scattered thoughts: this raid tier has been a very interesting one. we're currently at 14 hours of blind prog and have taken Wicked Thunder down to 43%, well past her phase transition. last two tiers* both took us 49 hours of prog, not including beating the doorboss to be able to prog in the first place. lots of people talking about how easy this tier is but given that it's the first tier of an expansion, I think the only thing they mis-tuned is the DPS checks on all of the bosses. the fact that there's an M1S mechanic that nobody in the static knows how to complete (due to us always clearing well before that point) is pretty funny... it's reminiscent of how Ericthonios was basically a striking dummy.

anyway - we agreed this time that we'd do three sessions per fight of blind prog and then look up guides to not get stuck doing 50 hours of prog again, but we cleared three and a half fights without guides anyway lol. skill diff I guess

*caveat being that we replaced two members of our static with better ones and are overall a better team now

Unsurprisingly, I did not win the 1-in-135 lottery for the coolest Medium plot in the Lavender Beds, lol. Luckily, I'm still pretty satisfied with my small, so I'm not in any real rush to upgrade.

did house relocation and to my horror now realized oh all my decorations got moved into storage so now those need to be redone

I retired from raiding in FFXIV after the first tier in Endwalker. Since then, the gear treadmill completely broke on me. I'd resub for a random month in 6.3 or whatever, do a couple Expert roulettes to get my tomes, then immediately come to a halt like, "why am I doing this?"

I'd been off the treadmill and unsubbed from the game for long enough that I forgot what the treadmill was even like anymore, and with a new expansion comes a new drive to play the game. I've spent the past month and change capping my silly little tomes and collecting my silly little normal raid tokens. I finally went to spend them all on just one job. I watch as my average ilvl goes up from 705 to 713. The illusion of gear mattering at all shattered once more. I'm a simple man— I like it when the number goes up, but to see weeks of daily effort amount to what feels like a rounding error is demoralizing; exponentially multiplied knowing that this was just for one job.

The gearing in XIV is so direly uninteresting. None of it matters. At best its an avenue for people to debate about miniscule gains on substats when syncing down to old content. At worst it locks you into doing content on just one job because it takes too long to gear a second, in a game that everyone proudly claims is good because you can play every job on one character.

I'm just going to go back to buying my gear off the market board and making my own party finders. Gear doesn't matter in any of the content I like to do, anyway.