Fox Battle Buddy

Fox Battle Buddy

I am a simple man made up of many rituals.  When one of those rituals is broken… things tend to fly out of control.  This morning is a prime example of this, considering I am getting a super late start to writing a post.  The normal sequence of events was interrupted and in the process I wound up fiddling about for far too long and now am under the gun to produce a post.  In truth I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning other than to show you my awesome new mount.  The luck truly has been with me over the last week, what with getting the legendary belt, a 870 ring from the raid… and the drop needed to start the fox mount quest in Suramar.  There are supposedly a whole bunch of ways to start this quest, but I got mine from one of the daily emissary loot boxes.  Whatever the case it all starts with receiving a Torn Invitation, that immediately turns around and unlocks a series of four day long missions in your Order Hall.  From there you get a quest out in Suramar called Volpin the Elusive that involves saving this fabulous mount, or at least the Fox that becomes the mount.  My head canon is that the fox is so grateful for protecting him from the mean hunters, that he decides to be our lifelong battle buddy and going off on adventures with us.  In any case it is a very different looking mount, much shorter to the ground than is the normal case and because of this it makes it feel sleeker.  This is coming from someone who was already used to riding around on the fairly sleek Spectral Tiger.

Fox Battle Buddy

Other than the mount I managed to push my paladin across to 110 last night while roaming around in a momentary lag in the dungeon running.  In truth I wound up running a normal Eye on him to help out some guildies, and that gave me the initial push needed to cross the finish line.  The only problem here is that there is one entire zone that I never touched, which means I am not only trying to hit Friendly with Nightfallen but also needing to go over to Val’sharah and do the same for the Dreamweavers.  Essentially the number one priority right now is unlocking world quests.  That will allow me to casually gear this character without really needing to push super hard.  If I just pop over and check to see what pieces of gear are available I should be able to get to fighting condition in no time at all.  Additionally I plan on starting to focus on my retribution weapon whenever I unlock the first gold trait on my tanking set.  The truth is I am far more likely to gear the paladin doing LFR as Retribution than I am as a tank… I just found it super handy for leveling purposes to push up without the threat of death.  It is always handy being able to talk for friends, and being able to pull literally whatever I wanted with zero threat of death is always favorable to killing things quickly for me.  Playing a tank in an MMO feels akin to playing god mode, which is simply something that is hard to get used to NOT having.  In any case… I need to wrap this up and get on the road, but I am sure this weekend will be filled with dungeons and more faction work on the paladin.  Hopefully yours is relaxing and enjoyable as well.

Eorzean Melancholy

Eorzean Melancholy

I find myself going through a bit of an odd patch with Final Fantasy XIV, or more so I guess one that has been dragging on far longer than I expected.  When A Realm Reborn launched I was reluctantly playing because my friends were playing.  However something happened along the way and I fell in love with Eorzea.  We drifted apart once our little circle of friends started exiting the game, only to come back a year or so later in full force.  Ultimately Final Fantasy XIV was the game that we left, without really having a reason other than simply running out of things we were able to do.  Mind you… not things we WANTED to do…  things we could realistically do with the gear levels we had without copious amounts of grinding.  When we ultimately came back there was an entire years worth of content waiting for us to explore and it quite literally took every moment up to the release of the expansion… and a bit after it to be able to see and explore all of it.  I cannot remember another expansion for any game that I looked forward to with near the anticipation that I did Heavensward.  While the story content was fun to level through, it was also an expansion of limited scope.  It is strange that getting two dungeons per patch cycle instead of three makes a huge difference…  but it really did and it made each new set of experts feel monotonous.  You would ultimately have the dungeon you liked, and the dungeon that you disliked…  and it always felt like you ended up getting queued into the dungeon you really did not care for.  I am looking at you Neverreap.

Once again we faded away from the game, and while I stayed subscribed this time… I pretty much only poked my head in for new content patches and holiday events.  Recently we made a push to “get the band back together” and start raiding again.  The problem there being that while I am interested in raiding with my friends…  I really want to put zero effort into actually getting the gear NEEDED to raid properly.  When I lay out the options I have before me each night…  I never end up choosing to spend my time in Final Fantasy XIV.  This week another content patch was released, and the game has almost lapped me once again since I was existing in “barely eligible” territory before.  There are several of the new things, like the story content that I can complete right now with my item level.  However to be a proper and reasonable tank I really need to get in and devote some time to gearing.  Unfortunately I really just don’t want to.  It is extremely hard to stay viable in a game that you find yourself only willing to play once a a week.  The malaise has been strong with this game for me, and I am not entirely sure why.  I have always been one to complete each and every holiday and quest that springs up…  and now I have this sad line of broken quests that I never actually finished.  I completed one part of the multi-part burning rangers quest… but never actually finished that up so while I have the armor I have none of the poses.  The Yokai event has been started but I have not actually put enough effort into anything to actually get pets or weapons.  Similarly I realized last night that I apparently completely missed The Rising, because while I kept thinking I will do it someday… I ran out of somedays to do it in.  Finally the Palace of the Dead arrived… and while I have done some with friends I have yet to actually finish any weapons.

I guess it disturbs me how uninteresting all of this seems to me right now, and I have no clue why.  Its like waking up one morning and realizing that you and your best friend… really don’t have much in common.  So often when I fade away from an MMO there are clear reasons why,  this decision or that decision that caused me to get frustrated and quit.  Final Fantasy XIV however is just simply dying from my own neglect and unwillingness to visit it.  On some level that makes me really sad because I am not sure what it was about the Heavensward cycle that made it so much less sticky for me personally than the Realm Reborn.  I think a big part of it is my attraction to loot, and the fact that it feels like there is nothing that I can really do with my time other than hopping on the expert dungeon train.  What I mean is that FFXIV for all intents and purposes is a lootless game… or at the very least a game devoid of interesting drops.  Sure there are chests at the end of dungeon encounters that reward items, but I am talking about is open world free range loot.  I like the fact that in other MMOs there is always a chance, albeit slim that I might get something awesome to drop when I kill any random mob out in the world.  This pushes me to run amok and slaughter everything I come across… in the hopes that this one might be the one that gives me something awesome.  Final Fantasy unfortunately gives me stacks and stacks of crafting materials that I don’t care about, especially since I find the auction house system and selling said materials cumbersome as hell.  So what ends up happening is every mob death feels equally meaningless to me, because there are no situations being set up like that one time I killed a Giant in Stranglethorn and go`dt the Skullflame Shield.

Final Fantasy XIV has hands down some of the best group content, but similarly it is equally boring.  Sure there are the occasional item that has a nifty graphic that you can pick up from roulette, but for the most part you are running dungeons not to get interesting gear… but instead to increment a number of tokens until you can then spend those saved tokens on a piece of gear.  Even then, for the most part gear is an incremental stat stick, that unless you are replacing a 180 with a 220… is not immediately noticeable that the game feels immediately better.  Granted this is a problem with a lot of MMOs when you pick up items that don’t do something.  I am running into this problem with World of Warcraft at the moment in that every single trinket I get just seems to give me a bunch of stats and doesn’t actually do much in the interesting column.  The big problem however is that I just don’t feel more awesome when I put on better upgrades in Final Fantasy XIV… largely because how I judge that “feel” is by my effectiveness to take down random stuff out in the open world.  Since there is nothing actually interesting to kill in the open world…  it is defusing that feedback circle for me.  Ultimately I get gear to feel more powerful taking down things that maybe I once struggled.  It is the “Sand Giant” effect played out in a smaller scale over and over and over for me.  In Everquest there were these mobs called Sand Giants that decimated players in what was ultimately a level 20ish zone called the Oasis of Marr.  However there was a moment of sweet retribution when you could come back at 45-50ish and destroy them and get all of that pent up revenge.  Gearing in an MMO has this same effect for me… as I level there are always big bads that I maybe struggled to take down… and then it feels great to eventually turn the tables on them.  Apart from the early raid content…  I don’t have that experience in FFXIV and I think it is why the open world combat feels so dull to me.  Anyways… this post has gone on far longer than I expected it to, but it still is sad to me… that for many of these reasons…  I am just not finding myself playing much Final Fantasy.

Eorzean Melancholy

Eorzean Melancholy

I find myself going through a bit of an odd patch with Final Fantasy XIV, or more so I guess one that has been dragging on far longer than I expected.  When A Realm Reborn launched I was reluctantly playing because my friends were playing.  However something happened along the way and I fell in love with Eorzea.  We drifted apart once our little circle of friends started exiting the game, only to come back a year or so later in full force.  Ultimately Final Fantasy XIV was the game that we left, without really having a reason other than simply running out of things we were able to do.  Mind you… not things we WANTED to do…  things we could realistically do with the gear levels we had without copious amounts of grinding.  When we ultimately came back there was an entire years worth of content waiting for us to explore and it quite literally took every moment up to the release of the expansion… and a bit after it to be able to see and explore all of it.  I cannot remember another expansion for any game that I looked forward to with near the anticipation that I did Heavensward.  While the story content was fun to level through, it was also an expansion of limited scope.  It is strange that getting two dungeons per patch cycle instead of three makes a huge difference…  but it really did and it made each new set of experts feel monotonous.  You would ultimately have the dungeon you liked, and the dungeon that you disliked…  and it always felt like you ended up getting queued into the dungeon you really did not care for.  I am looking at you Neverreap.

Once again we faded away from the game, and while I stayed subscribed this time… I pretty much only poked my head in for new content patches and holiday events.  Recently we made a push to “get the band back together” and start raiding again.  The problem there being that while I am interested in raiding with my friends…  I really want to put zero effort into actually getting the gear NEEDED to raid properly.  When I lay out the options I have before me each night…  I never end up choosing to spend my time in Final Fantasy XIV.  This week another content patch was released, and the game has almost lapped me once again since I was existing in “barely eligible” territory before.  There are several of the new things, like the story content that I can complete right now with my item level.  However to be a proper and reasonable tank I really need to get in and devote some time to gearing.  Unfortunately I really just don’t want to.  It is extremely hard to stay viable in a game that you find yourself only willing to play once a a week.  The malaise has been strong with this game for me, and I am not entirely sure why.  I have always been one to complete each and every holiday and quest that springs up…  and now I have this sad line of broken quests that I never actually finished.  I completed one part of the multi-part burning rangers quest… but never actually finished that up so while I have the armor I have none of the poses.  The Yokai event has been started but I have not actually put enough effort into anything to actually get pets or weapons.  Similarly I realized last night that I apparently completely missed The Rising, because while I kept thinking I will do it someday… I ran out of somedays to do it in.  Finally the Palace of the Dead arrived… and while I have done some with friends I have yet to actually finish any weapons.

I guess it disturbs me how uninteresting all of this seems to me right now, and I have no clue why.  Its like waking up one morning and realizing that you and your best friend… really don’t have much in common.  So often when I fade away from an MMO there are clear reasons why,  this decision or that decision that caused me to get frustrated and quit.  Final Fantasy XIV however is just simply dying from my own neglect and unwillingness to visit it.  On some level that makes me really sad because I am not sure what it was about the Heavensward cycle that made it so much less sticky for me personally than the Realm Reborn.  I think a big part of it is my attraction to loot, and the fact that it feels like there is nothing that I can really do with my time other than hopping on the expert dungeon train.  What I mean is that FFXIV for all intents and purposes is a lootless game… or at the very least a game devoid of interesting drops.  Sure there are chests at the end of dungeon encounters that reward items, but I am talking about is open world free range loot.  I like the fact that in other MMOs there is always a chance, albeit slim that I might get something awesome to drop when I kill any random mob out in the world.  This pushes me to run amok and slaughter everything I come across… in the hopes that this one might be the one that gives me something awesome.  Final Fantasy unfortunately gives me stacks and stacks of crafting materials that I don’t care about, especially since I find the auction house system and selling said materials cumbersome as hell.  So what ends up happening is every mob death feels equally meaningless to me, because there are no situations being set up like that one time I killed a Giant in Stranglethorn and go`dt the Skullflame Shield.

Final Fantasy XIV has hands down some of the best group content, but similarly it is equally boring.  Sure there are the occasional item that has a nifty graphic that you can pick up from roulette, but for the most part you are running dungeons not to get interesting gear… but instead to increment a number of tokens until you can then spend those saved tokens on a piece of gear.  Even then, for the most part gear is an incremental stat stick, that unless you are replacing a 180 with a 220… is not immediately noticeable that the game feels immediately better.  Granted this is a problem with a lot of MMOs when you pick up items that don’t do something.  I am running into this problem with World of Warcraft at the moment in that every single trinket I get just seems to give me a bunch of stats and doesn’t actually do much in the interesting column.  The big problem however is that I just don’t feel more awesome when I put on better upgrades in Final Fantasy XIV… largely because how I judge that “feel” is by my effectiveness to take down random stuff out in the open world.  Since there is nothing actually interesting to kill in the open world…  it is defusing that feedback circle for me.  Ultimately I get gear to feel more powerful taking down things that maybe I once struggled.  It is the “Sand Giant” effect played out in a smaller scale over and over and over for me.  In Everquest there were these mobs called Sand Giants that decimated players in what was ultimately a level 20ish zone called the Oasis of Marr.  However there was a moment of sweet retribution when you could come back at 45-50ish and destroy them and get all of that pent up revenge.  Gearing in an MMO has this same effect for me… as I level there are always big bads that I maybe struggled to take down… and then it feels great to eventually turn the tables on them.  Apart from the early raid content…  I don’t have that experience in FFXIV and I think it is why the open world combat feels so dull to me.  Anyways… this post has gone on far longer than I expected it to, but it still is sad to me… that for many of these reasons…  I am just not finding myself playing much Final Fantasy.

Yet another week of Legion

Another week has gone by and I’m still in my infatuation mode with Legion but it is starting to wear a bit at the edges. In the big picture sense I haven’t made a lot of huge progress since last week, but everything has still been moving forward in a satisfying way. Mage and Monk are still my only 2 characters at 110, but I now have 2 druids, a priest, pally, and another monk in various stages from unlocking the class hall through level ~105. Other than the minor faction BS that happens in Stormheim, there’s not much difference between Horde and Alliance side. This is making me feel less bad about focusing on my alliance servers where my friends are. It also helps that professions are so tied to quests that having my army of alts horde-side isn’t as huge a benefit, and is more a liability at this point.

I got to raid a tiny bit on Friday! We only cleared the first boss and put in a few attempts on the spider-bird boss, but it was a fun time. I also got to try a couple mythics and my first mythic+. Mythics are fun, they feel about what I’m used to for heroic dungeons. My only complaint about them is that they aren’t available through the group finder. I am hoping as the expansion goes on and the gear cap rises that they might lift that restriction, because there’s nothing about normal mythics that makes me think a restriction on grouping is necessary. Mythic+ on the other hand, that kicked our butts. I mean it probably didn’t help that we had never been in that particular place on regular mythic. We had a good time and we did complete it, but nowhere near beating the timer. With a couple weeks worth of experience and gear I’m sure we’ll be in good shape.

A few other things happened inside my brain over the last week. First, I finally realized that yes, I really am a healer at heart. Goodbye short-lived mage main, we hardly knew ye. Monk healing is fun and satisfying, and since I have a good group of friends to do mythics and raids with I think it needs to be my main. It will take a couple weeks to get fully up to speed on her compared to where my mage was, but it will be worth it to be settled in and not feel pulled in multiple directions. I even kinda enjoy windwalker, even though I usually hate melee. I’ve been playing it enough during world questing to get used to it though, and ran a dungeon as dps and it wasn’t awful. That was my one outstanding worry about monk and it is pretty resolved so I think I’ll be really happy going forward.

The other brain thing that happened is that Blizz’s insistence on forcing people to manually group for things and putting story content out of reach of the group finder has made me stop giving any fucks about it. I’ve got groups and friends so I can totally do these things! But sometimes I just want to queue for LFR and knock out a quest or run a random dungeon when my friends aren’t around. Now LFR gives absolutely nothing I need, not gear or quests or anything, so I have zero reason to do it. And heroics are only really worth it if there’s a world quest or a healer goodie bag. I am wondering if this expansion is going to really divide the population, between casual solo-ish folks who only do world quests, because they can’t move the story forward in accessible content, and raiders who group with their guild for the hard stuff and have no reason to do LFR or heroics. There doesn’t seem to be much incentive this time around for those two groups to overlap. At least in the last 2 expansions you could work on the legendary questline in LFR. Anyway I’m curious to see how this plays out, but I’ve decided I need to stop caring about the story and rewards that Blizz put in front of me and just wander around doing whatever I feel like instead.


Yet another week of Legion