Tl;dr: Lots of inane, self-indulgent and mostly disconnected rambling from someone whose brain has been cooked by repeated exposure to Ramuh's Shock Strikes. This is a long post. Sorry about that. For anyone solely interested in the data, here it is. Enjoy!
As it's Mentor Monday, and having just yesterday completed the I Hope Mentor Will Notice Me VI achievement, unlocking the Astrope mount, I thought I'd jump on a long-standing bandwagon in this subreddit and share the logs and data from my journey. I've also written up the story of how I went about it, why it took me so long (lol five years, do u even Mentor Roulette bro?) and some thoughts and feelings I have about Mentor Roulette now that I'm finally done.
Table of Contents
It commences
Observations on Mentor Roulette (and tips for those starting out)
It continues
Observations on the Statistics
It concludes
What next?
It commences
I ran Mentor Roulette for the first time on the 26th June 2021, playing on EU-Light, as Shadowbringers was winding down but with Endwalker still some way off in the distance. It was around the time, or perhaps shortly before, that the game experienced a massive influx of new players, often drawn to XIV by its free trial; from following a streamer to fresher pastures, while seeking refuge from World of Warcraft (with Shadowlands reaching its nadir), or a combination of the three. This had no bearing on my decision to unlock the roulette and to start running it - though I was aware that this was going on, I mostly just wanted something else in the game to do that would occupy me long-term, and I thought the Astrope mount looked cool enough to work towards.
I made one decision from the very beginning - I would never leave a duty and take the penalty, or choose to commence a vote abandon myself. I would stay for the long haul if the group wanted to, no matter what carnage I was thrown into. You could say, in a very Paladin-esque way, that I made an oath.
I'm strangely proud to say that - almost five years, 2,000 successful completions and 27 failures later - I kept that oath.
I knew enough about what I was getting into to know that I wanted to make a decent record of each duty (the spreadsheet-making and recordkeeping is the highlight of this entire process, anyone saying otherwise is a liar, I swear) but my very first queue was a wakeup call. Ravana on Hard - not exactly a challenge, but still a fight that I hadn't done for over a year, and one that I had precisely zero recollection of to boot. Extreme trials followed soon after (including my first run-in with, and failure to, Ramuh), and I quickly took to consulting a spreadsheet guide I'd found for ARR Extremes, which helped a great deal.
I hit the ground running and got into a decent groove for the first few months, with some successes and a feeling of general satisfaction. Repeated failures to Ramuh over the course of the next month left me frustrated enough to go and study the fight properly, and after some success thereafter I wrote and posted a text guide to teaching the fight, which drew some (belated) interest. In hindsight it was overly complicated and unnecessarily long, but I like to think it helped some people at the time.
In that guide I wrote that my intention was to hit 1k completions by the time Endwalker dropped. That... didn't happen, and in fact it wouldn't be until early 2024 that I would get there, smack dab in the middle of the next period I've divided things by, which I'll get onto after a (not-so-brief) diversion talking about Mentor Roulette.
Observations on Mentor Roulette (and tips for those starting out)
You can find various guides that other players have put together dotted around Reddit, YouTube, and the occasional stray google doc. More and more creators are also putting out series documenting their Astrope grinds, which are nice and encouraging to see.
coughmiserylovescompanycough
I'm not aiming to be so detailed or well-presented here in this post, but I have a few (read: a lot of) random comments to make on my experience nonetheless.
I would recommend playing roles or specific jobs that you like over trying to choose the "best" one for Mentor Roulette, but if you really want to optimise job selection, playing a tank or healer will probably give you the most control over a group's success. Still - high, consistent DPS from a damage job can make a significant difference, too.
I'll talk a little more about what roles appear more likely to get different types of duties in the stats section, but if you want to maximise the chance of hitting guildhests, go damage. Just be prepared for longer queues. Sometimes, much longer queues.
Having played tanks the most at 55%, I have the softest spot for PLD because of the breadth of utility it brings (Clemency, Intervention, Cover in particular), as well as a no-frills invuln, but it does lack sustain at 50 compared to the others, and GNB in particular brings Aurora to such content which may be a lifesaver.
For a specific job under the damage role, SMN may be the safest bet for success and recovering from difficult situations (e.g. the healer's keyboard disconnecting, their PC catching fire - the ususal), as it has access to rez at all relevant levels, where RDM only gets it at 64.
Again, though, it makes little difference in the grand scheme of things - play what you enjoy, above all else, and you'll probably be happier for it.
However, if making gil while doing this is of primary interest to you, play tank, as it has the bonus on Mentor Roulette 99% of the time, which is worth 7,200 gil a pop. I think I saw a bonus for damage exactly twice over five years.
If you enjoy/can play a wide range of jobs at max level, random selection can be a good way to break up monotony and stave off boredom. For much of my last 700, I had 12 jobs at 770+ ilevel and was rolling a d12 in a browser to choose between them, and there are roulette tools you can load up with your available jobs and spin to decide for you.
Bring consumables. For the love of the Twelve, bring consumables - at minimum, Phoenix Downs and health potions, and I'd recommend popping food on Extremes at least. Chug health pots early and often. You'll prevent so many deaths and save so many of your runs by doing this, it's not even funny. You can carry different kinds if you like (e.g. Max-Potions are optimal for ARR duties) but Hyper-Potions are a good catch-all up to Shadowbringers and even some Endwalker content. Spine Drops to cure paralysis are also worth taking, and players who frequently run healer may want to bring Echo Drops to cure silence too.
Sometimes, maybe even often, you'll be the MVP of the group. you'll know all the mechanics and help people learn them too; you'll bring the highest DPS, you'll keep the group up where your co-healer is struggling - you may even save things with a clutch play. Make a note of these moments, especially those where the group thanks you, explicitly or through lots of commendations (here's looking at you, 6/7 commendation runs) - they're good memories, and they'll help you to keep going as your count ticks slowly up.
Sometimes you'll have a bad duty, or even a bad day, and for whatever reason you will be the problem. Maybe you'll be the only one to die, and it'll happen repeatedly. Maybe you'll be unable to remember a particular mechanic, or have it mixed up with something from one of the other hundred duties you've done once, several years ago, and immediately forgotten. Maybe, at the worst, the group will shame you for it, and you'll get toxicity and negativity for being a mentor on top of what's gone wrong. It happens. All you can do is remember that nobody's perfect; dust yourself off, take a break for the day if you need one, and then ultimately go agane.
There's little consistency or pattern to the type of players you'll encounter. You'll meet some sprouts where it seems like it's their first day playing the game, despite the fact that they've managed to stumble into Zurvan EX, and you'll then meet others who are so good at mechanics or dps that you'd swear that they must be on an alt. Some mentors will be your best friends, and it seems like it's you and them against the world (the world including the rest of your group, sent to try your patience...) as together you try to drag the corpses of the rest of the group over the finishing line - while others will, through inaction or attitude, make you wish they'd just take the penalty already and leave you in peace.
Extreme trials are... an inevitability. This is a topic that comes up a lot on r/FFXIV, with people holding a wide range of viewpoints towards the trials themselves; those who queue for them, and those who really wish they wouldn't. After 2,000 completions, my opinion is that the ARR extremes are fine, even Ramuh and King Moggle Mog, and frankly I'd rather have them than a dungeon - they're often faster, and definitely more intellectually stimulating than pulling wall-to-wall and killing bosses while glancing at a YouTube video on a second monitor.
Heavensward extremes after the first two or three (Thordan is borderline) quickly go downhill, and - with some exceptions - the less said about those from later expansions, the better. (I had TMB: Endsinger's Aria last month, with six mentors and two unresponsive sprout healers. It was remarkably unsuccessful, and did not spark joy.)
Speaking more generally, the earlier in an expansion the Extreme was released, the more generous the scaling appears to be, to the point that the likes of Lakshmi and Titania are mostly free, despite their higher level, because most of their mechanics do little to no damage even when screwed up, and stacking Echo quickly makes them even more of a joke.
Conversely, the opposite is true the later in the expansion that the Extreme came out. (Fuck Zurvan.)
The Great Hunt Extreme is an exception. I don't know why, but I used to struggle with Rathalos on Mentor Roulette a few years back, and now it's practically free.
Again, Extreme trials are an inevitability. You have three choices - you can embrace them, pick them up over time and quickly refresh on the mechanics with a Google search, doing your best to teach; you can stay silent and just fight through them, or you can take the penalty, with optional encouragement to the group not to queue for such content again and to use Party Finder instead. I offer no judgment here, but I took the first route throughout my journey, and I think the positive experiences I've had for doing so have far outweighed the few negative instances that have come with them.
It continues
I've separated the next 681 duties out into what I've catchily called the "mid-Endwalker to mid-Dawntrail" period. It's the longest in real time out of the three I've split down, yet I don't really have much to say about mentor roulette specifically during it, nor many memories of running such roulettes during it.
It covers a period of time when I quit the IT job I had and moved cities for my dream career; discovered eight months later that I was entirely unsuited for said new role (woo, ADHD!) and quit that too as a result. I was then unemployed for a bit before getting a different job with my first ever employer, and then somehow getting back the IT job I quit for my dream career, in May 2025, when it opened up again.
Time is a circle.
Unexpected and medium-term unemployment might sound like the perfect conditions to make gains on a long, grindy MMO achievement, but I didn't make significant progress throughout much of 2023, and barely touched it in 2025. I think part of this was due to having other priorities in game - I fought unstable internet to conquer EO solo in late 2023, and raided a bit in 2025 - but also due to other games like WoW having a bit of a resurgence and capturing my attention.
At the same time, I think this was also, conceptually, the hardest part of the achievement to work through: when the novelty of the roulette had worn off somewhat, but I still had such a long way to go, even after getting past halfway. I took more and more breaks, did basically nothing with it in 2025, and figured I might pick it up again in the new expansion, even if catching up on Dawntrail extremes I'd neglected would be a pain.
Then came April 2026. Fanfest happened... and my plans changed.
Observations on the Statistics
Here's the link to the data again, if you didn't click it above.
I'm not a statistician, and any deeper analysis I might attempt of the data will likely be flawed at best. Additionally, attempting to draw conclusions may be a fools' errand from the start, as the first two-thirds (1300-ish roulettes) of data cover 4 years and 9 months in total, whereas I smashed through the last third or so (700 roulettes) in the course of two months!
Still, more for fun than anything else, I have a few comments and surface level observations - though if anyone who actually knows what they're talking about wants to play around with the data, please feel free to do so!
I'm not a morning person. (Sorry.)
Extreme trials, and trials in general appear to have been much more common during the "streamer wave" than after it. This may partially be because of the interest people had in them while watching content creators do them, but I was also primarily, almost exclusively, playing tank at the time.
Guildhests, by contrast, ticked up massively from late Endwalker onwards - but this was when I started playing DPS more. As much as I'm generally happy to do Ex trials (the ARR ones, at least...) this isn't something I'm complaining about.
After midnight and morning roulettes seemed to give more dungeons than those completed in the afternoon or evening, where trials and to a lesser extent guildhests were a bit more common. The normal raid figure was reasonably consistent throughout. Again, though, it may be hard to draw a proper comparison
Healer queues seemed to result in dramatically more dungeons than any other role. The guaranteed completion is nice - the comparative monotony, less so.
As previously mentioned, damage queues appear to result in significantly more guildhests. Getting a good chain of guildhests mAkEs NuMbEr gO uP fAsT, but I felt, oddly, a little guilty the one time I remember having such a lucky streak (see 10/06/2026). YMMV.
I had twice the number of failed duties in my first 645 as I did in the remaining 1382. Maybe I ran into easier duties and less groups trying to bowl over Extreme Trials, or maybe everyone just got better at the game? Who can say.
It concludes
Two factors motivated me towards getting this done at last, and ASAP, smashing out 700 duties over the course of two months in what I call the "Late Dawntrail" period:
- The significant changes announced at Fanfest to jobs and the cross-data centre duty finder could mean that Mentor Roulette will look very different in late 7.5 and beyond, and I wanted to keep the "picture" of data in the spreadsheet as consistent as possible (accepting the flaws with it that already exist).
- I realised that if I could be done before June 25th 2026, I'd have completed the achievement in under five years, which seemed like a nice milestone to aim for.
So I locked in... did little else in my free time over the course of the last two months, and got it done. I ran the last duty I needed late last night as PLD, and, fittingly, had the chance to say a fond farewell to an old adversary in the process. After 24 minutes, a few wipes (including at 0.1% - classic), and a clutch use of Cover and tank LB1... he fell over, and the road finally came to an end.
Suffice to say, if you have the time, freedom and concentration to smash out 15+ duties a day, or more on the weekend (I got to 45 on the very last day! It was hell!), then you can and will make significant progress. Had I stuck with this properly from the start, even just doing 5 a day, it wouldn't have taken me five years to finish... but it's entirely possible you'll find that such quantities are sustainable in the long term, and it doesn't take much (an hour-long EX that ends in failure, a couple of MSQ dungeons dotted around, etc.)
I don't think I could have kept such a pace up for much longer than I did, and was entirely reliant on being at what I could view as the "final stretch" of the achievement, alongside having two very specific goals in mind to get it done by a set deadline.
What next?
I'm definitely going to be taking a break from Mentor Roulette for the time being, but I might come back to it in Evercold. I'll certainly do so if there are new rewards, though this seems unlikely as the Astrope mount was added in 3.3, and the grind hasn't been extended (unlike the requirements for Mentorship, or that weird Accursed Hoard achievement in Deep Dungeons) since. In the meantime, I'm looking forward to the additions coming in late July; I'm going to level my remaining jobs; maybe do some Dawntrail extremes or raiding, and probably fall back on grinding out some Eureka relics.
To draw upon the sage wisdom of Eric Cartman once again, "Now (I) can finally play the game.".
Not that you're likely to knowingly read this, but for those who fought beside me these past few years - sprouts, other mentors on the same journey, and random players alike - thanks for some overall great times. It's been a pleasure to learn, to teach and to persevere... as much as I have fun complaining about the roulette in jest.
If you've stayed with me on this post all the way, thanks very much for your time, and I hope you've found this some combination of interesting; helpful, familiar and cathartic (if you've walked this road yourself) or mildly amusing. If you have any questions about my experiences, or have thoughts on what I've said or mentor roulette generally, feel free to reply too!
submitted by /u/Pbm23
[link] [comments]
Continue reading...