I’ve caught the gathering bug quite hard these days in FFXIV.
After getting my botanist to level 70 in December I’ve thought long and hard about what I wanted to do in the game. My static seems to have mostly fallen apart so I have no idea if I will be raiding in the new patch. I’m kind of worn out from leveling battle classes after pushing up AST and WHM very fast with the Alliance roulette, beast tribe dailies and just grinding roulettes in general. I’m not really in the mood to level another DPS right now and I despise Scholar as class which leaves me with leveling a tank. Which under normal circumstances would be fine but all my tanks are in the level 50 range and it would mean that I would want to run a lot of Palace of the Dead to maximize my experience gained. All in all I’m just worn out of it all so I wanted to turn my attention elsewhere.
I picked up my miner last week and just ran through a ton of leves and weekly handins to get her to level 70 as soon as I could. I actually don’t mind the whole mindless leve grind aslong as I can see some progress from it. And with the buffs to levequests, and the Stormblood ones being much less painfull than the Heavensward ones, I got to 70 in what felt like the blink of an eye. Ofcourse the handins from both M’naago and Zhloe helped a lot here and me being tired and thus being unable to focus on anything else also helped.

Now I just need to unravel the mystery that is Yellow scrips. I’m not going to aim for an entire set of gear for my Botanist or Miner yet but I do want to get atleast the weapons from Yellow scrips. It seems like I will have to farm collectables to stack up on them and then just spend them. Seems easy in theory but a lot harder in practice. I guess I will have to look up optimal rotations to get the right amount of collectability so I can hand in stuff for 23 scrips a piece, atleast that’s what I’m aiming for. I also want to unlock the Stormblood fokelore books and hopefully later on the Heavensward ones I missed aswell. I’ve already gotten both Fokelore books from Stormblood for my Botanist so now I just need the ones for Miner. I’m not sure what they do exactly nor am I really sure how I can start making money of off this but I will get there eventually.

Another thing I enjoy dearly when gathering is that you get to see great scenery and it offers up ample opportunity to take screenshots like the one I took above. Being a tough Miner staring out at the rock formation in the Steppes. I especially adore the cloud formations in the sky and the slight hint of sunglare in my screenshot. Stuff that I’ve not seen as much on my old PC thanks to the fact that I had to turn down all my settings to even be able to play.
Another thing I found on this new PC with gathering is that I have almost no lag. Normally there’d be some time between actions and I was so used to it taking a long time to hand in levequests that I was quite surprised with how smooth and fast everything goes now.
This has made leveling my Miner a breeze and an enjoyable breeze at that. However even though I’ve leveled Miner and Botanist relatively quick and together the last remaining gathering class had fallen a bit to the wayside.

Fisher is a bit typical in the Gatherers section. I’m only level 33 on it right now but unlike other Gatherers it doesn’t really use GP for instance. I feel like I also have no influence over the actual fish that I catch and whether or not they turn out to be HQ. I guess perception still somehow plays a part here as attribute that influences the catching of HQ fish but it’s still somewhat of a mystery to me. Especially considering that for mooching other fish you first need to catch HQ ones, making the whole mooching thing quite an unpredictable event. I now understand why people can spend hours and hours trying to catch a certain fish, especially if it involves double mooching which sounds really like my biggest nightmare. However I want my “Goddess of the Hand” title so I will have to bite the bullet and level up that Fisher whether I want to or not.
Luckily for me I do enjoy the leveling process itself. I like just going from questhub to questhub and fish up a plethora of fish. I get especially happy when I can get my hands on some HQ fish as I’m doing my quests since it means I can get double XP from the leves. I guess I could also fish up some stuff for my Grand Company but seeing as spamming leves is just super fast I feel like it’s a waste of time to do that.
I’m not really sure how long I can stay hooked on this whole leveling game but I hope long enough for me to get Fisher to level 70 this month aswell. This means I can finally convert/sell all the Gathering gear I kept a hold off for the past few months and ultimately empty out my Armoury chest and retainers a bit more. Because that really is my overarching goal with getting everything to maximum level: get rid of all the crappy low level gear that is now taking up space on my Retainers and in my bags.

I want to end this post witha  screenshot of me fishing in my most beloved zone: Eastern La Noscea. I love the sandy white beaches and the azure blue ocean. It reminds me of holidays, relaxation and fun. If I could book a flight to a location just like that I would be extremely happy. But for now I’ll just have to make do with the location ingame.