zephie's game journals
i'm so happy to pray return to the Waking Sands :) the early game is very slow but so cozy. i keep feeling giddy about being back in this world with my best friends Y'shtola and others!! sure ESO has the lore but i want the characters, and it may have the voice acting but this has the better and more abundant writing, that isn't all accompanied by the same four or five voices. anyway either i remember a surprising amount of the early story after seven years or i got further along in a previous new game+ attempt than i thought
this is a very linear early babylevel dungeon i must've done a bunch of times, yet somehow didn't have the achievement for making my way through the whole thing.. other players must have rushed me along more than i thought possible
mmm. finishing a new game+ chapter inside the Waking Sands when everyone's there, then being taken back to the present. don't like it! only want to cry a little bit though
i love going into the back rooms between quests and seeing all the new dialogue for all the little mini-stories the minor characters have going on amongst themselves. this was a leafcreature. it's amazing how easily missed this all is. i'm so glad all the lesser Scions survive
ya i'm a Ninja now if this wasn't enough proof... kind of wish Rogue became something else because i think it's cooler than Ninja. i think ninja are too much a "cool" that it circles back around to being uncool. also i wish when moving onto the job quests it didn't always abandon the characters from the class quests, i got attached to the Rogues' Guild crew but at least the Ninja storyline has a funny Michael Jackson villain
alright. alright it's more than a little bit now. hits a lot harder this time around now that i've known to go round back to talk to everyone between quests. should there be a spoiler warning here. i'm chronicling a playthrough of a very story-heavy game so it should be obvious that there'd be spoilers, but i haven't really been commenting on the story since i've played through it before. anyway the lesser Scions actually don't survive gotcha!
i'm progressing through the story a lot faster than i thought i would, although since i last played it they've removed a lot (not all) of the nothingquests, and also enabled flying in the base game zones thank god. if i was still playing Bard i'd be one-shotting everything which would make things way faster, but that would be boooring. and there's already a lot of disbelief i have to suspend for story's sake, like the world feeling extremely small now that i can fly everywhere, so a dozen-quest build-up to fighting a primal followed by me taking it out in just a few seconds would seem too silly
i forgot about the squadrons feature, but then again i think so did Square - apparently there've been talks of retiring them altogether? i have the max amount hired and some of them are kinda goofy so i wanna replace them, but they all say they were hired in 2016. they've been loyal too long for me to just throw them aside like that, even if their loyalty has amounted to sitting in the barracks not being given anything to do for years on end
almost done with the 2.0 MSQ today wow! granted i have been playing almost all day every day but catching back up on the story is starting to seem doable. yes i went into this fully expecting to burn out somewhere around mid-Heavensward, then put the game back down for long enough that when i eventually came back i'd feel like replaying even ARR again. i would be long done by now if i wasn't so stubborn about staying as a Ninja, and frequently having to stop to go level up to meet the quest requirement
leveling feels so needless in this game - it exists solely to gate off content, and the possible ways to level feel limited and not conducive to any reason for it to exist. plus it becomes totally irrelevant when you hit the item level treadmill (which also becomes irrelevant once you hit the next expansion). all the noticeable XP comes in massive chunks from dailies and missions etc. just grinding monsters like any other MMO isn't viable. it's good to be gradually introduced to abilities so it's not overwhelming but with the way levels are implemented there really ought to just be a button to say "yes i understand my rotation so far can i move on please" (well there is one but it costs $25)
i'm actually thinking before moving onto the Heavensward MSQ i want to really wring out ARR dry of its content. i want to get to know the dungeons and raids better, level a bunch of base classes, go for collectibles - kinda experience this game in order not just in story. i wish new game+ let me replay any sidequest, not only a select few storylines. i already went through and did every single ARR and HW sidequest i could find years ago, and it would be nice to be able to experience some of those stories again in a form other than journal entries
one boss toward the end gave me trouble, and the difficulty felt like my own making at first because i was deliberately using gear i'd picked up along the way that was often underleveled, but only because it never felt like it mattered. eventually i went to the market board and bought all the best gear for my awkward level of 49. to my surprise i was just bad at the fight because i continued dying in stupid ways, but i refuse to take heed when the game starts asking if i want pity buffs. i'm not playing my level 80 job for a reason