First days of Retail - 1 week early

So, I got a Collector's Edition of FFXIV and therefore got to play a week earlier than those "only" getting the Standard Edition.

I kept the name Naurha Mups, and rolled on Besaid. I found a linkshell with a lot of nice people in it (Luna Veneris) which is BIG atm with a lot of people from all over the world.

Okay, so what's different from the Beta?

• menu lag is reduced
• you can scroll the inventory
• you get more alerts when you are doing something wrong. E.g you can't switch your abilities when in fighting mode. In OB the game wouldn't tell you that. Now it shows a message in the chat.
• less reward from the first few quests
• less time in between leves
• less gear rewards from leves
• more people --> flooded starting zones. Which is as expected, I guess it will get worse next week when the SE comes out. 
• probably more I forgot right now

Okay well. I started out in Limsa Lominsa this time, because I played both Gridania and Ul'Dah during Beta and I wanted to know the LL story. This is also where I was able to make this awesome screenshot:

I guess there will be a Musketeer class sometime in the future. But at this time, the NPC took the weapon away from me again =(.

I tried out Botanist for the first time. And, I love it. You can either harvest grass strips, or log trees, the latter is wrapped into a nice little mini game, basically hot and cold. I somehow just love the whole concept in FFXIV where you have to work to get stuff. To log and get wood, in other games you just have to right click the tree while having the axe in the inventory. Here you a) have to be a botanist to do so and b) complete the minigame to successfully log. During the whole time you play you just have the feeling to achieve something, to do something that has an effect and that is just totally awesome.

You basically see this little glowing orb on the map and there you can harvest. Another awesome thing is that these points are shared. You can have a lot of botanists harvesting or logging the same grasspatch  / tree. Your tree can't be stolen by others. Okay, that may be a little unrealistic, because especially in the starting areas you can have like 8 people hacking on a tree, but I prefer this over not being able to log at all. 

In this lower picture you see the minigame. The orange pointer goes up and down and you stop it at one point and it tells you how close you are to success. You have about 3-4 trys, during which you usually get closer and closer based on the messages the game gives you. 

You can log one tree or grass patch up to 6 times!

I grouped up with 2 people from the linkshell to do leves. It was the first time I did that and I have to say it was pretty awesome. We were 2 Conjurers and 1 Thaumaturge (me) and we pretty much just mana burned the mob groups. The feared Dodo's stood no chance against so much magic power! :D Doing leves is very lucrative. Each of us made about 70k gil while having a lot of fun.

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Just a very pretty sight of Ul'Dah by night, I think.

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Oh, this is something I want to talk about. Do you see the earring on the blond Lalafell and the Choker around my neck? In this game, you see the accessoiries you equip! And it isn't just a ring or whatever, this guy had "Fang Earrings" equipped. All the models of the deifferent accessoiries seem implemented. So much love in detail in this game.



So I'm still loving it. I just hope they implement some kind of search function in the market wards soon. You can't really trade well, because of this. So far I gave stuff to guild members or even NPCd stuff because it's just so annoying to trade without auction house or search function.