FFXIV – Ding, Ding

Last Wednesday was a rough day at work* so I was too beat to try Turn 5 again, but Saturday the guild was kind enough to re-run it for me and we breezed through it like it was nothing. Thanks everyone! The previously-hated Dive Bombs were no sweat this time. Now I have the Second Coil of Bahamut unlocked for future escapades. (One of these days I’ll have to go back through Turns 1-4 just to see them.)

I’ve slowed down a bit on completing the Main Scenario so I haven’t done any more trials. There’s still plenty of time before the expansion in June so there’s no reason to rush, and honestly some of it is a bit dry. It turned out I wasn’t done with 2.3 after all since there was a lot of chatting with NPCs all around the world after defeating Ramuh. At this point though my time is probably better spent unlocking level 50 dungeons.

Sunday I finished leveling Black Mage to 50. (Or as I like to call it, “Blast Mage.”) As with most previous classes, once I get to the high 40s, it becomes impossible to stop until I reach 50, even if there’s no compelling reason to get there in a hurry. Toward the end I did a combination of FATEs, Aurum Vale, and Low-Level Duty Finder, but surprisingly enough in the end I dinged 50 by completing my Hunting Log. There’s a healthy amount of XP in that last tier.

To celebrate, I put on the two pieces of Crimson gear I had saved from ages ago, bought a random level 55 wand from the Marketplace, and jumped immediately into Labyrinth of the Ancients to start replacing that hideous class quest gear. (I’ve always liked the Crimson gear anyway.) It’s a really different experience this time. With no gear and under 3000 health, those AoEs in Labyrinth hurt, not to mention all of the 130+ geared players looking at with disdain for messing up their speed-farming.

So now I have Bard, Dragoon, and Black Mage at 50, which pretty much covers all the DPS options I’m interested in right now.

One of the nice things about taking several months off from FFXIV is that when you return, you have 100 Levemete allotments and a ton of rest experience waiting. (Honestly I can’t even remember the last time I didn’t have my bar full of rest XP.) And with 100 Tradecraft Levemetes it’s relatively easy to level a crafting profession. Just pick the quest that rewards the most experience for the least expensive materials (in terms of money to buy or time to make or gather) and repeat for five levels. Then move to the next location and repeat.

So leveling Alchemist went pretty fast and I made level 50 on Monday night. I picked Alchemist, by the way, because it was already at 32, and I think I originally started it because Alchemist is the melder for the White Mage relic, and at the time I was leveling WHM. So to celebrate hitting 50 Alchemist I finally melded two materia onto a stick for my WHM relic. That’s probably the extent of what I’ll do with it for the forseeable future. I had hoped that I could also use Alchemist to meld for the Black Mage relic but naturally that requires Goldsmith.

Speaking of crafting I’ve been looking into endgame gear for crafters a bit. Man what a rabbit-hole. There is so much to look at and think about and buy before you can do anything decent. I wanted to craft a one-star botanist hat with my weaver, but first I had to get out ffxivclock.com and harvest up a bunch of Crawler Caccoons so I could make Twinthread. Then I realized you can’t make Twinthread unless you have Craftsmanship 275. So I had to buy some gear and melding components to get that higher. Then I ran out of Lightning Crystals so I had to go harvest a bunch more of them too. It’s all very time-consuming and hella-expensive if you have to buy anything from the Market. Generally speaking, I enjoy crafting, but not when it takes all day and all your money just to make one thing.

* A pattern which is becoming far too common for my liking.