Does Not Obey the Laws of Physics

So, crafting on the free trial is a PITA. Mostly because you have to gather all the items yourself and level all the craft jobs simultaneously, since crafting higher level stuff requires items from other jobs. On a paid account, you can just buy the materials off other players, but for a free account with no way to trade, you're stuck crafting everything yourself.

I'm far from completing the thing, but here are some quick tips:

• You can unlock Ixali tribe quests once you hit MSQ level 41. Ixali tribe quests is a crafting quest and gives a ton of XP. Use the daily reset to level up your jobs really fast.

• There are 8 crafts (disciples of the hand aka DoH) and 3 gather (disciples of the land aka DoL) jobs. Of the DoH jobs, cooking is the only one that doesn't seem to be integrated with the other jobs, i.e. cooked things aren't used to craft other materials in the other seven jobs. Of the DoL jobs, fishing doesn't seem to be involved with anything. So I recommend leaving out fishing and cooking for later.

• Definitely level crafts and gathering simultaneously. Make/collect a little extra when turning in stuff for job quests, because often the item required to turn in on one job is an ingredient needed for another job's request, too. Keeping all the jobs at about the same level means not having to wait to play catch up when trying to collect/craft the quest items.

• On a free account, it's best to take things sloooooow and keep the inventory manageable. Save most of your inventory space for materia, not craft material that you can farm later.

• At around level 20-ish (I think it's more like 17), you'll start unlocking materia melding. You need so many pieces of materia for the level 20 job quests. Again, as a free player, the only way to get materia is to extract it yourself from equipment, so keep all your materia on hand.

• At craft level 30, you can unlock desynth. Here's a desynthesis guide. Point is, this is where a lot of gil will get used up. Since you can't spend gil on trade, time to buy up stuff from NPCs and desynth away. (I haven't actually gotten into this yet. I'm still working on getting my crafts up to snuff.)

• White Mage's Holy is a really quick way to farm large groups of low level monsters. Set chocobo to attack, cast holy in a group of monsters, watch inventory fill up. This is because Holy has a huge range and uses the player as the center of the AoE. I haven't tested it yet, but I think it's actually faster than DPS classes, which has higher single target damage, but slightly smaller range. When the monster is more spread out, however, Bard is much faster because it can just sit in one place and tab-target forever.

Anyway, personally, I don't think it's nearly as fun to follow a guide and speed through the crafting stuff. I mean, yeah, I'm leveling up crafting because I want to be able to craft some glamour items, but at the same time, crafting itself is a fun little puzzle and a nice distraction from all the combat.

So, I was trolling around to see some people in the GW2 community (and content creators) bemoaning that GW2 isn't getting a fair shake and that it's an under rated MMO and it deserves to be more popular. But...does it?

I think the GW2 community is truly confused why FFXIV, something they deem to be a far inferior MMO (subscription fee, simple mechanics, tab-target combat system, slow pacing), has become the WoW killer. Many MMO had tried to carve out their niche in the market, but only FFXIV managed to topple the giant. And all these WoW evacuees, for some reason seem to refuse to come to their beloved GW2 and fled to FFXIV instead. Why? How is this a thing? And how does FFXIV go from being a complete mess of an MMO with a launch so bad that they had to shut down the servers and start from scratch to becoming the only WoW killer in the MMO genre?

No, it's not because of the filthy casuals, are you kidding me. We're talking about how a subscription MMO killed another subscription MMO. It has nothing to do with casuals.

( Let's get down to business and defeat the ... orcs? )

Finally, I think GW2 needs to reconsider its "free" account. Part of the reason FFXIV is able to grow so big is because it's so generous with free account limitations. Compare the two side by side:

Characters: GW2 - 2; FFXIV - 8
Map content: GW2 - base game; FFXIV - base game + first expansion
Bags: GW2 - 3 + bank NPC (1 tab); FFXIV - 4 + Chocobo saddlebag (2 tabs)
Classes: GW2 - 8; FFXIV - 13

I get that GW2 free trial has less stuff because the paid GW2 account also starts off with less free stuff. But that just exasperates the problem. Paid accounts should have always started with 8 character slots instead of 5. Every expansion purchase should have given veteran players an extra character slot (compared to new comers). Or at least add a new bank tab for vets who have stuck with the game for longer to help retain older players.

Instead, GW2 has taken the clear and obvious route of "If you don't pay, we don't want you." For a "buy once play forever" game, that's pretty depressing. At least FFXIV never pretends like they were going to let you play indefinitely without paying, and yet plenty of people have logged thousands of hours into the free trial. Every time, FFXIV met and went beyond the player base's expectations. Meanwhile, GW2 has let the player base down again and again.

And the toxic protectiveness of GW2 players isn't helping. Anyone who dares to say a bad thing about their game will get told that they should be thankful they can play at all and that the community doesn't need this negativity. Well...guess what? It might be that your game isn't retaining players because it's not fun and the devs aren't responding. If you keep telling people to be satisfied with what they have or GTFO...then you're going to keep losing players.

So, FF14 free trial is quite entertaining and engaging. Definitely worth a whirl.

At this point, I've leveled Paladin and White Mage to level 50. I'm working on leveling the Bard, but so far, it's been...less than satisfactory. Probably because I didn't have the ease of using duty roulette bonuses to up up up my levels like crazy.

Thus, new thoughts!

( Tips and Tricks - as you level more jobs without MSQ's insane amount of experience. )

Oh boy, that was a long entry. It's super hot right now, so yeah, that's that.

I have finally unlocked Chief Flame Sergeant rank in my grand company and now have access to as many glamour prisms as I can afford with company seals! It required way too many runs through dungeons that I hate, but I did it. Somehow, I did it. It was a bit traumatizing grinding it so fast (and my muscles are definitely sore from running all those dungeons), but here are my feelings now that I've spent the better part of a day messing around with looks (even though I have very limited glamour items at the moment).

Glamour Prisms Part 1:

Glamour Prisms are consumable items needed to change the look of your equipment (armor, weapons, accessories). I'll go into detail on usage later, but for now, know that you will be using tons of these if you mess around with looks, so you want easy access as much as possible. The easiest access is to buy it from the grand company officer for 200 seals a pop, and that leads me to...

Grand Company

As I've mentioned before, Grand Company is probably the preferred way of getting glamour prisms. It's not without it's own grind, but it's still significantly faster than grinding your crafting jobs to 30. (Note: These are free account thoughts, so the lack of access to the auction house makes crafting a PITA.) Technically, you can craft glamour prisms at level 15, but one of the materials needed to craft the prism is a level 30 recipe, which you can't buy off of the auction house as a free player, so you'll need to get to level 30 to craft your own material, and that's just...way, way too long to be waiting on glamours.

( So, here's the fastest way to get yourself easy access to glamour prisms. )

Glamour Prisms Part 2:

OK, so you've put in the work and you ground up your ranks and you bought a stack of glamour prisms. Now what?

First: consult the glamour guide.

Here's the TL;DR. There's two ways to consume glamour prisms:

1. Change one piece of gear to look like another piece of gear and consume one prism.

2. Store a piece of gear in the dresser and consume one prism.

You're probably wondering why you'll ever need to change one piece of gear when there's the glamour plate system. That's because a) the dresser only contains 400 pieces and b) the glamour plates can only be used in cities. If you're trying to change some stuff on the fly, you'll have to consume prisms to do it.

NOTE: You need two pieces of gear for this to work. So if you like the looks of a piece of gear, you'll need to carry it in your inventory unless you stored it away in the dresser.

Which brings me to...

The Dresser and Glamour Plates

Constantly carrying two sets of gear (one to wear and one for looks) is pretty obnoxious. So in comes the dresser and glamour plates system. It costs 1 glamour prism to store a piece of gear in a dresser. Once stored, the look/skin can be assigned to glamour plates which can be reused infinitely.

So about this Glamour Plate thing:

( This is getting long, so another cut )

Dyes:

Oh man, dyes. Dyes confuses so many people. In short, you can directly dye the item or you can dye the plate. Dyeing an item is permanent. Dyeing a plate is temporary. Also, some stuff can't be dyed. Because...I don't know why, this game has weird limitations. Anyhoo, let's get going.

To dye or not to dye

As a general rule of thumb, if something is a dungeon drop or special gear (green, blue, pink), it can't be dyed. If the item is regular gear (white), it can be dyed. In game, the dye-ability of a piece of gear is indicated by a little circle in the upper right hand corner of the item icon. If there's a dot, that indicates it can be dyed. If there isn't anything there, then you can't dye the gear.

Dye the item or the plate?

This is the thing that trips people up. When you dye the item, that item will be that color. I.e., if you dyed the boots black, they will always be black when projecting the item with a glamour prism and they will be black by default when added to a glamour plate.

When you dye the plate, that's the color that's projected only for that plate. I.e., if you put the black boots from the previous example into the dresser and added it to a glamour plate, then dyed the boots pink in the plate editor and projected the plate, then the boots will appear pink. When you add those same boots to a second plate, they will turn back to being black again until you dye the second plate another color.

So, the best way to think of this is: dyed item is permanent (until you apply another dye), dyed plate temporary (and the color is lost if you ever remove the item from the plate).

Why do this?

There's rare dye and there's rare armor. Sometimes, you want to put the rare dye and rare armor together. Other times, you want cheap dye on rare armor or test out rare dye on cheap armor.

So it's advised to test rare dyes in the glamour plate editor to make sure that it's something you'll want. Discard the change so you get the dyes back. Then apply the rare dye to the item itself (via inventory window) so that it will project the rare dye by default. Then, if you ever want to change the color to a cheaper dye, you can always use the plate to apply a cheap dye, thus preserving the rare dye base color in case you ever want to switch back to the rarer color. (As long as you never remove the item from the plate it's attached to, the color won't change when you project that plate. So if you did end up using a rare dye on the plate...just make sure the leave the item in the plate to preserve the dye. You have 20 plates, so hopefully that's enough.)

Or perhaps you want to use the same rare piece of armor with two different colors. You can use the same piece in two glamour plates and dye the plates different colors. This way you won't have to get a second piece of armor just because you want to switch colors or constantly buy new dyes as you swap between two colors.

Thus ends the every long glamour summary. Now, time to go farm some more items to throw in my dresser. 😆

So, with patch 6.1, FF14 (the MMO) has extended its free trial indefinitely and level capped at level 60 (currently max level is 90 I believe). Level 60 gets you through all of base game, A Realm Reborn (level 50), and the first expansion, Heavensward (Level 60). For a full list of all the restrictions, check out Trials of Final Fantasy's guide.

The short version is: A few of the later classes are unavailable (like the very popular gunbreaker — no Squall cosplay for you), no access to auction house, chats, mail, or PvPs. No housing (although you can ask a paying player to make you a tenant and get access to housing stuff that way), no guild (called Free Company), and no way to make a party (although you can join other people's party if they invite you).

Essentially, all the end game stuff is locked out. But the journey is still quite fun, even as a single player game. (Also, just look at the fashion in this game. So much pretty. This is the ultimate dress up MMO.)

( So if you wanna try out the game, some super beginner tips )

And that's it. There's easily over a thousand hours of content if you plan to bring every job (combat/crafting/gathering) to level 60. So far, I'm enjoying the the free game. We'll see if I still like it once I start getting closer to end game or if I move on to something different.