Gracie Status Update – Page 21

Finishing Heavensward

March 30, 2017 by Grace

Level 60 AST get

Since I finished the story of Horizon: Zero Dawn, I’ve been getting most of my gaming fix from Final Fantasy XIV recently. This involves lots of tying up loose ends in advance of the new expansion launch. I hit a couple different milestones in the last couple weeks, and I think I’ll be in a really great place heading into Stormblood. Not a whole lot has changed for my Scholar main since I finished her zeta weapon about a month ago. I’ve been faithfully capping my scripture and very gradually upgrading her gear to 270, but it’s been slow. The increase in the weekly scripture cap should help me finish off her last few pieces in the next week or two. I have started working on her anima weapon, the Heavensward version of the relic weapon chain, and so far it seems just as much of a silly slow slog as the relic. I’ll be working on this for a while, and as with the relic I’m in no hurry to grind myself to death and will be perfectly happy finishing this months from now.

I have also been working on various alt class side projects. First I got my ninja to 60, mainly via palace of the dead with a small amount of Fate and leve grinding mixed in. I had most of a set of gear ready for it that I had accumulated from expert roulettes, so I could pop straight into experts and Dun Scaith. Since I don’t need anything from there on my SCH I’ve been using my gear lockout and UFO quest to grab a few ninja pieces. I don’t love being a melee DPS but having the NIN around has been really handy for doing quick beast tribe dailies and it is a nice change of pace from healing.

The next job I worked on was my white mage. I find that I really do not enjoy the white mage playstyle. I can’t quite put my finger on what makes me dislike it so much, but it feels incredibly slow and boring to me even though I know it is a very strong healer. Unfortunately, I made one of my retainers a conjurer when I hired her, and for her to level I either needed to start her over from scratch or get my white mage to 50 so I could give her a Heavensward job. So I leveled WHM to 50, mainly in POTD with a few beast tribe quest turn-ins for good measure. The process did nothing to improve my opinion of the class, but at least now my retainer’s level is no longer tied to it. Instead, I swapped it to astrologian.

As you might have guessed from the screenshot above, I managed to level my AST to 60 in a hurry. I think I like it even better than SCH in a lot of ways. It certainly has a lot of really fun tricks and tools to play with. Having all of my SCH healer gear waiting for me when I hit 60 was also a nice bonus, since it meant I could hop directly into whatever content I wanted, and not feel like I was underpowered compared to my main class. I am giving a lot of thought to swapping mains to AST for the expansion, but I’m playing around with it a bunch for now to see if I still like it when the novelty wears off. I was incredibly saddened that I can’t use my amazing SCH tophat as a glamour for it though. To make myself feel better about the loss of the world’s best hat I did some retail therapy and bought the AST ravana weapon pictured above. It is on fire and also has butterflies and I love it.

Between all of that and finishing up the main story quests that came out this week I am in a really great place for the expansion. Now I just need to stay interested and not burn myself out grinding the anima weapon until Stormblood arrives.

Another Horizon Weekend

March 13, 2017 by Grace

I don’t really want to go on and on forever about this game, and yet it’s pretty much the only thing I’ve been playing lately so that’s what you’re going to get. I’m more than 60 hours deep into this game and much farther along in the story now, so there will be spoilers in this post. Consider yourself warned.

Horizon continues to hit a lot of perfect notes for me. This far in, I’ve gotten most of the available upgraded weapons except the last 2 hunter lodge ones. Combat has become about getting better at killing machines with the tools I have, instead of learning the strengths and weaknesses of the different kinds of weapons. Now that I have more health, I’ve switched from favoring laying out elaborate trap mazes ahead of time to either just letting machines kill each other with corruption arrows, or tearing off a few key components from a distance and then running in with the blast sling. The exception is with Deathbringers, which even fully kitted out at level 50 require some smart use of elemental attacks and precision hits to do real damage. I really enjoyed the challenge.

Progressing the story has been fun, even though it feels like a slightly different game when you’re exploring ancient ruins and getting saturated with lore instead of hunting down machines in the open world. I have been pleasantly surprised that the story, while improbable, isn’t completely stupid. I’ve also been pleasantly surprised that so much of the story of the world is laid out pretty clearly for you as you progress. I was half expecting some kind of unsatisfying hand wave of “it’s lost to history” but that’s not what we get. So far I’ve seen exactly what happened to the world in the 2060s and what project Zero Dawn actually was. I’m excited to see how the last bit plays out and whether Aloy is satisfied with her answers when I get back to the Nora sacred lands.

I have come to absolutely love Aloy, to the point where she is now pretty high on the list of my all-time favorite videogame protagonists. She’s smart and capable and snarky and strong and she suffers no fools. Initially I expected that there would be some type of romance, either optional or forced by the story, but so far there’s no sign of that. Or rather, folks keep hitting on her and she keeps shutting them down. I love this. The best of these was when the sun-king found out his lover had died, and then immediately started hitting on Aloy. You get a couple response options here, and in the one I chose she basically says “do you hear yourself right now? I don’t think you’re actually interested in me.” The reason why I know this is a game and not the real world is because instead of freaking out or getting angry the sun king basically says “oh shit you’re right I’m sorry” and moves on to other things. I love this whole exchange because Aloy has plenty of empathy but doesn’t get mired down in anyone else’s emotional issues.

Anyway I said I didn’t want to ramble a ton more about this game and yet here we are another 500+ words later. I can see the finish line on this game looming pretty close now and I honestly don’t want it to end. I’m sure I’ll write even more about it here when I do though.

The Subligar Levels

February 14, 2017 by Grace

I’ve been playing more FFXIV than anything else for the past week or so. This has led to some fun times and some questionable fashion choices. Not that anybody would choose to wear this outfit if it weren’t the best available gear for the level. The subligar levels are not kind.

Palace of the Dead got added to the game right around the point when I was drifting away, so even though I was subscribed at the time I never ran it. Since I’ve been back I’ve been making up for lost time, chain running it to level some alt classes and score a sweet weapon upgrade for my scholar. I waffled a lot over what class to level. I started with my ninja since that’s closest to being done but by the time I hit 55 I needed a break. Then I decided I wanted to level all my low classes together so I could start getting rid of lowbie gear. I managed to get everything to at least 26 or so before a clear winner emerged. So now I find myself leveling a bard.

Barding it up in the random levels of PotD is a super relaxing time. Unlike ninja, where I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole with my ability buttons, bard has a rotation I can keep on top of with relative ease. It also keeps me safely out of melee and back in my comfort zone, as far away from angry monsters as possible. Running the 51-100 floors means the exp is coming at a furious pace, plus I can start working on more weapons now that my scholar’s is fully upgraded. I suspect when I hit 50 and the exp slows down I might get bored and swap to something else for a while, but for now I’m having a blast.

Meanwhile my scholar is also making progress. On the nonsense front, I’ve moved to the zodiac stage of my relic weapon quest thanks to my old FC mate who was gracious enough to bake me some sort of horrible eel pie so I could finish the prior step. Now I just need to farm some light to finish that off so I can start on the Heavensward version. Let’s all take a moment of silence in memory of my sanity.

In the slightly-less-nonsense realm, I’ve continued to make steady progress gearing up. Notable additions include the previously-mentioned weapon from PotD, and the healer hat from Dun Scaith. The hat came with a side of salt, since I won it while running with my white mage buddy who desperately wanted it for transmog but had already won an item on the previous boss. Ah, those delicious white mage tears. To add insult to injury I immediately glamoured it into the scholar tophat because the scholar tophat is the best tophat. Sorry friend!

I’m not sure if I’ll get to try out my new hat at our weekly FC raid night this week since tonight is some sort of holiday or something. I am sure that I’ll be spending a lot of time in Eorzea this week though. Hopefully it will be enough to get my bard far far away from the subligar levels for good.

Out of the gear valley

February 6, 2017 by Grace

I finally managed to slowly claw my way out of the item level valley I was stuck in with FFXIV. This was about equal parts hard work grinding tomes, generosity from my FC fellows, and the dumb luck of having enough tokens from Alex section 2 to put toward a weapon upgrade. Without all of those things I’d probably still be griping about how all my friends were having fun without me. Instead I got to see 2 new dungeons and one new raid and finish up the available MSQ.

It was actually weirdly frustrating to see ilvl 245 gear dropping like candy from the new expert dungeons. Yes, I’m happy that I’m getting lots of upgrades but it is so unsatisfying to immediately replace gear that I spent so much time grinding tomes for with green dungeon drops 15 levels higher. I accept that some amount of gear resetting is a fact of life in MMOs but FFXIV’s gear progression and gating seem incredibly uneven. Gear complaints aside I did enjoy the 2 new dungeons, although I like fighting dinosaurs much more than fighting people and mechs.

The thing I spent the most time on since getting my gear sorted out has been random non-progression activities. For instance I spent several hours farming old dungeons for the quest to upgrade my Nexus weapon, then hit a wall because nobody on Cactaur is selling the “tailor-made eel pie” I need. Gross. I also somehow found renewed interest in leveling up all my alt classes, and after this weekend all my combat classes are at least level 23. It felt good to throw out some of that low-level gear I had been hanging on to and it was just fun to spend a few hours figuring out different classes. I’m looking forward to getting everything up to 30 and unlocking jobs for all of them. The only down side is that I haven’t played some of these classes in so long that I had no idea what was happening in their class quests. Sorry GLD lady, I have no idea why you’re so mad at this other guy, please just give me my new ability and/or weapon upgrade, thanks.

I’m really happy I’ve gotten back into the swing of things in FFXIV again. It feels good to play with my friends there and it has been fun catching up on the story that makes the game so strong and endearing. I hope my newfound interest in alting doesn’t send me down the road to fast burnout. I suppose it could be worse, at least I haven’t jumped into the black hole of crafting classes…yet.