hey, the crafter/gatherers are FINE. we aren't losing it. we are very sane, and won't lose our minds crafting everyone's food/pots/gear/melds. please look forward to it.
Yeah, I'm sorry but I hope Wuk Lamat doesn't appear in Ex Sphene. I wish she didn't even show up in Normal. Her bursting in to save the day moment was completely unearned, as was her heart to heart with Sphene after while we stood off to the side acting like an NPC. She was an ok character, but she just hogged way too much of the spotlight for way too much of the expansion, and I feel like so many of the story issues could have been resolved simply by taking attention away from her and giving it to someone else. Krile got done dirty. Erenville could have used more focus. Koana, Thancred and Urianger barely even worked against us like they were supposed to and spent most of the time cooperating and/or praising Wuk Lamat. Zoraal Ja could have used a little more time interacting with Wuk Lamat during the rites to give insight into his motivations and challenge Wuk's ideals. Sphene was well written imo and could have been great, but she only got ONE zone, she wasn't even around for the final zone, she didn't get even remotely enough time to be fleshed out as a villain and become someone we could care for. Things like that. She was fine, she just wasn't good enough to carry an expansion like they seemed to think she was. I was perfectly fine with her being the main focus in the first half, but when interdimensional world-level threats show up, it should be WoL and Scions leading the charge, not the house cat. Besides disappointment in the MSQ, game is super fun though.
I'll say this much about the MSQ: There are a handful of ways the writing team could have handled the mentor-role we were taking on and the side-lining, and they decided to go with "over half of all spoken dialogue will be Wuk Lamat preaching the same thing repeatedly in the first half of this series. The second half will be a bit less of Wuk Lamat saying relatively the same thing but with a bit more character growth involved. Also during all of this time she isn't allowed to make mistakes or misstep or hurt someone for the wrong reason". That's primarily what I gathered when I struggled through; it wasn't taking the backseat for a change, it wasn't simply the fact my Scion friends were downplayed or nerfed for the sake of uplifting a newer character, it was the overwhelming amount of Wuk Lamat there was in comparison to potential villains' or other characters' growth. It's the first time I genuinely questioned if we had gotten a different team altogether and if FFXIV had plucked someone from ANET to frontier the writing this time around.
