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Update Time!
Mainly spent the evening doing the Borghetz Quest so I can start getting Artefact Gloves. I was able to obtain the ones for DRK and even reached the level cap with the class, so I switched to SAM for the moment.
I will say, DRK/SAM is much better than SAM/DRK. The lack of Souleater does a number on my needed buffs. So I may switch back to WAR as my sub class for SAM. I will say, SAM is a far more technical class than most, so I get the feeling I'm not really playing the class to its full potential sometimes, but we'll see as time goes if I get the swing of things. For now, I needed to level the class to Lv. 45 at least, because my best armor for him in in that range.
EDITGA: Looks like DRG might be the best subclass besides WAR for SAM, go figure.
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Update time!
I opted to try to finish a quest with Nonoto in Lower Jueno who wanted me to visit all the large crystals usually located by the large skeleton looking structures that summon demons. I realize I am only missing two, so I traveled the Altepa Desert to find one I missed because I didn't really explore this place, and the other is in the area Norg was. I unfortunately got lost in the local jungles and wound up finding the Mithra homeland instead. The OG batch are, quite different for sure... Like initially it sounds like a similar situation to the Viera, where leaving the homeland makes you an outcast because you are disconnecting from your heritage, but after meeting the Cheiftan and talking to a few peeps around, it sounds more like the main warrior class of Mithra, whom often are the ones in charge, left and the rest are kind of okay with the major power dynamic change. I would need to do more quests here to figure that out, but that's likely not going to happen.
I also tried to get the Aspir spell doing the quest in Windhurst, only to discover too late that I can't beat this quest as a solo act, since the item drops from an enemy located past a locked door that requires another player. I could check to see if the AH has the item in question, but honestly, I don't really use DRK as a mage much, so I don't have a real reason to bust my ass and my fictional bank account to get him up to par on that front. Especially since I would need to hit the next soft cap of Lv. 75 to get access to spells worth using magic one. So I'm going to leave filling up missing spells for another year.
I've enjoyed my time with XI, but I'm ready to move onto something else for a change. So, I may be switching gears because I really want to be done with this game before March ends. So I am going to go back to DRK/SAM since I enjoy this build the most, and then do the following:
- Finish the Lv. 60 Increase quest so I can start the Lv. 65 one and do it while I'm working on Mission 4
- Obtain the DRK Chaos Helmet by finishing that quest.
- While focusing on Mission 4, my two sub-objectives is to finish quest Lv. 65 Increase and obtain the last two armor pieces found in coffers in two of the dungeons I'll be visiting while doing this questline. So the Chaos Legging and Chaos Armor.
- Finish Mission 4
- Start and focus on Mission 5-1 and 5-2, with 5-2 being my goal line of beating the Shadowlord.
- Give XI a rest and play something else, maybe DMC5 to give me a break from RPGs for a moment.
So yeah, going to focus on collecting my final gear and level upgrades, and then focus on finishing the base game. I'm really starting to feel the burnout, but I worry if I stop before finishing, I won;t come back to this for months, so I would rather just get the job done since I am so close. Hell, I've even noticed some guides say I have a fighting chance to finish the game now if I chose, but I would rather get the level caps lifted and increase my chances of making the boss battle less of an annoyance.
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Update Time!
I finished the Lv 60 increase quest and started the Lv. 65 one. I cheezed this one by using Mounts to get past the guards, I did get spotted by two of them, but I trounced one and was killed by the second since he has one of those spells that does elemental spike damage. But unfortunately for the one I managed to beat, I managed to grab the final item before he spotted me, so my death was just a free Warp back home for me.
I also grabbed the last item I needed to officially start Mission 4.
The bad news was me trying to finish the Chaos Helmet quest and getting thumped by the NM I summoned thanks to him being a RDM that kept chain casting enfeeblements on my team and he also summons two cronies with their own annoyances. So I am going to have to make sure I farm another Quadav Magic Blood when I return to the Quadav stronghold.
I also raced my chocobo, and he managed to get third place! I need to raise him a bit better though, but it looks like I really need Chocobucks if I want to do that.
So my next phase will be doing Mission 4 and getting all the stuff for the Lv. 65 quest and the Chaos Helmet while I am at it. So my next stop is back to Davois to find the Monastic Cavern and the Magicite.
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Update Time!
Not as productive of an evening as I would have liked. I was largely wandering around Davoi trying to get the Orc Crest for the Lv. 65 increase quest and getting thumped by either wandering into too many swarms of orcs or particularly strong ones that decimate my tank. I may need to grind to the level cap to make this less annoying. The Orcs do give me XP still, but it's kind of on the modest side, so I may going back to the Ashen Tzh Forest place to see if I can find more lucrative XP gains. The real annoying thing about the Orcs is that in addition to low XP gains, they are tanky. So fighting them is a pain in the ass, but I also have to be hitting switches, so I can't be running around invisible either.
The only high point of the evening was finding a coffer and obtaining my Chaos leggings for DRK. So that's only two more pieces of the Artefact Armor I need.
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Update Time!
I haven't had much time to play got a few things done. I managed to level my Character to the cap of 60, so hopefully that will make the Magicite Mission a little less obnoxious. I also finished the Mirror Mirror quest and got a Signal Pearl!...which I'll probably never use, but at least I can say I have one. I also bit the bullet and spent some of my hard earned gil for the materials needed to increase my standard bag by five more items. I also threw a bunch of items clogging up my mog storage onto the auction, so I am hopefully I will earn all my gil back because I haven't been this poor in a while.
So my next playthrough will focus on doing my Nation Mission while also doing the Whence the Wind Blows quest to get the next level increase.
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Update Time!
Made it through Davoi and found the Magicite (pretty easy) and managed to get the crest as well. I did end up cheating for the crest. I lucked out and another player was in the area and I sneaked in past the barrier without having to do the silly Orb quest. I was not so fortunate in Castle Ostraja. I can't say I like this place. It's big, easy to get lost in and has too many trapdoors. The highlight was finding my Chaos Armor, so I now only need the helmet for my DRK class. Unfortunately, I got impatient and YOLO my way to the ??? mark to get the Ostraja Crest and was promptly vaporized while trying to toggle to the right spot because I aggro like twenty of those bastards. I'll need to switch my Subjob to WHM potentially or get some items to be able to sneak past all the enemies here. Then try to track down their magicite. At least I have a better sense of the dungeons layout.
I called it a night there, so I'll attempt again next time, but I ma excited I got my armor piece. I look pretty cool with the head piece I currently wear. I am sad the game lacks really cool helmets. Largely because all of them insist on letting you see your avatars face, I prefer the Dark Souls approach where like 90% of the helmets will cover most of your face. 
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Update Time!
Finally got the Yagudo crest. Had to pull a Dark Souls and do a suicide run to get it but the deed is done. Afterwards I returned and checked out the Magicite and got a cool story bit about Windhurst. I'm going to assume the real reason the area is being drained by magic is due to the summoning of Fenrir. Will be interesting to see what the Bastok Quadave Magicite is going to show me.
That will have to wait though, I'm pretty tired this evening. Not helping is that I have a lot to do in Bedeaux or whatever it is called. In addition to getting the Magicite and the Crest, I also have to farm Qudav Magic Blood so I can make another attempt at obtaining the final piece of my DRK armor. I also hope I cap Scythe soonish, because I sort of want to switch back to Greatswords, but since the Scythe has better stats, I opted to raise my proficiency with it first, because I'll likely be using it for the Shadowlord fight. I am sad I won;t be able to find a really good Greatsword for my DRK until I unlock Dynamis though, which won;t be until the Shadowlord is defeated. So scythe it is.
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Update Time!
A lot of successes, and one set back, but otherwise, a very productive day.
I managed to find the last Magicite shard (by accident no less) while exploring the Quadav area. I also managed to get the Crest as well, though I did have a few close calls because the Ruby Quadav isn't fooled by Silent Oils. I even got a the Quadav Magic Blood off my first Topz Quadav for the Blade of Evil quest.
So Mission got done and I can ride airships finally. I'm in the home stretch for my initial goal of 'beating XI". I also managed to get my level cap increased all the way to 70 since the quest after Lv. 65 ended up being super easy (with a guide of course) and I just happened to have 4 Kindred Seals on my person.
My setback for the day was once again attempting the Blade of Evil quest to get my Chaos helmet for DRK and once again getting thumped bad by the NM I have to summon. So it looks like I need to go back to the Quadav stronghold and farm more Magic Blood, but I'm thinking where I go wrong is that I keep getting distracted by his two annoying henchmen, and I really need to be focusing on him due to him being a RDM/DRK combo that loves to enfeeble the hell out of my tank and drain all the MP from my healer. With that said, now that I have the Lv cap raised to 70, I might grind to that cap so I can just bulldoze this asshole.
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10 Days 10 Hours 9 minutes and 35 seconds
That's how long I stayed in Vana'diel and for vets, that's just enough time to scratch the surface. XI was an interesting ride, and while I still have four more expansions and half a dozen special events left to do, I can lie to myself and say I at least beat the "base" game of XI. For someone who doesn't particularly care for the MMO genre, I will say I enjoyed my time. I often feel XI gets knocked around a bit in both the FF community (myself being one who slandered this game) and the MMO community at large since it's still a pretty active pre-WoW MMO. The game is certainly not user-friendly, but I actually kind of liked that about it. Maybe it's because I'm not a big fan of modern UI design that tries to spell out everything to the player, but I kind of enjoyed needing to look up guides, have several Wiki's pulled up, and often just find myself stumbling into situations. It was kind of refreshing.
XI is not an easy game to love, but despite it's best efforts (and my own OCD) I managed to look past the flaws and really get to enjoy the game. Like on the one hand, I'm grateful to finally be 'finished" and moving on from it, but on the other hand, I am going to miss it. When I initially started, one of my goals was to finish enough to feel done with it so I could finally cancel my subscription for it, but now, I'll probably hold onto it for a bit longer. The idea of coming back to explore the expansions doesn't feel like such a bad idea anymore. XI is a very cozy game, something that doesn't feel like it's rushing you to do much, but also offering you a ton of things to occupy your time. I still have like 30+ quests in my quest log I probably still need to finish.
My biggest gripes with the game don't really have to do with the game's design, but rather just the nature of MMOs. Mainly, everything take forever. Crafting was so tedious I gave up halfway through my runtime, and while leveling is much easier than it once was, it still could be a slog to spend evenings leveling up. It's a large part of why I gave up on playing with all the classes, because it would take ages to get a real feel for all of them and once I found a setup that clicked for me, it was hard to go back. But I did appreciate the variety and the missions to obtain them were mostly fun, except the RNG bulltrout that was the SMN class.
I did like the world and setting even if some locales weren't as interesting as others. But the lore of the game is pretty good, and I find that XI might be the last FF that really managed to tackle its central theme in a pretty strong way, as opposed to some of the clumsier efforts we see in other entries. I even started to get attached to some of the characters as well. Zeid being a big one for me, as he really did feel like a mentor figure after awhile. I was also surprised to find some characters I didn't expect to like such as Halver who won me over during the quest to find Prince Trion a bride. The story and characters are a real slow burn though, but again, that's the nature of the genre.
Come to think of it, I think my biggest gripe overall was the limited inventory, made more obnoxious by some of the steep requirements to expand it being either tedious quests that often involve spending way too much gil or mastering multiple crafting fields (which are hindered by the limited inventory) or spending real world money to buy additional wardrobes. I eventually just had to learn to cut my losses and keep my character focused, but it can be challenging when the game keeps throwing items at you that are useless now, can't be sold, but have value if you bother to see the game to the end.
The music was okay, very pastoral if that makes any sense. Not the type of music that pumps you up, but more like the type of music that makes you feel calm and easier to fall into the background of your thoughts while you spend time crafting, fighting, and exploring. So it gets the job done. Not sure if I'll bother to own it, but at least TheaterRhythm will be more enjoyable.
Combat was good as well. Not necessarily great, but kept you involved without being tedious about it. See FFXIII, you can make an engaging combat system without dumbing down all the RPG mechanics to the bare minimum and creating a speedy battle system that forces me to be hyper vigilant all the time so I can press two buttons. 
DRK and SAM were easily my two favorite classes to play and I enjoyed the fact they had great synergy with each other and I can finally drop WAR. WAR and MNK were good, but I was annoyed WAR had to be constantly leveled because its like THE melee class for subjob work. Whereas MNK was fun to play but had little synergy with other classes besides WAR. BLM was fun, but I prefer melee over casting classes. RDM was great in the beginning, but eventually it's jack of all trades design got the better of it for me as I was eventually overwhelmed by the options it offered, but it did eventually lead me to see I wanted to focus on a DPS class. I'm still a bit sad I didn't check out NIN, DRG, and SMN but by that point I knew I needed to start staying focus on the goal of beating the Shadow Lord. It's a large part of why I didn't pick up BLU either, because that is basically Time Sink the Class. Still, it's nice to think I have things to look forward to when I get back, and now that I know all the good leveling spots, I can power level any class I'm interested in up to getting their Artefact gear.
Overall, I found this to be a fun and rewarding experience. XI might not be my favorite FF, but I appreciate the fact I can feel safe actually ranking it within the FF series if I had to. Now I'll backtrack and move onto FFXII after I take a little break. I may revive this thread in the future if I choose to tackle the expansion down the road, but I am still trying to wrap my head around the time sink I put into this game. I don't think I've played any game consecutively for as long as I've played XI.
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So the first attempt ended poorly. A-Team on the other hand decimated him. The story bits around the final battle and afterwards were neat and he was an interesting boss that was very reminiscent of The Undying from XII, just less flashy and with physical pailings that last 2x longer than I would care for.