Early Spoiler-Free Thoughts on Dawntrail

For the last 10 days since early release, I've been mainly playing Dawntrail as time allows.  Despite considering playing on my machinist, I've followed the typical path and leveled my summoner.  I've also been taking it pretty slow.  I'm sitting at level 99 and still have a bit to go on the MSQ.  Looking back, I think with Endwalker, it took me about 2 weeks to finish things up, so I'm probably running slightly ahead of that pace, depending on my playtime over the next couple of days.

Here are my early thoughts:

• I'm not all the way to the end yet, but I've enjoyed the story so far.  I'm far enough along that I think I can see where this is going, but hopefully, I'm surprised.  There have been some good, unexpected surprises and character arcs that have really kept me engaged.
• The music, as always, is fantastic.  
• The dungeons and trials seem a bit overtuned for story content.  I haven't tried a ton yet, but I ended last week completely stuck on the level 99 dungeon.  That seems to be a general consensus among many players I've talked to.  
• There are at least two new areas in this expansion that would make for fantastic player housing, so I hope they consider that. 
• I've started playing with summoner, and the class changes while leveling are incredibly minor. There's a bit more at max level, so I'll have to reflect on that later in a blog post.
• I've been collecting Aether Currents as I go to unlock flying in each zone, and that hasn't been too hard at this point, which I appreciate.

After I finish the MSQ on the summoner, who will almost definitely hit 100 well before being done, the plans next are to knock out role quests for caster dps and healer and then start working on a job of each type to add to that.  That's likely going to mean Machinist, Samurai, and Gunbreaker like it has in the past, but I'm thinking about swapping Samurai for Viper just to try that.

I'll also start working on all the crafting and gathering jobs.  Like previous expansions, I usually just level those gradually by doing daily GC turn-ins.  Those generally give a ton of experience and are a reasonably casual way to level all of those within a few weeks while still working on other stuff.  The only exception to that is fishing, where I tend to level mostly through Ocean Fishing.

In other game news, before Dawntrail dropped, I got my Alliance Hunter to max level in World of Warcraft and started leveling my Alliance Warlock.

In Elder Scrolls Online, I still log on every day just to knock out a quick Enchanting Writ to keep working on leveling that towards 50.  It's my last profession, currently sitting at level 40, so it's not long to go.

That's the update for now!

Cheers,

Joar