I’m back in the saddle with Final Fantasy 14! Back to the lowkey socialization, the focused gaming, the attention-consuming escapism, and free of the need to think about my life and how much it sucks to be me this past week and a half while dealing with biological family problems (and how much it will continue to suck to be me while I’m still embroiled in this stuff for however long it takes). After my time away, I’ve come back at a bit of a loss for what to do next! There’s gear to accumulate, levels to gain, quests to do, and so much more, all of which is very familiar! This is how most patches usually start, with a huge number of quests, the ability to get new, better gear, and at least some confusion on my part about which of the many options I should start with. This time, though, the path is more muddled than ever. Instead of being able to use the resource I’ve been accumulating the whole time, “Tomestones of Poetics” to unlock new gear that’s pretty much the best stuff you can get at that point, I actually have to dig into the mud that is the various other Tomestones and resources from raids to figure out what’s the best gear for me to get right now, so I can do the current content in order to get better gear to prepare me for the harder current content while also getting myself into a position to be able to make or otherwise acquire the next set of gear that will come out with the next patch whenever that happens. It’s a lot and it’s taken me a couple days to figure out, but I think I’ve got it thanks to some incidental advice from the leader of my FC and my own organized nature.

I didn’t crack some secret code or anything, I just looked through what was available, what the minimum gear levels were for the current content, searched the markets for gear costs, and then asked a specific question that got a negative non-answer from my FC leader who I was able to prompt into giving me the information I needed anyway. Which means that, armed with this information, I’ve got my work cut out for me. It doesn’t seem like a lot, but it does mean getting all of my crafting jobs up to level 100 and probably doing quite a bit of grinding. Sure, I could probably buy all the gear, but where’s the fun in that? Better to make it all myself to prove that I can. Nothing quite like walking around in gear that has your name on it since you made it yourself. Gear that will absolutely be made obslete by doing the normal grind and getting gear that way, but gear that will enable me to actually participate competitively in that normal grind stuff until I can get all my jobs set up. The big one, that is my number 1 priority and the only one that really NEEDS to get done is getting myself a set of the best possible crafting gear so I’m ready to craft whatever comes out in the next expansion as soon as it drops. That way, at the very least, I’ll be competitive with whatever’s going on then. And maybe able to make a decent amount of money by selling that stuff immediately for a huge profit.

I could just buy all of this stuff. I’ve been looking over the prices and while it would be a hefty chunk of change, it’s a hefty chunk of change that wouldn’t really make a huge dent in my wallet. I might have just given a friend more than all the gear is worth for doing a photoshoot with my character for their roleplaying profile. I might have written off more than the gear is worth because I don’t expect the friend I lent a bunch of money to so he could buy a house to ever pay it back (and it I don’t even know if he’s even going to play again at this point! He’s been offline for a couple weeks now and stopped responding to my messages). But I’d have bought it all and not make any of it myself. And, like, what’ the point of the game if I’m just going to buy my way past every challenge? Better to figure it out and do the work myself so I know whether or not it’s possible for me to do it again. And if it’s possible for me to do it again, then I know how to help others do it. The biggest hurdle is how much all of this stuff costs in terms of in-game currencies (scrips) and how the easiest way to get all those is to do it slowly over the course of weeks. Instead, I’m going to have to a lot of crafting and gathering specifcally to get scrip to turn into other things. I’m not sure I want to sit down and calculate out how much of each of the four kinds I’ll need, given that it’s probably going to be a huge number and it might be better just to focus on one goal at a time since it’s not like I can even hold that full amount… I can only hold up to four thousand of each time and I’m going to need multiples of that, I’m sure.

There’s ways to get it done, though. If I put my nose to the grindstone and focus, I’m sure I can make it happen. I’ve done it before (in terms of focused leveling and scrip grinding) and I’m sure I’ll do it again. I’ve got the focus and the drive and the immense desire to not think about any part of my real life right now (I mean, since I got my mind back into this HUGE project I’m outlining here, my mood is noticeably better and I don’t feel quite so miserable and heartbroken!), so I’m sure I’ll figure it out by the end of this weekend or next. Won’t take me a huge amount of time now that I’ve got my systems in place and know how to use some of the outside-the-game crafting planning tools. I will freely admit that I might be underestimating this entire project given that I haven’t spent a lot of time crafting the Master Recipe gear in the past (it was easier to just get gear with tomestones and scrip and none of the stuff I’ve seen looked cool enough for me to want), but I expect I know how difficult it will be and can take appropriate measures to work around it. I mean, ultimately, if everything goes wrong and I fuck it up miserably, I can always just go buy the stuff I near from the market and try again with better gear. Replace the high-quality crafting gear I’m using with copies of it that I’ve made myself and then use that to make everything else I might want. It’s a little circuitous, but I’m pretty sure I won’t need to go that far. I’m confident in my ability to solve this particular puzzle and resource challenge somehow. And then I’ll have decent gear I can use to get better gear in the next patch! What fun that will be!