Ding! FFXIV First Job at Level Cap: Bard!
I’m a slow leveler. Most MMOs that I play, I don’t ever reach level cap (or if I do, they raise level cap and I never re-reach it). Something about FFXIV made me determined to push through to my first level 50 job on my moon kitty, Zuri Nimat. It took me six months to complete, but I finally reached that goal last night with Bard!
Zuri had a somewhat rocky start, which led to the slowness of leveling. I never expected to play FFXIV at all — had no interest in 1.0, and after being beat down by FFXI many years ago, could only imagine the suffering I’d endure in Square’s newest MMO experience.
But I kept hearing how great it was. I saw screens, saw the references to the old FF games, and was feeling the lull where my interest in Guild Wars 2 had begun to wane. At that time, FFXIV was nowhere to be found — they’d stopped selling digital downloads and you couldn’t find it in the store. So, after I decided I was going to give it a try, I had to wait a week or so for when the digital download became available again. I quickly picked it up, and decided to roll Zuri as my first character.
The first night, I rolled her on some random server because that was the only one that was still taking new players. I created her as a Conjurer because I do enjoy healing and helping people, but also because I heard the DPS classes had a much longer waiting time for instances.
I don’t think I reached level 10 with her that first time, but I ended up re-rolling her on the Gilgamesh server, since I liked that name better (who doesn’t love Gilgamesh?), and I heard it was the official Reddit server. I did get this version of Zuri past level 10, and was posting about it on my GW2 Tumblr when a couple of GW2 friends contacted me. They told me to join them over on the Midgardsormr server where they had a guild.
So I re-rolled Zuri for the third time (no free server transfers yet), and started her on her path on Midgardsormr. I continued to make my way in levels to unlock White Mage, but that’s where I stalled out for a few months. A couple of things happened about this time: Syn picked up FFXIV, and we rolled new characters together, and I started chickening out on the idea of progressing in story dungeons as a healer.
I wasn’t a bad healer. I didn’t dislike the class. But I’m a nervous dungeon runner, and being the White Mage was not helping the anxiety. I did various holiday events with Zuri, but mostly put her to the side until I finally came to grips with the idea that I was going to class change to Bard.
Good choice. Once I put my mind to leveling Archer seriously, I was able to grind through to unlock Bard and pick up where I left off in the main story with the White Mage job. Took a whole weekend to do, but that was the turning point for this character. Once I tried a dungeon as Bard, I felt like I’d found a good class fit for me. I’m traditionally a melee DPS (my alt is a Dragoon), but I’ve come to enjoy Bard just as much now.
So, the rest is pretty much history.
I still have a ton to do in this game — earning my Relic +1 armor, finishing the main scenario, picking up the quests that follow main scenario, my first Hildebrants, and eventually my relic weapon. Not to mention leveling all those other classes I want to try and working on crafting!
With a second character floating around mid level 48, I’ll be adding Dragoon to this list pretty soon, too!