FFXIV – Latest Adventures

To make a long story short, I left my old job and will be home all this week before starting a new part-time job Tuesday. (Technically it’s in the same building.) Being home is weird. I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. I haven’t had a full week off of work since the last time I changed jobs, which was in July 2014.

That means I’m writing this post on Tuesday morning on my gaming PC, which is a very strange situation for me. Most of my posts are written in a text editor when I’m bored at work, so it feels very strange to be “working” in the place I normally reserve for goofing off.

Bard

In the world of Final Fantasy XIV, I’ve been coasting along with my main Bard job. There’s not much to say about it. I try to do an Expert Roulette every day for the Verity tomes, and I pop into Omega raid PUGs once a week for a drop, but that’s about it. Soon neither of those things will help me, as my item level is now 313. I still haven’t gotten around to the Extreme trials or Omega Savage yet, which would be the next thing to do on the progression list.

White Mage

When one caps out their main job in FFXIV, one typically turns to an alternate job or two, and I’ve decided I want to work on White Mage next. (I’m also mildly interested in Samurai but, you know, DPS queues.)

Leveling White Mage unfortunately means confronting the fact that I don’t remember how to heal. :) I got fairly comfortable with healing leveling dungeons by the time I reached level 50, but that was several years back and I never healed any “endgame” dungeons. I’ve not done anything with the job since ARR.

I actually started a new Conjurer with the idea that I would level it to re-learn the job (see below), but I realized I was only stalling the inevitable. I would have to confront the perils of healing a dungeon one way or the other, so I went back to my 51 White Mage and jumped into Haukke Manor, a relatively short, lowbie-level dungeon I know pretty well. It went fairly well, in the sense that nobody died. It helped my confidence a lot, even though it wasn’t a very complicated run.

I thought about trying some other low-level dungeons, but I was disappointed with the lack of experience I got from Haukke, so I decided to “rip the Band-Aid off” and jump into The Dusk Vigil, the level 51 leveling dungeon. (Queues are basically instantaneous for healers, by the way. Wow.) It was nerve-wracking, but I got through it and nobody died-except me. For some weird reason I died right at the very end of the second boss. I think I was watching everyone else’s health so much that I forgot to look at my own. That run got me to level 52.

It was then that I realized I had not done any White Mage class quests yet, so I found and completed the 50 and 52 class quests. At level 52, White Mage gets the magic blue bubble spell, which is something I’ve never had before. I did another run of The Dusk Vigil and the blue bubble was very helpful. (In that second run, the tank said, “This is my first time here.” I chuckled and thought about saying, “That’s okay, it’s only my second time healing here,” but I thought the DPS would instantly abandon us.)

Disciples of the Land

In other news, I’ve leveled my Miner and Botanist jobs to 60, and finally unlocked the Collector in Idyllshire. Ironically, you have to get to level 60 to unlock it. Some other gathering stuff unlocked at 60 but I haven’t figured it out yet. I picked up the initial Miner and Botanist quests at 60 and then I’ll be on to gathering collectibles until I get to level 63 for the next quest. (The quests are the hardest part of leveling gathering jobs, because they make you gather a bunch of HQ items which takes a long time.)

I even did some fishing to get from level 19 to 26. Fishing is pretty relaxing, and when you get that “throw fish back” ability, it helps quite a lot with filling your inventory up with fish that you’ll never do anything with.

Low-level Playthroughs

I had so much fun recording my videos for Stormblood (most of which still have ZERO views, ahem) that I wanted to make some more for the Main Scenario Quests in A Realm Reborn (1-50) and Heavensward (50-60). In a happy coincidence, thanks to one of Aywren’s posts, I learned that the Midgardsormr server (a name I still can’t reliably spell) is a “preferred” world and thus if you create a new character there, you get an experience bonus through level 60.

So I created several new characters to play through the initial MSQ. I created one each to start in Gridania, Ul’dah, and Limsa Lominsa, to get the MSQ perspective from each starting zone. When the MSQ converges (which happens when you unlock airships and fly to the other factions to deliver a message, normally around level 15), I’ll pick one of the classes and continue from there. Unless I get bored and give up on it, that is.

The point is that I’ve really enjoyed going through the lowbie stuff again. I find it quite fun to play MMORPGs at low levels, personally. I’ve never seen the MSQ starting from Limsa Lominsa before. Going through many of these low-level quests makes me very sad that I can’t go back and see version 1.0 though. I can tell there are references back to people, places, and things in the initial version, but I can’t fully appreciate them. :(

Wait! I just found an 80-Part Let’s Play for Final Fantasy XIV 1.0!

Ahem. Anyway. If anyone is curious, the experience buff you get from rolling on a preferred world is insane. Normally you reach the Envoy quest at about level 15, but I’ve been getting to it at level 18 or 19. And that’s doing nothing but following the Main Scenario Quest. No side quests, no FATEs, no hunting logs, nothing. And very little rest experience. It took me about two and a half hours to get past the Envoy quest to the first dungeon Sastasha on a new Conjurer, running from quest to quest, skipping all the dialog and cut scenes. (I did all the training missions at The Smith to get the cool gray gear though.) It’s definitely a lot faster to level now than it ever has been.

That pretty much covers everything I think.