My plans this weekend were to get through the post ARR quests and get into the Heavensward expansion in Final Fantasy XIV. I had heard there was a lot of quests right after ARR but I didn’t realize how many until I read Naithin’s post “Starting The Horrible Hundred”.
At first, I thought, no way there’s a hundred quests and promptly headed over to the wiki. Yikes, yes there are exactly 100. I thought, well I must be a pretty good way through them. Nope, just barely over halfway there with 48 quests to go. It looked like I wouldn’t be getting to Heavensward after all. I found a nice stopping point about 1/4th the way through Patch 2.4 (Dreams of Ice) on Sunday.
Now I haven’t played FFXIV in a long time. I bought the expansions up to Stormblood on PC because of a sale but almost of all of my playtime has been on PS4. The last few times I resubbed I’ve made new characters so I could learn the controls with a keyboard. Each time I realized I didn’t want to run through all of the base game again and would let the sub lapse. Now I know what your thinking, why don’t I just play my original character? Because then I’d have to figure everything out again!
I bit the bullet this time around and dusted off my main and hoped for the best. It took me a good hour to figure out what was what. I had to remake all my gear sets, I had to weed out skills off my skill bar that don’t exist anymore, and then I had to figure out what everything did again. To make matters slightly worse I also switched my movement keys to ESDF to free up a bit more keyboard space for skills. I didn’t attempt to look through my inventory, I have my limits.
I tried to play Dragoon because she looked so cool in her armor but I was in no mood to relearn the combos. I decided to not attempt to play my White Mage until I had a handle on the keybindings again. Your welcome people running their roulettes. So I settled on playing Bard. Easy to play, no combos, skills that were mostly the same from 2 years ago, and a stylish hat.
I’ve been having fun reacquainting myself with the game, the locations, the music, and my character. I haven’t been finding this stretch of quests to be too bad. I wouldn’t call them horrible but they aren’t anything to write home about. Though it may not seem like it, I’m not actually in a rush. I think this stretch would be tedious if I had to run multiple characters through it but knowing I only have to do it once decreases the tedium for some reason. Plus I don’t actually know what’s on the other side. I’m amazingly good at avoiding spoilers.
So I figure, if I can find this stretch enjoyable, Heavensward’s just going to be that much better. 38 quests to go!
Many Welps 
I think the greatest problem I’ve had with them is that until you hit the last few quests of any given patch’s worth, they feel like mandatory side quests. They’re go here, fetch that. Talk to this person. Talk to this other person and bring something from them back to me. They’re like anime filler, basically.
At the end of each patch (well, admittedly I am assuming — I’ve only seen the end of the 2.1 content so far) things pick up a little bit. But the rest.. hoo boy.
Glad you made the return though and managed to relearn things. Also, hai2u fellow ESDFer! I’ve done a few posts on old blogs on this over the years, had been considering doing one again for the new. 😀
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I really like the description of anime filler! So far the patches I’ve played the story follows the same kind of arc. Oh no there’s a disturbance, oh no so and so is trying to summon a primal, oh no go fight that primal! But there’s enough other stuff going on that keeps my attention through it.
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