This is a departure from recent sessions. I’ll return to the Heavensward questline next session.
A while back, I decided that I would stop posting my individual job quests as I played them. It felt too disconnected to post a story fragment every few sessions, too easy to lose track of the overall storyline. I wanted to try only posting the full session after I completed the job.
FFXIV job quests generally span around seven quests. The first set comes from 1-30 every five levels, then 30-50 every five, then 50-60 every two levels. Presumably that continues from 60-70 every two levels, but I’m not there yet so that’s just a guess.
I’ve been working on my conjurer for the past couple of months. I just tonight hit level 30 and completed the final conjurer job quest, a storyline that spans level 1-30.
Here’s my experience as conjurer.
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Way of the Conjurer
I’m nervous. I’ve played MMOs for about 15 years without ever healing; just DPS. (Also never tanked, but I’ll deal with that later.) The pressure seems intense.
Time to confront that! I have great friends to support me, one of whom is an amazing healer. I’m starting a conjurer, which turns into white mage.
-The journey starts in Gridania. Conjurers are nature-based healers. They started out as communicators with local forest elementals, learning healing and purification.
-E-Sumi-Yan is the leader. I LOVE his character design.
Brother E-Sumi-Yan.
-The standard kill quests feel insufficient at times like these. “We are holy protectors of nature. For your first quest, go kill ladybugs and squirrels!”
-At least E-Sumi-Yan addresses this. I’m carrying out the forest’s will in a larger sense. An overabundance of creatures came to the forest nearby after the Calamity, so killing squirrels helps restore balance. Like forest rangers who help cull a foreign pest.
-On top of cures, I have nature-based damaging spells – Aero and Stone. Stone is me chucking a stone at the enemy rather than petrifying them.
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Trial by Earth
-The first element to learn about is earth. I go learn from Healer Nolanel, an earth-specialist conjurer.
-He sends me to heal a corrupted patch of soil. It sounds like the conjurer storyline will be similar to some early crystal-based storylines. Like when I had to go save the rotting earth from Lich in FFI.
-When I return, I meet a fellow student: Sylphie.
“Why should I bother learning from nature? I can conjure already.”
She throws off potential-Sith vibes. She’s got raw healing power but doesn’t want to learn from the land.
[Later edit: I first thought this might be an FFVIII reference. I no longer think so. Nothing in her storyline or personality seems to call back to Selphie.]
-The other conjurer guildmasters are similarly frustrated with Sylphie. Sounds like I’ll end up as either her rival or mentor. Probably a bit of each.
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Trial by Wind
-Hearer Wulfiue is my next tutor, a young wind specialist.
-I investigate some aberrant bee behavior nearby.
“Still your mind and reach out with your senses. Can you feel it? The path of the wind veers from its natural course, sweeping hapless creatures along in its wake.”
-Wulfiue and I join up and together take down the corrupting wind spirit.
-There’s a storyline continued from the earth trial: something is corrupting nature.
-I check in with E-Sumi-Yan at the end. He’s happy with my progress, but Sylphie is doing her own thing.
SYLPHIE: “They made you study wind? Why bother?”
-Sylphie’s mother apparently never needed to “embrace nature” to heal. Sylphie’s following that path.
She’s started experimenting on her own. She learned to cast “Raise.” And E-Sumi-Yan is PISSED. I don’t blame him. She’s dabbling in frigging RESURRECTION without any guidance or respect for conjurer/natural principles.
It’s the last straw. He kicks her out of the conjurer’s guild.
-So her mom really was a healer that could JUST heal, never use nature’s power. No Stone, no Aero, etc. She healed without being a real conjurer. But even she couldn’t use Raise.
I’ll bet Sylphie’s powers are related to the rising corruption in nature.
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Trial by Water
-An entity is corrupting a tree’s life force, and I have to use the purity of water to heal the corruption.
-Joacin is the water conjurer. I love the conjurer aesthetic.
They have branches with leaves and witchy costumes.
-This lesson focuses on balance, as with so many others.
-This is also my first chance to really be a healer. After I save the tree, a wild antelope stampede hurts a number of soulders.
-Sylphie is here. She uses her raise spell. It doesn’t go well – it doesn’t seem to work.
It’s worse than that. All her spellcasting seems to have gone.
SYLPHIE: “[The guildmaster] said I was repeating my mother’s mistakes. The same thing happened to her – losing her magic, I mean. And then she… am I going to die?“
-I return to the guild hall. E-Sumi-Yan clarifies the problem. She didn’t listen to the elements, and now when she heals, she draws not from the elements but from her own life force.
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Hall of the Novice
-I hit level 15, and the first dungeon opened up to me. I’m nervous about healing. Thankfully, FFXIV has a wonderful tool called “Hall of the Novice” (HotN).
HotN is a solo instance that teaches me to heal in a group. It provides increasingly challenging scenarios to heal in with NPC party members. I did it for the DPS role, which was easy and natural for me. Didn’t pay much attention.
Healer? I’m definitely paying attention.
-Completed it. This was a low-pressure way to get me accustomed to the basics.
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Sylphie’s Trials
-Sylphie’s near-death experience made her reconsider listening to the elements. It’s my job to help her.
-We start out by revisiting my personal trials. The trial of earth, to start. Maybe she can see how much ass I kick and be inspired to do the same?
-We take out a corrupted earth sprite together, then a corrupted wind sprite. Seeing nature’s power takes her by surprise.
SYLPHIE: “The wind blew straight threw me! It felt both gentle and sharp at the same time. I-I can’t explain it...”
She’s starting to feel the balance in earth, wind, and water. It’s a revelation for her.
-We return to E-Sumi-Yan together. Sylphie is unsure why her mother was so against listening to nature. It sounds like E-Sumi-Yan knows why but won’t say.
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Like Mother, Like Daughter
-The upswing was short-lived. Sylphie is feeling in crisis. She fled the guild. If you’ll forgive a brief conjurer pun, she’s in the wind.
-She was sighted in the Gridania woods, in a section especially filled with this elemental corruption/blight.
-Her mother called that region home. Uh-oh. Maybe her mother exists in some form still as the source of this corruption.
-Sylphie is here at this outpost. She discovered her mother’s old journal:
“There’s an entry that explains how nature became furious when conjurers use their art; how there are always more people wounded in battles when ‘mortals abuse the power that is not theirs to take.’”
Her mother was afraid that if she drew on nature, she’d make it angry. Sylphie is backing off of her “listening to nature” progress for the same reason. She also thinks that us using conjury is what’s enraging these elementals. (I doubt it.)
-We start a battle against corrupted elementals. Sylphie gets more and more freaked out at the “rage of nature,” until some uncorrupted elementals start helping us out!
She begins to see hope that we’re not just leeching off nature.
-We return to the guild. Sylphie better understands now why her mother feared to draw on nature’s strength – out of love and misunderstanding – and now the fog of indecision has lifted.
-E-Sumi-Yan asks one more thing of her: when she saw me cleanse a corrupted element, she heard voices. What did they sound like?
They sounded like joyful voices crying out. Her power is strong enough to hear that clearly.
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In Nature’s Embrace
-E-Sumi-Yan has finally concluded that all this corruption is due to a specific hostile agent.
-Sylphie wants to help. I’m nervous. If it’s her mom’s spirit behind it, she shouldn’t be forced to destroy it.
-We head to the forest. She’s super valuable, with her ability to listen to nature, to “hear.” She’s like a bloodhound, tracking all the bits of corruption.
-We cleanse some smaller bits of corruption, but then Sylphia finds the source.
-The air shimmers. Out pops an Ahriman named Akoman.
-It’s a tricky fight. It summons lots of adds, corrupted earth elementals, to help it. I have to keep healed while taking out the adds before it can draw too much energy/healing from them.
-After we take it out, Sylphie collapses – but from giddiness and joy rather than exhaustion.
SYLPHIE: “Isn’t it amazing, Ququshu? Did the breeze always feel this good? Was the ground always this warm?”
She’s achieved a sense of peace from her newfound harmony with nature. She’s borrowing from nature for her conjury, not from her own life spirit.
I really like this questline. Ququshu learned, but was never in real danger. Her role here was as a teacher, an aide to someone in far greater trouble.
-We return to the guild hall. So I guess I was wrong. It wasn’t her mom’s spirit behind the corruption. Just some random evil beast.
I’m okay with that. Sylphie’s mom didn’t have to fall into supernatural corruption for her arc to be tragic. Her fear of nature led her to drain her own life away. We helped Sylphie avoid the same fate.
-E-Sumi-Yan is impressed with how much she’s grown. He rewards me for helping her with Cure II.
“Wheresoever you go, nature will go with you, my frend. Ever shall the earth meet your footfall, and the wind guide your path.”
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Next time: back to the Heavensward storyline. I’ve had a lot of fun with both the storyline and learning to heal in groups, so I’ll start working on the white mage. The next job post I put up though will likely be the 50-60 Heavensward dragoon questline once I complete it.
