A Tale of Four Mounts

Griffon is Reasonable

Back in October I started working on getting the Griffon Mount in GW2. After some frustration I have that mount now. Mounts in GW2 are account wide, so all my 18 or so characters have access to the Griffon.

It turns out that you don’t have to do all the story quests of “Path of Fire”, but only the last section. At least there’s that. There are some good guides for getting the Griffon. Mostly this is a matter of jumping puzzles to get Eggs and then the cost of about 250 Gold to buy the items required. In each of the Five maps there are eggs to collect and Events to participate in. You purchase various items from heart vendors and others. All in all, a reasonable effort.

Obtaining Skyscale is Punishing

The Skyscale is a whole other matter entirely.

I’ve pushed my way through most of the effort, and after grinding for a few days on getting Eternal Ice to get Kralkatite Ore, and a few more days farming Diflourite Crystals, I now need Inscribed Shards. Fighting my way around the map and doing some events got me about 20, and I made another round today for only 6. What a waste of time.

The reason I want Griffon and Skyscale is to have them for the upcoming End of Dragons expansion where we go back to Cantha.

Back to FFXIV for some Fun

I’ve decided to go back to FFXIV for one of the interesting mounts there. First, while working on Skyscale, I spent a few minutes each day doing Beast Tribe quests to get the Kongamato mount. That only took about a week of 15-20 minutes per day.

But what I’m really interested in is the Amaro Mount.

The effort to get this mount comes from getting all the War and Magic jobs in the game up to level 80. But as it turns out, every job after the first one on a character, gets XP twice as fast. And you don’t need to do the Role Quests from 70-80 and of course the Main Sequence Questline was completed on one of your first jobs.

You might argue that this mount is butt ugly, and you’d be right. But there are many flashy mounts in the game. For example:

And of course, they all really fly, even if sometimes that looks a little odd.

Here’s where I am at this point in working toward Amaro:

So there are 17 jobs. Blue Mage is a “Limited Job” and is not required for this achievement.

One of the key issues is management of the Gear Inventory. I’m leveling up all the Tank Jobs together since they wear the same armor. I already have most of the high level gear since I’ve leveled Paladin and Gunbreaker. Not all the jobs start at 1, which is a great help. Gunbreaker starts at 60, and Dark Knight starts at 30. In less than a day I got Marauder from 1 to 30 and transitioned it to Warrior. Some of the jobs change names and add skills at level 30.

So getting to 80 does not start at 1 for all jobs and of course having those jobs available is interesting in the game. I’ve played most but not all of the jobs before.

So I’ll check in once a day to farm “Inscribed Shards” for the Skyscale Mount, but really that’s pretty boring. To level these jobs in FFXIV I’ll be doing dungeons, playing Palace of the Dead, doing Fates and Leves and enjoying the game.

May you walk in the Light of the Crystal.
:ww