Post Expansion Victory Lap

Good Morning Friends! This morning I thought I would rework something that I have threaded in a few different forms. Additionally, this is a great time for you to appreciate how adorable the next-door neighbors of our FC House are in their matching crafting smocks. One of the great things about having been afforded the ability to play content slowly in Final Fantasy XIV is that I have had time to sit down and sort out my feelings about what I just experienced. If you are brand new to the game, then you have been given the ability to binge the content in a very netflixian manner and it comes with positives and negatives. I personally think it might be a good thing to take some time after each major expansion and let what you just experienced soak in, before rushing headlong into the next expansion. This morning I am going to offer some distractions worth consuming after each expansion. Please Note: Each block contains soilers for the expansion I am outlining.

A Realm Reborn

While this is technically not an expansion, it plays much the same role given that it is a direct continuation of the story found in 1.0. As such the first thing I think that is worth re-experiencing is the full trailer of the Battle of Carteneau. The game opened with this and at that time you didn’t fully understand everything that was happening. However, upon reaching the conclusion of A Realm Reborn it should have a lot more meaning. Below is the extended edit that includes the scenes you experience by completing Coil of Bahamut.
That is pretty heavy, and for a lighter palate cleanser then I would highly suggest watching Dance Eorzea Dance. This is ultimately the video that turned me into a Lalafell, so be wary of its power. Denmo McStronghuge has this wonderful way of condensing an entire expansion into a single music video.
Another thing if you are interested in it is that over the years we have done full spoiler shows of the AggroChat podcast, the first of these happening back in April of 2015. This predates me going through the process of uploading this to youtube and creating a showcard. Instead below is a link to the MP3 if you care to listen.

Heavensward

Oh lord, this expansion is an emotional rollercoaster, and I know I would have absolutely needed a break to let everything sink in after its conclusion. One of the first things that I think everyone needs to do is watch the “final” trailer for the expansion, because if you watched this prior to playing… there are a lot of elements that won’t really mean anything until you have played your way through at least some of the content. Looking back now, knowing what you now know… it will mean significantly more.
Once again we have the amazing work of Denmo to cheer us up after being confronted with all of those feels once more. This is the first video that I can remember watching of his, that he really started pushing the bounds of what you can reasonably do with filming inside of Final Fantasy XIV.
The AggroChat crew had so many feels about this expansion, and we recorded a full spoilers show in August of 2015. This would have only covered the main story, and I think we pushed it off as long as we did because we were wanting to make sure all of our regulars had made it through it. I think I started the video thing with episode 74, so this just came in a little too early for that so once again I am embedding the audio.

Stormblood

Stormblood is an odd place in the story because they tried so many new things and attempted to broaden the scope of the game significantly. As a result, it ended up feeling a bit more location-focused than having quite the strong story arc of the other expansions. I still love it so much, but rewatching the trailer doesn’t have quite the same impact as it does for other expansions. However I still think it is interesting to rewatching knowing what you will now know.
Now here is where things go a little off the rails. Denmo created what is quite possibly his greatest achievement with the original Stormblood “Find Your Dance, Eorzea” music video. The challenge however is that it ended up getting copyright claimed and effectively nuked from YouTube. He edits these videos so tightly that they are bound to the song, and you could never simply replace a track and make it work. The original video is available on Dailymotion however.
Denmo took the footage and then cut it into another video that is also excellent in its own right after the first was taken down.
By the time Stormblood rolled around, I had gotten my act together and was uploading our videos to YouTube and creating proper show cards. This is Episode #167 of AggroChat and was recorded on July 30th of 2017.

Shadowbringers

There is a bit of a misnomer that I keep seeing from the community. There will be people talking about Shadowbringers being when the story really gets good. That is true in one sense of the statement, but in truth, Shadowbringers would be largely meaningless nonsense were it not for all of the story that came before it. This is a culmination of so many plot points starting from your first minutes wandering in Eorzea and I am wondering if things would land quite so hard if you had not experienced all that came before. Because of the weight of this story, I feel like the final trailer means so much more in hindsight than any of those prior … with Heavensward being a close second.
Given the somber tone that follows most of Shadowbringers, it is only fitting the Denmo also shifts things up a bit and presents one of the most heart felt and thoughtful dance videos to date.
We had so much to say about this expansion that we ended up recording what ultimately was an almost four hour long mega show, and then divided it up into two parts. These were recorded on August 24th of 2019 and represent shows 265 and 266 of the podcast.
Finally if you really want to give yourself a sucker punch straight in the feels… then check out this video by Fluff Stuff called Remember Us. Oh lord… some eye dampness occurred when watching this yesterday.
This game has so many important moments that they get lost if you rush through them too quickly. I highly suggest you take some time after each major story block to reflect upon what just happened. There is no need to rush ahead and there is no real reason why you HAVE to be at the level cap in November when Endwalker releases. There will still be plenty of time to do all of the things, given that none of them ever really stop being relevant. The post Post Expansion Victory Lap appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

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.

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.