Good Morning Folks! I took a bit of a break this week as I worked my way through the Dawntrail expansion Main Story Quest. I decided to just pause my blog posts until I had finished because I did not really want to discuss this expansion piecemeal. First I feel like we need to talk about the journey leading up until this point. Endwalker was released in December 2021 and represented the culmination of a ten-year journey the Warrior of Light has made since the bungled launch of the game in 2010 and relaunch in 2013. It felt like the awkwardly named “Creative Business Unit III” stuck the landing and apart from a few sour notes… gave us the finale to this series that we all wanted and deserved. Zenos can still fuck the hell off, but that is a rant for another day.
The challenge with Dawntrail is that honestly, I was uncertain I would be playing it. I had thought I was ready to say goodbye to this franchise as it had given me everything that I had wanted. Dawntrail is a new beginning and ultimately will be looked upon to set the pace for the next ten years, and I was uncertain how well anyone could do with the challenge of a clean slate. Last night I finished the Main Story quest and completed all of the expert dungeons, and I have to say it feels like Yoshi P and crew managed to pull off a miracle. Dawntrail is a deeply weird expansion, but it is no less compelling than anything we have gotten to this point and should blaze a trail for the new role that the Warrior of Light plays in the coming years.
The first ten years of Final Fantasy XIV were unequivocally the hero’s journey of the Warrior of Light. It was our tale being told as we begin humbly and arise to the stature of being one of the most powerful beings on our star. Dawntrail is not our story. If Dawntrail were Highlander we would be Ramirez, not Connor MacLeod. If Dawntrail were Star Wars we would be Obi-Wan Kenobi, not Luke Skywalker. We’ve had our tale and are now helping out others as they build their own legacy. This is potentially going to rub some players the wrong way, but it felt so perfectly crafted to me playing through it. Much of this game centers around Wuk Lamat a young uncertain Warrior who has set forth to prove herself because she has to for the good of her people. We are her mentor and as a result, we are not actually the person driving most of the story.
The sights that we see and the battles that we tackle are no less spectacular than anything we have experienced to date. We are very much the elder statesman, lending our gravitas to the cause of others and it feels fitting. We are not about to languish in retirement… we are an adventurer after all first and foremost. We will see the world and help those who we can along the way, and occasionally it will mean teaching someone else how to stand on their own two feet and be confident in the face of certain destruction. Because of this, it feels like we are playing an even more important role in the fate of our star than being the sole savior figure who can accomplish great things. The challenge I think is that Dawntrail is as meaningful as it is… only because I experienced the last ten years worth of content and felt like I successfully completed my own hero’s journey.
Do I think Dawntrail was perfect? Absolutely not. It feels like they listened to the wrong people and made a good deal of content that large swaths of the player base are going to struggle to get through. I figure there will be rounds of nerfs to bring things back in line with the rest of the content in the game, which should help those who struggle. Do I think Dawntrail is a good first step out into a new journey… absolutely. I am curious where we go from here and what becomes of our fledgling group of “not-Scions”. There are some aspects I probably would have seen play out differently. I would say the first half of Dawntrail is perfect… no notes are needed. The second half of Dawntrail lingers a bit too much for my taste and becomes more visual novel than MMORPG. I am still not entirely certain what I think about the final “zone” of the game… but hopefully subsequent patch content will color my feelings.
Dawntrail succeeded massively in being this love letter to Central and South America and I am here for it. I am happy to see Final Fantasy XIV branch out into brand-new themes, and I am very interested to see what other new areas of Eorzea we discover in the coming expansions. I am also largely happy with our role in the new scheme of things, as a helper rather than the de facto leader. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, some patches will sand off the rough bits around the edges and Dawntrail will set itself up as one of the better expansions. I think right now in my current mindset I would rank the content like this:
Shadowbringer – This is still the best expansion
Endwalker – A great Expansion but benefits from wrapping up the entire journey.
Dawntrail – A promising new beginning.
A Realm Reborn – Especially in its current state I feel like it is amazing.
Heavensward – Good but I don’t like Ishgard.
Stormblood – Largely solid but has some deeply disappointing notes.
So while I don’t consider Dawntrail the best thing ever, I feel like it is on solid footing given that there are none of the expansions that I would consider “bad”. I’ve tried to keep things spoiler-free as best I could other than talking about some general themes. If you’ve been sitting on the sidelines of Final Fantasy XIV you owe it to yourself to play through ALL of the story… and don’t be a cutscene skipper. You can skip them if you like, but you are only robbing yourself of the best RPG experience of the last several decades. I still feel firmly that taken as a whole, few games can hold up to the story that is told within Final Fantasy XIV, and Dawntrail is no exception to that lineage.
Anyways! I would love to hear your own thoughts as you finish your journey. I know I am out ahead of the curve a bit here, so feel free to return later or ping me over any number of ways folks can contact me. Please however keep things spoiler-free for the moment. Everyone deserves to experience FFXIV without the experience being tarnished.
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Good Morning Friends! I apologize but you are likely not going to get a proper blog post from me until I have spent some more time in Dawntrail. With a new expansion comes a bunch of spoilers information and it would not do well for me to be part of that problem. So I am going to be careful what I do share. Suffice it to say I am having a lot of fun already and I am enjoying the vibe of the new lands. The new coffer gear is 645 so 5 points ahead of the base level of the highest crafted gear from Endwalker. It makes me extremely glad that I did not go through a lot of effort trying to grind up my item level much higher.
While my friends who attempted to log in as the servers went online faced queues in the 2000s… by the time I got up and around at 6 am CDT Cactuar was down to a 45-player queue. I am sure this will not hold as the day goes on and as more players join the fray. I am pleasantly surprised at how well things appear to be working. I do wonder how many folks Data Center Transferred to Dynamis in hopes of lower congestion. I am very happy that it is an option nonetheless if things do end up getting a bit busy.
One thing I will say is that you are probably going to want to avail yourself of the new feature to push player models away from Quest NPCs. This can be found under Character Configuration > General Tab > and towers the bottom under Quest Progression Settings. I’ve turned it on and the entire experience of questing through the zones has improved greatly. No longer do I need to try and hold my camera angle just right to click on the NPCs.
I wish you all a fun journey in Dawntrail, and I will see you again once the weekend is done and I have more that I feel like I can say.
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Good Morning Folks! I find myself in one of those transitional periods in gaming… where the thing you really want to be playing has not come out yet, but everything that you are playing is not quite right. I am having a heck of a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but essentially only to the point where I run out of daily roulette bonuses. I spent chunks of yesterday trying to catch up on quests and honestly… I think I am of the mindset of my friend Jay and just going to cancel them en masse and then pick up the pieces whenever I feel in the mood to sort them out again. First I think we should all take a moment to appreciate just how pretty Limsa Lominsa is at night. I think more than anything this is why I decided to switch my allegiance to this city all those years ago.
I’ve been scurrying around trying to do a bunch of prep work, but am starting to feel like I am studying too hard for a test to where I start to second guess myself. I don’t really have enough time to get my gear maxed out at this point, and I have already geared out my Warrior and Machinist to a point where they should be viable for a good chunk of the early bits of Dawntrail. I’ve been pouring “bookrocks” into ninja gear so that I can finish that character out after I have finished leveling my tanks. My Dark Knight is getting pretty close as I managed to knock out two levels yesterday, and will easily get another level today. After that, I will spend the last week working on Gunblade but am unlikely to get it across the finish line before the expansion launch without some dedicated grinding. Essentially I am in this pattern of playing a lot of things… for a little bit of time… and feeling weird about it. Side note if you have not backed up your settings in awhile you might want to do so. I had not backed mine up since 2021.
In Guild Wars 2 I am pretty much playing a little bit each night at reset and knocking out my daily wizard chores. I should be wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure but I gotta say… I am not the biggest fan of Nayos. Right now the story quests have not inspired me to dive deeper into it. The fight with Ceros was easily three times longer than it should have been. That entire instance should have been chopped up into multiple instances because, by the time I finished it, I was ready to gnaw my arm off to release myself from that trap. I am in this weird place with Guild Wars 2 where I still enjoy playing it casually and I like knocking out things that will eventually get me another legendary… but I am having trouble fully attaching to it knowing that I am about to go all in on Dawntrail.
Similarly, I am in an odd place with Diablo IV. My build was good enough to get me to 100, but feels sort of awful pushing harder content. I have been poking at leveling a Necromancer, but the drive to play is mostly gone. Getting to 100 feels like “finishing” the game to me, that was the thing I had never done previously and after accomplishing that goal I was ready to do something else. I enjoy the changes to the game but it also doesn’t really drive me to play more of it. It is nowhere near as rich and textured as Path of Exile and there are not as many different things to interact with. Everything sort of feels very samey where you just keep pushing up difficulty rather than interacting with systems. I keep thinking about respeccing either to Dust Devils Dual Swing or the new Dust Devils Whirlwind… but it feels like it takes too much effort and focus to get me there. So instead I log in… flop around like a fish out of water for a bit and then log right back out.
I am still periodically logging into World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix as my “third game” but honestly a lot of my drive to play it is gone there as well. I’ve leveled and geared one character to the standards I am willing to do during a short event, and leveled a second character…. and now sit less than 10 levels away from the cap on a third. I could level more characters or I could grind out more bronze… but honestly… I scooped up most of the mounts I care about and gearsets are honestly more enjoyable to farm from the raids themselves once the warband changes go in with the expansion. I still have no clue what I am going to do for War Within. I have my Alliance home in House Stalwart, a Horde home on the same server in Facepull, and then another group of friends over on Drenden that have offered me a home. I just don’t really know what I want to do with myself when it comes to Warcraft nor how seriously I want to treat the game.
I feel like I want something that I can really sink my teeth into and no life… but also don’t really want to get engaged in something when in eight days I am just going go degenerate on FFXIV. Path of Exile released a patch yesterday and I logged in this morning because it needed to update its cache after some significant graphical changes. All in all the game seems to maybe perform better. I suppose I could while away the hours where I am not doing dailies in FFXIV or GW2 doing some more POE. There is another league challenge that I could probably knock out if I set my mind to it. I have a bunch of the memories maps and there is one for doing those that I did not touch during Necropolis.
Basically, as the title of the post says… it feels like I am wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants right now and some new ones arrive in eight days. I’m not fully engaged with FFXIV enough to be using this time to its fullest and doing all the raids… most of which I have not even unlocked. I finished up the Stormblood Hildebrand quest so I will keep moving forward in that chain, but I am not sure what else I am really going to accomplish before the 28th. How are you spending your time before Dawntrail? Drop me a line below.
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This is admittedly a post that I am not entirely certain how to get started. I’ve been thinking about it for a bit and yesterday’s blog post was a bit of a filler while I sorted out my thoughts further. It is my Birthday today and as a result, I am getting around much more slowly than usual. I did go get bonus donuts though so that was tasty. When I started this blog back in 2009 its original purpose was to be a “World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking Blog” patterned off of another idol of mine who was doing something similar with her experiences as the main tank for a raid. I was the main tank from Burning Crusade through Cataclysm, at which point I hopped off that bandwagon and had to sort of reinvent the concept of this blog. Basically tanking is in my DNA and I have done a heck of a lot of it over the years.
Something happened though during Shadowbringers that sort of broke me. I am not sure how or why it happened, but I stopped being willing to queue for random groups with strangers. I would still be willing to tank for my friends, but those groups became fewer and further apart. Instead, I started spending most of my time on a DPS alt, because it didn’t really require anything of me to join a group and blend in. I am not sure if it was my lack of willingness to take responsibility for the success or failure of a group, or that the community as a whole was feeling less friendly than it did previously. Whatever the case I developed a mental block against tanking that held for roughly five years. When Endwalker launched I exclusively did that content with the Trust system and tanked zero dungeons for random people.
I honestly think I probably would have stayed in this “stuck” state indefinitely were it not for my recent foray into Pandaria Remix. It was a temporary environment with extremely low stakes and to get anything started… you either had to hope someone accepted you into their party finder group or in my case… just start your own. It quickly became just the status quo that I was forming groups on the regular, at first just for the world bosses, and then later for the normal mode raids that did not have dungeon finder support. I got so comfortable building groups that it sort of whittled away at that mental block to the point where I felt ready to do more. I think the magic of Pandaria Remix is that it is a 90-day experiment and no matter how bad things go… everything you are doing is just temporary which makes the player base considerably more forgiving about everything.
Even then when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV for the purpose of catching up to the pre-Dawntrail content… I stuck with a DPS character. This was in part because somewhere along the line I had stopped gearing Paladin which was my Endwalker main job. All the while though… there was a not-so-subtle itch in the back of my skull telling me that I really wanted to try tanking again. I set my mind to finishing out the story and then my goal was to siphon off resources to the point where I could build up a decent set of gear for tanking purposes. That plan didn’t exactly carry forth as intended.
When Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn first launched, I went all in on Warrior and it was my main job up until Endwalker. I loved EVERYTHING about the job… except Overpower which last I knew was a frontal cone attack that you had to carefully time in order to make sure you clipped everything in front of you. A lot of the appeal of Paladin was that I could have a much more chill experience hitting everything around me in a big circle. However, as much as I love the concept of Sword and Board, there was just something much more enjoyable about hitting things with a big axe. Essentially I got the itch to level my Warrior and then noticed that at some point when I was not looking Overpower was changed to function almost exactly like the Paladin AOE. This set a plan in motion to level up and gear my Warrior so that I could switch to it as my main in Dawntrail.
However, at this point, I was not actually tanking much of anything. For the first few levels, I was running a daily Frontline and then doing the Hippo Endwalker dailies to get essentially one easy level each reset. However when I got to level 88… I started to get impatient and started queuing for what I thought of as some of the low-hanging fruit like Mainstory Roulette. It went pretty smoothly and felt pretty great… which built up my confidence to start queueing for Leveling, and eventually the Mid-level roulette, and so on. When I survived the embarrassment of forgetting to throw my stance on… trying to turn it on while pulling… accidentally dragging it off my bar… and then wiping the group… I figured I could handle anything. Truth be told… easing back into tanking has felt good. It has felt like I am exercising a skill that I had forgotten about and put away in the closet for some reason.
At this point I think I am on my fourth day of doing all of the roulettes as a tank… or at least everything but Trial and Alliance Raid. It isn’t so much that I don’t think I can do those… but more that I am not sure I want the hassle of tanking those yet. I’ve started splitting time with Dark Knight and Warrior as I am trying to level up that job… with the ultimate goal of getting all of my tanks to 90 so that I can jettison all of that old tanking gear. I’m honestly having a freaking blast and I feel more alive in Final Fantasy XIV than I have in years. It is like I had forgotten at some point along the way, just how freaking fun the dungeons are in this game and how well-designed they are. Do I remember every mechanic perfectly? Absolutely not. However, I am remembering most of them enough to limp my way through the fights while also racking up a lot of commendations along the way. Comms feel good.
I’ve managed to get my tanking gear up to a decent enough level for starting the next expansion and I will keep picking up the rare tomestone gear as I move forward. I did buy a shiny crafted Axe because I did not want to deal with the nonsense of getting a similar axe and then trying to augment it. Once the expansion goes live I will be spending my Poetics on getting maxed out level 80 and 90 sets for various roles so that I can level those in a chill manner. Generally speaking that max raid tier is good enough to get you all the way through the next expansion. My goal is to get really merciless with what I actually hold onto gear wise, because I am tired of having my vaults stuffed full of random trash. I’ve also been having quite a bit of luck buying loot boxes with Grand Company Seals.
I guess my next goal is to reclaim my raid leader heritage and get comfortable forming Squads with my mostly unused Catmander tag. Baby steps I know… but I think the dam that burst with me getting comfortable tanking for strangers may also sweep downstream and eventually batter down the dam that that was placed there to stop me from leading larger groups. Also, appreciate Thumper the baby Siege Turtle because he is precious. Anyways… I am now looking forward to Dawntrail more than I have previously because I actually want to try and progress through the raid tiers and extreme fights while they are current. I am trying really hard to apply the lessons learned during Pandaria Remix to playing more serious games… because at the end of the day… the opinion of strangers does not matter in the least. However, it does seem a bit like some of the toxicity I was seeing in the FFXIV community when it had a mass influx of WoW players… has potentially died down as well.
I hope you have a most wonderful day. I am going to be cleaning my office… which is probably not the most exciting birthday activity but I put together a new cabinet and I need to migrate stuff into it.
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