A Brief Update on Progress
I did not have as much time to play this weekend as I usually do, but I'll put a quick update here for anyone following along at home.
Real quick, one goal I had independent of other goals I've listed was to unlock all of the Trusts.
1) I missed Zeid (for the time-being), but I purchased Lion through the login campaign.
2) I easily unlocked Tenzen easily with conquest points.
3) It took 1 full night of play to unlock Valaineral…Going into the past, unlocking the maws, signing up for the fighting fourth, doing an Ops, and finally fighting a couple campaign battles.
4) Joachim was another night’s worth of play because it involved getting into an Aby party to get the cruor.
5) I still haven’t unlocked Mihli. I did however finish the quest to travel to Whitegate.
If I get desperate, I will trade copper vouchers for Imperial Standing in order to buy Mihli.
For now though, I liked actually earning the currency the old fashioned way.
I might pop a couple of Emperor band charges and beat up some ToAU mobs the old fashioned way for my 2000 IS if I can find the time before Feb 2nd.
I really liked the way they set acquiring these 4 NPCs up! These rewards seemed really well thought out. They should do a few more Trust acquisition campaigns like this.
On to the Meat & Potatoes
First things first, after I finished Limit Break 3, I did a couple pages then returned and quickly finished Limit Break 4. There are certain things the new homepoint system is really nice for. It should be further expanded.
My level cap was now 70, so I paired up with a couple linkshell mates to go kill some worms and get the cruor I needed to unlock Joachim. The party we created ended up being a big success and I capped out pretty quick. I was also able to get my RDM leveled up quite a bit.
Here’s where things start to get a little sketchy.
The trust system made it easy enough to get a WHM testimony. Of course I spent probably 3 hours farming one up because that’s just my luck.
This entire time I had just assumed I would waltz into WHM Maat naked and it would be that easy. My first fight I literally did not even eat any food and just kind of ran in thinking it would be easy enough to just kite him. It wasn’t.
Clearly I had underestimated the fight, having never done it on a caster before. So, I got an Earth Staff off of the AH which brought be down to 0 gil, and I got the Salted Fish buff from the Field Tome. For the record, there was no armor on the AH either time.
Even though I took half as much damage the second time, it still just wasn’t the right way to do the fight. I used Benediction too early, and I just barely lost.
So I bought a bunch of medication, and went in for a 3rd fight. The 3 fights per testimony is kind of a nice change.
I made it about 2 minutes into this fight with no resistance from Maat at all and a guaranteed win with all the medication I was packing (none of which I used). For some reason though I derped at that moment, and a crit took me down before I could cure myself.
This should be a super easy fight, so I chalked it up to a couple of tactical mistakes on my part.
1) Even though I’ve done well on spell acquisition, I use Kupipi, so I’d never bothered buying the rather expensive Protect and Shell spells. Missing out on the 120 defense from Protect IV is making this fight unnecessarily easy.
2) I decided to complete all of my AF1 solo before trying again. And not because it’s absolutely required, but just because fighting Maat naked is against my core value of playing this game to be a hero.
More on the AF
I’m going to cut this short and just say that these quests are pretty dated and it shows. I doubt much will change here, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most new people to this game should be completing their AF before moving on past level 75.
The problem is that there is a power disparity that makes it pretty unenjoyable to do the quests at 70, and completely absurdly easy at 99. Most people will just find a convenient way to skip doing it until 95 or so, but people who pick a job with a hard Maat fight won't have that luxury.
Needless to say, I’m trying to enjoy the challenge, and just finished my 3rd piece.
It does feel good to get this done solo, whereas without the Trust system, there would be no prayer of doing so.
These quests were badly designed, and reflect a bygone era of woefully bad design choices in this game. It is sad that this is still the first impression this game will give new players.
I like that intentionally better design choices are being made in the late game, but I find it incredibly vapid that the "winning strategy" is to just skip ahead to the stuff that wasn't badly designed.
