FF14 – Trying out other classes/jobs

Things are going well in the MSQ, but I decided to try out some different classes/jobs, for variety.

Rogue/Ninja

First up was Rogue. This class isn’t available at the start – you have to complete a level 10 class quest for another non-crafting class first, and apparently unlock the armory system. After that, you can find them in the Lower Decks of Limsa Lominsa.

You’ll gain new, exciting guildmates, and work together to represent the good the Rogue’s Guild can do.

Seriously though, I do like the plot line of the Rogue’s Guild. There is some tension between the official law enforcement and the Rogue’s Guild, mostly due to history. In the end, you fight to prevent an attack against Limsa Lominsa and the Admiral!

The Rogue plays about as I expected – skills chain in to other skills. For example, Gust Slash does potency 100. But Gust Slash after a Spinning Edge does combo potency 300. FF14 is nice and highlights (moving dotted line border) a skill when it can be used for a combo.

It’s fun and I plan to keep going!

Marauder/Warrior

Also available in Limsa Lominsa is Marauder/Warrior, a tank class. I tried it out for a bit (it’s fine!), however as a higher priority I’d rather advance some other classes/jobs first.

Due to the XP boost for being under level 70, working on my hunting log and doing class quests got me to 18 without much downtime. That is high enough level for the first 3 dungeons (Sastasha, Tam-Tara, Copperbell) so I plan to revisit the Marauder in a few weeks and try tanking for groups.

Blue Mage

Also available in Limsa Lominsa is the Blue Mage. What can I say, I’m loyal to my city-state. 😉 It starts in Limsa Lominsa but relocates to Ul’Dah faily quickly.

Anyway, this class is “limited” meaning it has restrictions with grouping and so forth. On the other hand, it offers a much different play style because the Blue Mage captures skills from monsters for their spell book. This reminds me of the Guild Wars elite skill mechanic, where you equip a Signet of Capture and defeat a boss with the elite skill you wanted to capture.

I made it to level 15 as a Blue Mage (again, thank the XP boost, plus Blue Mages get even more on top for fighting landscape mobs) and I don’t have a self heal. And that’s getting to be an issue.

I cheated and looked up the skills in order (sort by minimum level) and have the ones up to level 13, except for the level 1 Whalaqee totem skills, and fights are getting tough because you have to keep the mob alive until after it casts the spell you want, then kill it, without being able to heal! Possibly multiple times since you don’t always capture the skill immediately.

My skill bar right now is: Water Cannon, Blood Drain, Bomb Toss, Faze, Ice Spikes, Acorn Bomb. The two others (Self Destruct, Final Sting) are a bit less than useful. 😉

So, what to do. It certainly is unique and kind of fun to make a skill bar out of monster skills. But unless I missed something, no healing outside potions (??) makes this rough. There are heals but the skills look high level – Pom Cure (unlocked at level 1 but acquired at level 50, what?), Exuviation (unlock level 1, acquire at 50 or 58??).

I still plan to level this class a bit but probably more as a side diversion kind of thing.

Culinarian

I also opened a crafting (Disciple of the Hand) class. I figure cooking will be useful – it’s a consumable and being able to make my own . Cooking is more or less the only crafting I do in LoTRO as well (ok, also farming in order to grow the ingredients).

I reached level 23 mostly by crafting each item, going through my recipe list. Now I need to clean up my inventory as 1.5 bags of space are devoted to cooking ingredients, intermediate results, etc.

FF14 – Unlocking Content

I’ve been following a nice schedule with FF14 these past few days:

• Log in and check the Duty Roulette. If anything shows “Adventurer in Need: Healer”, queue up. This yields bonus Tomestones and/or Company Seals, which I can use for upgrading my equipment (the former) and getting promotions in my Grand Company (the latter).

• Peck away at the MSQ. This unlocks new areas, grants equipment (however due to the leveling bonus the MSQ gear is generally surpassed by Tomestones gear).

• Talk to NPCs with the Blue Exclamation Point/Plus quest marker (the icon that heads the Feature Quests and Class Job and Role Quests sections of Quests). This has unlocked glamours, appearance changing, beast quests (kobolds and sahagin so far, although I notice there are many others!), class/job changing quests, hard modes of dungeons, and probably some other stuff I forgot.

There is a ton to do and I don’t have to waste time traveling or looking for groups!

I had to take a detour to continue promotions in my Grand Company, and complete a hunting log. I didn’t notice before but Grand Companies have a hunting log as well as the base classes.

Anyway, a few mobs I needed were inside the Sunken Temple of Qarn, which was one of the dungeons removed from the MSQ in the streamlining. No problem, Duty Finder to the rescue!

It was a fun time, with a Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe. Thanks to Mizztek’s excellent video I could even feign expertise/familiarity with the mechanics.

I peeked ahead in the Seventh Astral Era quest list and see that I’ll need to finish the Crystal Tower Quests in order to advance past a certain point. Those unlock 3 raids, one at a time… looking forward to checking that out!

FF14 – Thoughts and Plans

My plans in FF14 include trying a few other classes/jobs.

First, get familiar with Scholar and comfortable healing for a group. Then, work through the Seventh Astral Era quests to unlock Ishgard and the Astrologian job

I’m also interested in trying out Rogue/Ninja, perhaps Marauder/Warrior, and maybe dabbling into Dancer and Blue Mage. If I picked a crafting skill, it would probably be Culinarian – I like cooking as a craft for several reasons, one which is that making consumables feels useful. Maybe Alchemist as well, for making potions. But I think that Scholar, Astrologian, Ninja will be plenty to keep me occupied and having fun.

The tricky thing about Marauder/Warrior is that is a tank class/job. As such, it requires more knowledge about the content. Info like: special skills the boss might use and what the tank needs to do (pull boss to particular area, face boss certain way, etc), what mobs drop important items, which direction to go, and so on. So while the queue times might be ever lower than the ones for healers, the tank job requires a familiarity that borders on studying the game! I’m interested, but perhaps later, so that job will be lower priority to level.

To take a break and try something different out, I did train the Rogue class. It turns out that doing my hunting log was enough to get the first dozen levels easily. With a little bit extra I can hit level 15 to qualify for the duty finder and level via dungeons.

At first I thought changing classes/jobs was a gimmick. What’s the difference between that and playing a few alts, something I typically do?

Well, I found out there is a huge benefit – you keep other progress.

Changing classes/jobs may lower your level, but you still keep your mount. So I’m a low level Rogue that happens to have a flying mount in the ARR zones. That’s super handy for working on the hunting log! In a game like ESO where mounts take ~180 days and ~45000 gold to train up, not having to deal with multiple mounts is a big savings.

Also, my rank (reputation) in my Grand Company didn’t change. That can also be huge, depending on how reputation is used in the game.

Fast travel points also stay unlocked. Also a huge time savings over playing multiple alts in other games. The game with fast travel the most similar to FF14 (that I can think of, that I have experience with) is Guild Wars 2, with it’s waypoints. In GW2, every alt needs to unlock the waypoints for each zone, so again FF14’s way is a huge time savings. My lowbie Rogue can pop around the world easily. If that makes questing too easy, you can always walk everywhere. 😉

I like the MSQ (main sequence quest). Advancing that gives you a mount, unlocks airship travel, joins you to a Grand Company, and unlocks various dungeons and trials one by one. It tells a story, unveils some lore (OK I’m not likely to become a lore-head but some fleshing out of the world is nice), leads you around from zone to zone, etc.

The fact FF14 grants you a mount for free (do the MSQ!) and also gives generous bag space starting out is great. No playing the inventory management mini-game, no WoW Classic skimpiness where your starting bag is so tiny even getting four more slots feels amazing. Which is great on one hand (woohoo, 20 inventory slots!) but ridiculous at the same time (I want to play the game, not jerk around with minuscule inventory space). LoTRO is nice in this respect as well, giving you a large amount of bag space from the start.

I also enjoy the class/job quests. The ones I’ve done tell a story, grant skills, and sometimes gear. Guild Wars 1 had a system vaguely similar, where you quested to gain certain skills, and also had to capture some skills from elites (a bit like how the Blue Mage gets skills).

The Duty Finder is a game changer for me. I’ve never played an MMO with such a functional one, that is actually used by the playerbase. It succeeds due to intertwined design: mandatory dungeons along the storyline, a robust down-leveling capability (FF14 calls it “syncing”, as in “duty at level 25 sync”), random dungeon selection, rewards to encourage needed classes and also if any player will be completing for the first time, and of course cross-server grouping. There is also the convenience of transporting you to the dungeon from wherever you are.

As a result, I’ve grouped more playing these past few weeks of FF14 than I have in any other MMO. It’s just so easy to hop in the game for 30 mins to an hour, and group once or twice.

What don’t I like?

Hm… it’ll seem nitpicky but as a native English speaker, hearing or reading Old English (thee, thine, wouldst, must needs, thou) really grates on my ears.

I can see being throttled based on MSQ progress could be spun negatively. It definitely has drawbacks along with benefits, so maybe this is more of a toss-up.

FF14 – Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium

With the end of the ARR main sequence quest line in sight, I cranked through as fast as I could to arrive at Castrum Meridianum. This had a very Latin sound to me, so I used Google Translate to discover this translates to “Castle Midday”. For that matter “Praetorium” (the next dungeon) is “Hall”. So there you go, FF14 has a Latin speaker on staff. 😉

So these two dungeons went by… quickly. As in, my groups basically pulled an entire room and then AoE burned down the mobs. I realize that this content is a few years old and players running in now are likely farming for rewards (Allagan tomestones of poetics) and not struggling with once-upon-a-time endgame content. I’m not complaining!

Both dungeons feature unskippable cutscenes, so new players don’t have to feel bad about slowing the group down (I suppose). The cutscenes are also fairly lengthy, a lot of story is covered, characters that had small or a limited number of appearances before show up extensively. It felt a bit… rushed but I’ll cut some slack here.

Not to spoil the story, but we won. 😀

I’ll dive right into the post-ARR pre-Heavensward content. I need to reach Ishgard in order to continue my class quests and unlock more classes – I am also interested in trying out Astrologian as well as Scholar.

As far as that goes, this is best time for me to start playing as a Scholar and transitioning to a healing job. In fact, these two dungeons offers very compelling reasons for me to go right back in as a healer: they are group size 8 with 2 healers, so I wouldn’t be the only healer there. Both dungeons grant tomestones which I can redeem for better gear – looks like up to iLevel 130.

So I think I’ll split my time between MSQ advancement and roulette queuing as a Scholar.