i'm all in on this "leveling every job" thing i guess. i'm excited to take another year-long break from this game then come back remembering how to play none of them. went for Arcanist next because i want to summon little guys and the more creatures following me around the better. along with my chocobo and my owl this makes three. But i need more

hate having to briefly flash every new guildmaster when i change classes for the first time

hitting "recommended gear" on a new class is always exciting. what ridiculous mishmash of leftover gear will i be starting off with. i will say i look perfectly ready to study some book's and cast some spell's in the sentai suit i got from the summer event the other day

this is a funny class because it's all about being a smart bookguy, and all the guild exposition is about being learned as hell but my "lessons" amount to going out and killing three boars with my big magic book and the creature that jumps out of it. i'm the Warrior of Light i'm immediately an expert at everything, and i'm such an expert at being smart that i don't even have to study anything. i hardly even had to study my rotation it's pretty simple so far

Arcanist is a weird exception in this game because it splits into two jobs. i totally forgot that years ago it wasn't just "Class eventually becomes Job which is just Bigger Class", progression was actually less linear than that. explains why i'm randomly level 15 in Pugilist; that used to be a requirement for becoming a Bard as opposed to just getting Archer to 30. what's still weird is that the two jobs Arcanist can become, Summoner and Scholar, share their level despite being very different. Summoner is in fact just Bigger Arcanist but then Scholar is a healer with totally different abilities? also again, very funny that i became so smart from killing three boars that i leveled up enough to become a "scholar" within half a day

i'm playing Summoner and Scholar pretty evenly. i thought i would learn more toward Summoner because i get to summon summons - like Final Fantasy summons (but small) - whereas Scholar summons a fairy. that seemed like an easy choice. but there's apparently an option to glamour any kind of summon to look like any other summon so that's cool. Scholar rules because as a healer i instantly get matched in dungeon queues and i hardly even have to heal during low-level dungeons, my fairy automatically heals people over time which most of the time is enough. the perfect healer class

actually right after writing that i totally screwed up during a dungeon but still got every commendation. perfect healer class no sweat <--- this is a lie i just healed through Aurum Vale for the first time and i am very much sweat. this game loves to prank me by having toggles that are crucial to my role sneakily untoggled whenever i'm synced down for a dungeon or i die. have had someone else remind me more than once so far to take my fairy out. really just feels like a funny joke this game plays on me

hit level 50 on two jobs today wow [is hoping people forgot when i wrote earlier that Scholar and Summoner share a level]. neither of the job stories were as interesting as the base Arcanist story, they were both pretty nothing up until the end. and why is the questline reward gear always so bad

just graduated from killing three boars university

summoned a traffic cone onto my forehead

and this is why i'm trying to play through this game as "in-order" as i can. here i am doing the Dragoon job questline, meeting one of the major Heavensward characters in his very pre-Heavensward state. it's real jarring to come back to early quests set when i am a mere baby of light and nobody knows me. i guess it's also weird that with a bow i've killed gods but i take up a lance and suddenly i have trouble killing ladybugs. but video game logic whatever

the last two jobs i leveled were a tank and a healer, and how i have not missed DPS queues. dungeons were real good for leveling those jobs because i was the big sexy role everyone wanted in their party, but now i'm back to being disposable. literally i have frequent mouse and keyboard issues that make me have to stop dead in my tracks for a full minute during dungeons, but everyone just runs ahead away from me because i'm not important and my lance smells so bad. "sorry keyboard acted up" i say, "no problem ^^" they say, because it is no problem!! anyway i read about Palace of the Dead being good for leveling so i guessed it was time to finally dive into that again

Palace of the Dead is a roguelike dungeon which i either inexplicably never played much of, or i did and just never made it far because it's hard and i'm bad. either way i hadn't seemed to have made much progress, and when people talked about it being good for leveling they're definitely not talking about the lower baby floors. it's certainly not faster than running dungeons right now, but it is certainly more fun. except for the hidden traps which are probably the reason i never made it far

cool i guess i'll just wait here in toadmode for 20 seconds

don't do that

this game is so rigid that i'm sure there's a way to figure out the locations of hidden traps and treasure. and there better be because to find hidden treasure i'm supposed to stand still for a few seconds in a random spot to check if there's any on that spot, which i did somehow manage to do accidentally, but there's an achievement for doing that one hundred times. then again there's also an achievement for finding them normally 20,000 times which i did maybe 3 or 4 in an hour, so the achievements for this place could just generally be insane world

i like the old-school FF UI aesthetic here :) do NOT tell Square but years ago i installed a mod to try to make the whole UI more like that (before they added it as an option (and the option is bad)). actually i like that add-ons straight up are not allowed in this game, so i never feel pressured to have to use them and turn my UI into a body horror hellscape. i have heard the horror stories from WoW raiders