Thread: Best way to do the 2.0-2.55 Story to access Ishgard?

Originally Posted by Seraphyel

Really? And it's filled with those awful irrelevant quests that bring nothing to the story?

Yeah, there's far too much that I continually ask myself why. I get that 1-50 quests had to have some padding, to keep you subscribed and make the leveling too quickly I suppose (but even then, the MSQ doesn't give you enough xp with all the filler), but for updates that focus solely on the story? I don't understand it, nor do I like it one bit. Why do I have to deliver this item halfway across the continent, isn't that what post moogles are for? I didn't have to do them all in one go like the new players, I don't even want to imagine how annoying it must be for them.

Now don't get me wrong, there are some moments that really shine, but they're buried among tons and tons of filler. I can definitely say it gets better with Heavensward though, but not in the way you might prefer. Instead of shoving all of the filler into the MSQ, they put them in side quests, and even when I did every last one I found myself still having to grind dungeons a bit, especially in the late 50s. Still, better than ARR I suppose. I can just grind dungeons, overlevel the MSQ a bit, and have fun with that, the English voice acting is much better too but that's irrelevant.

3.x has two entirely different loading screens for a bunch of the quests. Thankfully, a smaller proportion, but you do have to go Foundation -> Pillars -> House ______ quite a lot. Much less annoying than Waking Sands though! That was Limsa -> Arcanist Guild -> ferry to Vesper Bay -> Waking Sands -> Solar. x_x At least Rising Stones is only Mor Dhona -> Rising Stones -> Solar or whatever it's called there.

No classes (except Rogue) have quest markers for their opening quest, you just find the guild marker on the map, go there and register, unlocking the first quest. The jobs in 3.0 are the same - find the guild marker on the map, go there, register to unlock the first quest. The only oddity is DRK, which works the same way, except there is no DRK guild, and thus no marker on the map. Instead, you have to find the NPC with the quest marker over his head where there is no quest marker on the map. It's to the North East of one of the two city areas, I forget which.


The 2.1-2.4 stuff is a little tedious at times, though I think it picks up at 2.5, and found the 2.55 stuff to be really interesting. I feel like they would get more positive results and new subs if they added a digest mode, where each patch from 2.1 to 2.5 had a single, optional quest. Finishing the quest autocompletes all of the main story quests in that patch. In the new optional quest, the key story elements are shown as a cutscene that leads up to the primal battle, you do the primal battle, and then there's another cutscene showing the key story elements from there to the end of the patch. Doing this forgoes all rewards from those quests, but takes much less time. In 2.4 and 2.5, they'd have to have two breaks, one for the trial and one for the dungeon. Don't remove those, they're interesting and have story attached (especially the 2.5 dungeon and trial). For 2.55, the whole thing can be left in, since it's all just leadup for the ff-style, long cutscene of an ending. Finishing the final quest for a given patch auto-completes the cutscene version, so you can't do both.

I feel like that'd be a much better way of handling the tedious content while keeping the story and the non-tedious content (the trials/dungeons).

Alternatively, they could make these digest quests not autocomplete the rest, but still allow progression, so you could go back and do the story later if you feel like it.

Originally Posted by Seraphyel

They just should have introduced a new questline for access, summing up the 2.X-2.55 stuff in a few cutscenes. It could be more than one single quest, a little chain of quests, but not that tedious grind you have to do from 2.X-2.55 it's just painful and really makes no fun or doesn't give any motivation to do it.

Considering all the stuff that happens i doubt it would just be a couple cutscenes.
Most of the stuff that look very small (or pointless) in the start actually become big plotpoints later on.

You should probably just try to enjoy playing the game, because the content pre-expansion is pretty much exactly the same as the content post-expansion. It seems kind of silly to blast through most of the story so you can enjoy a smaller section of the same story at its current end (which will one day just be some tidbit in the middle).

There's nothing wrong with logging into a game you enjoy and still having plenty of stuff to do. I'm not sure why people get in such a hurry to reach that afk-lawn-ornament status.

Oh, forgot to mention - the AST guild symbol is the two interlocking squares, in case you weren't sure what to look for on the map.