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Blaugust 2015, Day 11

Welcome back to another episode of Shiphand Buddy! Today we’ll be trying our hand at space salvage and, of course, fighting weird space monsters.

What: Find the source of the infestation and get out alive with your salvage!

When: Available at level 17

Where: Galeras, Auroria

Gold Timers: Normal: None   ; Vet: 18:00

Gracie’s Run Time: Normal: 4:49   ; Vet: 6:55

Shiphand Buddy Says: I have seen an awful lot of this place, but I still really like it. It’s quick and easy! Take your time in the first room, kill the creatures and then seal the three vents. As you progress through the rest of the instance, remember that creatures can spawn from the round vents in the floor, as well as occasionally from cargo crates when you loot them.

If you proceed carefully in the next room it can make your life a lot easier. Clear the wandering patrol and mark the crate on the center platform. DO NOT go down the ramp yet. Mark the crate on the right, and walk out on the ledge there as far as you can. Do your best to aggro the mobs below you with any ranged attacks you have, then run back to the main upper platform to fight them. Be careful not to fall down onto the ramp! You can aggro the other pack either from the upper middle platform or by very carefully inching down the left ramp and attacking until you can just hit them with your longest range ability.

Why go through all this trouble? Once you move down the ramps an event will start with crew members being sucked out of hull breaches. You have a very short timer to find the breach and seal it before the crew and your gold medal get sucked off into space and lost forever, so clearing those creatures out before the event starts can make a huge difference. If you can’t do this, you’ll have to work on clearing them out in between the hull breaches.

I like to sit in the middle and spin my camera until I spot the next breach and then dash to seal it. If you have an addon that shows nameplates for interactive objects you can see all the possible breach locations and keep an eye on them. Any movement abilities you have will help a ton here as well. Once the event is complete make sure to tag the last crate in this room, up on top of some shipping containers. Be warned that more adds can spawn from the floor vents once the event is over.

After that the rest of the instance is a piece of cake. Make your way down the hall, killing creatures and tagging the last of the cargo before you get to the med bay. When you head toward the supplies in this room a short event begins. Kill a wave of infected crew, then a wave of 3 infection monsters. When they are near death they will run back to the middle and merge into a miniboss. It has a fair amount of health but otherwise isn’t too bad. Once you kill it you can finally loot those medical supplies. Note that there’s poison gas in the lower area during the event, if you are struggling to kill everything fast enough try pulling to the top of the stairs first.

The lights will go out momentarily during the transition to the last stage of this shiphand. You will need to fight your way back up to where you started, killing blobmonsters and “saving” the crew along the way. Each time you use the medical supplies on a crew member they’ll explode into multiple little mobs, so be prepared. Once you’ve found them all and killed all the monsters you’re ready for the final showdown with a giant gross disease creature. Partway through the fight it will hit you with a blind attack. If you’re prepared you can interrupt right away to avoid taking unnecessary damage while you’re blind. Once it dies you’re done!

Differences between normal and vet: Normal mode has no cargo to collect and no event/miniboss in the med bay area.

Other Thoughts: This is usually considered the fastest shiphand if you just want to do some speed runs, but you’ll want some practice to get used to the hull breach section first.

Next up: Rage Logic!

Source: Moonshine Mansion

Blaugust 2015, Day 10

I’ve been known to be a bit of a content locust, devouring new things quickly and completely. Sometimes I move on to new games afterwards, but often I stick around. It requires a bit of self-motivation to find your own fun when there’s no obvious goals sitting in front of you. In WildStar right now I’m not raiding doing much group content. Instead I have the goals of making as much money as I can in a casual way, and upgrading my gear in whatever slow manner I can without raiding. These go hand in hand when I see those drool-worthy ilevel 74 pistols sitting on the AH…

In FFXIV I’m at the stage where I can easily cap my raid-gear currency in a few days, and there’s little I need that can be obtained by pugging. I could just log in very rarely except for raid nights and still be making the exact same amount of progress. Instead, I’ve decided to pick back up where I left off on the relic weapon questline. This is a level 50 quest chain from before the expansion with about 8 different parts that starts you off with an ilevel 80 weapon and eventually progresses it up to 135. In some ways it reminds me of the legendary item quest chains in WoW from Pandaria and Draenor. The difference is that the end result of this chain is not really any better than what you could get from raiding, and it takes a pretty soul-crushing amount of grinding to get there. The quests also send you to a wide variety of different content, across every zone in the game and into most of the level 50 dungeons. It also asks you to dish out quite a bit of cash for vendor items and to either craft or purchase some high-level crafted items.

Before Heavensward released I was about halfway through. I set this goal aside when the expansion launched because there was so much new content to see. When things finally slowed down enough for me to return I was pleased to note that most of the quests had been altered to reduce the grind. I’m now on the next-to-last step, which requires 400,000g worth of vendor items, another 600-800,000g worth of crafted items, and multiple items only purchasable by spending level 50 PvE tokens. Oh yeah, it also requires item drops from 16 of the level 44-50 dungeons, and the drops are not guaranteed.

If you think it sound silly to go through all this effort for an item that was barely worth it when the content was new and is not even slightly useful now, well, yes it is. Sometimes we have to make our own fun in games when there are lulls between content. Sometimes the game puts a silly challenge in front of us. Right now I’m grateful to have something to do that keeps me active and engaged in FFXIV while I wait for new content and for my raid group to return from their end-of-summer travels.

These types of trials are also rites of passage that give a weird traumatic bonding experience. In late Wrath-era WoW I got my “The Insane” achievement, and part of what got me through it was the support of a guildie who had done it too, and the few other folks I’d eventually befriend just because I saw them working on the same tasks with me every day. So three cheers for silly goals that bring silly people together! And a Moonshine Mansion tip-o-the-hat to my FC-buddies Lonomonkey for inspiring me to go down this dark path in FFXIV, and Ash for keeping me company during the silliness! Hopefully I’ll be reporting on my success here soon, before a new level 60 version of this quest chain gets added to the game!

Source: Moonshine Mansion