Hopelessness of Odin

Impending Patch

Last night was an odd evening for a handful of reasons.  For starters when I first got home I attempted not to get into anything terribly involved.  As such I did a random low level duty roulette and managed to get Haukke Manor.  I think overall it went really smoothly, especially considering we had a brand new White Mage that had never healed it before.  I attempted to explain all of the fights, and was shocked and amazed that my party requested a full clear instead of the normal abbreviated rush.  Everything went pretty smoothly all things considered as I took the time to explain the final fight and what I was expecting from each of the party members.  I’ve found that often times on fights with very specific mechanics, no one wants to admit to not knowing what to do.  If I simply give an abbreviated explanation, overall it tends to go considerably smoother.

When my wife got home we walked to dinner and hung out for a bit.  By this time I was absolutely starving, but to be fair she warned me exactly when she would be getting home.  I should have eaten a snack when I first got home or something, because by the time we hit the Mexican restaurant I was absolutely famished.  When we left the house it looked like it might open up on us, and originally we were headed to a BBQ place, but while walking it started sprinkling a little bit.  Thankfully by the time we got out of the restaurant any signs of sprinkles had disappeared and we walked home on an extremely gorgeous evening.  I love being within walking distance of several restaurants, because there is just something cool about being able to walk to dinner in an otherwise traditional car culture.

Hopelessness of Odin

ffxiv 2014-09-15 21-33-25-687 With the patch downtime quickly approaching, but the time I got back from dinner I had roughly an hour and a half of play time left before the servers went down.  I tanked another low level random, and then opted to start working on my Paladin Hunt log.  For various reasons I have shifted my focus from working on my White Mage to pushing up the Paladin.  As I said yesterday I went from 28 to 35 Sunday and managed to get 36 and almost 37 last night.  I was essentially minding my business and porting from zone to zone cleaning up sections of my hunt log.  When I zoned into South Shroud I thought the place looked really odd.  One of the cool things about FFXIV is that you can check the current weather conditions by mousing over a little icon on the minimap.  When I did that I started to get excited… the conditions were “Hopelessness” which is a unique weather condition when the Odin event has spawned.  I shifted to my warrior job and shouted into zone “WAR LFG” and within seconds I got an invite.

It seems that Warriors are the kings of cheesing out FATE contribution, so they are apparently highly sought after for fights like Odin.  It seemed like everyone was coalescing on Urth’s Gift, so I headed that way.  I had never actually managed to catch Odin in progress before, and by the time I got there someone had just pulled him.  I was not quite ready for the sight in front of me, which seemed to be roughly 200 players working away feverishly to get him down.  The above shot is from the battle, and pretty much represents what the experience feels like.  The entire area is a wash in spell effects, which makes his attacks extremely hard to see.  During the battle he periodically casts these massive AOE fields that you realistically need to run out of.  I avoided most of them, and with less than 3% of his bar left I finally ended up dying.  I rode out the battle before releasing and managed to get gold contribution, which means I earned 5 Odin Mantles.

jIKMXpjzantetsuken What is awesome about getting gold contribution is the fact that you actually get enough of the tokens to be able to purchase something right then.  Both Odin and Behemoth have a number of really cool items you can pick up for mostly cosmetic purposes.  You can get barding that makes your chocobo look like Odin’s mount, or you can get a helmet and chest graphic that makes your gear look just like his.  The item however that I was interested is the one that any Final Fantasy fan will immediately recognize…  Zantetsuken his insane sword.  While the stats on the blade are no longer that great, thanks to the wonders of the glamour system I can make any blade look like this.  My good friend Ashgar has had one for some time now, but I had to scrounge around this morning to find a picture of someone wielding it.  As soon as I get my paladin up to 50 I too will be rocking the blade of Odin…  which to be truthful is probably longer than my Lalafell is tall.

Winding Down

Sagacyte After the excitement of Odin I was wandering around, and popped over to Uldah to purchase more Ventures when I ran into the ever amazing Sagacyte Luxaloix.  It is always awesome to bump into twitter folk while wandering about the server, and it seems like last night was a night for doing so.  Earlier in the evening Sagacyte had bumped into the very amazing Spiral Sun and posted about it as well.  Thankfully the meetings were commemorated in picture, so I could totally use them…  as in my rush I absolutely forgot to take one.  I love bumping into folks I know while wandering about the server.  When doing Odin there were a bunch of folks from the Howling Moon free company in the thick of the battle as well.  I was pumped to find out that Ayla Noye also managed to get gold contribution from the event, so we will all be rocking Odin goodies in the housing zone.

On top of all of this it appears that the 2.38 patch that went in this morning has a ton of quality of life modifications to existing systems.  It seems they are focusing on making some tweaks to make 2.4 go more smoothly, including some visual changes to Limsa Lominsa… which makes me wonder if the new Thief and Ninja NPCs will be located in that city.  The biggest news for me personally from the patch is the new command to copy an existing hotbar.  One of the big frustrations is that when you switch jobs, most of your hotbars change with you.  That means when you switch from Gladiator to Paladin for example you have to reconfigure your hotbar, as it defaults to giving you ones filled with the abilities in the order in which you received them.  This command will let you copy one current hotbar to a new hotbar slot in a different profile.

Another big one for me which is kinda silly is I am pumped that they added a /hug emote.  In every MMO this has kinda been my default interaction with a player that I happened to meet out in the world.  Apparently the Japanese are not big huggers, because after a year of the game they still had yet to put that emote in.  As a result my default had been /joy which is what happens to be pictured above.  So I will be happy to be able to do drive by huggings in game soon.  Another awesome change is the ability to scale back the spell effects.  Maybe I would have actually been able to see what Odin looked like were this system in place last night.  In any case, the patch looks to be a great one and I look forward to delving into all the things they added like Personal Player housing.

#FFXIV

4 thoughts on “Hopelessness of Odin”

  1. “I look forward to delving into all the things they added like Personal Player housing.”

    You might want to re-think this one. I like the rest, though. The ability to copy bars will be particularly handy for classes where I don’t have the job yet, because that bar is always a mess when you hit 30.

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