Welcome back to the latest installment of Eorzea Reborn! By the time this goes up, it will have been a week since the early access period was made available to pre-purchasers of FFXIV: Heavensward.

Most of the discussions online appear to note that early access and actual launch weren’t super terrible. By that, I mean that once you broke through server issues – of which the Aether Data Center took repeated beatings this past week – you could actually spend a rather long time uninterruptedly playing the game.

This week, I’d like to further discuss a topic brought up in a separate article on MMORPG.com: flight. Without being too spoilertastic, I’ll give a brief overview of the specific questline – Divine Intervention – needed to earn the Black Chocobo and the Aether Compass needed to fly in the various zones.

I’ll also be discussing the recently announced “Return Home to Eorzea” campaign that Square Enix is offering a subset of lapsed subscribers. Follow me, and let’s get you all saddled up and ready for Heavensward.

From Heavensward to House Fortemps

Assuming you’ve purchased Heavensward and completed the 2.55 storyline, you’ll eventually make your way to the city of Ishgard.

You’ll get a bunch of main story quests, with your story path temporarily branching out in two directions as you help the brothers De Fortemps with their errands in the Sea of Clouds and the Coerthas Western Highlands.

After completing the two storyline branches, you’ll eventually make your way back to the Fortemps manor, where you’ll then undertake the Divine Intervention Quest.

Divine Intervention

During the quest, I decided to make a bullet-point list of what I did to complete it. It’s not terribly long, and you only have to fight two enemies to complete the challenge of the quest.

From start to finish, here’s what you do:

• Speak with Steward
• Speak with Edmont
• Take the Aetheryte Shard to The Forgotten Knight section of the Foundation.
• Speak with Aymeric.
• Take the Aetheryte shard to the Tribunal section of The Pillars.
• Speak with Haurchefant.
• Fight two enemies (Tank and DPS).
• Talk to Haurchefant.

I don’t think the enemies change depending on the class, so you’re stuck facing the equivalent of a Warrior and a Lancer.

During this fight, you’ll have a healer with you, who will sometimes be wrapped in a chain by tank if the healer has Tank’s aggro.

As a dragoon, my strategy was to let my healer deal with the tank and absorb the damage of the tank while I took out the DPS enemy.

What I did was I destroyed the targetable chain when it showed up on my targets list, focused fire on the DPS, and avoided the path of a lightning ball attack that occurs at certain DPS enemy HP points. Eventually, you’ll get them both, watch a cutscene, and then talk to Haurchefant to complete the quest.

One thing you’ll have to remember is, like our earlier guide noted, you need to unlock and complete specific quests to open up Aether Currents, in addition to exploring the world and attuning to those aether currents too.

This follows a standard formula of 5 quest-locked currents and 10 unlockable explorable currents per zone save for one zone, where the Aether Currents are all unlocked through Main Story Quests.

I suggest you check this somewhat spoilery (as far as location names are concerned) work-in-progress guide for Aether Currents, as it appears to be quite up-to-date.

Catch-Up Perks for Returning

This portion is a rewrite of an earlier explanation, in which I misunderstood a promotional offer by Square Enix for Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward.

Originally, I thought it was a free month thing with additional perks, but rereading the informaiton (and thanks to the commenters mentioning it below) led me to make an immediate request for edits.

Basically, players rejoining the game through subscriptions who were subscribed to FFXIV before March 31, but did not log in between April 1 and June 7 will get "10 silver chocobo feathers that you can use to exchange for item level 120 equipment."

These silver chocobo feathers can be exchanged via the Calamity Salvager NPC that is located in each city-state.

If you focus on one character, you can actually complete the Realm Reborn Story with the right item level, along with earning dungeon currency for buying additional item level 120 equipment. Not a bad show, really.

In any event, I’ll leave you guys with this video of an iconic Final Fantasy Theme Song, as rendered by 143 laptops. Cheers!