FFXIV

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.

 

AggroChat #145 – I’m a Hufflepuff

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

aggrochat145_720

Tonight we have another big rambly show where we start out having zero clue what we are going to talk about… and then wind up recording for a couple hours.  Edited down the show ends up being roughly another hour and a half experience.  Tonight we talk at length about our addiction to Final Fantasy XIV and the Palace of the Dead.  Grace and I talk a bit about the blah feeling this latest patch cycle has given us in World of Warcraft.  Bel talk about getting into the Crowfall pre-alpha and how it is in fact a piece of software that he installed on his system and does in fact launch.  We talk a bit a bit about the weird City of Heroes nostalgia game wave and how there really is only room for one of those titles in the market.  We also talk about the drought of MMOs on the horizon and how instead it seems to be the Golden Age of expansions for existing games.  Bel gives an update on the gaming at work thing, and his first steps into God Eater.  Finally we have a weird offshoot into talking about building Gundams before wrapping things up.

Topics Discussed: Final Fantasy XIV – World of Warcraft Blahs – Crowfall Disappointment – City of Heroes nostalgia – Drought of New MMOs – Golden Age of Expansions – Elder Scrolls Online – Work Gaming Space – God Eater – Gundam Kits

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Tiny Black Mage

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Tiny Black Mage

My madness continues… and last night I joined in with Grace and eventually Storm and Muspel to do some Palace of the Dead.  Essentially PotD is the new FATE grinding, and while it can be sort of repetitive, I never seem to get tired of it.  I mean I thought Tam was insane when he went through his own period of time where he lived in dank dungeon, but now I finally get it.  What I am loving about it is that I can just hop in… run a bunch of Palace of the Dead…  mentally be somewhere else like watching a movie or a television show and then still feel like I made significant progress at the end of the night.  The first goal has been to catch up my classes to 50, because it is going to allow me to have a massive house cleaning of everything that has been clogging my retainers.  I have a problem with gear, because I know that eventually I would love to have every single class to the level cap.  That is just the sort of person I am.  In World of Warcraft I actually achieved this goal prior to the launch of legion and had at least one of every alliance character sitting at 100, and three horde characters as well.

Currently I have my Warrior sitting at 60 and he is my only viably geared character for doing big kid stuff.  Then you have my Dragoon that I also leveled to 60, but promptly abandoned because playing that class in Heavensward was just so much less enjoyable for me than it was in ARR.  When I was last furiously playing the game I was working on my Bard, which had become my defacto dps class for awhile and I managed to get it up to 55.  Then we drop down to my 50s which are Paladin that I have not touched since Heavensward because I simply don’t really like playing a Paladin tank.  We have my newly raised trio of casters in the form of the Scholar, Summoner and Black Mage all sitting at 50.  Then we drop down to some 30 somethings with Ninja at 38, Monk at 33, and Dark Knight at 33.  I have yet to even pick up the quest to be a Machinist or an Astrologian but at some point I probably need to do that so that I can weave those into the rotation as well.  Now I am sort of torn as to what I should pick to level next, but for the moment I am leaning towards either the Dark Knight because I miss playing heavy armor classes… or the Ninja because they are just really fun to play.

The other set of goals that is staring me in the face is that when I last left my crafting… I had managed to push everything up to 21… with mining and foraging sitting at 50.  At some point I really want to start this grind again and push everything up to at least the point where I can make glamour prisms.  In theory I should be doing my beast tribe dailies to use those to level my crafting, but I just haven’t reached a point of getting back into the game enough to sort everything out to be able to do that.  Once I finished with the Sahagin I sort of let the beast tribe thing die once again…  but in theory should be doing the Ixal at least for crafting levels.  Whatever the case it seems like I have been assimilated back into Final Fantasy XIV, and have more goals than I can realistically accomplish.  My Warrior gear could also always be improved, but I am just finding PotD a relaxing way to spend my evenings…  but sadly one that is not terribly interesting to write blog posts about.