Miscellaneous

So, the linkshell I am in, Luna Veneris, is pretty awesome. People help each other out a lot. There are a lot of crafters as well as adventurers and gatherers in the linkshell and everyone seems to do their best to give mats to crafters, craft gear for adventurers, farm and help with leve quests.
I got a new kitchen skillet today which is being made by Sakari on this screenshot. The red gear I am wearing is gathering gear made by Sanjo, the pickaxe was made by Pikarya and I am wearing jewelry most of which is made by Red ;)  In turn, I pass a lot of shards and crystals as well as mats to my linkshell mates and it all works out really well.

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We had an event on Sunday, a crafting fair. Everyone gathers together, brings the mats for items they need and pass stuff to people who need it. Also, repairs are getitng done as well. This is supposed to be happening twice a week, and I was enjoying myself.

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I did my first party grinding... At first I was the only mage, so designated healer. It was... boring but efficient. There is nothing left from the awesome group play FFXI had. This is mindless thrashing of mobs and your role as a healer is spam aoe heal when ever someone takes damage, hoping to get skillpoints from it.
I believe the disciples of Magic got screwed here, as usually I would get 200 SP tops (more like 150, if unlucky less than 100) for a crab while the fighters got more than 300 sometimes. However this of course still is way more efficient than grinding solo. I went from 17 to 19 in... 2-3 hours, i don't remember. Lateron more people arrived, and also other groups so the sp rate went down a bit.
Also, they really need to fix some stuff. I sometimes get stuck in the Battle Regimen (which in itself doesn't work) which is a different battle mode where, in theory, the party members can do abilities in order to put debuffs on the mob (if I understand it correctly). I don#t know how I get in the mode, as I don't hit the shortkey for it, and, worse, I can't get out of it anymore without completely disengaging from fighting.
Also, my AoE spells sometimes don't hit everyone in the group, even though they were near. Which is kind of annoying. But overall I'm rather content with the outcome of that grinding. It is boring, yes, but if I am ever in the mood of doing something where I don't have to think, while still proceeding in the game, that's the thing to do.

Thoughts on Content

So, my THM and my BTN are both 16. I did the level 15 story quest, which is just awesome. Other than that I spend my time either doing THM leves and grinding a bit or harvesting on my BTN. I do that cycling between the three cities.

The leves are... boring. They are always the same for each camp. I think there is a pool of 5 or 6 leves for each camp, of which you get 3 with random rewards. All the DoW and DoM leves consist of running off, killing the leve target(s) , turning in the leve.
They do get a little harder, for example at the second camp the mobs start running away spawning friends who you then have to kill as well, and at the third camps I noticed that some leves consist of mobs in "disguise" with a bunch of real mobs there as well and your task is to find the disguised mob and kill it.
Generally all the same though. The rewards are usually gil and if you are lucky a crafting material and if you are VERY lucky some kind of gear, but that's rather rare.
At the 3rd camp the reward also might be so-called "Guildmarks" from which you can buy new abilities for your class at the guild.

The constant damaged gear (buggy too, you get the red gear damage sign but all of your equipment is repaired...), then you can either repair it at the NPC , but only to 75% or you have to bug someone to repair it (but then to 100%) or you put it up in your bazaar asking for repair and if you are lucky, someone will do it for the amount of gil you offer.
To me, this is just annoying, and they could implement better means to take out gil from the economy. For example implementing chocobos and airships and make them (as wlel as the ferry) cost a fee. You get gil easily in this game, I'm close to 500k now and I DID buy equipment for 40-50k occasionally. And I don't even play much.

Anyway, back to the point. There really isn't much to do besides grinding (be it with leves or not), and I conclude crafting and harvesting into grinding as well as you keep doing the same thing over and over again. Which is a little sad, especially considering that this is a Final Fantasy. While the story, like I said, is awesome, you of course don't always do that as the storyline only continues at predefined level intervals. (0,10,15,20...) I'm not sure if any story is implemented after level 20, actually.

The game has been getting pretty bad reviews and while I still think that after some time, this weill become an awesome game, I start to agree with those who say that SE should have waited another 6 months before bringing out this game. It's just not ready.

Exploring

 So, I felt like exploring the two remaining zones, Coerthas and Mor'Dhona. Again, by night at first - somehow I never manage to travel to new places by day. Coerthas is a huge foresty/stony landscape which I find okay, but not that amazing. The music was quite nice though. Also I found a couple of Grade 4 Botanist spots. On this screenie you can see an airship beside my character's head. Those fly around all the time, but we cannot actually use them as of yet. In Coerthas is also the city Ishgard (sp), but I didn't see that one as I only found out after I had left already. It's a real bummer that the zones are so huge and we don't have chocobos. Running everywhere is not fun, really. I got to one camp in each Coerthas and Mor Dhona though so now, if I have to, I can teleport to each zone of the current game.

A pond with fun dragons in it, also in Coerthas.

This is Mor Dhona. There is this cool structure with the dragon in the middle (I believe it's the same dragon as in the opening video) but you can't get there yet. The rest of the zone is horribly uninteresting.

More dragon thingies.

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Enough of exploring. As I have mentioned I am in a linkshell now. It is very social with a good amount of crafters and adventurers and I constantly give away mats and shards/crystals to the crafters that I get from fighting and harvesting. In turn, crafters give away gear for cheap or even nothing and in this screenshot our

 goldsmith, Red Mage, made Silver Chokers for everyone. Pretty much everyone online gathered around him to get one, hehe. Thanks again Red.

On a side note, I tried to upgrade my weapon but I couldn't get the mats from the stupid market wards ~.~... I want a search function so bad...

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Just because I haven't posted a screenie during a battle yet, I put this here. :P

Story

I hit THM 15 and therefore got the next story line quest. Here Final Fantasy stands to its name. The story (Limsa Lominsa) is nice. I'm not going to put spoilers here, just post some screenshots.
I was very surprised and happy to see that they had rendered cutscenes with voice not only at the beginning of the game! I got stuck in a sea fight :o!
I do regret though to have started in LL because I like the Gridania story better. If I had started in Gridania I would have missed the LL story completely though and I didn't want that.
Anyhow, I'll just post some of those awesome screenies I took. :)

Group play

It has been about a week and I have several topics I want to write about. I will split this in three posts though, so the titles fit.

First, I want to talk about group play.

This is how the screen looks like when in a group of 6. While it looks tidy and doesn't have unnecessary elements taking away space like for example character portraits, its functions are rather... non existant. First, you can't target your party members via the F-keys. Nor does it seem to work to klick their names on the menu (however I only tried this once and I might have mis clicked...). You have to either tab through all the characters on the screen until you reach the person you want or click the character model directly.
Both of which is PRETTY bad if you want to heal someone who is about to die. Basically if you are healer, you need to stay locked on the tank and do nothing else. That is freaking boring, I imagine. I really do not understand why they took away the great group gameplay form FF11. That was simple and awesome. This is stupid and complicated and just a mess.
I didn't even address the bugs. Sometimes you can't target your party members. They show as 0 HP and 0 MP and don't have their character names displayed above their heads and you just simply cannot target them. Then, when you are in a group of more than 2, not everyone will gain skill points from attacking the mob! Isn't that great?
That basically means that groups bigger than 3 are stupid and unefficient. At 3 you can have one healer who heals and ONLY heals (how interesting, isn't it?) and the other 2 can hit the mob (probably tank and DD).
Ugh, this makes me rather mad, as you can probably tell.
However, if you do not want any EP but rather the reward of a quest or something the group play can be fun especially because of the monster design. There aren't any innovating things though. Just mobs with AOE or cone attacks so you have to be positioned correctly and stuff, but this really isn't anything new. Just fun as it always has been.

Sorry for the rant. But this is just such a mess. I also don't really understand people who actually support this and think it's okay like this. I like the game overall but after the first few awesome days are over I start to see the bad parts of the game. And especially group play is so important.I guess there is nothing we can do but wait for SE to fix this.