Final Fantasy XIV – Page 63

High Sodium and Paragliding

March 10, 2017 by Belghast

This morning I am going to start the blog out with some tales of high sodium content. It is safe to say that the Final Fantasy XIV “serious gamer” community is grumpy as hell right now. Essentially the downtime on Thursday introduced the return of the Diadem… which is functionally what Free Company airships are used for… and also something that I have never actually gotten the chance to participate. My understanding is it is a giant outdoor timed hunt zone of a sort, that has lots of mini objectives that then can reward chests full of loot. I am always down for Square to revitalize content that has fallen by the wayside… I am looking at you hunt marks. However why folks are super salty about this is that apparently there is a phenomenally rare chance at getting a 280 weapon to drop while doing the content. This is of note 5 item levels higher than either the latest relic step or the weapons from Savage Alexander. Ashgar posted a comment in our podcast slack that I can only assume came from reddit…

Can confirm, am salty.

Then I did some napkin math and if one person of the 72 players who participated wanted to get a specific weapon out of the 13 available, they’d need to do the Emergency Mission 1000 times to have a reasonable (read around 65%) of obtaining it. For a 90% chance of obtaining it, you’d need to put 2200 attempts into Emergency Missions.

If you play the roughly 2350 hours we have until we get early access to SB, you will at one emergency mission per hour, distribute 150 hours of sleep and non FFXIV related over 98 days, lets say you spend 30 min each day on food, personaly hygiene etc. and you will sleep for 1 hour per day. This is, of course, calculated with queue times estimated as 0, which I’m sure they will be. /s

So the thing is… getting one of these 280 weapons is quite literally winning the lottery. It is not something anyone can reasonably aspire to, but serves as enough of a carrot to get people interested at all item levels of gear to start doing Diadem once more. This absolutely fits the modus operadi of Yoshi P and crew… which is largely bribing players to do whatever content that they feel is under represented by placing the big new shiny rewards there. What I don’t get however is the folks claiming they are going to cancel the game over this action. This has been the way content is balanced from the beginning of A Realm Reborn… and nifty things through bribery is a constant theme. This does not however negate the work you put in on either a Alex weapon, or your Relic because nothing can ever tarnish the shine of those memories. If you are playing a game only to have things no one else will ever have… then you are probably playing for all of the wrong reasons. Numerical perfection is a constantly moving target, and one that will be outdated the next time a new patch lands. However if you just play for the joy of playing… and the memories of accomplishing content with your friends… then no one can ever take that from you. What I see instead is a company throwing one hell of a carrot into content that would have easily become outdated the second it launched, and more importantly is a way of getting folks geared in 265 gear which will help their transition into Stormblood.

One again I am super annoyed with having to snag screenshots from the web and use them in my posts when I talk about Breath of the Wild. The Wii U is so cludgy when it comes to posting screenshots, but I suppose at some point I really need to figure out how to make it work. Last night instead of hanging out on the sofa or upstairs… I opted to chill in the bedroom and play some more Zelda. As of the end of last night I have officially left the starter zone, and in truth the biggest thing holding me back… was the fact that I could not figure out how in the holy hell to cook things. My key problem with Zelda is that things just feel grossly un-intuitive. For example… I expected to be able to walk up to a cooking pot… and see a “Press Button to Cook” prompt. However this never actually happened and instead I had to google it… and then google it again until I found someone who could explain it in simple enough terms to treat me as though I understood nothing about this game. There are a lot of steps to this process that are not painfully obvious or were not to me. First off you have to make sure that your cooking pot has a fire under it… so for me that meant taking a branch… catching it on fire and then whacking the cooking pot which then lit the wood underneath it. From there you have to go into your inventory and press X on the materials to “hold” it. That however is not enough… you have to press A to add the item to your arms… and you go through and pick out the ingredients you want to cook doing this.

Finally when you exit the menu… you see the prompt to cook the items link is crudely holding… and you are treated to maybe the most magical tune ever. Like I am already hooked on cooking because I want to hear that tune over and over and over… and I tried cooking damned never everything in my inventory that looked even vaguely edible. There is a completely magical remix that blends the tune with the Carmen Sandiego theme. The cooking gave me access to frost resistance food… which then in turn gave me access to the last two shrines which allowed me to leave newbie plateau. I feel like maybe I am starting to hit my stride with this game, and maybe stopping the comparison with Horizon? Probably the highlight of last night for me was finding the Great Plateau Steppe Talus and then defeating it… after so damned many deaths. One of the things that I like about this game is that the auto save points seem to be sprinkled around just often enough… that you are really never losing too much time in making an attempt. So for the Steppe Talus, the save point was just outside of the little valley it is in so I could quickly run back and keep trying things until I finally defeated it. The trick for me was to try and stay on at all costs which meant sometimes crawling back down into climbing mode, and other times just simply running around on top to make sure I didn’t get knocked off. The hardest part however was once again the fact that no one weapon would ever last more than a handful of swings so I literally killed it… with a single weapon left in my inventory. This made it extremely awkward trying to kill a handful of skeletons that spawned as I was walking out of the valley. Whatever the case… I think I see the potential now for what boss fights might be like and I also sort of get the reference to souls games. That term gets thrown around way too much lately, but in this case I think they largely mean the need to keep learning new tricks to defeat overwhelming odds. In the case of the Steppe Talus, if I got hit once… with a solid enough hit it was simply over. So I very much had to stay ahead of the combat, and only through not making any mistakes was I really able to defeat it.

A Good Night

March 8, 2017 by Belghast

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.

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.

Random Screenshots #4

March 7, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is one of those mornings when I am super thankful that I cobbled together the random screenshot tool. Last night I sort of failed at doing any measure of directed content. I tuned into Spiral’s stream as she continued to push forward into Final Fantasy V and spent most of the night alt tabbing between twitch and Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been on this mission to make sure that I complete the Ixal quests each day, and they take significantly longer than your average quest. In truth the bulk of the slowdown is all of the swapping back and forth between classes and having to craft items over and over until I get X number of high quality baubles for the turn in. Sometimes I just get unlucky, and the higher crafting gets the harder this seems to be. So while I might only need 4 items for the turn in… I might end up with a stack of 15 normal quality items that I had to craft to get those four HQs. Needless to say when I finally finished up with the quests it was around 9 pm last night… and I was feeling largely done with Final Fantasy XIV for the night. So instead I popped into the bedroom where I have my Wii U connected and played some more Zelda. It is growing on me, but I still find a lot about the game frustrating, or at least non-intuitive. As a result I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, and definitely no screenshots so… once again I crawl back into the vault and do a random sort.

Random Screenshots #4 — Chua Starting Area – Wildstar

While I may have issues with Wildstar… it will always be a gorgeous game. This is I believe a screenshot from the tail end of Crimson Isle, the Chua/Draken starting zone. There are times I miss my little Chua, and I went so far as to create a new one awhile back as a Warrior. The problem is the game of Wildstar itself just never quite clicks. There is just too much going on visually for me, and the style of targeted directional abilities with hotbar combat never seems to feel as good as I think they hoped it would. I feel like the game would feel a lot better on a console where you can bind your main attacks to the triggers and bumpers and control movement and aiming with both analog sticks. In theory you could emulate this… but keyboard to controller emulators never quite work as flawlessly as if you set the controls up for that purpose out of the box. Just like running a console with a mouse and keyboard… you are trying to fake out the hardware while using out another control scheme under the hood.

Funny thing that I get a World of Warcraft image in this search because I really have not talked about the game lately much. I am admittedly on a bit of a break right now, and in part I am simply just not forcing myself to log in when I don’t really want to. For three or four weeks the real world got in the way of my raiding… and then I just got out of the habit of logging in regularly. As it stands I have this meeting on Wednesdays that usually lets out about 6pm which leaves me an hour to get home.. find food and log into the game for the raid which is simply too rushed for my tastes. So for the moment I am on extended leave, until the spirit drives me to start playing again. This image is from me finding the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker… aka the Protection Warrior alternate appearance. This is probably the moment in Legion when I was playing the most intently, and every single day I made a trek out here to see if the shield was up. The day it finally was… I took lots of screenshots and I so happily used this appearance until I got something newer unlocked recently. The Legion launch and the first few patch cycles will always be a happy memory… even if I have sort of fallen out of the habit of playing the game.

Another happy moment in a game… at the end of a long grind is when I finally got Turquoise on my Chocobo in Final Fantasy XIV. For those who are unfamiliar… your base Chocobo can be dyed through an insane process of feeding the chocobo various fruits. What makes the process maddening is that one set of fruit alters the RGB values… and another set of fruit seemed to instead alter CMYK. When we first started doing this it was largely trial and error before the calculators came out… and even when they existed it never really was an exact science. At the time we were doing this… the fruit for dyeing was prohibitively expensive. While we were trying to keep an active stock of seeds growing in the garden… it never quite met up with the desires. If you find yourself interested in this process, check out this calculator because it seems to be the best. I remember towards the end I teetered back and forth between three colors until it finally clicked and gave me the Turquoise that I was hunting for. All of this… was simply to make sure that it matched my Leviathan Barding.

Falling Crows and Ghost Moose

February 27, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend I largely set out to do one sequence of things… but instead of actually accomplishes it I spend a good chunk of the weekend piddling around in the Palace of the Dead. For those keeping score at home I am on a mission to get all of my classes to 50. Last week I pushed Summoner/Scholar and Black Mage and as a result this weekend I started in on my Dark Knight in an attempt to shift things up a bit. Originally I was not super keep in Dark Knight as a tanking class, but I have to say after having played a lot of it during this grind it is definitely growing on me. Last night while watching Talking Dead I managed to hit level 46 which means I have roughly 8 more runs of floors 51-60 before pushing this class to 50 as well. Up until around 42 I seemed to still be getting most of a level every single trip into the dungeon, but at that point it shifted to getting roughly half of a level so I guess that is something to note as you push your own characters. After the Dark Knight I am more than likely going to start up with the Ninja given that it is my next highest class sitting at 38. That will leave Monk, Astrologian and Machinist… the later two I still have yet to even accept the introductory quests. In part I am focused on the goal of 50, because up until that point the levels in PotD seem completely reasonable. The 50-60 grind however seems to take almost as much time as the 1-50 does, so in theory… when I actually pick up doing that side of the equation I will begin with my Bard who is already sitting at level 55.

In other weird weekend news… I apparently am now in the Crowfall pre-alpha? I talked a bit about it on AggroChat this week, if you are interested in more of my thoughts. Normally I would be posting a “Crowfall Impressions” post, because that seems to be the sort of thing I do when I get my hands on a new game. Unfortunately I am not really sure if I have a full post worth of feelings about the game. It is very alpha for start, so it feels like it isn’t exactly fair to really give the game anything resembling a review. That said… they are doing an alpha with zero NDA so I feel completely free to at least talk a little about the game. As I described it to my friends… Crowfall is in fact a piece of software that I installed and that offers the ability to launch when I click in the patcher. Past that I am not exactly sure what is going on in the game, and I am not really sure that I felt anything close to fun during the hour and a half that I spent grinding away to make a basic set of armor and weapons. It doesn’t really feel like there is much game yet, and maybe the murder box that is the PVP servers are more enjoyable. However based on the apparently cross shard server chat, it sounds like there is just a lot of spawn camping and ganking going on there. The big challenge I had was that there was simply not much to actually fight in the PVE server, and when I did find a boar or a bizarre crystalline cat my hud would lock up on loot allowing other players to come swoop in and harvest the leather and meat on the thing I just killed. Right now the game feels less fleshed out than Landmark did when it opened its doors to early access. It feels like it is trying to do a lot of things but I am not entirely certain if those things blend all that well.

Now in the “I want my Sunday back” territory… I logged in yesterday morning to work on my Archaeology questline in World of Warcraft. Of note… it has been 181 days since the launch of Legion according to the handy google “days since” query ability. The last two weeks have been the very first occasion to actually complete the Laying to Rest archaeology quest that rewards the Spirit of Echero mount. The last thing I really wanted to do was go grind arch nodes until I collected 600 moose bones… but then again I thought to myself if I ever wanted this mount I should probably do it now, since who the hell knows when it will be available again. I am not really sure how long it took in minutes… but I started watching Sword Art Online again somewhere during the first 100 bones… and I was able to watch three episodes in their entirety and started the fourth before I collected number 600. It was a slog of a grind, and while I am happy it is done… it feels like maybe a waste of time given that I am never likely going to ride the mount anyways. I chock this one up to simple and honest fear of missing out… because if I didn’t get it there might be a version of myself someday that wishes I had. Regardless it is done, but the second I turned in the quest I stuck around long enough to take the above screenshot and then bolted quickly from the game. In other happenings at some point during the grind I hit 800 Archaeology so that was at least something cool that happened as well as finishing up the Handle With Care achievement.