FFXIV ~ double XP is insane!

A couple of days ago Oceanic servers were released for Final Fantasy 14 and I very happily leapt onboard the transfer train as soon as I was able to! I said my farewells to the Japanese server, Tonberry, and very soon approached the new lands of Sophia, an Australian server where most of the RP'ers were rumoured to be flocking to.

The ping is fantastic. I've gone from 150ms (130 with Mudfish) to a nice, smooth 40 and ohmygosh, I didn't think the difference was going to be this noticeable, but it is!

I can dodge out of bad on the ground with plenty of time to spare! The jump button actually makes my person jump the very, very instant I tell her to jump! The cast bars, eeeeeee, I can cancel my cast, dodge out of bad, and resume casting with ease!!! Before I was mashing the button a couple of times, only for it to be interrupted by nothing, and I'd have to do it again, and eurgh.

This brand new server of Sophia is also super populated. The above screenshot is at 8 in the morning! And I swear I actually see more people out and about and in cities now than I ever did on the overly congested Tonberry. I wrongly assumed that I'd leave the super congested world and enter one with half the population, but nope, it is thoroughly populated with queues even on weekday mornings.

Dungeons pop within 5 minutes. I'm actually seeing a lottttt of people out and about and questing, and not just sitting AFK in cities. I've been informed that a lot of those people are probably just people who main on other data centres and are getting their free 15 days of playtime by levelling to 30 on a new world, but still! PEOPLE! Everywhere!

It's great!

As a "perk" for transferring to a brand new server you get 10 golden chocobo feathers, when you hit level 30 in any job you will get 1 million gil and 15 free days of gametime, and the XP rate is vastly accelerated.

So vastly.

When I transferred, my thaumaturge was level 31. I hit 50 last night. And honestly, I'll probably be at least 60 by the end of today. I've stopped doing side quests and am just focusing on the main story quests, my job quests, and the dungeons that the main story tells me to go into, and I'm very, very quickly outlevelling everything. It's pretty crazy. 😅

I also joined a guild (free company) with a nice name -- Eden -- and they have a perk where you get 5% more XP from creature kills. So that adds up too. It's very quick.

I personally don't really care about being max level as soon as possible, and it's a bit irritating to be level 50 with a bunch of abilities you've gotten used to, then hop into a dungeon meant for the level you're supposed to be at and now you can't use some of your abilities because you've been downgraded for level sync.

I'm really enjoying the thaumaturge though. The abilities are starting to proc a lot more often now which I really like.

I start with Thunder, which has a chance to proc a free thunderbolt, and when I use my fire spell which is my main damaging spell it has a chance to proc a more powerful (more expensive) fire spell for free. At the moment most of the procs are happening when things are already dead. 🤣 But I'm looking forward to finally being able to make use of the procs (the fire one especially) in dungeons. Need to get to the higher level dungeons!

My main issue with the procs though, is that I have to keep staring at my hotbar to see when they're available for free. I wish there was an addon I could use to make it a little more evident when something has proc'd. Like, in WoW there are visual cues! (and also the Weak Auras addon) but apparently addons in FFXIV are against the ToS. So........ visual cues would be really nice so I could keep an eye on the action instead of my hotbar.

All in all, I'm really enjoying my experience in FFXIV and I'm so happy we now have Oceanic servers to be able to play to our full potential. In guild chat and out in the cities, I'm seeing people marvelling at the difference in ping and talking about how awesome it is to be able to actually do things the moment you want to do them. 😅

And thanks to me playing, my partner decided to resubscribe and transfer over too. He didn't want to play until after Lost Ark was released, and then of course the Horizon Forbidden West is going to be released on his birthday so he wanted to play that. And now here I am, convincing him to play FFXIV for the short couple of weeks before then.

Muahahaha. 😁

(Nooooooooooo, the next Path of Exile league was just announced too and it actually looks interesting, grargh!!!!!!!) 🤣🤣🤣

 

Until next time!! ✨🙃

 

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_{All screenshots in this post are courtesy of me, @kaelci and are from the game: Final Fantasy XIV.}