My Personal Preparations For Patch 6.2 In Final Fantasy XIV

I’ve been talking a bit about FFXIV’s upcoming patch 6.2, from the perspective of what might be in it, when it would come out, and the like – but today, I wanted to get some Blaugust catchup in and talk about what I am doing personally to get myself ready for the patch.

In Endwalker’s launch raid tier, I had been thinking about playing Savage but was unsure of what to expect, and so my preparations were not sufficient and I was rolling forward with catchup as the tier progressed. I learned a lot about proper tier prep and the things I can do ahead of time to get ready, and so with 6.2 about two and a half weeks away as of this writing, I feel so much more prepared for the upcoming Savage tier. So let’s discuss what I’ve done and why!

Leveling and Gearing My First Raid Alt

I talked about this one in its own post, but the process is ongoing to get my raid alt into shape. Currently, Blender Threedee has finished the Endwalker MSQ including 6.1, has unlocked and completed the first tier of Pandaemonium on Normal (and I did the Savage unlock just for shits and giggles), and has two jobs at level 90 – Summoner and Scholar, with Paladin at 88 and Ninja at 80, all other jobs unlocked at their base levels (or classes as the case may be).

There are a couple of rubs to starting an alt in FFXIV that I learned a smidge later than I would have liked. The first is that you cannot mail yourself anything on the same account, so unlike in WoW where starting an alt is a process of rolling the character and then immediately logging over to your raid main to spoil them in goodies, you have precious few options for getting stuff to a raid alt. You can deposit to and withdraw from a Free Company chest, provided both characters are in the same FC (and mine are not), or you can use another player as a mule, trading the stuff to the other player from your main and then receiving it back from them on the alt (which is what I ended up doing to get some crafted 580 gear to the alt).

The second thing is that unlock quests post-story skip are a massive clusterfuck. While the story skip helpfully rewards you with flying in all the zones covered by the skip, it does not remove the Aether Current quests or flag them as done, so you will see tons of quest indicators with plus signs that you simply do not need to do, which then obfuscates the quests you do need for things like Tribal Quest unlocks and other such features. You’re not even safe in some capitols, as Crystarium is particularly lousy with Aether Current quests for Lakeland sprinkled between EX trial and raid series quests! Also, generally, there is a lot to unlock still, as the story skip doesn’t unlock EX trials, doesn’t give you the trial series unlocks for each expansion, doesn’t unlock the Normal raids, only unlocks the Crystal Tower alliance raids, gives you a Grand Company association but doesn’t rank it up which means Hunts are locked behind a short-ish series of promotion requirements before you can unlock them, and so yeah – my quest log is near-full with unlocks.

Lastly, a minor and previously known nuisance and delight – new characters on your account get some, but crucially not all of of your Mogstation purchases and account extras. I knew this going in, but I was surprised by the extent of it. Firstly, the Mogstation items are clearly labeled at purchase, so you’ll know what comes in if you read the description. Still, I was delighted to see my SDS Fenrir motorbike and the Lunar Whale come through and, while expected, a little sad still to not get my exceptionally fun store outfits like the Carbuncle getup. What I absolutely did not expect and was delighted to get was my full retainer loadout. Like a freak, I pay additional for the added retainers – all the way. 7 paid retainers and a companion app sub to get an eighth paid retainer for a total of 10 – and my raid alt also benefits! I should have known that – the subscription option does not make you target a character for the benefit – but I was delightfully surprised all the same!

So right now, raid alt focus is on leveling jobs, as I’ve got to get a melee and physical ranged DPS to have a full range of level 90 options to fill spots. Speaking of filling spots…

My Raid Main Has A Static Group, And I Don’t Know What Job To Play

Yesterday, I was offered a full spot on my Free Company’s raiding static, which is cool and feels like the culmination of being sometimes overly flexible to start off this last tier. It is a DPS spot to replace the group’s lone caster, but I’ve basically been given free reign to pick a job from either melee or caster DPS.

And thus a new dilemma arises. The group doesn’t need the caster buff with the composition they run, and they have two ranged already without the departing player, so I can pick literally anything in those roles. For me, that already isolates it to Samurai, Reaper, Black Mage, Ninja, and maybe Dragoon as the choices I would pick – my raid readiness on Summoner and Red Mage is not great in terms of understanding the fundamentals and performing consistently and Monk is perpetually confusing to me. On first thought, I was ready to go all-in on Black Mage, but my confidence hasn’t been strong enough to take it into even an EX trial at this stage, much less Savage, and in a prog environment, the only thing I’d have to offer is lots of damage, with the lots being predicated on me actually doing well at managing the gameplay around unknown mechanics. Samurai is a good greedy DPS for me, and I play it decently including in Savage and EX trial content and with this group, so it has a certain appeal. Ninja has insane burst every minute in the job’s current incarnation and I enjoy playing it, but it’s also not my highest-confidence job and I haven’t touched EX or Savage with it. Dragoon is fun enough and good for that kind of spot, but I also can’t say I’m super familiar with it and I’ve only played maybe 2-3 hours of it at level 90.

That leaves Reaper, and I think Reaper is where I am going to land, all told. Reaper is a job I have brought to EX trials with success, I have a decent mastery over the rotation and burst gameplay flow, I can do excellent damage with it right now without BiS (I can hit 9k single-target in a dungeon without tinctures), and it offers some measure of group utility – with Reaper’s self-defense button popping to give an AoE regen effect to party members in range and with Arcane Circle offering a full-group damage buff that aligns with 2 minute burst windows. It’s also just a job that I really enjoy playing – it has a satisfying flow, is really fun during Enshroud windows, and has very meaty, substantive animations and sound effects. It flows a bit more freely around the core combo compared to Samurai, where everyone is trying to hit a GCD target to make the rotation loop smoothly and to neatly fit filler GCDs in. I do still really like Samurai, but admittedly, it lost something with the removal of Kaiten and I feel like the gauge management and pushing into multiple Enshrouds quickly on Reaper gives me a lot of the same strategic thought and rewards that Kaiten did.

Preparing for Day 1 Crafting

In order to ease my mind (and reduce the amount of activities vying for my attention during the first week of the patch), I’ve been pre-crafting intermediate materials for crafted gear. Because datamining isn’t a thing in FFXIV until the patch is public/released, this is a challenge – you have to guess what is going to be in the recipes and take a bet on your guess.

So I looked at Shadowbringers patch 5.2 gear as a comparison point. The recipes for gear used a few common ingredients then – mostly intermediate materials from late leveling nodes in Shadowbringers (the last two tiers of each material, largely), Aethersands, and a Sublime Solution for each piece of gear (and also for Tinctures). With that in mind, I set out to try and prepare the following:

-at least 100 of the intermediate crafts for the last two tiers of each material (for cloth as an example, 100 bolts of AR-Caen Velvet and 100 Scarlet Moko cloth)
-close to 1,000 of each Endwalker Aethersand
-enough Immutable Solutions to make each gear piece (it’s either 69 (nice) or 70 depending on if the shield for PLD needs one), plus a stockpile of them for Tinctures (I ended up just shy of 500 for now)
-with my raid alt rolled, enough materials to make two full sets of the 610 crafted gear and stockpile consumables for my main and alt
-at least 200 each of the core materials from Endwalker’s first-tier 580 food recipes (except scrip mats) as Shadowbringers showed a base of common ingredients that were used repeatedly
-at least 200 each of the Shadowbringers “stat” herbs for Alkahests (it seems likely they’ll be used again here)
-enough White Crafters Scrip banked to buy my Master Recipes day 1
-stockpile Astronomy tomes to cap, cap Aphorism right before patch
-fully-leveled Desynthesis

And….I’ve got most of these locked in. Here is my material stash, not counting aethersands, Immutable Solutions, or food materials:

My stash is coming along, albeit light on the lower-level tier materials I wanted to bank. That is something I can fix with the time left to spare, and I’m also trying to maintain a stash of some unrefined Chondrite in case it’s needed for refining the new timed node ore into ingots. With awareness about when the patch is likely to drop, I’ve stopped spending Astronomy to keep income flowing for materials, and with my raid alt, I can buy even more day 1, which is good since that character will cost me some materials as well!

General Rotational Practice and Raid Group Socialization

At this point, I am double-committed to raid teams, with a full static and a half-static PF group, neither of which I’ve played with much. I’m also likely doing this tier on two different jobs that I haven’t played much before, at least certainly one if I take Reaper for the full static on my main. To those ends, I’ve been hanging out with my fellow raiders more, chatting in Discord, and I’ve been working on sharpening my skills with less-played jobs. My raid main is probably about to be all Reaper until and including the patch drop, and my raid alt, while switching to level, is going to be working on the jobs I’m most likely to be useful/needed on first.

Getting to know the people I’m playing with is something that feels important to me, because it is the piece I am missing most from WoW. Whatever has happened with my guild, whomever has joined, there has always been a core there I know and like and that core has grown over time. I liked my PF experience for my first Savage tier, but if I can find myself a new path with people I enjoy playing with and get to know in FFXIV? That would be the last piece I’m really missing from WoW (well, and Mythic Plus, but hey, Criterion dungeons seem promising on that front…) and it would probably cement my home in FFXIV for a long time to come. As much as I tend towards being a curmudgeonly solo player, I used to really look forward to raids, to hanging out in WoW and shooting the shit with some friends you know in person and some people in faraway places all joined together to play. My P4S prog team, with many of the folks I’ll be PFing with, is pretty close – while the rate of progress has been frustrating to a point, the runs have been fun and relaxed, and that gives me what I really want from raiding in an MMO.

And that wraps up my preparations for the upcoming patch 6.2 in Final Fantasy XIV (well, writing about them at least, I still need to gather a ton of Scarlet Moko, level 2 jobs and change to 90 on the raid alt, and further stockpile tomestones to be ready for day 1 material buys).

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