It's tough to be so close to 50 but not actually BE 50. I figured I'd better work on that. Sunday morning I used a combination of roulettes, hunting logs and fates to bridge that gap.
The level 50 quest was suitably wonderful, and goddammit if I didn't feel like a member of the Sultansword afterward. I can't imagine how I'll feel the next time I get a job to 50 — oh wow, looks like I (yawn) saved the world again, and just in time for brunch… The first time means something. I imagine the job quests didn't always grant both an iLevel 50 and iLevel 90 armor set. I'm grateful that they give newbies like me a little head start, especially since I'm not planning on buying Heavensward just yet. Level 50 is the hard cap for me now.
The first roulette dungeon I got was Garuda. I'd done it twice before; the first time was a struggle, the second fairly smooth with just one wipe. This time, though, everyone knew the fight, and it was a perfect run. First try, everyone survived the Reckoning in fine shape, it was over and done with in minutes. Next roulette was Sastasha, and lastly Stone Vigil. This turned out to be the problematic run. Everyone kept dying in the cannon room. Not sure why. I finally guessed it was because the dps and the healer were all camped out next to the cannons. I suggested they only go up to the cannons when they were shooting Isgebind, and we succeeded after that, though I'm not sure that had anything to do with it.
I finally made level 50 finishing the 3rd level gladiator hunting log.
I had a baby shower to attend, so I couldn't really explore much. I did add my new spell, Circle of Scorn, to my taunt macro. It'll be useful for grabbing that initial aggro. I also got an ability that will make me nearly invulnerable for 10 seconds. That might also be useful on large pulls. It has a seven minute cooldown; I'm not sure if I'll remember to use it very often.
Level 50 opened up a couple of PvP scenarios with my grand company, the Immortal Flames. I also got a new PvP roulette to play with. I signed right up. Half an hour later it popped me into a three-way PvP match between the grand companies of Ul'Dah, Gridania and Limsa. Standard capture and hold scenario. Enemy PCs are labeled only with their class, so you have an instant idea of what they can do. I, as a paladin, was largely ignored or ganged up upon. I had no idea what I was doing, but I did appreciate being stunned and kicked off a plateau to my death. That was a pretty slick move 🙂
Doing my first PvP got me another title, Flame Puppy. I found I'd also gotten the Flamelady title for earning over 100K company seals, so…. I'm the Heart of the Party no more. Flame Puppy for me.
Omuro, who'd finished the main story quest and started on the hard dungeons, grabbed me for a hard level dungeon, but newbie me couldn't play those games. He signed us up instead for Dzemael Darkhold. Not really a fan of that dungeon. I fell off a ledge, again, when a toad stomped me. Even though I'd done the dungeon twice before, I barely remembered the encounters, and nobody else in the group seemed to remember the second and third boss fights, either. I kinda had dim memories, and shared them. Second boss, dodge AEs. Third boss, kill the corrupted crystals.
Mostly Omuro just wanted to show me his cool, hard-mode armor. Which was suitably awesome. I defy anyone to prove to me that playing dps is ever hard mode. compared to tanking and healing. I've got my Dragoon job into the 30s, with Archer and Pugilist on their way. When I do dungeons or hests as dps, zero stress. If the tank is new, sometimes I can offtank (Dragoon is great for this), but mostly… after the thrill of tanking, merely doing dps — as vital a job as this is — seems a little boring to me.
Tonight's our story night. I'm looking forward to dealing with the new threat we encountered after defeating Garuda last week!
Gratz on 50!
Hard mode of a dungeon actually just means “scaled for i70 gear on a level 50 job, and it happens to share a name with a prior dungeon but actually is all new” — since you have i90 gear from your job quest due to the expansion, you should be able to handle HM dungeons no problem. You’ll get Poetic tokens from the dungeons which will allow you to buy i120 gear also, so that will end up making your life easier too.
If/when you get Heavensward, the gear initially given to you is HQ crafted i115 gear, so the i120 gear you can get from the Poetics is very comparable (slightly better, obviously) and will see you in good stead to continue on up to 60. Or you can just skip that step and get the i115 stuff from the quests. That works too 😛
Anyway, gratz on 50! Now keep going in the story — you’ve got quite a ways to go yet. And don’t forget to do the Hildebrand side quest series. HILARIOUS!!!!
Poetic stuff… I’m expecting to get new tokens or something now that I’m 50, but probably, inevitably, there will be a quest to open that. I’m getting some poetic stuff from the beast folk quests, but I don’t do those with any sort of regularity.
There is SO MUCH TO DO. Stopping at 50 will give us a chance to appreciate the old content before we head into the new. We get i115 armor from Heavensward? I wonder if that’s the stuff Omuro was sporting… and he was telling me it took him forever to get it. Uh-huh.
Hildebrand, will look that up. Thanks!
Tomes used to be Tomes of Soldiery, which got you i100 gear, and the rarer (and capped to 450 per week) Tomes of Poetics, which can be used to buy i120 gear. With raid-dropped tokens from the Syrcus Tower you can upgrade the Soldiery gear to i100, and with a weekly raid quest awarding a token to you for doing all 3 of the 24-man raids (Labyrinth of the Ancients, Syrcus Tower, and World of Darkness) you can upgrade an i120 piece to i130. Cost for a weapon is 1300 Poetics plus a special token that I think you pick up from the weekly quest, then a 2nd weekly gets you the upgrade item, IIRC. Everything else simply needs “enough” of the tokens. 325 for accessories and belt, 495 for hat, gloves, feet, and 875 for chest/legs. Again.. IIRC. Numbers might be slightly off. The vendor is in Mor Dhona up the hill from the aetheryte, then a touch off to the right.
Soldiery has been removed with the release of HW, though, so now Poetics are all that you get. They’re not capped weekly anymore though you still can’t have more than 2000 at a time. Even so…. you can use them to buy i120 gear and if you do the 24-man raids (which sadly will take a while in the DF now that no one is doing them since their gear has been surpassed by HW — used to be even dps could queue for ST and/or WoD and have less than 10 minutes to wait) then you can also fiish up the weekly quests for the i130 upgrades. Level 58 sees you receiving i145 gear from quests which is a bit better than the i130 blues, but not by a whole lot, so the i130 stuff can easily see you through to level 55-56 if you work to get it.
When you start in to HW, the quests begin to award you with High Quality white colored i115 gear. Since you get War and Magic rewards, but most people only are using 1 job to level, the “extra stuff” is being dumped on the broker, often for fire sale prices, so you might be able to hit up the market board and buy i115 pieces for cheap — assuming that gear isn’t locked behind owning the HW expansion, anyway. If you can get it, it will probably be a lot quicker than doing DF runs for Poetics. I was raiding a lot before HW dropped with an average iLvl of 106 which slowly crept to 116 when HW dropped, so… yeah…. bought stuff as good as former raid gear.
At 60 you start getting “Tomes of Law” which you can trade in for i170 gear, which can be upgraded to i180. This all goes a lot faster than the level 50 Poetics grind — I’m already at i175 for my average, actually, and when I do the daily hard mode roulette it drops me to 50 and syncs my iLvl to 110 and we just own those dungeons hard, so… if you do Poetics or are able to get the i115 stuff from the market board, you’ll find even the hard modes to be quite easy, I think.