basically, instead of nerfing picto they buffed everything else. The biggest changes are:

VPR: removed their boss side debuff that causes more 10% damage, and baked extra potency into the regular abilities (sorta like leaden fist / monk stuff).

BLM: Buffs via enochian, f4, despair and some aoe stuff, re-addition of ice paradox, and a QOL change to Umbral Soul that pauses the eno timer indefinitely after you press it.

SAM: Basically got a mini rework, tsubame is no longer tied to a Meikyo or Tsubame-gaeshi timer, you literally just hit Kaeshi Setsugekka after every single midare. This screws with the loop, you have to do 1 more gcd per minute which means no filler at 2.14/2.15. Ad hoc play unaffected. This also single handedly makes speed samurai viable as this is a pretty massive buff to the basic 10 (previously 9) gcd loop of building up 3 sen and doing your double midare.

I’m a bit disappointed that SE is continuing to enforce the God-given correct way to play these jobs (monk, pictomancer) rather than allow us to do jank tech for a 1% or sub-1% gain. For samurai tendo, I must be the only person on the planet who likes the long recast (double weave after iaijutsu, triple weave after tsubame). I like the two extra weave slots during burst. Also curious where the potencies will end up, I would expect BLM to get a sizeable buff, and I’m also not sure if Picto is meant to be on par with melee DPS but its numbers are really high rn.

Gonna make some rice and curry… Meal prep is important.

I will definitely starve if I do not prepare meals in advance. Not to death, but I would still starve

Some old friends had an inside joke that whenever we were getting called one by one (to receive a distinction or something) that the best was always saved for last. Then one of them would get called up and you could hear the hushed “Dang it!” coupled with a giggle of victory. Anyway that’s basically how i feel every time my main goes without being featured another day. #1 is probably viper to complete the bookends (since #21 was picto) but i’ll be pretty happy if my job makes the top 5

I just realized monk ROF/ROW are now getting new ranged GCDs (right?) Basically mudras except fewer of them so it doesn’t feel like cheating. That’s kinda huge, it feels like it will give just enough leeway for a good melee to keep uptime, and we all know how much the fight designers like to put big mechanics and movement/downtime during burst windows. Monk will probably be my 3rd job to level and gear up after samurai and dark knight

Direct Critical Hit!!

No, they just removed any gain from playing nonstandard BLM by forcing 6f4 standard line in order to get your high potency finisher in astral fire and forcing you to do GCDs to recover MP in ice. Also kneecapping font of magic+flare star use in Bozja. Unless the potency of the fire spells is royally screwed up, BLM is going to be a completely static rotation with no skill expression other than optimizing your movement so you can put 5x xenoglossy in buffs

The guitar for bard is pretty awesome, i love it when classes get an alternate take on their weapon type e.g. warrior hammers. The samurai and summoner top look good on the Au Ra ladies.

Back in my day there was a unique dungeon mechanic and also you could click off Transfiguration midair and die… Younguns don’t know how bad good you have it now that dungeons are so braindead formulaic that SE’s small-indie-company engineers can program a bot to complete them.

Actually I won’t kid myself, the game has been extremely formulaic for several expansions at this point. Like really, every dungeon is a hallway with 12 packs of trash divided into 6 pulls, and 3 bosses made up of reused enemy assets. Did they really have to remove the last remaining piece of personality from their content?

Well as long as DRS exists, I’ll probably keep playing. DRS is by far the best piece of content in the game. That and ultimate, except i’m pug-only and I don’t think I would enjoy pulling ultimate over and over. If the only Dawntrail content to be released was literally DRS 2, I would consider it better than Endwalker and I know there are people who would agree with me.

The E4S mount is easy to get these days. We outgear the fight unsynced now in 630-640+ ilvl gear, the boss dies before phase 2 and there’s only a couple of mechanics to watch out for.

You can watch the first 5 minutes of Joonbob’s E4S guide for a quick idea (mostly the colored shapes) but it isn’t too dangerous. Solo tank is fine, solo healer if they know what they’re doing.

If you give it a few pulls in Party Finder “mount farm” etc. you can beat the fight pretty quick.

FE engage is great. It feels really strategic, compact maps with powerful terrain effects and chokepoints to take advantage of, units don’t have a lot of movement, positioning and formation can let you do a lot of cool plays.

The new mechanics, chain attack and break, are very powerful and interesting to play around both on player phase and enemy phase.

The Emblems have some really powerful effects between AoE dance, AoE warp, a billion range nuke, +500 movement on one of your characters, and some other combat steroids. There are a lot of options and I think the game is fun on any difficulty.

The story… uhhh, I liked when the Fire Emblem: Engaged. The plot is very generic and pretty much the same as a plurality of previous fire emblem plots. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

Criterion seems to be a place for the fight designers to test “weird” mechanics similar to the 2nd floor of savage so honestly I have no idea what to expect.

My wishlist is that there will be a jumping puzzle mechanic (lmao). Imagine the boss starts channeling an enrage and you have to get to the top of Kugane Tower before you can hit him. Melee have to do an extra jump at the end to get into range

Also looking forward to more trash pulls where certain combinations of enemies are not pullable together or require stun/sleep/interrupt. Sort of deep-dungeon-like.

Or waiting for a roamer to cycle around, or kiting adds like DRS red golem or minotaurs.

On my first character, I went all the way to the end of the MSQ with only white mage. I took a long time to slowly pick up each new role and level it to max afterwards. I wouldn’t worry about “wasting” the extra experience that could be given to lower level jobs. But if the playstyle of another job sounds interesting then you should go ahead and pick it up! Also arcanist is a special class because it shares levels between both a healer and caster job, the scholar and summoner respectively.

As you progress through the MSQ and level up, you will also get improvements like flying mounts, more daily roulettes that give a lot of XP, and the armory bonus which doubles experience gained on jobs that are lower than your highest level (from “battle” experience, mainly dungeon bosses). So there are definitely benefits to focusing on just your “main job” including simply getting comfortable with your buttons.