FFXIV – Endgame Life

In another post I wrote about your basic objectives in FFXIV endgame and what there is to do, but in this post I’m going to talk more frankly about the more practical experience of what the endgame is like when you’re not in a big Free Company with lots of people available at your level.

It’s like sitting around waiting in a queue for a long time.

Again.

And again.

And again.

In each daily playing session I typically do the Duty Roulette - Main Scenario, which yields a whopping 300 tokens of Philosophy, then the Duty Roulette - Low Level, which yields another 100 or so tokens and a few Mythology tokens. (If I knew any of the dungeons yet I would also want to do Duty Roulette - High Level to get even more tokens and item drops.) After that I basically do the Crystal Tower instance over and over again, which yields more tokens and a chance at some level 80 gear once a week.

All of those instances are fun, but these queues take a fair amount of time to pop. Main Scenario is an 8-man group, Low Level is a 4-man, and Crystal Tower is a whopping 24-man group. On weeknights, as DPS, it’s a good half hour wait for these things, if not longer. And it can take a good while to go through the instance itself, depending on the makeup of the group. It’s almost impossible to get through all of the stuff I listed above on a weeknight without staying up to all hours.

Fortunately you can level alt classes while waiting in a queue, so it’s not quite as bad as standing in one place jumping up and down. Of course alt classes bring their own set of issues, such as the fact that it takes a veritable eternity to level up to 15 (the point when you can start dungeons) on subsequent classes.

My basic point is that the FFXIV endgame can be challenging to enjoy because of all the waiting. And, to be honest, right now there isn’t as much to do as some other games (like Rift). But on the plus side, what there is to do is pretty fun.