Good Morning Friends! It is time for yet another mix to land on yet another Monday. For those who don’t know this series, each Monday I release a new MixTape that is available in both Spotify and YouTube flavors. The idea behind it is that as a kid I was a creator of many mixtapes. I would share them with my friends and often times put a lot of thought and effort into placing songs in just the right order. My goal was trying to create something that was a “listen-through” or an album that you just put in the stereo and let play. Creating an album that could be played start to end had greater significance given that rapidly skipping tracks was just not a thing that was viable. Since I don’t make physical mixtapes anymore, I make them digitally and share them with you, my readers.
Major Party Foul Dude
This album is the soundtrack to a High School or College party that I can visualize in my head summoned from the bowels of my memory. Granted a number of these songs did not exist during my college timeframe, but there is an unmistakable brand of pop-punk that fueled similar events. In my mind’s eye, I can picture a sea of red solo cups, and maybe even a trashcan full of “cowboy Koolaid” with this playing in the background. Essentially I crafted this album out of the late 90s and early 2000s post-punk music that fueled the Warp Tour and Jackass. Granted I am placing this in a very specific time context, but I feel like this sort of music is ultimately timeless. I’ve been sitting on this one for a while because I had cranked out two albums that both included some Blink 182 on them. However that was six weeks ago, and I think plenty of time has passed in order for this to feel fresh again.
Track List
Swing, Swing – The All-American Rejects
Flagpole Sitta – Harvey Danger
Fat Lip – Sum 41
Over My Head – Lit
The Rock Show – Blink-182
The Anthem – Good Charlotte
The Middle – Jimmy Eat World
Basket Case – Green Day
Ocean Avenue – Yellowcard
Nothing Inside – Machine Gun Kelly
And I – Box Car Racer
Santa Monica – Everclear
Banditos – The Refreshments
Coolidge – Descendents
King of Wishful Thinking – New Found Glory
Listen on Spotify
Listen On YouTube
There we have it friends, the fifteenth Mixtape in this series. I still have a large number of these waiting in the wings and still, find myself every few weeks going through a period of cranking out three or four of them at a time. For now, the inspiration is holding steady, so I am wondering exactly how long I can keep this going. I do realize that if I am going to keep this series going, I will need to start consuming brand new music. If this is your first mix, then I suggest checking out the archive where I keep a list of all of the past albums.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start off with Bel confessing his love for a class that he never expected to like in FFXIV, the Dancer. From there we talk a bit about FFXIV in general and how weird the Bozjan Front is. Tam shares with us a game that is actually way more in the wheelhouse of Bel, Grace, and Thalen and is effectively Cyberpunk-themed Diablo. The Ascent is a game that was shown at E3 and actually the final product is pretty great. A topic that has been hanging on the list for a while is some discussion of Civilization 6 multiplayer and contrasting it to previous versions of the game. More specifically Kodra shares his experiences playing with asymmetrical difficult levels. We talk a bit about MTG Arena leaning into its computer game nature and doing some things that absolutely would break paper magic. Finally, we talk about the board game Bullet Heart.
Topics Discussed
Good Morning Friends! This is a rare Saturday post that I decided I am making today partially in honor of Blaugust and partially because I feel like sharing some information. If you follow me on Twitter you probably have noticed that I have been dropping a bunch of information threads about FFXIV, largely targetting brand new players or WoW transplants. One of the things that I keep mentioning is just how bad of an idea it is to roll new characters in order to play a new job. One of the great things that FFXIV has going for it is the ability to play a single character and have it be viable at every single job available in the game. Starting a brand new character effectively means that you are starting the game over from scratch and there is little to no carryover between these characters, meaning you lose all of your hard-earned mounts, titles, minions, and most importantly cosmetics.
This however is a bit of a double-edged sword, because the Main Story Quest of Final Fantasy XIV is designed to rapidly progress a single job in level ensuring that you are always caught up to be able to do the next quest in sequence. Unfortunately, you won’t have access to the MSQ on your alternate jobs and will quickly find that the ocean of side quests available in the game, just is not a great way to level because they reward a pittance of progression. There are of course a number of ways to grind up new jobs if you really want to “no-life” your way to the level cap. However, over the years I have realized that the game prefers a “variety is the spice of life” approach and rewards you for doing a little bit of a lot of different activities. Once I have adopted this methodology, I have found that leveling becomes pretty straightforward and just an application of days of repeated effort rather than a focused grinding session.
There are a number of activities that are rather rewarding, and I thought I would start by prefacing what I do on an alt that I am trying to level every day. Here is a quick bullet point list, and I will explain each of these further down in the post.
Main Story Roulette
Battlecraft Beast Tribe Dailies
Clan Hunt Logs
PVP Roulette
Alliance Raid Roulette (once it opens up)
Trials Roulette
Leveling/50+ Roulette
Generally speaking, I will hop in a queue for activity, and while in that queue I will be working on either Beast Tribe quests or Clan Hunt logs specifically, allowing that time spent in the queue, especially as a DPS to be productive. On another note, this is largely targetting folks who have leveled a single job all of the ways through the main story quest. If you don’t have a character to the level cap, you really should be focusing on that first. You get a bonus to experience for the alternate jobs if you have a single job to whatever the current level cap is.
Main Story Roulette
This friends is the single largest chunk of experience you are going to get from any activity. Main Story Roulette is a way of Square guaranteeing that every player can always get a group for Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium. I’ve said before that Square is extremely adept at bribing players to do the right thing, and it starts right here. If you are on an alt, you are going to get roughly 75% of a level for a Praetorium run and 50% of a level for a Castrum run. I greatly prefer Praetorium even though it is significantly longer because you can semi-AFK during the cutscenes and be doing something else on the other monitor. Do not sleep on this XP boost. Sure it becomes boring and sure there is a specific pattern to the way that these mega-dungeons are run, but the single boost that you can get every day is well worth your time investment.
PVP Roulette
This is another big chunk of experience and I think the secret to why I don’t mind doing PVP in this form is that the player is rewarded effectively the same win or lose. You are going to see somewhere in the vicinity of half of the levels worth of experience from running the PVP roulette every single day. This is something that I would suggest queueing for during prime time however as during off-hours the queues might be a little longer and your time could be served better elsewhere. A side benefit is you gain wolf marks which you can then turn in for pets, cool exclusive weapon and armor appearances, and even a magitek mount.
Battlecraft Beast Tribe Dailies
To be completely honest, I ignored these for the longest time to my own detriment. In “A Realm Reborn” the Beast Tribe quests were not worth that much experience. They were something that I did to earn a reputation and eventually unlock unique dyes and the mounts but not really a net positive on the experience gain. However starting with Heavensward, the quests began scaling with your level and this has increased significantly with Stormblood and no Shadowbringers. For example, doing the three Pixie Beast Tribe dailies can be upwards of half of the level of experience for level 70+ characters.
Each expansion seems to reward more experience than the previous expansion. If you are below level 50, it is still worth doing the A Realm Reborn quests largely because the later quests in the series reward better experience gain than the early ones.
Clan Hunt Logs
Scattered throughout Eorzea are Clan Hunt boards. From them, you can gain hunt bills that can be completed each day and reward a decent chunk of experience, Gil, as well as a specific clan hunt currency for each expansion that can be spent on gear. You can also join in “hunt trains” where groups of players go around the world taking out high-rank hunt targets, but I am not going to get into that today. I am largely focusing on the hunt bills that you can work on at your own pace, and between this and the beast tribe dailies, these serve as a thing you can do while waiting in roulette queues. Each bill will ask you to find a specific target mob in a specific zone and kill a specific number of them. Each time you complete a step on the bill you are rewarded experience, Gil, and the hunt currency. You can find the hunt boards for each expansion in the following locations.
A Realm Reborn
Your Grand Company Headquarters – Limsa Lominsa / Gridania / Ul’dah
Heavensward
Ishgard – just outside the Forgotten Knight Tavern
Stormblood
Rhalgr’s Reach – inside the tunnel by the tomestone vendors
Shadowbringers
The Crystarium – just outside the main Aetheryte on the same level
Alliance Roulette
I had been avoiding this one like the plague, but no that I have started to get my feet about me I gave it a spin. I was shocked by just how much experience these are worth. You can’t start running this until you reach level 50 on the character, but in my experience, it is worth roughly 50% of a level each day. The best time to run these is during the 50-60 grind because it means you will get either Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower, or World of Darkness… all of which are extremely safe these days and tend to go fast and by the numbers. Once you cross that 60 threshold, you start being eligible for monsters like Dun Scaithe that can turn into a horrific wipe fest. I still throw myself against this wall but your mileage may vary.
Trials/Leveling/50+ Roulettes
I am lumping the dungeon and trial roulettes in the same bucket because they are reasonably rewarding, but how rewarding varies wildly based on which activity you end up getting. The roulette itself is worth 15-20% of a level and this can scale upwards greatly if the activity you end up getting randomed into is near your level range so that you are getting decent experience off individual monster kills. They are most definitely worth doing, but not at the detriment of any of the other options you have available to you.
The No-Lifer Grind Methods
Are you the kind of player that prefers to find the most efficient method of doing something and then repeat that same process over and over until achieving the desired result? There are absolutely methods for leveling that follow this thought process. Truth is that I do some of each of these along with the above methods in order to keep things flowing smoothly and keep me from bogging down anywhere along the way. While I ascribe to the “variety is the spice of life” method of leveling, there are absolutely points at which I will grind my way over specific humps.
FATE Grinding
This is pretty straightforward… essentially go camp a zone and take out FATEs for the experience. The best possible course of action is to look in the party finder and see if anyone has a FATE grinding group up. There are a number of steps in the artifact weapon quests that involve grinding fates for some sort of a resource. In many cases, you can ride along with one of these groups and they will benefit from a faster time to kill and you will benefit from reaping all of that experience. If you can’t find a party finder group then the best practice is to choose a zone in your level range and just start doing FATEs. It is very rare that you will be in a zone and not have a group already running around and doing them. Mouse over each of the FATEs and then head towards the one that seems to be gaining progress, chances are you will find a fledgling group ready to go doing them that you can follow around.
Max Level Dungeon Queues
This one is pretty straightforward as well and works best if you are leveling a Healer or a Tank for the shorter queue times. Essentially you go into the duty finder, tick the highest level dungeon that you are eligible to queue for, and then do it over and over until you unlock a new dungeon. Repeat until you have achieved the desired level and also gear yourself pretty well in the process. Doing this as a DPS can suck because you end up with a much longer queue time than the Healer/Tanks and their near-instant queues.
Hunt Trains
This is admittedly one of the methods that I know the least about. On every server, there is a sequence of high-level hunt targets that spawn, and there are groups that are dedicated to running through them in sequence for experience and hunt currency. Generally speaking, these groups are organized out of Discord communities now, so I would suggest you do some searching for your Data Center and see what hunt communities might be available for you. I know this is a thing, and it is a great way of gearing alts… but also I have not really had the time or the mental bandwidth to dive into this system. I am telling you that it exists if you want to go down that rabbit hole, but I don’t have the knowledge to pass it along to you directly, unfortunately.
Deep Dungeon
One of my favorite methods for leveling alternate jobs, especially the 1-50 grind is the “Deep Dungeon” system. These are made up of the Palace of the Dead in the South Shroud and Heaven on High in The Ruby Sea. Essentially it is an alternate leveling scheme that allows you to walk in with no gear and be perfectly effective at playing your class, queueing with strangers, and completing a course of dungeon floors that take somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes to run. Palace of the Dead can be started by a character at level 1, slows down after 40, and then slows down again after level 50. Heaven on High picks up at level 61 and can take a character easily to level 70, but again slows down significantly in the 70-80 level grind. While doing the dungeons you have a chance of getting specific loot chests to drop that can be decoded into an assortment of minions and cosmetic armor pieces.
I have to be completely honest, that one of the best guides to understanding how this system works was produced by Square themselves. In order to gain access to each of these there is a short quest chain and below are links to the specific quest that starts each.
I am very new to this system, but essentially this is an alternate leveling system that involves doing battle against the forces of the Empire in an attempt to save the Bozjan people. It opens up for characters over level 71 and in my brief experience, the gain is comparable to that of a Deep Dungeon system. Unlocking the system requires you to have completed the level 80 Main Story Quest and have also completed the entire Ivalice Alliance Raid quest series. Since I am still learning the ropes I am going to refer you to another source for information about this system. All in all, I have found this enjoyable so far and I plan on pushing my Dancer into it some more once I hit level 71.
Summary
One of the other important things that you need to probably note is when the daily reset happens on your server. Each reset you get a fresh batch of all of the above bonuses available to you in order to keep working those levels up. Like I said before, I take an approach these days of doing a little bit of all of these things because it keeps things feeling fresh. However, at various other points in my FFXIV history, I was very much a FATE grinder or a Deep Dungeon grinder. The problem for me at least is that I got burned out on this method of play pretty quickly. I could keep my head down up until the point I achieved my first goal, but then found it extremely hard to start over again with the next class. I ground all of the Battlecraft jobs to 50 using a combination of FATEs and Deep Dungeon for example.
I think ultimately you need to find your own groove and what works for you the best. If I happen across a party doing a FATE I tend to pop in and join the fun, because it will ultimately provide a little chunk of experience along the way. If you employ multiple methods of leveling, I think you too will find that grinding up those Alternate Jobs doesn’t feel quite so grindy. As always if you have any questions or comments feel free to drop them below. I hope this guide is useful to someone out there because it certainly took a long time to write this morning.
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One of the things that I love about being a fairly prolific blogger, is that it also makes me a fairly prolific “screenshotter”. I like using images to break up blocks of text, so it means that I am always looking to capture moments in games. At last count, it also means that I have an archive of somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 GB worth of images recouting my time in various games. This means that with some measure of accuracy I can usually pinpoint exactly when I started playing a game. For example with my most recent return to Final Fantasy XIV, I know without a doubt that it happened on June 26th or 2021 and the above image is the first screenshot that I took. I started playing again on a Saturday which allowed me to get in, buy a jumbo cactpot ticket, and then cash that in after the podcast and I took a screenshot of it because I got a prize slightly greater than the default. It isn’t always a moment of huge significance that causes a screenshot to happen, but I do enjoy the fact that I do this regularly enough that I can use it as a visual journal.
This puts me slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to the recent wave of players trying out the game. It also has me still playing catch up for all of the content I missed since I last played around the release of the 5.3 patch. Something I had never participated in for example was the Bozjan Southern Front which is like this interesting halfway point between a Deep Dungeon and something like Eureka. To get it unlocked however I had to run through the entire Ivalice Alliance raid series that I never actually got around to doing in Stormblood. I’ve not spent a lot of time in there, but what limited time I have has been enjoyable. I mostly bounced from FATE to FATE and then signed up for all of the boss fights that happened while I was in the vicinity. I’ve unlocked the second area of the zone and I think at last count I was rank 6 of 15. Every time I can put on a new rank I pop back into the base and upgrade because I had been warned that often times this opens up new quests which unlock new things.
The bulk of my week was spent working on my machinist job, and I have to say right now at this very moment it is probably my favorite DPS class in the game. This is weird given how much I did not like Machinist when it was originally released in Heavensward. We’ve lost track of how many revisions to the class this has been, but right now they have a really enjoyable mix of a gunner class and Edgard from Final Fantasy VI. One of my friends Erry mentioned that she was not digging the class at all… and then she got Drill and that changed everything. I have to agree with this sentiment, it is really when you get the gadgets and the upgraded “heated” versions of your base attacks that it really starts to come alive. I hit level 80 with the class a few days ago and as is usually my pattern, once I got some basic gear I flipped out and started leveling something new.
There was one job that was completely greyed out for me, and I decided to remedy this. Otherwise, all of my battlecraft jobs are at least level 50 or higher. Dancer was introduced with Shadowbringers and I have to admit it is not traditionally what I would consider my jam. The first thing we had to remedy was getting rid of the default appearance which looked a bit goofy on a Lala. Instead, I went with this whole pirate lord sort of theme and I think it works nicely. Shocking to me is how much I am enjoying the class because it feels like playing a melee… but all of your attacks work at range. This means that like Bard and Machinist it is a class with a high degree of mobility since I don’t have to wait on any abilities to cast. What really pushes it up there though is the group support it provides with a bunch of interesting AOE minor heal abilities. I am learning the ropes but definitely a job that I dig. I think ultimately I am on the path to level everything to 80, but I sincerely doubt that happens before Endwalker.
Grace and I were joking that somehow I was replaced by the version of the player that they were in 2017. I have been throwing myself at all sorts of random group content and am even doing the daily Alliance Roulette for fun and experience. Sometimes it works great and we get a nice easy Syrcus run, and other times it does not… and you get Dun Scaithe that has so many wipes that I eventually had to bail out and go to bed. All the time however I find myself enjoying doing content with random players and how generally awesome everyone has been. Even in the cavalcade of wipes that was that Dun Scaithe run, no one was really hostile at least not the levels of hostility that I would have seen in other games. Like I can take passive aggressiveness because I grew up with plenty of that, it is the downright hostility towards other players that I think has driven me away from random group encounters in other games.
I had built this mental block up against doing things with strangers, and it makes me wonder how many opportunities I had missed out on. For example, I happened to be doing clan hunt logs in the Lochs when I noticed the Ixion this big mega FATE was up. Shortly thereafter folks started flocking to the zone and grouping up to prepare to kill it. They sat there and waited a good solid 10 minutes for folks to filter in from other zones and when there were 20 minutes left on the FATe they pulled. You can see the grouping of players that already had their mount, but were super happy to help out and do the FATE just because it was fun. I was in that camp as well, because I got the mount through another source and was just there to experience the event. It wasn’t particularly difficult but also wasn’t a trivial face stomp either. I walked away with enough Ixion horns to be able to pop over to Rhalgar’s Reach and get the minion version of Ixion to show for my effort.
Thing is… there is a version of me from not too long ago that would never have signed up for an event with a bunch of strangers. I know this is corny, but it feels like this game and its community have summoned forth a version of me that I thought was long dead. I used to be a group organizer and constantly slamming my face against impossible obstacles with strangers. That is more or less how I survived all of Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King, and because of it I had long lists of friends and was in my maximum number of social channels that I used as a reservoir of people to do things with. Then the community changed, or at least I became fearful of it and I stopped grouping with anyone that I did not know personally… or at least were not vetted through one of my friends. Coming back into this atmosphere it has revitalized that part of me that is willing to talk to strangers and even lend a helping hand again. I’ve missed this version of me.
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