Phase 4: How was you exp? What level did you reach?Follow

Hello all.

How was your experience? Did you get to accomplish all that you planned? What level(s) did you get to?

I had a great time playing. I planned to get to level 15 with ACN but only managed to get to level 10. I had fun running errands in LL while learning the map of the city. I had several FATEs that were very exciting and found the fighting very well paced.

I'm playing on PS3 and had to get used to the most comfortable and efficient control style for the controller. I minimized most of the HUD and everything is still very visible/legible for me on my 42"HDTV.

Only hiccup was trying to join an instanced battle. I think it was a 90000 error.



I'll have to make time to play, but I really look forward to early access and launch.

I figured I ask you how fishing works with Culinary in this game? SE stated fishing won't affect the economy but that confuses me. I'd imagine you use fish in prep for food items.

I reached lvl 17 on THM doing all of the city based quests in Ul'dah, main story quests, THM specific quests, hunting logs, the first 3 or 4 Guildhests (including the tutorial one) and occasional FATEs as I stumbled upon them as I was doing all of those other things. I didn't have to use any of my Guildleve allowances on THM.

I also got CNJ to lvl 12. I basically went from 1 to 9 just from the city based quests in Gridania, hunting logs, rested exp bonus, and a couple of FATEs. I ran out of quests I could do at that point, and 3 Levequests basically got me to 10, at which point several more quests were unlocked.

I probably played around six hours from Friday through Sunday and managed to get Arcanist about 6000 XP short of 18.

Arcanist made the "gathering" (and, to a lesser extent, the "escorting") Leves very easy. Sic Carby on whatever mob was standing in your way, grab the trinkets in the area, and move on to the next. A few thousand XP in less than ninety seconds.

Got a name & appearance change for my 1.0 character. Then started as Arcanist with him. Got through Sastasha and set up for TTD before capping @ 20. Also did the available class quests & hunting log objectives on pugilist. That's really all I could do with that character without wasting XP. And there wasn't anything I just had to get done that couldn't wait for release.

For the roughly 16 hours I got to play friday and saturday until the night it was awesome. The 24 hours I wasnt playing were miserable. I got arcanist up to 18 only

It was fun and I am already going through some serious withdrawal.
I was able to get:
20 Arcanist
15 Thaumaturge
20 Fisher
20 Culinarian
5 Weaver

I wish I ditched cooking and focused on weaving for the materia...=/

20 lancer
15 conjurer
11 archer

I also got up to the ifrit battle quest but didn't see the point in going any further as it would just be wasting exp.

20 cnj,20 btn,15 acn,17 weaving,12 cooking,6 fishing

Edited, Aug 19th 2013 6:05pm by silverhope

Phase 4 only sealed the deal that I really wanted to play this game even more! The 3102 error did hit me, but I understand it is a beta and will not blame them since that is the very purpose of a beta. I only got to level 15, but that was because I read each and every quest and enjoyed my time hunting for achievements and all that. Very enjoyable. Rushing to 20 for each job means you did not read many quests and missed out on lots of possible fun quests. Most are go here, get / kill that and return, but they had some strange story as to why. It was entertaining to see the stories relate. One thing I did not like was selecting my character's voice, but not hearing it in main story quests. My character would open her mouth and the NPC would then start talking leaving me a bit confused.

Wow.

I thought I played a lot and I got my PUG to 20, Goldsmith to 19 and Miner to 12.

I didn't use any leves though. I just did quests on my PUG and grinded Goldsmith and Miner.

There seemed to be a lot more quests, either that or they upped the EXP from them. Getting to 20 was pretty quick.

----

I like crafting but maybe I'll wait until the economy is established and I have some gil to burn. I might just focus on leveling and Miner for now...

I had a legacy character as my main but had to switch to Japanese server for a day.

Japanese server

Archer: 13
Botanist: 16 (99 crow feathers = brutal I made it to 50 and the NA server came back up. Thanks ZAM for the quick notice.)
leatherworker: 5
carpenter: 6

NA Server (Only played one month of legacy.)

Thaumaturge: 23 (started there and 0 leveled up to 15 of the Thaumaturge Guild Story)

Gladiator: 14 (Made it to the level 15 gladiator quest and through the level 15 story quest.)
Pugilist: 4

Miner: 16
Goldsmith: 19
Alchemist: 6

I think I was a 13 miner and a 7 goldsmith when I started working on it again. It amazes me how far I got considering I played pretty hard for a month on version 1.0 and made better progress in 3 days than I did doing 30. I felt like having items in my backpack was a huge advantage, especially crafting shards. Not sure this is true, as no one ever asked for any, and I have a lot of shards left. But I was able to do a lot of crafting without having to go buy extra items. I just grinded it out. Feildcraft leve quests seemed ridiculous! I had made 4 brass rings, two high quality, and got to turn the same leve quest in multiple times for like 3k exp a pop. Plus a decent gil pay out.

Economy thoughts. I started with 8k and stayed even all the way up till about 30 minutes before I quit. At which point I started to gain a bit due to leve quests.

Teleporting is a negligible cost and one should never walk to save money. (This seems contradicted by others in other threads. I never hesitated to use teleport and found the 95 hit was supplanted by the time it saved me. I make more money being out in the field and I didn't die all that often.)

Pros:
highly addictive gameplay.

Cons:
The story cinematics are painfully slow. I can't click through them fast enough. Zero agency in the story; my character is along for the ride. I don't save people, people save me, and then they act like I saved them. Suspect this will change as I level up.

Will I play more?
i don't know. It depends if my friend buys it. On the Jp server we stuck together for the first 10 levels of archer, and then split off a bit. On the Na server we never ran into each other. She loved the hunting logs. I think that will be fun to quest together.

When I played 1.0 it was a ghost town. I saw no one. I was the lone person moving through Gridania. 1-15 and then I went to Limsa, another ghost town, even the npcs there seemed like ghosts. There were people in Ul-Dahl but it wasn't home. Then they patched stuff and when I came back all my gear was changed, all my spells were different, and now... now the desert is my home?

If/when I come back I will try and hook up with the legacy zam linkshell.

Edited, Aug 19th 2013 8:06pm by Squander

Only played about 20 hours :(
CNJ-20
ACN-15
Bot-14
Fishing-12