Last Friday Final Fantasy XIV's Producer and Director Naoki Yoshida announced patch 7.3 would drop early in August. Early means the first 10 days of the month, so players are looking at 5 August to receive new content. With six weeks to go I think it's time for another update on my experience in FFXIV.
I checked out the Cosmic Exploration status page and saw my server had completed the development of the base on the moon. The entire game is making good progress and only servers on the newer data centers of Dynamis in North America and Materia in Oceania were still on stage 18 of 20. On my home data center of Primal only Famfrit had not completed the construction of the moon base.
I went to visit the moon to see what the finished construction looked like. I'm not going to lie, I was impressed. The site had gone from a cleared area with a couple of tents surrounding an aetheryte to a sprawling base with a spaceship and ground transportation system. Upon returning to the moon I received a couple of missions. One for the completion of the site and another for having completed 100 cosmic exploration missions. The completionist in me wants to keep gaining standings but I have other things to do.
On Sunday I reached Bloodsworn status with the Mamool Ja, the second of Dawntrail's three allied societies. The Mamool Ja are all about gathering in the lower forest of the Yak T'el zone. Yak T'el is a very blue and glowing area, perfect for the Branchbearer mount I could purchase when I became Trusted with the tribe. I have to admit the framing kit and triple triad card made available in the store at the end was a bit anti-climatic as the big reward for me was the Branchbearer. However I do see the logic. Earning the mount early made the Branchbearer available to ride for a few weeks while running around doing the allied society quests. If I had received the mount at the end I probably would have rode the mount once and then stored it away with my other 100+ mounts.
With all the Cosmic tools acquired I went back to working on the Blue Mage job. I decided to level from 50 to the job's level cap of 80 using the "leech-and-Clionid" trick in The Tempest. Yes, the method is cheesy as all heck but works solo. The big benefit is I can get a lot of the spells for Blue Mage easier since I can walk through level 50 dungeons pretty much untouchable. Not exactly in the spirit of the game but I only have six weeks until I'm distracted with the new content in patch 7.3.
I'm currently about halfway through the level 50 entries in The Masked Carnivale. I've used the tomestones rewarded for finishing each stage on obtaining iLevel 530 gear. I only need to get a pair of rings and I'll be, if not best in slot, very close. I also have used all the allied seals earned to purchase aetheryte tickets. I started off Dawntrail with 240 tickets and was down to 190 at the end of the Cosmic tools grind. Thanks to The Masked Carnivale I'm up to 400 tickets. Considering how much I might zip around gathering that's a lot of gil saved. Better yet, if I do the weekly novice and moderate stages of the carnivale I can earn 50 tickets each week for about 15 minutes of work. A lot better than chasing around hunt targets like I had done up until now.
Perhaps not the most exciting experience but I'm having fun. A lot of things are coming together right before the patch. Now I just need to finish up the projects and begin preparing for the changes coming in the first week of August.
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