Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 34 of 118

Shirogane Extreme

October 11, 2017 by Belghast

For most of my journey through Final Fantasy XIV, my home has been The Mists Plot 13 where we managed to snag a small house and turn it into our Free Company house years ago. The sad thing at this point I can no longer seem to remember what ward we were originally located in. Once we placed that Aetherite shard in our lawn… I stopped needing to care about which one I was intending to visit. Over the years we contemplated trying to move houses to something larger, but we were so ideally situated in the ward that nothing ever felt right. We were across the road from a market board and retainer bell, and just a few short paces away from the vendors located centrally on the zone. Similarly we were only a row of houses away from the beach making it feel like everything was close at hand. One of the key problems with housing in Final Fantasy XIV is that it is extremely expensive… and secondly it is completely unavailable most of the time given that it is physical housing rather than instanced. Each Ward having a limited number of potential spaces divided up among small, medium and large plots, and unfortunately Square Enix has been extremely slot to add additional resources.

With the launch of Stormblood came a golden opportunity because they announced that they would be adding a brand new housing area in the city of Shirogane. It was about this time that we started talk of actually finally moving to a new area, especially after seeing that this new zone had beach front lots. There was still the logistical problem of having to sell one house and then immediately turn around and try and buy a new one… all the while hoping you didn’t get sniped and end up without a Free Company house in any form. However at some point along the way they announced that they would be adding in a relocation system that allows you to move houses and everything in them. There has been a standing joke online over the last few days of the opening of the Shirogane housing area being the ultimate extreme battle… and reading reddit it definitely seems the case. Functionally how we got the house was having Tam and Ash both online at 3 am PST when the housing area opened… both with enough money to buy a house in the hopes that one of them would be able to get in and purchase something. Tam absolutely nailed it and got us Ward 7 plot 49, which is a great medium house right off the beach and beside the entrance to the zone. The nearest Market board is up the hill from our house making it still a short distance away, though I have to admit they have done an amazing job of trying to make sure ALL of them are a very short distance away.

This is a different shot of our new home, and the one that Tam posted when he made his “we got one” post. It is a freaking nice location and the only problem we have right now is dealing with trying to decorate it given that we moved up from a small… and this thing seems massive with three floors. There is currently some sort of a bug hitting a bunch of us with our private rooms, but I put in a ticket and am hoping they can do something to fix that. The Free Company house has been this hub of activity for our members over the years, and while it is going to feel weird to be in a new location… I am sure given a short amount of time it will feel just as much at home as the last one did. I’ve not really had time to meet our neighbors but I am hoping they are as cool as our last batch was. It seems however like we were the lucky ones, given that everyone is clamoring for more available properties. I think if you were not awake at 3 in the morning when the plots went on sale… you didn’t get a home simple as that and it reminds me of the land runs that happened in Horizons each time a new housing area opened up. This is the problem with physical player housing, and one of the reasons why I tend to prefer implementations like Everquest 2 or Wildstar that have unlimited instanced housing. I will say the feeling of a physical neighborhood with other players that you get to know over the years as you hang out at the market board is pretty great. It just sucks that so many players have to go without housing because of this.

Warbears and Stormsplitter

July 12, 2017July 12, 2017 by Belghast

We will lead off with the accomplishment of the night. I knew I was pretty close to the ARR Warrior “Raid” mount but I had lost sight of actually going after it specifically. I never really did anything to purposefully grind for this, and for the most part got my 200 “high-level duties” organically by running various raids with the free company. It was at some point during our Omega runs that I happened to notice I got the achievement, and that prompted a trip to the guy near the waterfall in Gridania… who also apparently had the Maelstrom themed mammet waiting for me as well. The way I ride this mount is sort of insane, with me reaching down and trying to hold onto the fur and it runs around insanely. It is funny how animation cycles affect how we feel about the speed of a mount, because while this is technically the same speed as everything else I own… the feels so much faster because of the dynamic run loop. Grizzled warbear is probably the most Bel mount in existence… and it is only slightly sad that it doesn’t fly. There is however a newer bear that supposedly does have the ability to fly… and at the moment I am 49 of some silly number of 70+ content needed for that achievement. I doubt I will purposefully grind for it, but instead someday also be surprised when I see its achievement scrolling by after tanking a dungeon for someone.

Once upon a time in a small town far far away… I was a little skater punk kid. Technically I only grew up an hour away but we are going to call it far away for sake of the narrative. I was lucky enough that I had a half pipe in my yard, that we bought second hand and moved to our location and reassembled. Now this was too small to have a roll in, so it was functionally a “drop in” style ramp. For those unindoctrinated… most ramps have a bit of metal coping at the top of the lip that is there to protect the wood of the ramp from the “trucks” aka axles of the skateboard as you come up to the top and grind. Getting onto the ramp involved danging your board out over the edge of the ramp, with your back trucks butted up against the metal coping and then shifting your weight from the tail of the board to the front causing you to “drop in” to the ramp. I found this process completely terrifying, and each time I went out to skate the first few runs involved me not being willing to give myself over to gravity… and ultimately sliding down the ramp on my ass. Eventually I would loosen up and get comfortable and be able to drop in just fine for awhile and be able to ride the ramp legitimately for the rest of the day.

The reason why I have related this analogy is that for the most part… doing new organized content in an MMO is like dropping in for me. I am super hesitant for awhile and unwilling to venture off on my own and give it a shot. I didn’t do a whole lot of solo grinding of Alexander because I felt like I needed that safety net there in case something went wrong. Similarly this expansion I have thusfar been unwilling to join a party finder group to do Susano Extreme or Lakshmi Extreme, and last night… was the moment I dropped in for the first time. My friends Mor and Grace decided that we were going to do the encounters, and we recruited Muspel as well… and the four of us… two tanks and two heals set forth to build a party finder group. Susano was for the most part a learning experience, but very quickly it became a situation of having to work the kinks out and get our dps up high enough to be able to beat the enrage. With about 20 minutes to spare we manage to do it and I got my first kill under my belt. Lakshmi did not go so well, and not only was it much harder to pull together the group… but it also was pretty clear early on that we had nowhere near enough dps to be able to finish the job. After some wipes… having someone drop… refilling the group and re-queuing… only to wipe again due to not enough damage… we opted to call it for the evening. That said I now feel significantly more comfortable in either fight as a tank, and in theory I would probably be willing to solo queue from now on. I got over the coping… and got my weight shifted in the right way and now am more or less fine. However it is only because I went into the content with some people that I trusted… that I was eased over the edge, so I appreciate it when someone is willing to just hang out with me and answer my questions while I do new harder content.

Leveling DPS is Butts

July 10, 2017 by Belghast

One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character. One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal. When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip. Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story. As always I leveled my Warrior first because well… like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission. There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best. However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up. You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job. The only problem there is… quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest… is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life. There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible. Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear. When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time. Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61. There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder. There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner. My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough. Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished. I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it. I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded… much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage… I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story. My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete. Unfortunately… these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit. I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE. Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing. In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves… but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood. There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs. I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening. However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar. There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals… they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot. You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70. However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up. Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon. Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes… with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes. If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum. However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all… it was noticeably dragging. Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy. At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there. I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1. Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again. This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company… because leveling DPS is butts.

Unstuck

July 3, 2017 by Belghast

It is always bizarre when I make a post on a Monday… and almost everything that I was talking about on Friday has changed. This is one of those situations. When I wrote Friday we had a cute dog in our back yard… but it was still a dog. We had not slept very well for several nights in a row… because doggo wanted to be barking lots. There were several times that my wife got up and snoozed out on the back patio in an attempt to keep the dog from waking the neighbors. While I didn’t get the brunt of it… because the dog latched onto her and not me… I did get a significant interruption in my sleep patterns because when someone else in the house is moving about I wake up, or at least go into super shallow sleep mode. Functionally we were following two lines of thoughts… the best possible solution was to find the original owner and in attempting to do this… we cast a pretty wide net of posting about the dog any place we could think to do so. The second line of thought was to try and find a “dog person” to take him, and find him a good permanent home. Saturday afternoon I got a few excited messages from my wife who was out chilling with the dog on the back patio. It turns out that one of her facebook posts reached the human responsible for doggo, and within thirty minutes or so my wife was walking the pupper back home. Rocko as the human calls him… lives about dozen and a half houses away and had probably just escaped when he decided to start following my wife. We had a bunch of assumptions.. that he was in fact loved, and that he had a female human that looked after him… and that he had not actually traveled very far based on the way the pads of his feet looked. All of that turned out to be completely true and while the puppy seemed to be happy enough with us… once he got in range of his sibling he seemed to get super amped. Thankfully we were able to connect the dots and find his original home.

As far as the other thing that was distressing me… that had cleared up as well. When I last wrote about it, I talked about my struggles to find a group capable of getting through the Royal Menagerie trial. Also at that time there were several of us hung up on that step and functionally high center in the expansion. The Trial itself lasts for 60 minutes and after the five full attempts worth to get through it…. I had spent roughly 300 minutes of my life doing the fight over the course of the week. Friday night however Ashgar my usual co-tank reached the point where he was also needing the Trial, and we gathered up two heals, two tanks and a dps to take into the encounter. Up until this point we had all been talking about our battle scars that had been invoked by the fight… and then because apparently Ash is super lucky we managed to one shot the fight. The best part about this is the fact that three of us were stalled in the MSQ and got dislodged by that one victory. Saturday evening Kodra also reached that point, and similarly we rallied the troops… this time bringing six players in… and once again we one shot the encounter. So maybe I just had a streak of bad luck, but it was maddening nonetheless. However since pushing past on Friday I have been on a gearing spree and am sitting at 302 I believe now on my Warrior. When not doing roulettes though I have been working on the Samurai and have that job up to 58 so far. I need to do some research on the Extreme Primals because yesterday Grace tried to convince me and Tam to do this thing. I originally thought I would wait until the rest of the group got there as well… but I don’t mind the through of joining a party finder group… but I just need to be able to know what the hell is going on beforehand. Unfortunately there is no MTQ guide for either yet, and I am going to have to rely on one of the other guides to get the basics of the fight.