Aether Datacenter is Full

Because I generally have my Mixtape Monday thing going on at the beginning of the week, Tuesdays have turned into a bit of a “Catching Up On the Weekend” day. I am still solely devoted to Final Fantasy XIV in my game time because I have a whole slew of goals to complete before moving into Endwalker. The biggest of these is that I want to try and hit level 80 on every single job before the expansion drops. Over the weekend I wrapped up the Ninja and got it to 80 and geared to a reasonable state. This means that I have shifted focus to Scholar, that I had been sorta low key working on in the background. Leveling through roulettes and all of the bonus experience activity that I mentioned in my Alt Jobs post, meant that on many days I ran out of things that were effective to be doing. So when that happened I would grab a character that was next in line and start working on their leveling in Palace of the Dead or Heaven on High.

So essentially I have many things moving at once. Dragoon sitting at 74 has largely been my Faerie/Hunt soak for when I am working on a lower level character and still wanted to do those Shadowbringers activities. I am not in a super rush to level it to 80, and as such, it is sitting there slowly gaining levels when I have time. Scholar has been my core focus and I managed to get it up to 72, which admittedly opens up Bozjan Front as an option. I still don’t really love that content but I might do some more of it as a healer because there are just certain activities that I do not want to do as a healer. Right now I am doing MSQ Roulette, PVP Roulette, Faerie quests in Il Mheg, and Alliance Raids on a daily basis, which adds enough experience to gain roughly a level and a half each day. This is good enough for my tastes and keeps me from having to heal more stressful content. For Alliance Raids I am absolutely dropping if I end up getting randomized into the harder content because I am a fairly shitty healer.

For the daily dungeon roulettes, I have shifted over to working on the Dark Knight. Tanking is my jam and this is probably going to be worked up slowly similar to Dragoon as a soak for any content that I don’t want to partake in on a given focused character. Once I get the Scholar up and gear, I will probably start running up another DPS. So that leaves either Monk or Black Mage, both classes that I find enjoyable in their own way but I do not love. Black Mage is very immobile and wants to stand still and cast spells which I find distasteful. Monk on the other hand has the opposite problem of being very mobile and needing to move around the target so that you can fire off specific positional attacks focused on either the back or sides of the mob. Neither is really my jam, but I am rapidly running out of things to level up that is pure joy for me. I enjoy Dragoon and I enjoy tanking… so I am rationing those classes as a way of making the rest of the grind feel a little better.

In other news… I said I was quitting the house search and I apparently lied. I am continuing to low-key chase houses as they open and the truth is something is opening up almost every day. Generally speaking, I go hang out near the placard while queueing for activities and then click it while waiting on the queue to pop. I still feel like I don’t have a shot in hell at getting a home prior to Ishgard’s opening and the lottery system going in. The problem there however is that it is highly unlikely that Ishgard will open in the Endwalker launch patch. What is more likely is that it will come with the 6.1 patch that usually lands three months after the launch of the game. That means the .1 patch is likely going to land sometime around February putting the Lottery system roughly six months away. This at least gives me a chance, albeit a very slim one.

We have been doing this thing where on Sunday nights we gather up all of the level 80 maps that we have access to and then run through them for prizes. These can be extremely lucrative, and this past Sunday for example I cleared about 500k gil in cash drops alone. We still struggle a bit in organizing the people and getting everyone online in a timely manner, but we have been shooting for starting around 7 pm CDT. If you happen to be on the Cactuar server at that time hit me up and we may have an opening. This past week we only had one map NOT open a portal. We didn’t make it terribly deep into many of them, and our best attempts were booted on the 4th step, but we did manage to fight a large number of Elder Summons. This meant we got a few more people the Frog minions and several of us walked away with the paint emotes. I love this chill activity at the end of my week.

In the last bit of news, it seems as though the server congestion has gotten to the point where Square has completely shut off the ability to create new characters within the Aether data center. That means if you were hoping to either move to Cactuar or roll an alt there, your window has closed and I am doubtful it will open again until well after the Endwalker launch. Over the last few weeks a number of friends have relocated to our server, but for now, it appears that is completely off the table. The end result is that we are going to have to ultimately wait for world travel between data centers before anyone can hang out with us Aether folk again. I do greatly appreciate the way that Yoshi P addresses the players and if you want to read the full statement you can check it out here. The positive is however it seems that all of the Crystal data centers has been flagged as preferred and that means buffs until you reach level 70.