I hit 51 in the process and with Ramuh down I’m just past the half way mark of the pre-Heavensward quests since launch.  Yay?

While the majority of these quests are fetch/talk quests, the story behind it is pretty neat.  There’s a consistent B-story in it all as well, which is sort of like a season-long storyline with each patch being an episode.  That’s pretty neat.  Plus so far, each patch has had a “raid” of 8 people.

King Moogle was the first, nothing too complex really.  I like moogles though, so there’s a certain flair here.  Leviathan was next and that one had a fair amount of moving around the map to avoid the big hits.  Nothing too crazy mind you, and the tank was pretty good (or at least “tanky”).  Ramuh though, he’s a friggin’ box of fun.  I think there was 1 person there who had done it before, which didn’t help much.  Plus I’m pretty sure I was the only one who read up on it before hand.  There’s a single mechanic where if you share this lightning link with another player, you take damage if you attack.  So you need to walk over these lightning balls to get rid of it.  I’m sure we lost 4 players on the first run and more than 2 on the last one.

I get that particular mechanics can be tricky and that’s the flavor of each fight.  There’s always the whole “don’t stand in the fire, take down the adds” of every fight but each one has a twist or 2 to keep you on your toes.

Healing

I used to play DPS a lot, back when I was actively grouping and you needed DPS more than you needed healers.  When LFD/LFR came around, I swapped to healing to avoid the queues.  That’s stuck in FF14.  DPS-wise I can solo without really issues.  Duty-finder is pretty much instant too.  And healing itself, well that’s a bit different and for 2 main reasons.

First is the global cooldown.  At 2.5second, you need to pre-emptively heal the big hits and it’s a rare occasion that everyone is above 90%.  In the larger fights, this has a rather interesting mechanic of actual triage of targets, making DPS responsible for their own actions.  It’s a neat swap of the traditional HEAL EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME of other games.  It’s still hectic but it’s rare that you feel cheated.

Second is the group size.  At 4 people in a regular group, it makes healing a lot easier.  It’s one of my favorite parts of SWTOR to be honest.  And raids set at 8 people is even better.  Healing a dozen+ people is like having ADD and you can rarely pay attention to what else is going on.  Smaller groups means more focus and that’s fun.  I’m rather enjoying healing.

Gold Spam

I guess this is due to the expansion – sure do see a lot of new players in the game. I’m not sure Square Enix does anything about this actually.  Here’s a picture of my current Blacklist, all goldspammers.

When an account gets banned, it gets listed as “deleted”.  Maybe gold spam is a sign of a healthy game?

Next Up

Continue on with patch 2.4 content.  There’s a good chance I’ll hit 52 before stepping into the expansion.  All of these through quests and the odd challenge log that coincides with my questing actions (duty-roulette and the odd fate).

And find a Free Company.  I’ve met a lot of neat folks mind you, and at a lot of odd hours.  Just need to find one that fits my playstyle.