Keep Cactuar Weird

Good morning friends. I sorta did everything in the wrong order this morning and as a result, I have been struggling to get started on this blog post. I thought for a while about trying to do a Favorite Fridays post, but really if I did one it would have been for the server that I play on in FFXIV. Right now I am clinging super hard to FFXIV because it has been a glimmer of joy in an otherwise lightless void of a week. We have a weekend starting however so that is at least a really good thing. I still find myself glued to the continued trickle of news about Blizzard’s wrongdoing even though I know I should probably stop watching it for my own mental health. I do want to reiterate that yesterday’s post was not a call to get people to leave World of Warcraft, but instead to provide some options for folks who have never played another MMORPG.

I really do love Cactuar the server I have played on since the release of the game. More recently the server has become widely known for the place where he-who-must-not-be-named plays, but really Cactuar has been amazing since day one and has largely been unaffected by e-celeb’s presence. During Stormblood, there was a random day when someone was shouting to the entire zone in the Loch’s talking about the Dodo Appreciation Society and giving everyone a Dodo minion that would come up and open a trade window. Similarly we have a player who has been travelling around the zones offering everyone a pet rat. I had to bring my own rat out just to make sure he knew I was already indoctrinated. Thing is… this is by no means a strange occurrence because people are constantly doing interesting and weird things on the server and I love it greatly.

In other news my friend Lonen reached the point in the main story quest where she needed to do the sequence of three dungeons in a row. We pulled together a Free Company group last night so she could have her first public tanking experience be a pretty chill one. The shocking portion of this is that I brought along my Scholar and healed. Well in truth Eos healed and I mostly just casted dots and nukes while we burned through the packs of mobs. I don’t really heal at all but I have White Mage and Scholar both sitting at 50. Astralogian is boosted to 60, largely because I did not want to level it and I wanted to get rid of all of the low level healer gear I had clogging my vaults. I am not a terribly good healer, nor am I really attentive to hotbars.

I spent the first years of my MMO gaming life as a healer. I played a Cleric in Everquest and the Complete Heal rotation was about the least engaging way to play a game. That was not however what killed healing for me. I could handle the slow pace of Root and Nuke gameplay and I could even handle spending most of my time sitting on the ground to regenerate mana. What I could not handle however was the constant calls at all hours of the night to log in and come resurrect someone because they took a bad death and were about to lose a level. This distaste for healers has carried over into modern life and other than a brief stint going to raids as a Holy Paladin, I have never really spent any significant amount of time as a healer. Thing is though, for the most part a lot of the healing classes in FFXIV are actually enjoyable. While leveling White Mage and Scholar and I actually spent a fair amount of time queueing for random dungeons.

Well friends, I think that is all I have in me this morning. I hope you all have a very good weekend and can get some much needed rest. I am probably going to pour myself further into Final Fantasy XIV and keep working on the Machinist and Dragoon. I might even try my hand at healing some more because last night was fairly enjoyable. If you are looking for a server, I highly recommend Cactuar. It can be a pain in the butt to get onto, but generally speaking if you roll a character first thing in the morning you can get in. Make sure you check the official server status page to see if you can create a character or not.

3 thoughts on “Keep Cactuar Weird”

  1. Complete Heal is probably my favorite spell of all time in any game. I’m not such a fan of the CH chain, something I only did a couple of times in pick-up raids, but as someone who mostly played a Cleric in group content there aren’t many things as satisfying in gaming as landing a perfectly timed Complete Heal. I was a very pro-active healer. I liked my tanks to feel safe. My CHs landed in good time, mostly. When I tanked, though, which the second thing I did most, I often played with a great Cleric who would land the CH at the last possible moment. It was only because I trusted them that I could stand it at all.

    Also, my original FFXIV server was Cactuar. I have no idea what server my current character is on, though.

  2. I’m with you on the “being a terrible healer” anymore. Oddly, in EQ2 I was actually pretty good — I was a raid healer, generally playing the Fury class and being the healer for the “mage group” of the 24-man teams. In good pulls it was pretty chill, and in bad pulls, I could often keep my group up and they could do enough dps to save the bad pull so I had a pretty good rep in my guild as a result — especially since at the time the Fury class was generally considered to be a “bad” healer, yet I could do up to 3x the hps as any other healer in the raid in some parses.

    In FFXIV I enjoyed healing during ARR and HW, but I fell off the wagon with SB. I’ve got my healers all capped, but I just did that by running daily beast tribes and the MSQ roulette (which is so overgeared that one barely needs to cast anything other than the occasional group heal) over the course of time, so…. yeah. I now admit that I suck at healing.

    I actually bumped in to “he who shall not be named” a week or so ago. Wasn’t a big deal, he looked to be just questing and had a big group of people following him around, but they didn’t take the mobs I needed for my quest, so it was all good.

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