Bel Folks Stuff Debut

An Evening With Syl

cropped-belfolksstuff_banner A few weeks back I talked about a new kind of podcast I was planning on doing.  Where I grab one of the very interesting members of our community and chat with them a bit.  Somewhat of an informal interview podcast.  Thankfully everyone I have talked to about this idea thought it was cool and has been willing to volunteer for the process.  Since my friend @Gypsy_Syl and I have notoriously struggled to find time to actually hang out together on voice chat, I figured it would be awesome to start this entire process with her.  Thankfully she graciously accepted and last Sunday at noon my time which was 7 pm her time… we sat down to record a show.  I am really pleased with how it turned out, and while I still feel like I am absolutely “winging it” I can see how this is going to work with other “Folks” as well.

Right now the plan is to do this as a semi-monthly show, because quite honestly with daily blogging and weekly podcasting with AggroChat, I don’t feel like I can really add much more to my schedule.  Naming a thing is always the hardest part, after some time I landed on more of a statement of what the show was… than an actual name.  “Bel Talks To Interesting Folks About Really Important Stuff That They Enjoy Doing”.  This however was way too long to be the title of anything… so I just shortened it to “Bel Folks Stuff”.  It’s quirky I know, but I figure the folks that will be listening won’t care much about the title… but will instead be tuning in to listen to someone from our community talking about stuff that they enjoy.  So please tune in and enjoy “An Evening With Syl” the very first episode.

Gobbie-Boom

ffxiv 2014-10-24 06-14-29-107 Last night I spent most of the night working on my Monk, trying to push him ever higher in level.  I was happy the other night to graduate from Totorak to Haukke Manor as it is a considerably more enjoyable dungeon.  My friend Ashgar likes to refer to Totorak as “The Thousand Yawns of Total-Nap”.  For me, I don’t mind the dungeon that bad but it does definitely seem to drag on, especially in that section where you keep having to bust poison balloons and move through the green sludge.  Last night however I got to move into one of my favorite dungeons…  Brayflox’s Longstop.  The reason why I like Brayflox is simple…  it has some really awesome sets that come out of it.  While tanking the place I had managed to gather up a full set of Cavalry, and while healing I had managed to gather up most of a full set of Battle Mage.  However every time I ran the place, either Infantry did not drop… or someone else was with me that wanted it far more.

As you can see from the above picture, last night I managed to get the Infantry Chest to drop.  So far I only have legs, hat and chest…  but I figure I will be running a lot more Brayflox.  One of the things that I didn’t really cover in my guide is that every night I always do at least one completely random dungeon run.  This is worth a massive amount of xp even if you end up getting one of the primals… that normally rewards next to no experience.  After that I tend to just queue for whatever the highest level dungeon I can run happens to be… especially if I am playing DPS.  Nothing sucks worse than wading through a thirty minute dps queue, only to end up getting Ifrit.  So I expect over the next few days to queue up for Brayflox, and then run FATEs while waiting on the roulette to pop.  The only thing I wish is that you could queue with your chocobo out, because this greatly lowers my survival in FATEs to have to run without him.

Using My Boost

rift 2014-10-23 06-27-53-875 This morning Faeblight appears to be down, so I can’t actually log into the game and take any proper screenshots.  As a result you get a shot of my menagerie of characters.  This is fitting because in reality I was going to talk to the boost to level 60.  As you can see I have a whole slew of characters that I could have used this on.  Mostly I struggled with a choice between boosting Belgrenth my Dwarven Mage, or Belgaroth my Bahmi Cleric.  Belgrenth is still stuck down in his 20s, but overall I enjoy questing on him because the launch content feels better to play than the Storm Legion content.  Belgaroth however I had just started the Storm Legion slog with, and felt like I was making no real progress.  So did I go for maximum number of free levels… or did I go for helping me skip the content I wanted to skip on an otherwise really enjoyable character.

As I am sure you can tell from my lead up… I ended up using it on the cleric because skipping Storm Legion sounded like an awesome deal.  Unfortunately I didn’t really have a good use for the free boost to 375 crafting, so I ended up spending it on survival…  something that I struggled to level on my other characters.  If I had been thinking really I would have used it on fishing… because as time goes that one seems to take significantly longer to level.  The other big news from yesterday is that I think I figured out a pretty decent leveling build for Belghast.  All of the warrior builds I was using when I last played have seemed to have gotten nerfed significantly.  Once upon a time I could farm things with impunity and keep myself at nearly full health.  Those days were long gone as upon starting the Nightmare Tide content it was a struggle just to stay alive.

I landed upon a thread on the official forums by a guy named Inny proposing his leveling spec for 3.0.  You can check out the full magelo build here but essentially it is a 42 Warlord, 34 Champion, 0 Liberator build.  So far it seems to be working pretty well, and the combination of a few minor heals and the combination of Weapon Defense and No Permission to Die allow me to stay alive in most situations.  No Permission to Die need some really specific timing to make it work, as it heals you to 50% if you receive a killing blow in the time that the buff is up.  The biggest boost to my survival was crafting a new set of weapons.  Thankfully it was pretty easy to gather up the materials to do that, but unfortunately I have pretty much burnt through all of my available platinum on tradeskills.  Hopefully that will start to regenerate as I quest, so I can do the same for Armorsmithing as I did for weaponsmithing.  All in all the content is enjoyable, or at least significantly less grindy feeling than the Storm Legion content was.

4 thoughts on “Bel Folks Stuff Debut”

  1. One day we should tell the story of your introduction to MMOs.

    I have been getting much email from Rift of late about coming back. Not sure if I have it installed anywhere at this point. Only thing MMO like I am currently playing is Trove.

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