yesterday i woke up itchin' to be back on da lake. i found a 200-page book online on all things fishing in this game and it reminded me just how much of this game i've yet to experience, and it got me really excited. unfortunately that excitement didn't translate well to the patience needed for fishing and i quickly got bored and moved on. although one thing that does make fishing more exciting is how wildly the experience gains vary between catches
also what was disappointing was finding out the class quests didn't really have a story like the combat jobs, and they apparently stopped doing them after Stormblood. maybe for the better - i'm often pulled out by how immediately NPCs are ready to tell me i'm an unbelievable master of the trade i picked up a couple hours ago. every class questline is like this and i don't need those kinds of expectations tensing my nerves out on the docks. the fish can sense that
the "Forestbreaker" title i have is from an unreasonable mind-numbing mining grind i did years ago, specifically because i liked the title (it's for mining like seven thousand times in the Black Shroud). my desire to "experience this game in order", against my own best efforts, is extending to completionism as well. i thought if i'm gonna attempt to fish 'em all, i should finish off minin' em all first since i'm so much further along with that. i plugged in a controller, lied on my bed and ran to different rocks for an hour while watching TV, until i couldn't bare how pointless it all felt - i wouldn't have even felt that bad if i was only watching TV. i just don't think i can shake the feeling of, i've done enough of this in games, throughout my life. i should be able to show Square the full year of playtime i've amassed in RuneScape and they'll give me those titles and achievements anyway
i needed some genuinely interesting experiences to pull me out of that little existential pit i fell into briefly, and luckily that's when i discovered this exists? i knew i could find treasure maps - i did not know that at the end of one it can open up a portal that sends me to a treasure dungeon. it was exciting enough despite me dying immediately due to not heeding its recommendation of an 8-player party. i just wanted to poke my head through see what was going on
i want to become more familiar with dungeons so i can get some cool multiplayer dungeon experiences like that. i've ninjed to level 50 now but that's a DPS class and i don't think that'll call for me to learn mechanics well enough. and so - i'm entering my tanking arc
Gunbreaker seems cooler than Marauder/Warrior but it's a Heavensward job that starts at level 60, and i need to go as slow as humanly possible with learning how to tank. thank god there's actually a way to get practice in now without having to spoil everything in the dungeon for myself beforehand with a guide. even as a DPS dungeons were nerve-wracking because i didn't know what to expect and i could easily mess things up, so thinking about tanking was always out of the question. on my very first character in 2015 i unwittingly chose a tank class without any knowledge of MMO roles and got chewed out for it. i've played a bit of Conjurer and healing is a bit more straightforward but that always felt like the limit to how anxiety-inducing rather than fun-inducing i was willing to make this video game for myself
i went through the Hall of the Novice and tried my first dungeon with other players and i'm not sure it went so well, though i think the problem was the DPSes not following their roles since it was a babydungeon (Tam-Tara) and they looked like babyplayers. i am not in a million years going to start getting mad on the Internet about other players in my MMO party, something that other people's extreme willingness to do is a reason for my tanking anxiety in the first place, i'm just not sure how much of the problems were on me. one of them could've ran into the boss alone while our healer was still in a cutscene and i would still worry it was due to me being a bad tank. actually one of them did speed off ahead of the pack and pull a bunch of mobs but part of me still believes they were simply making a statement on how slow i was going. baby steps!
today i woke up and decided to disregard the fact that i will have fallen off this game in a week's time
i have become a Mightey Warrier... the Marauder story and characters were boring so i was excited to replace them with. Curious Gorge
i won't remark on the name promise. but on this game's incessant need to make every name or title a stupid pop culture reference i will big time. even the name of this quest is a Skrillex reference, which i only know because it was very obviously a reference to something so i web searched it. sometimes i think it's cool how much flavor the dialogue has compared to the Japanese script and how much work must go into localizing it, but that's so at odds with having pop culture references everywhere, which is inherently lazy and the writing equivalent of dangling keys in front of someone's face, and then i envy the Japanese version for probably not being so obnoxious with it. i don't need a line from the Simpsons quoted in the middle of a pivotal story moment. i saw a FATE called just 'Full Metal Alchemist' which, i would say they don't even try sometimes but that would imply it usually takes effort
i've now stepped fully back into Daily Hell on this game; slowly working to max out my ARR beast tribe tribal reputation (they changed the name recently so as not to draw the ire of the all-powerful Moogles). this is another time i yearn for the ability to new game+ any quest - i had to read quest journal entries before doing the final Sylph story quest because it has been years and i don't know what da hell goin on, but it was funny and cool so i wish i coulda played the other ones again first... i will never just resort to watching videos of someone else doing sidequests because they interfere with my headcanon of "my guy is the true guy of light and all the other guys running around are just NPCs and that's why they never talk to me"
currently working my way through getting a general hang of each dungeon/trial with squadrons or duty support. one thing that's annoying though is not being able to pull many groups of mobs because the NPC healer sucks (i'll complain if it's not a real person) so i can't get any real practice "wall-to-wall" pulling. but still very thankful that i can practice and take the time to learn mechanics, because at one point in a dungeon i straight up led the NPC party the wrong way for a full minute
also in researching mechanics i found out why i got that achievement. apparently a bunch of base game dungeons were overhauled recently? which thank god because i'd forgotten how they used to be and they were bad. woulda been a lot more likely to bail on this tanking journey early on if i had to deal with some of that stuff
