The Rising and Leveling Updates

Good morning friends. It has been a minute since I have actually sat down and brought you a proper blog post update about what I have been doing over in Final Fantasy XIV. With Monday being dedicated to Mixtapes, Tuesday brought us the sad news of losses, and yesterday being the wrap-up for Blaugust… more time has passed than is usually the case and in that time I guess I have done a bunch of different things. Firstly if you have not already done so, I highly suggest swinging by Uldah and starting The Rising event that is running through September 9th. Of all of the excellent in-game holidays, this is probably the most personal. It celebrates the birthday of A Realm Reborn, and with it the rebirth of this game from the ashes of the previous. As is often the case we as players get a very special message directly from Naoki Yoshida aka our beloved Yoshi P. Some tears may or may not have happened.

Another thing that happened over the weekend is that I buckled down and finally finished the Main Story Quest for Shadowbringers and got my second credit roll. The problem with talking about this is that I don’t really have a great screenshot to show other than my mug… because effectively everything else I took pictures of contains massive spoilers. I am very much looking forward to when the full trailer for Endwalker releases in October and we see the rest of that sequence. For the sprouts among us that might be reading this blog… something really cool to do is upon completing an expansion… go back and watch the final trailer for that expansion. You will start to notice bits and pieces of the story that you didn’t quite understand that more or less foretold the direction things were going to go. This is especially true with the Shadowbringers trailer for me at least, and I am intrigued where things are going with Endwalker.

I’ve also become terribly distracted of late by The Diadem that is accessible through the restored Firmament crafting area in Ishgard. Essentially this is a turbo button for leveling gatherers, and I made a fair amount of coin in the process of doing so as well. First, you have to have gotten a job to 60, which will unlock access to the “Towards the Firmament” questline. Once you unlock this area you can talk to Augebert at x 11 / y 14 in order to unlock access to the Diadem. From there you will be able to bring level 10 gatherers in and run around picking up nodes at what seems to be an extremely fast experience gain rate. The items that you gather can then be appraised and either stockpiled for leveling crafters through the Ishgard Restoration recipes or sold on the market for a pretty decent profit. I devoted myself to trying to gain a level of Mining and Botany every day, and in the thirty minutes or so that I spent doing this… I would usually gather up enough materials to turn around and flip for around 200,000 gil. Soon I am going to start exploring what I need to start using the Firmament to push up my crafters as well.

Since we last talked I have finished off the Scholar and Summoner, and then started pushing up the Dark Knight and Monk in earnest. Dragoon is still very much my soak class for picking up the Faerie quests in Il Mheg if I don’t have a character up high enough to be able to run them. Another thing of note is I have finished up my gatherers and now Miner, Botanist, and Fisher are all sitting at 80 and I am sufficiently geared to start picking up maps for map night every day. Side note… there is no way to see all of your jobs at once so I photoshopped them together like this just to provide a better visual representation. Right now I am splitting my daily roulettes between Monk and Dark Knight because a number of them I really do not want to do as a Tank.

Another thing that has happened is that I have become terribly distracted by the Dark Knight anima weapon questline and at this point have completed the first four steps in the chain. I am very close to being able to knock out the fifth step because apparently without knowing it I have been ratholing the materials needed to knock this out quickly. This is going to slow down really fast however because I am about to enter the Crystal Sand/Umbrite phase… which involves doing a bunch of things none of which are actually rapid. I am going to need around 75 of each which means I am entering the hardcore phase of the grind…. which I am probably going to ignore until I hit a lull after the release of Endwalker. I want to rush through the next phase however because it opens up the vendor that lets me buy different replica versions for glamour purposes.

I have roughly eighty days until the release of Endwalker, and my goal is still to be sitting at 80 on all of my jobs when it rolls out. Blue Mage is a bonus, given that it doesn’t exist at level 80 yet but I am not including it in my mission. I figure Dark Knight, Monk, and Dragoon will be hitting cap before too much longer which leaves me Gunbreaker, White Mage, Astralogian, and Black Mage. After I finish the current trio of classes that I am working on… I guess I will grab another healer to space those out a bit. White Mage is my lowest currently so I will spend some time focused on it. I am trying really hard not to just go no-lifer mode with Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High, but I have a feeling before all is said and done there will be a bit of that happening just to push through faster. Still finding myself having a blast on my little mission, so here is hoping that I keep the stamina and make it.

Glamour Plates and Gear Sets

Hey Friends! This is a bonus Saturday post because something came up yesterday that made me think it might be worth talking about. I post a lot of information on twitter about Final Fantasy XIV, in part because I know I have a lot of friends who are still in the sprout phase. This is a game that has systems within systems that take a considerable amount of time to unpack. I was talking about getting my Monk ready for the leveling process, and the first thing of course was to create a new glamour. It was around this point that one of my friends chimed in about not being certain if it was worth setting up a glamour given that you would have to keep changing your appearance as you leveled. I mentioned the wonder if Glamour Plates and my friend had no clue what I was referring to. This made me think it might be high time to talk about this system.

Glamour Chests can be found in your Inn room or your Grand Company Squadron room

Essentially Glamouring is the process of changing the appearance of an item, and you can right-click on any piece of gear and choose glamour to replace its current appearance with that of another. In order to make this system a little easier, Square added a few systems to the game. The first of which is Glamour storage in the form of either the Armoire or the Glamour Chest. The first has been in the game since release and was a way of storing very specific types of information without taking up retainer or inventory space. The second is a specific chest that adds 400 inventory slots for keeping appearance items. When you add an item to the chest it resets the spirit bond to 0% and removes materia or any other customizations. It costs one glamour prism to store an appearance, but after that point applying that appearance to new gear doesn’t cost anything.

This in itself is useful, but it requires you to go back to your Inn Room or Squadron Room to keep changing appearance on items. To make this a little simpler, the game allows you to set up Glamour Plates, which are predetermined appearances that you can apply on the fly any time you are in an area flagged as a “sanctuary”. Generally speaking this means you are in a large city, be it one of the original three capitals, one of the expansion hubs, housing areas and a few other specific locations like the Doman Enclave. A Glamour Plate itself is a series of slots that you can select appearance data from our Armoire or Glamour Chest and combine it with dyes to create a specific outfit. You are given fifteen of these and if you need to update one, you can return back to a location that has a Glamour Chest. Right now sadly these are not available to be placed in personal housing, because there is some negative interaction that can occur if two players try and access it at the same time.

Glamour Plates interact with another system in the game called Gear Sets. This allows you to configure a specific set of gear and is the functionality that allows you to rapidly swap between jobs. This unlocks when you hit level 10. Glamour itself unlocks around level 15, or when you reach Vesper Bay for the first time depending on where you are in the Main Story Quest. If you right click on one of your predetermined gear sets, you can link it to a saved glamour plate. What this allows you to do is to reapply that specific glamour to that gear anytime you switch to that gear set. Now the same rules apply for swapping glamour plates, namely that you have to be in an area flagged as a sanctuary. However this allows you to associate a certain appearance that you want to go along with a certain jobs gear set. So anytime I swap to Monk, for example it will reapply the same appearance that is seen in that very first screenshot.

I’ve learned over the years that if you look cool while playing a class, you end up enjoying it more. As a result the interaction between these systems allows me to always look like I want to look regardless of the gear that I happen to be wearing. I don’t have gear sets for every job yet, but I figure as I finishing leveling them I will be doing this interaction to create a semi-permanent associate of appearance and gear set. I feel like I gave only the highest level overview of the system, but hopefully it is enough to give you the basics and let you feel comfortable enough to start exploring this system.

As always if you have any questions feel free to drop me a line below.

They Suspect Something

Friends… I have been plying a dastardly trade and I think they are beginning to suspect something. I spend an awful lot of time in my Squadron room in Limsa Lominsa. It has access to glamour resources and is some place I want to go a few times a day, unlike the Inn Room which at this point serves very little point. Honestly, I wish we had a bit more control over the Squadron room and could decorate it based on our exploits. One of the systems it does give me control over is the makeup of my Squad themselves, and slowly over time I have been recruiting Lalafells and replacing the stalls with them. As of yesterday, there are only three remaining, and based on the reaction poor Cecily is giving me… I have a feeling she suspects what is happening. She is a sweet girl though, and part of me is considering keeping her around… because we might need someone that can reach the pedals.

I’ve spent a small amount of effort gearing my Machinist. There are times that I don’t want to tank content, and more often than not that includes raids. We are in the process of pulling together information about raiding interest, and I will be tabulating that this weekend after letting the survey run for two weeks. When it comes to free company and my friends, I am absolutely on board with tanking. Tanking for a group of strangers in harder than dungeon content… well that is less than exciting to me. A lot of my joy from tanking comes from protecting my friends, and in a small dungeon group, I can pretend they are friends for long enough to get us through the content. Tanking for something that lasts thirty minutes like an Alliance Raid brings me significantly less joy. So as a result I have been spending a lot of time on my Machinist because they do a great job of being mobile and also dishing out a fair amount of damage in the process. it also gives me cause to create great cowboy-themed glamours.

Last night as a whole though was an evening where I played catch up on the Main Story Quest. Things are getting really interesting, which is usually the case with that final patch of an expansion. The *.3 patch generally wraps up the conflict of the expansion, and then *.4 presents a new challenge that will ultimately ignite the conflict leading into the next expansion. With that in mind, the *.55 patch is that new conflict coming to a head and presenting a central conflict that sets the tone for the world state of the expansion launch. Last night I reached the final dungeon of the expansion and it looks to be a doozy. I didn’t have time to get through it last night, but I look forward to running it tonight and am probably going to do it the first time with a Trust group. I’ve really enjoyed that as an option because firstly it gives me a chance to get used to the mechanics in a purely judgement-free environment. Secondly, the idle banter and reactions of the NPCs really add to the experience of a dungeon, and given how much story is going to be crammed into this one I am absolutely looking forward to it.

The mission to level all of the things continues unabated as well. At the moment I am sitting at level 77 on the Scholar, level 58 on the Dark Knight, and then each of the gatherers is at least 74. I managed to push Fishing up to 75 because I was following the Qitari quest line and hit a reputational break point giving me two sets of quests in a single day. Since Fishing is harder to level through the Diadem I am using it as my Beast Tribe daily class and getting my levels for it through that method. Doing a single level each day in the Diadem seems to be a reasonable option and by next week it should mean I have level 80 gatherers and can start collecting maps. After that I need to sort out what it takes to level through Ishgard restoration and start putting some effort into crafting classes. I am feeling the need to get up Culinarian so I can craft my own food so that might be my first focus.

That said, I do want to spend at least a bit of this weekend over in Destiny 2. I managed to complete the opening quest of the Season, but have not gone much deeper than that. The problem I am having is that I have things I want to do outside of FFXIV… but I am so engaged with the game that I don’t really want to dettach to go do them for fear I will lose my momentum.

Rooftop Magic

Good morning friends. I have to say our Medium beach front home in Shirogane has grown on me in my time back in the game. For the longest time, I was deeply nostalgic about our original FC home, but I think more than anything I was nostalgic about that era in the game when I was so engaged with it. The house simply became shorthand for explaining my feelings, and I put way more importance on that one location than I really should have. Now that I have been back in the game and have actually reached out to begin meeting our neighbors, I have come to realize that we are still in a pretty phenomenal neighborhood. Yesterday morning while I was blogging I taught one of our neighbors the joy of hanging out on the roof of our home and the amazing view it provides. There is a bit of a process to get up there, but I spend enough time that the neighbors are finding their way up there as well.

The highlight of yesterday is represented by another roofline shot, this time of me in my level 70 gathering gear set. I usually glamour this stuff, but I have to say the base appearance is pretty adorable. I’ve been spending a not-insignificant amount of time in the Diadem and been focused on trying to get at least one level per day on all three of the gathering professions. I need to catch Fishing up at this point, but right now I have Botany and Mining both at level 71. Ultimately the reason behind this push is twofold. Firstly I want to be able to contribute more than my single solitary map each week to Maps night, and that requires a high-level gatherer to get those level 80 maps. Secondly, I figure having a max level gatherer will make leveling all of my crafting all that much easier because I can make my way into the Diadem to stockpile the materials I need for the Ishgard Restoration stuff. For now I am putting most of those materials gained on the market which serve as a pretty reasonable way to gain a little cash quickly.

The other big activity that I knocked out last night was starting the process of catching up on the YorHa Alliance raids based on Nier Automata. I had started the precursor quest some time ago, but like so many things in my quest log never quite got around to finishing it. I ran The Copied Factory and The Puppet’s Bunker last night, and at the end of the night unlocked the final of this triad of raids The Tower at Paradigm’s Breach. This area of the game is way more detailed than I expected, allowing players to basically roam around the areas represented by each raid in a sort of exploration mode. I am pretty certain that The Copied Factory is straight from the beginning of Nier Automata, or at least is very similar to what I remember from the beginning of that game. Side note I really need to get back to that and finish it at some point.

My favorite visual from the raids is when the entire alliance queues up at a checkpoint and then takes the pods down to the next area at the same time. It ends up looking like a roller coaster as everyone glides down in unison. I was apparently extremely lucky last night because, on the second raid, I managed to get bot the 2B and 2P minions, and then after the raid Rae ended up mailing me two of the hairstyles that she got from her own run. There was a lot going on, but I like this series far better than I do the Void Ark sequence from Heavensward or the Ivalice sequence from Stormblood. There are a few mechanics that are not messaged like FFXIV normally are, but I adapted. I did however take several deaths to stupid things as I was learning. I really want to farm a set of gear from this series of raids, maybe for my dancer because it seems fitting.

All told I am extremely impressed by the level of the content and am also realizing that I need to dive back into the Eden raids and finish those out. I think I only actually did the first set of them, but they were pretty enjoyable. I need to tabulate the results of my raiding survey and try and zero in on both a group of 8 players and a timeslot to start trying for more focused raiding attempts. The Scholar is still progressing and I managed to get another two levels on it, and finish off a level on the Dark Knight. I have a lot of different balls in the air but so far juggling them is providing me with a good amount of enjoyment. The only thing that could potentially derail this is me getting distracted by another game… and I am afraid that might be happening soon.

Yesterday there was a Bungie Showcase event that I believe tied into the larger Gamescom show happening this week. During it they revealed the trailer for The Witch Queen expansion, and the new seasonal content that started last night. I miss Destiny 2, and I am feeling the subtle tug as some of my friends are engaging with it again. For a long time I managed to play both FFXIV and Destiny 2 at the same time, and given that they are wildly different experiences I might be able to make it work. So at some point over the next few days I expect to dip my toes back into D2 and see how well that concept works. My core focus remains FFXIV, but there are times I could go for something a little more visceral.