The Wings of the Goddess

On November 21, the content for the latest expansion, The Wings of the Goddess, was unlocked. The story behind the expansion is that there are these Cavernous Maws that have appeared/been discovered in several locations on the Mindartia and Quon continents. Upon investigating them, you discover that they take you to "twenty years" in the past, during the Crystal War, and your task is to join up with the mercenary units for one of the three nations, and help fight off the Shadowlord's minions. There are three completely new regions, a "fort" area for each city, which are bypasses for the Tahrongi/La Theine/Konschtat areas, which are not (yet?) accessible in the past.

After I got the expansion installed, I started out doing a bit of light exploration, and happened to talk to the right NPC in Crawlers Nest to get an invitation to the Windurst mercenaries, the Corbra Unit. I made my way to Windurst, travelling as PLD/WHM for reraise/sneak/invisible, and stopping to activate all the Cavernous Maws along the way. You have to go through them in the past once in order to use them in the future, somewhat like Runic Portals - forcing you to do some exploration to unlock the easier travel options. The zones are pretty much the same as they are in the future, with some different buildings, and some different mobs.

There are a lot of new monsters in the past, and it sort of makes one wonder where they all went. Did they drop stuff that was so good they were hunted to extinction? One of the nicest additions are the Pixies. They're high level WHMs, and as long as you haven't killed any of them, they simply drift through zones, handing out Raise IIIs to the fallen players, casting Cure IVs on those they see in yellow (or lower) HP.

Once I got to Windurst, I picked up the mission to become a member of the Cobra Unit, which involved three fairly simple quests. The third quest was a fight with a War Lynx in Fort-Karugo-Narugo, which was a bit harder for some jobs to solo, due to a TP move the lynx can use that drops you to 2 HP. If you're alone and not using shadows, it's likely the next hit will kill you. I didn't know this at the time, so headed up there as PLD/WHM, ready to solo the kitty, and was doing quite well against him. Then boom I was dead. As I rested while weakened, I watched the same thing happen to a MNK/WHM, and then to a PLD/WAR-BLM/WHM duo. So we all teamed up, and killed it so fast that it didn't make sense that it had killed us all just a few minutes earlier.

Over the next week, I made my way to Bastok and then to San d'Oria. In San d'Oria, I did a couple quests to get a deathstone and angelstone for one of my favorite features of the new expansion: 2 new gobbie bag quests! So I now have 70 slots in my gobbie bag, which was a big help, but I'd really like another 10. I still can't carry every piece of PLD gear with me at 70 slots, at least not with food and meds, and at least one free spot for any drops I might want somewhere.

They added two new jobs with the expansion, Dancer and Scholar. I've already talked about Dancer, but I haven't even done the quest to unlock Scholar yet. I'm sure I will eventually, but I don't currently see it as a job that I'll be leveling, so there's no rush.

The biggest addition to the game is the introduction of Campaign, the fight of the cities and their mercenary troops against the Shadowlord and his forces. There are Campaign Operations, which provide you with a small amount of experience points and a good chunk of Allied Notes (the equivalent of conquest points and imperial standing points for the past). Quite a few of these don't involve any fighting, and some you don't even leave the city to do, so they'd be good for quick bits of exp on jobs you don't want to necessarily level in an exp party. You have "tags" like for assault, and can have up to 7 available, getting a new one each day. By doing these operations, you help boost the resources, supplies, intelligence, and so forth for your nation.

This is turning into yet-another wall o' text, so I'll talk about Campaign Battles in a later post.