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Minfilia's next quest can wait. I haven't actually recorded the next arc yet.
Instead, over in Ul'dah, we find this nice fellow in the marketplace.
I had copied and pasted all of this guy's text, but it was just a sad old man full of survivor's guilt over living when all of his friends died.
Northwest of Black Brush Station is a huge ant mound, full of ants that are physically bigger than Ginger.
This is Cutter's Cry, a labyrinth of sand-ridden caverns. And you hear that? That sound like the whuffing snort when a fire catches? That's the chimera...not that I've seen it. Sure, go right on in, if you're that certain of your ability to make it out in one piece. Just don't expect me to go trotting in there after you...no matter how hard you wail and holler.
Ah, you promised old Sibold the Stoic, did you? He's what's called a man of principle, he is. A little too much principle, I'd say. What's wrong with wanting to live when you've a wife at home big with child? Aye, the tale goes that rather than facing the fate spun for him by Nymeia, he hid beneath the mangled body of his leader and watched as his companions were torn apart, one by one...all so that he might return home to see his son born.
Should he have died a hero rather than lived a coward? Was being able to see his son worth having the boy grow knowing his father was a craven, a disgrace to his friends and family? Should I ever find myself faced with a similar decision, would I have the courage to walk the righteous path? Now you know the true reason I will never step into that cave.
Man, what the fuck is wrong with this land. Did people really call this man a craven because he barely escaped from a deadly beast? That's the sort of stupidity you expect from Ishgardians, not from the rest of Eorzea.
Welp, now that we've got some dungeons to do, let's do them!
Because I recorded this at 4:20 AM (seriously!) Eevee was the only one around. So Ginger is only joined by Orokin for this little trip. But first up on the dungeon tour is...
Echoes of Ages Past
SERIOUSLY with the fucking nighttime. I swear I'm gonna have to boost the gamma or something. Can you believe there are people that actually install mods to make the game's nighttime even darker?
Qarn used to be kind of infamous, because it was an optional dungeon... until the ARR postgame. Then, for some unfathomable reason, the devs actually forced you to run it. Not for any storyline reason, no. Just... because. The dungeon isn't bad. It isn't Cutter's Cry or Toto-Rak or anything like that. But it was just so odd that they made you run it for no adequately explained reason.
There are two types of tanks in Qarn: those that slow pull and "no mods no masters no barriers try and keep up bitches."
We're going it slow here. That's actually not a bad thing.
Do you see the Temple Bee at the top of the screenshot? That little bastard is dangerous. If they're left alive long enough, they'll start casting something called Final Sting. It deals 80% of the target's maximum HP in damage. Not current HP. Maximum. If you have a tank that mass pulls, you'll often have multiple Final Stings being charged at the same time.
This Qarn Facer is an interesting enemy, because if you fail to kill him in a short amount of time here, he runs away really fast and then pops up later to harass you again. Whenever you kill him, however, he drops a chest with some loot in it! 
Sunken Temple of Qarn is a level 35 dungeon, so any items that Ginger can equip from in here are direct upgrades to the stuff she's been wearing for more than 20 updates. These fists are a much-appreciated damage boost.
The next boss is another weird stumbling block for a lot of players. This is actually the introduction to a mechanic that will very infrequently pop up for the rest of the game. The boss himself is nothing special. Just a wall of HP. However...
He periodically summons adds. These dung wespes don't have a lot of health, but they also have Final Sting. So they need to die pretty promptly!
This is the big one. The Teratotaur has a little mechanic called Mortal Ray. The entire arena turns orange to let you know that it's a raidwide. So there's no escaping it.
In the arena are three pads. The one in the back is currently glowing orange, which means it's active. As soon as Mortal Ray goes off, everyone needs to book it to the active pad to get their debuff cleansed. What debuff? Just look next to Ginger's party list. That's the Doom icon.
If it isn't cleansed in 12 seconds, you just die. Full stop. The glowing pad clears Doom. This mechanic is rarely used, but it's something you always need to keep in the back of your mind going forward. The active pad changes periodically throughout the fight, so you need to be sure of which one is active before you run to it.
Yes, it is fully possible to make it to the active pad just as it deactivates. In that case, you're pretty much boned because the 12 second timer is generally not long enough to get to a second pad.
Mechanics keep repeating after that. So just burn he butt.
The next mechanic this dungeon is inordinately fond of is these Avordupois. They continually respawn when killed...
Unless they're killed on top of the glowing pad. No I don't know why. I'm pretty sure it never again pops up after this.
Immediately after the first one, there are two more. Naturally they like to randomly stop and cast cone AOEs for no particularly good reason except to tempt greedy DPS into nuking them.
You technically don't need to kill these two. They leash pretty quickly. But if you do, you get access to side chambers with usable objects. You can see the first one in the background here: the Flame of Magic. The other side has the Fruit of Knowledge. These will be needed for the final puzzle of the dungeon.
If the Qarn Facer hadn't been killed earlier, this is where it would pop back up.
Second boss is in the large room down the stairs.
This guy is extremely simple. The fight has two phases that continually cycle. In the first phase, the golem's body barely takes any damage, but the soulstone takes full damage.
So just break the soulstone!
Without the soulstone, the body takes full damage.
But it eventually reforms. When it does, the body will run around uncontrollable for a moment, pounding on the DPS and healer with some shockingly high damage moves.
In the past, I have had groups not be able to kill the boss in two cycles. Once I had to heal a group that took four cycles. But most will be able to clear it in two like this one here did.
The dungeon is actually almost over. Qarn is thankfully very short! Up ahead we have another one of those gimmick "kill on the pad" statue enemies.
No this is not a second screenshot of the same fight. This is the exact same fight, but just up the stairs from the previous one. The fight so nice they did it twice.
This last group of enemies is all that stands between us and the final puzzle.
Eevee's already set them up, but I didn't realize that at the time. But for the purposes of the LP, I want to show this off anyway. You need to balance magic and knowledge. There's no penalty for getting it wrong, and if you do the speedrun trick I mentioned above, you can't actually complete it. If you do get it wrong, all that happens is some optional enemies spawn in.
But to get it right? There's a really easy way. The flame goes on the left, the fruit goes on the right. Everyone has their own mnemonic, but I'm pretty fond of mine. fLame and fRuit. Yes, really. The flame goes on the left because it has an L in it, while the fruit goes on the Right for the same reason the other way.
The Adjuticator is really simple. Just burn his ass until something else pops up.
A Sun Juror will continually spawn throughout the fight... unless you kill it on top of a pad. That will stop it from respawning.
The fight is otherwise just a simple add rush. Mythril Verges will spawn that cast line AOEs at random players. The longer the fight goes on, more of them spawn. Unlike a fight much later on, we can't ignore these because of outgearing. So we need to take them out.
A second type of Mythril Verge also spawns that just traps you in a square alone with it until it's destroyed.
The final mechanic is that the boss will occasionally try to paralyze someone. Do you see how the cast bar is highlighted in red with a glowing outline? That means it's interruptable.
For getting the fruit and flame puzzle right, some optional treasure chests become available. There's some extra loot in here too!
Fast forward past another Qarn, and Ginger is now level 38. She needed to be 37 to quality for Cutter's Cry, so she's now in ideal range. Also check out her new goggles. These are actually the exact same model that machinists get for their level 70 class set!
When the rework happened back in July, the devs touched up the loot tables in a lot of the ARR dungeons. All the optional mid-range dungeons now have better loot, and some previously class-locked items were placed on the loot tables as well.
Fitting for being a desert temple dungeon, the armor Ginger got from Qarn makes her look like Indiana Jones. Normally you can't don't get access to this set until you're a level 50 gathering job.
Abomination (A pretty decent theme for a pretty shit dungeon.)
Back in 2019 I actually participated in a group roleplay where the DM took everyone into Cutter's for an in-character exploration of the dungeon. It was pretty fun! It's not often someone gets to say that about Cutter's Cry, one of the infamous 1.0 holdover dungeons.
That means that Cutter's used to exist in 1.0 and while significant changes were made to it to make it playable for 2.0, its roots still show because it's fucking terrible and nobody likes it. Toto-Rak was another 1.0 holdover dungeon, to the surprise of absolutely nobody.
Do you see those little circles in the sand? Those deal damage if you stand in them. Don't stand in them.
I love MNK getting AOE before any other melee jobs. If Ginger was playing NIN, she'd have only just gotten her first AOE, and DRG doesn't get its AOE until level fucking 44. I'm serious. BLM gets AOE by level 18. BRD gets AOE by level 18. Melee are stuck using single target like a chump until 26 at the earliest, and 44 at the latest.
When the devs change classes around every expansion launch, they never remember that melee gets shafted on AOE availability until later.
The first two chambers follow the same pattern: kill all the enemies and more will spawn in that also need to be killed.
Each time you change from a chamber, you also need to take a sand bath.
The third chamber is just a long winding tunnel full of enemies. While it has optional divergences, they don't last very long. Before the rework, the divergences used to have chests in them that only contained crap. Since the rework removed useless items like potions from loot tables, the useless chests were also removed. Fair enough!
The first boss is this queen ant. Er, princess ant. Whatever.
She targets random players to silence them. Like paralyze in the last dungeon, this should be interrupted if it's on the healer or any magic DPS.
If your group's damage is good, you can burn through most of her HP bar before she summons reinforcements. It's been so long since I had to deal with them, I legitimately can't remember what the reinforcements do.
They apparently swarm your healer, but what else is new in add rush fights?
The next chambers have some fights in them, but you're free to leave as soon as you find the exit. Most groups speed through these.
In the second chamber, if you go to the left and up a hill, there's a sneakily-hidden chest you can grab for some loot.
It's the exact same gloves the first boss dropped.
I want you all to know that this screenshot is #42069. That's all. That's it. I just wanted to say "nice" before moving on. (Update 42, image 69 if you were wondering about my numbering scheme.)
Hmmm... we must have walked with rhythm.
The boss occasionally vomits sludge on someone that ticks for damage over time. Good healers (like Orokin) will know to esuna that shit off! Also the boss dives underground periodically.
See that explosion in the distance? That's the boss tunneling toward a specific point. If you get hit by those, it really really hurts.
I don't know what happens if you get sucked into the middle of this whirlpool, but it probably ain't good.
The bosses in Cutter's really aren't very interesting compared to Qarn. At least they're easy for the most part.
This is the last chamber, and it's just a gigantic winding path.
Occasionally the blue pools catch on fire and then explode. You probably shouldn't stand on top of those.
There's also a fork in the road. If you go down the optional path, you can get some optional loot!
The last boss is just at the end of the path.
The guy outside warned us about the chimera. This boss actually has a lot of mechanics, and ones that you can't just ignore.
Throughout the fight, different parts of the boss will glow different colors. If the ram's eyes glow, you want to get out of melee range.
Easy way to remember that? The goat rams you out of melee range.
If this happens, you need to run away and not stop.
And while this happens, the other mechanic happens. If the dragon's eyes glow, you need to get inside the melee range.
Because we had to kite ball lightning around, we got hit by paralysis. Even though we were well outside of the maximum area of effect. Also it really fucking hurts. Ginger lost 2/3 of her HP!
Here's a better view of the dragon voice move. The mnemonic for this one, by the way? The dragon drags you in.
This guy can be really rough, especially for unprepared groups. But the good news is if you remember my easy mnemonics, then you're prepared for whenever the game throws another chimera at you. Because they all operate just like this jerk.
I blew the limit break too early, but Cutter's is probably the first dungeon you will visit where a full LB2 will charge up. In plain english, that means that the limit break meter will fill up 2 bars. So far I've been glossing over limit breaks, because dungeon bosses are chumps that die before the second bar fills even halfway. But this is a good time to discuss them.
Limit breaks are often left for melee jobs to perform against bosses. Melee LBs deal a lot of damage, but it's single target only. Ranged physical limit breaks target everything in a large line from the user clear across the battlefield. It deals less damage than melee, but against 2 or more targets, actually maths out to better damage overall.
Caster limit breaks share the same damage calculation as ranged, but theirs is a ground target effect. Good ranged or caster DPS will use a LB1 as soon as it's charged against the next pack of enemies in a dungeon. Most players will not care and will probably actually give their commendation because of it.
The players who do care are are the sort who waste the limit break. They don't see a massive single target damage nuke... they see a Glorious Anime Style Finishing Move. So they don't use the LB when the boss is around ~25% HP. They wait until the boss is at ~5% so they can kill it with the LB and waste most of the move's damage potential.
And if a group has two casters or two ranged DPS, they will just never use the LB period. Probably because they got yelled at by a greedy melee for using it. God forbid the melee doesn't get to waste 75% of the move's damage against a dead target. 
Anyway, that's all for this update! Ginger is now a level 40 MNK. The MSQ she's about to start is around level 28. She's achieved a level beyond over-leveled and has become "over-leveled to the point of excess." So to that end, I'm going to put MNK on a shelf for a while to prevent it from getting too far ahead.
NEXT TIME: ROG20 and ROG25. But after that? The new arc is starting! It's even shorter than the one we just ended. Seriously. I'll show Ginger's new MSQ job off then!