FFXIV – The Level 58 Slump

I’m a little miffed that I’ve run out of level 58 quests in the Dravanian Hinterlands only about halfway to level 59. Alphinaud and [redacted] stopped talking to me about the Main Scenario almost immediately after I ascended to level 58 and entered Idyllshire, which is apparently the new Mor Dhona. They now want nothing to do with me until I get to level 59.

So I did every level 58 quest I could find around Idyllshire and the Hinterlands, mostly involving the gobbies’ loony adventures building their city government. After that, I followed two racist refugees from Uldah in their misadventures of gobbie mistrust. I thought for sure that somewhere in those quests I would unlock Saint Mocianne’s Arboretum, which is clearly marked as a dungeon on my map, but nope. That blue dungeon icon is still there, and I guess I’m supposed to pretend I can’t see the rather obvious entrance.

Now I’m sitting there in Idyllshire with half a level to go, wondering what to do. Did I miss something? The only thing I can think of to do is grind The Vault dungeon or Leveling dungeons until I get to 59, but I don’t particularly want to. I don’t remember ever being at a point in FFXIV before where I *had* to do dungeons to progress. I mean, maybe I had this problem when I originally hit 48 and 49, too, but I don’t remember it. For alt classes I would usually do FATEs around Camp Dragonhead from 40-50 (actually more like 35-50), but as far as I can tell there’s nothing like that in Heavensward.

Tonight, after I wrote the above at work, I re-discovered the Battle Levemetes and Clan Hunts in Foundation, but they are slow and not very efficient in terms of leveling. But it’s about all I could find that didn’t involve a Duty.

By the way I have not enjoyed the quests around the Hinterlands. Well, the quests themselves are fairly amusing, but there is a *lot* of running back and forth, which is really time-consuming when you can’t fly yet.

In terms of land mass, the Heavensward expansion reminds me a lot of the Storm Legion expansion in Rift, and not in a good way. They made the maps *gigantic* in comparison to the launch maps, presumably to impress people or in FFXIV’s case to make flying more important, but what you actually end up with are these huge maps that take forever to get across, which are mostly empty of content. I’d just as soon developers not make bigger maps unless they plan to fill them with more points of interest.