiny size and comparatively limited functionality (outdoor housing items can't be used in apartments, including large gardens), plus apartments cannot have multiple users living in them like a house can. Last but not least, on the old "first-come first-serve" system, there were housing timers to help players try and get a house without the pressure of waking at the crack of dawn to snag a plot. In practice, however, it has done little to alleviate the issue because of the steep timer on it that usually goes for probably days, incentivizing players to remain up for hours and essentially camp outside so that they always can bid on it before others can anyways, and less scrupulous players still managed to find a way to sell their plots by exploiting company housing. The old housing is infamous for having cutthroat competition, leading to it to being one of the most botted things in the game. Housing purchases were eventually overhauled into a lottery system to alleviate all the faults the old system had, but there's still the persistent scarcity problem that won't go away anytime soon. At least there also came a change that prevented players using the same subscription account to have multiple characters own multiple houses on the same world— only one Private and one Free Company estate per world, no matter how many characters you have.
• If you're lucky enough to snag a house, you're not out of the woods yet. To make sure that players don't hoard a house they'll never use, you have to periodically enter your house once every few weeks or it'll be considered abandoned and the timer for the auto-demolition will start (you do get several email notifications about it so you can't miss it). This means that if you don't want to lose the house you spent millions of gil on, you effectively have to stay subscribed to the game so you can have access to your home. Worse: it has to be the owner, as even having a tenant and giving them full control over the house while they use the house daily, doesn't prevent the house from being demolished if the owner hasn't visited lately.
• There's something (angry and foul) to be said about the weather system that ARR was so fond of shoehorning into a lot of already annoying quests, such as the maligned "Feast Of Famine" Fishing quest. While 3.0 onwards gradually made weather no more than a cosmetic effect, those who are either starting out or going back to do old quests are forced to deal with RNG's often uncooperative whims when it comes to the weather - and because the weather is universal for all players and time-based, you have no way of controlling it beyond waiting it out.
• The Duty Finder has caused some frustration to players, simply because they end up seeing the same handful of duties over and over again in the roulette. Some of this is caused by newbies completing a dungeon for the first time, which is understandable. But it's sometimes caused by people grinding relic weapon(s) and picking a "fast" duty. Or it's caused by people who want get daily bonuses and "steering" the Duty Finder into A Realm Reborn duties so they can get the roulettes done easily, thanks to Power Creep making players generally overpowered for A Realm Reborn with little effort. This has caused some people to poke fun at the Duty Finder, but it's also made people express annoyance at getting nothing but the same handful of duties. On top of that, most players are focused on the mandatory duties, "easy" duties for grinding tomestones and XP, and the "current" duties. This means that unlocking side duties from past expansions can be a waste of time, as the playerbase has largely declared themselves "done" with side dungeons. This results in players queueing for these duties enduring long wait times, owing to few people wanting to run them.
• Once you've reached an expansion's current endgame, be prepared to either shell out tons of Gil for the sake of crafted gear on the player-driven Market Boards, spend tons of resources and Gil anyways in getting all the rare materials together to craft these pieces yourself (unless others bring you the materials to be crafted for them and so forth), or spend literal months slowly accumulating the best Tomestone gear — for a single class type (while accessories are shared among the general types, actual gear is reserved between Monk/Samurai, Reaper/Dragoon, Ninja/Viper, Ranged, Casters, Healers, and Tanks). A weekly limit of a paltry 450 tomes lets you buy maybe an accessory or a lesser gear piece like head, hands or feet, but it takes at least two weeks just to get a chest or leg piece, never mind a weapon which also requires at least one Nintendo Hard Savage run completion for a requisite item, depending on your drop and roll luck. And you can only get the highest tomestones in the Duty Finder and/or latest content with a maxed class, meaning spending any time leveling something else awards you with no progress towards those items, or with extremely lucky line fills on the weekly Wondrous Tails. The sheer and utter time gate is designed to waste your time as much as humanly possible and drag out your subscription, or kick you hard in the in-game wallet with lesser gear for the shortcut's sake, which has earned this progression system the ire of many players. And once the next expansion rolls around, you can just buy all of the tomestone gear in its augmented form with regular Tomestones of Poetics for quick catch-up anyway, rendering this nightmare of a grind as arbitrary.
  • There's two more caveats after all of this, too; the Item Level requirements in post-expansion content have a habit of jumping well past what most players may have had by the end of the main story quest, making acquiring some of these items nigh-mandatory to continue the game. And this isn't even accounting for augmented versions of all this gear, which requires either buying/making tons of that crafted gear to turn in for tokens towards augmenting a single piece yourself, lots of Savage runs to individually augment every piece of tomestone gear, or obsessive amounts of Hunt grinding every day and week just to get enough requisite currency to buy the items that upgrade tomestone gear. As of Endwalker, your likelihood of seeing players fully kitted out in Augmented Credendum or Diadochos equipment is a rarity for a reason.
  • The final kick in the teeth is that this happens twice every post-expansion patch cycle. The first round of gear between the Raids, Crafted and Tomestone round about shortly after release as the primary endgame focus, and then around the x.4 patch, a second tier is added, tomestones are changed and the previous gear now is only available with Hunt Seals/Nuts. Those who are into the grind for the sake of the grind thus have to do this for a whole other tier of gear altogether, and the system almost feels favored and more reasonable towards players that wait for the second tier, as the first tier are worth nothing more than Company Seals, Doman Enclave donations or token fodder unless you liked them enough for Glamour.
  • Patch 6.5 added an update to the Alliance Raid roulette, specifically to reduce the number of times Crystal Tower appears and to keep people from trying to get "Crystal Tower" for easy tomestones. At max level, the Alliance Raid roulette has an item level requirement. Unfortunately, this has drawn the ire of some players who are attempting to get max-level tomestones specifically for the current iteration of alliance raids (Which you do not get unless you use the duty roulette at max level). It also has caused issues for players who have just hit the max level - Especially Ninjas due to the fact that Ninjas have very little shared gear with any other job until Dawntrail. Some feel that this is not the way to reduce the instances of Crystal Tower in the Alliance Raid roulette.
• Related to the above, the game has a population that fluctuates around every expansion/patch drop. This is by design - since the developers don't want people to feel like they have to play every day and doesn't actively force a gear grind on them. However, this has caused a bit of problems:
  • For those who tend to play mostly around patch times and expansion releases, the jump in item level requirements can be quite annoying as they feel like they are "Forced" to grind content they don't particularly care for, or just waste a lot of their in-game money to get gear to get caught up. (See above) What's worse, the Trust system (Which allows players to run a duty with NPCs instead of players) will still have these item level requirements. Trials (Also a part of the main scenario) have no "Trust" system at all with one exception.
  • For those who play every day, the "Drought and drop" system of delivering content means that during the "Droughts" (The months between patches) the queue times are longer and a lot of playtime is devoted to the grind for gear or PvP. During the "Drop" periods (Every 1-2 months around a patch or expansion release), players are constantly dealing with long login queues, server lag, and Quest NPCs being smothered by bodies of players in cutscenes.
• During particularly busy periods of time, server queues can actually disconnect players - and it's particularly bad during busy periods. (Such as patch drops or expansion releases) While the game will hold your place after disconnecting for this very purpose, the window to get back in line and still have your spot is only about five minutes. This means that the player has to constantly babysit the server queue, instead of being able to wait in the queue and do household chores and check every 5-10 minutes. This can be particularly bad if say, the player needs to use the bathroom and they disconnect.
• Rage Quit penalties. Anyone that ditches a party on a quest will be unable to sign up for anything on the Duty Finder for thirty minutes. While the mechanic helps curb rage quitting (which is what it's supposed to do), it also punishes players that want to leave due to the party being trolls, players who can't finish the quest, or players who run out of time to complete it. The thirty-minute penalty applies globally, which means that even if you're in a pre-made party with your friends, you can't do a Duty Finder quest until the timer runs out.
• Loot drops. By itself, the mechanic isn't bad, but when combined with a weekly lockout for raids, it's a major pain. Said weekly lockouts make it so after you fight the bosses of the most recent patch, you can't get any more loot from them until the weekly global timer resets. If you're really unlucky, you'll probably never see the piece of gear or token that you need. The weekly look lockouts do eventually get abolished once the gear from those raids are no longer the best ones that can be obtained, but you're still subjected to the whims of the Random Number God on getting specific drops.
  • There is also no way to influence loot drops; whether you play the hardest content in the game or you're doing unsynced runs of the earliest A Realm Reborn dungeons, every single drop is genuinely randomized. This means you can do forty runs of a set of dungeons for your tank job's Fending gear and get everything else but what you were hunting for, regardless of what job you do the runs as. The aforementioned unsynced runs aren't so bad; trying to get up-to-date dungeon or raid gear from later in the game, however, is going to require a lot more time and effort plus actual live players, turning upgrades and Glamour hunts into an absolute time sink.
• Crafting scrips, high-level crafting/gathering, and collectibles for the Heavensward expansion and beyond are a bastion of headaches.
  • While specialty nodes for gatherers appeared for a small window in ARR, these windows allowed enough time for players to travel to different zones and gather the items they needed. The new nodes, however, only appear for roughly 55 real-time seconds. Some of them are far enough away from Aetherytes that you can only gather from one node at a time... and with some zones, they're so far away that you literally can't reach them in time from the Aetheryte. Plus, each one is only available twice per in-game day, or twice every 70 minutes. This could mean a lot of sitting around and waiting for over an hour in the same location just to try and get one thing you need.
  • The collectible minigame involves using a series of skills in a precise order which not only renders the item gathered unfit for use in any crafting, but each item acquired takes up a single inventory slot. And, if any deviation in said minigame occurs, it's impossible to recover from and either means losing another collectible or wasting the node entirely. Collectibles must be of a certain rarity value (achieved through the minigame) to have any XP value as a turn-in, or be worth any amount of end-game scrip currency.
  • Collectibles also impact crafting classes, who must engage in the same type of minigame upon making an item to turn in, if they wish to see any moderately level-appropriate XP rewards or acquire any scrips. The terrible thing for crafters is that it's extraordinarily difficult to make the items needed without first having the gear and tools to acquire said items. But this just turns the whole thing into a Catch-22 Dilemma: you need the best items to get the best gear, but you need the best gear to get the best items.
• The Palace of the Dead has received mixed reviews. In addition to the grinding to boost your weapon stats mentioned above, there's the fine print in the much-touted save your progress feature: you can only save every ten levels, after defeating the boss for that section of floors. If your party wipes, the duty fails, and you get to start all over at the first level in the set, regardless of where you were when you wiped. You lose all progress you'd made. The Palace also has its own internal leveling system. Normal game XP is awarded after defeating the boss, so if you fail to clear the section, you get no rewards and no XP. Essentially, the whole thing is All or Nothing — die at any point before killing the boss, and you've just wasted up to an hour of your time with nothing to show for it.
• The mechanics for progression towards floor 101 and beyond in the Palace of the Dead are widely hated. First, you have to make the attempt in a fixed party, which means you can't use random players like a typical duty finder run. Second, to even reach floor 101, you have to reach floor 100 without ever failing the duty, whether due to wiping, abandoning, or letting the time expire. If your group has a Total Party Wipe just once, you're out of luck and have to start over back from floor 51. This also includes the floors beyond 100. Nothing like reaching floor 199 and then your party gets wiped due to mishaps or just bad luck. What makes this even worse is if a single player leaves the instance via quitting or disconnecting, even if you succeed in clearing the current set of 10 floors, your fixed party is no longer complete and cannot be continued, thus ending your run by default. Each set of 10 floors (starting point to the boss) can take about an hour and the trek to the 200th floor is going to be a very long one. Unless your party has plenty of free time and knows that they won't suffer any outside distractions, reaching floor 200 may as well be a pipe dream. The only saving grace in all this is you can start at floor 51 instead of floor 1. Also that everything beyond floor 100 is just bonus, the storyline ends at floor 100. The spiritual successor, Heaven On High, only has 100 floors and can be started from floor 21 so that retries won't take an eternity.
• The portrait system introduced in patch 6.3 was liked in concept, but disliked in execution. For each one of your jobs, you can craft a portrait for your character which shows up at the beginning of a duty, dungeon, or raid, as a way of adding some personality to your character. However, there's a number of restrictions and annoyances that come with it. For one, any time you change anything about your character, you also have to go into the Portraits menu to update your portrait, or else it will reset to default when a duty starts. This even includes things that don't affect your appearance in the portrait, like changing your boots despite the portrait being a headshot or changing a ring when you're wearing gloves that hide the rings. And if you visit the aesthetician or use a Fantasia, that means updating all of your portraits one at a time. Also, there's restrictions on the poses you're allowed to make, such as that your character's face must not be obstructed. But what counts as "obstructed" is unclear; if you're wielding a weapon in the portrait, the system might decide that it's blocking the camera or obscuring your face, despite the weapon being nowhere near either one. Finally, the portraits only show up for a few seconds, the portraits go away the moment a boss is pulled in a raid, and players can just turn the portraits off (making all this effort wasted). While the playerbase responded well to the portraits as an idea, the execution left a lot to be desired because of the busywork and frustration involved with it.
• Blacklisting someone is startlingly ineffective for what's supposed to be a block feature. When you blacklist another player, they can't contact you directly, and you can't see their messages in party chat. However, you can still see their messages in /shout, their avatars can still see yours (and vice versa), they can still be matched up with you in random Duty Finder activities, and blacklisting them doesn't remove you from their Friends list if you're on it. The latter point means that someone who wants to stalk and/or harass someone else can still see when their victim is online, with the victim unable to do anything about it. As such, the blacklisting in XIV does little to prevent someone harassing you if they really want to, including a resident in Tokyo using the game to stalk someone in 2023 even after his victim had blacklisted the stalker. While you absolutely can report someone to the Game Masters for stalking at places like a private residence or a Free Company house, it's up to you to open the ticket and report it. Players have complained for years that XIV needs a more secure way to prevent trolling and harassment, and while there have been promises to change the blacklist into something more concrete, they were only addressed with the release of Dawntrail, which finally expanded the blacklist to not only prevent a blacklisted player from even seeing your character model, but also blocks all character across their entire account.
• Lag is always an issue with online games, and this one is no exception. But there are some issues with Final Fantasy XIV that are worth pointing out, mainly around how the game decides if you were hit by attacks or not. The server decides you've been hit by an attack if you're in the line of fire when it goes off — this is referred to by the community as "snapshotting", like the game is taking a picture. To sum it up, if you're standing in an attack's area-of-effect at the exact moment that the attack goes off, you take damage; if you aren't standing there when it goes off, you're safe. But whether or not you were hit by an attack is not communicated by the server until after the animation starts. This results in situations where players get killed because of attacks that appeared to miss them by a country mile. This "snapshotting" method is never communicated to the players beyond trial-and-error, meaning a lot of players end up confused before they either figure it out or have it explained to them. And should lag or a disconnect come into play, then whenever your connection manages to catch up, you'll suddenly be hit with a barrage of attacks you couldn't possibly have avoided in time.
  • Final Fantasy XIV seems to be designed and playtested using Japanese internet. While it's understandable since Square-Enix is a Japanese company, this can sometimes lead to a rather unique form of Difficulty by Region. Players in areas with poor internet connectivity (Namely the Americas) often have pings of over 300-400+ on a good day. Most players are able to adjust at least - but this can still lead to multiple occasions where players were out of the way of an attack, yet the game still thinks they were in the danger zone, or where they get out of the way in time but the servers had the casting bar complete ahead of time.
  • The lag in particular has added a lot of frustration to the Fall Guys crossover event as well - while many people responded to the failures with "Git gud" or "Please learn how to do that", some opinions changed when multiple videos were posted detailing people getting hit by hazards that, according to the rules of the game, they shouldn't have even come close to hitting.
  • One of the game's main shortcomings is that it does not do a good job of showcasing players' specific locations against each other compared to what individual clients show. While it's generally good for the most part, in some fights that require a player to be in specific placements (Especially in very small areas) this can cause issues/confusion, especially if you or someone else is lagging. This has actually caused many a player to waste a rescue because their client showed someone in a different location than them, confusion when people appear to get hit by attacks when they were in the safe zone, and Fall Guys event loss.^ExplanationMultiple videos and GIFs have been posted of people clearly being the first to reach the finish line - yet the person behind them is somehow declared the winner. On occasion, this is because either the server did not acknowledge someone beat them by a very small timeframe, or the client was not showcasing where they actually were. Sometimes, the player who is behind you is actually ahead of you!
  • While the lag can be mitigated somewhat by playing on a server closer to you, this still won't fully fix the problems some people have with lag - especially if you live in a more rural area. Some players may find playing on international servers to be impossible due to the lag, and this can limit your ability to play with friends. And if you live in some areas of the world without dedicated servers, you have to get used to the lag - like players in Oceania had to prior to 2022.
  • Many of the above problems are due to the netcode having been built upon the framework of 1.0. While it was fine in The New '10s, it's less so over ten years later. Square-Enix is aware of the troubles some people have and have been trying to correct, but it's quite a daunting task.
• Inventory Management has been a long Scrappy Mechanic in any MMORPG. This game is no different. In theory, you have about 630 inventory slots for free split between Chocobo Saddlebags, two retainers, your own inventory, and your armoury. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, it's very easy to fill up - especially if you're leveling up multiple classes (Even ones with shared gear). Especially if you're leveling up your crafting classes, since some items don't stack so creating them in bulk will cause your inventory to be flooded with duplicates. People also oft forget about saddlebags or retainers. People have jokingly called the inventory the hardest boss in the game.
• The level scaling for certain duties can annoy people in many ways:
  • Depending on your class, the number of abilities you have available depends on your level scaled to the duty. While Endwalker did adjust this by making a few class components available earlier on, some can find it annoying when they get stuck in a duty ≤50 because a lot of classes don't get their main cooldown(s) until about level 60-70.
  • The scaling is also on the higher end of things. For example, the first dungeon available to players, Sastasha, is level 16-18. A player above level 18 will be synced to level 18. This also includes item level too - which can become a problem for "Max level" duties. Because of how much the power scales through an expansion's lifetime, this means players with higher-end gear can enter something intended for freshly-attained max level and utterly massacre it - to the point where they flat out skip mechanics. (This actually resulted in Square-Enix instilling an iLvl sync for Endwalker's Final Boss due to players utterly slaughtering what was supposed to be a climactic boss fight). Some also argue this dilutes the intended feeling of "fighting the boss the way players at the time would have", since players at the end of an expansion's cycle might have twice the stats.

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