The Summoning of Yoshi P

Good Morning Friends! Seeing as this past weekend was a holiday weekend here in the United States, I observed a holiday posture and did not make a post yesterday. That means that this is going to be a week without a Mixtape Monday post. I assure you however that it will return as scheduled next week, but for now, you are getting another Final Fantasy XIV post. Currently, there is a Holiday event happening in-game called The Rising, which commemorates the launch of A Realm Reborn on August 24th of 2013, and more so the struggle that was turning this game into what it is now. During the event, the host cities are decorated and in the evenings there is a constant flow of fireworks in the night sky.
Each year the event centers around an in-game character known as the Wandering Minstrel, which for any new player is a self insert avatar for Naoki Yoshida aka Yoshi P the Game’s Director. Generally speaking, the culmination of these events is receiving a personal message from Yoshi P directly, thanking us the players for keeping the dream of Final Fantasy XIV alive. Each year the message is poignant and unique… and at least for me ends up summoning forth a few tears as I experience it. So this might be me reading more into it than I should, but if you look at the decorations in the first photo… all of those blue lamps… are Aether Crystals. Right now Limsa Lominsa for example is chock to the brim rull of them… and what happens when you combine Aether Crystals with Prayer… you summon a primal. Is Yoshi P being summoned each year during The Rising event to deliver a message to the players?
Maps night didn’t actually happen this week, but I have some nine maps waiting and ready for the next one. Instead, Waren, Cyl, and I decided to knock out some of the activities required by this week’s Wondrous Tails book. After doing a bunch of Extreme primals, I decided we should do the First Turn of Final Coil of Bahamut because it should also be pretty easy. The only challenge here is that Cyl, upon returning to the game has started a brand new character and with it requires everything to be unlocked again. This is ultimately how we ended up clearing all of Coil of Bahamut Sunday night, because after getting through Nael van Darnus… we might as well see if we could kill a Bahamut. With our little ragtag group we persevered but wiped several times to both Nael and Bahamut until we landed on a strategy that worked for our assemblage of classes.
My prise for this effort was this really sweet gun for my Machinist, which has more or less turned into my DPS main. I really love the class and how it was reworked since the last time I attempted to play it back in Heavensward. The gun is pretty unique and reminds me more of a drum grenade launcher than anything else. The drum itself spins during the firing and ready animations which is freaking awesome. I honestly would not mind farming Bahamut some more in order to pick up other cool weapons. As far as the process of unlocking it… we ended up getting 100 bonus poetics for each turn, so going through the process for a new player is a pretty effective way to grind those out. Will probably be offering this to some other folks if they care to partake. The only sticking point is Nael, but I think we sorted out some strategy that works more or less. Given how much damage I can take, I just ate all of my meteors and then killed two golems quickly and used the last golem to gobble up the remaining meteors. Keeping the golems from merging was pretty much the hardest bit.
My last leveling update was five days ago, and in that time I have pushed Dark Knight from 66 to 76, Monk from 56 to 63, and added two levels of White Mage. The splintered approach that I have been taking is causing each individual job to go a little slower, but ultimately means that I finish more jobs in the process since I can flip through them freely. White Mage has become my “all the roulettes are done, time to do some palace” character for the moment. It doesn’t seem like I have made much progress but it does I guess add up to roughly 4 levels per day when you factor in all of the various classes that I am moving. I have 77 days until the launch of endwalker and 124 levels worth of classes to push through, and if I can maintain a pace of roughly 3 levels per day… it should in theory take me about 42 days to finish leveling all of my classes to 80 before the expansion. This flipping between characters is making the process pretty joyful to be honest, and I am having an awful lot of fun in the process… so here is hoping I can keep this up. The post The Summoning of Yoshi P appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #358 – Magic Gets Weird

Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we are surprised to have with us Kodra and his five-day-old daughter.  Gotta get that podcasting started early.  This evening Ash and Tam talk about attending Pax Prime during a Pandemic and the oddities that come with that.  After that, we dive into a topic that we somewhat previewed at the end of last week’s show, but Magic the Gathering goes to some really odd places in 2022.  It seems that Wizards of the Coast is finally taking advantage of the fact that they exist in a game setting that can travel to all sorts of dimensions.  Bel talks for a bit about his adventures with the Gamesir X2 controller that turns any Android phone into something resembling a Nintendo Switch.  Finally, we talk about how the mechanics of “Real-time with pause” is generally awful and talk about some of the games that would have been made better with a proper turn-based mode.  Lastly, a quick topic as Kodra talks a bit about the 2.3 updates for VVVVVV and how he hopes to try speedrunning some other modes.

Topics Discussed

  • Attending PAX During Pandemic
    • Interesting games
  • Magic in 2022
    • Cyberpunk Kamigawa
    • Art Deco Gangland
    • Street Fighter
    • Fortnite
  • Gamesir X2 Android Controller
    • PS5 Remote Play
    • Xbox Game Pass
    • Steam 
  • Real-Time with Pause Sucks
    • Pathfinder
    • Pillars of Eternity
    • Dragon Age: Origins
  • VVVVVV 2.3 Released
    • Kodra can speed run more modes
The post AggroChat #358 – Magic Gets Weird appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Anima Distractions and Android Switch Fun

Good Morning Friends! I give you this lovely picture of Moogle’s doing a chorus line to brighten your Friday. This is evidence that I did in fact finally get around to finishing the Dark Knight storyline in Heavensward. No, it doesn’t make any sense why Moogles should factor heavily into the edgelord Dark Knight storyline, but this is Square and never question their madness. I am feeling heavily distracted right now, but even in that state, I am still putting on levels, which means I am still ultimately serving my final goal of 80 everything by Endwalker. I mean for reference when I made yesterday’s post I was 66 Dark Knight and 56 Monk and I have put two levels on for both classes, which is just about all one can really hope for without excessive grinding.
I ran another Syrcus tower, getting me my final Aether Oil needed and allowing me to turn to get my Hyperconductive Nothung. I don’t love the appearance of the Nothung in general, and for glamour, purposes am still using the Awoken Deathbringer look. The next step involves a lot of slow grinding out materials, but luckily it does give me a really great poetics sink if I find myself needing one. If I so choose there is a method for this next part that involves burning through Leve Allowances and farming “Amber-Encased Vilekin”. This material is a guaranteed drop… but sadly from the random chests that appear during levequests. The preferred method of farming is to start a levequest, fly around looking for a chest… then abandon the quest and start another one doing the same thing. This seems wasteful and by god, if I am going to do this thing I am going to at least complete the quest and get the gil/items.
Since I am very easily distracted apparently… I also decided to knock out the first two parts to get a nifty glowing weapon for Paladin. Ultimately I want the final step for paladin because like Dark Knight it looks really cool, but at a minimum, the first few parts were easy enough to do since I could run all the dungeons required to solo. At some point, I need to return to FATE grinding for Atmas, but I figured I would save that for a time when Bee is also around and we can farm together. Running FATEs with at least two people feels significantly better than soloing them.
In other news, I have been spending a lot more time with my Gamesir controller and my phone. I don’t have a proper photo of how mine looks set up with the Razer Phone 2… because the device is also what I tend to use as a camera making it extremely impossible to take a picture of itself because android doesn’t offer an astral projection mode. In practice, it feels like using a much more narrow switch, and it does an extremely solid job of playing emulators and I am slowly branching out into more remote play options. The Xbox Game Pass app works great, meaning you can stream anything easily through XCloud that you would normally.
The other thing that I have been messing around with is streaming games from my PlayStation 5, though in practice it would work the same for a PlayStation 4. There is an official Remote Play app, but sadly it does not seem to work as expected with the Gamesir controller. Instead, I had to move over to one of the third-party unofficial apps and am running PSPlay which costs $5 on the android store. By default the Gamesir is configured for Japanese style controls with the bottom-most button begin “back/undo” and the right-most button is “confirm”. However, I was able to remap all of the controls through the PSPlay app and have been enjoying the heck out of playing PlayStation games in this pseudo-android-switch sort of setup. The PSPlay app offers a local-only mode, which greatly reduces latency, and of note when you are not touching the screen to take a screenshot… those on-screen controls touch controls go away. A tap of the screen or a swipe translates to taking the same action on the controller touch screen, which is nice.
Like I said though, I am slowly easing into testing different apps. The next on the docket is going to be to start trying out Steam Link and maybe Moonlight if I have to fall back to that instead. One of the reasons why I wanted to explore this was to find a way to play Final Fantasy XIV from bed… and I already have a very viable solution for that. The only gotcha is that I need to devote the hour or two of time to set up my account with the crossbar UI, and then get used to actually using a controller. I am wondering if it might be easier to set everything up on the PC with a controller, and then synchronize those UI settings over to the PS5, given that on PC I at least have access to a mouse when it comes to dragging windows around. All in all, I am very happy with this solution so far, and while the screen mapping functionality for android games is still not the best thing in the world when something supports a controller the experience is flawless. If you are curious about the Gamesir controller, it is available in a Type C variant that I use as well as a Bluetooth version. From what I understand the Bluetooth version requires being charged before using, whereas the Type C is plug and play. It is of course available on all of the major Chinese websites, but based on what I am seeing the price difference is not enough to deal with the month long ship times. The post Anima Distractions and Android Switch Fun appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

The Rising and Leveling Updates

Good morning friends. It has been a minute since I have actually sat down and brought you a proper blog post update about what I have been doing over in Final Fantasy XIV. With Monday being dedicated to Mixtapes, Tuesday brought us the sad news of losses, and yesterday being the wrap-up for Blaugust… more time has passed than is usually the case and in that time I guess I have done a bunch of different things. Firstly if you have not already done so, I highly suggest swinging by Uldah and starting The Rising event that is running through September 9th. Of all of the excellent in-game holidays, this is probably the most personal. It celebrates the birthday of A Realm Reborn, and with it the rebirth of this game from the ashes of the previous. As is often the case we as players get a very special message directly from Naoki Yoshida aka our beloved Yoshi P. Some tears may or may not have happened.
Another thing that happened over the weekend is that I buckled down and finally finished the Main Story Quest for Shadowbringers and got my second credit roll. The problem with talking about this is that I don’t really have a great screenshot to show other than my mug… because effectively everything else I took pictures of contains massive spoilers. I am very much looking forward to when the full trailer for Endwalker releases in October and we see the rest of that sequence. For the sprouts among us that might be reading this blog… something really cool to do is upon completing an expansion… go back and watch the final trailer for that expansion. You will start to notice bits and pieces of the story that you didn’t quite understand that more or less foretold the direction things were going to go. This is especially true with the Shadowbringers trailer for me at least, and I am intrigued where things are going with Endwalker.
I’ve also become terribly distracted of late by The Diadem that is accessible through the restored Firmament crafting area in Ishgard. Essentially this is a turbo button for leveling gatherers, and I made a fair amount of coin in the process of doing so as well. First, you have to have gotten a job to 60, which will unlock access to the “Towards the Firmament” questline. Once you unlock this area you can talk to Augebert at x 11 / y 14 in order to unlock access to the Diadem. From there you will be able to bring level 10 gatherers in and run around picking up nodes at what seems to be an extremely fast experience gain rate. The items that you gather can then be appraised and either stockpiled for leveling crafters through the Ishgard Restoration recipes or sold on the market for a pretty decent profit. I devoted myself to trying to gain a level of Mining and Botany every day, and in the thirty minutes or so that I spent doing this… I would usually gather up enough materials to turn around and flip for around 200,000 gil. Soon I am going to start exploring what I need to start using the Firmament to push up my crafters as well.
Since we last talked I have finished off the Scholar and Summoner, and then started pushing up the Dark Knight and Monk in earnest. Dragoon is still very much my soak class for picking up the Faerie quests in Il Mheg if I don’t have a character up high enough to be able to run them. Another thing of note is I have finished up my gatherers and now Miner, Botanist, and Fisher are all sitting at 80 and I am sufficiently geared to start picking up maps for map night every day. Side note… there is no way to see all of your jobs at once so I photoshopped them together like this just to provide a better visual representation. Right now I am splitting my daily roulettes between Monk and Dark Knight because a number of them I really do not want to do as a Tank.
Another thing that has happened is that I have become terribly distracted by the Dark Knight anima weapon questline and at this point have completed the first four steps in the chain. I am very close to being able to knock out the fifth step because apparently without knowing it I have been ratholing the materials needed to knock this out quickly. This is going to slow down really fast however because I am about to enter the Crystal Sand/Umbrite phase… which involves doing a bunch of things none of which are actually rapid. I am going to need around 75 of each which means I am entering the hardcore phase of the grind…. which I am probably going to ignore until I hit a lull after the release of Endwalker. I want to rush through the next phase however because it opens up the vendor that lets me buy different replica versions for glamour purposes.
I have roughly eighty days until the release of Endwalker, and my goal is still to be sitting at 80 on all of my jobs when it rolls out. Blue Mage is a bonus, given that it doesn’t exist at level 80 yet but I am not including it in my mission. I figure Dark Knight, Monk, and Dragoon will be hitting cap before too much longer which leaves me Gunbreaker, White Mage, Astralogian, and Black Mage. After I finish the current trio of classes that I am working on… I guess I will grab another healer to space those out a bit. White Mage is my lowest currently so I will spend some time focused on it. I am trying really hard not to just go no-lifer mode with Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High, but I have a feeling before all is said and done there will be a bit of that happening just to push through faster. Still finding myself having a blast on my little mission, so here is hoping that I keep the stamina and make it. The post The Rising and Leveling Updates appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.