Friends… I have been plying a dastardly trade and I think they are beginning to suspect something. I spend an awful lot of time in my Squadron room in Limsa Lominsa. It has access to glamour resources and is some place I want to go a few times a day, unlike the Inn Room which at this point serves very little point. Honestly, I wish we had a bit more control over the Squadron room and could decorate it based on our exploits. One of the systems it does give me control over is the makeup of my Squad themselves, and slowly over time I have been recruiting Lalafells and replacing the stalls with them. As of yesterday, there are only three remaining, and based on the reaction poor Cecily is giving me… I have a feeling she suspects what is happening. She is a sweet girl though, and part of me is considering keeping her around… because we might need someone that can reach the pedals.
I’ve spent a small amount of effort gearing my Machinist. There are times that I don’t want to tank content, and more often than not that includes raids. We are in the process of pulling together information about raiding interest, and I will be tabulating that this weekend after letting the survey run for two weeks. When it comes to free company and my friends, I am absolutely on board with tanking. Tanking for a group of strangers in harder than dungeon content… well that is less than exciting to me. A lot of my joy from tanking comes from protecting my friends, and in a small dungeon group, I can pretend they are friends for long enough to get us through the content. Tanking for something that lasts thirty minutes like an Alliance Raid brings me significantly less joy. So as a result I have been spending a lot of time on my Machinist because they do a great job of being mobile and also dishing out a fair amount of damage in the process. it also gives me cause to create great cowboy-themed glamours.
Last night as a whole though was an evening where I played catch up on the Main Story Quest. Things are getting really interesting, which is usually the case with that final patch of an expansion. The *.3 patch generally wraps up the conflict of the expansion, and then *.4 presents a new challenge that will ultimately ignite the conflict leading into the next expansion. With that in mind, the *.55 patch is that new conflict coming to a head and presenting a central conflict that sets the tone for the world state of the expansion launch. Last night I reached the final dungeon of the expansion and it looks to be a doozy. I didn’t have time to get through it last night, but I look forward to running it tonight and am probably going to do it the first time with a Trust group. I’ve really enjoyed that as an option because firstly it gives me a chance to get used to the mechanics in a purely judgement-free environment. Secondly, the idle banter and reactions of the NPCs really add to the experience of a dungeon, and given how much story is going to be crammed into this one I am absolutely looking forward to it.
The mission to level all of the things continues unabated as well. At the moment I am sitting at level 77 on the Scholar, level 58 on the Dark Knight, and then each of the gatherers is at least 74. I managed to push Fishing up to 75 because I was following the Qitari quest line and hit a reputational break point giving me two sets of quests in a single day. Since Fishing is harder to level through the Diadem I am using it as my Beast Tribe daily class and getting my levels for it through that method. Doing a single level each day in the Diadem seems to be a reasonable option and by next week it should mean I have level 80 gatherers and can start collecting maps. After that I need to sort out what it takes to level through Ishgard restoration and start putting some effort into crafting classes. I am feeling the need to get up Culinarian so I can craft my own food so that might be my first focus.
That said, I do want to spend at least a bit of this weekend over in Destiny 2. I managed to complete the opening quest of the Season, but have not gone much deeper than that. The problem I am having is that I have things I want to do outside of FFXIV… but I am so engaged with the game that I don’t really want to dettach to go do them for fear I will lose my momentum.
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Good Morning Friends! This morning’s topic is going to go some places, and hopefully, you are along with me on this ride. I am very much a PC-focused gamer, but that does not mean that I don’t also spend a significant amount of time playing consoles like the Switch. Essentially PC will probably always be my platform of choice, but over the last few year when my wife determines it is time for sleep I have gone along with her. This means most of the time I am piddling around on either a phone, tablet, or my switch if it has sufficient charge until I reach the point where I am actually ready for sleep. This means I am always on the lookout for a novel use for one of these devices, especially if it allows me to continue having an experience similar to my gaming PC in a portable form factor.
This week the Ayn Odin went up on Indie GoGo and it is a device that I have been watching for some time as it went through R&D and development. The idea is to create an android based device with a comfortable form factor similar to the Nintendo Switch. The “Pro” version of the device is $265 and honestly seems like quite a deal, at least compared to the recent pricing of the Steam Deck. The thing is… I already have a way more competent android device that I use on a daily basis… my Razor Phone 2. For a few years now I have been chasing the concept of turning that into a more proper gaming device that includes some physical controls. The thing that really is the thing holding me back from completely embracing mobile gaming… is touch screen controls just feel like shit. I have giant fumbling fingers and they never offer the level of precision that I am seeing in a touch screen interface.
Since I have a Razor Phone, my first step on this journey was to pick up the Razor Kishi when it first landed on the market. Razor makes decent enough peripherals, and I have to admit the thumb sticks and buttons on the device feel solid. The first strike against the device however… is that it doesn’t fit their own phone. There are some rubber inserts on the sides of the device that are designed to create a firm grip when you dock your phone into it. However with the Razor Phone 2, it will not fit into the device unless I yank these two rubber bumpers out of the way. Without them in place however there are other problems that arise.
This image comes from Razor’s own marketing slides, and shows the back of the device. Essentially your phone is suspended between the two chonky sides of the device by an elastic band. Without the rubber bumpers in place that grip your device, the entire thing feels floppy in the hand. Given that I have nonsensically large hands that I have already discussed in the past, I am constantly causing the device to flex in unnatural ways given that it isn’t making great contact in the first place. While I have spent some time gaming in this manner, namely playing XCloud… it isn’t exactly an award winning experience.
Now we zoom forward to last week, as I was following news about the Ayn Odin device… I saw someone mentioning that it was just cheaper to get a burner phone and the device shown above and end up with the same results. The device in question is known as the Gamesir X2 and it comes in both a Type-C connection variant that I own and a Bluetooth connected version. I specifically went for the Type C model because it is powered by connecting to your phone, and allows for pass through charging of the device. There are a few things that I feel warrants discussion here. Firstly you notice that the sides of the device are completely flat, and not curved like that of the Kishi… which allows for you to support a fairly wide array of devices with this design.
The second bit which is significantly more important for me personally is the way that the device actually telescopes to fit the device. Instead of an elastic band, there is a sliding plastic bit that extends for most of the length of the device. The end result is that the majority of your device is supported and not just floating out there without a rigid structure. The extended portion is not flush, but in my personal experience with the controller it does not feel flexible like the Kishi did. Instead it feels more like I am holding a solid body handheld, which is ultimately the experience that I wanted. The negative of the Gamesir is the pricetag… which was originally $100 but has more recently fallen down to $60.
This is awesome if the games you want to play on Android natively support a controller. The challenge here is that most of them do not… which means you now have a rather expensive bauble that can’t really do what you want it to do. Genshin Impact for example fully supports a controller in the iOS platform but that feature has yet to trickle over to Android. Gamepad mappers have existed for quite some time but generally require you to root your device in order to get them to work… which triggers protection schemes that various mobile games have to stop cheating. Those that don’t have traditionally done something called Screen Cloning, which also shows up as “cheating” to various software scanning for such activity. For example if you try and use a popular app like Octopus while running Genshin, you are forced to log out .
Now is where things start to get super fiddly and Rube Goldberg device like. There is a piece of software called Mantis Gamepad that functions in a completely different manner. Essentially the only way to run a piece of software at a system level is either to root your device or to flip your device into developer mode. While in developer mode you can essentially debug software with low level permissions, which requires you to have some other device “Activate” it. This is done through something called the Android Debug Bridge or ADB, and if you are really curious you can see a description of how that works here. The above video explains how to get it up and running more specifically for Mantis Gamepad. The reality is that you have to either have access to a PC or access to another Android device in order to activate the Mantis app before it functions.
Once activated however you have a floating widget that now appears over games you launch from within the Mantis app. The buttons in the above screenshot shifted when I tried to pull up my screenshot app, but essentially you get a menu full of widgets that you can place over top of the controls on the screen. You also have the ability to assign “phases” and toggle between them so you could have one set of controls for action mode, and another set of controls for when you are in a dialog box for example. The final result was that for the first time ever, I could comfortably do my Genshin Impact dailies while sitting in bed using a controller with my phone. I tried a few different control schemes but ultimately felt more comfortable using face buttons for combat than I did triggers. This is probably just a me thing, given that the majority of my console years were spent playing Super Nintendo era games and not more modern titles where everything focuses on the triggers and bumpers.
I’ve tried a few other titles like Dragalia Lost and Tales of Wind and they worked perfectly fine as well. Now that I have a viable way to play android games, I am going to start branching out into emulation with this set up. Mostly I am making this post, just in case there is someone one there trying to do this same thing. I am going to start experimenting with Moonlight and Steamlink as well, and maybe even try some PlayStation Remote Play. I can already say however that using Microsoft XCloud feels awesome with this set up as well. I highly recommend the Gamesir, because so far it has come the close to giving me that Android Switch experience that I was looking for.
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Good morning friends. I have to say our Medium beach front home in Shirogane has grown on me in my time back in the game. For the longest time, I was deeply nostalgic about our original FC home, but I think more than anything I was nostalgic about that era in the game when I was so engaged with it. The house simply became shorthand for explaining my feelings, and I put way more importance on that one location than I really should have. Now that I have been back in the game and have actually reached out to begin meeting our neighbors, I have come to realize that we are still in a pretty phenomenal neighborhood. Yesterday morning while I was blogging I taught one of our neighbors the joy of hanging out on the roof of our home and the amazing view it provides. There is a bit of a process to get up there, but I spend enough time that the neighbors are finding their way up there as well.
The highlight of yesterday is represented by another roofline shot, this time of me in my level 70 gathering gear set. I usually glamour this stuff, but I have to say the base appearance is pretty adorable. I’ve been spending a not-insignificant amount of time in the Diadem and been focused on trying to get at least one level per day on all three of the gathering professions. I need to catch Fishing up at this point, but right now I have Botany and Mining both at level 71. Ultimately the reason behind this push is twofold. Firstly I want to be able to contribute more than my single solitary map each week to Maps night, and that requires a high-level gatherer to get those level 80 maps. Secondly, I figure having a max level gatherer will make leveling all of my crafting all that much easier because I can make my way into the Diadem to stockpile the materials I need for the Ishgard Restoration stuff. For now I am putting most of those materials gained on the market which serve as a pretty reasonable way to gain a little cash quickly.
The other big activity that I knocked out last night was starting the process of catching up on the YorHa Alliance raids based on Nier Automata. I had started the precursor quest some time ago, but like so many things in my quest log never quite got around to finishing it. I ran The Copied Factory and The Puppet’s Bunker last night, and at the end of the night unlocked the final of this triad of raids The Tower at Paradigm’s Breach. This area of the game is way more detailed than I expected, allowing players to basically roam around the areas represented by each raid in a sort of exploration mode. I am pretty certain that The Copied Factory is straight from the beginning of Nier Automata, or at least is very similar to what I remember from the beginning of that game. Side note I really need to get back to that and finish it at some point.
My favorite visual from the raids is when the entire alliance queues up at a checkpoint and then takes the pods down to the next area at the same time. It ends up looking like a roller coaster as everyone glides down in unison. I was apparently extremely lucky last night because, on the second raid, I managed to get bot the 2B and 2P minions, and then after the raid Rae ended up mailing me two of the hairstyles that she got from her own run. There was a lot going on, but I like this series far better than I do the Void Ark sequence from Heavensward or the Ivalice sequence from Stormblood. There are a few mechanics that are not messaged like FFXIV normally are, but I adapted. I did however take several deaths to stupid things as I was learning. I really want to farm a set of gear from this series of raids, maybe for my dancer because it seems fitting.
All told I am extremely impressed by the level of the content and am also realizing that I need to dive back into the Eden raids and finish those out. I think I only actually did the first set of them, but they were pretty enjoyable. I need to tabulate the results of my raiding survey and try and zero in on both a group of 8 players and a timeslot to start trying for more focused raiding attempts. The Scholar is still progressing and I managed to get another two levels on it, and finish off a level on the Dark Knight. I have a lot of different balls in the air but so far juggling them is providing me with a good amount of enjoyment. The only thing that could potentially derail this is me getting distracted by another game… and I am afraid that might be happening soon.
Yesterday there was a Bungie Showcase event that I believe tied into the larger Gamescom show happening this week. During it they revealed the trailer for The Witch Queen expansion, and the new seasonal content that started last night. I miss Destiny 2, and I am feeling the subtle tug as some of my friends are engaging with it again. For a long time I managed to play both FFXIV and Destiny 2 at the same time, and given that they are wildly different experiences I might be able to make it work. So at some point over the next few days I expect to dip my toes back into D2 and see how well that concept works. My core focus remains FFXIV, but there are times I could go for something a little more visceral.
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Because I generally have my Mixtape Monday thing going on at the beginning of the week, Tuesdays have turned into a bit of a “Catching Up On the Weekend” day. I am still solely devoted to Final Fantasy XIV in my game time because I have a whole slew of goals to complete before moving into Endwalker. The biggest of these is that I want to try and hit level 80 on every single job before the expansion drops. Over the weekend I wrapped up the Ninja and got it to 80 and geared to a reasonable state. This means that I have shifted focus to Scholar, that I had been sorta low key working on in the background. Leveling through roulettes and all of the bonus experience activity that I mentioned in my Alt Jobs post, meant that on many days I ran out of things that were effective to be doing. So when that happened I would grab a character that was next in line and start working on their leveling in Palace of the Dead or Heaven on High.
So essentially I have many things moving at once. Dragoon sitting at 74 has largely been my Faerie/Hunt soak for when I am working on a lower level character and still wanted to do those Shadowbringers activities. I am not in a super rush to level it to 80, and as such, it is sitting there slowly gaining levels when I have time. Scholar has been my core focus and I managed to get it up to 72, which admittedly opens up Bozjan Front as an option. I still don’t really love that content but I might do some more of it as a healer because there are just certain activities that I do not want to do as a healer. Right now I am doing MSQ Roulette, PVP Roulette, Faerie quests in Il Mheg, and Alliance Raids on a daily basis, which adds enough experience to gain roughly a level and a half each day. This is good enough for my tastes and keeps me from having to heal more stressful content. For Alliance Raids I am absolutely dropping if I end up getting randomized into the harder content because I am a fairly shitty healer.
For the daily dungeon roulettes, I have shifted over to working on the Dark Knight. Tanking is my jam and this is probably going to be worked up slowly similar to Dragoon as a soak for any content that I don’t want to partake in on a given focused character. Once I get the Scholar up and gear, I will probably start running up another DPS. So that leaves either Monk or Black Mage, both classes that I find enjoyable in their own way but I do not love. Black Mage is very immobile and wants to stand still and cast spells which I find distasteful. Monk on the other hand has the opposite problem of being very mobile and needing to move around the target so that you can fire off specific positional attacks focused on either the back or sides of the mob. Neither is really my jam, but I am rapidly running out of things to level up that is pure joy for me. I enjoy Dragoon and I enjoy tanking… so I am rationing those classes as a way of making the rest of the grind feel a little better.
In other news… I said I was quitting the house search and I apparently lied. I am continuing to low-key chase houses as they open and the truth is something is opening up almost every day. Generally speaking, I go hang out near the placard while queueing for activities and then click it while waiting on the queue to pop. I still feel like I don’t have a shot in hell at getting a home prior to Ishgard’s opening and the lottery system going in. The problem there however is that it is highly unlikely that Ishgard will open in the Endwalker launch patch. What is more likely is that it will come with the 6.1 patch that usually lands three months after the launch of the game. That means the .1 patch is likely going to land sometime around February putting the Lottery system roughly six months away. This at least gives me a chance, albeit a very slim one.
We have been doing this thing where on Sunday nights we gather up all of the level 80 maps that we have access to and then run through them for prizes. These can be extremely lucrative, and this past Sunday for example I cleared about 500k gil in cash drops alone. We still struggle a bit in organizing the people and getting everyone online in a timely manner, but we have been shooting for starting around 7 pm CDT. If you happen to be on the Cactuar server at that time hit me up and we may have an opening. This past week we only had one map NOT open a portal. We didn’t make it terribly deep into many of them, and our best attempts were booted on the 4th step, but we did manage to fight a large number of Elder Summons. This meant we got a few more people the Frog minions and several of us walked away with the paint emotes. I love this chill activity at the end of my week.
In the last bit of news, it seems as though the server congestion has gotten to the point where Square has completely shut off the ability to create new characters within the Aether data center. That means if you were hoping to either move to Cactuar or roll an alt there, your window has closed and I am doubtful it will open again until well after the Endwalker launch. Over the last few weeks a number of friends have relocated to our server, but for now, it appears that is completely off the table. The end result is that we are going to have to ultimately wait for world travel between data centers before anyone can hang out with us Aether folk again. I do greatly appreciate the way that Yoshi P addresses the players and if you want to read the full statement you can check it out here. The positive is however it seems that all of the Crystal data centers has been flagged as preferred and that means buffs until you reach level 70.
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