Good Morning Friends! I realize that for the last few weeks I have pretty much talked about nothing but New World, but that does not mean that I completely abandoned Final Fantasy XIV. In fact while I knew the launch of New World would slow me down, I wanted to keep making slow and steady progress on my goal. I am not exactly sure when I set it into my head, but at some point I decided that I was going to try and make it to level 80 on all standard jobs before the launch of Endwalker on November 19th. While this does in fact net you the Amaro mount that I am riding in the above screenshot, it wasn’t necessarily about getting the “CamelBirb”, but more that I just wanted to have leveled everything that Final Fantasy had to offer class wise. In fact without the sentimentality of having experienced Shadowbringers… the mount isn’t that spectacular… unless that is mine begins to talk to me.
I came back to the game on July 3rd of 2021 after a very long absence and the top chart represents where I was with all of my jobs at that point. I figured the easiest way to get back into the game was to start leveling one of my lower level jobs, and since I favor tanks… I started working on my Paladin and managed to get it to 80 in pretty short order. After that I noticed that my Red Mage was already 73, so I might as well invest a bit of time and work that up to 80. That sequence I guess triggered something in me that wanted to see just how close to leveling everything I could get before the next expansion dropped. It was some years ago, prior to the launch of Stormblood that I decided to get all of my characters to level 50 so I could begin to jettison some of the gear in my bank. I did this largely by “no-life-ing” my way through Palace of the Dead but it felt like a significant accomplishment.
It was part of the way through this process that I realized, I had been pretty regularly posting screenshots of my progress on all of my jobs. This made me decide that I should probably spreadsheet this to see how fast I was leveling. The above curve represents me taking all of these data points, and some that I specifically collected after that point and charting it. If my napkin math is correct at the point of dinging I had been back in the game one hundred and three days and in that time I had put on three hundred fifty three levels. That averages out to be a little bit more than 3.4 levels per day which sounds like a lot… but in truth I have simply been exploiting the daily bonus system to do a few things each day and earn several levels for doing it. If you are curious about this process you can check out my post on leveling alternate jobs that I made some time back.
There were a lot of these that I did not do every single day, but in the very least I tried to do three of them. The first of course is the Main Story Roulette, because it is such a huge boost in experience. More important than that however I tried to get Praetorium specifically, because the amount of bonus experience is just so much higher than Castrum. This means that there were days that I got Castrum bailed and then waited out the 30 minute timer for abandoning only to get Castrum again and wait through another timer. I tried to save things like my daily hunts as something that I could do during this time frame to make the wait a little less painful. On top of that I tried my best to always do the Faerie daily quests if I had a character that was in the 70s. Lastly the PVP Roulette is similarly important in that it is a very quick way to add over half of a level worth of experience. If I had time and patience left I would do the Alliance raid next but there were plenty of days that I neglected to do it.
What About Blue Mage?
Throughout this entire process, especially as I got towards the finish line… folks have kept asking what about Blue Mage. Blue Mage does not count, both literally and logically. Blue Mage is what they call a limited job which means that I cannot do any of the things that I have been doing to level it. There are no roulette bonuses because you cannot queue as a blue mage unless you are going through the party finder… with an entire group of other blue mages. Additionally Blue Mage is nowhere in the stack of achievements for leveling all of the Magic and Melee jobs or for the Amaro mount. Blue Mage is enjoyable in its own right, but it more or less involves a lot of grinding and I am not super concerned about getting it to cap. That said now that I am finished with over a month of time to spare, I will probably see what damage I can do in grinding out the last 20 levels of that job.
What Job Did I Like Least?
So another thing that people have asked is what my least favorite job was to level. The truth is there isn’t a single job that I found that I hated, and they were all interesting in their own way. That said… I thought for awhile that Black Mage might be the class that broke me. It is doing nothing that I want to do in an MMO because I have this long standing feud with “Finger Wiggler” classes, and as a result I tried to finish off all of my casters leaving myself a melee and a tank as the last two things I had left to level. Black Mage though… has no mobility… is squishy as fuck… and is basically the antithesis of the sort of class that I enjoy playing in a game. It does some really interesting things and I created a super sweet glamour for it, but there is never going to be a case where I choose Black Mage over Red Mage for example.
What Job Surprised You The Most?
Another thing that I have been asked is what Job I enjoyed the most, or what Job did I enjoy that I didn’t expect to enjoy. That crown goes to Machinist because I fully expected it to be a real slog to level. I had tried Machinist during Heavensward and hated it. However since then it has been reworked a number of times and the current version feels awesome. In fact this is very highly likely going to be my DPS main for Endwalker, or at least the first DPS that I push up to maximum level. I really like the mobility of the class and the animations just feel great. Additionally who doesn’t love summoning a literal robot to come fight by your side? Machinists are a bit disappointed that the Job doesn’t seem to be getting anything flashy and new going into Endwalker, but I think that is largely because they were in the best shape after their most recent revamp.
What Is Your Endwalker Main?
For years I had been a Warrior main in Final Fantasy XIV, and liked being the dude with the huge hitpoint pool and the ginormous axe. However over the last few expansions they have leaned more and more into the “Blue DPS” fantasy and honestly that has never really been my jam when it comes to tanks. I want all of the aggro and I want to be a massive bulwark against the oncoming storm. Leveling Paladin has made me feel the way I want a tank to feel and it plays more into my tanking fantasy than Warrior ever did. I am not sure why I shied away from Paladin early on in the game other than it was a pain in the butt to tank low level content as Gladiator and that they got their Aggro Stance late. However now that I have found Paladin in its most recent form, I am holding on with both hands and this will be my main going into Endwalker.
The embargo on the Endwalker influencer media tour has lifted and there is so much content now available to hype us up for the expansion. My personal favorites of these are the interviews with Yoshi P. He gives big kindly uncle vibes and I am so there for it. Listening to the way he talks about the game gives me so much hope for the future. While I am currently focused on getting to level 60 and gearing up in New World, I am also super ready for the launch of Endwalker and for them to punch me straight in the feels again. I am super glad I went through this little experiment and now with the launch of Endwalker I will have two new classes to level from Scratch and 10 more levels on every other class to add on. I figure I will be busy for quite some time to come.
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