Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail is now live, and we finally have the full patch notes for the massive new expansion.
Building on the already long list of changes from the Patch 7.0 preliminary notes, the full changelog for FFXIV: Dawntrail gives us all the details of what to expect before going in, from new Job actions, even more quality-of-life adjustments, a crafter rebalance, and more.
What’s new in the full Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail patch notes?
Finalized job actions list for Pictomancer and Viper
With the release of Patch 7.0, we now have the finalized job actions for all the new jobs in Dawntrail (excluding Beastmaster, which will be added in the latter half of 7.x updates). According to the official Job Action Guide, it looks like the toolkits for Pictomancer and Viper haven’t changed much from what was teased during the Media Tour and Live Letters.
Most notably, the cooldown-reducing mechanic of Pictomancer’s defensive abilities—Tempera Coat and Tempera Grassa—has remained unchanged, still allowing for a potential 10-percent party-wide shield every 30 seconds. If the devs don’t scale it back before releasing the Savage versions of the first Arcadion raid tier, we’ll be seeing a lot of Pictomancers in party compositions for week one.
Tenacity buff
It looks like the FFXIV team is tired of players treating Tenacity like a dead stat, and is determined to turn the tank meta around. The patch notes state “Tenacity’s effect on damage dealt, damage received, and HP restored has been increased,” though it doesn’t give any details on how much it’s been buffed.
Because of the convoluted way that stat tiers work in FFXIV, this may or may not mean a big change in the meta. As a tank-specific stat, Tenacity was mostly ignored due to its extremely poor return value compared to investments in Critical Hit. We’ll have to wait and see if this buff promotes it to compete with Skill Speed as a tertiary priority stat (or, failing that, at least a minor but not completely overlooked stat, as Piety is to healers).
Changes to Unrestricted Party option
With the new level cap raise, all Endwalker duties are now eligible for the Unrestricted Party option and can be entered with undersized parties without syncing down their levels. Additionally, players can now exit an unsynced duty even in the middle of combat; now you don’t have to wait for your last party member to die before you all escape from a trial you weren’t quite prepared for.
Crafter rebalance
If Focused Synthesis and Focused Touch were part of any of your crafting macros, you’ll need to delete and start from scratch—both actions have been removed from the game entirely. Instead, Observe has been reassigned to Advanced Touch as a combo action, giving it the same CP cost reduction that Standard Touch does.
But more importantly, Reflect has gotten a major buff that might change the advanced crafter meta in Dawntrail. The Quality multiplier has gone from 100 percent to 300 percent, matching the potency of Muscle Memory and potentially making it a viable alternative opener for crafting rotations.
Known graphical issues
The full 7.0 patch notes also include a complete list of known issues that couldn’t be resolved before launch. Unsurprisingly, a majority of them have to deal with minor graphical glitches as the dev team continues to calibrate the graphics update—the good news is the more severe issues seem to have quick workarounds for the moment. Some known issues include the following:
- Incorrect display and glitches when Real-time Reflections is set to Standard or High.
- A flickering skybox at night when the graphics settings preset is set to Maximum or High on certain desktop graphics cards.
- An issue where the game displays a black screen, which can usually be fixed by restarting the game and/or your launcher.
For now, the only major gameplay-affecting issues seem to be that Gunbreaker’s main damage burst rotation—the Gnashing Fang combo—doesn’t light up despite correct execution, and that certain level 90 duties don’t reward experience despite the raised level cap. Hopefully for players, most of the problems will be fixed in future hotfixes.
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail is out now on early access and launches officially on July 2—you can get more details from the full patch notes here.
