Good Morning Folks! I spent a lot of this weekend catching up on Final Fantasy XIV stuff. I talked a bit about this last week but the character that I took through Endwalker was a Paladin aka a Tank. I did not really want to slide back into the game and experience the content… in a job with quite as much responsibility as a tank. Given especially how much the FFXIV community is on the “BIG PULLS” bandwagon usually… I want to just chill out in the background and play a class that no one respects much from. I like the feel of the Machinist animations, so I opted to push that up. I managed to hit level 90 relatively easily by running a combination of Duty Support dungeons, daily frontline, and starting to chip away at the new combat beast tribe quests in Thavnair.
Rather than pestering friends, I wound up buying a set of gear for a little less than a million gil. This might not have been the most cutting-edge gear but it should be able to take me all the way through the new story content, while also hopefully picking up a handful of pieces along the way. I think my goal is to get caught up on the story and then maybe do some of the additional content like the Alliance Raids that I have missed, and maybe the 8-player content on the easiest difficulties. Pending the next expansion comes with Duty Support… I might just level a DPS character from the start so I don’t run into this problem at the end of the expansion when I want to play catch-up, but don’t feel like tanking.
One of the things that I unlocked over the weekend is the next Deep Dungeon system that is Crystal Tower themed. One of the weird things that bugs me is the gaps in these systems. Palace of the Dead the original Deep Dungeon takes you to level 50 extremely easily… but then Heaven on High does not start until level 61. HoH will take you pretty easily to level 70… but again you have this huge gap between when it stops and level 81 required to do the new one Eureka Orthos. Prior to the launch of Endwalker I managed to get all of my jobs at the time to level 80, so that means I am going to have to put on at least one level before I can step foot into the new Deep Dungeon. This morning I started working on Samurai as my next job to level and knocked out Thavnair dailies and then a set of the Fae dailies from Shadowbringers as that is still reasonable experience.
Mostly I plan on leveling classes that share a gear set, because that way I can get rid of excess gear that I have lying around for them. I really really need to clean out my retainers and just shred any gear that I don’t need to make room. I’ve not touched Reaper or Sage so at some point I will probably level those as well. For the moment though I plan on knocking out Monk and Samurai largely because those were the gearsets that I had completed and did not need to do anything in order to switch to… other classes I will have to sort out what is missing from my inventory before I can swap over to them. Technically leveling bard would make a lot of sense given that I just finished up Machinist, but I think I removed some of the lower-level Dex ranged gear from my inventory while leveling and trying to make room for things.
All in all I have been enjoying myself, but mostly because I am biding my time for the next Path of Exile event. I have a feeling that it is going to take me a while to get caught up in the story because when I am working my way through an audiobook, I can’t really do story content. It was cool to get in over the weekend and get invited to the assorted Fediverse-based Cross World Link Shells, so it will be nice to get to know all of those folks a bit better and maybe even run content with them at some point.
Machinist is a pretty fun job, might have to dust off my set and play it again!
Also, while I agree that the gap in deep dungeons is weird and confusing, there is a slight out – the Bozjan Southern Front stuff for the Relic weapon in Shadowbringers can be entered at level 70 and grants experience, and it’s intended to also be the deep-dungeon replacement for ShB. The gameplay is definitely different, but it exists in-part to fill the exact void you pointed out. (it was also, at Endwalker launch, a way some people would grind to level 90, which seemed weird to me but hey).