Chocobo Training

[Xenosan]

Be sure to get your weekly Challenge Log bonus for your companion (defeat 20 enemies, defeat 100 enemies), train your bird in the stables regularly, and whenever Fate grinding, bring it along.

Seems daunting, but it becomes pretty routine. Just the reality that it's something that's going to take more than just a few weeks. Just keep swimmin'

The complication is rank 10 abilities (the AOEs). You may need to buy a couple SP reset items from The Hunt vendors (cost a paltry 20 allied Seals iirc). Why:

You need to actually acquire the Rank 10 ability (meaning, bird has to learn/be able to use the AOE) to get Barding at Rank 10, and get all 3 at Rank 20.

So at R10 if you want the barding right away, invest the SP into the R10 ability, but then reset your bird and invest up to R9 (but don't put points into R10 AOE again).

Birds with AOE can be dangerous. And it's not just healer AOE spam that's the problem, but Tank/DPS. Say you're doing Levequest at a high difficulty, 1 of the leve mobs is standing next to a zone mob. During the fight with the leve mob, your bird will do it's AOE attack, hitting the unaggressive zone mob. Great, now that mob is hostile and you are put in a situation you probably didn't want.

After hitting rank 20, I unlocked all r10 AOE abilities to receive the 2 bardings I didn't have yet, but then used the SP reset carrot and only invest up to R9 in each tree - because I don't want my bird to have any AOEs. Just not worth the micro imo.