FFXIV: Completing Dawntrail Again -- Grappling with Burnout
Posted on March 3, 2026 by Aywren
I have a goal of finishing up Dawntrail for all of my alts before Fanfest in late April this year. I buckled down and made it through Dawntrail on Ben last night – this makes my 5th time through the expansion. I have one alt left to push through, which will probably be my toughest alt given it’s Tai on Reaper, and I have little to no experience playing melee in this expansion’s difficulty level.
Nearing Burnout
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that last week in particular was the first time I felt as close as could be to burnout in FFXIV for me. I put a LOT of hours into making progress on Ben through the MSQ, and ended up finishing all of Dawntrail’s base expansion content. On top of that, I’ve also been running Expert/Leveling dungeons almost every night over the past month on Amon in order to unlock the new relic weapon.
I still have quite aways to go on my relic despite having run so many dungeons to get this step done – much thanks to Syn for being my patient dungeon running buddy despite the fact she’s already finished her relic. The one thing that eases my mind is that once relic is done, all I need are tomes to unlock the weapons on additional jobs. I know some folks complain about the tome step, but for me, I know that if I had to run all these dungeons over again on additional jobs, I’d never do it. I’m having trouble enough doing it on one job!
It also didn’t help that I saw the longest DPS queues for trial runs that I’ve seen in a very long time while doing MSQ. It almost took 40 minutes to get into the final boss fight of base Dawntrail, which is pretty rough!
Little Ladies’ Day Event
The Little Ladies’ Day event launched last week on top of all of that. The moment I saw that this requires you to complete a FATE several times to get all of the rewards, I groaned inwardly.
Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy doing more than just talking to 3 people in town and calling it a day for these events. I also thought the FATE was cute overall, especially for newer folks who don’t have the event glowsticks from years ago. However, I typically run 17 alts through these holiday events, and always hope for something that doesn’t require huge chunks of time for me to get rewards for them all – especially when it comes to glamour and emotes.
This time around, I ended up foregoing the cherry trees on all but a couple of my characters. The FC leaders did earn the trees and the housing decorations for the houses I own. But for those who only have an apartment or don’t own a house, I chose to skip.
This whittled down the number of FATES I had to run to three per character. The frustrating thing about these FATEs are that they are always exactly 3 minutes long and I never earned more than 4 certificates per FATE. There’s a variable wait time between each FATE, as well. This was easily 15-20 mins per character depending.
Getting Things Done
Interestingly enough, there was something about the game forcing me to slow down, chill in town, and wait for these FATEs that did me some good. I thought this was going to be a frustration, but I found myself turning on YouTube on the second monitor and just knocking out the event on one character after another over the weekend.
I’m not sure why that helped to ease the feeling of burnout I felt coming on last week, but it did. After taking some time off from MSQ progression over the weekend (though I did do some runs for relic paste on Sunday), I was able to buckle down and focus on finishing up all of the 7.0 post-patch content on Ben yesterday.
I also think that pushing through MSQ for the 5th time on a familiar job was part of the problem. When I went through MSQ last time on Tad, I was playing Machinist, which is a job I don’t main. This meant I was exploring a job I don’t play often, and the novelty of doing that helped make the MSQ feel more interesting.
While I do love Red Mage as my main class, playing Ben through MSQ on Red Mage was just more of the same thing I always do. While it made it less stressful, it also made it quite dull.
I do want to say that I realize this is all on me in the end. It’s on me for having so many alts. It’s on me for deciding to keep these alts somewhat current on MSQ for no reason outside of simply doing it. It’s also on me for pushing huge chunk of MSQ replay in a short section of time as I try to knock out this goal.
I know there’s a light at the end of the tunnel for this, though. I only have one more character to finish. Soon, I’ll also be done with forced nightly dungeon runs because I’ll have finished the relic.
Once those things are complete, I can go back to doing as I please in the game. But until then, I need to pace myself as I push just one more alt through… Wish me luck!