Good Morning Friends! I apologize but you are likely not going to get a proper blog post from me until I have spent some more time in Dawntrail. With a new expansion comes a bunch of spoilers information and it would not do well for me to be part of that problem. So I am going to be careful what I do share. Suffice it to say I am having a lot of fun already and I am enjoying the vibe of the new lands. The new coffer gear is 645 so 5 points ahead of the base level of the highest crafted gear from Endwalker. It makes me extremely glad that I did not go through a lot of effort trying to grind up my item level much higher.
While my friends who attempted to log in as the servers went online faced queues in the 2000s… by the time I got up and around at 6 am CDT Cactuar was down to a 45-player queue. I am sure this will not hold as the day goes on and as more players join the fray. I am pleasantly surprised at how well things appear to be working. I do wonder how many folks Data Center Transferred to Dynamis in hopes of lower congestion. I am very happy that it is an option nonetheless if things do end up getting a bit busy.
One thing I will say is that you are probably going to want to avail yourself of the new feature to push player models away from Quest NPCs. This can be found under Character Configuration > General Tab > and towers the bottom under Quest Progression Settings. I’ve turned it on and the entire experience of questing through the zones has improved greatly. No longer do I need to try and hold my camera angle just right to click on the NPCs.
I wish you all a fun journey in Dawntrail, and I will see you again once the weekend is done and I have more that I feel like I can say.
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Good Morning Folks! I find myself in one of those transitional periods in gaming… where the thing you really want to be playing has not come out yet, but everything that you are playing is not quite right. I am having a heck of a lot of fun in Final Fantasy XIV but essentially only to the point where I run out of daily roulette bonuses. I spent chunks of yesterday trying to catch up on quests and honestly… I think I am of the mindset of my friend Jay and just going to cancel them en masse and then pick up the pieces whenever I feel in the mood to sort them out again. First I think we should all take a moment to appreciate just how pretty Limsa Lominsa is at night. I think more than anything this is why I decided to switch my allegiance to this city all those years ago.
I’ve been scurrying around trying to do a bunch of prep work, but am starting to feel like I am studying too hard for a test to where I start to second guess myself. I don’t really have enough time to get my gear maxed out at this point, and I have already geared out my Warrior and Machinist to a point where they should be viable for a good chunk of the early bits of Dawntrail. I’ve been pouring “bookrocks” into ninja gear so that I can finish that character out after I have finished leveling my tanks. My Dark Knight is getting pretty close as I managed to knock out two levels yesterday, and will easily get another level today. After that, I will spend the last week working on Gunblade but am unlikely to get it across the finish line before the expansion launch without some dedicated grinding. Essentially I am in this pattern of playing a lot of things… for a little bit of time… and feeling weird about it. Side note if you have not backed up your settings in awhile you might want to do so. I had not backed mine up since 2021.
In Guild Wars 2 I am pretty much playing a little bit each night at reset and knocking out my daily wizard chores. I should be wrapping up Secrets of the Obscure but I gotta say… I am not the biggest fan of Nayos. Right now the story quests have not inspired me to dive deeper into it. The fight with Ceros was easily three times longer than it should have been. That entire instance should have been chopped up into multiple instances because, by the time I finished it, I was ready to gnaw my arm off to release myself from that trap. I am in this weird place with Guild Wars 2 where I still enjoy playing it casually and I like knocking out things that will eventually get me another legendary… but I am having trouble fully attaching to it knowing that I am about to go all in on Dawntrail.
Similarly, I am in an odd place with Diablo IV. My build was good enough to get me to 100, but feels sort of awful pushing harder content. I have been poking at leveling a Necromancer, but the drive to play is mostly gone. Getting to 100 feels like “finishing” the game to me, that was the thing I had never done previously and after accomplishing that goal I was ready to do something else. I enjoy the changes to the game but it also doesn’t really drive me to play more of it. It is nowhere near as rich and textured as Path of Exile and there are not as many different things to interact with. Everything sort of feels very samey where you just keep pushing up difficulty rather than interacting with systems. I keep thinking about respeccing either to Dust Devils Dual Swing or the new Dust Devils Whirlwind… but it feels like it takes too much effort and focus to get me there. So instead I log in… flop around like a fish out of water for a bit and then log right back out.
I am still periodically logging into World of Warcraft Pandaria Remix as my “third game” but honestly a lot of my drive to play it is gone there as well. I’ve leveled and geared one character to the standards I am willing to do during a short event, and leveled a second character…. and now sit less than 10 levels away from the cap on a third. I could level more characters or I could grind out more bronze… but honestly… I scooped up most of the mounts I care about and gearsets are honestly more enjoyable to farm from the raids themselves once the warband changes go in with the expansion. I still have no clue what I am going to do for War Within. I have my Alliance home in House Stalwart, a Horde home on the same server in Facepull, and then another group of friends over on Drenden that have offered me a home. I just don’t really know what I want to do with myself when it comes to Warcraft nor how seriously I want to treat the game.
I feel like I want something that I can really sink my teeth into and no life… but also don’t really want to get engaged in something when in eight days I am just going go degenerate on FFXIV. Path of Exile released a patch yesterday and I logged in this morning because it needed to update its cache after some significant graphical changes. All in all the game seems to maybe perform better. I suppose I could while away the hours where I am not doing dailies in FFXIV or GW2 doing some more POE. There is another league challenge that I could probably knock out if I set my mind to it. I have a bunch of the memories maps and there is one for doing those that I did not touch during Necropolis.
Basically, as the title of the post says… it feels like I am wearing a pair of ill-fitting pants right now and some new ones arrive in eight days. I’m not fully engaged with FFXIV enough to be using this time to its fullest and doing all the raids… most of which I have not even unlocked. I finished up the Stormblood Hildebrand quest so I will keep moving forward in that chain, but I am not sure what else I am really going to accomplish before the 28th. How are you spending your time before Dawntrail? Drop me a line below.
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This is admittedly a post that I am not entirely certain how to get started. I’ve been thinking about it for a bit and yesterday’s blog post was a bit of a filler while I sorted out my thoughts further. It is my Birthday today and as a result, I am getting around much more slowly than usual. I did go get bonus donuts though so that was tasty. When I started this blog back in 2009 its original purpose was to be a “World of Warcraft Warrior Tanking Blog” patterned off of another idol of mine who was doing something similar with her experiences as the main tank for a raid. I was the main tank from Burning Crusade through Cataclysm, at which point I hopped off that bandwagon and had to sort of reinvent the concept of this blog. Basically tanking is in my DNA and I have done a heck of a lot of it over the years.
Something happened though during Shadowbringers that sort of broke me. I am not sure how or why it happened, but I stopped being willing to queue for random groups with strangers. I would still be willing to tank for my friends, but those groups became fewer and further apart. Instead, I started spending most of my time on a DPS alt, because it didn’t really require anything of me to join a group and blend in. I am not sure if it was my lack of willingness to take responsibility for the success or failure of a group, or that the community as a whole was feeling less friendly than it did previously. Whatever the case I developed a mental block against tanking that held for roughly five years. When Endwalker launched I exclusively did that content with the Trust system and tanked zero dungeons for random people.
I honestly think I probably would have stayed in this “stuck” state indefinitely were it not for my recent foray into Pandaria Remix. It was a temporary environment with extremely low stakes and to get anything started… you either had to hope someone accepted you into their party finder group or in my case… just start your own. It quickly became just the status quo that I was forming groups on the regular, at first just for the world bosses, and then later for the normal mode raids that did not have dungeon finder support. I got so comfortable building groups that it sort of whittled away at that mental block to the point where I felt ready to do more. I think the magic of Pandaria Remix is that it is a 90-day experiment and no matter how bad things go… everything you are doing is just temporary which makes the player base considerably more forgiving about everything.
Even then when I came back to Final Fantasy XIV for the purpose of catching up to the pre-Dawntrail content… I stuck with a DPS character. This was in part because somewhere along the line I had stopped gearing Paladin which was my Endwalker main job. All the while though… there was a not-so-subtle itch in the back of my skull telling me that I really wanted to try tanking again. I set my mind to finishing out the story and then my goal was to siphon off resources to the point where I could build up a decent set of gear for tanking purposes. That plan didn’t exactly carry forth as intended.
When Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn first launched, I went all in on Warrior and it was my main job up until Endwalker. I loved EVERYTHING about the job… except Overpower which last I knew was a frontal cone attack that you had to carefully time in order to make sure you clipped everything in front of you. A lot of the appeal of Paladin was that I could have a much more chill experience hitting everything around me in a big circle. However, as much as I love the concept of Sword and Board, there was just something much more enjoyable about hitting things with a big axe. Essentially I got the itch to level my Warrior and then noticed that at some point when I was not looking Overpower was changed to function almost exactly like the Paladin AOE. This set a plan in motion to level up and gear my Warrior so that I could switch to it as my main in Dawntrail.
However, at this point, I was not actually tanking much of anything. For the first few levels, I was running a daily Frontline and then doing the Hippo Endwalker dailies to get essentially one easy level each reset. However when I got to level 88… I started to get impatient and started queuing for what I thought of as some of the low-hanging fruit like Mainstory Roulette. It went pretty smoothly and felt pretty great… which built up my confidence to start queueing for Leveling, and eventually the Mid-level roulette, and so on. When I survived the embarrassment of forgetting to throw my stance on… trying to turn it on while pulling… accidentally dragging it off my bar… and then wiping the group… I figured I could handle anything. Truth be told… easing back into tanking has felt good. It has felt like I am exercising a skill that I had forgotten about and put away in the closet for some reason.
At this point I think I am on my fourth day of doing all of the roulettes as a tank… or at least everything but Trial and Alliance Raid. It isn’t so much that I don’t think I can do those… but more that I am not sure I want the hassle of tanking those yet. I’ve started splitting time with Dark Knight and Warrior as I am trying to level up that job… with the ultimate goal of getting all of my tanks to 90 so that I can jettison all of that old tanking gear. I’m honestly having a freaking blast and I feel more alive in Final Fantasy XIV than I have in years. It is like I had forgotten at some point along the way, just how freaking fun the dungeons are in this game and how well-designed they are. Do I remember every mechanic perfectly? Absolutely not. However, I am remembering most of them enough to limp my way through the fights while also racking up a lot of commendations along the way. Comms feel good.
I’ve managed to get my tanking gear up to a decent enough level for starting the next expansion and I will keep picking up the rare tomestone gear as I move forward. I did buy a shiny crafted Axe because I did not want to deal with the nonsense of getting a similar axe and then trying to augment it. Once the expansion goes live I will be spending my Poetics on getting maxed out level 80 and 90 sets for various roles so that I can level those in a chill manner. Generally speaking that max raid tier is good enough to get you all the way through the next expansion. My goal is to get really merciless with what I actually hold onto gear wise, because I am tired of having my vaults stuffed full of random trash. I’ve also been having quite a bit of luck buying loot boxes with Grand Company Seals.
I guess my next goal is to reclaim my raid leader heritage and get comfortable forming Squads with my mostly unused Catmander tag. Baby steps I know… but I think the dam that burst with me getting comfortable tanking for strangers may also sweep downstream and eventually batter down the dam that that was placed there to stop me from leading larger groups. Also, appreciate Thumper the baby Siege Turtle because he is precious. Anyways… I am now looking forward to Dawntrail more than I have previously because I actually want to try and progress through the raid tiers and extreme fights while they are current. I am trying really hard to apply the lessons learned during Pandaria Remix to playing more serious games… because at the end of the day… the opinion of strangers does not matter in the least. However, it does seem a bit like some of the toxicity I was seeing in the FFXIV community when it had a mass influx of WoW players… has potentially died down as well.
I hope you have a most wonderful day. I am going to be cleaning my office… which is probably not the most exciting birthday activity but I put together a new cabinet and I need to migrate stuff into it.
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Good Morning Friends! Remember yesterday when I said I was hesitant to finish up the Final Fantasy XIV storyline? Well… sometimes I contradict myself because I did precisely that. I was about maybe a third of the way catching up on the story when I started this mission over the weekend. I am honestly surprised at how fast that I managed to catch myself up. I went into this not being certain I would actually play Dawntrail, and now I find myself rather pumped for it. Truth be told I would have rather the Thirteenth storyline tied into the expansion, but I guess I am relatively happy to see it concluded for the time being.
As happy as I am with where the story wrapped up, I want to talk a bit this morning about the worst freaking part about this game. At two points last night I had to stop the flow of the story, to run to the market board and buy a piece of gear so that I could get over the arbitrary item-level gating requirements. Now I came back before the last set of crafted gear was put into the game so when I bought my way to relevancy I bought most of a set of 610 gear for a few million gil. This meant that my item level was sort of all over the place. I bought a new weapon when the last gear set went in giving me a single 640 item level item, and this mishmash was good enough to get me all the way to the last dungeon of the expansion.
When I set forth to do The Lunar Subterrane I needed an item level of 620 and I was sitting at 617. So I went to the market board, replaced my lowest-level item, and was able to get past this gate. It cost some 300k gil, but I figured I was probably good to go for a bit and could at least finish out the story. Then a few minutes later when I unlocked the final Trial… I was hit with a 5-level jump and again needed to make up the last two points to get over that hurdle. So once again I had to break my way out of the flow of the story to go pay my way to freedom again. It just feels awful to know that you have to keep getting nickeled and dimed by the market in order to see the conclusion of the story.
What I find most frustrating about this situation is… that Final Fantasy XIV has some rather damned good scaling tech. It would likely be trivial to scale players up to the minimum item level for a dungeon so that they can complete the story. Yoshi P has freely admitted that a large chunk of the player base returns right before the launch of a new expansion to catch up on the story… plays through the new expansion… and then disappears again until another expansion launches. It seems somewhat ludicrous that this has been a problem for EVERY expansion… and yet there has been nothing done to ease the pain. I am not saying that scaling should always be there… but folks catching up on the MSQ should be given a one-time pass of that gate so that they can actually see how things sort out without a lot of grinding. I have plenty of gil… it was easy for me to buy my way to freedom but not everyone has that option.
I think what makes all of this worse is that I am really rather pleased with how the post-Endwalker content was resolved. I had a lot of fun playing it. But there is this base level of resentment that I feel towards the game for draining my wallet just so that I could see it to its conclusion. Maybe I am just too used to Guild Wars 2 at this point where I set up a single set of gear several years ago and have been able to do everything in the game without ever needing to change it. I’ve gone through this with Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now Endwalker so I knew what I was getting myself in for. That does not make it feel any better to keep having to return to the Market Board to try and limp through the story gates, however.
All of that said… I am legitimately looking forward to Dawntrail. I am looking forward to seeing the new continent and I legitimately like Wuk Lamat. She reminds me of my friend Shandrah but with a Spanish accent. I don’t love some of the setup where we will be on opposite sides of a conflict from our friends, but I feel like before all is said and done we will end up together. I am very much looking forward to adventuring with Krille, and I am hoping that before all is said and done we get to see Zero once more. I became really invested in that character and want to see far more of her story and that of the Thirteenth. I’m also curious how the fuck Solution 9 fits into all of this because a weird cyberpunk city does not seem to make sense.
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