Charakter

Question answered: What can I do in a year in FFXIV?

Well, I got ONE answer. I'd have to start over and run this again a few times to get a more complete answer. lol. (I considered it!)

Starting over in the content was honestly a hoot. I'd run through mid to late Endwalker on an alt, had run hundreds of mentor roulettes, endgame crafting, and savage raiding. But my old laptop kept me from being able to continue. After time away, and eventually with a new system, I wanted to run a new character. In part to fill in some story gaps, and in part to test some ideas about leveling, making gil, and "The Best Way to (fill in the blank)". There's a lot of advice circulated around that serves most people well enough, even if it's not entirely true, and I wanted to test much of that advice.

I started to type about some of those pieces of advice, and lord I got rambling. I'll break it up. OTHER posts. For this one, I'll sum things up and simply say - I enjoyed doing it this way. :) There are so many ways to suffer in FFXIV, and this was pure fun:

Leveling: All classes to 90 EXCEPT:
Blue Mage (it just goes to 80)
Black Mage: Intentionally stranded in Bozja at 83. I'll level them over time.
DRK, MCH, and AST. These are all on an extended mission to pick up all of the minions, orchestrion rolls, and triple triad cards from dungeons as they level. MCH I zoomed up to 70, so that they could tackle the pixie tribes. They're now at 77 and may get my roulettes for a bit.
Typed and erased a lot about this, but in short: I emphasized doing content at level, both for fun, and to benefit from exp - from side quests to FATEs to society quests and sightseeing logs. Experience lying all over the map, and I took it. For crafters, this meant crafting gear that I needed, or that others needed as I went along. All of this instead of blasting to 100, then going back and doing everything I skipped. All of this in a way that had me glad for long DPS queues... because I had things to do with them. Good lord, the suffering in this game simply because people don't do things. I AM BUSY LEVELING RIGHT NOW. NO TIME TO DO HUNTS. But. . . lol. This could be a whole post. I'll shush.

Speaking of hunts

I picked up all of the Shadowbringers and Endwalker swag I wanted from collecting them nuts. Also the Wyvern mount from Heavensward. Largely from doing a lot of the daily/weekly hunts. The final nut mount from EW was picked up in the last week.

Speaking of mounts: 53 mounts in 52 weeks. This may have been intentionally slowed. I have been toying with the idea of holding off on any extreme trial mounts until I clear the content at Min Ilvl, No Echo. . .we'll see! I would have been content with 52 in 52 weeks, but there was a gil-sink mount I had my eye on...

Speaking of gil

100 million gil in one year from sprouthood, with a few hands tied behind my back: None of this involved airships or submarines, FC tools that trivialize gil-making. None of it involved server hopping. And none of it involved spending my own money beyond the basic subscription. Obviously, that meant ignoring the people selling gil everywhere in game. Less obviously, it meant not buying gil from Square Enix... by paying them for more retainers. :D Two retainers: One miner, one botanist, 40 sales slots. If you would postulate that making gil is easy in the game, and you've got ten retainers, or what-have-you, with 200 things up for sale... even if a quarter of those things are good sales, I would *hope* that you made some gil off of that RMT!

TLDR: You can make gil hand over fist in the game without endgame crafts, subs, server-hopping, or Real-Money-Transactions, be they the ones that Enix cracks down on... or Enix themselves. ;) Just sell things that people want to buy.

Speaking of things that people want to buy:

ARR and HW crafting quest turn-ins for the win. People just want to get to the crafting endgame where the real gil is (lol see above) and will spend silly amounts of gil to get there. The belief that you need to sell endgame crafts to make any real gil is mythological. I am making gil off of that mythology, so like... don't tell anyone! But this was one of the things I wanted to demonstrate in this experiment. Patience can make you a lot of gil.

Speaking of patience. . .

Relics! I have done slow work with these, lining up the activities for relic-grinds with other goals. Society quests in ARR were done while I was running around doing hunts for the ARR books. Long queues for HW dungeons for my HW relic? Done while I was running around spawning hunts in HW zones, killing things for mats, etc. And done at level synced up so that my dragoon could get the experience points for running the dungeons, and so that I could like... play with other people in an MMO :D ... casually grind for Orchestrion rolls, pick up commendations...

Speaking of commendations:

1654 in a year, while leveling ALL jobs. Say hi, don't be a jerk, learn your job, learn the content.

Speaking of learning the content:

A "failure" of this year, and something I'll fix moving forward - Alliance Raids. "They're not that hard" was stated in chat recently. Lol. I mean... true in that you can go into any alliance raid, and come out the other end with it complete, rarely wiping. You may die a LOT in them and may be encouraged to learn the content. This is one thing that I couldn't/didn't do in a year. There are so many alliance raids, and so many ways to die in each one of them. Many mechanics are repeated through all content, and you can often follow the group... unless you have a blue marker... lol. And you had better be ready to run with the group in the right direction after this resolves or... oh, you died again. :D

I do want to spend some time on these. On all of the content, really. There is experience that comes from running things over many years, and a large part of the base has almost no empathy for someone learning content. If you *had* to run this alliance raid for tokens when it was current content... of course it's easy now! I'll be grinding these to get good. OH and for triple triad cards, and orchestrion rolls...

Speaking of triple triad cards and orchestrion rolls...

258 cards - mostly from knocking out all of the NPCs (glad I cleared side quests!) and also by purchasing all of the MGP purchasable cards. Yes... three lines one week on Wondrous Tails made a difference there!
310 orchestrion rolls - with the leveling and content routines described above, I've gotten all but one of the ORs from ARR dungeons. Just missing one from Keeper of the Lake. AST and DRK will be my collectors as they level.
220 minions - same deal. I have all of them from ARR dungeons. HW dungeons are next up. With jobs at 61, these will continue to give me meaningful leveling experience.

Speaking of meaningful leveling experience...

Did you know you get experience points for sightseeing vistas from Stormblood onward? So I've been doing them. Surprise surprise I fell two vistas short of having them all done.
ARR - the hardest expansion, even if it didn't have the hardest vistas. This was the first I finished.
HW - the next one I finished. They clearly heard the people cry, and removed all difficulty from the vistas
SB - not done. They clearly heard people saying things were too easy and decided to slap them down for it. I am just down to Kugane and the lamp post. I was working on them in the last week and got 2/3 of the way up. Good start. One or three others in here were a challenge.
ShB - the drop onto a post in Eulmore...I tried this many times when I would pass it, but finally buckled down and got it. All complete.
EW - Radz at Han had a nice challenging one. It was my warm up for Kugane. Good fun for a bad jumper.

I had other unfinished business, honestly, and not all intentional:

Free Markets: Done in all zones in Shadowbringers, but I was one short in Endwalker. Will be spending some time in Ultima Thule!
Society Quests: All ARR done. All HW done except Moogles (lol I... I'll get to them). Stormblood - ONLY Ananta done. Kojin are moving along. Namazu and all subsequent DoH and DoL tribes have been sorely neglected :D. ShB: Only Pixies done. EW: Everything is open. The Arkosadora (spelling??) are up to rank 6 or 7, waiting for my Machinist to arrive and finish them off.

Relics! ARR, HW, and EW done. Going to casually start exploring Eureka and continue to explore Bozja.
Weird DoH and DoL areas: I found out I HAVE to go back to the Firmament and Diadem if I'm going to catch all of the fish. They want some specific rods in hand to catch some of the HW fish. May go back to Doma as well... we'll see!

Speaking of fish:
711 fish! All of the ARR fish, and 26 fish left in HW. Doing all of that while doing everything above has been fun. Some of those fish... lol. And no, I haven't seriously hit the Stormblood fish yet, so I don't have that one done. But I intend to have meaningful reasons to be in all of the zones as I work on these fish. Exactly why I like having these underleveled jobs!

Any one of these could be a longer post on their own. I will likely keep blogging as I continue through Dawntrail. And I'll continue to have fun. All blog, no slog, baby. ;)

Cheers!