Invaders from Mars

Weekend Goals

This weekend I set out with a handful of goals, and as always not everything got accomplished.  The first goal was to manage to get to 20 in Destiny.  Had the servers not gone down last night I might have actually hit it, as I am a little ways into 19 and still have quite a lot of story content t o do.  The second goal was to finish my second Animus book, and that one got wrapped up yesterday afternoon without much issue.  Sadly I don’t have the “bookrocks” stockpiled to buy another one, but in theory I could hop on the nightly hunt mob train and get there without much issue.  The third goal was to cap out my soldiery tomestones, and while I am not quite there I am close enough that tonight’s elite roulette will get me there.  Finally I had planned on trying to get to 10 on my Knight in Trove, which I didn’t quite make but I am now level 9 and also have a level 6 gunslinger.

All in all I think I had a pretty productive weekend full of focused faffing.  I think the Godmother would be proud of my little checklist of accomplishments… or at least almost accomplished items.  This is what keeps me motivated in games, is to have things that I want to tick off a list.  I am finding that I am exceedingly good at grinding headlong towards a goal, but when I lose sight of that goal I start to get bored.  One of the more interesting side goals of the weekend was to figure out how to configure JoyToKey and in part thanks to this tutorial video from Beau Hindman, I managed to get it running with little issue.  So now I am running around in Trove using my Xbox 360 controller and I have to say it works pretty well.  There are some wonky issues with occasionally my view drifting off slightly to one side or the other, but I think that is more an issue of the thumb sticks not entirely centering each time.  I might see if I can lower the sensitivity at some point to make it less twitchy.  The big thing I notice is the amount of time you spend mapping and remapping controls until you find the thing that feels most comfortable.

Invaders from Mars

Destiny_20140928212227 As always it was the love of loot and the desire to acquire more of it… that ended up lighting a fire under my ass in Destiny.  Previously I had been happy to slowly poke my way around the patrol missions, wandering aimlessly through objectives.  However due to the various loot issues going on that patch 1.0.2 intends to address,  they are basically having a loot giveaway event.  As we talked about in the podcast Saturday night, folks are frustrated with the grindy nature of the endgame, and as such they rolled out a limited time event that addresses that at least to some extent.    The event that is going on is known simply as The Queen’s Bounty, and through it a series of items appear on the bounty board.  Supposedly if you complete a handful of these you end up earning a legendary quality weapon.  Basically I want to get in on this loot grab before it goes away.

Destiny_20140927232244 I had managed to get to level 16 before setting foot on Venus, through just wandering about on the moon doing patrol missions.  As such I knew that if I just worked my way up through the backlog of story content I had waiting on me, I would ding 20 without much issue.  So yesterday I set forward doing just this.  I got to experience Venus and Mars… and so far I have to say I still prefer good old Cosmodrome and the Moon.  Venus can be extremely pretty, but everything seems to have this yellow green haze to it.  Additionally I have come to realize I am really not a huge fan of fighting the Vex.  The fact that I have to shift from aiming for the head to aiming from the yellow glowing spot in their belly can be frustrating at times.  Additionally fighting them is a bit like fighting a zombie horde.  The Fallen and the Hive had a fair amount of cowardice in their moves.  You can push and pull them around the map, but the Vex just keep advancing regardless of what you do like this unrelenting mass of shambling robots.

Destiny_20140928204249 Once you land on Mars however… the Cabal take heavy metal up to eleven.  This is very much the Warhammer 40,000 faction, in that they seem to have a cavalcade of ever more insane mechanized environmental suits to do battle with you.  There is this one baddie known as a colossus that has some sort of a chain gun that just pinned me down stunned as it ripped through my shield in a few moments.  The Phalanx however were what became super maddening.  They are basically a space marine with a giant riot shield.  They fire out from around the corner and appear to be deadly accurate regardless of how awkward that position must be.  The best tactic seemed to be either to toss a grenade, or try and bait them to move in one direction would looping around behind them.  In any case… my sequence of hand cannon one shots pretty much stopped when I reached Mars.

Destiny_20140928212751 At some point it appears that Destiny reset the player preferences, because apparently my grouping setting got flipped from invite only to allowing anyone to join.  In part I am thankful for this because I was joined by Nidrew who basically carried me through a few of the rougher missions, or at the very least kept me from having to start over.  So long as one of us stayed alive we could eventually respawn back up.  I find that aspect of the game interesting, that when a team mate has fallen, your focus goes from finishing the objective to just staying alive for 25 seconds so that they can revive and get back in the fight.  Of course you can go over and rez them youself, but often times they got pinned down in a fire fight and running back in there might end up being suicide.  In any case I am very thankful for the help, and when I stopped I was sitting at 19 so hopefully I can push on through to 20 tonight and maybe start working on the bounties.

Book of Deeds

ffxiv 2014-09-28 15-56-37-128 When you see this text pop across your screen it feels extremely epic…  until you realize that this was just one of nine books that you have to do…  and you have so many left to go.  I love the feel of the Relic weapon quests because they still remind me so much of just how difficult it was to get your epic weapon in the original Everquest.  The reality is that it is going to take me an insane amount of time to complete it, far longer than is reasonable considering lots of my FC mates are taking the significantly shorter route to a ilevel 110 weapon.  I don’t want to call it the easy way, because it is in itself a significant amount of grinding, but with the most recent patch it just got way easier to acquire the necessary bits.  In fact since that patch went in I already have everything waiting in my inventory to be able to get my ilevel 110 Axe, I just need a bit more soldiery which I should get Tuesday when the reset happens.

5OpoacO That said I still plan on going through with the Relic quest chain, because man… the Bravura Nexus looks amazing.  I borrowed this image from the FFXIV reddit, but man I really want to swing that weapon.  Granted the step between where I am currently and where you get that weapon involves months of work, but at some point I will be swinging it happily.  Granted by the time that happens they will probably add another tier of progression in there, and it will already be outdated but screw it… it looks awesome.  Final Fantasy XIV is really good so far at giving me things that I want to get that require lots of work to get them.  I’ve always been extremely luck with drops, so getting that item to drop off a boss seems to be an ineffectual way of keeping me engaged.  Giving me something that I have to do every week to slowly inch my way towards victory…  that seems to actually work at keeping me around.  I love the way that the books work so far in that each one slowly incrementally improves your current weapon.  Someday I will get there, I just hope that the rest of the people I am playing with will still be playing when it happens.

#FFXIV #Destiny

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