My Predictions For The Next Patch 6.2 Producer Live Letter in FFXIV

Next Friday marks the last Live Letter before patch 6.2 for Final Fantasy XIV’s Endwalker expansion launches.

With that date drawing close, and key art for the patch released, I wanted to come forward with my predictions, so let’s go!

Patch 6.2 Will Release August 23rd

It’s a guess, but an educated one that follows a trend of a week and a half between the final pre-patch live letter and launch. That means if you save your Astronomy tomes now for a day 1 material purchasing spree, you can nearly cap out!

There Will Be A Launch Trailer

Obviously, but the launch trailer has been a big part of hyping upcoming patches and allows the team to use voiceover from patch content in misdirecting ways to set us all on fire with speculation while also showcasing the patch music. With the raid series no longer quite as mysterious as it was at expansion launch, I expect footage and music from Abyssos to be a big part of the trailer, along with Island Sanctuary and small, very careful clips of the MSQ and new trial.

We Still Won’t Know The Boss For the New Trial

While nothing trial-related will likely ever be as much of a swerve as Endwalker launch and the clear misdirections it offered, the heavy Final Fantasy IV callbacks mean the order of the trial series is as interesting as the actual boss designs and such themselves. Right now, we have Golbez and the Four Archfiends, which leaves us with 5 bosses against a standard 4 trials, one of which would typically be MSQ and thus different. However, that doesn’t have to be the case, as they could both make all trials for the remainder of Endwalker be in the MSQ and there could be more, as was the case in Shadowbringers where the Resistance Weapon quests gave us Memoria Miseria and it’s EX version. Of course, in a standard 4 trial cycle, we could be denied one of them as means of crossing into the story of 7.0, but then there’s also the matter of Zenos’ returned voidsent (Zeromus?). Basically – we have 6 potential trial-size bosses here with a normal trial budget of four, one of which would be MSQ-locked, and even in a stretch, the most we have precedent for being added is 5. All of this basically to say – we won’t know the new trial until patch day.

Big Details On The Island Sanctuary

FFXIV thrives on the back of its casual audience and the content most geared towards that playerbase in Endwalker is the Island Sanctuary, since it offers solo-friendly, low investment, non-competitive gameplay that you can take at your pace. At least, that is the assumption – and given that there is no delayed launch showing on the patch preview site for the Island Sanctuary, it seems like we’ll be seeing a lot of this in the Live Letter, by my estimation.

Raid Gear Printouts

One of the fun quirks of the FFXIV live letter format is how often Yoshi-P prints a glossy in-game shot of a character in new armor to show on a live letter, a visual aid that gives a vague form while also crushing most of the detail and color visibility to leave some things a mystery until implementation. I imagine that the Abyssos raid armor will continue this trend.

At Least One Fakeout Tease in the Trailer

The launch trailers, particularly for expansions but even for patches, will often go to painstaking lengths to both conceal the actual nature of the MSQ but also to plant a fakeout for players to obsess over. Endwalker launch gave Alphinaud a big death flag as a head fake, while the 6.1 trailer used a shot of G’Raha Tia from the Alliance Raid unlock quest to create a death fake for him. My guess for this patch, if I had to bet? Probably going to have a fakeout involving the ancient Lahabrea from Pandaemonium (since the key art seems to imply he’ll be present and a focal point for the raid story this time out). There’s a lot of speculation that he’s not evil, or that Pandaemonium sets him on the path towards evil (witness the mirror-image styling of the wide-eyed guy in the key art), and so I suspect that a namedrop in the trailer audio with some footage from the raid quests will get the speculation flowing. If, however, they don’t voice-act the quests for the raid again, my guess is that Zenos’ voidsent will get up to some shenanigans in a way that hints at Zenos.

Further Clarifications On The One-Week Savage Delay

The translation live letter digest for the last live letter seems to show that the team knows the info on the Savage pushback was not quite all that was needed, as no week-one Savage raises questions about Tomestone gear, crafted gear, and how the whole ecosystem that exists essentially around Savage would work. The digest still uses some vague wording, but seems to imply that crafting and tomestones will all be day 1 of patch, with only the Savage raids being pushed out one week. I don’t expect them to say much else about Savage, though.

Details On The Substat Adjustments

In the last liveletter, the team addressed something of an interesting issue that makes gearing in FFXIV weird – the varying usefulness of certain substats for some jobs. Direct Hit has been popular since it was added in Stormblood, but it also doesn’t provide nearly as much value for jobs with guaranteed Critical Direct Hits on attacks, like Warrior, and it also has a counter-intuitive value to healers (it has no effect on healing, but is a priority stat in most healer melds because of the impact on damage done and the game’s focused damage metagame). Likewise, while not to the same extent, Critical Strike suffers a smidge under jobs with guaranteed crits – you still want it there because more rating also scales up the damage done by a crit, but the value does fall off a smidge in a way that is often hard to conceptualize.

Advanced FFXIV raiding is all about substat tiering and optimization in this way, and I think it is good to see addressed. If the details are good, it becomes theoretically possible to omni-role off a single main gearset in a way it isn’t always right now (if you main a Warrior tank, you meld pretty differently compared to how all the other tanks meld, meaning that one gearset is always either going to be subpar for WAR or subpar for the others, which all also have minor variations in how they prefer their stat loadout). Reservedly optimistic on this one!

Some Small-ish Job Adjustments

Given the largely-negative response to the removal of Hissatsu: Kaiten from the Samurai kit last patch, the team is obviously hesitant to simply drop big adjustments undefended, since even the rationale for Kaiten being pulled led to a fair bit of backlash – so I expect to see more details expanding on changes to be made. The team has also pulled back on doing big reworks for Endwalker, so while Astrologian and Dragoon were on the table for some large changes, those have been postponed. As a result, I expect that they’ll pick around the carcasses of both jobs to trim some fat – AST is fairly easy to predict as they have a lot of button bloat they can target, but I couldn’t even tell you where to start on Dragoon. I think, in all honesty, that Dragoon would be well-off with some potency tweaks and further improvements to jump locks, maybe even removing the limitation on movement while jumping. AST is all button bloat problems, because while the skill ceiling is pretty high on the job, it stretches way beyond its pure-healer sibling in White Mage to be just flat-out better in most high-end content (although White Mage is still quite good in capable hands, rest assured). I suspect Machinist mains will have the table scraps of another round of 10 potency upgrades to select abilities, and that is about all I can easily predict there.

Wildcard Previews

I think some hinting at the next Ultimate to come in patch 6.3 is likely, at least to a point. That’s honestly all I think they would try to really sneak in. I do have a sneaking suspicion they’ll goof around with how close the new dungeon looks to Aglaia, because the similarities are pretty damn apparent once I looked at the screenshot again and I feel like that is not accidental!

In Closing

The patch live letter right before release is always a good hype moment, because even if the letter is scant on actual details, we get a trailer, more in-depth previews, but also just the knowledge that new things to enjoy are right around the corner, with a date to build excitement towards. I’m looking forward to it.

Advertisement