(This piece is spoiler-free, and intended to be accessible to people at all levels of progress in Final Fantasy XIV.)
This might be the most vulnerable thing I’ve ever written for Noisy Pixel, but this is a bit of a different kind of piece. To pull back the curtain somewhat, I found myself somewhat out of my element when I was invited to the Final Fantasy XIV media tour a few months ago. I greatly appreciated and embraced the opportunity, and I met a lot of really cool people, but as the day went on I started to realize just how out of my depth I was as a “casual” player, or as casual as someone who’s played two thousand hours of the same game can be. I’d been playing one job for years and gotten so comfortable with it that I really didn’t do much else, and I never engaged in anything beyond “normal” tier content.
I made a personal goal for myself, then and there. I wanted to engage with Final Fantasy XIV in ways that I had never done before, and not only that, but once Dawntrail released, I wanted to journal my experience in order to both keep myself accountable, and give space to others who might also aspire to become better players. I have some goals I want to achieve before the next expansion, and a potential invite to the next media tour, and while you don’t have to share all or even any of the same ones, I encourage you to engage with me in the comments, or on Twitter, and we can all motivate each other to keep going.
Here’s what I want to do.
- I want to get every single job in the game to Level 100, and review each of them as of the most current content. Jobs change somewhat frequently, and there are several that are almost certainly going to see heavy reworks in the near future, but having the experience will only help me further understand how the team intends all of them to work.
- I want to clear every Extreme-level fight that currently exists in the game, at their intended difficulty, starting with the most recent ones.
- I want to, at least, clear a single Savage-level raid. Depending on how well this goes, this may lead me to start seeking out a party with which to clear an Ultimate raid.
One of these goals is going to take significantly longer than the others, but I did at least start to come up with a plan that led me into a sub-mission. One of my biggest recurring issues in FFXIV is that I’m not very good at keeping my inventory clean, whether it’s an overly stuffed Armory Chest full of things I don’t even have on gear loadouts, retainers full of crap I’m worried I’ll need to level other jobs, or hoarding of easily-farmed crafting materials I’ll forget I have, so, with this in mind, I had two goals for July.
1) Start leveling every job up to 50.
Obviously I wasn’t going to be able to accomplish this in a single month, given that the only applicable jobs I had already done this for were White Mage, Red Mage, Black Mage, and Warrior, but there’s a good reason to do things this way. The idea was to categorize jobs by their gear sets, so that I could keep my inventories as clean as possible, since all I’d need at that point for the majority of my jobs is the Item Level 130 Ironworks Gear that would work for several jobs per set. Since I’d already started working on Dark Knight prior to Dawntrail, I elected first to finish leveling my tanks, while also missing a rather frustrating detail.
In A Realm Reborn, gear was not as job-specific as it is now, and was instead very broadly divided into Disciple of War and Disciple of Magic categories, with some pieces being specifically intended for tanks. Dragoon shared its gear with the tanks, which visually makes sense but is definitely not in-line with how things work now. I successfully got my Dark Knight and Paladin up to 50 and casually Expert Delivery-d away all the stuff I’d been wearing while levelling, missing that fact, and so when I go back and do Dragoon later I will have to reassemble all that gear.
In order to level efficiently, I decided to be strategic about what I ran my daily content roulettes on. It was easy to leave the Normal Raid roulette for Red Mage, the job that I’m trying to hit level 100 with next simply because it’s the closest, as the Normal Raid roulette doesn’t unlock until level 60 anyway. Every day I was able to, though, I was at the very least running Leveling, Main Scenario, and Frontline, as these were the best in terms of weighing time spent waiting for queues versus experience reward, and I would also run Level Cap, Alliance Raid, and Trials only if time permitted. (I also just chose to make Alliance Raid the last thing I did just because the idea of doing Labyrinth of the Ancients every single way was mentally exhausting.)
Unfortunately, both this and my second goal for July were heavily hampered by the connectivity problems that I started to experience only the day after I finished Dawntrail, and also my annual week-long camping vacation. Both of these coming in the same month dramatically reduced what I was going to be able to do in July, but nevertheless, I did manage some progress on all fronts.
The other major thing I set out to do, with all of the Gil I’d earned from my roulette-maxing, was to finally commit to levelling my crafters. I had already maxed out my Weaver, Miner, and Botanist back in Shadowbringers, but everything else was still sub-50, mostly because of the daunting task of assembling the requisite equipment to speed my way through Ishgardian Restoration.
If you don’t know already, Restoration is a piece of side-content unlocked after the completion of Heavensward, the game’s first expansion, that offers a very speedy route to levelling up crafting and gathering jobs. My progress here was significantly boosted from having spent many hours doing Restoration to level my gatherers, so I had hundreds of materials lying around, but the real difficult part is having to juggle equipment as one rapidly levels all of these jobs up. They use the same armor sets, but you’ll still want High-Quality tool and subtool replacements every ten to fifteen levels, and since people know the process well now, these are often extremely expensive to buy from the Market Board, if you even have access to that. (Free Trial players are extra-screwed when it comes to crafting, since they’ll have to gather everything themselves since they can’t trade.)
About a hundred and fifty thousand gil and quite a lot of trips out to bulk-gather my own extra materials later, though, I’ve gone from my lowest crafter being at level 20, to all of them at a minimum of fifty. One of my lesser goals for this expansion is to be able to make all of my own best-in-slot gear once that becomes a possibility, as those items tend to be the priciest thing endgame players will have to dip into if they don’t want to spend weeks grinding.
2) Complete at least one Extreme trial. (Screenshots omitted here to avoid spoilers.)
Shortly after completing Dawntrail, I had already begun to blind-prog the second Extreme trial, but was interrupted in this task for several weeks, by which point Party Finder (at least on Aether, my home Data Center) had largely moved on from blind progression to using pre-determined strategies for the fight’s most notorious mechanic. The video guides for these fights tend to be around fifteen minutes long, which is extremely daunting considering that most guides for normal-difficulty fights average a third of that length, but given that I had been able to work out the first half or so of the fight without the video, I decided it was probably not going to be too difficult from there.
I’m not going to spoil much about the fight here, but something to keep in mind with Extreme trials as opposed to Savage or Ultimate content is that there really is still room for error. Timing windows tend to be tight, but if you minimize other player effects, the mechanics are still not especially difficult to work out, and you can go down even multiple times without dooming your entire party. The thing that really puts this content above normal-tier is that each fight will end with what players call an “enrage”, effectively an attack that goes off after all other mechanics have passed that is guaranteed to wipe the party. My first time making it to this point, we had around ten percent of the boss’ health bar left, or as the kids say, “for cleanup”.
From this point, it’s a matter of the entire party staying aware enough of mechanics to go down less often, as the biggest loss of DPS possible is getting knocked out – not only are you not doing any damage for at least a good ten seconds while you’re being picked up, but you have to start your rotation over, likely with several of your abilities still on cooldown, and you get hit with a minute-long debuff that stacks if you die a second time before it expires, and can halve your damage output at that point. Not dying is imperative.
Being a healer escalates this a little more, as while my damage rotation is dead simple, I have even more pressure to take as little damage as possible because I have to keep the rest of the party from dying to unavoidable damage, something Extreme trials have plenty of. This next run got dicey, as the final phase caused a lot of the party to go down with basically seconds left on the clock. No exaggeration, I ended up the last member standing as the enrage cast began, with less than a percent left on the HP bar…but, my White Mage damage over time spell managed to down the boss as I panicked, and my fist shot into the air as I accomplished my first-ever true Extreme trial clear, despite my lag spiking.
So, even with this month being a serious mixed bag when it came to how much I could actually play of the game, I still managed to make some serious progress towards my current play goals. I don’t currently have any concrete plans for how I’m going to tackle the new Savage raids introduced in Patch 7.05, so my goals for next month are as follows:
1. Get all of my crafters to 80.
Given the amount of progress I made on this in just the last week of July, this should be very do-able, and I’ve got friends in my corner to help me through this. I may even blow past this goal, but I don’t want to set it too high and then fail to meet it. (Always good to underpromise, and overdeliver.)
2. Complete Dawntrail EX1.
From my understanding, EX2 is actually the more difficult of the two fights, and I really only focused on that one because I’d already started before the community came to that conclusion. Especially with the Arcadion raid gear that I’ve already assembled a good chunk of, this shouldn’t be too difficult.
3. Get all of my casters and Dragoon to 50.
I’ve already gotten Summoner most of the way there, and Dragoon was next on my list anyway for the reasons listed above, so the only other job I need to worry about here is Astrologian, which starts at 30 and will be easy to level with accelerated Healer queues. This and the crafter goal should let me clear the majority of clutter from my Armory Chest as it currently is, and then from there I can move onto Ranged and Melee DPS.
4. Form a plan for Arcadion Savage.
Whether this means putting together friends to get through the fight once the world race ends and the raids are solved, or joining Party Finder groups and just brute-forcing it, I want to know what I’m going to do to get through this content. By no means am I committing to finishing this, since I’ve really never tackled Savage at all before.
And those are my plans. If you’re in the same boat as me, though, I wanna know what your plans are. Leave comments below, or find me on Twitter @thearcaneranger, because I want all of us to get through this together. See you in September!
