My road to 2000 mentor roulettes: A two year restrospect

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Today, after a painful two years of grinding I finally achieved one of the most notorious grinds in this game; The mentor mount. and now, looking back i want to recount my experiences, my advise and my cirtisicm with the system in the hopes one day this can be an enjoying endevour for all

As a new mentor when I went for this mount some 2+ years ago i wasnt much put off by this grind because i didnt really know what was the come, but after the first 500 I started to see some major issues in this games community and in the games unvoiced mentality
Let's talk ex's and how many i got and how many you might get. for every 100 mentors, id say 1/15th were an ex trail, ususally ARR which are very easy to do, the worst ex for me is easily ramuh because it can either be a super fast kill or a complete slog and it 100% depends on whos the new player and whos the mentor. I also experienced a great deal of wonderfully nice sprouts eager to learn and follow instruction
My majorty of pops was actaully dungeons which for the most part were OK, but they felt slow and boaring to do, i didnt really feel like i had any use or impact inside them... even the harder ones like dead ends.. if you get a dungeon, my advise is not to take a penalty because its largley afk and <15 minutes when the penalty is 30 minutes and ur highly likley to get another dng

Moving onto player attitude and mentor attitude combined
The attitude of the sprouts was for the most part well behaved, but yes you got the odd sprout that was VERY toxic, would pull the boss, not listen to your advise, hide chat, remove your help marker and attack mentors for being.. well mentors.. This is a horrible but entirley likley experience youll one day have, if this does happen please dont let it get to you, there are good ones out there.
The mentors themselves were more problematic than any sprout, most of them were unwilling to teach, didnt know the mecanics themselves or didnt care about staying past 1 wipe. some of the would attack sprouts for even daring to pop fights like sephirot or nidhog ex in party finder "why the $%^& would you pop this, what a huge waste of everybodys time"

My experiences inside NN
oh boy.. this is where it really unravels, this place was truely hell to sit in.. Rules are seldom obeyed in here and mentors will kick anybody who doesnt agree with there rhetoric. I noticed a lot of mentors with "high and mighty" or "hollier than thou" attitudes, the latter i CANNOT stand. do anything to bring them back to earth or humble them and they were go completly insane. remind them how little power the have, again... nuts. This is not every mentor but my experiences in here cover a majority

For now while i have nothing else i can think of, this is my look back, and my issues and praises with this content. happy grinding!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxivdiscus...es_a_two_year/

That makes me want to queue nidhogg ex on purpose to make them rage. I am going to unlock it next time l login.

sounds like everything else you hear about being mentor and mentor roulette

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but after the first 500 I started to see some major issues in this games community and in the games unvoiced mentality

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I recently reached that (at 527). Not seen anything that I hadn't already seen in my over 10,000 duties on my main as well as on alts prior to starting the grind.

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id say 1/15th were an ex trail, ususally ARR which are very easy to do

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Yes, although I more frequently get The Great Hunt (Extreme) which is usually pretty easy and I've even had some one-shots. I also joined Ravana (Extreme) in progress once and once I noticed it was the extreme version, I explained the most important mechanics to get us through to the last phase and The Echo stacks allowed us to skip the entirety of the adds phase as well as anything meaningful post-adds.

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My majorty of pops was actaully dungeons which for the most part were OK, but they felt slow and boaring to do

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Right ok, you chose to do the grind despite finding them boring. To a degree you probably would by the time of reaching battle mentor status, but it's fun for the new players. Personally, I find them fun to do as well.

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i didnt really feel like i had any use or impact inside them...

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Try a different role then. I always feel like I am carrying aspects of the run on any role, especially when the other players are relatively new, so I can't relate to this.

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The attitude of the sprouts was for the most part well behaved, but yes you got the odd sprout that was VERY toxic, would pull the boss, not listen to your advise

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Not really had that. But there was for example a time I taught a tank about interrupts after we wiped in Dohn Mheg.

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and attack mentors for being.. well mentors..

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Had that a few times prior to starting the grind, back when streamers were watching that anti-mentor video. It's very rare that anyone actually treats mentors that way in the game, but the video caused a few people to harass mentors at the time. They made a weird assumption that being a mentor meant I was a bad person somehow.

The most notable one was the person who had a problem with me doing big pulls. The first person to ever express a problem with big pulls in over 10k duties. They were a healer and were having no trouble healing those pulls - they were clearly unaware that I put in the work to make sure that even a novice healer that casts nothing except "Cure" once every 15 seconds can keep me alive.

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The mentors themselves were more problematic than any sprout

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Mentors are usually veteran players. Veteran players often have done the content many times and just want to rush through it using the most efficient method. This is true about veteran players in any MMORPG. I've seen similar behaviour from people without the mentor icon in late ARR/early Heavensward because less people would obviously have qualified then despite having played a long time. We just have to remember that this is a veteran player problem, not a mentor problem.

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most of them were unwilling to teach

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Also common of veteran players in an MMORPG, although I think if you ask a lot of people a question there is no reason they wouldn't answer if they knew the answer.

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didnt know the mecanics themselves

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We do have getting close to 100 dungeons. Even as a mentor I only remember the mechanics because of how much I play, my commitment to remembering them and I don't think a lot mentors necessarily have the 10,000 duty achievement or spend more of their time doing raids than dungeons. It is also just the truth that anyone who wasn't around in ARR, Heavensward or Stormblood may not know the mechanics for old extreme trials, especially the ones that did not have unreal versions recently.

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some of the would attack sprouts for even daring to pop fights like sephirot or nidhog ex in party finder "why the $%^& would you pop this, what a huge waste of everybodys time"

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I know that blunt behaviour. I have seen it in EU. You seem to be from EU. That is probably why. People don't talk like that in NA usually. But you see that sort of comment even in normal trials and dungeons in EU. They call out any perceived incompetence or laziness from players immediately, regardless of if they may be reported for it.

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mentors will kick anybody who doesnt agree with there rhetoric.

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I have heard of that in a few novice networks, but not really seen it in the novice networks I've been in across NA. I didn't see it the limited times I played on EU worlds either. My experience with NN is that sprouts/returners ask questions and then they get answered and sometimes between that there are discussions, some of them with sprouts about game systems and some of them completely off-topic (which I wish they weren't but usually it's not that bad unless the subject is inappropriate).

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Originally Posted by Eastwall

That makes me want to queue nidhogg ex on purpose to make them rage. I am going to unlock it next time l login.

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Do it. I welcome more Heavensward and Stormblood EX trials in my mentor roulette because they're way more fun than ARR trials. Aside from Ramuh/Titan, the other ARR EX trials tend to be really boring. Nidhogg is actually my favorite Heavensward EX and I think I only got it once during my 2000 roulettes.

I honestly keep forgetting that system exists lol. I flagged mentor status a couple times when I happen to run past the NPC while doing something else only to have it fall off later when requirements changed XD.

I also did the mentor and my thoughts are:
Go dps. Preferrably a dps that can raise so RDM/SMN. It can save an entire run.
Being a mentor made me take off my titles (ultimate titles) because I got abused so horribly sometimes by just having the combo of title and crown. It honestly made me feel so angry towards the community.
I did get toxic at times in the end because I was so tired of the abuse (I think one time I asked "are you going to listen to me or would you rather just wipe?", I never insulted anyone or namecall. Granted. I didnt do it over two years, I grinded it quickly over a summer, so I was doing runs multiple times a day and that probably made it feel worse or like people were constantly being buttheads.

Once I got my mount I stopped. Not because of "I was done" but because I just didnt want to hang out with the community anymore.

In my experience most mentors went quiet. Some would try to say something but most nonmentors would either not listen, insult or just be really, really bad. There were times ofc where you did spend an hour in ifrit or whatever and clear and that was joyous. It was VERY satisfying getting a group with positive people that actually listened and then you guided them to a clear.
In regards to the "you can do this unsynced" it is just being helpful. Some people would be really thankful and we could show them how to, while others would explain they wanted the experience of the synced run, which is fine as well.

Weak, during hw when it was new, my wife did it in 3 months xD

Nah but really, congrats, for the lots of wasted times i could never do that, especially back then when it was basically castrum roulette lol

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Originally Posted by LuciaMirain

In my experience most mentors went quiet. Some would try to say something but most nonmentors would either not listen, insult or just be really, really bad.

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Tbh my approach is always to let ppl try first unless its one of those "you will 100% if no one knows" mechanics...

But yeah you get too many "no one asked" "how should i know that??" etc...

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Originally Posted by Kuroka

Weak, during hw when it was new, my wife did it in 3 months xD

Nah but really, congrats, for the lots of wasted times i could never do that, especially back then when it was basically castrum roulette lol



Tbh my approach is always to let ppl try first unless its one of those "you will 100% if no one knows" mechanics...

But yeah you get too many "no one asked" "how should i know that??" etc...

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Yeah definitely, everyone is allowed 1-3 tries imo but some wanted NO info anc ompletely blind in suzaku and that was just an hour of wasted time. I would encourage people to form a PF party for something synced and so on instead so they could get the full experience but then they would say "it was just faster getting a group like this". Which is fair, this is what we signed up for. But boy oh boy did it feel like a trap at times LOL.