Level 60 AST get
Since I finished the story of Horizon: Zero Dawn, I’ve been getting most of my gaming fix from Final Fantasy XIV recently. This involves lots of tying up loose ends in advance of the new expansion launch. I hit a couple different milestones in the last couple weeks, and I think I’ll be in a really great place heading into Stormblood. Not a whole lot has changed for my Scholar main since I finished her zeta weapon about a month ago. I’ve been faithfully capping my scripture and very gradually upgrading her gear to 270, but it’s been slow. The increase in the weekly scripture cap should help me finish off her last few pieces in the next week or two. I have started working on her anima weapon, the Heavensward version of the relic weapon chain, and so far it seems just as much of a silly slow slog as the relic. I’ll be working on this for a while, and as with the relic I’m in no hurry to grind myself to death and will be perfectly happy finishing this months from now.
I have also been working on various alt class side projects. First I got my ninja to 60, mainly via palace of the dead with a small amount of Fate and leve grinding mixed in. I had most of a set of gear ready for it that I had accumulated from expert roulettes, so I could pop straight into experts and Dun Scaith. Since I don’t need anything from there on my SCH I’ve been using my gear lockout and UFO quest to grab a few ninja pieces. I don’t love being a melee DPS but having the NIN around has been really handy for doing quick beast tribe dailies and it is a nice change of pace from healing.
The next job I worked on was my white mage. I find that I really do not enjoy the white mage playstyle. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes me dislike it so much, but it feels incredibly slow and boring to me even though I know it is a very strong healer. Unfortunately, I made one of my retainers a conjurer when I hired her, and for her to level I either needed to start her over from scratch or get my white mage to 50 so I could give her a Heavensward job. So I leveled WHM to 50, mainly in POTD with a few beast tribe quest turn-ins for good measure. The process did nothing to improve my opinion of the class, but at least now my retainer’s level is no longer tied to it. Instead, I swapped it to astrologian.
As you might have guessed from the screenshot above, I managed to level my AST to 60 in a hurry. I think I like it even better than SCH in a lot of ways. It certainly has a lot of really fun tricks and tools to play with. Having all of my SCH healer gear waiting for me when I hit 60 was also a nice bonus, since it meant I could hop directly into whatever content I wanted, and not feel like I was underpowered compared to my main class. I am giving a lot of thought to swapping mains to AST for the expansion, but I’m playing around with it a bunch for now to see if I still like it when the novelty wears off. I was incredibly saddened that I can’t use my amazing SCH tophat as a glamour for it though. To make myself feel better about the loss of the world’s best hat I did some retail therapy and bought the AST ravana weapon pictured above. It is on fire and also has butterflies and I love it.
Between all of that and finishing up the main story quests that came out this week I am in a really great place for the expansion. Now I just need to stay interested and not burn myself out grinding the anima weapon until Stormblood arrives.
