Morning Folks! This is the point where I fess up to cheating on my beloved Cactuar. One of the cool things that came with this expansion is the ability to overflow onto less populated servers. We did this a few times over the first few days of Dawntrail and there were four of us who independently chose the Kraken server over on the Dynamis Data Center. There is no small amount of running inside jokes about unleashing the Kraken that I won’t go into, but suffice it to say we have a connection with that server name. So when Ace and I started kicking around the notion of creating some baby characters, it seemed like an obvious choice, and “Belghast Tho’catte” was born. The very first character that I created in beta testing A Realm Reborn was a Miqo’te and I figured that was a good choice for this project. Hilariously Ace chose to play a Hrothgar so we are running around as a Tank/Healer duo of Cat-adjascent folks.
Within seconds of my logging in for the first time I was asked to help a Free Company form by signing a charter. In short order, the leader found enough signatures and I was suddenly a member of Darkwraith. Disturbingly quickly I was an officer in this Free Company, and instead of doing our own thing Ace and I largely decided to roll with this. The folks have been nice and chill to chat back and forth with while we have been leveling, and as a result, I’ve seen no reason to not stay. They are well aware that these characters are our alts and are cool with that. However, there is a limited amount of easy progress we can make on Cactuar each day so as a result we are spending quite a bit of time poking around and experiencing the old content.
The most hilarious part of this entire experience is just how fast you end up leveling. We’ve been doing each dungeon as it unlocks and last night we did Aurum Vale and Wanderer’s Palace… but in the MSQ we are only up to Brayflox. So that means I am a level 53 Warrior with a full item level 90 artifact set, but am doing a level 30-something MSQ quest. I have no clue when we will hit 100 but I am figuring at some point during Shadowbringers if not sooner. I have contemplated doing some PVP just so I can get some Poetics and be able to buy gear upgrades that way since I can’t zone into Ishgard without having completed the MSQ. I legitimately understand why folks end up doing a story skip, just because you end up getting locked from doing a lot of the content in spite of your level being high enough.
Once we got mount unlocks, the leveling became way more enjoyable. I’ve also started farming up MGP in the Gold Saucer because there are some cool cosmetics that you can buy there. I need a nice-looking Axe because I can get by with the Warrior Artifact appearance for a long while… but it is a bit before any cool-looking weapons start dropping. It has been so much fun doing the content again with fresh eyes after a decade’s worth of time has passed. I’ve made alts before but never gotten anything this far. Generally speaking, I peter out around the time you do the three-dungeon tour at 15ish. I just unlocked Palace of the Dead so I might grind up some alt classes using that. We both go to Brayflox before the end of the night and plan on running it first thing tonight. After that, I think the next big thing is Titan.
Over on Cactuar, my Warrior is now fully decked out in item level 700 gear… minus one ring which is always the case. I wish you could buy two tomestone rings at a given level, and I’ve not gathered the fortitude to PUG my way through the two Ex Trials. I really wish I had a full 8-player group of friends to run harder content with. With the raid opening soon, I am going to have to start wading into the party finder waters for such things. I have a discord that I started with the purpose of trying to find people to group with, so I might start putting out feelers there to see if I can get a group going. The biggest problem is that with the server congestion, datacenter and server travel have been a problem. I’m in a few linkshells that I could potentially recruit from as well. We will see how much gumption I have towards such notions.
Then over on my Summoner, that project has been rolling along swimmingly. Weirdly enough I find myself really enjoying the class. I dinged 88 last night and should be able to push through to 90 today. I have a full set of 660 gear waiting to be equipped for when I hit there, and I will probably start doing a lot more FATEs given that the new zones are always active. I will probably focus on “Texico” since I want the Capybara mount that comes from a Boss FATE in that area. Given that I am not starving for tomestones I am probably going to keep running leveling and high level on my Warrior and then focusing on MSQ roulette and the like for my Summoner to get levels faster.
I am very much still in the honeymoon phase with Final Fantasy XIV and my return to the game. I think the babby alt project over on Kraken is keeping me way more engaged than I would be at this point after having leveled two jobs to 100. There is really only so much that can be done that feels like progress until the content deepens, so having 10 years’ worth of content to chew through on a brand-new character feels good.