longer.blue

As we near the end of our time with Dawntrail, I wanted to say thank you to friends both old and new. At the same time I’d like to talk about my experiences during Dawntrail. Thank you to all of the people that made this expansion so enjoyable from start to finish, both from the most casual, to the most challenging experiences. While I was around for Endwalker from it’s beginning, Dawntrail felt the most like my actual first expansion. Being able to go through the story with so many different people and learn of a whole new world within XIV has been incredible. This was also where my love for raiding came out and was fully fostered. Having raided with multiple friends in different groups amongst different skill levels as well. It opened my eyes to the joys of going through harder content and learning how to play different jobs. Since the start of my time in XIV, I have been solely a Bard and Dancer main, not really branching out to other roles. However over the last year or so I have gotten all of my jobs to level 100, including crafters and gatherers. With that milestone, I’ve started testing the waters with tanking as well as melee dps in some groups. For me this was monumental as I was always afraid that I would mess up too much because of the nature of the jobs. Causing a wipe do to missing mitigations or even because of losing uptime resulting in the boss having just a little too much health at enrage. Having friends that pushed me to try these unfamiliar roles though helped with gaining the confidence to play them. It’s also helped me find some new favorite jobs, Gunbreaker and Viper have become my go-to’s for the respective roles. Not to leave the DoH/DoL jobs out either, this was also where I learned the fun of crafting especially on some patch releases with figuring out the optimal crafting “rotations”. Joining calls with friends while we craft and gather away were very enjoyable times because those days just chill hangouts. I have also been slowly coming out of my shell with gposing. I used to stick with close friends for pose collabs or recently making use of my other OCs. Lately, I have been getting more comfortable with reaching out to other gposers that I’ve wanted to pose with. While I still call myself an amateur gposer, my confidence with posing has been raised thanks to many kind comments from friends and mutuals here on bluesky. When I first started posing, I had initially wanted to make poses similar to some of the more popular gposers out there. I’ve since realized though that that simply making gposes that I feel happy with, even if there are some messy details and sharing them either just between friends or posting them here is more than enough for me. I learned that, so long as I’m happy with my work, then I need not worry if it doesn’t get tons of likes. In the short time leading up to Evercold, I hope to have more chances at collaborating with other gposers. As a goal for myself, I will also be trying to make connections for when the “dark arts” come back online after the expansion launches. In short, I want to say thank you to everyone who made this expansion, and the last couple of years the best time of my life. I’m not really the type to put myself nor my feelings out there so thanks for reading my ramblings. A big thank you to the good friend who proofread all this and helped edit the doc as well.