Maybe coming back.Follow

Since...launch? Quite a bit.

There have been 5 patches worth of story missions, new dungeons, new trials, new raids including both the hardcore Coil raids and the more casual Crystal Tower series of raids, a new job (Ninja), a casino, and probably a bajillion other things I'm not thinking of.

Since you never made it to 50, you wouldn't have been terribly familiar with end game grinding to begin with. So even the "old" content would still be new to you.

There probably was no "roulette" before you quit, I'm guessing. There is now a daily incentive to queue up for a random dungeon from a predetermined set. So even though the vast majority of players already have one job at level 50, it won't be terribly hard finding a party through Duty Finder for the story line dungeons that you hadn't cleared before you stopped playing.

Back before you quit, there would have only been a handful of end game dungeons. There are now 17 end game dungeons. Most people do just 3 of those dungeons through the expert roulette. The other 14 are part of what's called the high level roulette. You can't do either of those roulettes until you complete every dungeon in the group. However, people who are doing a roulette can still wind up in a group with you when you are trying to clear a dungeon for the first time.

The most accessible end game gear is obtained by farming a currency called tomestones. You get tomestones mostly from clearing dungeons.

The best end game gear mostly comes from an 8 man "dungeons" called the Final Coil of Bahamut, and they are the most challenging content in the game right now.

There is also a series of 24 man raids called Crystal Tower, Syrcus Tower, and World of Darkness. They're actually not all that hard provided you are properly geared and learn the mechanics, and World of Darkness drops pretty decent gear for anyone who doesn't already have best of the best stuff.

There are 2 different kinds of PvP events now. I don't know how popular either are, as I don't personally do them.

They just added the Golden Saucer in the last patch, which has a host of things you can do as a diversion, including Chocobo Racing and Triple Triad.

Crafting is mostly just more of the same, except for the addition of Desynthesis. Desynthesis for any of the existing DoH classes has to be leveled separately from the crafting class itself. And unlike the DoH classes where you can level all of them to max, you can only level Desynthesis to max for at most 3 classes.

Oh yeah, that was a pretty big change. I remember being saddened at how I finally got this iconic looking full set of Black Mage AF when I dinged level 50, got to wear it for basically two dungeons, and then I immediately got something to replace it in my very first end game dungeon. The life of that AF was far too short lived.

At least now, you can glamour whatever hodge podge gear you get to look like something that matches. Or to look like your in your underwear. Whatever floats your boat.

Well, the fourteen dungeons in hard roulette run a wide range of difficulties, though none are that difficult. The three in expert are the three newest ones (Before they came out, the three newest from before were expert) In any case, the current expert roulette dungeons are actually mostly easy:

Wanderer's Palace (Hard): Easy all the way through.
Amdapor Keep (Hard): Easy all the way through.
Keeper of the Lake: Easy 'til the last boss. Then God help you if even one person doesn't know it.

Basically, the reason people do the three EX dungeons is the rewards. Hard Roulette dungeons give 20 poetry tomes for the roulette, plus 5-20 for the dungeon itself. EX gives 35 poetry tomes for the roulette plus 40 for the dungeon itself.

Story line will still continue to be a lot of solo content with occasional dungeons. At the level you left off, you probably still need to do 1 8-man fight (Cape Westwind) and then 2 fairly story heavy 8-man dungeons.

As for the end game dungeons, they were released over multiple patches, and so the newer dungeons tend to be "tougher" in that the mobs are slightly tougher in an attempt to scale to the higher item level that they were aimed at at the time of their release. Mechanically, the newest of the 3 dungeons may be slightly easier than some of the older dungeons. But if you wind up running one a dungeon with a bunch of players who are overgeared for it, you may wind up clearing it easily in spite of ignoring key mechanics that used to be crucial back when the dungeon was first released.

The older 14 dungeons may not be as popular as the newest 3, but people will still run the older 14 for high level roulette. High level roulette gives people a decent chunk of soldiery tomestones, which people need a lot of these days if they are working on a relic weapon. And if someone in the group is clearing one of those dungeons for the first time, the other players will even get extra bonus soldiery. So your presence may very well be welcomed with exclamations of "wooot bonus soldiery!".

Many of those older 14 dungeons are optional for the most part. Two of the 3 newest dungeons are "Hard Mode" versions of older dungeons, so you'd need to clear a couple older ones for that. That is, access to Amdapor Keep Hard Mode requires clearing Amdapor Keep. Likewise, clearing Wanderer's Palace Hard Mode requires clearing Wanderer's Palace. As an aside, even though you weren't level 50 back when you quit, you may remember end game players talking about those two dungeons. That's what players used to grind for tomestones back when ARR was released. So the game feels like it came back full circle just before the expansion, with players grinding out those two dungeons once again.

Out of the remaining 12 dungeons, only Snowcloak is a part of the main story line. So that's 11 dungeons that are completely optional.

Having said all that, you will still probably wind up needing to use those dungeons as a stepping stone. The newer dungeons have a minimum ilvl (the average item level of your gear) just to enter, and you're not going to meet those requirements the moment you hit level 50 as WHM. The older dungeons drop gear that will work well as intermediate upgrades for you. And even if you don't get drops from them, you can use the tomestones that you obtain just running the dungeons to improve your gear. You'll also eventually need to do those optional dungeons if you ever choose to upgrade a relic weapon.

If queue times in DF is long even for you as a healer because there's lower interest in the few older dungeons that you meet the ilvl requirement for, you can also participate in "Hunts" to get soldiery tomestones (which you can use to get gear upgrades). Hunts are basically XIV's version of NMs. You don't need to meet an ilvl requirement to participate. However, you may need to be in a party to be able to effectively contribute and get the full reward (since rewards are based on contribution). So you may find that it's not feasible to do Hunts AND seek for a party in DF at the same time.

Yea I think I was on Garuda, and was never able to get a group that understood what to do -.-



Not back yet :p
Still giving the guild another week or so to figure out wtf they are doing. If we do not plan to raid Normal/Hard in WoW, then I have no reason to keep playing (starting to get boring doing the same 30min game "dailies")

Off the top of my head...the few I had played with Xfered from the JP server Titan to EU Odin (maybe lol, started with an O). This was all during the massive server overloads and playing on a NA realm was not happening.

I figure I will be coming back (not seeing anything "new" in FFXI that I feel I need to go back again for), but the when is up in the air. I'll probably just start fresh with a new character.


Thanks for all the info. I didn't realize it I basically quit at launch-area. Other then getting bad groups and playing alone, I remember the game being fun.

So I did come back, for at least 3 months (what I've paid for). I rolled on Lamia, new guy. Name is Sa Nd.
I don't dig I have "poor" connection to the "NA" servers lol. I logged on my WHM ("EU" server) and have an "excellent" connection