Good Morning Folks! I’ve now reached a point on my Warrior where I feel like I am prepared for Dawntrail. I’ve gotten my gear level up to 630 and can technically do all of the content in the game if I so choose. I’ve started focusing on my Dark Knight a bit in trying to get it leveled to 90 as well with me splitting time between roulettes of running Frontlines and Mainstory with DRK, Trials and Alliance Raids with MCH, and then pretty much everything else with WAR. This is giving me one to two levels per day on Dark Knight given that I am also doing the Fae and Hippo dailies as well for an additional boost of experience. I am still having a blast tanking things, and plan on shifting to Gunbreaker whenever I have dinged 90 with Dark Knight.
Probably after I wrap up my tanks I will pop back over and snag Ninja and level it to 90 because that would round out everything but Reaper. I figure Reaper, Sage, and the two new jobs of Viper and Pictomancer will be treated as their own separate adventures at some point. Why do I want everything to max level? So that I will stop hoarding gear on the off chance that I might need it. This is a problem that I have and the only way I know around it is to max out all the things. At some point, I really would love to begin working on crafters because my “Land” jobs are still at Shadowbringers levels and my “Hand” jobs never graduated out of the old world. Crafting in this game is way too tedious for my tastes normally. I greatly prefer the “buy X amount of Y resource and make Z number of items to cap” crafting systems from other MMORPGs.
I think my real focus over the next few days is going to be doing my best to clear as many things out of my quest log as I can for the moment. I am sitting on 20 of 30 quests and would really like to see this cleared out a bit more before the launch of the expansion to give me some more headroom for questing. A lot of these will be simple enough but will require me to do specific content. A lot of the raid content I will probably do as a Machinist because I am just not sure I am ready for raiding yet as a warrior after having just gained back my ability to comfortably do dungeons. Come Dawntrail however I really want to do all of the raid content on Curve and will be pugging that if needed to accomplish it. I am not sure I will ever do Savage, but I at least want to clear the normals every week. I have a lot of debris in my quest log of raids long gone like Sigmascape and even some Alexander stuff.
I’ve unlocked the three Variant dungeons and can now run those, but I have not devoted the time to soloing them. I kind of love that there is now content in the game that can be completed with a variable party size, and that has multiple endings similar to the dungeons in Guild Wars 2. I think it would be fun to Duo these, but I would have to tip Ace over the edge into resubscribing to really make that happen. I am also really interested in the Criterion dungeons, which are similar to something like Mythic Plus is in World of Warcraft. I really dig all of the variable difficulty levels of content for variable sizes of parties so that if you have a certain number of friends that are available to do something, you can probably find something meaningful to fill your time doing.
As far as catching up on content goes, I think my focus is going to be getting up to date in Hildebrand. I fell off the wagon at some point in the past and know now that I am multiple quest series behind on this content. I know that the latest series is also what unlocks the relic weapons and that they are fairly easy to accomplish which is to some chagrin of the community. I remember the Bozja weapons were really easy to get started but a pain in the ass to complete. At some point, I would love to get to the point where I understand the appeal of either Eureka or Bozja but I have not been willing to devote the time to get into either system. They have both felt needlessly obtuse.
Mostly I feel pretty solid with where I am for the start of a new expansion. Both my Main job of choice WAR, and my DPS of choice are ready to go. It is going to be my intention to try and swap between these two so that maybe I exist in the main story with them both at 90 or pretty close to it. I’ve also emptied out my bags and Chocobo saddlebags so I am ready for an influx of new gear. I need to spend a bit more time clearing out my vaults because really… I think I am going to commit to buying full sets of Poetics gear at levels 80 and 90 for various jobs to level them up to 100 eventually. At that point… I don’t really need all that tweener gear because a fully maxed-out set of 80 gear can take you all of the way to 90 and I figure the same will be true for leveling to 100.
I’m trying really hard to get better about letting things go, because really if I want something again… it is relatively straightforward to go get it. I wish FFXIV had a better cosmetic system similar to the games that collect appearances as you acquire items. However, I feel like I will always be wanting things on the systems level because either due to design limitations of the game, or technical constraints… Final Fantasy XIV will always feel slightly behind the curve in the user interface and systems department. I just have to learn to accept its shortcomings and move on with my life, because I realize I am an outlier in the fact that I have played 500+ hours in most of the major MMORPGs out there and as such know there are much better solutions to be had. All games though have their shortcomings, and as much as I would love to normalize the playing field… that is never going to happen.