Hey Folks! I did not make it terribly far last night but spent most of my evening in Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been fighting some sort of unnamed crud so when my wife decided to head to bed around 8:30 to read, I decided to follow and wound up falling asleep pretty rapidly. I’ve been avoiding the desire to roll a new character in Path of Exile because I know there are a series of short events coming up starting this week, and I don’t want to burn myself out. Also, I have already made seven functional builds this league and I am uncertain what I might want to build after those. So as a result I had the intent of working on the Main Story Quest but wound up fiddling around with Eureka Orthos instead on my Samurai.
I got the first twenty floors done but only because my friend Donald Serrot took pity on me and queued. For whatever reason this version of the Deep Dungeon does not seem anywhere near as popular as the previous ones. I guess for starters… it is way more punishing with the mechanics having several AOE attacks that I found out just straight-up one-shot you. The boss fights as well are significantly more challenging than a Deep Dungeon tends to be. I’ve got no idea why the team decided to go in this direction, but it is somewhat of a bummer given that I could not get the last part of the dungeon at all last night and finally gave up after the two folks who seemed to be queueing along with us bailed. Huge thanks still to Don for helping me out. The first queue… was over 50 mins so had I not gotten some help I likely never would have gotten it going.
This morning I noticed that the Fall Guys collaboration started in the Gold Saucer. This introduces a new area called the Bluderville Square that is completely decorated in they Fall Guys style. What this introduces is a new queued zone where a bunch of players complete to get through all of the Fall-Guys-inspired obstacles and win the crown. If you have ever played Fall Guys it proceeds very similarly, where each round culls the total number of contestants until the final round crowns a single winner for the event. The cool thing is that even if you fail miserably like I did… you get some MGP and Fall Guys event points so that eventually you will be able to purchase whatever you want from the event.
There is a whole slew of items available for the currency tied to the event. You can check out the full listing on the Fall Guys event page. I think I probably want to at least pick up the two minions the Pink Bean and Pegwin, but I am not sure what else really interests me. Getting eliminated in the first round earned me 50 points so even if I continue to failboat this miserably I can chip away bit by bit on getting some of the rewards. If nothing else this event seems to be a good source of bright primary-colored dyes so if you are inclined it might be something to stock up on. There are housing items, but I am uncertain that I want to decorate my home to look like an obstacle course.
Even in the case of failing out miserably… 680 MGP seems like a reasonable reward. I am wondering if there is a daily cap on how many times you can attempt the event. You could in theory fail out pretty quickly and then go about your way queuing for another round. I will probably do some testing around this to see if I hit some sort of cap at some point. I don’t spend a ton of time in the Gold Saucer, but it was fun enough to try at least a few times. I suck at jumping puzzles so this is not really down my alley. It is cool to see something weird like this go into the game though.
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Good Morning Folks! I spent a lot of this weekend catching up on Final Fantasy XIV stuff. I talked a bit about this last week but the character that I took through Endwalker was a Paladin aka a Tank. I did not really want to slide back into the game and experience the content… in a job with quite as much responsibility as a tank. Given especially how much the FFXIV community is on the “BIG PULLS” bandwagon usually… I want to just chill out in the background and play a class that no one respects much from. I like the feel of the Machinist animations, so I opted to push that up. I managed to hit level 90 relatively easily by running a combination of Duty Support dungeons, daily frontline, and starting to chip away at the new combat beast tribe quests in Thavnair.
Rather than pestering friends, I wound up buying a set of gear for a little less than a million gil. This might not have been the most cutting-edge gear but it should be able to take me all the way through the new story content, while also hopefully picking up a handful of pieces along the way. I think my goal is to get caught up on the story and then maybe do some of the additional content like the Alliance Raids that I have missed, and maybe the 8-player content on the easiest difficulties. Pending the next expansion comes with Duty Support… I might just level a DPS character from the start so I don’t run into this problem at the end of the expansion when I want to play catch-up, but don’t feel like tanking.
One of the things that I unlocked over the weekend is the next Deep Dungeon system that is Crystal Tower themed. One of the weird things that bugs me is the gaps in these systems. Palace of the Dead the original Deep Dungeon takes you to level 50 extremely easily… but then Heaven on High does not start until level 61. HoH will take you pretty easily to level 70… but again you have this huge gap between when it stops and level 81 required to do the new one Eureka Orthos. Prior to the launch of Endwalker I managed to get all of my jobs at the time to level 80, so that means I am going to have to put on at least one level before I can step foot into the new Deep Dungeon. This morning I started working on Samurai as my next job to level and knocked out Thavnair dailies and then a set of the Fae dailies from Shadowbringers as that is still reasonable experience.
Mostly I plan on leveling classes that share a gear set, because that way I can get rid of excess gear that I have lying around for them. I really really need to clean out my retainers and just shred any gear that I don’t need to make room. I’ve not touched Reaper or Sage so at some point I will probably level those as well. For the moment though I plan on knocking out Monk and Samurai largely because those were the gearsets that I had completed and did not need to do anything in order to switch to… other classes I will have to sort out what is missing from my inventory before I can swap over to them. Technically leveling bard would make a lot of sense given that I just finished up Machinist, but I think I removed some of the lower-level Dex ranged gear from my inventory while leveling and trying to make room for things.
All in all I have been enjoying myself, but mostly because I am biding my time for the next Path of Exile event. I have a feeling that it is going to take me a while to get caught up in the story because when I am working my way through an audiobook, I can’t really do story content. It was cool to get in over the weekend and get invited to the assorted Fediverse-based Cross World Link Shells, so it will be nice to get to know all of those folks a bit better and maybe even run content with them at some point.
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I’ve most definitely reached this place in Diablo IV where my only real progression comes in the form of lucky drops from the World Boss. At this point, I have item level 925 items in every slot but my Chestpiece and Two-Handed Hammer weapon and it is all up to the luck of the draw when I finally replace those. I am using a unique main weapon that is going to be a bit harder to replace than your average hammer. Given that I am getting zero benefit from Whispers Caches and the Bloodtide event… I am guessing that means I would have to grind up to high levels of Nightmare Dungeons to actually find some viable drops again. As a result, I am mostly only logging in for World Boss kills.
I could always fall back on playing some Path of Exile, but I do not really want to burn myself out further knowing that I really want to play next Friday when the Sentinel/Kalandra event starts. At the moment I think I am going to try out leveling a Righteous Fire Chieftain as an alternative for when we start “Bel League” at the beginning of 3.23 in December. Mostly I want to test that out as an alternative to Juggernaut because it is so much easier to get maximum resistances on and we won’t likely have access to Legacy of Fury boots for quite some time. Hinekora’s Wrath gives a nice big explosion that is actually better than the Maven Boots but I will be missing a lot of the bonuses that you get as a Juggernaut for survival purposes. It won’t be as sturdy, but hopefully, the big explosions will make up for it.
What I did instead last night was poke my head back into Final Fantasy XIV and do something more than playing the daily cactpot and reset the demolition timer on my house. I’ve been in this weird place with FFXIV for a while now because I leveled a Paladin through Endwalker. Playing a tank is not really conducive to easing back into a game in a low-pressure manner. I did not last long enough in Endwalker to actually get to the point of leveling a DPS alt, which has made it a bit hard for me to summon the desire to come back in earnest.
Yesterday however I remembered that Duty Support exists, and is no longer the massive pain in the ass that leveling the trust system was. This has allowed me to pick up where I left off on my Machinist and run some low-key chill dungeons with my Scion friends. Sure it is a bit boring to keep running the same dungeon over and over… but that is probably what I would be doing anyway with a pack of random strangers. I might as well ease back into the game with friendly bots that are not going to hassle me over dumb mistakes I make while I get used to the game again.
It has to be said that right now Final Fantasy XIV feels really odd. It has been a very long time since I have played a purely hotbar combat MMORPG. Over the last few years, I have either been playing ARPGs or Guild Wars 2 and New World… both of which are way more closely related to an Action MMO than their earlier hotbar cousins. The first time I needed to get out of an AOE I instinctively tried to hit my usual dodge roll button… and was really sad when I remembered that Final Fantasy XIV does not have something like that. The game feels very “old” when it comes to design… but again I think it is more something that I will have to get used to.
Largely I want to get to the point where I can catch up in the story, and grind out some gear so that I can get ready for the next expansion. I am going to give it a shot even though I largely felt like FFXIV storywise wrapped up in a good place with Endwalker. I think Guild Wars 2 might be more my speed as far as MMORPGs go, because I have gotten used to more active combat but by the end of the evening I did finally start to hit my stride. I know FFXIV is probably never going to be my main game again because my tastes have changed a bit but I do want to get back to a point where I can have fun with it again.
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A very groggy morning to you all. Wait maybe not everyone is sleepwalking through the morning. We had a big wind storm last night, enough so that we got alerts on our phones about it. This happened around 1 am and I managed to sleep through the first wave of it. The second wave around 3 am woke me up, and enough so that I did not manage to get back to sleep until maybe 4:30. Even then I am not sure if I actually slept or if I just laid in bed thinking thoughts with my eyes closed. I will have to do the walk around the house to check for damage later, but my wife sent me this photo as she was leaving for work with some damage at the rental house across the street. We didn’t lose power, but around the time I went upstairs at 3:30 we lost internet and I spent a truly dumb amount of time cycling the modem before it came back. The cable company website claimed everything was fine, but I assume in truth… something happened due to the storm damage. It is back currently and I am hoping it stays that way.
I spent most of my weekend screwing around with my Lightning Arrow Raider build, but I’ve written two other blog posts about that which each come with their own companion video. I am really looking forward to Friday, and hopefully, I don’t jinx it… but I went ahead and took the day off work. I know this is usually a bad idea when a game launches… but generally speaking a Path of Exile League Launch has been smooth as butter. I’m really looking forward to seeing how well the early mapping goes with this build. If evidenced by the red maps, I think it is going to be really solid and should give me enough time to look for upgrades along the way. Fixing my resists is probably the thing that I am the most worried about, that and trying to find a Vaal Lightning Arrow early. If I can solve those problems… I should be good to go with this build. Thankfully the colors that I ultimately need on the bow should be pretty straightforward to hit.
At some point yesterday afternoon I took a break from ARPGs to pop into Final Fantasy XIV and do the seasonal quest. There is no way I was going to turn down having a Power Ranger outfit. More specifically I think this is going to be my monk Transmog from this point forward. You have to dye it green, however, because everyone wants to be the green ranger. I guess I could go for Ninja as well and then try and find some daggers that look like the Green Dragon Dagger. I wish I could get back into this game. I saw my friend Bear had created a new character, and I contemplated doing this just so that I could get back into the swing of the game. I need to figure out what content I need to complete to unlock the newest Deep Dungeon.
Other than that I am still screwing around a bit in Diablo IV Season of the Malignant. While I am still pretty nonplussed by the seasonal mechanic, the state of the game does feel considerably better than it did. I am now mostly just trying to figure out an easy path to level and then I can complete the keystone dungeon and move to World Tier III. At that point, I will feel like I have at least progressed a bit further and can start doing Helltides. I am trying to catch the World Boss whenever I can, but in truth… it doesn’t seem like it rewards that much experience, and anything I get loot-wise is going to be upgraded rapidly. I seem to be having way more issues maintaining a good amount of gold than I did previously. Not sure if they rebalanced gold drops, but it feels much tighter than I remember it being.
Apart from the storms last night… it was a pretty solid weekend overall. I am really happy about the state of Lightning Arrow and looking forward to the league start on Friday. I have not really been in the mood for Baldur’s Gate 3 lately… mostly because it requires more thought than I am willing to give it at the moment. I’ve needed gameplay that I can mostly turn my brain off for, which for me is ARPG gameplay in general. Anything that I can commit to muscle memory and instinct… allows me to free up the rest of my brain to consume content on the side. I think more than anything that is the part of this league I am looking forward to the most. I’ve stalled out super hard on book consumption over the last few months, and listening to an Audiobook while playing Path of Exile is sort of my happy place.
I hope you all have a great week ahead of you, and I hope that we don’t have anything much in the way of damage from last night’s storm.
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