Good Morning Folks! I am reading a lovely story about my murder faerie on this rainy day in Limsa Lominsa. I wish that it were actually rainy in the real world because maybe it wouldn’t be targeted to get upwards of 115 degrees Fahrenheit today. I managed to push my Summoner across the level 100 line on Friday which means I also have a lovely companion level 100 Scholar. Not that I have a clue what I am doing and had to go button by button on my Hotbar trying to find Esuna when it was required in a quest. I’ve not finished the healer role quest but my intent is to do this thing… and then make myself a Mentor because it is funny. The only hesitation I have is that I am not sure if I can hide my mentor tag once I have it… like I can do with my Commander tag in Guild Wars 2.
All of that said… the main reason why I have not finished any of this on Cactuar… is that I have been spending almost all of my time on my babby Warrior that lives on Dynamis/Kraken. Am I switching mains? Fuck no. This is just a really fun project and quite honestly all of the grouping I have been doing with Ace lately has been deeply beneficial to my mental health. At this point, we have finished the Main Story quest for A Realm Reborn, and it has been hilarious doing all of this content as a sprout that understands most of the mechanics. Truth be told I think most of the folks on Dynamis are rerolls because significantly more folks seem to just automatically understand what to do. Every so often you run into a proper sprout and it is delightful when you see one. I love the paternal instinct we seem to get around new players, and that is honestly one of the best things about starting FFXIV.
The best aspect of all of this however has been experiencing this content with the understanding of where things are going in this story. Once again fair warning for spoilers in the rest of this post. I feel like Square might have retconned a few things, but we are seeing the echoes of the end of days all the freaking time. They essentially split Praetorum up into two different dungeons, and a solo duty, and now during the Lahabrea fight he casts an attack also called “end of days”. More than that there are so many weird plot threads that are out there that we know get wrapped up before all is said and done. It is REAL hard to interact with “Urine Jar” knowing what a fucking heel he is at so many points during the story. More than anything it has been awesome to rewatch some of these cutscenes like our Carebear Stare that ultimately destroys Lahabrea.
One of the coolest aspects of the flow of modern Praetorium is you are left with this weird photo op moment after finishing up the first dungeon, but before fighting Ultima Weapon where you can sort of just roam around in the space and take screenshots. I am sure you can do some truly dumb things with gpose, but I am a noob and do not know how that system works in the least. I just took a few shots staring up at the big snake-dragon-taur. The lighting is especially awesome on the Ultima weapon fights because this used to look pretty matte black and now has shiny bits glinting in the light and the glow of all of the red greebles.
It would not be Ace and me if we did not engage in some complete insanity. This means that not only did we complete the storyline… but we also started down the path of unlocking our Zodiac weapons. It all started with an innocent enough conversation about whether or not we were going to run the Hard mode versions of the primals. I said that if we were going to do that… we should probably just start the Zodiac weapon chain because we would have to do them all anyways during that. This led us to roam around like mad on Saturday morning doing all of this in the period of about two hours. We now have a shiny Zenith weapon to show for our efforts and are now unlocking the Extreme versions of the fights… and contemplating going down that rabbit hole as well.
When you finish the ARR MSQ, you unlock a truly stupid number of dungeons… and again… being us… we had to run all of them. Between Saturday and Sunday, we have completed every single one of these dungeons and I have to say… the Hard modes still do occasionally deserve their name. Trying to teach folks how to do mechanics that the large chunk of the player base has not seen since this left Expert Roulette was definitely a thing. There were a few cases where we ourselves had to look things up because we did not remember how to stop dying to certain mechanics. The worst was absolutely Pharos Sirius where we had a troll Viper who kept running several rooms ahead of us and chaining shit back on top of us. The first time I tried to save him and wiped the party. The second time I just let him die four rooms away from where we were currently. At that point Ace decided not to rez him… and the game would not let me kick him… so thankfully he called us all noobs and left the party allowing us to get a fill from a lovely monk player.
All of this said… I do sort of wonder if this is going to be the case going forward any time we stray from the path and do content that is not absolutely required by the Main Story quest. Really all told there were really only two extremely rough spots, the second being Tam Tara Deepcroft Hard. Most of the dungeons have gone pretty easily. We saved Wanderer’s Palace Hard as our last dungeon of the sequence because it was one that we both knew extremely well and understood all of the possible pitfalls. We essentially guaranteed ourselves a smooth landing from this nonsense. We’ve now moved on to doing the Crystal Tower series of Alliance Raids. We did Labyrinth of the Ancients last night and it was a bit rough around the edges… but we got through it and will probably progress to Syrcus Tower tonight.
Throughout all of this nonsense… a dare happened. You have to understand that I am notorious for playing a Lalafell character, and Ace is pretty renowned for being a dedicated Roegadamme. Given that the game just seems to throw Fantasias at new characters… and I had four of them… a scheme was hatched where each of us was required to swap races. So after the podcast on Saturday, I ended up swapping over to a Roegadyn and Ace over to a Lalafell. This has felt extremely bizarre if I am being perfectly honest. I feel so fucking slow… and I have no clue where the hell Ace is half of the time because I am not used to looking for a Lala. We are mostly still rolling with it out of spite and our strong desire to not be the first one to break and Fantasia back to something else. Like there are no true stakes in this contest… just honor is on the line.
I had to shift up my glamour to something more sufficiently tanky, but all in all, I think I am pretty okay with this. I feel like it is not going to be me that breaks first. I went with the shortest possible Roe, but it still feels like I am playing the Incredible Hulk. I’ve always loved the look of this chestpiece so I decided to build something around it. I have the matching legs but not the matching arms… so decided to go with the Sentinels set for the time being. I mostly did not just want to run around permanently in the Warrior artifact gear set. Anyways… alting in FFXIV is way more enjoyable than I ever expected it to be. I will probably continue to share updates on our progress as we tackle more content.
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