Belghast

Yesterday kinda sucked, and to be honest this week so far has been fairly awful. The core problem with a holiday that gives you off a Monday, is that a five-day week is still crammed into the remaining four days. However, that specifically is not what made yesterday awful. My wife was out for the evening, and with that generally comes a binge of guilt-free completely unresponsive gaming. However, the moment I got off my last conference call for the day, there was a loud boom coming from the direction of the power substation for the neighborhood and everything went dark. This was the beginning of what was ultimately a 4.5 hour long blackout. Thankfully my phone was fully charged, and as it got progressively darker in the house I found a candle. Apart from that I ordered some takeout and snuggled with my cats while I waited for the lights to come on. It was a stark reminder how many of the things I enjoy require electricity… and those that don’t explicitly require it do require good lighting.

Moments after my wife walked in the door… the power came on, so needless to say I did not make near the progress last night that I had hoped. Let’s review how far I have managed to make it in various jobs since the last time I posted one of these images. Dark Knight, I have taken from 76 to 79 and I should be able to easily take it to 80 tonight. Monk, I have taken from 63 to 66 and potentially can put on another two levels there if I focus a bit. I’ve gained a single level of White Mage, but it really has not been a focus. Lastly and disconnected from any of my pre-Endwalker plans… I have pushed Culinarian from 21 to 24 largely because I have had some extra beast tribe allowances and been using them with the Ixal to help level that up a bit albeit slowly. At some point, I am going to want the ability to craft my own food, so I will probably be slowly working that up.

In my travels, I encountered the strangest thing. It isn’t at all uncommon to encounter players that do not yet have a job and are leveling as one of the base classes in Palace of the Dead. However, yesterday while in Heaven on High, I did a bit of a double-take when I noticed we were running around with a Thaumaturge and not a Black Mage. Something important to note… your Class turns into a job around level 30 and Heaven on High requires you to be level 61 in order to enter. I blanked out the player’s name because this isn’t about shaming them, but I posted it on Twitter and got a bunch of different responses. Firstly most people thought they were simply a troll, and I could see that given that they do have a few actual jobs. In the run, the player said something to the effect that they wanted to be a Thaumaturge and not a Black Mage and was super defensive about that point… which makes me think they have gotten this line of questioning more than once.

Another friend thought that maybe they were just a hardcore roleplayer and devoted to leveling as the base class for some of the jobs. Notice they have level 80 in Gladiator, Conjurer, Lancer, Rogue and have taken Pugilist to 50 and Thaumaturge to 68. If it is a roleplayer, that is fine… but please god don’t make your alternate way of playing the game the problem of live players. In the Deep Dungeon system it doesn’t matter that much, but in actual proper duties you are missing like half of your abilities if you enter the dungeon as the Class and not the Job. Back in the day there was a bit of precedent for doing this, because often times as a Class you had more access to a wider variety of cross class abilities than you did as the final Job. Now however it is largely just playing the game “wrong”. My personal theory is that they are no-lifing the Deep Dungeon systems to level a bunch of things and have not come up for air long enough to actually finish the job quests.

Once I finish off the Dark Knight today, I am probably going to focus a bit more seriously on White Mage and try and get it up to 80. Monk is going to continue getting a bunch of time with me focusing on doing that class with the roulettes that I am not comfortable healing. Wierdly I feel way more comfortable doing things like Alliance Raids with the White Mage, because at least there are other healers who can maybe help out when I falter. I do my best to carry my own, but I am not nearly as good at healing as I am at other roles, and I own that. That said I am getting better and I am going to have to given that two of my remaining classes are healers and I don’t just want to grind them up exclusively being green dps in the Deep Dungeon.

Good Morning Friends! Seeing as this past weekend was a holiday weekend here in the United States, I observed a holiday posture and did not make a post yesterday. That means that this is going to be a week without a Mixtape Monday post. I assure you however that it will return as scheduled next week, but for now, you are getting another Final Fantasy XIV post. Currently, there is a Holiday event happening in-game called The Rising, which commemorates the launch of A Realm Reborn on August 24th of 2013, and more so the struggle that was turning this game into what it is now. During the event, the host cities are decorated and in the evenings there is a constant flow of fireworks in the night sky.

Each year the event centers around an in-game character known as the Wandering Minstrel, which for any new player is a self insert avatar for Naoki Yoshida aka Yoshi P the Game’s Director. Generally speaking, the culmination of these events is receiving a personal message from Yoshi P directly, thanking us the players for keeping the dream of Final Fantasy XIV alive. Each year the message is poignant and unique… and at least for me ends up summoning forth a few tears as I experience it. So this might be me reading more into it than I should, but if you look at the decorations in the first photo… all of those blue lamps… are Aether Crystals. Right now Limsa Lominsa for example is chock to the brim rull of them… and what happens when you combine Aether Crystals with Prayer… you summon a primal. Is Yoshi P being summoned each year during The Rising event to deliver a message to the players?

Maps night didn’t actually happen this week, but I have some nine maps waiting and ready for the next one. Instead, Waren, Cyl, and I decided to knock out some of the activities required by this week’s Wondrous Tails book. After doing a bunch of Extreme primals, I decided we should do the First Turn of Final Coil of Bahamut because it should also be pretty easy. The only challenge here is that Cyl, upon returning to the game has started a brand new character and with it requires everything to be unlocked again. This is ultimately how we ended up clearing all of Coil of Bahamut Sunday night, because after getting through Nael van Darnus… we might as well see if we could kill a Bahamut. With our little ragtag group we persevered but wiped several times to both Nael and Bahamut until we landed on a strategy that worked for our assemblage of classes.

My prise for this effort was this really sweet gun for my Machinist, which has more or less turned into my DPS main. I really love the class and how it was reworked since the last time I attempted to play it back in Heavensward. The gun is pretty unique and reminds me more of a drum grenade launcher than anything else. The drum itself spins during the firing and ready animations which is freaking awesome. I honestly would not mind farming Bahamut some more in order to pick up other cool weapons. As far as the process of unlocking it… we ended up getting 100 bonus poetics for each turn, so going through the process for a new player is a pretty effective way to grind those out. Will probably be offering this to some other folks if they care to partake. The only sticking point is Nael, but I think we sorted out some strategy that works more or less. Given how much damage I can take, I just ate all of my meteors and then killed two golems quickly and used the last golem to gobble up the remaining meteors. Keeping the golems from merging was pretty much the hardest bit.

My last leveling update was five days ago, and in that time I have pushed Dark Knight from 66 to 76, Monk from 56 to 63, and added two levels of White Mage. The splintered approach that I have been taking is causing each individual job to go a little slower, but ultimately means that I finish more jobs in the process since I can flip through them freely. White Mage has become my “all the roulettes are done, time to do some palace” character for the moment. It doesn’t seem like I have made much progress but it does I guess add up to roughly 4 levels per day when you factor in all of the various classes that I am moving. I have 77 days until the launch of endwalker and 124 levels worth of classes to push through, and if I can maintain a pace of roughly 3 levels per day… it should in theory take me about 42 days to finish leveling all of my classes to 80 before the expansion. This flipping between characters is making the process pretty joyful to be honest, and I am having an awful lot of fun in the process… so here is hoping I can keep this up.