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!