Idling in a Red Cap

With Maat knocked out of the picture I'm starting to feel like I'm at loose ends.

Back when I first got into this game I had very simple and realistic goals for myself.

• Complete my Arfifact armor
• Beat up Maat
• Reach level 75

With the advent of Abyssea and the recent patch to exp, the last of my original goals will be met in short order, leaving me in need of a new set of accomplishments to strive for. What sort I haven't decided yet.

The obvious choice would be to find myself a complete set of relic armor, or to be more precise: pimp hat 2.0. But then, that's just another list of gear to get and while satisfying, it isn't really what I want my main focus for the game to be. To go through the game with nothing but the intent to get more shinies seems like a good way to burn yourself out.

My previous list of stuff to do was more about the journey to the top, but now that I'm getting up here I find myself losing perspective. When I was a small and inexperienced Red Mage I used to be all about the running around to dumb places to exp and couldn't understand why folks wouldn't want to sync down. But now that I'm all the way up here at level 70 I'm starting to understand. There's an definite appeal to keeping all of your abilities and spells, because they're a lot of fun to use. The higher you go the more you can do with the job and the more fun it gets. On the other side of the coin is a gradual erosion of that mystical sense of adventure you had when you first joined the game. No longer do I run headlong into Dangruf Wadi to smack bunnies and evade goblins for the thrill of it. Instead I find myself sitting in exp parties wanting to strangle my various party members for being horribly inept.

Somewhere in that journey something changed in me, and it's not a change I like. My fear is that if I continue playing primarily for the acquisition of shinies that it will only cause that change to fester until it turns me into a very bitter player.