Eorzean Evening Post: New Year Plans in Final Fantasy XIV - MMOGames

Happy new year everyone! Looking at the games we can expect to come out over the next 12 months, I’m quite confident that I will be sticking with Final Fantasy XIV for the majority of the year. So I thought it fitting that I’d list some of my hopes, dreams and plans for 2015.

A World of Darkness

The first major thing we’re looking at for 2015 is patch 2.5. As we’ve covered here before, it looks to be filled with cool stuff to do – personally, I can’t wait for it to come out. As I said earlier, I’m almost looking forward more to that new content than the actual expansion. New Hildibrand quests are always welcome and the Gold Saucer looks like it will be a great diversion from the things we usually get up to in Eorzea.

But one of the big additions will be the final wing of Crystal Tower, the World of Darkness. Finally we’ll find out what happened to Nero, hopefully, and the others sucked in through that ominous portal. My hopes and plans for it is to be on the ground running when it opens up, to be able to go in blind together with everyone else. Both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower are fun raids, but by the time I started to do them everyone knew exactly what to do – I’ve never seen a single wipe in there. So with World of Darkness, I hope to be there right next to the rest of you, figuring out mechanics and celebrating every boss kill. While it probably won’t be very hard, I’m still looking forward to at least some form of challenge this time around.

Beast tribe dailies

Another plan I have for 2015 is to max out all my Beast tribe reputations… Ha ha ha! No.

Classes in Final Fantasy XIV

I’ve been quite bad at getting the rest of the classes/jobs up to speed after hitting 50 on my Dragoon – there’s simply too much to do at level cap already. I got my Marauder at 30 with a few levels more to go on Gladiator to unlock Warrior, but the rest of the classes are sitting at everything between 10 and 29. My hope is to get at least the Disciples of War up to 50 by the time Heavensward hits, perhaps skipping Puglist/Monk for Black Mage (I get enough of the positional gameplay with Dragoon after all).

I know if I don’t, all of them will fall to the wayside when Machinist is released in the expansion. Big guns > everything else, after all. With the new classes/jobs coming out, you never know how the low-level DF queues will look.

I don’t expect I’ll be doing any crafting during 2015 either. That’s really one side of the game I’ve never really explored, having Culinarian sitting firmly at level 3. I am getting tired of being perpetually poor, so I might have to bite the bullet and get a Disciple of the Land-class – probably mining, which I’ve started to play around with – up. It’s a pain though and fairly far down on my list of priorities.

Heavensward

Here’s a big one, I guess. Here’s where we simply get a whole lot of more game, with everything that entails. Most of it is kind of given already – aiming for things like “finish up the new story lines” and “hitting the new level cap on my main class as soon as possible” feels like something you’d do by default anyway. “Getting used to the new abilities” is on that list as well. Hopefully things will change enough to feel fresh while staying relatively the same that we don’t feel alienated by our favorite classes.

I’m a bit wary of rushing through it all, but Final Fantasy XIV has a bad tendency to put all the really cool stuff – new primal battles, raids, etc, at the end of new storylines. In order to unlock all the new trials and dungeons, there’s a clear risk that we’ll have to at least rush through a large part of the new content just to be back at square one and be able to use the dungeon roulettes again. That part I’m not looking forward to. While I want to hit level cap as soon as I possibly can, since I’m not a big fan of leveling in any MMO, I’d love to take my time when it comes to the story.

Alexander

Here’s the big one on my list – not just because he’s big (right, that’s a bad pun), but because I’d really like to get in on the action this time around. By the time I started playing Final Fantasy XIV for real, it felt like everyone that wanted to raid was already so deep into the Coils of Bahamut and so geared that I’d have a hard time to catch up. No matter where I’d turn, I’d always be a scrub and finding a static would be tricky. Once the Final Coil opened up, I had already given up on the idea. Alexander, on the other hand, will be a clean slate.

My dream this year is to find a static and be ready to raid with them as soon as possible after Heavensward is released. While I’m hardly a hardcore player anymore, the days of raiding multiple times every week are long gone, finding a semi-casual static to hit the new raid with hopefully isn’t outside the realm of possibility. In some ways it’s the same as with World of Darkness – I want to hit the ground running, throw myself into the fray before the first few turns of Alexander have been cleared too many times.

Of course, being on a US server (Cactaur) as a EU player might make this difficult. I’l have to weigh the risk of missing out against the process of transferring to a new server and starting out fresh. I’ll see where I’m at as the release date looms closer.

So how about you? What are your dreams and plans for Final Fantasy XIV during 2015?