Various Thoughts

Endwalker turned out to be a remarkably solid overall addition to the game. Right up there with Heavensward narratively and mechanically more or less equivalent to Shadowbringers.

They have found new ways to waste your time though, mainly in the form of escort quests that prevent you from using mounts or teleporting while said quest is active. Fortunately you don’t have to ever worry about the NPC’s health in those quests. Experience-wise the main questline alone gives just enough to get a character from level 80 to level 90, though leveling others will take some time. While I’ve maxed out my crafting and gathering classes, only RDM and BLM are at 90 (with most of the others at 81) even after doing all the sidequests.

As for the new classes:

Reaper, though it ~vaguely~ resembles Dragoon with its focus on switching from side to back positionals interspersed with instant attacks, feels very much like it’s own new thing. It’s a very fluid combat experience and not overly complex.

Sage meanwhile just comes across like Scholar 2.0. Instead of a fairy that indiscriminately heals, there’s a modal that heals your chosen target every time you deal damage. The rest is basically the same, though with a bit more focus on flat damage mitigation rather than shield strength.

And then there’s Summoner, which got overhauled so heavily it’s basically a new class. You no longer have an autonomous pet which attacks on its own, but rather one that just sits there and does nothing but enable the use of a couple of your abilities. The class also no longer has access to any damage-over-time abilities. So what exactly does it do now? Well, first you cast a buff, then when that runs out you can use a summon as a one-off attack which then unlocks the use of additional summon-themed attacks. Ruby does the most damage but has a cast time, Topaz does normal damage with no cast time, and Emerald does the least damage with no cast time and half cooldown.

It’s become a very simple, and admittedly somewhat boring class to play. But even if you don’t decide to play it yourself, you should absolutely use the /petsize “All” “Small” text command to avoid being blinded by summon effects.

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).