Unlikely White Mage

Agendas

Yesterday a good friend and I were having a conversation and she said a certain phrase I have heard over and over before.  “Everybody has an agenda”, which is something I have just taken at face value in the past.  But this lead me down a line of thought that I had not actually travelled before.  If everyone out there has an agenda…  and this is pretty much just accepted common knowledge…  then what does the world think my agenda is?  I am out and about in the community on a daily basis interacting and mingling…  but I wonder how many people think I have some grand ulterior motive?  This lead me to assess what my actual Agenda is, and the only thing I could come up with is something along these lines.

I am a very simple monkey. My world pretty much revolves around making new friends and trying to recruit them into my zany extended family

— ▪Bel▪Writes▪Things▪ (@belghast) February 4, 2015

To which I was immediately accused of being a cult leader…  but really isn’t every good group at least slightly cult like?  While I won’t be trying to convince everyone to wear matching tracksuits so that we can ride a comet…  I am trying to convince people that it is cool to hang out with friends and share these games we way with one another.  I feel like all of this starts with the fact that I grew up the only child of extremely busy parents.  I am exceptionally good at entertaining myself, but I always felt jealous of the kids that had close neighbors, or siblings to play with.  These days I try and surround myself with as many awesome people as I can find, and build a giant extended family of sorts.  Being the whirling dervish of social media interaction that I am sometimes… folks could get the wrong impression that I am “up to something”.  However in truth, I am just looking to hang out with interesting people.  I approach every interaction like this person could be a new life long friend, rather than someone who could bury a dagger in my back.

Unlikely White Mage

Last night I had but one mission to accomplish.  Upon logging out Tuesday evening, I was sitting roughly one third of the way into 49.  White Mage has been the hardest class for me to level in Final Fantasy XIV in part because it is the least like the sort of character I normally play.  I set down the path of leveling a Conjurer so that I could become a Paladin, and then just kept up with the process thinking that I had 2 tanks, 1 ranged dps, 1 melee dps…  and the only thing I was really missing role-wise was a healer.  Originally I simply kept leveling Conjurer so that I could get to level 34 and get Stoneskin… which is extremely useful for soloing as a Paladin.  From there I figured I was close enough that I would go ahead and push for 50.  Additionally over the course of running so many dungeons and casual raids in this game, I had accumulated quite a bit of healer gear simply by greeding on it.  The final incentive came when I needed to spend down some of my soldiery tokens and opted to go ahead and purchase the level 110 White Mage weapon pictured in the image above.

As a result of all of this I got on last night, ran a guildhest, and two low level duty roulettes and finally reached my level.  After sifting through my bags I managed to equip enough gear to get me to level 85, which is not too shabby gear wise.  The hardest part of course was figuring out what my White Mage outfit would end up looking like.  I finally settled on the Loyalist Bilaud dyed Morbal Green, with gloves, pants and boots from the Acolyte set and the awesome shades Cylladora made for me ages ago.  I felt like I needed to go with something non-traditional since the white mage 110 weapon is a giant war mace…  and I happen to like it.  The end result is my take on a final fantasy battle priest, which is fitting considering I seem to spend as much time casting Stone II as I do healing.  Largely I am just happy this push is over, because leveling as a Conjurer/White Mage is slow going.  Chewing through every mob simply takes more time that I am used to from playing anything else.  My only suggestion for future CNJ/WHM players…  run it up first before you realize just how slow it kills things.

Ninja or Monk

At this point I am not sure what my next Final Fantasy XIV project will be.  Right now my Rogue is 15 and my Monk is 33.  Both classes are extremely fun to play, but I think I will probably spend more time at max level playing the Monk than I ever would the ninja.  The Mudra system seems interesting, but it also seems like something that is extremely fiddly and likely to just piss me off… especially combined with just how “weak” survival wise the ninja ends up feeling.  Mostly I am biased against Ninjas after spending so much time running raids and dungeons with random ones.  Ninjas seem to either take no damage at all… or all of the damage at once.  Healing Ninjas as my White Mage has been the bane of my existence over the last few weeks, and I really don’t relish putting anyone through that.

So you would think the decision is all wrapped up and I would be leveling Monk right?  Well not quite that easy.  Up until this point I had felt like the pugilist/monk play style was far less interesting than say a Dragoon, which is the reason why it has been lagging so far behind my other melee classes.  On top of this…  almost all of their gear sets look silly to me.  If I played a monk, I would ultimately be stuck wearing the Infantry set for the rest of his life, because I really have not cared for any of the other sets I have seen.  There is a set from Labyrinth of Ancients that looks amazing, but it is also one of the most hotly contested item sets in the game.  Last night I ran a guildhest with an adorable Lalafell ninja…  which got me thinking that since my goal in playing a Lalafell is to be adorable all the time…  maybe Ninja is in my future.  I guess time will tell which one I actually start playing.  In any case I would love to finish out my Disciple of War classes so I can clean all of that gear out of my banks.  Months ago I said I would like to hit 50 on all classes before the expansion, and with my raid schedule in World of Warcraft that is never going to happen.  Maybe I will set that goal a bit lower and target finishing out all of the Disciple of War classes before the expansion.