Favorite Fridays – Enbarr Whistle

Good Morning Friends! A few weeks back I had this idea for a Friday mornings series where I talk about something that is special to me. In the first post in this series I talked about my bunny hat, and today I am talking about another item that has deep sentimental meaning to me. I don’t do one of these every week but I do plan on weaving them in from time to time.

Enbarr Whistle

The Enbarr Whistle is an item that drops from Whorleater Extreme, one of the original extreme primal fights introduced with the subsequent patches to A Realm Reborn. Most specifically this is the fight in which you tackle the extreme version of Leviathan, and was generally known to be fairly tricky given that it has a mechanic similar to Extreme Titan where players can be knocked out of the fighting arena and cannot be recovered by resurrection abilities. Essentially this means that all of the players have to execute on all of the mechanics in a timely fashion to keep from being knocked off of the barge that the fight takes place on.

Each Primal fight in the sequence had a rare chance of dropping a whistle to summon an elemental pony-themed after that specific encounter. Enbarr, for example, was themed after the color palette of Leviathan and as it runs you can see water splashing up at its feet. These were heavily sought after mounts not just because they look cool, but because while you are riding it the musical theme of the boss plays in the background. For anyone who has never experienced FFXIV boss music, this might not mean a lot… so I challenge you to listen to this banger of a track and not get excited. As you explore the world, this became your soundtrack and each pony allowed you to vary it up.

The Primal fights were just difficult enough to require attention to mechanics, but not so difficult as to feel tedious. Since each of them dropped a Whistle that summoned a different themed pony, we would occasionally do nights where we farmed a bunch of the fights in the hopes of getting drops. Enbarr specifically is special to me because it was the first of these whistles that I got. Based on screenshot evidence I seem to have gotten it on 4/25/2015 and I wrote about it the next Monday in a post titled Splashy Pony. It is also extremely special to me because we farmed it with our original crew and while it was still an extremely challenging encounter. I dug up the above picture… and I believe it is from the same night I got my pony to drop. This is the beautiful thing about having my blog as a memory archive and lots of screenshots to go with it.

Among the Primal Ponies there is one that is significantly rarer than the others. Nightmare has a chance of dropping from any of the original A Realm Reborn Primals, but that drop chance is pretty low. We continued farming Ponies throughout other expansions, trying to complete sets for our members. On one of these Primal farm nights I managed to not only see this mount drop but win the roll. As a result I had it in the back of my head that I now needed to complete the entire set. Slowly over time I gained addition primal whistles. Xanthos from Garuda, Gullfaxi from Titan, Aithon from Ifrit, and Boreas from Shiva. I never had any luck with Markab from Ramuh, in part because that fight was never terribly fun to run and we just didn’t repeat it as often as the others.

Coming back recently I was told by my friends that I could probably easily farm Extreme Primal fights, specifically for the purpose of knocking out Wondrous Journey stamps. This leads me the other night to make an attempt at Ramuh Extreme and wouldn’t you know it… but on that very first kill I managed to get Markab the only pony missing from the set. One of the cool things about the primal pony set is that if you manage to collect them all, it triggers another quest that starts from the Wandering Minstrel in Mor Dhona. You assemble all of the Primal Ponies and it summons a new mount… Kirin. There is a neat cutscene from which the above screenshot is taken. The end result however is that you walk away with a brand new fairly rare steed.

Here is a picture of me riding Kirin, which has a really nice wing animation. The thing is though… Kirin isn’t the mount that is special to me. The one that I think about the most is good ole Enbarr because it sent me down this path and gave me a journey to follow. As gamers, we look for projects and missions in these MMORPGs because that is ultimately the driving force that keeps us engaged. For me, the Pony farm was an equip journey spread out over the course of several years. Now that I have completed it though… there are several more similar journies ahead of me. With each expansion they have introduced a new series of Primal mounts so I feel like I need to collect all of them. The next target is the “Lanner” collection from Heavensward which are a series of giant eagle like birds. So far I only have one of these but I am wanting to start farming the rest.

Side note if you want to join in this madness at some point hit me up. More than happy to help folks complete pony sets or come along as I start trying for the other mount series. The great irony here however is that I mostly just ride my Chocobo.