#I finished the Neir raids LAST MONTH

[drowxiv]

I just want to share the absurdity that is my intro-to-FFXIV experience because it comes back to bite me sometimes and it's kind of funny. I started playing FFXIV in 2019 after rage-quitting WOW. One of the things I hated most about WOW was raids, mostly because I was treated poorly by a guild while playing them. This is important later. My partner spent weeks trying to convince me to pick up FFXIV including "I'll literally buy you the game" but what finally got me was "You can be a Drow that picks flowers." I had a couple friends who played at the time and were VERY excited for me. Shadowbringers had JUST come out when I started playing and both my partner and my friends were really eager for me to reach endgame so I was told explicitly "just do the MSQ, don't worry about anything else." Cue absolute fucking CHAOS y'all.... I obviously did what I was told but the game kept pointing me at these job quests. So I asked about that and got "Oh yeah well obviously do your job quests AND MSQ" which is the point that I should have become suspicious about the advice.... but dear reader I am a dumb idiot who blindly trusts people. So I plowed through MSQ & Job quests per instructions until I got pretty deep into Heavensward and I wanted to unlock flying. THEN the instructions changed to "Oh, well, yeah, you have to look at those blue quests and if they have a green crystal go ahead and do those." One might think I'd start doubting the advice now, for sure. Nope. Dumb idiot. I just added that knowledge to the list and KEPT RIGHT ON TRUCKING. Blew through HW and SB that way. Finally got into SHB and my friends were so stoked for me. At this point I need to pause and point out that at this time the Crystal Tower raid was NOT required MSQ content. So I got to "THE MOMENT" in SHB. THE "parry this you fucking casual" moment and all my friends are freaking out and screaming and I'm just staring blankly like "...?" They go "Don't you KNOW who that IS?" No of fucking course I don't! And they go "OH! You should have played the Crystal Tower raid!" THE WHAT? So they had me unlock it and ran me through it to get the story. Because I only knew of raids from WOW I just kind of wrote that off as "the big raid" from ARR and then never thought about it again. Until alllllllll the way in Endwalker when my partner goes "Hey do you want to do the Pandaemonium raids with me." "RAIDS? I'M SORRY? PLURAL? RAID-S? THERE IS AN S? AS IN THERE IS MORE THAN ONE?" I missed EVERY. SINGLE. raid series from EVERY. SINGLE. expansion.... I'm still sifting through everything I haven't unlocked. I JUST learned that all the raid series' have savage versions which I haven't unlocked either. So I thought I had all of "Coils" open - NO WRONG! It's a mess.