Had a little discussion on Twitter lately and maybe it’s time that I write down the things that annoy me with FFXIV, as of course not everything can be great. I guess all my posts in the last two months were mostly positive and showed how much I like the game, so here’s a bit of the other side.

First of all, I’m 78.8 ish on White Mage and I don’t see any feasible way to level quickly now until I can do MSQ duty roulette again tomorrow. I guess I could manage the 3 Pixie dailies as well, been doing them on Dancer at the moment. I also did my dungeon “Leveling” roulette today, but there’s no real way to do anything but heal dungeons. Not even for a missing 20%. Mayyybeee FATE spam, but even those are hard to solo. Why o why do those damn side quests not give at least “ok” XP, I’m not even saying they should be good XP. Just enough to be worth doing. But the same is really true for Dancer. I seem incapable of finding activities I like that get me some XP. I don’t like PotD/HoH, I don’t want to spam dungeons. I like dailies, but there are never enough for a given level range, etc.pp.

While I am a fan of the Armoury Chest, it drives me nuts that I can’t filter in there and of course there’s not enough space to separate stuff in the four courners or whatever. I am honestly so annoyed right now, if this was WoW, I’d be writing an addon this weekend to just finally solve this problem.

If there’s a way to cancel a cutscene and be able to restart from the beginning, I’ve not found it (mostly when getting a pop). So either it’s not there or it’s one of those undiscoverable things.

Many people are saying they like how it encourages people to do old content, for example with poetics. But from the other perspective, why is it worth to me running the MSQ duty roulette every day, but only on the role that has the benefit. On my data center it’s feasible to check it every few minutes while playing and always queue as tank or healer, depending on the bonus. So much that it feels not worth doing it with the wrong role, and basically never as a DPS. I could use some variety here.

I’ve had a lot of fun healing for the first 70 or so levels, but the meta seems to have changed and the higher towards “current” content you get, the more tanks are doing the wall-to-wall pulls. Yes, even the tanks you have to absolutely spam heal. Not sure who like this, but it’s completely not enjoyable for me. Also you don’t actually learn to heal because I hardly can use a variety of spells or even dare to try to use them. I need to use the 5 buttons that I know will keep the tank alive, no clue if it’s optimal. No chance to learn, just run and spam. I’d actually say for me there’s currently no middle ground between “terribly boring” and “painfully difficult”. Maybe the only way is to read up more and talk to a White Mage main, but learning by doing with medium difficulty? I don’t see how.

The ingame map. Why does it have to be so horrible? Again, I don’t love the WoW map, but would it have been so difficult to let me zoom out three times via right click? Zooming in via left click works! And I get that not all major zones are connected, but why do I have to select Norvrandt or Othard from the menu every day? Why could I click on the Yanxia map to get to the Doman Enclave a while ago and now I have to use the Teleport menu?

Why are the Gathering Job Quests so horribly boring? Port around 5 times, then collect 10 of some HQ materials. Some are more terrible than others, but only the first one or two were “good” in a sense that they were at least new?

Why is it so hard to deglamour a piece of equipment?

Why am I a Storm Captain of the Maelstrom and the highest 8 ranks have never been put ingame, but also not removed from the GC ranks tab?

So yes, a lot boils down to maybe being spoiled by switching specs and being able to get some XP on Healers and Tank as DPS, like in WoW. But I sometimes like to do solo stuff and still progress. And yes, the last few points were a bit petty, but I didn’t even have to think hard about any of this.

Maybe I shouldn’t be comparing all the things to WoW, because overall I think the systems are implemented in a better way and WoW has structural problems, while FFXIV mostly has annoyances and systems that are badly explained. But many of WoW’s small annoyances can be fixed with addons.

And yes, overall I’m still pretty happy. I think I have one thing to finish for the last quest of Shadowbringers’ 5.55 patch, I’m very close to 3 jobs at 80, I am 90% ready for Endwalker and looking forward. But some things could be so much better, especially if you want to level in bursts and not trickling every day. WoW may waste a lot of my time, but I have the feeling I can optimize a few things a lot better.

After finally finishing the Ivalice raids (not a huge fan of the story, we’ll see on repeat clears about the raids themselves, but wasn’t impressed so far) I went to unlock Bozja and got my first Resistance weapon, the 485 bow Brilliance.

Then I actually had enough Poetics left to also grab the 485 Axe, Skullrender.

White Mage is very close to 77 and Dancer is nearly 76 so I guess I can start buying mats for those 2 as well. It’s nice that you can get those so easily, even if they are “only” 485 iLvl.

The last days I thought about what I wanna do before Endwalker launches (50 days left), so here’s an unsorted list:

• White Mage from 75 to 80, mostly MSQ duty roulette
• Dancer from 73 to 80, Pixies and duty roulette
• Machinist from 65 to 70, maybe 80, duty roulette
• Rogue/Ninja to 50, duty roulette
• get at least one Resistance weapon, investigate a second, this needs the Invalice Raids (1/3 done)
• level Red Mage via Heavensward Beast Tribe quests for rep
• catch up crafting job quests somewhat, maybe all to 60
• the NieR raids
• finish the Shadowbringers MSQ
• maybe work on Paladin (currently 62)
• farm the missing ponies from Leviathan and Garuda, I have 4 already

And here’s a list of things I’ve done:

• Bard to 80
• Warrior to 80
• all crafting and gathering jobs to 80
• catch up gathering job quests to 60
• did my first Wondrous Tails (working on second)
• check out some Alliance Raids
• Emanation EX with 3 people, mostly for Wondrous Tails, but also for the challenge (I know it’s been solod, shh)
• get all missing caster jobs to 30 (BLU, BLM, SCH, AST)

And finally a list of stuff that I am not planning to do:

• gear grinds
• powerlevel all the jobs
• trying to solo 60 EX trials with my bad gear any further
• start PGL/MNK or LNC/DRG or SAM

Thursday saw quite a bit of progress. After doing my duty roulettes on Warrior there was just a little bit missing so I spammed some FATEs (for some reason on my server Il Mheg is really good for this and no one does them in e.g. Lakeland) and got to 80.

Then I finally unlocked the Wondrous Tails and was a bit dumbfounded by the activities I should do. The 4 dungeons shouldn’t be a problem, but the rest were mostly Alliance Raids (of which I’d never done a single one) and Extreme Trials (which I had never done and not even unlocked most of them), so I set out to do some quest collecting. I had heard that you should be able to solo some of them so I tried just that. First was Shiva, where I even had the quest already (since 2019, actually). Killed her on the second try (80 Warrior with iLvl 406) and got a pony, yay. Then I went to Good King Moggle Mog, first try. Then I learned that the duty finder resets your “undersized party” setting if you disconnect, so I found myself in a Garuda Extreme party with 6 sprouts and one experienced tank. I told them I had misqueued but might as well try it. The other tank gave us instructions and we were successful after one wipe. Nice. Then I either needed Titan or was just curious, and it was unlocked after Garuda anyway. That one took three tries to get the positioning right, but there was another pony. So maybe it’s worth trying to get all the mounts now, if they’re soloable that easily.

I also need Ravana EX, but as it’s a Level 60 trial the guide suggested an iLvl of 460+, so I’m not sure I should try that already and I guess I’ll go for Alliance Raids on the weekend then, because I really want to finish this Wondrous Tails thing, preferably with 2 lines.

So overall I’m still confused in this game how some things seem to go so fast and some go so, so slow. Machinist from ~53 to 61 was quite a slog. Dancer from 60 to 70 felt so much quicker. MSQ is really fast, but why can’t I do the whole post-expansion stuff on a 79 job to not waste the XP? Meh.

Friday didn’t bring much, except Thaumaturge to 30 and starting Rogue, my first melee DPS class.

Today I queued for the Alliance Raid Duty Finder and again was very lucky, Labyrinth of the Ancients, so that’s two birds with one stone (actually three, Shadowbringers MSQ, Wondrous Tails, and bonus EXP for White Mage). Then I continued on through Cyrcus Tower and won Amon’s Coat, nice. Those two were near instant pops, World of Darkness took quite a while but again, no wipes or problems. Then on to Ramuh Extreme, 2 tries, no pony. Then Ifrit, first try, pony. Then Leviathan, 2 tries, no pony.

I “finished” the Dwarf and Pixie Beast Tribe quests insofar as I reached Sworn and got the mounts, we’ll see if if there’s any benefit in continuing.

Yesterday was the weekly reset and so I managed to get a few more Custom Deliveries in and this is the result:

Now I simply need to catch up 40 levels of job quests for the left side and 30 levels for the right side. Easy… Apparently I can get White Crafters Scrip for Deliveries at 80, which is good because I had no clue how to get better gear there. I’m going for a generic set for all jobs instead of weapons or specialized stuff. We’ll see if that works out until Endwalker, so I’d be prepared a bit better. No huge plans, but I’d prefer to have 80 gear and not 70 gear for leveling them up to 90.

For my battle jobs there were a few small milestones, Dancer is 70, Machinist and Dark Knight are 60, but I continued the quest for cleaning up my inventory and so Summoner/Scholar is at 30, I picket up Astrologian (at 30) and started and leveled Thaumaturge to 25 so far, and Blue Mage to 30. So just 5 more levels and I can get rid of all sub-30 caster gear, that should help a bit. Warrior is at 78 and that’s what I’m mainly pushing now, together with Machinist, who took over Ananta+Kojin Duty from Dancer.

Still haven’t had a look at the Wondrous Tails and I find the limit of 2000 Poetics a bit silly, I need a spreadsheet now to keep track of which gear sets I already bought because I need to store them at a retainer.

For the MSQ and post-Shadowbringers content, first I was blocked by item level (but that could be solved by buying 2-3 cheap-ish crafted items on the market board) and now I guess I need to run all Crystal Tower raids? I thought that was a recent change if you were finishing up ARR, not that it would come to haunt me in 5.3. Anyway, I still have 2 months to get through the story.

Oh, and I still need to read up if it’s feasible to get at least one Relic Weapon at 80, either for Bard or Warrior. I don’t want to invest a huge amount of time and Gil, but I think it’s an iLvl upgrade and if it looks cool… why not? At least the first step.