FFXIV

Weekly gaming grab bag

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I’ve been adrift a little bit in my gaming over the past week or so. The D3 season keeps progressing in smaller chunks, and I am getting close to finishing my second conquest. I just need one more set dungeon mastery, since I did Tal Rasha’s, Vyr’s, and Firebird’s after finishing my 4 demon hunter ones. The wizard dungeons have been harder overall than the DH ones, with Vyr’s in particular being quite awful due mostly to its size and spread of monsters to kill. I did the basic completion of Delsere’s before, but never mastered it. I guess as long as it isn’t worse than Vyr’s I should be fine. I am very much looking forward to being finished with these.

I’ve mostly wandered away from FFXIV, with most of my play time happening on Tuesday for our weekly raid night. There’s so much I could be doing but I’m in a really solid place to start the expansion so anything else is not very vital. It’s nice to stop obsessively grinding lore. I also made yet another attempt at FFXV and yet again bounced off it super hard. I guess I need to admit that the combat in that game is just not for me and let it go. At this point it is not that I can’t do it, it’s that I really just do not enjoy it at all. Instead I booted up a new game of Horizon: Zero Dawn and put in an afternoon reliving that joy. I think I’m going to try to motor through the story this time instead of doing all the side quests and exploration, just so I can have it fresh in my head to talk about with friends who are playing now.

I have also been logging into WoW every once in a while to work on my reputation grind to unlock flying. I’m hoping I can get it finished before my subscription runs out because I doubt I will pay for another month right now. The game is fun enough but the manic joy from the Legion launch is long gone and everything in front of me looks like a horrible long grind. While many of my WoW guildies have embraced the grind, it just makes me want to check out and do something else.

The same combination of overwhelming amounts of new stuff to do along with a long grind for character power rewards is keeping me away from WildStar as well. Every time I log in I have fun for a while but when I look into the long term progression I check out. These kinds of mechanics are great for people who are super invested in one game and need something to keep them engaged, but seem like this unassailable mountain that you will always be behind on when you’re a new or returning player. I guess this is one of the reasons why D3’s seasons are so appealing to me, because no matter how progressed or not my non-seasonal characters are, everybody gets to start over from scratch at the start of a new season, and you avoid that sense of “I can never catch up” that’s so demoralizing.

Well, that’s what I’ve been up to over the past week or so. I can feel the start of a super introverted spell coming on as I start poking at more single player games and avoiding group content. I’m mostly fine with this since I have a lot to keep me busy on my own, and my friends are somewhat dispersed across multiple games right now too. As long as I’m out of this mode by the time Stormblood launches I know I’ll be fine.


Weekly gaming grab bag

AggroChat #151 – The Holy Snorkel

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

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Tonight a very sleepy Belghast leads our cast through a discussion of the things that have been sitting waiting to be discussed due to last week being a Game of the Month show.  The year of amazing video game releases continues and Tam especially is extremely amped to talk about Persona 5.  In a weird turn of events Kodra discovers Castlevania Symphony of the Night in looking for things to play on his PSTV and we dive into a length discussion about that game.  We continue on our discussion about Zelda Breath of the Wild and how Tam is just struggling with it.  Belghast and Tam gush a bit about the Nintendo Switch given that Bel just recently joined the Cult by getting one from Amazon during their extremely brief window of availability.  We talk about Specter of Torment the latest addon pack to Shovel Knight, and how it is doing a bunch of different things than either the Shovel or Plague Knight content.  Grace and Bel talk a bit about the Diablo 3 10th Season and how they are desperate for new content… but still finding a lot of fun in the game.  Finally there is some discussion about the World of Warcraft 7.2 patch and how both Grace and Belghast have largely bounced off of it so far.

Topics Discussed: Persona 5 – Castlevania: Symphony of the Night – Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild – Nintendo Switch – Specter of Torment – Diablo 3 Season – World of Warcraft 7.2 Patch

 

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Finishing Heavensward

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Finishing Heavensward

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.


Finishing Heavensward

A Good Night

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A Good Night

Last night was as the post title might give away…  a really good night.  Lately in Final Fantasy XIV I have been caught up in one of two different grinds.  The first being getting everyone to 50 by running floors 51-60 over and over again in Palace of the Dead.  The second being leveling crafting through the use of the Ixal beast tribe quests…  which is significantly more time consuming that it initially seems.  There have been so many nights I have completely squandered the entire evening trying to get that last high quality item needed to turn in a quest.  This past evening however we ran group content, and actually had a full team of eight players.  Granted at some point during the evening we lost Mor, and Neph is in Iceland and unable to game with us…  but we have built back up to a large enough group that we can do things together without queuing in randos.  Not that random players in Final Fantasy XIV are ever really a problem… it is just nice to not have to explain that we are hashing things out on a voice chat that they don’t have access to.  The prime target of the evening was Zurvan the last of the warring triad.  While I was not really a huge fan of Sephirot…  I have to say both Sophia and Zurvan are awesome fights.  Zurvan is a bit more of a good old fashioned avoid the shit fight… but still very fun to tank at least.

A Good Night

After finishing up Zurvan we got another person keyed for the last part of Alexander by running them all in sequence.  I have a feeling we are ultimately going to be doing a lot of this at some point given that both Stormrazor and Muspel are coming up through the ranks.  It sounds like at some point we really need to run the early Alex for Storm, which is absolutely a thing we can do.  All in all the Alex fights are extremely fun…  except for maybe that middle section.  There are definitely some memorable encounters, but I simply don’t like it nearly as much as I like the first four and the last four.  I actually managed to roll lucky and walked away with an accessory and a belt, which takes my total item level up to 247… which I am simply hoping is high enough to avoid another gear wall during the next batch of content.  That has been the problem with Heavensward and one I am hoping they are fixing for Stormblood…  the hitting of walls that are not super easy to get to through casual content.  I still feel like they need to be doing a round of hunts each item tier to help folks catch up in a solo manner as well as through doing group content.  Final Fantasy XIV as a whole is a weird social experiment… of applying pressure in one direction and rewards in another direction to try and influence player behavior.  Sometimes it works out perfectly… and other times it feels cludgy as hell.  The gear barriers are one of those rare occasions in this game where I feel like they made the wrong choice.  That said it was a really great night of running stuff with friends, and now that we seem to have a regular group of eight people…  so many other options open up.