FFXIV – Ramping Back Up

I’m starting to get back into the swing of FFXIV. Over the weekend I played more than I have in ages. I finally got a chance to play a bit with the guild which was a lot of fun.

My first priority is finishing the Main Scenario, what with the expansion coming and all, so I picked that up again. I had stopped at Thornmarch (King Moggle Mog or whatever) because, given my last experience with PUGing Titan (Hard), I had no wish to enter another impossible Trial, so I kept putting it off. Then over the weekend I decided to buckle down and finish it. I watched a guide but I couldn’t really follow what was going on, so I decided to leap headlong into the middle of a PUG and experience it firsthand. I figured I would learn what I could, and when the PUG fell apart, I would ask the guild to see if there was anyone around who could help.

Well, it turned out that Thornmarch (Hard) is not very hard. I think there were two of us new to the Trial, but nobody gave us any instructions or marked any targets. I just winged it and tried to do what everyone else was doing. (In such cases I try to look for the target which is losing health the quickest and go after that one.) The first time, we wiped, and then someone thought it might be a good idea to tell us that, after the big dance party and light show, we had to kill all the adds before The King got below 65% health (or something like that). Basically, we should concentrate on the adds and ignore the King. (I’m pretty sure that’s what I was doing, but maybe somebody else was focusing on The King, I don’t know.)

On the second try, we pretty much breezed through it. So here’s my advice if you’re new to Thornmarch: Shoot all the little moogles while dodging the bad stuff, watch the dance party, then shoot all the little moogles again before shooting the big moogle. That was the full extent of the strategy I got out of it. I believe there is supposed to be some optimized order of killing the moogles but nobody marked anything and it seemed like everyone was shooting a different target, so nobody was on the same page and it didn’t seem to matter. For a trial marked “hard” it was not that hard. Maybe everyone is way overgeared for it now. (I actually put on some ~70 gear for it instead of my ~96 gear because it only required ~50something gear and I wanted to play it at least close to level-appropriate.)

Anyway, I finished that part of the story and moved on to the next. I believe a Leviathan Trial is coming up in my future soon.

Secondarily I’m also working on leveling my Black Mage class to 50, to have more DPS options (Bard and Dragoon are my other two). As of this writing I’m at BLM 35. Basically I just do a Low-Level Roulette every night along with two or three leve quests and that gets me about one level each day. Pretty soon I’ll also be able to hang around Camp Dragonhead and ride the continuous-FATE-train to 50 (if that still exists).

The third goal is to continue to grind FATEs for Atmas. I do this while waiting for the above Low-Level Roulette to pop, which can take a good half hour or more on Cactuar. As of now I have all but three of them. I don’t even remember what kind of bow I’m going to get from these things. (I also need to do plain relic quests for Dragoon and White Mage but those are for another day.)