Games

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.

Good Morning Friends! I give you this lovely picture of Moogle’s doing a chorus line to brighten your Friday. This is evidence that I did in fact finally get around to finishing the Dark Knight storyline in Heavensward. No, it doesn’t make any sense why Moogles should factor heavily into the edgelord Dark Knight storyline, but this is Square and never question their madness. I am feeling heavily distracted right now, but even in that state, I am still putting on levels, which means I am still ultimately serving my final goal of 80 everything by Endwalker. I mean for reference when I made yesterday’s post I was 66 Dark Knight and 56 Monk and I have put two levels on for both classes, which is just about all one can really hope for without excessive grinding.

I ran another Syrcus tower, getting me my final Aether Oil needed and allowing me to turn to get my Hyperconductive Nothung. I don’t love the appearance of the Nothung in general, and for glamour, purposes am still using the Awoken Deathbringer look. The next step involves a lot of slow grinding out materials, but luckily it does give me a really great poetics sink if I find myself needing one. If I so choose there is a method for this next part that involves burning through Leve Allowances and farming “Amber-Encased Vilekin”. This material is a guaranteed drop… but sadly from the random chests that appear during levequests. The preferred method of farming is to start a levequest, fly around looking for a chest… then abandon the quest and start another one doing the same thing. This seems wasteful and by god, if I am going to do this thing I am going to at least complete the quest and get the gil/items.

Since I am very easily distracted apparently… I also decided to knock out the first two parts to get a nifty glowing weapon for Paladin. Ultimately I want the final step for paladin because like Dark Knight it looks really cool, but at a minimum, the first few parts were easy enough to do since I could run all the dungeons required to solo. At some point, I need to return to FATE grinding for Atmas, but I figured I would save that for a time when Bee is also around and we can farm together. Running FATEs with at least two people feels significantly better than soloing them.

In other news, I have been spending a lot more time with my Gamesir controller and my phone. I don’t have a proper photo of how mine looks set up with the Razer Phone 2… because the device is also what I tend to use as a camera making it extremely impossible to take a picture of itself because android doesn’t offer an astral projection mode. In practice, it feels like using a much more narrow switch, and it does an extremely solid job of playing emulators and I am slowly branching out into more remote play options. The Xbox Game Pass app works great, meaning you can stream anything easily through XCloud that you would normally.

The other thing that I have been messing around with is streaming games from my PlayStation 5, though in practice it would work the same for a PlayStation 4. There is an official Remote Play app, but sadly it does not seem to work as expected with the Gamesir controller. Instead, I had to move over to one of the third-party unofficial apps and am running PSPlay which costs $5 on the android store. By default the Gamesir is configured for Japanese style controls with the bottom-most button begin “back/undo” and the right-most button is “confirm”. However, I was able to remap all of the controls through the PSPlay app and have been enjoying the heck out of playing PlayStation games in this pseudo-android-switch sort of setup. The PSPlay app offers a local-only mode, which greatly reduces latency, and of note when you are not touching the screen to take a screenshot… those on-screen controls touch controls go away. A tap of the screen or a swipe translates to taking the same action on the controller touch screen, which is nice.

Like I said though, I am slowly easing into testing different apps. The next on the docket is going to be to start trying out Steam Link and maybe Moonlight if I have to fall back to that instead. One of the reasons why I wanted to explore this was to find a way to play Final Fantasy XIV from bed… and I already have a very viable solution for that. The only gotcha is that I need to devote the hour or two of time to set up my account with the crossbar UI, and then get used to actually using a controller. I am wondering if it might be easier to set everything up on the PC with a controller, and then synchronize those UI settings over to the PS5, given that on PC I at least have access to a mouse when it comes to dragging windows around. All in all, I am very happy with this solution so far, and while the screen mapping functionality for android games is still not the best thing in the world when something supports a controller the experience is flawless.

If you are curious about the Gamesir controller, it is available in a Type C variant that I use as well as a Bluetooth version. From what I understand the Bluetooth version requires being charged before using, whereas the Type C is plug and play. It is of course available on all of the major Chinese websites, but based on what I am seeing the price difference is not enough to deal with the month long ship times.