FFXI: Return to Vana’diel – Unlocking Dark Knight
I return to Vana’diel after not having played FFXI for over a decade. Here are my adventures!
Since I’d unlocked mounts and reached level 30 on my Red Mage, it was time for me to experience unlocking my first Advanced Job ever in FFXI. Of course, I picked Dark Knight for two reasons – the quest sounded pretty easy and scythes.
The quest actually was pretty easy, except I made it a lot harder and longer than it needed to be by mis-reading the wiki guide (several times). This was totally my fault, though.
The first thing I had to do was make the run to Bastok, which wasn’t too big a deal. I needed to do this anyway to unlock the warps to all three of the main starter cities, so this was a good thing. Then I had to find the quest giver, which started an interesting cutscene about the emo nature of the Dark Knights in general.
I then had to go into the Palborough Mines to continue the quest. I made sure I had a map before I set out to go there… but this was where things started to go wrong. At first, none of the enemies aggroed as I was higher level than they were, so I thought I was pretty safe.
The guide noted that I needed to go to the third floor of the mines, where I’d find a boat. Only, the third floor apparently meant only taking the elevator downwards once (so confusing). So, here I thought I was on the second floor, and didn’t even go looking for the boat. I saw that there was a crystal further in the mines, so I navigated through towards it, thinking that must be the way I needed to go.
The problem with this is that the enemy level changed abruptly, and suddenly I was getting attacked! Because I hadn’t been attacked before, I didn’t have any of my Trusts out… so I promptly died before I got to the crystal.
Whelp. That meant a run back out to the mines. This time, I pulled my Trusts out and battled my way to the crystal, unlocking the warp there.
Going further, I found a set of stairs, which I thought must lead to the third level. Only, they didn’t. They led to some kind of shrine instead.
Okay. Crud. I looked back over the guide to try to figure out what I’d done wrong. I noted that it said that floor 3 had a burn mark on the map, which matched with the map I was on (even though it seemed like it should be floor 2), so I went back to the starting point of the map. Sure enough, there was the boat, like the guide described.
Ooops. Well, that was a death and 40 mins of fighting I didn’t need to do. But at least I opened the warp to the mines, right?
So, I enter the room via boat and get the cutscene where Zeid is supposed to give me the sword Chaosbringer. Once that’s done, the cutscene kicks me out of the mines.
Alright… except… my inventory was full at the time of the cutscene and I didn’t realize it! Which means, I didn’t get the sword! And now I have to run back and do that all over again! UGH!
Honestly, it was just easier to use the warp back and fight my way through to the boat, which is what I did. I guess opening the warp was a good thing in the end.
SO. This time, I made sure I had room in my inventory for the sword before entering the cutscene, and I SUCCESSFULLY obtained Chaosbringer.
Dark Knight Quest
So, the Dark Knight quest boils down to this mainly. You equip the level 1 Chaosbringer and kill everything. You can kill anything you want at any level at any location. You just have to kill 100 things.
Ok.
Some stipulations:
- Only Warriors, Dark Knights and Rune Fencers can use great swords.
- The game doesn’t keep track of how many things you kill in any recordable way that you can see. So you have to do it manually. Like with a paper and pencil IRL.
I hadn’t even started leveling Warrior yet, so it was back to level 1 for me to equip the sword. Then, I got myself a pad and pencil, summoned some Trusts, and dug in for the long, tedious task of killing 100 things out in the forest.
This went pretty fast with Trusts helping out. Leveling Warrior (which I needed anyhow) was a good side effect. I was about level 15 by the time I finished marking my 100th kill.
That’s when I looked back at the wiki and realized my mistake.
Wait… killing blow? Oh, crud. I’m pretty sure that with a party of Trusts, I wasn’t getting most of the final killing blows on things.
So… what does that mean?
Yeah. De-summon Trusts. Do it again.
But at least my Warrior was now in the upper teens and slaughtering things pretty fast.
Once I was pretty certain I’d killed 100 things (again), I had to travel to Beadeaux. There, I got a cutscene that made me an official Dark Knight!
Woot! First Advanced Job unlocked!
Finally.