Good morning friends, I had no intention of taking a break yesterday but this week has conspired against me. It is shocking what a difference having a good cup of coffee in the morning makes. On Monday we ran out of creamer and I had some truly heinous coffee in which I attempted to make a vanilla protein shake work… and it very much did not. During the day a whole other crisis ensued as we lost access to water for about half the day, and given that I have neighbors in visual range of my back yard the whole “peeing in nature” thing doesn’t quite work. Yesterday morning we were awoken at 4:47 by the awful sound of the next-door neighbors AC unit forcibly shutting off… as we lost power. This was off for the entire morning and given that the creamer we purchased was sitting in the fridge… I was deeply hesitant to open that in order to preserve the cold as long as possible. This morning however the dials all clicked into alignment and I have just finished my first cup of coffee the way I wanted it… and it was grand.
I am still very much grinding away towards my ultimate goal of having all classes to level 80. In fact, I have been trying to add a little bit more effort given that I know New World is going to be launching in a few days and I will be spending a significant chunk of time getting started over there. My goal is to reach a state of equilibrium where I am playing both games, but given my focus on the leveling goal that might be a little harder than I want it to be. I am updating the spreadsheet daily and there is a certain joy in seeing the numbers drift upwards. I tweaked my log scale line chart a bit to show the maximum number of total levels which is 1430 and better indicate where I am sitting on that curve.
It is still much easier to see progress on the bar chart where I am mapping each individual job and my current level. The main thing that I changed was adding level call-outs to each of the bars and changing the color of them to denote DPS, Tank, or Healer class. Visually it feels like I am way closer to my goal than I actually am. I should very easily push White Mage to level 80 today once the roulettes reset, but that would still leave me with 57 levels to go. Given that I really enjoy Heaven on High, I am working a bit on grinding out AST and BLM through those levels. Once I get to 71 Trust becomes an option, but that really is a somewhat mind-numbing offering. Trust levels go so much slower than actually running the dungeon with human beings. Getting to level 71 also opens up Bozja which is probably something that I should actually explore a bit further, but I do not find the joy in it that Asha and Waren seem to.
Another big thing that took place over the weekend is that the stars aligned just right and we were able to bring our next-door neighbor to the Free Company house and their assorted friends along for map night. In the car with me are Sigrid, Vita, and Aimi and we had a grand night of maps. I think they brought us significant luck because not only did we manage to make it to the final stage of a single portal… but we managed this feat twice. I am pretty convinced at this point that what happens in the dungeons is completely up to chance. However for the entirety of the night we each managed to clear just shy of a million gil in cash drops alone, not taking into account anything that we were able to sell after the fact.
I am not sure if there is a broad offering of bosses, but we managed to get one which a rework of Echidna from Void Ark. It was actually a somewhat challenging encounter or at least one that was pretty hectic. Another big bonus of the night is that we managed to drag along Eliyon who picked up most of the level between 79 and 80 on his White Mage. It was so good to finally be able to do something with Sig, Vita, and Aimi other than just waving and talking in Shirogane outside our respective houses.
I did not get a proper screenshot after conquering the dungeon, but I did manage to snap this one before we all exited. I kinda wish there was a higher alliance raid version of these maps, to be honest. Whatever the case I am glad we have gotten in the rhythm of running these every Sunday. They make for a really relaxing way to close out the week and a good way to just hang out with friends.
Good morning friends. There is a topic that has been bouncing around in my skull for a few weeks now, and I have never really gotten around to speaking my mind about it. The thing is I am not even sure what I want to say. Patch 9.1.5 is sticking in my craw for a bunch of reasons, and I am not entirely certain what I want to say about it because I am afraid most of my thought processes are poisoned by built-up bile. There are so many changes going into the game that are needed. For example, maybe the love rocket icon should not have looked like a big cartoon penis for the first twelve years it was in the game. I am also all for the painting changes because quite frankly the artwork looked like shit, and the versions that are replacing it are rather nice.
However, 9.1.5 is shaping up to be this make-or-break moment for the game, with the devs seemingly dumping everything that players said they wanted into the game. Legion Timewalking is this giant fanservice event that brings back a bunch of things that folks had been pining for like the Mage Tower and an ability to collect a whole new set of alternate recolors. The problem is… this is an event… a limited time moment in the game where it is going to feel extremely good for players to come back and play but ultimately has an expiration date associated with it. This feels in so many ways like a lover in a toxic relationship asking you what they can do to keep you from leaving them. Players DID leave and the problem is… a single data point does not make a trend.
Then there is another part of me that is frustrated that if this could have been pulled together so quickly… why didn’t they do this years ago? The changes that are going into the game break so many of the things that I have long considered just the World of Warcraft design ethic. Previously it seemed like we could never get something just universally good for the players, without it also being horrible in some way. Like Transmog has gone through this cycle for years, with you being able to collect item appearances… but only for the armor class that can be equipped by the person looting the items. There is part of me that wants to believe that this is a shift in the direction of the game, but the cynic feels like this is an attempt to make players temporarily forget about the bad times.
Then there is the developer in me that realizes that a lot of this is unfair to the team working on the game. Even in my own job there is a long list of things that are relatively quick to wrap up, but never quite get done because there is a prioritized by management list of things that take precedence. This part of me thinks that what we are seeing is probably a combination of two things. Firstly the management is caught off balance and desperately grasping and universally good things that they can pump out quickly, and a lot of these things were probably side-projects of the devs and are now given leave to finally finish them up and get them out into the game. Everyone has a list of items that they know would be really good… but that they can never quite find the time to finish up, and I think folks are being allowed to finally work on these things.
Then there is the other part that is frustrating me right now. I see folks making their way back to Blizzard titles, when in the end… nothing has really changed yet. There have been some high visibility exits from the company, but none of the demands that the Blizzard employees have made have actually been met. To make things worse there is talk of fears over retaliatory firings, which may or may not be a thing but the rumors are there. I am just not personally ready to forgive and forget yet, and I am thankful that I had already made my break from being a “Blizzard Gamer” back in 2011 during Cataclysm. There are folks who were hurting when they were not playing the game, and there are good employees that potentially suffer as subscribership goes down… so I get that this is an extremely complicated issue. However I am just not personally ready to jump back and pretend that everything is okay.
I am frustrated that gamers have extremely short memories. Patch 9.1.5 seems poised to be the gaming equivalent of Calgon, and is fixing to take away all of the memories of bad times… at least temporarily. I guess on one hand I am happy that the folks who are capable of making good with Blizzard and returning are going to have some excellent new toys to play with, but frustrated that I can’t look the other way this time. I miss the hell out of Diablo 3, but I am not ready to come back yet.
Sometimes the YouTube algorithm is creepily accurate. Over the weekend it decided that I needed to be exposed to a channel called “TheCrafsMan SteadyCraftin”. I watch a lot of crafting videos because while I am far too lazy to actually do many of these things, I do daydream about one day following through on some of my real-world ideas. I love toys, more specifically action figures, and big vinyl toys, and apparently, I watched enough crafting videos and toy videos to where they have morphed together into a single entity known as the Crafsman. This channel is presented as a puppet and all of the close-ups of the work is a human wearing a pair of gloves in order to keep the illusion. There was a Q&A video that at one point hinted that the gloves became a thing because the creator was embarrassed by their ashy calloused hands. Whatever the case it is this delightful experience of a mild-mannered relatively child-friendly puppet making awesome crafts.
There are times that you have memories buried so deep inside that you have not thought about them in decades. While watching these videos, it finally hit me like a bolt of lightning why I was bonding with them so heavily. When I was a little kid we would occasionally go visit my Great Aunt and Uncle in Witchita. Next door to him was this super nice old black man named Flip, and I loved Flip so much… even though in truth I realistically spent a very small amount of time with him. The character that the Crafsman plays… reminds me almost exactly of my memories of Flip. The sad thing is I don’t even know what his last name was, but I do know he passed away probably when I was in middle school and I was fairly devastated. It is bizarre how such short encounters can have such formative experiences in your life that are rooted deep enough that they stick around in the background to come bubbling to the surface decades later.
There is a lot of me that wishes I spent more time on physical products. There is a version of me from the past that used to really like to sculpt, and always wanted to create my own action figures. This Crafsman does exactly this and while the videos are extremely entertaining, they also bring forth a lot of easy to understand information. For example this video shows you how you can take a mold and either grow it to increase the size of the casting or shrink it to refine details. I knew my entire life that toy sculptors actually sculpted in a larger format and then shrunk the model down to make the details more tightly packed, but I never understood how that worked until watching this video. The dude reminds me a lot of my own wandering nonsense, because he seems to flit back and forth between a bunch of related disciplines, using whatever he needs in order to get the desired effect.
Speaking of nonsense and side projects, yesterday at some point I realized that I have been informally cataloging my journey since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV in screenshots of my character jobs. I was stuck on a very boring conference call yesterday and I opened up Google Sheets and started tabulating all of the times when I took a picture of the state of my jobs. Looking back through all of my blog posts since returning to the game the weekend of July 4th, I had eleven different data points… twelve including one I took this morning.
I created a spreadsheet with jobs across the top and dates running down and a snap shot of what level I was sitting at which which jobs at a given point. Trying to figure out a way to track growth, I decided to simply add all of these levels together into an aggregate total. It would be way too complicated to track a trendline for each of the jobs and I also lack enough fine granularity between samples to really make something that is reasonable.
When I take all of this data and chart it with a logarithmic axis, you end up with something like this showing the general trendline of my leveling since the first data point on 7/6/2021. Why the hell did I spend time doing this? I have no idea. I mean remember I was manually charting Covid-19 numbers as they were being released on a daily basis, so apparently there is a part of my brain that likes to see how things are progressing and be able to play with the data myself. This isn’t nearly as cool as crafting a figure from scratch and then casting dozens of copies of it… but it is still some of the nonsense that I get up to that is largely only useful to me.
To close out this mornings post, I ran into mister Pine Sternn for the third time last night. This is the first time I have used his name in a post, and is the guy that is willfully choosing to level a bunch of classes without ever turning them into jobs. It was a few minutes into the run when he recognized my name, I was waiting to see if he would remember me. I guess I have reached a point of peace with this aberration because it is something he is doing on purpose and not just because he doesn’t know better. He has a number of jobs, just more that have never finished the quests needed to get the job crystal. My theory is still that he has been no-lifing the Deep Dungeon systems and simply has not taken the time to pop out and do the job quests and at some point in the future these will all end up as their proper jobs. For the time being however it seems like he is making the most of his nonsense.
The thing is… just like Craftsman and my stupid charting of things no one cares about but me… leveling a bunch of classes without ever turning them into Jobs is absolutely related nonsense. Once I realized this… it made me realize that this is probably something that I would have tried. This is no less weird that my self imposed goal of trying to level everything to 80 before Endwalker, when there really is no actual NEED to do this. So I guess my advice is find whatever nonsense makes you happy and stick to it, because life is too short to worry about what appears to be normal.
Good Morning Friends, I must start off this post by apologizing. I probably gave some of you a heart attack yesterday when I was talking about the event to get the Regalia in FFXIV. I misread the timeline and it is in fact October 18th and not September 18th that the event finishes, giving you roughly a month instead of a week to complete it. I appreciate the reader who commented about this because I legitimately had simply glossed over that there were two different months in that statement. I’ve updated the previous post in order to hopefully keep anyone who was slow at reading it from having the same negative reaction. Another quick update is that yesterday I modified the masthead for the site, and finally after over a year have included PSO2 Belghast into the character collage. As always huge thanks to Ammosart who does most of my artwork, and that one collage represents some seven different commissions over the course of multiple years.
One of the things about this mission to level everything to 80 that has proven beneficial, is that as I adjust to each new class I learn some of its quirks. The hope is that after the experiment, I will be able to better support the unique needs of each class while I am tanking. One completely new adjustment however is how much time I have spent healing because that is more or less a role I have wholesale avoided since Everquest. There are a lot of little things that players need to know about healers in order to stop putting them in no-win situations. For example, you should never break the line of sight from your healer… especially if you are deciding that you are going to take damage. Healers cannot heal through walls and if you are out of range or in a whole other room… chances are you are going to die and that healer is going to feel like a failure as they resurrect your stupid ass.
I talked about this a bit on Twitter, but I thought it might be a good time to talk about some general theory around fight placement. I cobbled together this quick diagram to aid this discussion, but the idea is pretty straightforward. In a good scenario, the tank has pulled the boss and spun it away from the party so that frontal attacks won’t cause needless splash damage. The melee is set up either at the flank or in the rear of the boss depending on positional requirements. The healer and ranged DPS are spread out in a ring around the boss just outside of melee range so that they can run in for donut attacks or run out for any other markers, but close enough to be within splash healing range. This more or less allows the party to work efficiently, with healers doing some AOE healing while focusing on bigger heals for the tank.
However, what often happens is the bad scenario shown with the red box. Too often do I see tanks just walk up and start tanking the boss or pack of mobs in place without care for facing. This forces your melee to be back behind the encounter and vulnerable to any adds that join part way through from behind. Too often the healer has spread way the hell out and the ranged DPS is off in practically a whole other county completely out of the range of healing, and no one but the tank and melee is in the range of any splash AOE healing. Essentially my goal going into a fight is to optimize the conditions so that we have the greatest chance of succeeding and having a nice clean and swift run. Nothing slows down the party more than having to run back from a wipe because the fight mechanics that we had control over… were just carried out in a poor manner.
There are always going to be scenarios where this does not work, but it is a basic approach that works some 90% of the time. Another thing that took place yesterday, is that I managed to get the Stewards gathering beast tribe to Sworn which unlocked access to this goofy mount.
If you press the mount special button, which apparently replaces your pet hotbar… the “Serpent” springs forth from the mount and circles you before ducking back inside the jar. This is pure nonsense and is truly delightful. It reminds me a lot of the easter egg mount that springs forth a baby chocobo. You may not think it is worth leveling gathering up to Shadowbringers levels in order to get said mount, but for me it was a huge bonus of something I was already going to do.
There are many nights that I wraap up all of the activities that could give me “easy” levels pretty quickly. Traditionally this would be when I would fall into a rhythm of pushing up something through one of the Deep Dungeon systems. Last night however I apparently was restless because logged out and played a handful of other titles. The primary of these was Deathloop, which released yesterday. Prior to getting my hands on it, my initial impression based on the trailers was “What if Arkane created Bioshock but set it in the swinging 70s No One Lives For Ever visual language”. So far that more or less seems to be true.
This game is the same well crafted artistry that we have come to expect from the Dishonored series, and even some of the same visual language for set design is at play here. The device that bars your entry to your flat, reminds me a lot of the mechanism that was used to bar entry into plague ridden buildings for example. The only real problem I am having early on is that one… for some reason print screen is just straight up blocked and as a result ShareX doesn’t work for me and I have had to revert back to using F12 for Steam Screenshots. Secondly the lack of the ability to manually save your game is a real pain in the ass, and while absolutely intentional due to the gameplay… ends up just pissing me off as I have to keep repeating the same level over and over because I needed to bail for one reason or another. The idea is that you complete one entire level as a single pass, and then your gameplay state is snapshotted at the beginning of the next mission. What I want instead is just an ability to quicksave out of the game and return to that save state at a later time.
So far I am enjoying the game enough to stick with it, but am probably not going to spend much time with it until the weekend. This is absolutely the sort of game that I am going to need to carve out large chunks of time, rather than my normally fragmented gameplay. For one reason or another, during the week I seem to end up AFKing quite a bit, which is not conducive to a game that wants me to play one entire segment in a single sitting. This is one of those situations where the console players may have it easier, given that the PlayStation 5 allows you to pause a game and return to it at a later date. I feel like Arkane is going to have to patch in some sort of save game system, because right now what exists is awful and had I known about it… I might have given the game a hard pass for the time being.
