WoW Leveling and FFXIV Trade Jobs: Up We Go

Well, at least I dinged 70 in WoW – a couple of chapters before I finished the zone 3 story. Leveling is very fast in this expansion, this is true.

At the same time, I’m somewhat reluctant to login much. I have completed three zones’ main story and parked upon arriving to Valdrakken so far. I will see about zone 4, dungeon and raid lore yet and make my final opinion after, but so far I’m quite bored with the main course. I mean, I see how Blizzard wanted to make their next adventure “simple”, without SL’s or other mindfucks, but with their usual pendulum extremes, “simple” has dangerously swinged into a “primitive” area. All the very same story moves, “twists”, story character replies, talks and even gestures and facial expressions are done by the previous patterns, and I’ve seen this too many times in this game already to get excited. It’s like they’re walking their own tracks in circles over and over. We shall see what comes next.

It’s amusing, but I can’t wait to finish the main storyline, to be done with it and dive deep into sojourner side stories. For those that I completed already on the way seem to be a lot more interesting than the main one – and actually scream adventure and exploration, from zone 1 to zone 3.

I have collected all dragonriding glyphs from 3 zones, and now just the lowest skill row remains to be unlocked. Well, yes, it’s becoming a bit easier, but not that drastically to mitigate even the travel A>B concerns. I still call my dragon “Wheezy”, as it gets tired in a direct A>B flight and can’t climb a mountain without taking a break and a nap.

Obviously, all my other concerns will remain unanswered: it can’t hover and provide a safe rest mid-adventure, you can’t admire the landscape and always focus on keeping it in the air rather than the terrain. You don’t pay attention even to a bigger picture as it passes through as a bullet train, and smaller sights and cozy corners should wait until you’ve landed. Yes, you’ll learn how to keep it afloat with a certain degree of success and avoid certain obstacles, but it does not make a proper a flying mount in every sense – it lacks a lot of vital features of how I’m using them.

My plan is simple: explore everything they throw at me through yellow quests, and then gear up enough to be valid for the LFR content. I’ll run and gear up in raid then weekly – I can allow it on one toon. As for long term goals – we shall see. I don’t think I want to grind reps, mounts or anything so far. First and foremost, my goal here today is exploration, and sojourner quests and side activities seem to be most attractive in that sense – to simply walk the land and shove my nose in every possible corner for discoveries.

P.S. Yes, and I’ll roll Evoker for a simple goal of seeing its starting questline. Not really a fan of scaly characters, neither I’m inclined to play alts yet, but it’s a piece of current lore that I’d like to put on my shelf. It’ll be a female one obviously, and I think the one with white scales :)

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FFXIV: a major threshold has been reached, and it’s that I made it past ARR with all crafting/gathering jobs on the first toon!

Leveling is super exciting, except for certain slogs. Of course, a grind is not that of a grind – you can get a convincing stack of anything in under 10-15 minutes, but it could be bothersome, as you need a lot of mats and so a lot of realm hopping and grind sessions, especially for Culinarian. By 40-50, my biggest problem became elemental shards, and although I can grind them fast and relatively easy, I still indulged myself, saved some grinding time and spent all my cash at Market Board mostly for them. So I arrived to Ishgard totally broke!

Mind you, I’m actively using retainers now and selling things on the way. I pumped up my quickly waning bank account several times for 50-100k a day which kept me afloat. I know how to make it better: for example, crafting glasses for glams brings 50k a piece, with some ridiculously low requirements of mats and effort, but so far I’m trying to make some cash on spare mats that I don’t need anymore.

I did not like several quests that teach you about perks: those were a few gathering ones with time and condition requirements. For example, a quest ore pops up only at 1 a.m. in FFXIV time, so I waited for an hour instead of doing a quest and happily hopping further. Catching some fish for a quest required rainy weather in a certain location! Of course, there’s a convenient way to check when it comes within the game itself, but RNG with a step of IRL 8 hours or more? Market Board it is, they never asked where my fish came from :)

Anyways, I leveled relatively fast, and my crafting/gathering gear was mostly done by myself on the way, all items of high quality. I leaned to maximizing my first-time bonus, except for culinary/alchemy… and that makes the progress very convincing… but no one told me about leves! These are short and quick quests you could accept indefinitely at every major settlement on the map, either for combat, gathering or crafting jobs by choice. Even combat and gathering “grinds” are completed in under 2 minutes, and crafting ones require just a single craft – but you can make three items to give in in a single quest to triple the XP income.

You see, once you unlocked dungeons on combat jobs, leves become largely outdated. Not so with crafting or gathering. At level 46, completion of just 3 leves in the same village took me to 50, and that required crafting just 6 of some very mundane, non-demanding items in a couple of minutes! Moreover, if you bother with spending another 20 seconds and play a high quality crafting game, your XP is doubled! It’s a life saver, it removes the requirement of thousands of elemental shards and other mats – ergo grinding time and endless realm hopping, and in general this is how I would rapidly level my other two toons. Too bad that my main discovered leves effectiveness only when there were three jobs to go from 46 to 50.

I’m all ears now for quick options to level in Heavensward and up :) Maybe I’m missing some insanely effective stuff? I’ll check out the DoH/DoL quests for sure, is that gonna be it?

Oh, and most of all: there are stories for every crafting/gathering job! They start all the same: learn how your trade tool even looks, make a testing craft, help a failing guildmember, but since level 20 the lore starts to branch in very different directions, eventually leading to a level 50 unique cutscene climax. There’s some amazing variety of endings, amusing, touching, hilarious, heartwarming, tearjerking, even a detective story, and there’s literally no winner for me here – all are so different and so cool.

I’ve seen the intros to Heavensward questlines, and can’t wait to see them too – even at level 50 they’re already very promising.

And one more thing: once you equip an “epic” crafting tool, your crafting station also changes its looks, and they’re just gorgeous. I wonder if they have more glams in the future, but I’m definitely keeping the level 50 tools for glams just in case.

So, this is gonna be it for tonight :) Excited about FFXIV crafting/gathering, and slowly crawling up Dragonflight as a side game – which certainly has its moments despite all my critique.

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