As life goes, endings must always arrive. This also holds true for MMORPGs, though how permanent the ending is depends on the player.
I’ve personally found FFXIV’s current expansion, Endwalker, to be a bit underwhelming, considering I went into it with every single quest completed. Maybe as someone with more free time than she cares to admit she has, a game that’s designed from the ground up to respect one’s time isn’t for me. That’s not to say I’m not going to play Dawntrail when it releases nor have I fully quit, just for now it’s not my primary game.
I’d gone back to WoW for a time as a friend of mine also had, but when I realized that even after boosting a second character, prepurchasing the forthcoming expansion (as is my wont), boosting my main, then leveling two others up so I could finish Blood Infusion for Shadowmourne, getting exceptional luck with Legendary drops from Burning Crusade raids, I was basically raid logging, so I had to make a decision: keep this up or go elsewhere?
Now, for the past few years I’ve often browsed either BlueGartr and BG-Wiki, FFXIclopedia, FFXIAH, /r/ffxi, or simply reread old posts of mine about FFXI. As mentioned in part in an earlier post, I’ve done several “go backs” to it since I left it for FF14 10 years ago: 2015 for Rhapsodies, but realizing I needed to finish Seekers to really appreciate it left me in a lurch. Then in early 2020 I finished Seekers and Rhapsodies, then in early 2022 I went back for the 20th anniversary, which lead to my playing FFXI a pretty good amount of the last couple of years and doing the modern endgame which was admittedly enjoyable. Even as a 20+ year old game it’s got a lot to do in it simply because of the effort required to do things in it, which really speaks to me as a lady who grew up on early RPGs.
I was going to wait until the next free play period, but I decided it was time to just jump back in, so I reactivated my accounts and went back to tasks left undone from the summer. First and foremost, I wanted to get my alt caught up on all but TVR, so I dragged him through Wings of the Goddess so I could feed Maiden of the Dusk II drops to him while I kept farming the last drop I need from it. I did the fight a few times then got distracted by the Kupon W-Pulse he got from Deeds: Centovente trials for Naegling BRD/NIN fun go! I went through them pretty fast until the ones that required Evisceration, which he didn’t have. Took care of that quickly, then once I hit Fusetto +1 I decided to wait a bit, so it was back to Maiden II farming.
On Friday night the tabard finally dropped for me, so I am officially 9/9 on drops from that fight on my main, so it was onto a different fight: Divine Interference II for a Sacro Cord for RDM and BLU. That dropped pretty quickly as I could fight it on Easy vs. Very Easy with the extra -DT from the tabard. Plus having two Minuets + Victory March from my alt always is quite helpful: once I get off my tail and get a Daurdabla for him, I’ll be set to easily replace a Bard trust with him who can serve as a buffer and an extra source of Savage Blade.
I had some weekend work to that went well into the morning each day, so I took the time to level one of my alt’s mules to 99 for an A.M.A.N. Trove mule: this will be nice next time the silver voucher login thing happens. I’m planning to do the rest of those over the next couple of weeks, so that will be nice. Maybe I’ll get an Orpheus’s Sash or two…