Real Talk, I Need Some Advice.

So I've been playing for a couple of years now as a career BRD, and one thing that I've noticed is that anything I seem to do just isn't good enough. It's difficult to really pin my thoughts down into words on how I'm feeling, but I'm mostly just looking up this impossible to climb mountain of HMP in order to even be as relevant as 90% of alts on Asura. I've tried picking up other jobs to try and maybe facilitate gearing my main job, but even that seems like a herculean feat. Truly, I have no clue where I'm supposed to be or how I'm supposed to try and progress, what contents would be good, what jobs I should learn, etc. I have all jobs leveled and a good hodgepodge of gear from my various shenanigans over the years... but I don't know how to apply it. I'm missing a lot of the basics, but they're a bit difficult to identify and research in my experience.

Tl;dr - I need (serious) advice on wtf I'm supposed to be doing to get better at the game and better gear in general. Definitely feel like I'm trying to climb an impossible slope.

First and foremost, you need to find a group of people you enjoy playing with in general.
If you log with nobody to play with, you're already setting yourself up for failure.

You need to pick a job. BRD or any other, but you need to pick one. Once this is done, you need to see what is your next gear step for each slot.
Once this is done, you need to tackle this, step by step. Do not set yourself short/mid/long term goals that are fancy, you're bound to be disappointed if you do so because you won't reach them. Keep them simple.

Plates taking forever? Maybe try to find a way to buy them faster or farm them directly. Try to look at the game as a game that offers you many solutions but ultimately most of them are boring if you do it alone.

Don't expect things to go fast, just make sure to keep going at it. Things all come in due time. Enjoy the journey, don't focus on the end.

level, gear blu, go cleave 3x a week during gain exp in escha zones. buy hmp. repeat for 1 month till harp is done

level, gear whm. clear out ambu with that job.
whm is stupid easy to gear, just requires you to pay attention.

sell mars orbs.

Set a goal. Work toward that goal.

Set a new goal.

Repeat.

Figure out what you want. It's easy to get there once you have an objective. If you just flounder it will always feel impossible.

You can, with very minimal effort, just a lot of boredom make all the money you need, for literally everything with just one month or less of working at it.

Guy has a RM(?)A BRD, he doesn't need to know WHM. He needs to know how to play the game while already having the gear.

He talked about the HMP for the harp, meaning he's hurting for gil otherwise it wouldnt be such a daunting task. If he feels he's not good enough, then gear other jobs to help brd out. IE blu for cleaving and whm for ambu.

Never suggest someone play WHM.

You can give any and all the advice you want about any and everything but that one thing needs to stop being a thing.

People feeling forced to play whm that don't want to play whm are seriously better off quitting. No point in them being miserable playing whm and making other people miserable too.

Notice I said pay attention. Something that alot of whm forget to do lol

everyone has to play a job they dont want to occasionally to get ***done. everyone cant be DD ect. Thats the name of the game in this well.. game.

playing whm only to cap hallmarks each month until brd is finished isnt unreasonable

You've been playing for years and still can't afford an empy? Really?

You should have aimed for the head

Occassionally playing and getting permanently locked in because established dps dont like playing non dps jobs are very different things.

*** that noise.

For, two years or so, yes. That's not too long - basically still a new player.

Its ambu not dyna. Perma locked on a job for ambu shouldnt be a thing, unless its your only geared job for that tier. In which case id hope your working on getting another job at or above that tier

if you have trouble getting HMP/gil for harp and don't want to play the game like its your job; bots and stuff aren't your thing either then i suggest quitting for a year or two, maybe three.

make sure to get the KI that starts accumulating voidstones befor you quit. once you return you should have enough voidstones stored up to chip away at voidwatch. iirc you'll want around 2-3k voidstones to get enough HMP and maybe also some of the cinders/dross.

you also mentioned you have several jobs decently geared, if you are short on resources its probably more important to focus on a few, maybe 1-3 jobs (preferably jobs that share a lot of pieces for inventory/gil reasons), to excell at those instead gearing everything to average.

I play during Japan nighttime, 2100-2300 JST. If you want to tackle some stuff together hit me up, I'm normally playing solo bst 99% of the time.

Also how much are u using bg-wiki and the job forums and fight strats or youtube videos?

One major thing about ffxi is that it relies heavily upon dissemination of ingame knowledge by the playerbase. The game rarely tells you what to do.

Start by covering core game mechanics:

- Damage
- PDIF
- WS Damage
- Magic Damage
- Player TP Gain
- Attack Speed
- Skillchains
- Enmity

Then move on to job-specific info:
- FFXIAH Job Forums
- BG-Wiki Job Guides
- Ruaumoko Video Job Guides

As for content, SE actually made an Adventuring Primer awhile back... it covers all the basics, including prereqs and difficulty, and gil-making:
- Adventuring Primer

You say you have all the jobs leveled. What about job points.

If you aren't mastered, you aren't really leveled.

It's easier to get away with it you are on a support job, but there is a huge difference between level 99 and 2100 jp.

To be quite honest, I think Bard is a very difficult first job. Most people have ridiculous expectations... for certain content they won't even let you join if you don't have G.Horn, Marsyas, and Daurdabla. It is quite literally the most expensive job in the game.

I think you should still pursue Bard if you enjoy it, but something I also recommend is building a "meal-ticket job", one that you can easily get gil/gear from without extreme suffering.

For me that was Geomancer. I knew I wanted to max out Dancer but that nobody would take me anywhere on that job. Instead of getting the Dancer mythic, I got the GEO mythic, and in a matter of weeks it already paid for itself. From there all of these doors opened at once and I was able to get the Dancer mythic super quickly.

It kind of sucks, but "sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do in order to get what you want."

GEO, WHM, PLD, BLU, COR are generally very useful even if you aren't pimped out. If you work on one of those simultaneously with your Bard, I think you'll get very far.

Only brd mastered, WHM ~100 JP. I understand that the super meriting is quite important to get a job turned on (like BLU). Does that also apply to just casual gameplay to try and make some gil on the side?

Making gils is easy with sparks really. Even on BRD you should be able to cap sparks 2 times in 4h window of gain exp. That's 2M gils. Can be done 12 times in a month, so 24M. Next go do Ambu. Even Normal. Make enough points to buy at least 100-150 HMP and all the Alex. Sell Alex. 2 months and you should be able to get most of the 1500 hmp.

If you work or sleep during gain exp... RIP

Moderatly OT but how do you people "empty" your sparks? Manually?
Long time ago I was using an addon but that stopped working and I never bothered to find a new, working version.


From a certain point of view having 2100 JP or being zero is like being a level 70 character expecting to do level 75 content.
Just an example but I wanted to enforce the idea that JPs, in a way, are like "levels". I think that was their original intent and they resorted to that since our level was already 99 and they didn't wanna break past that.

You're doing gainxp wrong if all you get out of it is 2m, no matter what job you're on.

FastCS
doesn't buy for you, but does cut down on time spent at that npc at least.

Stopped reading after that. Go for a walk outside.

Eh? Is that incorrect terminology? Should I say BRD main instead?

Where are you at currently with your bard? AF+2/3? Do you have a DD set? What are your plans for the future once you have Dharp because by assumption it doesn't sound like you have Carn or Aeneas yet.

3 songs is fine and can work well within the boundaries of any event in the game, I've used one to clear out Wave 3 Dynamis and it worked out just fine.

It's literally 30 seconds... why does this have to be a thing?

Because I need to buy a bunch of things from sparks npc on certain days when the crafting guild decides I should make something the sparks npc sells, and like 50 of it.

Apparently being a career anything is some sort of mythical taboo.