As I start this post, it is 1 hour until the servers of FFXIV shut down for a full day to patch to 6.1, the first major patch release in Endwalker. The last time I wrote about my goals in-game was January 18th, when I had finished leveling all jobs except Blue Mage to level cap. Since then, a lot of time has passed, and I was near a threshold of 580 item level on all jobs then due to crafted armor.
So where am I now?
Well…still really enjoying the game and really pumped for the patch this week, to start!
Endwalker has marked a lot of firsts for me – first expansion where I leveled everything early, where I raided Savage content, where I farmed launch EX trials, where I’ve had a home, built a stash, and generally wrung as much fun as I could out of the content on offer. I did my first treasure map dungeons, played something other than just a healer in high-end content, and the game is still feeling fresh and exciting to play, which is good news as I’ve put it forward in my gaming rotation as I’ve left WoW behind.
But in that last post, I set some new goals, and how did I do against them? There’s some achievements and some big misses, so let’s check it out!
Find a Raiding Static: Nope. I didn’t do this one at all. In fact, I haven’t even really looked. I’ve been kind of having a sick sort of fun in Party Finder, fun that has increased as my comfort level with the content has grown. Not every reclear party is rosy, not every run is successful – I still sometimes have to find a second or third group for P3S in the Party Finder – but overall, it’s a fun challenge and not even that bad, as the last 3 weeks, I’ve had my full reclears done in a single day. I still haven’t finished the tier – haven’t even started P4S prog, in fact – but I’ve been having a lot of fun with it and the skills you pick up from playing with PF folks are valuable for recovery and learning when to panic and when not to.
Build My Gil Stash to At Least 65 Million Prior To Patch: Lol absolutely not. I haven’t played the market board much at all, and while my Gil reserves have only been increasing on the regular, they’re not going up that fast. When I logged out tonight, I was sitting on just shy of 9.7 million Gil – the most I’ve ever had in game, but not that much against my goal and ambition. With the patch launch, I may be able to make a quick buck – I have a pretty big stash of crafted HQ intermediate materials from timed nodes and Tomestones and with the new crafting and gathering gear going in plus the crafted battle gear upgrades coming, it’s a hustle I’m looking at strongly. I still have my small plot house in the Goblet from 5.4 and I like it well enough, plus I don’t really play housing – I redid my walls and floors with new Endwalker crafts but I haven’t finished the work and I haven’t even been in my house in like 3 weeks at this point! My self-sustenance is fine enough for me – with crafting and gathering fully leveled, I’ve been able to avoid spending pretty much any gil save for teleports below 1,000 in cost. At some point, would it be cool to get a medium or even large plot’s worth of Gil and take a stab at moving on up? Sure, and if I have a profitable first week of 6.1, I could see bidding on a medium plot easily enough, whether it is an Ishgard house or a plot opened by someone relocating to Empyreum, but I’m not too pressed on this one.
Get Some Older Achievements and Mounts: Through the Grand Company lootboxes, I’ve been slowly working on the mounts and minions, and that has gone fairly well. The Moogle Tomestone event this time saw me get the Suzaku doggo mount, so that is off the list with a few more to go for Stormblood (and hopefully those will get easier to solo in 6.2 with fresh raid gear at 610 for normal!). I’ve been working to chip away at Triple Triad (I want the mount, but that is a long-term goal) and I’ve been using time in-game to push up older Tribal quests, starting with the Vanu Vanu and Ananta from Heavensward and Stormblood respectively. On top of those, I’ve been going back in reverse order and knocking out sidequests zone by zone, and while I stopped pretty early into Endwalker content, I only have a bit of Garlemald and Labyrinthos left to do before moving further back into Shadowbringers and below. I might save Shadowbringers content for when Blue Mage gets bumped to a level cap of 80, but it’s likely as ever that BLU leveling is going to boil down to finding the best efficiency mobs and doing dumb AoE pulls to bring everything down, so I might just sprint through them anyways!
Build Good, Unique Glamours: Good is certainly subjective, but through my newfound love of PvP in FFXIV (who knew?) I’ve been able to complete all of the Lost Allagan sets added in Shadowbringers and have been slowly working backwards through the sets of Stormblood and lower (the sets I’m working on now are the base models used by the current 580 crafted gear, so I could just use those appearances, but I want the completion!). My current loadouts are a far cry from using the 2B ensemble with different tints, and that’s nice, because when 6.15 comes out and I can rep up with the twins’ mother, she’s going to be wearing it! By virtue of FFXIV PvP being a small corner of the game, my glamours are fairly unique, at least – my current favorite is the Lost Allagan tank set dyed with pearl white color and with the Hydaelyn EX weapons, which I have for all 4 tanks.
Finish My House: Haha, nope. I did start in on it to get things sorted better, and shuffled some housing recipes and materials around, but ultimately I never really finished the house redecoration. I’ve been getting inspired by some posts on the game’s subreddit with some stunning house designs, but it’s just one of those things that is so low on my priority list that it often falls off when there is actual stuff to be done.
Before setting my 6.1 goals in this post, as a last check-in on Endwalker launch period, here are my current gear item levels:
With this, you can get a sense of my priorities when playing. My main jobs have centered in as Sage, Dancer, and Samurai, with Sage being my decided main for most play including Savage prog at this point and Dancer being my PvP main and the job I enjoy rolling around the open world in. I largely play Samurai for reclears in Savage and for Eureka leveling, since I have a Haste chest for the job. Everything else that has increased item levels comes because of those 3 jobs – I have Savage raid gear for each, albeit not complete sets or best-in-slot. I’ve been tanking more as of late for Adventurer-In-Need bonuses, and while I have enjoyed goofing around on both Black Mage and Summoner, both the tank and caster DPS roles have been my least played overall.
Now, let’s turn to 6.1 and discuss my prep for the patch and my newest set of goals for the game!
Newfound Goals
My patch prep centered on a few basic tenets to ensure I am ready to go on Tuesday.
For crafting and gathering, I’ve spent a little bit of time weekly doing rounds of timed nodes, both the materials and the Aetherial Reduction nodes for Aethersands. I have a stash of intermediate crafted materials from the timed nodes of around 50 crafts per material, ready and waiting for patch day. I have at least 100 of each Aethersand to go along with that, as well. To supply the new gear I will craft for crafting and gathering with Materia, I’ve been doing extractions and buying some with Scrip, so I have around 20 of each rank 10 and 30-40 of each Rank 9 for crafting and gathering. It’s not as much as I wanted, but the gathering rounds were letting me extract pretty well as were my weekly Challenge Log crafting sessions, but I did not make any special effort to do collectibles gathering and I used most of my Custom Deliveries allowances on crafting, using scrips from each week until this last week to buy more crafting Materia. When I logged out for patch, I had 1,990 White Crafter’s Scrip and 2,000 Purple, which I expect to burn through on Tuesday with whatever this expansion’s Sublime Solution replacement is. If the cost is identical to Sublime Solution at 150 Purple a pop, I’ll be able to get around 20 on patch day with just my current stash of scrip plus a full round of Custom Deliveries for the week, which should (based on the Facet gear in Shadowbringers) be enough to hopefully craft the main armor slots. I’ll probably hold on tools until later when I can do them in one shot.
For my combat gear, patch day has 4 paths for me. I have 4,000 nuts banked for Radiant Twine to upgrade left-side armor further, my reclear of P2S on patch week will give me the book I need to buy another Radiant Coating for accessory upgrade, and the coin I get from my first Aglaia clear will get me another Twine for armor upgrade. The two twines are earmarked for my healing set (it will push very close to 598 item level that way and will give me two BiS pieces for Sage!) and the Coating will be for my Striking necklace to boost my Samurai set to 594, with a little boost to all other melee jobs coming from that too. After these upgrades, my next target is the large amount of crafted gear I have, starting with my healing chest – it will be getting upgraded to 590 immediately through that shuffle, followed by my two remaining Samurai crafted pieces, followed by most of my left-side Dancer gear. Tank will be just below that in priority, and then casting DPS, with Maiming left-side gear for Dragoon and Reaper being bottom of the list.
After all of this, the Alliance Raid added with the patch will probably be where I chase most Tank upgrades while building my Aphorism stash back up, as my main play jobs have little use for 590 gear at this point and the ones that need more of it (Dancer) will be getting priority on my crafted gear upgrades.
One thing I will withhold upgrading from crafting, though, is weapons. My plans are to get through Endsinger’s Aria EX quickly on day 1 and start working towards a full slate of weapons (except Sage as I already have an item level 600 weapon on that job!). I’m doing a blind group run of the Alliance Raid on patch day, so I have a fair few hours before that to do the MSQ, run through my gear upgrade plans, and get some shots in at the EX trial. Most of my jobs without Savage raid gear should be near 591 within a few weeks of the patch, or at least that’s my plan. I can cap out Aphorism at 2,000 twice a week and so it shouldn’t be too long to upgrade all my crafted gear as-is, especially since I can push harder and do more content in the early weeks to knock that out faster if I want to.
As for weekly capped Tomestones, I need one more piece for Sage BiS to upgrade to 600, and then I’ll split between Samurai and Dancer on those upgrades before going down my list. As with my prior gearing, I have a main job in each armor type that I like and will gear to BiS without too much fuss for the other jobs (Sage, Samurai, Dancer, Gunbreaker, Black Mage, Reaper are my mains per armor type) and I don’t expect I’ll end the patch cycle with everything geared as high as I can take it, unless they unlock the Savage loot lockout early in the cycle.
So that just leaves my goals!
Clear P4S By End of April: My Sage gear is looking good and will get immediately closer to BiS after the patch, so I’m going to pull the bandaid off and start looking harder for prog groups on the fight. If I want to actually get BiS and the mount (and boy do I want those things) then I need to clear it and it is, allegedly, an easier fight in PF than P3S.
Get My Totem Count to 99 for All 3 Endwalker Trials by End of Patch: I’ve slacked on totem runs for Hydaelyn and Zodiark to date, but I have around 20-25 for both. Provided the launch trials don’t item level sync you down, I expect that clearing these will be a lot easier (and it already is getting easier, as I successfully did a 1 tank/1 healer run on Hydaelyn EX tonight for the first time). With Endsinger EX giving 2 totems a kill, that one seems pretty straightforward to get to 99, although I may end up breaking to buy some weapons if drops are unlucky enough to where I don’t get the weapons I want for my “main” jobs.
Get to PvP Season Rank 25 and Get the Seasonal Glamour Set: The PvP armor they showed in the live letter looks awesome, at least to me. If it is a job-independent look I can wear as any job, then I really really REALLY want it. The ranking system doesn’t seem that bad, and with Crystalline Conflict matches clocking in at 5 minutes a pop, it seems likely that I could sprint through early days and get my rank up to where I want to go.
Hit 20 Million Gil During the Patch Cycle: Getting a medium plot during Ishgard opening seems like it won’t happen, and I’m okay with that. However, I want to work towards reaching a point where I could move to a medium plot once demolitions resume or if more wards open up. Plus, having money in the bank feels nice so that if I do see something I want to buy in-game, I can do so easily enough.
Complete Leveling/Ranking In Eureka and Bozja: I’ve been slowly getting into the grind of Eureka as a means of completing a handful of Challenge Log entries for completion credit, but I’ve spent some time this last week doing NM runs with groups and those have been pretty fun. I’m almost done with Pagos and can then progress through Pyros and Hydatos, which would be cool. I want to do Eureka mostly to get the glowy armor sets from Pyros and to do Baldesion Arsenal for the Ozma mount. As for Bozja, I was progressing that a bit in Shadowbringers – I’ve done the full Southern Front story, Castrum Lacus Litore and Delubrum Reginae, but I haven’t done Delubrum Savage or Dalriada, and I have not fully unlocked Zadnor yet either. While getting Relic weapons is a long grind to commit to, I do want to slowly start winding towards that as a goal, and these special field zones are a good way to start and offer a fair bit of content.
And that’s about it! The waiting room starts now and I know I am very excited for brand new stuff to do in FFXIV!
Kaylriene 
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