It’s been a few days since I have written a post about Final Fantasy XIV. When we last addressed the game I was working towards infusing my Novus weapon so that it could in fact become a proper Nexus weapon. I’ve done that and now have the Nexus weapon glamoured over top of my real axe. I’ve made some progress on the next step in the quest aka the “Braves” weapon Ragnarok but unfortunately I’ve hit a wall. Basically you need 400k to progress past this and I am way too broke to do that at the moment.
Between my buying my way up to proper item level when I came back to the game, and the money spent on Materia… I have been hovering around the 150k mark for a bit now. That will regenerate over time, but for now we have to close the door on the Zodiac weapon quests and be happy with the shiny spikey state that the weapon currently is in. I am sure at some point in the near future I will pick this back up as expansions tend to come with a windfall of money. Additionally I am using the shit out of my retainers to auction off various baubles, which are moving… but moving slowly. In theory I need to learn some strategy for making money on a reliable basis in this game because I never quite landed on one that did not involve crafting.
For the last several days I have been entirely focused on cleaning house. Recently I pushed the last of my classes to 50, freeing up a bunch of room for getting rid of any older gear that was clogging my vaults that was not something I actually wanted to wear. With the new classes starting at level 60, it is highly unlikely I will ever have a sub 50 character again… and even if I do it will probably be along the lines of blue mage where it more or less came with its own set of gear that I did not really upgrade out of until 50. I currently have 9 items in my inventory… and this is the closest to “inventory zero” I have ever gotten. In truth several of these items could be tossed in the vault but whatever this is a stark improvement over having roughly five item slots free at any given time.
Over the last several days I have set about a very tedious process of sorting my retainers. Previously there really was no rhyme or reason to how I was storing things. At one point yes there was a pattern but as vaults overflowed I wound up just shoving things into any open slot I could find. Which lead to the situation of having a random assortment of items in pretty much every retainer’s vault, making it very hard to find upgrades as you encounter them. I subscribe to additional retainers, because ultimately I had to in order to keep up with the mess. What we have wound up with is the following scheme.
Druin – Melee Weapons – Yes I have enough of these to warrant it’s own bank
Tiga – Strength Melee Class Gear
Tallow – Tank Gear
Dauphin – Dexterity Class Gear
Belgrave – Caster Gear
Waxwood – Healer Gear
Dorma – Jewelry for Every Class
Finni – Crafting Gear, Materials, and Assorted Token Items
This is the final scheme that we ended up with, and largely Druin becoming a weapon vault was a thing that happened late in the process. I can honestly already see some need for variance as Tiga and Tallow the Strength and Tank vaults respectively are close to overflowing. So in theory I will have to do something in the near future to further split things up. I could in theory split off the striker and lancer gear into their own vaults, because there is a pretty clear delineation between those archetypes. However tank gear is tank gear… and they don’t really have much in the way of paladin or warrior specific gear for example other than class sets.
I can add one more retainer now if I so choose, and I figure with the coming expansion they will increase this by another slot. So in theory I could split up tank gear by slot, and have 3 of the slots in one bank and 3 of the slots in another bank or something like that. Whatever the case we have some semblance of organized for the first time in the roughly six years I have been playing the game. This is a major achievement because it absolutely does not carry over to any other game that I am playing. I tend to be a packrat in life and a bigger packrat in video games. A large part of why I no longer play Everquest II is that I just have too much crap and did not want to take the literal hours to sort through it.
In truth to get to the state I am in right now probably legitimately took me about 8 hours worth of diligent sorting and slowly ferrying items back and forth between vaults and or selling them. Here is hoping that I can manage to keep things in order as we go into Shadowbringers.
Hi, I am Belghast and I am susceptible to hype… and like pretty much all of geekdom I have been playing around with Wizards Unite over the last few days since it’s release. First off… the servers were absolutely on fire when it clandestinely launched the night before its official release announcement. However by the end of the day on the 20th things seemed to be moving along normally. Niantic seems to have learned its lessons from the Pokemon Go launch and the fact that the game works at all… they seem to have planned adequately for the initial crush of users.
The play experience is not unsurprising for anyone who has played either Pokemon Go or the prior Ingress. If you live in a city core you will have lots of things to do. If you live in the suburbs or god forbid rural areas… the game will be a solitary wasteland. In the above image the middle pane is what the Wizarding World looks like from my office in the heart of downtown. The last pane is what the world looks like from my front door… because apparently I live on Privet Drive where we excel at quiet and mediocrity.
The gameplay largely revolves around recovering “confoundables” or spells gone awry by some force that we have not quite figured out. The timeframe of the game appears to be set in that of the Cursed Child with Harry and Hermione taking key positions in the Ministry of Magic and our character occasionally has need of interacting with them as we are on the SOS task force. Basically we are Wizard Cops trying to protect muggles from seeing things that they should not be seeing, and also rescuing various members of the Wizarding World that have been attacked by these rogue spells.
Howe we do this is by casting spells with our wand by tracing a shape on the touchpad screen. I’ve not nabbed a screenshot of this interaction but basically something along the lines of a Z or and E shape will appear on the screen and you are graded for how closely you can trace the shape. This grading appears to denote how successfully the spell was cast and how easy it is for the confoundable to resist said spell. Each time you need to cast a spell you consume something called Spell Energy… which in this game would be the equivalent of your stock of Pokeballs.
You regain by visiting the Poke Stop equivalent in this world. So far I have encountered Inns and Greenhouses, but there might be other times scattered around the world. You play a soft of mini-game but effectively it is just a roll of the dice because you seem to be assigned a random amount of energy that you are gaining. The problem is… each spell cast costs 1 energy, and in most case you get 2 or 3 at most energy back from an Inn with a 5 minute recharge timer. As a result expect to be spending a lot of time hanging out and waiting down that timer to recharge yourself, which again becomes more difficult for those in rural areas.
You can of course pay the in game currency of gold to recharge your energy meter. If I remember correctly it was 100 gold for 50 energy. Like every single mobile game they purposefully make the gold system obtuse… given that the prices and the amounts you purchase never line up. Effectively recharging your energy is a little over a dollar. Inventory limits are the key challenge to most things in this game, and similar to Pokemon Go they cost around 150 gold to increase them by increments of 10.
One of the more annoying challenges that I have encountered so far is the ingredients racket. These are used to craft potions and can only be used in a specific combination. However as you wander around the world you seemingly pick them up randomly so you will almost always have stacks of one type and next to none of another type. This is only an issue because ingredients are now what the Item inventory in Pokemon Go was, and you are limited to only 200 at a given time without purchasing vault extensions. I’ve found myself in the situation of having too much of one type of ingredient and being unable to pick up the ones I actually need when I encounter them.
The other problem for me personally is the Portkey game, which represent what was hatching an egg in Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go is fully integrated with Google Fit and keeps track of the distance that I walk without the app having to be open. With Wizards Unite I am back to the era of needing to keep the app open at all times and drain my battery while playing. It feels like a massive step back and as such I have yet to “hatch” a single loot box to be able to tell you what exactly is located within. I am so used to not having to care about the app being open and having my watch catch my steps and direct them towards egg hatching that I will have to shift up my methodology to make this work. I hope the integrations come quickly.
As far as general game impressions… so far it just isn’t near as infectious as Pokemon Go was. With that game there was a certain amount of exploration and a sense of excitement each time I encountered a brand new type of Pokemon. Sure that excitement is diluted as you catch your 3000th pidgey just to grind experience, but even now I occasionally come across something I have never seen that quickens my pulse a bit. Wizard Cop… seems to largely just have too many dials, is too fiddly… and has a been there done that feeling. You notice in the post how I kept equating things back to Pokemon Go terms…. because most everything you encounter is effectively a reworked version of a mechanic we have already seen.
The deal breaker however so far is the Energy problem. This game is only fun if you can cast spells and collect doodads in the wild. When you have no energy you have no great way of collecting it other than hanging out at a location for a very long time and spinning the same plates over and over. The act of interacting with an Inn takes way longer than that of a pokestop, making it somewhat cumbersome to hit a bunch of them in a row. The feeling of interacting with most of the things with the game just feel less optimized than that of Pokemon Go, and as a result way more time consuming.
I could in the past stop in at the local QuikTrip and within a few minutes have captured all of the Pokemon on the parking lot. The equivalent took me a good fifteen minutes the other morning and I still had not gathered everything up. So far… it is interesting but I doubt it will ever reach the national obsession level that Pokemon Go did. The worst part is the fact that this is an AR game… and playing with AR enabled makes the entire experience actively worse as you have to do a fiddly motion controlled line up the stars mini-game in order to interact with anything. With AR off everything is just a straight forward capture, then again I also play with AR off in Pokemon Go so that might not be entirely damning.
I am not entirely sold on the experience, but would love to hear your thoughts? Are you finding it more or at least as enjoyable as Pokemon Go? Are you also finding yourself frustrated by the little mechanics? Leave me a comment below.
This past week has been a bit stressful IRL, so the XIV escapism has been very welcome. I knuckled down and got the rest of my ten wins in PVP for Isa's Ginga Pipe, and she now has her fancy metal pony. I can now happily remove her "Makai Astrologian" title and put on "Kingsglaive" forever. She's also in the home stretch with her HW beast tribes, and even if she won't be done with them before SHB, they'll all be allied Soon.
This week on Exodus, our little primal farming group put in extra time fighting Seiryu (now that we're clearing him consistently), and most of us are now proud owners of the pretty blue wolf. This was the last wolf several of us needed, so we also now have the final SB Primal mount reward for collecting one of each whistle. We thought we'd still be farming Seiryu into SHB, but that happily will not be the case, although we will most likely be helping a few members with their collections. But for the most part we'll be tackling fresh story content and re-doing all of our houses with the new batch of decorations coming our way in just a few days...
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we have a few new things to discuss and a few topics that bumped from last week.  However first off we talk about Four Job Fiesta the charity event where you run Final Fantasy V with a randomly assigned set of jobs.  Next up we talk about the sheer blasphemy that is how well the Games Workshop Contrast paints work. From there we go into how damned good Bloodstained Ritual of the Night is and how it is exactly the game we wanted it to be.  Kodra geeks out about the Silksong Nintendo Treehouse demo and who much he is looking forward to that game. Tam talks about his recent run through of Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition on Tablet, and we end the show with some talk about SGDQ or Summer Games Done Quick starting on Sunday.
