Light Party

Well my recent push to get some friends in FFXIV is bearing fruit.  And I must say, when you're getting newbies by the bucket full and you're the only mid level crafter - damn does it keep you hopping.  Since these guys are experienced MMO players, getting used to the mechanics just involves a lot of bitching that FFXIV does not follow current conventions (yea, we know, we know).

From the point of view of a crafter, the upcoming simplification of crafting as per the dev blog over in lodestone is a little disappointing.  My inventory and my ability to supply my fellow linkshell friends will thank them but as for the game mechanics - I think they are going a little too far.  But that's me, I like a complicated system.  We'll see if the materia system adds enough to compensate for the loss of complexity.

In the meanwhile, we were enough last night to have an entire light party together for the first time.  And even with a level discrepancy of level 1 to level 21 we got things rolling.  After a bit of "bash the star marmots" to test things out and get the rank newbie familiar with the controls, I took charge and lead the group to that oblong zone right before camp Tranquil.  As a level 21 PUG I have no problem soloing things like the Megalocrabs so I figured so long as:

a) I grab aggro first
b) Nobody is stupid enough to use area attacks

Keeping the party alive would be a cinch.  So we started off with a rank 21 PUG, rank 3 Archer, Rank 9 Marauder and a Rank 13 Conjurer.  Needless to say the Rank 13 Conjurer was the keystone in this arrangement.  He permitted me to concentrate on unloading special moves to guarantee I kept aggro.  Sure enough this worked very well.  And except for two Marauder deaths (thanks to some badly timed area attack moves - "but it spawned right after I fired the attack").  By the end of the evening I had some progress towards rank 22, the Archer was rank 11, the Marauder was like 13 or so and the Conjurer almost broke into 16.

We're going to need to equip these boys now (damn going to have to go Cactuar hunting and that's dangerous).