Final Fantasy XIV Patch 7.2 Is Going To Keep Players Busy For A While

Today, Yoshi-P hosted the first half of the Patch 7.2 Letter From The Producer Live, offering Final Fantasy XIV players a look at a good bit of content that will be coming to the MMORPG. The update, titled “Seekers of Eternity,” is slated to release in late March. No, we don’t have a precise date. We do, however, know that another patch will drop before that on February 27. Patch 7.18 will lift restrictions on weekly tomes and possibly add echo savage.

As is always the case with the streams that are in Japanese only, we relied upon the translation skills of the unofficial Final Fantasy XIV discord channel. If you’d like to follow along during these streams, joining the channel isn’t a bad idea.

Before showing off the content coming in 7.2, Yoshi-P took a moment to talk about the stalking mod issues. They’re currently taking steps to address it in 7.2. The issue stems from wanting to give players a way to block an entire account in one go to prevent players from being able to just create a new character and continue harassment, but it resulted in players being able to gather more information on users and their characters.

The new content coming in 7.2 will include more MSQ, continuing from where we left off. For this stream, they really only showed some screenshots. Y’shtola’s back from Living Memory and Sphene is there as well. Yoshi-P made a comment about her expression, saying that it reminds him of Asahi. (That’s just what we all needed, another version of that guy.) Of course, there’s some tech stuff going on. That’s to be expected since we’re in Solution 9. (Kinda wonder how much longer it will be before we summon the Ironworks crew to look at this stuff. Then again, it’s probably best to keep Jessie and Nero away from it.)

Of course, a new MSQ typically means a new dungeon. Technically, we don’t know whether this is an MSQ dungeon or a sidequest dungeon, but we do know it’s titled “The Underkeep”. It’s a little difficult to tell from the images exactly where it’s located, but it does appear to be a castle. Perhaps it’s in Heritage Found?

The Arcadion raid returns with the Cruiserweight challenges. It looks like Brute Bomber might have a soft spot for kittens. A new trial has been teased as well, although all we really have are some screenshots. It seems that some kinks are still being worked out after internal playtesting, so they’re obviously going to wait to show more.

Continuing with battle content, a new unreal trial is being introduced. Get ready to head back to Hells’ Kier.

The 7.2 Update will finally bring us a new field operation, The Occult Crescent located on an isle in Shades Triangle. This is the third one, following Eureka and Bozja, and includes several different types of content. It looks like a beautiful island, but it’s filled with dangerous creatures. There’s also a castle to explore and a 48-man raid.

The content is made for level 100 jobs, so you won’t be using this to get those 90s leveled up. Instead, they’ll be leveling “knowledge” which will have an influence on combat.

The field operation will also introduce something called “phantom jobs”. These are unique jobs that players will only have access to on the isle. When in use they’ll grant players new actions that can be used with their main jobs. These do include jobs that we’re familiar with so, in the examples, a Warrior can use abilities from a Monk or Bard. However, several jobs that don’t currently exist in the game are shown as well: Geomancer, Ranger, Berserker, Time Mage, Chemist, and Canoneer. These are apparently intended to make up for the fact that we may not see these jobs as primary jobs in XIV, despite their existence in previous FF games. Then again, Yoshi-P kinda waffles on that. So… grain of salt and all that.

Weapon enhancement will also be tied to the Occult Crescent. Since some people thought the Manderville way of doing things was too easy and others thought the old way was too hard, we’re getting a blend. According to Yoshi-P, we’ll have two methods for weapon enhancements. The first will be like what we did with Bozja and Eureka while the second will be similar to Manderville. However, note that he also said he can’t show us exactly what that method will look like, so we’ll have to wait to find out.

Moving on from battle content, the big content is finally arriving for the crafters and gatherers. Cosmic Exploration is on its way. When doing this content, players are intended to collaborate with each other “to explore the cosmos”. We’re headed back to space, but this time not to kill things. Instead, we’ll explore new stars and develop them – starting by building a base and going from there. To get around we’ll be building ziplines to use.

Based on the explanation Yoshi-P gave, Cosmic Exploration is a blend of the Island Sanctuary and Ishgardian Restoration. It’s like Ishgardian Restoration in that it’s collaborative and encourages players to work together. However, that content was time-sensitive, so anyone who came to it later missed out on being able to see the changes as they happened. This time, they want players to be able to see the progress no matter when they come in. In that sense, it will be treated more like Island Sanctuary. However, perhaps a better comparison is the Society Quests or the Doman Enclave, where players at different points in progress see things differently.

We’ll be getting help from the Loporrits for this – other than the Omicrons, there’s probably not anyone else qualified to help. Based on the images shown during the stream, we’ll get some space-themed goodies out of it, including a new sci-fi uniform.

A new Society Quest is coming in this update. This one’s for the gatherers and will have them working with the Mamool Ja. That makes sense as a big part of their story in the MSQ was their agricultural woes. Obviously, they’re in dire need of botanists.

For those waiting for the next installment of Hildibrand’s Adventures, that’s coming too. The first thing was just intended as a prologue, so now we’ll be getting into the real meat of the story. Yoshi-P notes that it will be “a bit over the top” – which, honestly, if you weren’t expecting that, I’m not sure what Manderville content you’ve been playing.

On the topic of silly quests, it seems the Cornservant is coming back for a short sidequest. There’s no real explanation for his return other than that people seem to like him. (I’m going with “him” since Yoshi-P referred to him as a “little guy”.)

Moving on from quests, Yoshi-P took some shots at our math skills while introducing the new tomestones, which happen to be named Allagan tomestones of mathematics. There was some joke about prime numbers, as you would expect.

The devs are continuing to add past dungeons to the duty support. At this point, they’re onto the sidequest dungeons. Halitali is already in, so one coming this time is The Sunken Temple of Qarn.

Speaking of things from the past, apparently, the team is considering making past PvP rewards obtainable again. Unfortunately, they didn’t really expand on this statement and just moved on to the next PvP update which will introduce Series 8. The update will adjust currently available actions while adding new ones. Frontline (Secure) will return with an improved map.

Finally, we’re down to the general announcement stuff. First, there’s a collab with instax, the instant camera from Fujifilm, so a camera emote is coming in 7.18. Next, since we have the Final Fantasy XI alliance raids going on right now, they’ve decided to hold a discount campaign – which means anyone subbed to XIV who’d like to try XI can do so at a discounted price of $6.95 for a month (1 character) down from $12.95. You can only get 1 month at this price and existing FFXI subscribers aren't eligible. There’s also a taco chip collaboration with chips named after XIV content. Yoshi-P modeled one of the items from the Blackmilk collaboration. No, not one of the dresses, but that coat does look really nice.