Jason is a big old Final Fantasy XIV super fan. So much so he couldn’t possibly put all of his thoughts on Dawntrail, the latest expansion, into one article. So folks, instead of a traditional one-page review, we have a 3-part epic. Welcome to part two where Jason looks at the the tech and job systems.
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail Review - Part 2 - The Monkey's Paw: The Turn
Calm blue ocean, positive feelings, this is a safe space. I ranted in part 1 about the story but you have to understand, that’s only one part of the greater whole. Final Fantasy XIV leans heavily into its story and there’s a lot of greatness there, but I digress. Now, I want to talk about what’s new in Dawntrail.
Two new jobs were added, and all other jobs were increased to level 100. The two new jobs, Pictomancer and Viper, were a huge surprise. There were a lot of hints of other jobs that could potentially be coming (especially Green Mage) but I’m not unhappy with the two we got. Viper plays a lot like a squirrel on speed, zipping and zagging all over the field in a blue. The actions per minute are absolutely massive, the biggest of any job so far, so for an older man like myself it’s practically speedrunning carpal tunnel.
There’s enough jobs in the game that I have plenty of options anyway. The armoury system of being able to switch between jobs at will has huge benefits here, and it’s only getting better. Pictomancer is a lot slower but has positively obscene damage output. Our group has a joke about how Pictomancer is ‘the cooler Black Mage’, and it’s true. It’s a strange job where you’re fiddling with paintings during combat and smudging your way across the field.

So yes, the new jobs are very cool. Some older jobs have interesting reworks too, or expound upon the core competencies in interesting ways. But then there’s my main DPS job, Summoner. Summoner’s been in a really weird spot for a long time, and I can’t help but feel slighted at the changes in Dawntrail. They did nothing interesting to the rotation and added a summon so far out of left field that it has literally no references anywhere in the lore. They had so many cool primals to choose from and they give us this weird wet fart of a summon and expect people to be happy. It’s irritating but I also know it won’t be fixed until maybe the next expansion at best.
It raises up an interesting issue though. Upping the level of all jobs every expansion brings a tonne of technical debt that it must be untenable at some stage. You not only have to balance them to feel new but not break everything and do that for PvE and PvP, but also make sure old content isn’t completely impossible, or way too easy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last level increase we get, just so they can keep adding new jobs. On the flip side, if players wanted to level all the jobs to an increased cap, the mountain gets larger and larger, and fully maxing things gets harder to obtain. There’s more to rant about here, but my editor has been very kind to give me this much space and they do need to sleep sometime and not be haunted by the sheer length and breadth of my thoughts about FF14.
A myriad of changes have been made under the hood too. Quality of life stuff that is very awesome to see. It sounds small, but they added a second dye channel to gear which in turn adds a swathe of options to glamour, which we all know is the real end game. The monkey’s paw wish means that some of the dye channels they gave are so odd that it makes you wonder why it was done that way. Still, I wouldn’t see it go away, just gets tweaked.


The graphics engine was completely overhauled, giving us a lot at much more detail on our characters, their gear and the world in general. For a ten-year-old game, its age is suddenly a lot less showing. Things are gorgeous, allowing players to see details they never had before. There is legitimately no experience of being used to your character for years, then loading into Dawntrail and seeing them all gussied up with the new engine. Just awesome.
The lighting engine was completely overhauled too, which means that older zones, light in cutscenes and especially on our character models also look fantastic. These are big things, even if there’s clearly still some work to be done there.
It’s not only the world that’s been altered for the better. Lots of little interactions, like flourishes in game UI have been added. These seem small but there are a lot of things (like the new Pelu Pelu trading UI) that could not have been done before. These little touches add up to make something feel really fresh.

So, some of the changes were for better or worse. The engine change has been fantastic but some of the job changes feel very ho-hum (to outright annoying). In the final part of this epic, I’ll talk about what I think shines the most; combat and dungeons. Stay tuned for part 3.
Stay tuned for the finale of Jason’s epic review tomorrow. If you missed part one, you can check it out here: