The Cult Of Tea And Dice

As I may have mentioned a couple of million times I am at the moment playing a large amount of Final Fantasy 14 recently. The game is one of the most polished MMO’s I’ve played, simply because they seem to have looked at every MMO that came before and taken the good parts from them. This includes a UI that actually covers most of the requirements that other games only have with add ins. For example aggro meters are already built in, as are sortable party lists as standard.

The other great thing is that they got rid of the need for Alt characters with their Soul crystal system allowing you to level a number of different classes without having to create an entirely new character. I have been levelling my Black Mage since I started playing the game, first increasing it to level 50, and then starting to improve the item level. As I am now item level 91 (the top is Item Level 100 approximately) I decided to start thinking about a new class.

I have actually levelled some other classes up to relatively high levels, my Scholar is level 44, and I recently power levelled my Archer 17 levels in five days to get an ability which could be cross classed into the Black Mage to make coil easier. However all of my classes have one thing in common.

They are damage dealers.

I have a Healing class as well (the scholar) but I mostly use that class to make it easier to get the daily roulettes as healers are always needed. I haven’t really started to learn how to heal properly in end game content.

So when I started thinking about new classes, and in particular classes that I could write up for the cult, I turned immediately to the Tanking classes. I have actually never played a tank in any MMO I have played, I’ve ended up tanking occasionally, for example in the Molten core when I evasion tanked Ragnaros for a bit (well 30 seconds), but I have never actually meant to do it.

There are two tanking classes in Final Fantasy, the Warrior and the Paladin. Having talked to the healers in my Free Company it seems that warriors take a lot of damage, spiking up and down quickly, whereas Paladins are a much smoother as it were. They also look cool as they get to wear proper plate armour. In addition their skills can be cross classed from the healing classes, allowing them to heal themselves and others during the fighting. This is the sort of thing that appeals to me, and so I wandered off to my original home city of Uldah to join the Gladiators guild.

The first issue I had was that I couldn’t complete the joining quest because I didn’t have enough space in my bag for the equipment I was taking off, so had to go and sell a lot of stuff. One thing that they REALLY need to add to final fantasy is a warning if you attempt to sell something included in one of your clothing sets you have in your armoury. Having sold things then switched to my Archery set I found I had to go buy a new bow for example, which was a pain.

However I then equipped my new sword and went to talk to First Sword Mylla.

The minor issue was that I don’t have any low level tanking gear, so as you can see I ended up looking a bit… special.

Strangely enough the black trunks I’m wearing there don’t actually give any stat bonuses. But it’s better than running about in your pants I suppose. I did also put on the helm of light (not shown) which was a Collectors edition item which for the first 10 levels gives a bonus to Experience gained.

The Trunks of Power donned I went back to the first sword, who promptly told me that she wanted to see how good I was and so dispatched me to kill Marmots, Hornets, and Shrews.

Not exactly the most heroic of things but as she asked I set off immediately.

Handily the critters I was sent to kill were also on my hunting log. The hunting log is a set of creatures that if you kill certain sets of give you large experience bonuses, and if you complete a tier of ten sets you get a very large bonus.

Killing one extra of each of the critters netted me three of the sets in rapid succession, and with the bonus of the Helm of light this got me up to level 5 in short order.

So far however I haven’t really been “tanking” per se, mostly I’ve just been whacking marmots in the face with a sword.

Next time, however I’ll try and do some levequests (a good way of levelling using repeatable quests) and possibly some Guild Hests (training mini-dungeons).

This entry was posted on 11 May 2014 at 21:20 and is filed under The Witterings of Mawdrigen with tags ffxiv: arr, Final Fantasy, final fantasy 14. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.