The New Perils of Leveling Through Alliance Raid Roulettes

One of the main strategies that I used while leveling new jobs in Final Fantasy XIV is to do a handful of daily roulettes that usually give a lot of xp and other rewards.  The ones that I do every day for jobs over 50 are the MSQ, Frontline and Alliance Raid roulettes.  With Endwalker, leveling jobs from 80-90 using the Alliance Raid roulette contains a bit more risk now because of the likelihood that you could pop up a one of the Nier Automata crossover raids from Shadowbringers

Maybe it's because I've done the older alliance raids a lot more, but the Shadowbringers Alliance raids all just seem to have a much higher level of difficulty than the alliance raids from previous expansions, as well as taking probably about 15 minutes longer on average.  

Paradigm's Breach seems to pop a lot, so I'd encourage folks to watch the video for that one a few times before doing alliance raid roulettes between 80-90.

One advantage to getting this raid, is if you're working on gearing alt jobs, the gear that drops in Paradigm's Breach is relatively just as good as the Cryptlurker gear that you can buy with Poetics, so it's also a decent way to stock up level 80 gear for alt jobs.

I finished all of my DOH jobs last week as expected.  I now just having Fishing to complete in order to be completely done - just waiting for the time to do a few raids out of Limsa, which should finish that up pretty quickly.  I'm also sitting at level 89 on my Dancer, so expect to start on Bard by tomorrow, and then will finish up on White Mage.  I may take some time off from leveling these guys from 80-90 in order to grind up some Astronomy tomes on my Summoner so I can grab the 590 weapon after I finish my 7th run of Pandaemonium.  Although that will probably only actually take a day or two.

Most of the other jobs that I'm working towards 50 are sitting around level 44 / 45, other than DRK which hasn't moved since the last update.  

That's about it for now.

Cheers,

Joar

Big Progress on Crafting and Gathering and More Jobs to 90

 The big news since my last blog post update is that I've gotten quite a few of the DOH/DOL jobs to 90 at this point, most within the last day or two.  Mining is done on the DOL side, and Leatherworking, Blacksmithing, Armorer and Goldsmithing are all done on the DOH side.  Most of the rest are somewhere around 89, so the rest should be done fairly soon.

I did end up making a full set of level 87 crafting gear, just to make finish all that up a little bit easier.  Thought it looked pretty good:

Once all of the DOH/DOL jobs are done, I'm going to start working through all of the ilvl 560 crafting and gathering gear, so I'm not in the same spot for the next expansion that I was for this one.  All of that is obviously absolutely no rush at all, so I will likely just work on single pieces here and there as I have time.  

I've also continued to make progress on leveling my other jobs.  I finished getting both Gunbreaker and Samurai to 90 and am now working on leveling Dancer, which is sitting at level 82.  After that, it will likely be Bard and then White Mage, and that will finish up the jobs I had previously gotten to 80.  My Astrologian is sitting at level 50, so that will be the one to go after White Mage.  I also finished the Tank role quest, leaving only the melee dps role quest to complete, which I've already started on.

I've also made good progress on working the other various jobs towards 50.  Most are sitting around level 44.  I did realize that I had never started a Dark Knight, so I went back and rectified that, and have gotten that job to level 35.  I am just working Dark Knight through dungeons trying to catch that job up with the rest of the sub-50 jobs.

Finally, I've been trying to do Pandaemonium every week and am only still missing two pieces of gear from that raid - gloves and boots.  

Till next time.  Cheers,

Joar

Thoughts on Endwalker so far

 On of my New Year's resolutions is to try to do better about posting to this blog on a regular basis.  I realized now that I look at it that it has been over a month since my last post.  Much of that is because I have been very much head down working my way through the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Endwalker, and I've also been trying to honor the generally accepted one month ban on spoilers.

But we're far enough along, I feel like it's time to go ahead and start posting again.

So first, lets' do some quick status updates on where I stand.  I ended up playing my Summoner for the MSQ despite my initial intentions, and was glad I did.  I really like the changes that they made to the job for the expansion and am finding the rotation to fit my playstyle a lot better than it did before.  Since finishing the MSQ, I have also managed to get my Machinist to 90 and am almost there on my Gunbreaker (currently at 89).

I've also finished the role quests for both caster dps and for healers and am about half way through the ranged dps one.  If you haven't had the chance, I would highly recommend going through the role quests.  For this expansion, they involve going back to some old places and tying up a few loose ends on older storylines, all while working through issues that are in keeping with the themes of this expansion.  They're very well done.

I've also started to work on getting my DOH/DOL jobs up to 90.  I quickly figured out why I should have updated all my gear for those jobs to the level 80 gear as it became apparent that it was going to be difficult to do much of anything in level 77 gear.  

I also regretted not finishing the job quest lines for each of the DOH/DOL jobs as it also became apparent that with the changes in abilities for each crafting job that I would probably need the ability Manipulation for each job, which is unlocked separately for each crafting job through those quest lines.

That was the bad news.  The good news was that working through those quest lines got me enough xp to get up to level 82 on each job, which enabled me to use the level 81 gear from the new expansion.  I wasn't able to craft it, so I had to drop about 1.5M gil on the market board to buy all of it, but I've already pretty much earned that back through my regular activities.

The level 81 DOL/DOH gear is actually pretty decent looking.  It's a nice improvement over the dwarven-themed level 77 stuff that I was using.

I've been working through Studium delivery quests in Old Sharlayan, which are very similar to the Crystarium delivery quests, but have mostly been using Grand Company turn-ins to level those jobs.  They're all sitting between 83 and 85 at this point.

After I finish Gunbreaker, I'll work on my Samurai next and then finish up the rest of my level 80's, before I embark on getting the rest of the lower level jobs to 90.  I've been using the daily leveling roulette to work on my lower level jobs a bit at a time and all of them are above 40 at this point.  Once they get above 50, I will go back to doing them one at a time, rather than all at once.

I'm not going to get into much here on spoilers for the expansion story line, other than to say that I really enjoyed it.  You can tell that the developers poured their hearts and souls into this one and the story did a great job of tugging at the emotional heart strings throughout.  I was pretty pleased that it was essentially a fairly clean happy ending, because I definitely wasn't expecting that, particularly since they kept consistently foreshadowing that it was going to be anything but.

I've also done a couple of weeks worth of the new raid, Pandaemonium, which I'm also enjoying.  It's only the 2nd FFXIV normal raid that I've ever done as current content, and so far I like both the fights and the story line.  The fights are challenging and take some time to figure out, without being frustrating.  Your mileage may vary.

That's it for now.  Until next week.

Cheers,

Joar