I preordered Endwalker not so I can catch up with the story or see the newest classes and things like that. I bought Endwalker for one thing and one thing only!
RED MAGE BABY! That's all I've been anticipating since I got Endwalker and you bet that as soon as I logged back in after the infernally long (9188 players) queue, I jumped at the chance to get Red Mage. Checked if Samurai quest in Ul'dah was still red for me and it wasn't and I was so excited!
Little did I know that by taking up the mantle of Red Mage I would subsequently butcher..... my currently standing male Elezen crush streak.
See here, since I started playing back in October (2 months ago) I steadily built up a list of characters I'd subsequently crush on, the more quests I did: Urianger, Aymeric, Artoirel de Fortemps, Briandien (yes, from the Hildibrand questline) and coincidentally all of them are male Elezen.
Well, swaglord Deep Red X'rhun Tia holds the distinction breaking my male Elezen crush streak. And I'm glad of it. I'm actually glad it took me too long to warm up to Estinien (which I still haven't by the way, I'm almost done with the HW MSQ and I still haven't warmed up to him) else I would have been distracted from gawking properly at how cool X'rhun Tia is :D And he isn't just a useless Job Trainer who just sends me on errands, I HELP HIM do investigations and I tag along in whatever he is doing, which is.... not something I can say about most job trainers. He's actually a USEFUL NPC!
It also helps that he is really handsome and I already have a soft spot for Male Miqo'te as my story focused alt is a male Miqo'te. :>
---------------------------------------------- Oh as for my experience with the job itself. It's much more snappy and smooth playing than Black Mage. While Black Mage is very satisfying with its huge explosions, I also don't like how punishing it can be if I accidentally mess up and press Fire I instead of Fire III to switch from Umbral Ice :/ The only thing I mess up with Red Mage is accidentally hard casting any of the longer cooldown casts, which I can quickly recover from by Double Weaving Fleche+Fleche AoE (I forget the name Contre ...smth).
As such, I picked up Red Mage in a matter of hours I was weaving GCDs and other instant cast abilities like it was second nature to me. Guess all that time spent paying attention to BLM cast bar has kind of honed in me a sense of being more capable of using the OGCD effectively. ------------------------------------
Ok that's all I wanted to say. I anticipate doing more quests with X'rhun Tia and hug him and blow him kisses and take advantage of him in gpose ;)