Hi everyone!
First off, I’ve moved across the US, so I’m now on Pacific Time. I’ve also been relegated to my personal laptop since the end of March because of moving, so I’ve been unable to play games as much as I was able to at the time of my last post.
In the time since then, I ended up getting a third character going in FFXI, and I elected to have this one be primarily a White Mage, with potentially making her a Geomancer or Corsair in addition. This was part of my coping mechanism in the wake of my father’s death in early November. Sadly, just a few weeks after the last post, my mother ended up going into assisted living, hence my move.
I’d managed to get through the base story, Zilart, Promathia, Aht Urghan, Wings of the Goddess, and Adoulin missions pretty easily, doing Rhapsodies missions as I went.
Once I got across the country, due to the very temporary nature of housing for a while, I did what I could, mostly merit refills and getting some base level gearsets for the WHM going.
Luckily, just over a month ago, I was able to get an apartment with the friends I was moving in with, and both of them do play FFXIV, so that lead to their prepurchasing the new expansion, Dawntrail.
I’d preordered Dawntrail in March during my nearly week-long cross-country move. I was debating between pivoting to Red Mage but at the same time thinking I should just do the initial story as Paladin. As indecisive as I can be, I decided to flip a 50c piece and it came up with Paladin. It took me about the same time to get through the MSQ as it did Endwalker, and notably my mother’s funeral was the Sunday of early access. I’d opted not to attend due to flight logistics, so I really felt it going through the MSQ at times.
I’m at a bit of a crossroads with MMOs right now, mostly because I’m trying not to strain my personal laptop too much. A friend is going to help me get the rest of my stuff up here, so maybe I’ll have my gaming rig set back up soon and can more effectively multibox XI and not worry about XIV overloading the machine.
I’m still torn on what to play as my main this expansion. I took Red Mage up to 100 over the first few days of the expansion while roulettes were very accessible, and I did the initial dungeons as it. Sadly, I don’t have nearly the muscle memory on it as I do Paladin.
Note that this blog’s title is “Magic Fencer Report”: I named it this after my being a Red Mage main in FFXI since 2004, and I really want to try playing it more seriously in FFXIV. However, it kind of bugs me a bit that it is a magical DPS job as pure “support” is not a role in XIV. Maybe I just see XI’s version of Red Mage is the best MMO job ever created, and I feel XIV’s version betrays the XI version’s identity. Or maybe I’m just salty that they never implemented the “Fencer” class in 1.0, so we got this hybrid mage/melee version in Stormblood, long after I’d settled on Paladin. The only reason I picked Gladiator as my character’s starting class in 1.0 was Red Mage didn’t yet exist in the game. Note that the Japanese name for the Gladiator class can be translated as “fencer”. Maybe it’s just semantic nonsense, and I’m grasping at straws…