Tips For Eorzea: Part 1

Good morning all you happy people in digital land.  I am fairly sleepy this morning, as last night I had to resort to some Motrin PM to shut my brain off.  I really hate Sunday as a construct… I always have trouble switching back over to week day mode after the freedom a weekend brings.  My brain is never quite willing to give up its freedom, and as a result always ends up fighting me a bit… namely in trying to keep me awake rather than sleeping.  Unfortunately having to resort to a minor sleep aid like I did last night also means I am going to be overly groggy in the morning.

Cactuar Returns

For the last several weeks since the release of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn, the server we all play on has been locked down tight from new character creation.  After the Wednesday/Thursday maintenance this eased up a bit… but only briefly.  Right now it appears like character creation is open early in the morning for most of the US realms, but locks down tight again as the day goes on.  Over the weekend we managed to get five new players that had been waiting to create characters into the game and onto our server.

One of them I was scared had messed up.  They decided they did not want to start the class they started, so as a result they deleted the character to create a new one.  When they did this the list showed that Cactuar was still open for new character creation.  However by the time they redesigned the character and went to create it… it was locked down tight.  Essentially locking them out of being able to play at all Friday evening.  Luckily however at 5 am the next morning they were able to get in, create the character and get going again.

Tips For Eorzea

I thought today I would take a few minutes to rattle on about various tidbits I have either learned or wish I had known before I started my characters.  None of these are rocket surgery, but various little things I have picked up along the way.  I am going to try my best to make them spoiler free, however I cannot guarantee there won’t be any tidbits of information that are mildly spoilery at least in the general flow of the game.

Aethernet

In major hubs there are Aetheryte crystals.  These allow you to teleport back and forth between them.  In the three major cities, there are also smaller Aethernet crystals as well.  As you roam through the city, make sure you attune to each of these.  When you have collected a full set for a city, it additionally unlocks teleports to the major gateways into the city.   This becomes super handy as you are questing and need to go back out into the world to one of the specific destinations.  Generally speaking these teleports will take you to each of the various guilds and locations in the city, as well as the exits to the various zones that connect to the city.

Favored Destinations

When you attune to the Aetheryte crystal network, it allows you several options.  One of these is to set it as a favored destination.  Doing this greatly reduces the cost of teleporting to that location.  Your teleportation cost is based on a number of factors, but is primarily based on how far away you are from the zone.  What I generally suggest is that you favorite the three hub cities Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, and Uldah.  Once you have unlocked the ability to travel between them, you will spend quite a bit of your time late in the game popping back and forth between the various areas of the world.  Once you reach the hub, you can usually travel to whatever zone you need to go to via the Chocobo network.

Set Nearby Home Point

Death in Eorzea tends to come swiftly and unexpectedly.  Almost all of the deaths I have taken that are not inside of instances, have been because I got suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed.  When you die, you get teleported back to your home destination.  At the beginning this will be your home city, however as you move throughout the world you can set your bind point to any of the large aetheryte crystals that are located in major cities… at least one per zone.  I would highly suggest that you bind wherever you happen to be hunting.  That way when you die you return to a place nearby and not someplace you will have to teleport out of to get back to doing whatever you needed to do.

Starter Gear

One of the key features that sets Final Fantasy XIV ARR apart from other games is the ability to literally do anything in the game on one character.  You can be every class, job and trade profession.  You enter the game in a set of gear that is based on your races native appearance, that can be equipped by any class or trade.  Don’t make the mistake I did and sell this… because each time you pick up a new class you start back at level 1, and therefor can only equip level 1 gear.  You can repurchase this gear from the independent trader (name varies per town) in your starter city, but it is just easier to say for the first little bit don’t sell ANY gear you might get.

Armoury Chest

Any equippable items you pick up get saved into a special inventory called the “Armoury Chest”.  This allows you to carry quite a bit of gear with you at any given time.  You have 25 slots available per individual armor type… that means 25 chests, 25 gloves, etc.  The gear you collect in one class may be useable by other classes so as you decide to multi-class you have lots of resources to draw upon.  Later on you will be able to break down spirit bonded items into Materia, which will become important for outfitting your gear and improving it.  As a result I highly suggest you do not sell gear, but instead save it until you have the ability to break it down.

Trade Coins

Almost every quest you complete in Eorzea gives you the option of receiving items or trade coins.  Now the game never refers to them by the term trade coin, but that is essentially what they are… so I have begun referring to them that way.  Essentially you have various types of Allagan coins… these come in various denominations Tin, Bronze, Silver, Gold… and there might be higher ones that I have not encountered.  They all have a base value on the vendor, Tin 10 gil, Bronze 100 gil, Silver 500 gil, Gold 2500 gil.  The gear you get from quests is exactly the same as what you can get from the market.  Often times you can get a piece of gear far cheaper than the amount of gil offered by completing the quest.  As a result keep tabs on the prices for the gear for your level range.  In most cases I would highly suggest taking the trade coins in lieu of gear.  You will almost always be able to purchase the items cheaper.

Levequests

Very early in the process of the story, you will unlock the Levemete NPCs.  They offer a type of quest called a Levequest.  These can be used to level crafting, tradeskills… and later on you can get special versions of them that will raise your standing with the various grand companies.  You get an allotment of 6 per day, and these stack up until you have reached 100.  They are an amazing source of gil, and oddly enough really solid source of gear.  Since I just suggested that you take the trade coins over the items in a quest… usually the same type of item is being awarded as a bonus for levequests as well.  So make sure you do the quest to unlock each areas Leves as you travel around the world.  Often times you can pick up gear for free by completing these. Additionally if you scale up the difficulty level by one step, you are almost always rewarded a bonus chest, and these have a chance at Aetherial versions of the normal crafted items.  Ultimately these will be your best source of upgrades for some time.

Guildhests

Do not neglect Guildhests, I am finding this out the hard way.  Around the same time as you unlock Leves in general, you unlock a special multi-player version of a Levequest, called a Guildhest.  These are essentially small dungeon like encounters that are designed to teach players the mechanics needed to succeed in Eorzea.  They start at around level 10, and will offer two new Guildhests every 5 levels.  The gotcha here that I am finding out, is to continue progressing you must have done all the previous ones.  As a result my lovely guildmates helped catch me up by running level 10-30 last night.  Once you reach the 40 quests, they start being 8 man instead of 4 man.  So I highly suggest you do these as part of your normal questing rotation.  They reward massive amounts of xp if you are doing them at the level they are offered.

Wrapping Up

I can already see this is going to have to be a multi-part post as I have a ton more things to write about… and have run out of my allotted morning writing time.  Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn is a deeply nuanced game, and with that there are lots of little pitfalls alone the way.  I will be trying to collect the various bits of information and sharing them in these bit info dump posts.  However now I need to go pack up my laptop and get on the road.  I hope you all have a great day and that it goes extremely smoothly.  I have numerous things waiting on me at work, so I figure I better get on with that.