Obsession with a Skillet

To Achieve Self Sufficiency

There are a lot of reasons why people craft in online games.  Some start down the path because there is an item that can be created that is better than something that they can get through other means.  Others start down the path to earn money, or be able to play the market.  For me I have always been the type that crafts so that I don’t have to rely on anyone else.  I have the most awesome guild in the world, and in it are a group of individuals that would drop whatever they happened to be doing to craft me anything that I might happen to need.  The problem being I hate asking people for things.  I am the type of person who would give away anything to anyone that might need it, but when it comes to me asking for something… it goes against every bone in my body to impose on someone else.

As a result I tend to level crafting so that I can make my own gems, brew my own potions and enchant my own gear.  In World of Warcraft for example I have one of every single craft at maximum or at least near maximum level.  This has allowed me to basically take care of my own needs and it makes me pretty happy.  In Rift I have the same thing, in fact I spent a large chunk of my bonus currency when they converted to free to play unlocking all of the trade skills available on my main character.  So self sufficiency is an important mission to me, and it is a bit strange that until last week I had not actually touched the crafting system in Final Fantasy XIV.  In part I had watched lots of my friends fall into the black hole that I am now in and wanted to avoid doing so until I had at least leveled one of every combat role I might need.

Obsession with a Skillet

Like I wrote yesterday I have now left the territory of being able to purchase goods from a vendor and craft those up in rapid succession.  You can get to fifteen in a given crafting profession relatively easily.  Sure it takes a lot of time and getting to fifteen in all professions took me roughly two weeks of piddling at leveling off and on to get there.  Now however it seems like the challenge is not the leveling portion but the acquisition of items to use in crafting.  While my friends seem to think I am insane in doing this my strategy falls along the lines of picking a single item and then farming up three for four stacks of materials and mindlessly crafting a given item until I ding.  This worked extremely well for leatherworking in that I simply gathered up enough aldgoat skin and allumen to be able to craft up four stacks of aldgoat leather.  Sure it was pure tedium to craft that many items in a row, but I did so while watching television so it ultimately was not that bad.  The crafting system while more involved than just pressing a button and crafting an entire stack of items, is simple enough that you can pretty much do it through muscle memory.

Last night I spent crafting mortar by combining stacks of limestone and fine sand, both of which I mined up myself.  This pushed me from 15 in Alchemist to 21 over the course of the evening, watching Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, Veep and Last Week Tonight for a reference in just how long it takes to push a profession.  After that I started work on Culinarian by crafting a bunch of salted fish.  I purchased three stacks of fish from the market place because it was relatively cheap, and the table salt I crafted by combining rock salt and distilled water.  I managed to make it to 16 last night before heading to bed, and as soon as I finish writing this blog post I will begin the journey once again.  Ultimately I decided to push Alchemist and Culinarian first because they are ultimately the professions I like the least.  The strange thing is… that each step I make towards 50 makes me happy because I am that much closer to being self sufficient.  While honestly I am not to the point of being able to make all that many useful things…  I know eventually I will get there.

To Lost Causes

At this point I have 25 days to push eight professions from 15ish to 50, and I don’t feel like there is a way in hell for me to make that work.  Even if I took that month off from work and did nothing but craft full time… I don’t think I would be able to make it.  Even knowing this fact…  I am still going to try.  If I can at least get to 40 by the time Heavensward launches I will be happy enough.  There are so many other competing things that I would like to accomplish but right now I am as my friend put it past the “event horizon” and the only way out is through.  Crafting has dug its hooks into me and I am currently obsessed with getting caught up.  I wish I had not waited so long to make the push, but in the grand scheme of things I tend to only feel the drive to do something… when pushed on from external forces.  The impending launch of Heavensward is the catalyst that makes me want to do this, and for that I guess I am thankful.

Right now I am so thoroughly amped about the launch of this expansion, more so than I have been since potentially the launch of Shadows of Luclin in Everquest.  That was really my “first” expansion launch, and I was so unbelievably excited about what it might hold for me.  Everything I have seen about Heavensward is making me feel that excited about it all.  I think this expansion is going to be just as game changing, because the new content feels so vast.  The scale of everything seems to be amplified, and that makes me so happy.  The world building of Everquest embraced the feeling of everything on a large scale, and my hope is now that the team has proven their mettle with a smaller experience that we will see them branching out and building worlds on a bigger scale.  My hope is that with the introduction of flight that we will see less hard edges in the world.  I admit I am leery about flight because in both World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 it changed the way I played the game potentially for the worse.  In both cases I skipped content because I could simply fly over the top of it…  and I am hoping that Square can approach flight from a slightly different direction.