Labyrinth of the Ancients

Manderville With Friends

ffxiv 2014-08-13 17-28-46-658 Yesterday I had a bit of a rough day at work from the mental and emotional sanity standpoint.  So I was pretty much bummed throughout the day and this carried on to coming home that night.  I did have a weird sequence of events happen that lead to me meeting a new friend.  When I play a game on a specific server I have gotten in the habit of creating a column in tweetdeck with the server name and the game name in it, just to see what happens to be going on in that community on social media.  When I came back to Final Fantasy XIV I did that and created a column that said “FFXIV Cactuar” giving me any FFXIV posts related to Cactuar.  It has been less than amazing considering that it also catches all posts about the cactuar creatures…  and as a result I had gotten out of the habit at looking at it.

ffxiv 2014-08-13 17-49-54-819 When I looked yesterday however there were a bunch of posts from a seemingly friendly person playing on our server.  In fact there were pictures posted of the mists housing district, and I thought wow… wouldn’t it be a crazy coincidence if we ended up virtual neighbors.  Turns out she is in ward 1 of the Mists which pretty much means “we bought housing the second it was available”.  We friended each other in game and next thing I know she is coming to visit our house in the ward.  What do you do when you have guests over?  Dance the manderville of course.  After a bit I got a few guildies in on the act, and she even taught us what happens when you get a bunch of Moogle pets together.  After a short period of time they apparently start dancing in a circle together.  With some experimentation it seems like lots of pets interact with others of the same type.  When you summon a Pudgy Puk for example, all the other Puks rush over to greet the newcomer.  It is little details like this that make the game so amazingly charming.

ffxiv 2014-08-13 17-55-41-290 The awesome side effect of all of this madness however is that through twitter we all met a new friend.  As the evening progressed she pulled two of my guildies into Syrcus tower and I think they had a pretty good time.  She on the other hand seems super excited to actually know some people on during the EDT primetime.  She hails from a huge guild on the server, that apparently at one point was one of the highest progressed guilds, otherwise I would totally try and steal her into the guild.  It might still happen because her group is not active at all, as for whatever reason most of them went missing posts patch 2.2.  In any case it was a pretty awesome random happening, and I think its always great to meet more awesome people on the server I play on.

Labyrinth of the Ancients

ffxiv 2014-08-13 20-32-51-933 As far as my evening, my wife and I walked a mile and some change to dinner and when I got back everyone was otherwise engaged.  So I decided to take the plunge and queue for the first of the crystal tower instances.  Labyrinth of the Ancients is essentially the Final Fantasy XIV version of the WoW LFR system.  You queue up individually or as a group and are matched up with other players forming three groups of 8 or 24 in total.  Each “alliance” as they call it works as a team to make its way through the tower, and often times has to split apart so that each time covers a specific mechanic.  The first part of the dungeon drops ilvl 80 gear, and has no loot restrictions, which makes it a pretty popular place to grind out some basic gear.  Additionally each run through rewards both kinds of “bookrocks” making it a decent way to get some currency.

ffxiv 2014-08-13 21-45-09-396 In total I made two runs last night through the raid.  The first run seemed to be going really smoothly with us one-shotting the first boss encounter.  However there was a portion that involved us splitting up into three teams and our team kept failing.  I am not really sure what was happening as my role in the fight was super focused on burning down the “boss” at the end of the platform.  Apparently however the adds were not getting handled and the ranged dps that is supposed to burn them down failed to do so.  The end result was a slow cascade of players leaving the group until finally the game asked us if we wanted to abandon the duty since there really was no shot in hell of getting fillins.  Unlike World of Warcraft the Final Fantasy duty system allows you to say “I only want fresh raids” and this is the default option….  so for the most part it is very hard to get people to join your group.  In future runs I might just flag myself as a fillin to see if the queue goes any faster, as each time I have queued it took around thirty minutes.

Second Chances and Onion Knights

ffxiv 2014-08-13 22-37-59-392 I took a break, stretched my legs and got a drink and then sat down to queue for Crystal Tower again when my group failed out.  It was roughly thirty minutes again when I got a brand new group.  At first I was wondering if this would be a repeat of the last group when we struggled to defeat the Bone Dragon encounter.  However from that point onwards everything else went pretty flawlessly, and in no time at all we were through the dungeon and I was on to being flagged for Syrccus tower.  Most of the look was meaningless for me, however form the Behemoth encounter a lancer hat dropped.  I mostly rolled on it for the cosmetic look and that I was the only lancer in my sub team.  When loot drops, it drops for your 8 man group and not for the 24 man raid instance as a whole.  This means you are only really in competition against a handful of players, and so far I have been the only dragoon on each time.

completed_onion_knight  I was able to scrounge up a picture of what the completed Onion Knight set looks like, so yeah I totally rolled for cosmetic purposes.  In truth I would really like to get all of the pieces of the Wolfram set because I am really digging the appearance there.  I seem to have lucked into the chest and helmet.  The Chest was 66,000 gil and the Helmet was 80,000 gil on the Market Board, and since then I have not seen ANY piece of Wolfram gear cheaper than 150,000 to 200,000 gil.  I am sure the crafter that posted them that cheaply is kicking themselves, but as a result I have some really awesome ilvl 90 gear.  I will have to ask some of my crafter friends what exactly it takes to make more pieces because yeah… I could totally use some more of it.  In any case I had a fun time checking out the raid instance.  I think it is all of our hopes to be able to do Binding Coil of Bahamut at some point as a guild, especially since that is only an 8 man raid.  I really like the encounters in this game so far, and I look forward to seeing what more of the raids look like.

#FFXIV #Cactuar #CrystalTower

3 thoughts on “Labyrinth of the Ancients”

Comments are closed.