nero tol scaeva may not be my favorite ffxiv character but he's definitely one of the FUNNIEST ffxiv characters
highlights include:
killing the lights and fucking booking it when you defeat him, and then just straight up deserting the garlean army with absolutely no remorse or hesitation
leaving the praetorium and almost immediately posting up under a streetlight in a stupid outfit in revenant's toll like some kind of clown hooker, waiting to direct wol to the crystal tower questline JUST so he could involve himself, too
showing up in the middle of a major city not even slightly in disguise to walk up to a meeting of world leaders and say "now it's clear the problem you're having is that you haven't involved MEEEEEE"
accepting wearing an ironworks uniform but dying it red because #aesthetics
magical girl armor transformation
bonus: cid keeping his sunglasses and then just silently handing them back afterward as if they do this all the fucking time
getting attacked and injured but just refusing to tell anyone about it until he literally collapsed
sneaking out of the infirmary but not before forging cid's signature on his expense report
telling his fellow garleans that if all they were gonna do is whine and refuse any solutions to their problems they could just fucking die for all he cares
truly one of the characters of all time. he's like a horrible beetle man. i love him.
A free-range group therapy called "get herded, idiot", where you and everyone in your group is set loose to run around on an open field while a highly trained shepherd dog tries to keep you all in one group. I am not sure what benefit this would have for anyone involved.
The summoned hero gathered his party/harem and said, "I could understand maybe one or two of you being attracted to me. But all 5 of you? With seemingly no infighting? Tell me what's really going on."
The oldest, a grizzled veteran of a thousand campaigns with crow's feet at her eyes, stepped forward. She looked at the younger men and women in the party, as if asking for permission, then faced the hero squarely again.
"Maybe you should stop using the Sword of Inexplicable Attractiveness? I know it was a gift from our king, but it's getting..... really hard to say no to you."
"What?"
The hero pulled his sword out of the scabbard, confused. He looked at the sword, then looked at the woman, then looked at the sword again, before dropping the sword on the ground.
A collective sigh of relief came out of the group. The cleric groaned, sitting on the ground, and pulled out his rosary to start praying to his god for deliverance.
The youngest woman, the king's daughter and a skilled swordswoman in her own right, carefully stepped around the sword and approached the hero normally for the first time since she'd been assigned to his party.
"I told my father it was a stupid idea to give you that sword," she said. "He believed that the summoned hero was going to need help holding a party together, and that is the purpose of that sword. To allow a king to inspired loyalty in his subjects during coronation or during a big speech. It's got a spell on it that gets stronger the more the wielder and any onlookers are exposed to it. Its not meant for long term use!"
"Why didn't you say anything before!?"
"Because the spell forbade us until you brought it up." She looked at him, and where the once nearly worshipful simpering expression had been was a much more clear eyed face. "Such is the nature of a charm spell. But it was getting harder and harder to restrain ourselves." She took a deep breath. "I think we'll be a better party without trying to use an artificial means of creating a leader."
The quiet caster mumbled something about "concentrating on the spells again finally" and the bard was already strumming a ditty about being freed from the curse of liking another man.
"I think you're right, princess," the summoned hero said. "I had no idea why you guys kept assuming I was supposed to be the leader when the Commander has been right here all along, but I thought maybe it was something to do with the summoning ritual."
"Nope, my father's stupid sword did it." The princess turned to the commander. "Ma'am, would you please destroy this national artifact? Hero, we'll get you a new sword at the next village."
"With pleasure." The commander took her axe and struck the enchanted sword in half, destroying the runes that powered it.
The princess recovered the two halves, and then handed them back to the hero.
"Don't worry," she whispered in his ear. "I still like you anyway, but now I finally don't have any competition!"
friend whos always planning everything: hey guys lets do something this week!! when are you all available?
friend whos always available: i can do whenever
friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho
friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)
friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)
friend whos really into genshin impact: does anyone want to play genshin impact
i take my tomestone to ishgard and show it to a sickly brume child and i say theres this band called imagine dragons do u wanna listen and he stares shellshocked off into the distance and says i dont have to imagine them
“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.
“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”
She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”
After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”
get more anti school now btw. the school system does inhumane shit to countless youth and it's only getting worse.
you work 5 days a week for 8 hours at a very intense job with multiple skills required. you have 5 minutes to grab all of your very heavy tools and navigate to the opposite end of the building when you change shifts. you get a single 30 minute lunch. you have to exercise, regardless of illness, neurodivergence or disability for an hour and you don't get to choose what you do. you have hours of the same work to do at home. also if you fuck any of this up, or do it the wrong way, or stop showing up, you will be punished and your caretakers could go to jail.
maybe you have the choice to do this all at home. the only difference is that you don't have to transport as much. so you're stuck in one spot, alone, head down, working like you usually would otherwise.
completely inhumane, right? but sure, "kids these days are..." alive people who think and feel. you should not torture children.
kids are natural learners. putting them in what is effectively a prison for the first 18 years of their life does not do anything but make capitalists happy.
I...I never thought it was a prison! I didn't do any work besides school, so I thought school was the best! I read there! I only ever read there! I don't know when I'll get to read again, because elementary school and high school were my only reading places.
The worst part of school is that I was bullied there. And I was bullied there, which really led to me being messed up. But school was still really important to me, so I miss it sometimes. sigh...
My home life was occasionally pretty shitty because my mother was mentally ill and I have a disabled sister.
School was often my sanctuary from bad things at home.
I think it's very much a case by case basis - some children will thrive in a less industrialized learning environment, or small classes with personalized attention, or even at home with a one on one tutor, like a caring parent. Others (like me) need the social aspects of group classes, and also a safe place outside of a dysfunctional home with parents who were themselves unable to provide more attention.
If you've ever customized your HUD for easier personal use, please show it to me. I am always looking for ways to improve my setup for maximum efficiency, fun, and aesthetic enjoyment.
This includes customized macro buttons and changed keybinds!
Please note: If you participate in this thread, please refrain from negative comments towards others' choices. Some things that work for you might not work for someone else and vice-versa. Please be respectful of others' preferences. The fact that there is no one single 'right way' to have a HUD in FFXIV is frankly pretty magical!
Some of mine below. (You do not have to be as thorough in explaining things as me lmao)
This is my setup for RDM.
Let's first check out the box of buttons next to the chat box.
The top row:
These 4 buttons are activated by CTRL+SHIFT plus Z, X, C, and V.
The first two is an emergency retreat and a gap-closer, while the third is the standard sprint.
The fourth is whatever the best potion I have on in my inventory; in this case, I was doing Pilgrim's Traverse lately ;p
On all of my classes, I make sure that the sprint is always in the same spot activated by the same keybind. ^^
The middle row:
Sleep (very rarely needed to be used) and two macros for disabling and activating Battle Effects for big raids.
The bottom row:
Quick-change macros to change class! An example of what my class-change macros look like:
/macroicon "White Mage" classjob
/snap motion
/gearset change 2
/hudlayout 3
/minion "Skallic Uolosapa"
Next, the lower-center of the screen;
Most importantly: I put the enmity list right smack-dab in where my eyes usually hover! This is universal for all my classes and is especially helpful when tanking. I am always certain whether or not I have enmity on me and need to run to the tank or (as a tank) grab enemies off of someone else.
Now, the top-right!
EXP bar is made smaller and put in a spot that won't take up valuable real estate from more buttons.
Money and mini-map squeezed together :3
From top horizontal hotbar:
Teleportation ring, macro to yell at the close-range melee DPS to activate Limit Break, a button to send a party invite to my bff (doesn't really work lol), a phoenix down, gysahl greens, class-change macro for crafting, priority aetheryte pass, wondrous tails, unending codex, and 3 macros that show or hide other hotbars.
First vertical hotbar: fireworks, minion guide, a few minions and fashion accessories.
Second vertical hotbar: custom macro emotes, mostly to change the expression during looping emotes or repeat non-looping emotes longer.
Third vertical hotbar: Favorite mounts.
I nestled the Duty Information/Quest Information in the corner there :3 MSQ guide also hovers over the horizontal hotbar while out of dungeon.
The bottom-right corner hotbar!
Standard waymark buttons, the aetheryte passes (again?! oops), aether compass, and a custom emote keybinded to the V key to play the Draw/Sheathe emotes. I no longer remember nor can seem to understand how these emotes work ^^; so I'd recommend looking up a guide on how to use them on reddit since that's where I originally figured it out... but they look like this;
Finally, the main RDM ability hotbar that rests on the bottom-right-middle of the screen.
This is obviously heavily up to preference, and I can't claim to be a pro RDM or anything ^^; but this is something I started to devise when I had a hand injury, and it was decently easy to use while wearing a cast on my dominant (right) hand.
The box on the far left is all buttons that I would activate with the mouse only and need to be activated as much as possible. I keep my eyes on the cooldowns there. The cure and surecast buttons are moreso for very specific emergencies.
On the far right are some buttons that are also mouse-only; things like raise and Limit Break. (I just realized I regularly forget that I even have Engagement...)
Bottom bar also has a few quick chocobo commands for FATE grinding. There definitely could be a better place for them, but I was lazy.
To better understand how the main button keybinds work, see this image:
Aah... does that make sense?
While messing around, I discovered I could also upload my configurations and get a share code! Um.. Feel free to use it, but a lot of it might break on another character without as much unlocked. ^^;
First off, I have a giant monitor. This means I have a lot more screen real estate to play with than most folks. I think my monitor resolution is 2560 x1440.
Second, my primary method of interface is keyboard only. FFXI predated WASD standard, and was made for the IBM 102 keyboard layout (as opposed to the more compact laptop keyboard.)
I don't like to use the mouse in battle, so everything here is meant to minimize having to touch it.
Major keybind changes:
I use the number pad on my keyboard to control movement instead of WASD . Up down, left, right. Strafe is moved to 1 and 3.
Camera is controlled by my thumb on the arrow keys, and that frees up my left hand to control macros. I also flip the arrows around to match FFXI.
Some other changes: Zoom in moved from Home to F5, and auto run is moved from R to the 7 key.
Sprint, mounts, emotes, and even Limit Break are added to freed up letters!
Sprint is keyed to S, on a universal hotbar (10) so its the same on all jobs. This is visible in the top hotbar on my screen.
My mount is either set to H or CTRL+H (since my main character is done with the Hunt log; alts get CTRL+H and get the hunt log flashed in their face to get it completed, ahaha.) CTRL+G is a secondary mount for funsies.
Emotes are set to the E key.
Party finder is set to the F key.
Limit Break is CTRL+L on a universal keybind (also visible on Hotbar 10 on the image I included.)
Summon Chocobo set to CTRL+B on top hotbar. CTRL+R returns it.
CTRL+P is my universal "Mechanics incoming" warning; I still use the "Pork Chop Sandwiches! GTFO!" I've been using for a decade.
I can use the mouse when needed to click, of course.
And I also have a controller that I swap to for menu heavy things, like my retainers or gathering.
I also add in a third permanent hotbar, accessed using the ALT key.
Other changes made related to FFXI muscle memory:
Current quests shoved over to the upper left corner
Current enemies are below that
Party list shoved over to the right hand side
Desperius Clean UI System
This is a complex system of macros on hotbars that leverages the unused hotbars from your base classes. This method lets you keep your base UI out of the way, and focus on what's on the screen.
Mine is accessed with the Up Arrow icon on the top hotbar.
