This past weekend was a weird mix of extremely busy periods and extremely languid gaming stretches. On Friday itself we went through a whirlwind of activity where we got a ceiling fan installed in the bedroom, went and got copies of our birth certificates, found a place to do passport photos on zero notice and managed to talk an appointment only passport application location to see us as a walk in because they were thankfully not busy. However the whirlwind of activity meant that I will not have to take a day off work in the future to try and wrap things up. I personally found the whole process of applying for a passport to be exceptionally stressful given that neither of us have had one before.
Saturday I managed to get in on a run clearing Eden with nearly a full free company group, and I joined while downstairs which means I was not on voice chat. That is probably not something I will repeat again because I more or less felt lost the entire time. However I managed through it enough to finish… with Meca-Titan and Hydra-Leviathan being the hardest fights to adjust to. I do think it is sorta badass that we are seemingly on a path to repeat much nastier versions of all of the Primals we fought before. I also think I will be trying to get in on a guild group on the night this opens from now on, rather than waiting as late in the week as I did.
My main project for the weekend was getting the Dragoon leveled to 71 so that I could start doing Trust content with it. It is weird the way I think of the various jobs as though they are different characters, even though technically it is all the same Lala Bel each time. Through all of the running of content I managed to collect enough poetics to deck the Dragoon out in most of a full set of Scaevan gear, and the pieces that I didn’t pick up on the right side of the gear screen were augmented by items picked up in the first Trust dungeon.
Another side note is that I managed to pick up another full set of barding, this time the Expanse barding originally from Bismarck. I actually managed to pick up two full sets of it, and the second of which I gave to Ashgar who happened to be standing there at Heaven on High as well. I mean I could sell stuff on the market place but would ultimately rather find most of it a home amongst my friends. Some of the things that are dropping in the dungeon have to have wreaked havoc on the prices as all of the Thavnarian gear seems to drop there as well. It is a nice bonus incentive for leveling in this fashion however to pick up previously hard to get items.
I should have in theory taken the Dragoon as a win for the weekend… but instead I started pushing up the Red Mage in Palace of the Dead. It is weird going from Heaven on High bad to PotD, because it is very clear that they learned several lessons between the two designs. PotD seems actually a much harder dungeon experience than HoH, and I actually managed to wipe out completely on the third floor of a run last night. In part this is due to a bunch of tanks starting to try pulling everything to the portal and waiting for folks to burn it all down… which sorta works at times in HoH but does not work at all in PotD. It is still a much better leveling experience for dps than pretty much anything else available in the game. Largely I like the fact that I do not need to give a shit about gear in the least, and I get to run dungeons while listening to random tracks from the amazing FFXIV musical back catalog.
It was a good if not busy weekend, but we got a lot accomplished in the real world as well as me ticking a bunch of boxes in the virtual world. On the Blaugust front people continue to trickle in and we are up to I believe as to the time of writing this 34 entrants. There was apparently a problem with some of the links on the previous list. They came directly from the sign-up sheet and a handful were missing the scheme part of URI… aka the https:// bit. This should be updated and the new list of folks looks a little something like this.
Once again a reminder that you still have plenty of time to sign up and participate in this years running of Blaugust. Here again is the summary of links with pertinent information related to that.
Last night I could have done a bunch of things, but instead of doing something productive… I piddled around on alts. Timing and a last minute run to Walmart made me unavailable to run content for Thalen which bums me out a little bit. My focus was largely to get the Dragoon to 61 and capable of starting in on Heaven on High. I noticed that Main Scenario Roulette even had DPS as the bonus role, so I decided to roll the dice and give that a shot again. What I ultimately needed was just a little over half of a level to hit 61.
Since I talked about this yesterday, this time around I managed to pull Praetorium and even with adventurer in need bonus… I just managed to get slightly more than half of a level. I am thinking at some point they stealth nerfed how much experience this was giving out during the 5.01 patch making it significantly less rewarding. Maybe they saw the numbers that told them that people like me were using it to fix gaps in the MSQ while leveling in Shadowbringers and they wanted to nip that in the bud. Regardless it is still a viable way to bridge the gap but it now takes two days worth of runs instead of a single day.
I will likely keep doing this thing given it is a really low pressure way of getting across that chasm. Sadly I think I am out of level 60 characters apart from the Gunbreaker, and I am doubting that I want to tank Castrum/Praetorium on a class that I have barely played at all. I could in theory start up a Dancer and push it across to Heaven on High levels. More likely I will start mixing up HoH and PotD runs and pushing some of my 50s to 60s to start this process all over again. I have no clue at all why I am suddenly obessed with leveling all of the things, but I apparently am.
As far as Eden goes I still have not touched it. Right now I know Warenwolf and Thalen both will need it and we are tentatively making plans for Friday night pending on a bunch of variables. Today is effectively my Friday this week, as I am taking tomorrow off to deal with a bunch of errands that need to be taken care involving locations only open during the 8 to 5 window. So in theory I probably will have some time to push characters between those activities. We had an installer reschedule us for 8:30 in the morning so it is my hope that we have our afternoon completely free.
As far as Blaugusty things… we continue to pick up steam as we roll towards the official start in a little less than two weeks. Timing this thing is always a challenge because I don’t want to make the announcement too far ahead of the event that we lose steam before it has officially started. Last year I posted on I believe the second week of July which seemed maybe a bit too early. I effectively waited a week later and so far it seems to be providing enough of a reminder and catalyst to get people engaged.
So far we are up to 29 official sign-ups with still a few more who will likely be buzzer beaters that I know are planning on participating.
First off we are going to start with a bit of a retraction. I am not sure if it was me, or a situation of circumstances or the difference between two dungeons. Yesterday I said that Main Scenario Roulette was a great way to jump across the gaps in Final Fantasy XIV. Yesterday we also had a patch, 5.01 with some tweaks applied. Yesterday I said that Main Scenario Roulette should be worth a full level, and that had been my own experience when I took my Bard from barely into 70 all the way to 71 in a single run. However last night… it was not my experience.
There are some variables at work that might account for it. Firstly I have been getting Praetorium a lot more than Castrum Meridianum of late which is a longer and more major boss laden dungeon. All of my “oops a full level” experiences that I recall were with Praetorium and last night I drew Castrum from the hat. The end result is that my fresh level 60 Dragoon only managed to get just shy of a half level. Still worth the time, especially considering that Castrum is a way faster run than Praetorium… however I was really hoping for that full level so I could start Heaven on High. I will of course be running it again tonight and will report back the results if I manage to pull Praetorium.
The big thing that went in with the patch was Eden in a new location called The Empty, which I went through the motions of unlocking last night. This is supposedly the Alexander/Omega style raid made of up four parts. I had a fairly shitty day yesterday and didn’t really feel like I had raiding in me, and as such I lost out on running with the rest of the Free Company. I will likely pug this either tonight or later this weekend to gather up at least one piece of gear for the week.
I have no earthly idea where the above image came from, so apologies for the lack of attribution. However it seems as though Eden has a fixed drop pattern which is a huge improvement over a specific boss being able to drop a handful of things but a random assortment each time. Next it seems like Eden is way more generous with 8 fixed drops each time you run a given floor. For reference you need the following pieces to turn in for a finished piece of gear.
Helm – 2 Items
Chest – 4 Items
Gloves – 2 items
Belt – 1 item
Legs – 4 items
Boots – 2 items
Accessories – 1 Item each
What is interesting about this system is that never before could you get your chest piece or your legs in a single week. However with this… that is absolutely doable pending you keep holding your roll for a specific floor and only spending it on a specific slot. This could get super grindy, but would allow you to have more specific control over which items you are getting rather than hoping on random chance to complete something.
I mostly spent the night screwing around on the Bard again, and even if Main Scenario potentially got nerfed… it is still an excellent source of poetics. You get 600 of them in a single go from completing the duty, which I have been using to kit out the Bard in gear… which in its upgraded form lasts quite a ways into the Shadowbringers content. I am one run away from getting my Trust their first level up, which still seems like a nonsense amount of time needed to level them. I feel like it is worth my time considering the vast stable of alts that I would like to push up so I can piddle with them as well.
On the Blaugust front we are up to 20 sign ups and I know of a handful more people who intend to but have not actually filled out the form. One thing I thought I would address is that the form collects your email address, not because I intend to use it for nefarious purposes but I have had situations in the past where I needed to reach out to a participant about something but had no stable means of doing so. We’ve had scenarios where companies have ponied up prizes to be distributed, which is not necessarily something I have actively courted… but just in case it happens again I feel like I need a reliable method of communication.
The list of participants is currently looking like this:
Every so often I get something stuck in my head and am forced to push forward with it. This week it has been leveling more characters to 71, and the present fervor has largely been focused on the Bard. I spent an excessive amount of time in Heaven on High either solo or with some FC friends, and managed to finish off the ascent to 70 last night. I’ve been going around since then unlocking the various spells for the quests that I completely ignored during the process of leveling. This is a weird place to be in because the game will even let you drag an ability to the hotbar… but you can’t use the spell until you have completed the quest.
The other thing I have been doing an awful lot of is Main Scenario Roulette, which effectively is always going to be either Praetorium or Castrum Meridianum… aka the last two raid like dungeons required as part of the ARR main story quest. In both cases they have now disabled the ability to skip any cut scenes, which means you will be surrendering 30 minutes of your life. However this proposition becomes well worth it when you consider that doing this scenario at level 70 will pretty much make you instantly level 71. Even at level 79 when I completed this while working through a gap in experience to the next level… it was worth almost 75% of a level.
One of the things that Final Fantasy XIV is excessively good at is incentivizing content that no one wants to run. These were painful at level and continued to be a painful process to get through as a fledgling player who was trying to random queue for them. Now they become an experience in watching how players have figured out how to optimize the process to take the least possible amount of time in doing so. Sure the player gets to watch every single cutscene, but they also will get lost in a heartbeat if they are unable to keep up with the optimized routing through the place.
I did some experimentation and they are absolutely not chain running, as I maybe got 10% of a bar filled when I was not getting the Roulette bonus. This has become a ritual for me pretty much every night to get one free level on one of my alts and then go on about my business. I am absolutely now using this as a way of jumping across the gap at 60 or 70 to fix those missing runs on the latter that I talked about the other day. In truth I really liked both Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum because they felt extremely epic when we ran them with a full party of 8 players. Now it feels sorta like going back and soloing Molten Core.
As far as Blaugust goes… the sign-ups are starting to trickle in and I have been transferring them from the private sheet over to a more public listing. Additionally if you read this post early in the morning you may have missed that I added a Media Kit page that was requested. As time allows I will be moving some more of the event information over to that page so that it is kept in one spot. Additionally I want to go back and stub in data about the previous runnings of the event.
