I feel like I was busy all night long but didn’t really accomplish much. I think this is in part because I really did not do much if all on my Warrior. Instead I largely focused on leveling the Bard and the Samurai. I completed my daily hunts minus one mob on the SAM, which served to give me a pretty hefty chunk of experience. Combined with another run through Holminster Switch on Trust system managed to push that class up to 73.
Now begins the problem with the Trust system. I am ready to start running the 73 dungeon… but my trust party is still level 71 and will need copious amounts of grinding to get them up to the level needed to run the next dungeon. At this point I realized I needed more classes to soak experience from the first dungeon… which lead me to start working on my Bard which is likely my second favorite dps currently. The challenge there is I cannot yet start Heaven on High… as I am not 61.
This is the problem I foresee right now with the state of leveling alts, and I will break it down. Right now you have a ladder system with a few missing rungs. Once you have a character to level 17 or higher you can unlock the first of the two Deep Dungeons… Palace of the Dead. This provides a pretty fast path to level from 1-50… and then a considerably more grindy path from 50-60. At the low levels it takes one or two runs per level, and during that 50-60 grind it is something closer to six runs per level.
With Stormblood they added in a second Deep Dungeon called Heaven on High that starts at level 61. You can immediately see there is a gap that has to be traversed somehow, and I have yet to find a really great answer to this. No one is running FATEs anymore for anything but the highest content, so that method is largely out. The level 60 dungeons reward crap for experience because they were designed essentially for players who had reached the end game and were not scaled for such. You can continue running Palace of the Dead but it suddenly jumps up to taking around a dozen runs to get through that level.
I feel like the real answer here is that they need to drop the level for Heaven on High to 60. However I am open to ideas from my readers on how they bridged that 60-61 gap on their various alts? There will be another similar gap when I top the Heaven on High ladder at 70… as the Trust system doesn’t begin until 71. However on that side of the gap there is at least a pretty constant running of FATEs that I could deal with for a single level. Ultimately the challenge of Final Fantasy XIV is that they have nice systems in place now… but there are just some Everquestian Hell Levels to traverse to move between them.
Final comment of the morning… expect to see some news about Blaugust on Monday. I have a plan in the works and will make my traditional big post and start the sign up process then.
