When I made my return to XI, I wasn’t sure at what capacity I would be coming back. After all, I have a full time job and its one in where I work extra hours because I both have and want to do so. There is also XIV to consider, which has been made into a weekly event between friends to do leves. So I am here chipping away at getting my BLU, BRD, and WHM to 90, getting Atma, gear, doing missions for friends and for myself, and doing Dynamis for gear and money. Its been a fun ride, especially since my little group has expanded to the people I met and played with on XIV, or have talked to during my short tenure at ffxivblog.com.

I am not even sure where to start concerning my adventures, so I will first start with Tuesday from last week and work my way down the week.

For a few weeks, a friend had been asking me to join her and a few of my other friends in another LS to do Abyssea NMs. At first I said I wanted to wait until I reached 90, then I held off on it for a few other reasons, and then decided to go on a whim just to see how it was going to be. To be honest, I was very worried at first. I think I am a so-so player, and I can be ok at times but… I hadn’t read up on anything concerning Abyssea NMs and knew nothing except for what my friends had told me briefly.

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When I began playing XIV, one of the very first jobs I began playing was THM. I had chosen THM because I was lured in by the damage equal to that of DoW classes. Somewhere along the way, however, I became disgruntled that the spells assigned to THM were primarily debuff spells or spells that didn’t scream “boom!” like a BLM’s nukes from XI. The problem was further compounded when I needed to play as a support role in a party and being able to target everyone was frustrating to no end due to the cone effect. It was the primary reason I had decided to stick with CON as I leveled with my friends, thinking it was the role best suited for support role in a party.

As a CON you have longer timers on Protect and Shell, Cure spells, and of course the coveted circular AoE vs. the cone AoE found as a THM. One of my biggest gripes as a THM was needing to be behind everyone else and making sure that they were in my AoE spell range. This was especially problematic before the November 2010 patch when SP gain was more haphazard and required mages to make a fine balance of nuking and curing in order to gain a decent amount of SP in any party. It was during this time that CON allowed a bit of flexibility that I found hard to achieve as a THM especially in larger party settings. However, now that things are different I am seeing that while CON has great spells lending themselves for great support roles, THM’s cone AoE makes those spells better because of CON’s smaller spell radius.

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Since the new update added new mobs, we’ve had trouble with one little mob that LOVES to follow us around; goats. Being a former player of Final Fantasy XI, I am no stranger to the “friendly” aggressive mobs that love to follow you around. In fact, I often enjoyed having them follow me around because it brought about a bunch of entertainment for me. Flash forward to today and I want to do nothing more than to wipe goats off the face of the Hydaelyn. They are big, bulky, and most certainly AREN’T as cute as Lycopodiums or Sea Creatures.

On the other hand, I have come to also appreciate just what they bring to the battles: more awareness. Now at the point of being able to do r30 leves, I’ve found that being more aware of your surroundings is essential to being successful. This was never as much of a big deal in the r1, r10, and r20 leves because most of the time the areas were much cleaner and the mobs? Most certainly not as much of a pain to fight. r30 is where things get annoying. Having played in mostly the Ul’dah area, I can only attest to what I’ve seen there and that is mobs waltzing in during the heat of the battle, sitting there looking pretty, and then looking at you almost smirking and daring you to do your AoEs skills. Ok, I made the last part up; but is it really that far from the truth!?

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