Final Fantasy XIV

Hit 60 on Bard today and already managed to do the first of the end-of-expansion dungeons, but not the second. First I was a little letdown as I hadn’t expected to be blocked by the gear wall (needs iLvl 142, I had ~127) but then I remembered to update my gear, 5mins after dinging 60 – I had already bought 5 pieces of Idyllshire 230 gear, which easily catapulted me to 181, so I was even downleveled 1 iLvl for the dungeon. Oops.
Warrior is 58 and, like Bard, caught up on Job quests for now. I’m trying to do one 50-60 dungeon roulette per day and not catch up to Bard again. Not sure if the XP bonus now works or not.

I’m still a little mixed on how I liked the Heavensward MSQ. Parts of it were great, parts of it were kinda weird and seemed out of place. I think I liked the ARR MSQ story better, overall.
From a gameplay perspective, I didn’t like Ishgard at first, but this improved a little. It’s still ugly as hell and boring and grey. The zones are all too big and with too few Aetheryte Crystals, until you are able to fly, that is. But once I was able to fly in a zone, I was basically done there. We’ll see how often I need to go back in the post-expansion quest line. The ones I kinda dreaded in ARR. According to this page there’s only 25+19 = 44 though, and not over 70? like in ARR. Also I want to learn more of the Scions’ fate, dammit!

I also pre-ordered Shadowbringers last night and am enjoying my +30% XP earring already. And I did a few Ixal quests again, so Weaver is 30 now, Blacksmith is 29.5 and there’s only Armorer at 25 and Goldsmith+Leatherworker at 26 to grind out until 30.

Friday: Going afk for a few days so might as well post a progress update before that.
Sunday: Of course scheduling didn’t work, but unexpected downtime, checking other people’s gaming blogs and noticing it…

WAR and BRD are both at 56 (poor planning on my part). Did some 50/60 duty roulettes as a DPS. Planning to do more of them as a tank when I saw them once. Also caught up with the MSQ, didn’t finish the Level 56 ones, but those were the reason I soldiered on to 56.

I also unlocked flying in the first 3 zones after a dungeon and some running around to find the remaining Aether Currents and some easy quests. Kinda painless compare to WoW.

In lowbie news, the WHM is nearing 40 and the GLD is now a Paladin, at Level 30. Culinarian is 38 (37 would’ve been enough) and I’m already kinda sick of the Ixal dailies. Ah well, fine if you’re waiting in a DPS duty queue…

Big news in the last week. I did finally manage to finish all the ARR content and I’m now finally in Ishgard. Because of this slog I was also busy doing quite a lot of other things. Ishgard is… grey. But the quests aren’t bad so far, but also not really awesome. Let’s see.

In reverse chronological order I finished the FFXV crossover event last night, and Hatching-Tide a few days ago.

Then I finally did some crafting again, although I had stopped doing the Ixal dailies every day. But 2 jobs are over 30 now, next is Culinarion to 38 for a new skill. Also the gatherers got some love

And finally I did gain some levels on the normal jobs

• 54 Warrior – trying to stay ahead now because of Armory XP
• 53 Bard
• 36 White Mage – and the trinity is complete
• 25 Gladiator – more tanking!
• 15 Arcanist
• (50 Red Mage) – just a quick glance, this seems weird 😛

It’s not that I’m not having fun in FFXIV, but I was really enjoying the game before I hit 50. I tried everything the game had to offer me as a beginner (as far as I know): a DPS class, a tanking class, a healing class, crafting, more crafting, gathering, beast tribe dailies, random duty roulette – everything was fine in moderation. And new. And fun.

Then I hit 50 (with the MSQ) and had to do all the story end-game content in the original game (ARR). This page shows my struggle, but it’s misleading. Each of those quests can have 3-7 steps with trips to several towns.

• Patch 2.1 (A Realm Awoken) – DONE
  • 19 quests, 1 dungeon
• Patch 2.2 (Through the Maelstrom) – DONE
  • 19 quests, 1 trial (hard)
• Patch 2.3 (Defenders of Eorzea) – DONE
  • 19 quests, 1 trial (hard)
• Patch 2.4 (Dreams of Ice) – DONE
  • 19 quests, 1 dungeon, 1 trial (hard)
• Patch 2.5 (Before the Fall – Part 1)
  • 8 quests…
  • no wait, go back to 2.4 – the page is missing something:
    • 1 trial (hard)
    • 1 trial (hard)
    • 1 trial (hard)
• Patch 2.55 (Before the Fall – Part 2)

And worst of all, they are sequential – it would be a lot better if you could just queue (30 mins as dps for the first one today) for all of them at the same time. But no, that’s probably 2 hours where you have to be available for up to an hour, so a planned session. Meh.

As I wanted to get this stuff done (the above was written last night) I queued for Garuda (Hard) and waited in vain for an hour. Two awesome people in the novice network offered to help and while I was confused at first I learned something new: you can queue up unsynced and the 2 70s made quick work of Garuda and Titan (at Level 50, Hard) and not 15mins later I have this step done. Thank you, random strangers helping new players out!

So far my plan to chip away at the FFFXIV ARR Level 50 content slowly but steadily seems to work out, I’ve found a bit of the fun again. Today I queued up for The Whorleater (Hard) and started doing some crafting dailies, after that I finished the Patch 2.2 content (Through the Maelstrom). Tomorrow I’ll probably start with 2.3 (Defenders of Eorzea) and try to do at least 1h of quests. This wiki page has been very helpful so far, actually the whole wiki is awesome. The Leviathan fight was fun, but again too easy due to gear and people I guess. I did watch a quick tactics video before though…

Sadly I’m not in the mood for tanking right now, but we’ll see, maybe I’ll queue up for a random again in the next days before doing my quests.

For crafting I’m a little undecided if I want to bring all of them to 30 or Culinarian to 37 first. One higher level to craft the daily stuff is kinda nice (better gear) and apparently there’s a good skill at CUL Level 37, according to this extensive guide.

The last post about FFXIV has been nearly 2 weeks, but not for lack of play time. It’s more that it has been a little slow. I finished getting all the crafters to 25-27 and got most (if not all, need to check) Level 25 quests done, and the 3 gathering jobs are at 31/31/32.

I am currently stuck in the ARR MSQ endgame it seems, and I need to catch up all the quests at 50 (that don’t even give a lot of XP) before I can continue there. That’s playing as a Bard. I also tanked my way to 50 as a Warrior and got to 30 as a White Mage with dungeon runs, but I don’t want to do that every day, so now I focused on Ixal dailies a little more. And yes, played a lot of WoW, but I think I logged in to FFXIV every single day, did the Ixal dailies most days and even sent the Retainers on missions a few time and visited the Gold Saucer. All in all I’m still having a lot of fun, but I was really let down that I now have to do like 60 quests at Level 50 before the expansion content starts, this killed my motivation to press on more than a little, although I enjoyed the MSQ pretty much up to Level 50.

So I guess so have finished the ARR content of the original game in a bit of an anticlimactic way by coming years late to the party. The last 3 main story quests happen in 8 man dungeons (aside: funny that at Level 49 you finally get an explanation why a 4 man dungeon group is called Light Party) which are a little heavy on the cutscenes (not a problem) but are made really, really trivial by apparently not downscaling higher level players (enough or at all). The groups I had didn’t have anyone say hi, explain tactics or do anything other than focus DPS the boss down with maybe the offtank grabbing some adds. Or not, or just doing a bad job, couldn’t really tell. The evil Garleans set up for all these levels definitely felt a bit like cannon fodder and kinda wasted, but maybe those were epic battles when the content was current.
All in all a bit of wasted time, for example like sending a 6x group in TBC equipment into UBRS. Smash and grab, just without any loot. I guess it’s good the higher level players get poetics as a reward so us newbies don’t get blocked on the quest, I only had to queue for ~33min as a DPS, on a weekday in the early evening just after work.
Also maybe it was me or maybe the game, but after that I found myself wandering aimlessly for the first time. Sure, I did continue the MSQ, but I saw these “unlock quests” with the partially blue symbol at 50 everywhere and tried to follow a few, but they didn’t all seem to end up in something meaningful. In the progress I unlocked more beast tribe quests and dungeons, sure. But why do all these quests only pop up at 50 despite being high 40s. I don’t believe I missed ALL of them earlier, or maybe I did?
Also the amount of XP I got for all this running around seemed a bit low on Level 50/51 but maybe it was just a lot of breadcrumb ones and I was playing lower jobs too much in the last two weeks. Or maybe Heavensward does start a bit slow and it’s not me, we’ll see.
This may sound overly negative so maybe I just had a bad day, but the anticipation was kinda spoiled. The Praetorium definitely felt worse than the 2 8mans before it, which I did in the last days. Oh, and while it’s nice to know I am already eligible to start the quest for an epic purple bow I’m 90% sure it’s only good as a transmog now, if at all, but researching so far has proved inconclusive if it can later be upgraded or stays at 50.

Waiting it out paid off, yesterday I checked the Square Enix store like every few days and lo and behold, Stormblood was on sale for 15 EUR. So I grabbed it, cheered in /g and went on to play WoW for an hour until it had patched.
Then I could finally hand in my Level 50 Bard quest and kill 5 mobs to finish the Archer Hunting Log. I hate wasting XP. The rewards for the Job Quest were a bit weird IMHO, the chest for your blue Level 45 set and then a full 50 set as a recolor. But I won’t complain… Checked the AH for a cheap 50 bow, neck, bracers, ring, and earrings and got all except the earrings for cheap. Now to just finish the last 2-3 steps of the ARR MSQ.
So if you started playing recently, grab your discounted expansion.

Just when I thought this game didn’t have /played I learn that it’s /playtime. And yeah, 4d 20h – after 25 real days, that makes 4.6h per day on average. But to be fair I let it run a while because I thought there was no /played.
Warrior is finally shaping up to do a bit more damage. So I’m kinda glad I don’t have the expansions yet, so I can focus at the low level stuff for a bit. Although I would really like to finish the final bard quest and do some stuff but it’s wasted XP and I’m not doing anything either. Short term goals now are some Kobold beast tribe dailies and getting to 44 with the Warrior to get some dungeon + quest out of the way.
What really annoys me a little right now that my Duty roulette has been Sastasha for 3 or 4 days straight now. Bah!