It’s time to order the Pre-Order for the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Expansion. The expansion is coming in November and whichever pre-order you purchase you can get some good items to help with leveling. As always, the process or ordering in the Square-Enix Store is confusing. Unlike other games, for some unknown reason, purchasing games and upgrades is very confusing.
For me, the important part of the Pre-Order is the Leveling Earring. Minions are nice, but not that important to me. This earring adds 30% XP for all content up to level 80 and is account wide. You’ll get this from the Delivery Moogle for all your characters.
For a while now I’ve been working on the Amaro Mount in FFXIV. As a reminder, to get this mount, you need to get all of your Fighting jobs, except BLUe Mage, up to level 80. So it takes a while.
Here is my current progress:
I’m currently spamming Heaven on High after getting all the jobs to at least 61 in Palace of the Dead. It takes about 4 to 5 runs of HoH to get a level. Once I reach 70, and equip Scaevan Armor, I move on to another job. Also once per day, I do an MSQ Roulette. At lower levels, doing dungeons was a win for experience, but at this level, dungeon queues are too long and XP too low to make doing dungeons, except the MSQ Roulette, to be worth the trouble. To avoid over running the Armory storage, I’m keeping all the jobs at about the same level. Otherwise the Armory space would be gone pretty quickly.
I’m not sure how to level 70-80 most efficiently. I’ll probably try Trusts and may look into Eureka. I have figured out where to buy level 76 and 78 armor from merchants, so gear won’t be a problem I hope.
Guild Wars 2 or World of Warcraft share mounts and mastery progress on mounts across the entire account. However, Alts in FFXIV are completely separate silos. So to get this mount on all my characters would be a horrific grind. But I have nice mounts for all my characters, esp the Falcons in various colors, from holiday events over the past couple of years.
FFXIV had a streamed showcase on 5 February, 2021. It was over 2 hours long and can be found here on Youtube. For those of you who may not have 2 hours to spend right now, but want the highlights I’ve put up some slides from the show here. I’m not going to comment very much. There are plenty of folks on Youtube that will do that. But you can get the gist of what’s been announced in short form here from the slides: Enjoy.
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.
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.
I’m working my way through Path of Fire to get the Griffon mount. It’s the first mount that looks like it’s flying, but it’s not.
The second “Flying Mount” introduced into GW2, Living World Season 4 is the Skyscale. This has enhanced flight mechanics, but still can’t really fly.
There must be some “religious objection” to flight. Ever since Gliders were introduced in Heart of Thorns, we could only “Glide” while all other popular games in the genre have True Flight. Well, not really…
There is a marked difference between the GW2 Story Trials or Instances and the FFXIV Story Instances. I have many GW2 characters of all races and classes, but haven’t played it much recently. Back when Path of Fire came out I worked through the story and maps enough to get many of the mounts: Raptor, Springer, Skimmer, Jackal and Warclaw. I recently decided that I’d like to get the Griffon mount. To do this I need to complete the Path of Fire story on at least on character. So I started with my Necro, which was farthest along this journey. After about 4 hours I gave up in “The Departed” when I could not figure a way to kill “The Soul Eater”.
There have been some changes to Shire [60] and Scaevan [70] Gear upgrades with 5.3. And it’s a little confusing. You can check the patch notes for 5.3 here.
Notice that the NPC in Idyllshire no longer sells Un-Augmented gear and no longer sells upgrade materials. The upgrade NPC across the street will still upgrade gear if you have the upgrade materials left over from before the patch.
However, if you have the un-augmented gear, but no Twine, Gobcoat or whatever, then you have to take a hike to the Calamity Salvager in a major city. Here’s my visit to the one in Gridania.
Calamity Salvager in Gridania
When you visit the Salvager in any of the three starting cities, you need to “Deal in Spoils” and then choose the Shire / Scaevan War or Magic choices to upgrade your old gear to the new augmented type. It costs the same number of tomes as before, but the intermediate materials [ twine, coat or gob] are no longer needed. Once you upgrade all your gear, you never have to deal with the salvager again. All the new gear starts as Augmented, for more tomes of course.
I’ve not yet dealt with the issue of Ironworks gear [50]. I’ll come back here to update this when I found out what’s up.
There are lots of help videos for Final Fantasy XIV on Youtube. But most of them assume you have already started to play the game. How do you get started playing the game in the first place? I suggest starting with the Benchmark to see how it will run on your system and then starting with the Free Trial. Here’s how you can do that.
Start with the Benchmark
First find the FFIXV Benchmark page here. This will show you how the game will perform on your machine. I suggest not using a laptop. While the game is somewhat forgiving and the graphics can be downgraded quite a lot, it’s still a modern game, so it’s going to cause a lot of strain and heat on your laptop unless you have a high end gaming laptop.
FFXIV Benchmark
The benchmark is about 2 GB. Very much smaller than the full game, which is about 40GB. I suggest you load the benchmark, and the game, onto an SSD – Solid State Disk – if you have one. Also, you probably want to install the benchmark and the game into a folder such as “C:\FFXIVBench\”. Here’s a video with all the steps to install and run the benchmark.
Windy Weather 