Guide to Heavensward: Early Access

Heavensward has come out and we’re all excited to watch everyone play it besides us. All of these changes that we won’t get to see for a while have made us more elitist than ever. This guide will show you how to embrace the early access and get ready for The Binding Coil of Alexander: Rebirth – Genesys (This time it’s for The Watch).

ffxiv_heavensward

Preparation:
You. Are not. Preparrrred.
Seriously, there’s nothing you can do. Go to Start, search for cmd.exe and type in “sugarpill /flushmysanity”. Do this every time your client exits. If you do it right, you should be too blind to read this from the depth perception changes of looking at your one-time password and the computer screen incessantly because this will not work on your first time, and if it did, it was probably going to work anyway. Let’s face it, though. You’re superstitious and even though you know this isn’t helping you, you’re going to do this step every single time anyway. Because it could, right? RIGHT?! I’ve found that this step does work better though when I wear a Power Balance band around each wrist and (stay with me here, because it WORKS!!! CONFIRMED) one around my dick. The trifecta of balance is so perfectly weighted that it inspires servers thousands of miles away to work properly. If it doesn’t work, consult Dr. Phil.

Turn 1:
The first bosses of Early Access are called error 2002 and error 5006. They come as a pair but you’ll only see one at any one time. Basically, anytime that you want to get on, they make sure that you can’t. They’re pretty much the digital version of bureaucrats in that you feel like you’ve done everything right but you still spend hours caught up in red tape and congestive nightmares. The best strategy I’ve seen with dealing with these is to just git gud. If you just connect better, you would be playing by now, wouldn’t you? Get your shit together.
You’ll want to budget maybe 5 hours a day for FFXIV. This way, you can play for maybe about a half hour. If you manage to get past these bosses, quit your job and fake your death (dental records should be pretty easy unless you live in an area where the dentist has bars over their window in which case your Internet probably isn’t good enough for this game anyway) because you can’t afford to log off the game until this turn gets nerfed (IMPORTANT NOTE: When faking death, do not real death or it will be a wipe).

Turn 2:
As soon as you log in, repeatedly ask where the Dark Knight quest giver is. You don’t want to play the class because they can’t use Blood Weapon while their tank stance is up, so what’s the point, but still ask where it is. You also don’t want to play Machinist because apparently they’re using 0.22’s. You also don’t want to play Astrologian because that’s a healer, and healers are for girls and casuals. It only has a few low damage skills and no fairy to heal for you. You can’t kill shit by healing allies. It actually doesn’t work. Stick with bard or idk. Dark Knight or whatever. Bard doesn’t have to bother with that ‘moving’ mechanic anymore, and Dark Knight was in the benchmark, and you can fantasia into an Au Ra so you’ll be a dragon knight of darkness named xXInuYaShADARKNEssXx and you can make macros that say “CUT MY LIFE INTO PIECES, THIS IS MY [Darkside]”

Turn 3:
Set your homepoint at every new aetheryte, because there is going to be a lot of running back and forth for quests. It’s very common for you to have overlooked a piece of sparkling blue debris, and teleports cost like in the triple digits now. Death gives a free teleport (YOU’RE WELCOME), and teleporting is faster than running (which is your only other option, because you’re going to spam leves and Dusk Vigil until you’re 60 because it’s a race and flying is stupid). Death is probably the most economical way to transport yourself. Standing still and waiting for the cold embrace of death also gives you time to bitch about Turn 1 or the fact that flying is only given to you at the end of an area, and that your time is too precious to be delivering tea and sandwiches to Goblins that ran away from home.

This is pretty much everything to note about Early Access. There are some pretty big changes to the existing classes that I didn’t go over, most notably Dragoon, but I would be wasting my time writing anything about it, because everyone knows that Dragoons can’t read anyway.