Oh my God, what am I wearing.
As some of you have no doubt heard (read) I have been playing Fufaaarrr aka Final Fantasy a Realm Reborn (aka FFXiV) quite a bit recently. My progress has continued, and now I am slowly getting towards my first level 50 class as a Black Mage. What this means is, ALL THE DAMAGE COMES OUT OF MY FACE AND BURNINATES EVERYTHING THAT DARES STAND BEFORE MY ELDRITCH MIGHT… sorry that just popped out.
One thing I do like about FFXiV is that, at least for your first class to 50, it doesn’t feel too “grindy”. The grind is death in any MMO and is almost guaranteed to make me want to leave a game. The moment a game ends up feeling like a job, you know you are doing it wrong. Its why I stopped playing WOW, its why I stopper playing Secret World, its not why I stopped playing Planetside (that was all the fucking elmos) but you get my point surely.
That said I’ve run into a bit of a block at the moment. I’ve been doing quests as they pop up and keeping ahead of the game while doing so. This has meant that I’ve been doing quests meant for level 50’s at levels 46 and 47, and means that now at level 48 I’ve somewhat run out of quests. This is something I would have preferred not to happen. Luckily the game has given me some options for things I can do to keep up my progress.
Low Level Duty Roulette:
Hey high up character, do you fancy helping out the lowbies in this dungeon? No? Well how about we give you a massive stack of bonus exp, a few allagan tomes and a chance to earn player commendations? Much more interested you say? Excellent.
Remember how I said that the lowbie dungeons are really fun (actually most of the dungeons are fun) well this gives you a reason to return to them, and usually the bonus exp for one of these will give you about 1/3 of a level which is not to be sneezed at. The Tomestones are useless to me at the moment, but once I hit 50 will become very important! You can do lowbie roulette four times per day, but unfortunately you only get the EXP bonus once. Given I’m looking for EXP not tomes at the moment I tend to do this once.
Fate “Grinding”
The public quests are a bit of a slower way of leveling, but if you can follow the large groups of people who are heading from Fate to Fate can be fairly lucrative. The areas I’m working at the moment give about 13K exp and a load of storm seals for each success. Given a Level is about 500K you can see you need to do a lot of fates to get to the next level, but added to everything else it’s not too bad.
Levequests.
These are the least often used thing I have for leveling. They give about the same amount of stuff as Fate grinding, but they seem to be a little bit less varied. I usually do one set of four and then go do something else. One thing they are good for however is the fact that they tend to all be clustered in the same part of the map, so you can do all four in quick succession and then turn them all back in. As long as you are doing level appropriate things you should be fine and they are not a bad way of levelling up, but they tend to be multipart quests, and as such Fates seem to be more efficient.
What I am starting to do now however is beginning to run the higher level Dungeons more often. When I hit level 50 I’m going to need Tomestones and you are capped for how many you can earn per week, so it seems like a plan to get earning them early. Plus the higher level instances are still damn fun AND you get a chance of nice gear dropping.
Which is why I went to Dezmael Darkhold.
Don’t try this one if you suffer from Lag. The dodge-rock fight and the final boss will eat your head if you do. There are a number of interesting parts to this one. Much like Stone Vale before it, you get a taste of one of the bosses before you get to it. In this case however if you are stood in the right place you take no damage, the right place being in the glow of the crystals.
This becomes important when you fight the bugger. You have to drag him from one glowing crystal to another so you can hurt him. We found it was really handy to have the DD classes shouting when the crystal was dimming so the tank knew when to move to the next one.
The Second boss… AKA dodge rock fight.
I was told that I would hate this fight, being a caster that has to stand still to cast. Luckily the lag that made Titan such a pain in the arse actually disappeared for this fight. I did end up being useless for quite a lot of the fight, however judicious use of Thunder 3 (damage over time with chance of more thunder for free with no cast time) and Fire (low damage but a chance for a free Fire 3 with no cast time) meant I could be sort of useful.
The Final boss however was not so good. The lag returned and given the boss does both horriffic laser beams of doom and pits of black ichor this is not so good. We still downed him first try however although I did have to help the Healer keep me from dying after a laser beam with a swiftcast Physik which gave them enough time to top me up to full despite having a bit of a dot on me. The fight mostly involves noticing when he connects to a rock and not being in the laser bean or the ichor.
Even better when he drops dead, he gives not only loot but Tomestones as well.
Oh but the loot.
One piece of caster loot dropped during the run. Now I have kept up with my quests so I have now got the first few parts of my Class gear (aka my blue gear) I’m wearing a black mage Hat, Boots, Gloves, and Trousers. However over this I was wearing a somewhat useless and very out of place white robe, not very good stats and generally not amazing. So when something dropped with a load of Intelligence, Vitality and Spell speed on it I was always going to need on it, then put it right on.
I should possibly have considered what it looked like.
Given the curly shoes and the baggy trousers, and now what looks like some kind of black leather shawl, I now look like the best be-hatted eunuch in the Sultan’s favourite BDSM harem. The response “Oh my god what am I wearing” may well have been heard over the Vent server… but the stats are SO GOOD!
I definitely think I will be running more dungeons. Although I may have to vary it a bit so I don’t drive myself mad!
Leave a Reply