Books and Bad Decisions

I’ve been piddling around in Final Fantasy XIV for awhile now, but have largely languished without a real purpose. This weekend I guess I got a sense of purpose and managed to push my Machinist up to level 50 with darkest dungeon. I had been piddling around during the podcast in Palace of the Dead for a few weeks now, but largely just wound up running around the top of the wall in Quarymill while we talked. I refer to this activity as Dalaran-ing because anytime I would need to talk to someone in game I would find myself running laps around whichever incarnation of Dalaran was in World of Warcraft at the time. I find I do the same with Final Fantasy XIV hubs, and I greatly miss the running friendly walls that our old Free Company house used to have.
As it stands I have every class that is currently in the game above the level of 50, which in theory should allow me to massively clean my vaults and get rid of anything lower level that isn’t particularly cool looking or at least dyeable. I did dump a ton of stuff into ye olde glamour commode, and was pretty happy to see that we are getting an increase in storage space with the upcoming Shadowbringers update. At this point I have dumped every Axe and Katana that I care about keeping as those two classes are already at the level cap. I need to start working my way backwards through my weapon archives and saving anything that I particularly want to keep. Inventory management is the bane of my existence in most MMORPGs and FFXIV is no exception sadly.
After tooling around on my Machinist I decided to push Bard up to 60… at which point something started to bother me greatly. At the end of everything I have completed I get a warning telling me I am capped on Tomestones of Poetics. This lead me down a path of trying to research ways I can spend said Poetics… which lead me back to the original expense that I had previously used them for… Books. I never finished doing books for my Bravura Animus. In fact right now I could not tell you where I am exactly in that process, but I am working my way through a speed book that involves a FATE that apparently never spawns.
So there it is folks. I am making poor life choices and apparently drawn back into piddling around with my Zodiac weapon. I solo’d my way through several dungeons last night and at current moment find myself just needing to do Amdapor Keep and get a FATE in Coerthas to spawn that seemingly doesn’t want to. I figure at some point I will have to start farming down the FATEs that have popped since I believe every zone has a limited number up at a given time. This is apparently what I am doing with my life now… in this lead up to Shadowbringers. Sadly I have not even begun to go through madness because I still have to do my melding materia step. The good news however is that I probably won’t be able to complain about not having something to spend my Poetics on shortly.

AggroChat #256 – Excessive E3 Rambling

Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we actually record episode 256 and we believe the first time have all seven active members of the show on at the same time.  We start the show with a bumped topic about Lapis X Labyrinth and then dive into a lengthy stream of consciousness ramble about the various things we saw from E3.  As a result we talk about over thirty games… during which I probably lost count of a few in my running list.

Topics Discussed

  • Lapis X Labyrinth
  • What Makes Games Fun
  • E3 Smorgasbord
    • PSO2 Westernization
    • Commander Keen
    • Elder Scrolls Blades
    • Square the Dark Horse Show
    • FF7
    • Romancing SaGa 3
    • Seiken Densetsu 3
    • Trials of Mana
    • Panzer Dragoon
    • Link’s Awakening Remaster
    • Watchdogs Legion
    • Roller Champions
    • Fallout 76 NPCs and Battle Royale
    • Ikumi Nakamura Won E3
    • Spirifarer
    • Way to the Woods
    • VTM Bloodlines 2
    • Age of Wonders Planetfall
    • Empire of Sin
    • Contra Rogue Corps
    • Animal Crossing New Horizons
    • Marvel Avengers
    • Breath of the Wild Sequel
    • Cadence of Hyrule
    • Elden Ring
    • Nintendo Against Crunch
    • Brawlhalla
    • Fall Guys
    • Psychonauts 2
    • Double Fine bought by Microsoft

Selfies and Deep Dungeons

This week during E3 Yoshi-p's been spending some time on the NA datacenters... Mostly being surrounded by phasing hordes of Eorzea's finest, waving glowsticks and standing on his Lalafell's adorable little head.  I tried to see him on Aether, the first DC he visited this week, and barely arrived before he was consumed by the /shouting, /emoting mob.  A few days later he was on Primal, and at least there someone gave a few handy tips that I should've considered earlier.  Basically, turning down your character limit to minimum in system settings, target the Lalafell, and then stand back to enter Gpose.  While it doesn't produce perfect results, with some futzing I did manage a few amusing screencaps with Aluze.

Lately on Primal, a group of friends and I have taken a serious shot at Palace of the Dead and Heaven-on-High... we've wiped both now, but made it to 183 in Palace and 78 in HoH.  Both wipes were a mix of miscommunication and panic, but we're going pick it back up and try again with a few lessons learned.

My To-Do list from last post is still moving along... slowly, as I've had another surge of inspiration with decorating Isa's house.  However, I have made a dent in her beast tribe reps and also got through her HW scholar quests.   A few weeks of coffer farming in Diadem has finally produced the pegasus mount, and the minion is just 2-3 days away as long as the coffers continue to flow.  At this point, all I'm really aiming to get from the Treasure Trove event is the Answers music scroll, and that finish line isn't too far away, now.

Avarice and Guns

Over the course of this week my blog has largely been devoted to E3 show coverage, or at least that thing that I call coverage where I talk about the things I personally cared about. In the background it has also been a pretty crazy week with a good deal of my time going to trying to catch up all on things E3 instead of actually playing games. This was only complicated by the fact that Tuesday night I went to the rebroadcast of RiffTrax live which is all sorts of wrong name-wise. Then on Wednesday night we met some of my in-laws for an early Father’s Day dinner. Which largely left Monday and last night free… but Monday I more or less spent the night cobbling together the footage needed for the Tuesday post. Over the weekend I finally reached a point where I was ready to make a run at the Avarice Conquest. For the uninitiated this conquest requires you to hit a 50,000,000 gold streak which means every couple of seconds you need to be looting more gold to keep it active. There are a few ways to do this in game, but the most sure fire method requires copious amounts of farming. Since this takes so much time I absolutely went for the overkill method and gathered up a vault and a half worth of stuff… or in my case 8 rows of 7 caches equally 56 bounty caches.
Now the gotcha here is that a bounty cache retains a memory of what difficulty it was looted on and I started banking the caches when I first became able to farm Torment 13 and quickly worked my way up to 15 and 16… and had not really been paying much attention as to which difficulty I got them on. The key to doing this is to dismiss your companion and dismiss your pet… then stand beside your stash and be ever so careful to not touch anything until you are ready to go. I started by loading every bounty I could fit into my inventory and then reloaded the rest without moving at all. For sake of my own sanity I held down the Shift button while opening the Stash to make sure the game would not accept a movement input from me. The real challenge however… was doing the cleanup. What you see above is somewhat of a lie, because each one of those items actually represents a stack. At this point I had completed a Solo Greater Rift 80 which I believe took my blood shard capacity up to 1300, and I am pretty sure I made twenty trips between Kadala and the bloodshard pile before I finally farmed those down. I probably crunched over a hundred legendaries and I have no clue at all how much I had in the way of crafting materials. Which is good because I also needed the various Kanai’s Cube related achievements as well. I am essentially in a point with Season 17 where I have knocked out a good chunk of most of the remaining steps, but need to spend some time playing clean up and actually start finishing them. I need two more conquests, and I have not even set my signs on what those are going to be yet.
The other game I have spent a bit of time in lately is Destiny 2 and I am largely working on getting my light level up enough to be able to feel like I have some semblance of choice weapon wise. Right now I am largely just using whatever trash happens to drop with a higher level because I do not have a great stockpile of infusion materials. Now the interesting part of this is that I have picked up some weapons that I have found I actually enjoy and probably never would have played with otherwise… like the submachine gun I am current wielding in my primary slot. I still find it very hard to get into the Crucible, and whereas I played Gambit constantly it feels like the queues for standard gambit are extremely long. I am however trying to plug away at the various tasks that will give me “powerful gear”. Like I knocked out the planetary quest last night and did a heroic adventure… then plugged away a bit at the crucible related bounties. I will say it is really odd getting to the activity tracker off the map screen because I keep wanting to see it on my inventory. Quite honestly I would prefer if they put that tab in both places, because it takes a lot of retraining to stop looking for those items in my inventory. Still having an awful lot of fun in Destiny 2, but I probably should be playing Final Fantasy XIV and prepping for the impending launch of Shadowbringers. What have you been playing on regular rotation? Drop me a comment below.