Good morning you happy people of the digital verse, I am slowly waking up this morning. Normally I have this open and writing well before six, and at this point well past. I had a good nights sleep but I also feel like I could have likely slept forever this morning. It took me a few minutes to realize that the alarm was going off, and that it was a thing I should care about. Hopefully the coffee beside me will cure this present stupor.
Unintended Night
Last night I had every intention of coming home and playing some Rift to try and push my rogue up to 60 for dungeon running. However that is not at all what happened. I logged into mumble, where everyone was currently in FFXIV so I ended up joining them as well. Not that it takes much coaxing to get me into the game mind you… it was just counter to my original plans. Tentatively I agreed to run Brayflox’s Longstop to help the people still needing gear from it. However this ended up taking quite a bit of time to pull together. So as I munched on the super tasty Chicken Tiki Masala takeout… I continued on with my questing.
Currently I am out questing in the Coerthis Highlands region that is essentially the “snowy zone” for the game. Not sure what it is about snowy climates but they usually end up being some of my favorite ones in any given game. I was a huge fan of Winterspring in the original WoW, and Icecrown seemed to be the zone I always defaulted to going to when I wanted to kill something… since Ice + Undead is a pure winning combination. Coerthis is no let down as you wander around a truly inhospitable climate ringed with extremely fierce and isolationist royal houses. I won’t go into details about the main story arc for the zone… but suffice as to say it is hard to win friends.
One of the best things about Coerthis is the Svaras fates, or at least off the top of my head I think that is the name of them. Essentially there is a really awesome series of fates that begins by following a soldier northwards from Camp Dragonhead. You battle numerous drake attacks along the way, until you reach a ruins to the north. When that fate ends another begins immediately to hold of against a dragon onslaught. Finally when this second fate ends, a third one begins to destroy the mother dragon Svaras herself. They go pretty quickly, but the first fate rewards around 5000 xp, the second around 10,000 xp and the final dragon fate roughly 20,000 xp. So if you can hop on and ride the entire thing out, you mob up over 35,000 xp and a large number of grand company seals.
Add to this big main fate a number of smaller fates that spawn in the central corridor of Coerthis, and it becomes a fairly solid fate zone. The only danger is that the entire zone spans from 30 at the lowest points to 50 at the highest points. So there is a high chance of roaming into areas that are just too high for you currently. On other cool notes however… in my wandering around last night I located the plateau that Behemoth spawns on. This is a big end game primal fight, that my server has taken down at least once. Not sure how difficult it is, but from what I have seen it looks absolutely amazing. I am sure there is the chance as some spiffy gear from it as well.
Brayflox Conquered
Brayflox’s Longstop is a level 32 dungeon that appears as part of the main storyline. Essentially everyone is forced to run it in order to progress their quest chain forward. As a result I ran it quite some time ago for the first time, and did not like the dungeon at all. Essentially it was the first dungeon that I learned how unreliable overpower becomes after your transition to warrior. It is decent for initial aggro, but you simply cannot hold multiple targets for long with it. Essentially Overpower was a crutch that I needed to discard, and this involved developing some new tactics. Brayflox was the run that I ended up going through most of these growing pains… so I remembered it in a less than fond way.
Ironically… this is the dungeon that everyone in my guild seems to want to run. Admittedly it has some of the coolest “unique” gear sets in the game to date. As a side effect our players have been wanting to run the place til their eyes bleed trying to collect the last set pieces. The big bottleneck we have is that there are essentially two tanks right now. Myself and Ashgar are our only dedicated tanks at the high end of the level range. We have one additional dedicated tank in the mid 20s, and a bunch of alternate tanks that are hovering in the 15s. So since all of us prefer greatly to run dungeons as a guild, everyone ends waiting on myself or ash to be able to run the instance.
Ash was not available last night, the 1.5 HD remix of Kingdom Hearts was released… and he had given us warning he would be spending time playing that. So as a result I offered to tank Brayflox in his place. The funny thing is… after having conquered the Sunken Temple of Qarn… this dungeon felt like a cakewalk. The primary difference is that I have developed strategies for multi-target tanking that did NOT rely on Overpower since then. As a result the dungeon no longer felt like the chaotic mess that it did the first few times I ran it. The good thing about the dungeon is that it is really pretty good experience, and with roughly ten chances at bonus chests… you end up with a good amount of loot, some of it was actually an upgrade to my current gear.
It was thanks to the two dungeon runs in Brayflox that I was able to ding 39 and equip the Flames grand company axe that was sitting waiting in my bag. The grand company seal gear is really amazing, and I have found that it lasts normally twice as long as the average item for a given level range. Last night Ash finally made it on, and the group that had not gone to Qarn ended up running it. During the run he ended up getting a unique named axe, but after rattling off the stats… the grand company seal axe was still slightly better. So it is equivalent or better to a dungeon drop for the level.
Four Oh
After the Brayflox runs wound down, I decided to continue on with the main story quests out in Coerthis. Over the course of the next few hours I managed to whittle down the gap to four to something extremely manageable. After a good Svaras fate, I was within a stones throw of dinging… so I ended up picking up one of the more “killy” leve quests I had available to me. After a few minutes of collecting pages, and summoning a big baddie… I dinged 40. This opened up a bunch of gear to me… allowing me access to the majority of the Mithril set and a the new line of parry jewelry. I feel as though the majority of the crafters on our server much be stalled out in this range, because all of the gear for the level could be purchased around 1000 gil… which I considered a steal.
After equipping all my new shiny baubles… it took my unbuffed, non-defiance hitpoints to 2230, which is a sizeable increase over where I was previously. Right now I kinda look like a mishmash of gear sets, but I can live with that. Nothing I am wearing looks too terribly heinous, even though it is technically from about four different “appearances”. Now I really want to run the next optional dungeon, Cutter’s Cry… as a number of my Flames hunt log mobs come from there. Additionally I would like to continue to push dragoon up. I got him to 32 so I would have the option of dpsing Brayflox… but considering the relative guild tank shortage I doubt that will ever really be an option.
Cactuar Locked
Right now my biggest point of frustration is the fact that while everything appears to be working great server wise… and I can log in at almost any moment without a queue… we still have a completely locked server. As of right now I know of at least four people waiting to make characters on Cactuar the server we are on that cannot because it is seemingly perma-locked. There is a list on the FFXIV ARR website that updates five times a day… and while other servers are coming off the lockdown… Cactuar appears to be permanently stuck in that state. It is my hope that with today’s lengthy maintenance period… that we will finally get some additional resources and the folks who have been waiting in limbo can roll on the server.
Additionally if they offered us a way to transfer the entire guild to another server… we would likely jump at the chance. Personally I would love to have us move to Gilgamesh, since that seems to be where the majority of folks I know that are NOT in my guild are located. The problem is… right now our guild is level capped… and we have a massive stockpile of the guild currency to spend on the day long buffs. I would not want to readily give that up, so in order to make a jump feasible we would need to transfer as a total unit… rather than a bunch of piecemeal server transfers. I don’t necessarily relish the thought of moving, because after the initial launch the server community here has ended up being not too shabby. At the very least, the public channels are not quite the painful experience that they are for me in most games.
Wrapping Up
Tonight is going to be an odd night. We need to run up to my hometown after work to wish my Grandmother a happy birthday. After we get back from that, whenever that is.. I will be over in Rift alternatively working on my Rogue and trying to get some dungeon runs started. I am kinda hoping that folks won’t mind running the normals that a 57 rogue can attend, as I really prefer playing support as a rogue than I did on my warrior the other night. The problem is I really have no clue when exactly I will be getting on, since getting away from my hometown is generally painful. I hope you all have a great day ahead of you, and I hope mine is productive and that I can get online tonight at a decent hour.