Good morning friends. It has been a minute since I have actually sat down and brought you a proper blog post update about what I have been doing over in Final Fantasy XIV. With Monday being dedicated to Mixtapes, Tuesday brought us the sad news of losses, and yesterday being the wrap-up for Blaugust… more time has passed than is usually the case and in that time I guess I have done a bunch of different things. Firstly if you have not already done so, I highly suggest swinging by Uldah and starting The Rising event that is running through September 9th. Of all of the excellent in-game holidays, this is probably the most personal. It celebrates the birthday of A Realm Reborn, and with it the rebirth of this game from the ashes of the previous. As is often the case we as players get a very special message directly from Naoki Yoshida aka our beloved Yoshi P. Some tears may or may not have happened.
Another thing that happened over the weekend is that I buckled down and finally finished the Main Story Quest for Shadowbringers and got my second credit roll. The problem with talking about this is that I don’t really have a great screenshot to show other than my mug… because effectively everything else I took pictures of contains massive spoilers. I am very much looking forward to when the full trailer for Endwalker releases in October and we see the rest of that sequence. For the sprouts among us that might be reading this blog… something really cool to do is upon completing an expansion… go back and watch the final trailer for that expansion. You will start to notice bits and pieces of the story that you didn’t quite understand that more or less foretold the direction things were going to go. This is especially true with the Shadowbringers trailer for me at least, and I am intrigued where things are going with Endwalker.
I’ve also become terribly distracted of late by The Diadem that is accessible through the restored Firmament crafting area in Ishgard. Essentially this is a turbo button for leveling gatherers, and I made a fair amount of coin in the process of doing so as well. First, you have to have gotten a job to 60, which will unlock access to the “Towards the Firmament” questline. Once you unlock this area you can talk to Augebert at x 11 / y 14 in order to unlock access to the Diadem. From there you will be able to bring level 10 gatherers in and run around picking up nodes at what seems to be an extremely fast experience gain rate. The items that you gather can then be appraised and either stockpiled for leveling crafters through the Ishgard Restoration recipes or sold on the market for a pretty decent profit. I devoted myself to trying to gain a level of Mining and Botany every day, and in the thirty minutes or so that I spent doing this… I would usually gather up enough materials to turn around and flip for around 200,000 gil. Soon I am going to start exploring what I need to start using the Firmament to push up my crafters as well.
Since we last talked I have finished off the Scholar and Summoner, and then started pushing up the Dark Knight and Monk in earnest. Dragoon is still very much my soak class for picking up the Faerie quests in Il Mheg if I don’t have a character up high enough to be able to run them. Another thing of note is I have finished up my gatherers and now Miner, Botanist, and Fisher are all sitting at 80 and I am sufficiently geared to start picking up maps for map night every day. Side note… there is no way to see all of your jobs at once so I photoshopped them together like this just to provide a better visual representation. Right now I am splitting my daily roulettes between Monk and Dark Knight because a number of them I really do not want to do as a Tank.
Another thing that has happened is that I have become terribly distracted by the Dark Knight anima weapon questline and at this point have completed the first four steps in the chain. I am very close to being able to knock out the fifth step because apparently without knowing it I have been ratholing the materials needed to knock this out quickly. This is going to slow down really fast however because I am about to enter the Crystal Sand/Umbrite phase… which involves doing a bunch of things none of which are actually rapid. I am going to need around 75 of each which means I am entering the hardcore phase of the grind…. which I am probably going to ignore until I hit a lull after the release of Endwalker. I want to rush through the next phase however because it opens up the vendor that lets me buy different replica versions for glamour purposes.
I have roughly eighty days until the release of Endwalker, and my goal is still to be sitting at 80 on all of my jobs when it rolls out. Blue Mage is a bonus, given that it doesn’t exist at level 80 yet but I am not including it in my mission. I figure Dark Knight, Monk, and Dragoon will be hitting cap before too much longer which leaves me Gunbreaker, White Mage, Astralogian, and Black Mage. After I finish the current trio of classes that I am working on… I guess I will grab another healer to space those out a bit. White Mage is my lowest currently so I will spend some time focused on it. I am trying really hard not to just go no-lifer mode with Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High, but I have a feeling before all is said and done there will be a bit of that happening just to push through faster. Still finding myself having a blast on my little mission, so here is hoping that I keep the stamina and make it.