Rainy weekend, time to play games.
I’ve finished the first part of Stormblood (Level 61-62 quests) on Bard and have cool looking outfit now. So far I really liked Stormblood and can’t wait to continue.
Other than that I pushed White Mage to 49 with Palace of the Dead and daily roulettes (got some sweet Level 50 gear waiting) and Miner to 43 because I wanted to continue to level my Miner Retainer. Didn’t touch Warrior or Paladin really since the break, but it’s ok.
Yesterday I finally managed to drag myself to continue FFXIV’s MSQ. First I had to do an 8 man trial then some running and some cutscenes, today I had to do a normal duty and a solo thing. But after a few hours I finished Patch 3.4 (Soul Surrender) and now only have like 8 quests left until Stormblood. I know, one expansion late, but at least I’m continuing with hardly any XP as a reward.
Also didn’t get to do my WoW dailies to unlock flying today because of this but as I’m not enjoying them so much anyway this was some welcome distraction. Still feels grindy to be caught between patches, so I kinda just exchanged one grind for another. Such is life as an MMO gamer.
I know it’s a silly coincidence, but I just learned the /battlestance emote in FFXIV, which I didn’t even know existed. That is all.
PS: Thanks to Shintar calling me out in the comments I finally installed OBS again so I can do videos. And I replaced the screenshot with a better one 😉
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.
Right now I’m not dead set on playing a certain character, or even a certain game. FFXIV is a lot of fun, sure – but I’m right at the end of leveling in Heavensward (Bard is 59 now) and I have the feeling that you need to grind out long stretches every time you need a level to continue the MSQ. It was a little painful to reach 59 already, and now I need a dungeon run in some library and then… a quest gives ~40-50k XP and I need like 4m to 60. That’s about 80-100 quests. Dungeon runs are a little better XP per time, but for that I need rested XP.
Switch to WoW, I’m not participating in any endgame stuff or even trying to gear up my toons any further (iLvl 394 on Alliance and 390 on Horde is plenty, without really trying), but somehow leveling is really fun right now. I also have quite a few toons with rested XP, so here’s what I managed to do in the last week or so:
Rested XP and many alts Read More »
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…
Quick FFXIV update Read More »
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
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.
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.