Over the past weekend, we completed not only the remaining two role quests series left to do, but also the finale series after one has completed all of those as well! Bearing in mind that the last ‘bonus’ questline doesn’t appear until after completing the Endwalker MSQ, but just up to 6.0.
Note: Minor spoiler talk about the bonus finale role quest series, along with the achievement image.
The Caster Role Quest series was pretty good, nothing really to write home about but did a nice job adding in an additional story relating to Heavensward. The instance fight at the end was super fun and even Black Mage friendly! The Healer Role Quest, however, was by far the absolute best one in terms of story. The ‘fight’ was fun and required using an ability that most of the player base keeps forgetting about (this would be Esuna). To me, it felt more manageable of an instance fight than the Shadowbringers’ one was, but that might have also something to do with how they fixed how heals work with NPC’s in these sort of scenarios.
Originally, to the best of my recollection, AoE heals wouldn’t work correctly and everything had to be hard-targeted to NPC’s for them to work in instance fights. I can’t say for Trusts as I’ve never healed for them before. I could be very inaccurate in this thinking, so definitely take my thoughts about this with a cup of salt.
Anyway, in terms of Role Quests stories, I’d place them in this order from my favorite to ‘least’: Healer -> Tank -> Caster -> Ranged -> Melee. Melee and Ranged aren’t ‘bad,’ but they just didn’t hit any interesting notes with me. I think I said in the prior post about these, that one’s mileage will vary with how one feels about them as well.
Speaking specifically of the healer one without getting into spoilers, it just had me moved to tears on a number of occasions. If one appreciates the later Stormblood MSQ sections, I’m certain one will very much appreciate the entirety of the Healer’s Role Quests series as well.
Moving on, once we were able to access the final bonus questline, it had us heading to Garlemald to deal with one more Blasphemy with all of our friends from all of the role quest series. The entirety of this whole adventure was an absolute blast! Everything upon entering Garlemald to the instance fight (dungeon?) it had was so darn fun. One recommendation I will say as of right now the instance fight is not iLevel Sync’d, so go in with whatever one is more comfortable with and/or highest iLevel for a fun tail kickery.
Once it’s all done, everyone goes home, and hints at something to come that I believe was mentioned for Dawntrail, but we’ll see. We’re asked to return to Radz-at-Han and let them know that the end of the Blasphemies are upon us and all is well once again.
Overall, I cannot recommend these enough to anyone wanting to see the entirety of it. It’s just so fun, but please don’t go out of one’s way to level 5 different job types just to see this specifically. If one is already going to level said job types, then that is where I recommend looking at these.
Comparing it to Shadowbringers’, I think it suffers a little bit in terms of anchoring the stories as well as those did. However, they’re nice little additions and follow-ups (or perhaps conclusions) to specific areas of previously told parts of the story/MSQ. One nit-pick is I hope in Dawntrail and beyond is they start them again at base expansion level (i.e. 90 for Dawntrail) instead of halfway through.
With those behind us, on wards to the next adventure~!!