With the release of Endwalker imminent (~20 hours away for those with early access) I’ve been spending the last 3 weeks or so re-acquainting myself with the game.
Originally this meant completing Eureka with my first character, which I had skipped, but that only ended up taking a week. Turns out you can level quite fast by just showing up at any monster spawn, not dissimilar to the Bozja experience. Wasn’t able to do any Arsenal runs though since that character happened to be located on the Crystal data center, whose BA instances are completely controlled by a Discord group. Everyone else refuses to enter the place.
So I’ll have to wait for a server visitation option to get added to the game before I can clear that.
The next week was spent loitering in Eureka to make a few million gil selling expensive (and very rare) monster drops and loot boxes. The Tracker site ended up a true godsend for that goal. Partway through though I started thinking about how Shadowbringers has a bit of quest development locked behind completing all 4 role questlines; none of my existing characters met the requirements to accomplish that since they all had their own job-exclusive themes.
Basically there were two options: Either level some of the ignored jobs on one or more of the existing characters, or create a 4th character. I originally went with the latter both because I like the whole ‘progression’ experience and I wanted a character on a non-North American server (all three NA data centers had recently gone down twice). But on this last day I also decided to go with the first option as well.
Which meant raising Gladiator and Archer on my Soul of Magic (who will also pick up the new Sage and Reaper classes). Why Reaper? Because the preliminary EW patch notes mention that it’ll have five sets of role-specific questlines. So I’ll need a melee physical DPS class to see its bonus story bits.
Future plans then include raising Arcanist and Machinist on my Tank-specialist, and Gunbreaker, Red Mage, and Sage on my ranged DPS specialist. Finally, the most recently created character will raise Astrologian, Dark Knight, and Reaper (no ranged physical DPS though because none of them even remotely fit their theme).
Doing all that should take a great deal of time. Theoretical far-future plans include ~maybe~ raising Fisher on the SoM to see all the crafting-related role quests and creating a 5th character on the upcoming Oceanic data center (if the connection strength ends up too weak I’ll go with the European Light data center instead).