Wednesday night, I finished Endwalker on Amon, making it my second time through the expansion. That’s the one downfall of having so many alts, and alts that you’d like to be in somewhat relevant content.

For me, this is because I want to level all my gatherers to 90 so that once maps start opening portals, I’ll have a flow of gil from daily gathering as I did in Shadowbringers. This means I need to at least get three of my characters to a point where they can hit up the level 90 nodes, wherever those will be located. So far, I’ve finished the expansion on two of those characters and the third is about to enter Garlemald.

The nice thing about going through the expansion again is that I can pick and choose what I want to rewatch when it comes to story points. I thought that the expansion being as long as it was, it was going to be long and drawn out to replay. But I’ve found, with the exception of those few forced NPC instances and the follow-hide quests, it really wasn’t that bad.

I buckled down and skipped most of the cutscenes (unless I wanted to pause and see something), and got it done in about 4 solid nights of after work playing. Having memorized a lot of quest locations and aether current spots the firs time also made it faster.

The fact that you only have to do two trials with a real group of players also makes replay far easier. This time, I did Trusts with every dungeon, and honestly, it helped me learn the mechanics a lot better. I was a little antsy about replaying this with Trusts seeing how poorly I felt I did on some dungeon bosses the first time through. But I didn’t have a single wipe the whole way through.

Even that second trial (which I won’t name because of spoilers), if you majorly mess up, the Trust doesn’t let you fail it. I was surprised about this. Not only were the Trust healers super fast to respond if you ever got hit with a mechanic that took you to low life, but if you actually get killed, the instance tells you that you survived due to strong will (or something like that), and you were only stunned for a few seconds as a result.

Update Based on Feedback (thank you!): You get a stack of buffs that allow you to survive death-hits in this fight, so you can still wipe it (I just wasn’t paying attention to my buffs, apparently). Also, I’ve been informed there may be an enrage timer if you can’t pump out the needed DPS.

So unless you have a strong group of friends to take you through, Trusts are superior than struggling with PUGs. I’m looking forward to the day that they make other trials use Trusts since now the excuse of “they can be tempered” should be kicked to the curb.

The more I spend time in the new zones and become comfortable with them, the more I’ve come to like Endwalker. I always have this period of adjustment with new expansions due to the unknown. It actually helps me to play through them all over again for some reason.

I still stand by my thoughts on some of the small pacing and storytelling issues I felt the first time through. And I may actually use one of my alts to do a slow playthrough in the future, just to get a feel for it a second time around now that I see the big picture.

But for now, I’ve got plenty of work to do across my characters. It’s just a pain that due to queues, I’m mostly forced to log in on one character and stay on that character all night. That forces me to have to choose between farming Tomes on my main, who needs it for gear, or actually making progress on alts. Because there’s only so much Tome farming I’m going to do in any one night.

I know we’re all hoping that the queues chill out soon. And that my issue is a little complaint in the big picture of it all, especially since some folks are still struggling just to play through EW right now.

Sorry, also, there weren’t more images in this post. I just didn’t take too many non-spoiler pics!