Leveling Alt Jobs in FFXIV

by

Good Morning Friends! This is a rare Saturday post that I decided I am making today partially in honor of Blaugust and partially because I feel like sharing some information. If you follow me on Twitter you probably have noticed that I have been dropping a bunch of information threads about FFXIV, largely targetting brand new players or WoW transplants. One of the things that I keep mentioning is just how bad of an idea it is to roll new characters in order to play a new job. One of the great things that FFXIV has going for it is the ability to play a single character and have it be viable at every single job available in the game. Starting a brand new character effectively means that you are starting the game over from scratch and there is little to no carryover between these characters, meaning you lose all of your hard-earned mounts, titles, minions, and most importantly cosmetics.

This however is a bit of a double-edged sword, because the Main Story Quest of Final Fantasy XIV is designed to rapidly progress a single job in level ensuring that you are always caught up to be able to do the next quest in sequence. Unfortunately, you won’t have access to the MSQ on your alternate jobs and will quickly find that the ocean of side quests available in the game, just is not a great way to level because they reward a pittance of progression. There are of course a number of ways to grind up new jobs if you really want to “no-life” your way to the level cap. However, over the years I have realized that the game prefers a “variety is the spice of life” approach and rewards you for doing a little bit of a lot of different activities. Once I have adopted this methodology, I have found that leveling becomes pretty straightforward and just an application of days of repeated effort rather than a focused grinding session.

There are a number of activities that are rather rewarding, and I thought I would start by prefacing what I do on an alt that I am trying to level every day. Here is a quick bullet point list, and I will explain each of these further down in the post.

  • Main Story Roulette
  • Battlecraft Beast Tribe Dailies
  • Clan Hunt Logs
  • PVP Roulette
  • Alliance Raid Roulette (once it opens up)
  • Trials Roulette
  • Leveling/50+ Roulette

Generally speaking, I will hop in a queue for activity, and while in that queue I will be working on either Beast Tribe quests or Clan Hunt logs specifically, allowing that time spent in the queue, especially as a DPS to be productive. On another note, this is largely targetting folks who have leveled a single job all of the ways through the main story quest. If you don’t have a character to the level cap, you really should be focusing on that first. You get a bonus to experience for the alternate jobs if you have a single job to whatever the current level cap is.

Main Story Roulette

This friends is the single largest chunk of experience you are going to get from any activity. Main Story Roulette is a way of Square guaranteeing that every player can always get a group for Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. I’ve said before that Square is extremely adept at bribing players to do the right thing, and it starts right here. If you are on an alt, you are going to get roughly 75% of a level for a Praetorium run and 50% of a level for a Castrum run. I greatly prefer Praetorium even though it is significantly longer because you can semi-AFK during the cutscenes and be doing something else on the other monitor. Do not sleep on this XP boost. Sure it becomes boring and sure there is a specific pattern to the way that these mega-dungeons are run, but the single boost that you can get every day is well worth your time investment.

PVP Roulette

This is another big chunk of experience and I think the secret to why I don’t mind doing PVP in this form is that the player is rewarded effectively the same win or lose. You are going to see somewhere in the vicinity of half of the levels worth of experience from running the PVP roulette every single day. This is something that I would suggest queueing for during prime time however as during off-hours the queues might be a little longer and your time could be served better elsewhere. A side benefit is you gain wolf marks which you can then turn in for pets, cool exclusive weapon and armor appearances, and even a magitek mount.

Battlecraft Beast Tribe Dailies

To be completely honest, I ignored these for the longest time to my own detriment. In “A Realm Reborn” the Beast Tribe quests were not worth that much experience. They were something that I did to earn a reputation and eventually unlock unique dyes and the mounts but not really a net positive on the experience gain. However starting with Heavensward, the quests began scaling with your level and this has increased significantly with Stormblood and no Shadowbringers. For example, doing the three Pixie Beast Tribe dailies can be upwards of half of the level of experience for level 70+ characters.

Each expansion seems to reward more experience than the previous expansion. If you are below level 50, it is still worth doing the A Realm Reborn quests largely because the later quests in the series reward better experience gain than the early ones.

Clan Hunt Logs

Scattered throughout Eorzea are Clan Hunt boards. From them, you can gain hunt bills that can be completed each day and reward a decent chunk of experience, Gil, as well as a specific clan hunt currency for each expansion that can be spent on gear. You can also join in “hunt trains” where groups of players go around the world taking out high-rank hunt targets, but I am not going to get into that today. I am largely focusing on the hunt bills that you can work on at your own pace, and between this and the beast tribe dailies, these serve as a thing you can do while waiting in roulette queues. Each bill will ask you to find a specific target mob in a specific zone and kill a specific number of them. Each time you complete a step on the bill you are rewarded experience, Gil, and the hunt currency. You can find the hunt boards for each expansion in the following locations.

  • A Realm Reborn
    • Your Grand Company Headquarters – Limsa Lominsa / Gridania / Ul’dah
  • Heavensward
    • Ishgard – just outside the Forgotten Knight Tavern
  • Stormblood
    • Rhalgr’s Reach – inside the tunnel by the tomestone vendors
  • Shadowbringers
    • The Crystarium – just outside the main Aetheryte on the same level

Alliance Roulette

I had been avoiding this one like the plague, but no that I have started to get my feet about me I gave it a spin. I was shocked by just how much experience these are worth. You can’t start running this until you reach level 50 on the character, but in my experience, it is worth roughly 50% of a level each day. The best time to run these is during the 50-60 grind because it means you will get either Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower, or World of Darkness… all of which are extremely safe these days and tend to go fast and by the numbers. Once you cross that 60 threshold, you start being eligible for monsters like Dun Scaithe that can turn into a horrific wipe fest. I still throw myself against this wall but your mileage may vary.

Trials/Leveling/50+ Roulettes

I am lumping the dungeon and trial roulettes in the same bucket because they are reasonably rewarding, but how rewarding varies wildly based on which activity you end up getting. The roulette itself is worth 15-20% of a level and this can scale upwards greatly if the activity you end up getting randomed into is near your level range so that you are getting decent experience off individual monster kills. They are most definitely worth doing, but not at the detriment of any of the other options you have available to you.

The No-Lifer Grind Methods

Are you the kind of player that prefers to find the most efficient method of doing something and then repeat that same process over and over until achieving the desired result? There are absolutely methods for leveling that follow this thought process. Truth is that I do some of each of these along with the above methods in order to keep things flowing smoothly and keep me from bogging down anywhere along the way. While I ascribe to the “variety is the spice of life” method of leveling, there are absolutely points at which I will grind my way over specific humps.

FATE Grinding

This is pretty straightforward… essentially go camp a zone and take out FATEs for the experience. The best possible course of action is to look in the party finder and see if anyone has a FATE grinding group up. There are a number of steps in the artifact weapon quests that involve grinding fates for some sort of a resource. In many cases, you can ride along with one of these groups and they will benefit from a faster time to kill and you will benefit from reaping all of that experience. If you can’t find a party finder group then the best practice is to choose a zone in your level range and just start doing FATEs. It is very rare that you will be in a zone and not have a group already running around and doing them. Mouse over each of the FATEs and then head towards the one that seems to be gaining progress, chances are you will find a fledgling group ready to go doing them that you can follow around.

Max Level Dungeon Queues

This one is pretty straightforward as well and works best if you are leveling a Healer or a Tank for the shorter queue times. Essentially you go into the duty finder, tick the highest level dungeon that you are eligible to queue for, and then do it over and over until you unlock a new dungeon. Repeat until you have achieved the desired level and also gear yourself pretty well in the process. Doing this as a DPS can suck because you end up with a much longer queue time than the Healer/Tanks and their near-instant queues.

Hunt Trains

This is admittedly one of the methods that I know the least about. On every server, there is a sequence of high-level hunt targets that spawn, and there are groups that are dedicated to running through them in sequence for experience and hunt currency. Generally speaking, these groups are organized out of Discord communities now, so I would suggest you do some searching for your Data Center and see what hunt communities might be available for you. I know this is a thing, and it is a great way of gearing alts… but also I have not really had the time or the mental bandwidth to dive into this system. I am telling you that it exists if you want to go down that rabbit hole, but I don’t have the knowledge to pass it along to you directly, unfortunately.

Deep Dungeon

One of my favorite methods for leveling alternate jobs, especially the 1-50 grind is the “Deep Dungeon” system. These are made up of the Palace of the Dead in the South Shroud and Heaven on High in The Ruby Sea. Essentially it is an alternate leveling scheme that allows you to walk in with no gear and be perfectly effective at playing your class, queueing with strangers, and completing a course of dungeon floors that take somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes to run. Palace of the Dead can be started by a character at level 1, slows down after 40, and then slows down again after level 50. Heaven on High picks up at level 61 and can take a character easily to level 70, but again slows down significantly in the 70-80 level grind. While doing the dungeons you have a chance of getting specific loot chests to drop that can be decoded into an assortment of minions and cosmetic armor pieces.

I have to be completely honest, that one of the best guides to understanding how this system works was produced by Square themselves. In order to gain access to each of these there is a short quest chain and below are links to the specific quest that starts each.

Bozjan Southern Front

I am very new to this system, but essentially this is an alternate leveling system that involves doing battle against the forces of the Empire in an attempt to save the Bozjan people. It opens up for characters over level 71 and in my brief experience, the gain is comparable to that of a Deep Dungeon system. Unlocking the system requires you to have completed the level 80 Main Story Quest and have also completed the entire Ivalice Alliance Raid quest series. Since I am still learning the ropes I am going to refer you to another source for information about this system. All in all, I have found this enjoyable so far and I plan on pushing my Dancer into it some more once I hit level 71.

Summary

One of the other important things that you need to probably note is when the daily reset happens on your server. Each reset you get a fresh batch of all of the above bonuses available to you in order to keep working those levels up. Like I said before, I take an approach these days of doing a little bit of all of these things because it keeps things feeling fresh. However, at various other points in my FFXIV history, I was very much a FATE grinder or a Deep Dungeon grinder. The problem for me at least is that I got burned out on this method of play pretty quickly. I could keep my head down up until the point I achieved my first goal, but then found it extremely hard to start over again with the next class. I ground all of the Battlecraft jobs to 50 using a combination of FATEs and Deep Dungeon for example.

I think ultimately you need to find your own groove and what works for you the best. If I happen across a party doing a FATE I tend to pop in and join the fun, because it will ultimately provide a little chunk of experience along the way. If you employ multiple methods of leveling, I think you too will find that grinding up those Alternate Jobs doesn’t feel quite so grindy. As always if you have any questions or comments feel free to drop them below. I hope this guide is useful to someone out there because it certainly took a long time to write this morning.

Ahead of the Curve

by

One of the things that I love about being a fairly prolific blogger, is that it also makes me a fairly prolific “screenshotter”. I like using images to break up blocks of text, so it means that I am always looking to capture moments in games. At last count, it also means that I have an archive of somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 GB worth of images recouting my time in various games. This means that with some measure of accuracy I can usually pinpoint exactly when I started playing a game. For example with my most recent return to Final Fantasy XIV, I know without a doubt that it happened on June 26th or 2021 and the above image is the first screenshot that I took. I started playing again on a Saturday which allowed me to get in, buy a jumbo cactpot ticket, and then cash that in after the podcast and I took a screenshot of it because I got a prize slightly greater than the default. It isn’t always a moment of huge significance that causes a screenshot to happen, but I do enjoy the fact that I do this regularly enough that I can use it as a visual journal.

This puts me slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to the recent wave of players trying out the game. It also has me still playing catch up for all of the content I missed since I last played around the release of the 5.3 patch. Something I had never participated in for example was the Bozjan Southern Front which is like this interesting halfway point between a Deep Dungeon and something like Eureka. To get it unlocked however I had to run through the entire Ivalice Alliance raid series that I never actually got around to doing in Stormblood. I’ve not spent a lot of time in there, but what limited time I have has been enjoyable. I mostly bounced from FATE to FATE and then signed up for all of the boss fights that happened while I was in the vicinity. I’ve unlocked the second area of the zone and I think at last count I was rank 6 of 15. Every time I can put on a new rank I pop back into the base and upgrade because I had been warned that often times this opens up new quests which unlock new things.

The bulk of my week was spent working on my machinist job, and I have to say right now at this very moment it is probably my favorite DPS class in the game. This is weird given how much I did not like Machinist when it was originally released in Heavensward. We’ve lost track of how many revisions to the class this has been, but right now they have a really enjoyable mix of a gunner class and Edgard from Final Fantasy VI. One of my friends Erry mentioned that she was not digging the class at all… and then she got Drill and that changed everything. I have to agree with this sentiment, it is really when you get the gadgets and the upgraded “heated” versions of your base attacks that it really starts to come alive. I hit level 80 with the class a few days ago and as is usually my pattern, once I got some basic gear I flipped out and started leveling something new.

There was one job that was completely greyed out for me, and I decided to remedy this. Otherwise, all of my battlecraft jobs are at least level 50 or higher. Dancer was introduced with Shadowbringers and I have to admit it is not traditionally what I would consider my jam. The first thing we had to remedy was getting rid of the default appearance which looked a bit goofy on a Lala. Instead, I went with this whole pirate lord sort of theme and I think it works nicely. Shocking to me is how much I am enjoying the class because it feels like playing a melee… but all of your attacks work at range. This means that like Bard and Machinist it is a class with a high degree of mobility since I don’t have to wait on any abilities to cast. What really pushes it up there though is the group support it provides with a bunch of interesting AOE minor heal abilities. I am learning the ropes but definitely a job that I dig. I think ultimately I am on the path to level everything to 80, but I sincerely doubt that happens before Endwalker.

Grace and I were joking that somehow I was replaced by the version of the player that they were in 2017. I have been throwing myself at all sorts of random group content and am even doing the daily Alliance Roulette for fun and experience. Sometimes it works great and we get a nice easy Syrcus run, and other times it does not… and you get Dun Scaithe that has so many wipes that I eventually had to bail out and go to bed. All the time however I find myself enjoying doing content with random players and how generally awesome everyone has been. Even in the cavalcade of wipes that was that Dun Scaithe run, no one was really hostile at least not the levels of hostility that I would have seen in other games. Like I can take passive aggressiveness because I grew up with plenty of that, it is the downright hostility towards other players that I think has driven me away from random group encounters in other games.

I had built this mental block up against doing things with strangers, and it makes me wonder how many opportunities I had missed out on. For example, I happened to be doing clan hunt logs in the Lochs when I noticed the Ixion this big mega FATE was up. Shortly thereafter folks started flocking to the zone and grouping up to prepare to kill it. They sat there and waited a good solid 10 minutes for folks to filter in from other zones and when there were 20 minutes left on the FATe they pulled. You can see the grouping of players that already had their mount, but were super happy to help out and do the FATE just because it was fun. I was in that camp as well, because I got the mount through another source and was just there to experience the event. It wasn’t particularly difficult but also wasn’t a trivial face stomp either. I walked away with enough Ixion horns to be able to pop over to Rhalgar’s Reach and get the minion version of Ixion to show for my effort.

Thing is… there is a version of me from not too long ago that would never have signed up for an event with a bunch of strangers. I know this is corny, but it feels like this game and its community have summoned forth a version of me that I thought was long dead. I used to be a group organizer and constantly slamming my face against impossible obstacles with strangers. That is more or less how I survived all of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and because of it I had long lists of friends and was in my maximum number of social channels that I used as a reservoir of people to do things with. Then the community changed, or at least I became fearful of it and I stopped grouping with anyone that I did not know personally… or at least were not vetted through one of my friends. Coming back into this atmosphere it has revitalized that part of me that is willing to talk to strangers and even lend a helping hand again. I’ve missed this version of me.

Boycott or Not

by

I’ve felt like I needed to talk about this point for a few days now, but honestly was uncertain exactly what I would say about the matter. If you remain blissfully unaware of the situation happening with Blizzard entertainment, I would like to have some of whatever you are smoking because apparently, it works extremely well. The short rundown is the State of California has filed a lawsuit against Activision Blizzard for hostile working conditions, specifically targeting women and in EEO language “protected classes”. Since this point, a cavalcade of horrible stories of Blizzard employees behaving badly has been loosed upon our community. I am in no way trying to diminish these stories but there are way too many of them to ever realistically cover in a blog post. If you have remained oblivious then I highly suggest educating yourself and PC Gamer has a fairly good rundown of the timeline of events.

As part of this discussion, I feel like it is important to at least talk about the employee walkout at the Blizzard campus. The first image in this blog post is a picture of Blizzard staff walking out on July 28th to protest the situation. Corresponding to this action there were calls across social media, many of which coming from Blizzard staff to boycott all of the studio’s games on that day and to create a virtual picket line. This specific call to boycott was targeting a specific time and date and not a larger drive to boycott the games as a whole. The thing is… once this ball started rolling it was difficult to stop and now there are a number of individuals that are maintaining the boycott as a way of showing support. It is all a double-edged sword because, in order to make the “corporate overlords” take notice, the company has to be losing money. However, in order for the company to lose money, you have to take actions that will actively harm the folks that are still working there.

In fact, there are folks in the community trying to say “hold up a minute” and stop the boycott. Alanah Pearce is a trusted voice in the gaming community, and I generally speaking appreciate her opinion on things. Yesterday she released a heartfelt video talking about how a boycott might do more harm than it does good. I’ve seen this echoed in the comments on Twitter of my own friends who work at Blizzard. Now that the initial employee action is over, there seems to be a general fear that the fans won’t be coming back. I mean and honestly, that fear is warranted given that I myself cannot stomach the thought of playing any of the games right now. Diablo 3 Season 24 is happening currently and the start of a new Diablo season is generally my happy place, but I cannot bring myself to touch the game.

If you have reached this spot in the blog post, you might be wondering… “Bel why are we even talking about this right now?” On Tuesday just ahead of the investor earnings call, J. Allen Brack the president of Blizzard Studios left the company to “pursue other opportunities”. Replacing him is a team of “co-leaders” made up of Jen Oneal that came from Vicarious Visions, and Mike Ybarra previously from Microsoft and the Xbox platform. Firstly let me be clear, that I absolutely believe that JAB needed to go to begin the process of change. Secondly, I don’t necessarily see anything specifically wrong with the choices that were made other than they seem to reflect Activision more than they reflect BLizzard as a studio. They are choices that point at corporate control and stability with Jen Oneal being a pretty familiar surrogate for Activision and Mike being looked at as a rainmaker from Microsoft.

I think my ultimate fear with all of this is that these were simply performative actions in order to show the stockholders that Kotick and crew were seizing control just ahead of the earnings call. Additionally, the head of Human Resources left the company, which makes sense given that every single tale that I have heard involved either that department being apathetic or openly hostile towards those coming forward to report incidents. The timing of this all synchronizing with the earnings call, however, makes this all seem like a calculated series of steps in order to smooth out investor sentiments. I wouldn’t exactly classify the stock prices as being in freefall, but there has absolutely been a downward trend since the announcement of the lawsuit and the other information coming to light. There is even a lawsuit coming from the investor community alleging that the company misleads shareholders.

Tuesday, August 3rd was the Activision Blizzard earnings call. If you are so inclined you can check out the webcast recording of this call here or view the slide deck from which the above image is pulled. Some of the core takeaways are that Blizzard as a whole continues the downward slide of MAU’s reported, losing another 1 million players and down roughly $50 Million in revenue compared to the first quarter. Additionally, Diablo Immortal the oft-maligned mobile port of Diablo 3 has been pushed out to a 2022 release and there are still no firm dates for either Overwatch 2 or Diablo IV. Diablo II Resurrected appears to still be on track for a September launch which is largely the big positive.

In 2015, Blizzard stopped reporting subscription numbers in favor of a more ambiguous engagement figure of MAU’s or Monthly Active Users. However in the above image pulled from MassivelyOp, shows that since 2018 Blizzard has lost 32% of its Monthly Active Users. In other terms, it is now sitting at 26 Million MAUs for Q2, which means it is down 12 Million users for the company as a whole in that timeframe. I think what is scarier is the fact that this quarter doesn’t even take into account the current exodus of players from World of Warcraft. That all more or less started during the Month of July. My own World of Warcraft account was canceled and laying dormant, but still on the books until the first part of July for example. When it comes time for the investor call in Q3, it is likely going to be pretty bleak.

So I guess we wind up back at the first question of the post. Should you boycott Blizzard games? Ultimately I don’t have a clue. I don’t know what actions are going to lead to a significant change in that company. I do know that it is a more complicated issue than just seeing some performative actions taken to convince the investors that change is coming. Change actually needs to happen. The other side of the coin that we have not even begun to discuss is the fact that not only are the allegations of sexual assault horrific, but the fact that World of Warcraft has not been in great shape for the last four years. I didn’t quit World of Warcraft because of the allegations, I was already long gone when I bounced hard off the Shadowlands content. While my six-month sub timed out corresponding with the great exodus that is happening, it is not part of it. I simply input didn’t want to play this game anymore.

Going back to the changes that are happening with the company, the Employees that were protesting made a list of pretty straightforward demands. To the best of my knowledge, none of these demands have actually been met or even publicly discussed by those in power at Activision Blizzard. Until these demands are taken seriously I am hesitant to ease up on the pressure. So if you did in fact quit World of Warcraft or any other Blizzard titles over this recent situation, then it isn’t exactly time to take your eye off the ball because no tangible action has actually been taken to improve the situation other than a changing of the guard. If you were boycotting for this specific reason then it is a pretty fraught decision to determine if you should go back to playing like normal or not.

It is very easy to look at any corporate action taken as being “good enough”. The thing is gamers have very short attention spans when it comes to boycotting the things that they love. There are deep structural issues at work in the gaming industry as a whole, and that doesn’t align itself with rapid change but instead, a slow and prodding ship that takes decades to turn. I’ve been guilty of being angry with a company and then forgiving them quickly because it means that I can return to doing the things I want to do guilt-free. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and we all want to return to the places that give us those happy feelings. I would love to be able to return to playing Diablo 3 for example with a clean conscience.

The thing is… I can’t, at least not yet. I can’t tell you what you should do or the actions that you should take. Your situation is different than mine and in the eyes of one of my friends “the money is already spent”. That is a perfectly cromulent way of viewing the situation if it works for you. For me, it does not, because I know that regardless of what I happen to be doing… I am also broadcasting that action to the world. I can’t in good faith keep publicly supporting Blizzard or its games. That is not to say that this will always be the case. It is entirely possible that next week I buckle and return to the fold, but for the time being, I am holding my ground. It is not so much a boycott but instead me doing what feels right. You need to look deep inside yourself and determine what feels right to you.

Okay to Take a Break

by

Good morning friends! I am feeling better this morning, or better enough to actually be interactive and mostly functional. Right now we have this weird thing happening in Oklahoma that is a perfect reminder that as a state we just get the weather patterns that are left over from the rest of the country. The air is filled with smoke from fires but said fires are happening in Canada and the Pacific Northwest but the current wind patterns are causing it to hang over the middle of the country. As a fairly severe asthmatic and one that is particularly susceptible to smoke, it has been destroying my lungs. For reference in 2005, there was a house fire down the street and that was enough exposure to send me to the hospital for five days. Yesterday was a day of rest and lots of Benedryl to try and halt the allergic reaction causing my lungs to stop functioning.

The results are that I feel more like a human being, but yesterday was not so much. As a result without really meaning to, I made the tactical decision just not to worry about blogging. I made a comment on Twitter given that the largest chunk of my vocal readers have a presence there where I sheepishly half apologized for not posting.

It felt strange that the key proprietor of Blaugust was taking a day off during the running of the event. I was rapidly presented with a chorus of my friends telling me that it was perfectly okay to take time off from blogging and that maybe it was a good lesson to present to younger bloggers. So here we are this morning with a post I did not intend to write on a subject I did not think to cover. The thing is… my friends are completely correct. Your health and wellbeing are far more important than maintaining a schedule. As a result, Uncle Bel is going to tell you a story.

The Grand Experiment

I am going to be completely honest with you, but right now my legacy in blogging seems to be the fact that I am more prolific than most. I am not necessarily known for the quality of my posts, but instead the quantity of them. Sure there are true daily bloggers that completely clean my clock when it comes to posting count, but people keep returning because I have things to say and keep saying them. This was not always the case and in fact, for the first four years of this blog, I was extremely irregular in my posting patterns. In 2013 I decided I wanted to change this and proposed what I then called The Grand Experiment where I force myself to sit down every morning and write something. The idea was simple enough, that not every blog post needed to be this epic tale and there could be straightforward “day in the life” style posts along the way.

In that first year, I made a total of 257 blog posts, which was over a hundred more than I had made to that point in the first four years of blogging. The more I wrote the easier it became to summon forth something to talk about, and honestly the more the barriers lowered in talking about my real life. I had always tried to keep my readers at arm’s length and never really talk about anything that I was going through. When you are blogging every day it becomes exceptionally hard to do that, and bits and pieces of my real life came through in this new journal format. Thing is, years after the fact I am very glad that I opened up because I can now use my blog as a way of determining when exactly which events happened in my life.

The Double Edged Sword

The challenge with blogging every day is that it becomes extremely difficult to stop blogging. You feel like you are a failure if you miss a day and for three and a half years I managed to crank out something new every single morning. There were a lot of days that I did not want to make a post and probably would have been better off not making one. The thing is I didn’t want to let that ball drop so I keep juggling and eventually reached this place where I felt like I needed to purposefully drop it in order to keep my own sanity. I’ve been so good about marking the passing of specific milestones, that I find it funny this morning I had to search for the exact point when I purposefully broke the streak. The history of daily blogging was looming over me and it felt like pressure pushing down on my shoulders. My ultimate fear was that if I did not break it on my own… I would potentially have a longer break when burnout finally caught up with me.

Instead of daily blogging, I shifted over to a format of blogging every weekday, which gave me a bit of a break on the weekends to recharge my batteries. The truth is I actually landed on a format where I took Saturday off because Sunday ended up being a quick posting of that weeks AggroChat which was more or less a required thing. In general, this was enough of a break to make me feel less pressured to keep things going. Even then however there are days when I just can’t bring myself to post like yesterday, and I need to be better about giving myself room to allow those days to happen. I did start out yesterday feeling like a bit of a failure for not summoning forth a blog post, but my friends came to the rescue and dispelled that myth.

Give Yourself Breathing Room

So while I absolutely think setting a schedule for yourself and sticking with it is a key trait in blogging, you do have to give yourself a bit of wiggle room. I am a daily blogger of a sort, but I give myself the leverage to determine which days I actually make posts. I try and follow a weekdays format, but occasionally there is going to be a day where that just doesn’t work. Yesterday I was sick, other days in the past I have been too busy at work or just didn’t feel like I had anything to add. Those days are okay and natural and it is important to let yourself have a break every now and then. Blogging is about the marathon and not the sprint. Ultimately we want you to be a voice that is around for the long haul and not someone that is going to be super active and then disappear forever. Breaks I think are key to that longevity.