Much Darkness

Very White Mage

ffxiv 2015-01-31 11-58-05-09 I won’t say that the sparkle is gone from World of Warcraft, because I am absolutely looking forward to starting Blackrock Foundry on Tuesday.  However the shine has diminished enough that I no longer have any real pressing needs to spend non-raid time doing.  As a result I have been spending considerably more time lately in Final Fantasy XIV.  While I was at Pax South the 2.5 patch dropped and I have course have been working my way slowly through all the new stuff.  Last Tuesday I was getting dangerously close to the 2000 soldiery cap, so I opted to purchase another of the 1300 soldiery level 110 weapons.  Now I have one of these already for my Warrior, Bard and Dragoon…  but rather than purchasing it for the Paladin my other 50… I instead opted to purchase it for my White Mage.  Problem there is that my White Mage was only level 45 at the time of purchasing it.  As such I now kind of feel like I should finish leveling, and for most of the weekend that is what I set my mind to doing.

I figured I would solve two problems, namely that I had been out of Venture tokens for months… and I miss running Quick Exploration ventures.  For the uninitiated this game has a strange banking and auctioning system that revolves around the hiring of NPCs called retainers.  Some time ago they added in the functionality to send your retainers out on missions for you…  very similar to how the garrison mission system ended up being.  One of these is called Quick Exploration, in which your retainer brings back something completely random.  It could be something amazing like a rare primal weapon, or it could be something absolutely useless like fish glue.  I spent most of my day piddling around doing levequests which have a chance of rewarding venture tokens but at the same time reward not too shabby experience.  At the beginning of the day I was 45 and at the end I am almost 48…  so making slow but steady progress.  Probably going to start doing some  beast tribe dailies tonight to mix things up.

Much Darkness

ffxiv 2015-02-01 11-48-34-74 Syrcus Tower had been a thing for the majority of the time we have been back in the game.  Which as we are realizing was like six months ago.  One of the big additions in the 2.5 patch is the conclusion of the Crystal Tower series of raids, The World of Darkness.  This only serves to further confuse me since WoD now means World of Darkness the dungeon, World of Darkness the pen and paper setting or the aborted mmo…  or of course Warlords of Draenor.  For the uninitiated the Crystal Tower series follows for the most part the theme of Final Fantasy 3.  These are what I often refer to as the “casual raid” content and reward some nice “catch up” gear for players.  In a Crystal Tower raid you are part of an 8 player full party, which is then part of a 3 full party alliance…  making 24 players taking on the content.  We have long joked that since 4 players is a Light Party, and 8 players is a Full Party…  then 24 players should have been a Heavy Party or something similar.

ffxiv 2015-02-01 12-13-09-27 At this point we have run Syrcus aka part two… so much we can literally sleep walk through it, so it was really refreshing to have to struggle through this raid.  In fact we flat out wiped on the first encounter because of so much craziness going on.  Each encounter has a laundry list of things that you need to watch out for or react to.  Everything in the place just looks gruesome.  I took a moment to snap a picture of this boss, which looked brutal but ended up being one of the easier encounters.  This is another first and last boss are the worst scenario, but I have to say the Cerebus fight in the middle was pretty frustrating.  I think a large part of that was the chosen strategy our group decided to employ.  I don’t want to spoil the mechanics, but for folks who have ever fought C’thun it is going to feel fairly similar.

To some extent I forgot that we were back under loot rationing and rolled on a dragoon piece winning it.  Normally speaking it is faster to queue as dps, and I just roll greed on the warrior items.  The Final Fantasy XIV loot lockout system is fairly unique in that you can run content as often as you like, but you can only receive a single piece of gear.  Granted both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower have had this restriction lifted for some time, but I forgot that World of Darkness being brand new would still have it in place.  This is both good and bad, in that when you get a piece of gear you can stop running it for the week.  But if you need only ONE MORE item…  it becomes maddening when you cannot manage to get it drop, and keep running it over and over each week.  I am not in a horrible place gear wise on my warrior so I guess it doesn’t matter that much that my first piece of World of Darkness loot went to the Dragoon.

So Zombie

H1Z1 2015-01-31 18-16-02-97

Another activity this weekend is that I patched up H1Z1 and decided to pop in for a bit to give it another shot.  I am still on the Carebear server Willamette and was surprised honestly that there had not been a rollback of any sort from my previous character.  In the above picture I feel like I kinda looke like Nes from Earthbound had a really bad day.  Overall it was more enjoyable because the world was populated with “stuff”.  When I last played I logged out in a small town, and inside a house that was well fortified.  Upon logging back in… the house was no longer well fortified but thankfully I did not get swarmed.  In fact I watched a zombie completely ignore me and run chasing off after a deer, which admittedly was rather comical.  A lot of things about the game seem to have improved drastically, like the fact that damage against zombies seems more predictable… and less likely for me to flat out end up dead as a result.

When I last played I kept looking for items in cabinets, trashed cars, etc…  but apparently “container loot” was bugged… meaning the only items to be found were ground spawns.  This time around I managed to find a backpack, craft a bow and arrow, and find lots of food…  making my chances of survival not entirely dependant upon eating three million blackberries.  I still found water something difficult to find, so I need to do some research to find out what other sources I can use for it.  I know you can fill a bottle if it is raining…  but not sure if you can go stand in a stream and fill a bottle as well.  In any case I plan on popping my head in again this week as time allows because the game is starting to feel less alpha.

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