Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Tonight apparently there is something funky going on with Bel’s Mic and he fades in and out at weird times. First off we talk a bit about Paizo and their efforts to Unionize. Bel talks a bit about having reached level 80 in all of his battle jobs in Final Fantasy XIV. From there we talk about Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous, Unsighted, and revisit Wildermyth. We talk a bit about what happens when you make cataclysms happen 100 years earlier in Stellaris. Then we finish things out with some New World updates.
Good Morning Friends! I realize that for the last few weeks I have pretty much talked about nothing but New World, but that does not mean that I completely abandoned Final Fantasy XIV. In fact while I knew the launch of New World would slow me down, I wanted to keep making slow and steady progress on my goal. I am not exactly sure when I set it into my head, but at some point I decided that I was going to try and make it to level 80 on all standard jobs before the launch of Endwalker on November 19th. While this does in fact net you the Amaro mount that I am riding in the above screenshot, it wasn’t necessarily about getting the “CamelBirb”, but more that I just wanted to have leveled everything that Final Fantasy had to offer class wise. In fact without the sentimentality of having experienced Shadowbringers… the mount isn’t that spectacular… unless that is mine begins to talk to me.
I came back to the game on July 3rd of 2021 after a very long absence and the top chart represents where I was with all of my jobs at that point. I figured the easiest way to get back into the game was to start leveling one of my lower level jobs, and since I favor tanks… I started working on my Paladin and managed to get it to 80 in pretty short order. After that I noticed that my Red Mage was already 73, so I might as well invest a bit of time and work that up to 80. That sequence I guess triggered something in me that wanted to see just how close to leveling everything I could get before the next expansion dropped. It was some years ago, prior to the launch of Stormblood that I decided to get all of my characters to level 50 so I could begin to jettison some of the gear in my bank. I did this largely by “no-life-ing” my way through Palace of the Dead but it felt like a significant accomplishment.
It was part of the way through this process that I realized, I had been pretty regularly posting screenshots of my progress on all of my jobs. This made me decide that I should probably spreadsheet this to see how fast I was leveling. The above curve represents me taking all of these data points, and some that I specifically collected after that point and charting it. If my napkin math is correct at the point of dinging I had been back in the game one hundred and three days and in that time I had put on three hundred fifty three levels. That averages out to be a little bit more than 3.4 levels per day which sounds like a lot… but in truth I have simply been exploiting the daily bonus system to do a few things each day and earn several levels for doing it. If you are curious about this process you can check out my post on leveling alternate jobs that I made some time back.
There were a lot of these that I did not do every single day, but in the very least I tried to do three of them. The first of course is the Main Story Roulette, because it is such a huge boost in experience. More important than that however I tried to get Praetorium specifically, because the amount of bonus experience is just so much higher than Castrum. This means that there were days that I got Castrum bailed and then waited out the 30 minute timer for abandoning only to get Castrum again and wait through another timer. I tried to save things like my daily hunts as something that I could do during this time frame to make the wait a little less painful. On top of that I tried my best to always do the Faerie daily quests if I had a character that was in the 70s. Lastly the PVP Roulette is similarly important in that it is a very quick way to add over half of a level worth of experience. If I had time and patience left I would do the Alliance raid next but there were plenty of days that I neglected to do it.
What About Blue Mage?
Throughout this entire process, especially as I got towards the finish line… folks have kept asking what about Blue Mage. Blue Mage does not count, both literally and logically. Blue Mage is what they call a limited job which means that I cannot do any of the things that I have been doing to level it. There are no roulette bonuses because you cannot queue as a blue mage unless you are going through the party finder… with an entire group of other blue mages. Additionally Blue Mage is nowhere in the stack of achievements for leveling all of the Magic and Melee jobs or for the Amaro mount. Blue Mage is enjoyable in its own right, but it more or less involves a lot of grinding and I am not super concerned about getting it to cap. That said now that I am finished with over a month of time to spare, I will probably see what damage I can do in grinding out the last 20 levels of that job.
What Job Did I Like Least?
So another thing that people have asked is what my least favorite job was to level. The truth is there isn’t a single job that I found that I hated, and they were all interesting in their own way. That said… I thought for awhile that Black Mage might be the class that broke me. It is doing nothing that I want to do in an MMO because I have this long standing feud with “Finger Wiggler” classes, and as a result I tried to finish off all of my casters leaving myself a melee and a tank as the last two things I had left to level. Black Mage though… has no mobility… is squishy as fuck… and is basically the antithesis of the sort of class that I enjoy playing in a game. It does some really interesting things and I created a super sweet glamour for it, but there is never going to be a case where I choose Black Mage over Red Mage for example.
What Job Surprised You The Most?
Another thing that I have been asked is what Job I enjoyed the most, or what Job did I enjoy that I didn’t expect to enjoy. That crown goes to Machinist because I fully expected it to be a real slog to level. I had tried Machinist during Heavensward and hated it. However since then it has been reworked a number of times and the current version feels awesome. In fact this is very highly likely going to be my DPS main for Endwalker, or at least the first DPS that I push up to maximum level. I really like the mobility of the class and the animations just feel great. Additionally who doesn’t love summoning a literal robot to come fight by your side? Machinists are a bit disappointed that the Job doesn’t seem to be getting anything flashy and new going into Endwalker, but I think that is largely because they were in the best shape after their most recent revamp.
What Is Your Endwalker Main?
For years I had been a Warrior main in Final Fantasy XIV, and liked being the dude with the huge hitpoint pool and the ginormous axe. However over the last few expansions they have leaned more and more into the “Blue DPS” fantasy and honestly that has never really been my jam when it comes to tanks. I want all of the aggro and I want to be a massive bulwark against the oncoming storm. Leveling Paladin has made me feel the way I want a tank to feel and it plays more into my tanking fantasy than Warrior ever did. I am not sure why I shied away from Paladin early on in the game other than it was a pain in the butt to tank low level content as Gladiator and that they got their Aggro Stance late. However now that I have found Paladin in its most recent form, I am holding on with both hands and this will be my main going into Endwalker.
The embargo on the Endwalker influencer media tour has lifted and there is so much content now available to hype us up for the expansion. My personal favorites of these are the interviews with Yoshi P. He gives big kindly uncle vibes and I am so there for it. Listening to the way he talks about the game gives me so much hope for the future. While I am currently focused on getting to level 60 and gearing up in New World, I am also super ready for the launch of Endwalker and for them to punch me straight in the feels again. I am super glad I went through this little experiment and now with the launch of Endwalker I will have two new classes to level from Scratch and 10 more levels on every other class to add on. I figure I will be busy for quite some time to come.
The post All 80 Before Endwalker appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Last night I dinged level 50 in New World, which means I have ten more levels to go before the “endgame”. I am honestly finding myself looking forward to reaching the end game in part because it will allow me to start finally working on my “forever gear”. One of the problems that I have had with New World is how fast I am leveling, not necessarily in time scale but in content scale. With New World all of your experience gain matters, which means those 10 points that you get for harvesting a node or for crafting an item all add up over time. Since I am crafting, gathering, and also questing it means that I am perpetually behind the curve when it comes to actually completing content in a given zone. Last night I spent time wrapping up some things in Cutlass Keys… a zone that is supposed to be level 35, and that means I am not actually seeing any drops that I can use in the least as upgrades.
This becomes a problem when one of the early praises that I had for the game was how generally approachable the gear from your faction was… ultimately stops being reasonable. I have managed to stay caught up with the faction quests so that I am always unlocking the next tier of gear around the level that I could start using it. The problem is the rewards you get for running faction missions don’t come close to giving you enough tokens to be able to afford a set of gear. Take the chestpiece for example, it is 24,000 faction tokens and currently in Ebonscale Reach, the highest zone that I can realistically quest in… I am earning 900 tokens per faction quest. That means in order to get a single piece of gear I would need to grind out 27 faction missions. If my pocket math is correct… in order to grind out a full set of this gear I would need to run roughly 90 faction missions, and that would not even include my chosen pair of weapons. Essentially this source of gear stops being viable until you reach level 60, when it offers up a good entry into the endgame and is worth grinding out… given that you aren’t going to simply out level its usefulness.
The additional challenge is that because my gear is lagging… I can’t really jump successfully to Ebonscale Reach and just start questing there without hitting the market board and buying some upgrades. Which gets us into the territory of folks assuming that just because something is blue or purple that it immediately has value. I’m not finding near the number of cheap upgrades on the board right now than I was before. So ultimately I think I might spend some time chasing portals and hoping that those chests offer some sort of meaningful upgrade path. I am in that annoying phase of being so close to being able to earn lasting and meaningful gear upgrades… but so far away. Ultimately I could probably easily push through to 60 just on the scraps that I have left hanging in the zones I have already leveled through. Still having a lot of fun with the game, but it is starting to get frustrating seeing a cavalcade of drops that I can’t really use for much of anything.
What is nice however is seeing the changes that were made yesterday. We spent last night running through elite camps and finishing up some quests there which was a freaking blast. This was prompted by the fact that a confusion patch note that I called out yesterday… turned out to be phenomenal.
Fixed an issue reducing variety and potential quantity of loot obtained from game modes and chests within the world.
What this means in practice is that apparently all of those supply chests and the like that we have been looting… have not been rewarding near as many crafting resources as intended. So instantly over night boxes that would reward a couple of sandpaper started giving us ten or twenty of them. This also means that it is going to single-handedly kill the highway robbery that was happening as folks who were not crafting would charge over a gold for a single sand flux. I think I talked about going through around 800 sandpaper in a single day… and in one night I think I have farmed most of that back. So while I am struggling to find the drops I need… I might just be able to afford to level up my professions to a point where I can just create my own upgrades. That is were it not for the fact that the act of me crafting that much is going to go ahead and push me to level sixty in the process.
Given the pace at which I have been going through levels… it is highly unlikely that I am going to be stuck in these doldrums long enough to really matter much. By this time next week I am very likely going to be at the level cap and toiling away at my starter set of endgame gear from the faction vendors. A whole world of options is going to open up in front of me because I still have yet to scratch any of the true “endgame” zones out there. Seeing Ebonscale Reach however has only served to cement my desire to have a house there. This might be the town that I actually save up and buy a proper tier 4 house in because it is really gorgeous. It FEELS like an endgame zone, and quite honestly its layout somewhat reminds me of the temples in Pandaria with everything terraced out of the face of a mountainside. Key difference being this feels more like an actual place and less like a contrived outpost with convenient resources.
At some point this weekend I am hoping to be able to run the depths, but as it stands now we are going to need to recruit a healer and a dps to make it happen. Waren, Vernie, and I have outpaced the rest of the folks in the guild. Seeing that Depths is a level 45 dungeon, and reportedly one of the more challenging ones… we should probably make sure everyone is at that level. I do have a friend on the server that is a healer, so I might pester her to come heal me. On a closing note… I got my first legendary item today. It was a crafting resource however… but I am certain this will be useful when it comes to crafting Legendary gear at some point.
The post Faction Gear Conundrum appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I had a pretty great night of gaming but first, we are going to talk about the most sought-after resource in New World… Iron. I’ve found a rather tasty new Iron route that seems to be relatively unknown, at least on my server. Yesterday morning before work I spent about 20 minutes doing a double loop and gathered around 3000 Iron ore with nary a sign of anyone else aware that this was even a thing. As such I am only going to show you a brief glimmer of the glory that I have uncovered… which includes these four spawns of 1 large, 2 medium, and 1 small iron node in a fairly tight cluster. Is this not the most beautiful thing you have ever seen in your life?
Since I hear you all telling me what a struggle you are having finding Iron, I thought I would at least help out a bit and share my old route with you. This is one that I have been running for quite some time, and after posting a picture of this route on Twitter yesterday I decided to run it real quick just to see what sort of a haul I could get from it. In a single pass, I found 1414 Iron Ore and 183 Oil, and passed up some silver along the way since I have yet to start Jewelcrafting in earnest and mostly consider that a trash metal. The only problem with this route is that it is very well known and has been since beta, and as a result, you are going to encounter quite a lot of competition along the route. Essentially it starts at Windsward, dips down into Last Light, and crosses over to Cutlass Keys featuring a truly staggering number of potential Iron Ore spawns. However, you are likely going to have someone either right ahead of you or right behind you… so make sure you always grab the big node first.
There were a couple of big highlights for yesterday. The first being that I managed to finish up my faction promotion mission in Mourningdale. This is a big zone that is a pain in the butt to traverse given that there are some big changes in elevation and mountain ranges in the way. Visually it reminds me an awful lot of Arathi Highlands in World of Warcraft or maybe the Plains biome from Valheim. For the most part, all of the camps needed for the quest were pretty easy to deal with except one. It featured a named elite that would drop the spinning Diablo 3 style turrets and just straight wreck me. I had to wait for a party in order to take that boss down and claim my prize. Unfortunately…. the quest will allow you to use the items more than once… so I had to actually complete this circuit of camps twice because I got to the final node and didn’t have an item left to use on it.
Eliyon got to the point of needing Starstone Barrows, the second dungeon in New World and as a result, we gathered a group to venture forth. This seemed like a smaller map than Amrine, but it involves retreading over certain areas multiple times in dealing with the ever-present pink lasers of death. Mechanically the dungeon was a lot of fun, but it is super easy to get lost, and if you fail at playing limbo with the aforementioned beams… it is instant death. This would not be that big of a deal but it is seemingly impossible to resurrect players that died to mechanics because they stand up… hit the beam and die again. The final boss was an awful lot of fun and I feel like I am starting to get the swing of how to tank in New World because it is wildly different than tanking in any other game. I will probably go into this more in another discussion once I feel I have mastered the basics.
Lastly, after the dungeon, we roamed over to Brightwood and knocked out some quests for the elite area there. I had already done this but was more than happy to venture forth because even at 49… it is a shockingly good experience. Our little jaunt was worth segments on my XP bar, and I picked up a not insignificant number of resources from the assorted chests. I really need to drag everyone over to the level 40 elite area in Weavers Fen because I have a number of quests that lead there. Since I needed to tank I didn’t get much in the way of weapon skill given that I have already maxed out the sword. However, the others were flying through the levels because it seems like elite farming is the way to go there.
Finally, we need to offer up a moment of silence for Boarsholm. We all knew this would eventually get patched, and the very public spotlight that was shone on just how rewarding this camp was guaranteed it would be high on the bug fixes list. Overnight Amazon released the patch notes for update 1.0.2 that is being applied this morning, and sure enough both the Boar spawns and Bear cave spawns have been updated to more appropriate levels. So here is hoping that you managed to get your skinning maxed to 200 before this went away because it was a truly glorious ride. On the positive, it means that folks will actually be able to complete this quest without having to fight for kills. There is one note that confuses me a bit.
Fixed an issue reducing variety and potential quantity of loot obtained from game modes and chests within the world.
So was there a bug that was reducing variety and quantity… and they fixed that, or did they reduce the variety and quantity to fix a bug where chests were too rewarding? The wording is extremely confusing here, but I am hoping it is the former rather than the latter. It seems like we are falling into a pattern of patch day is Wednesday morning, and the servers are reported to be down for roughly five hours. Here is hoping that the update also brings us closer to server transfers for those folks who are still waiting for them.
The post Beams of Certain Death appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Belghast 
