Games

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.

Because I generally have my Mixtape Monday thing going on at the beginning of the week, Tuesdays have turned into a bit of a “Catching Up On the Weekend” day. I am still solely devoted to Final Fantasy XIV in my game time because I have a whole slew of goals to complete before moving into Endwalker. The biggest of these is that I want to try and hit level 80 on every single job before the expansion drops. Over the weekend I wrapped up the Ninja and got it to 80 and geared to a reasonable state. This means that I have shifted focus to Scholar, that I had been sorta low key working on in the background. Leveling through roulettes and all of the bonus experience activity that I mentioned in my Alt Jobs post, meant that on many days I ran out of things that were effective to be doing. So when that happened I would grab a character that was next in line and start working on their leveling in Palace of the Dead or Heaven on High.

So essentially I have many things moving at once. Dragoon sitting at 74 has largely been my Faerie/Hunt soak for when I am working on a lower level character and still wanted to do those Shadowbringers activities. I am not in a super rush to level it to 80, and as such, it is sitting there slowly gaining levels when I have time. Scholar has been my core focus and I managed to get it up to 72, which admittedly opens up Bozjan Front as an option. I still don’t really love that content but I might do some more of it as a healer because there are just certain activities that I do not want to do as a healer. Right now I am doing MSQ Roulette, PVP Roulette, Faerie quests in Il Mheg, and Alliance Raids on a daily basis, which adds enough experience to gain roughly a level and a half each day. This is good enough for my tastes and keeps me from having to heal more stressful content. For Alliance Raids I am absolutely dropping if I end up getting randomized into the harder content because I am a fairly shitty healer.

For the daily dungeon roulettes, I have shifted over to working on the Dark Knight. Tanking is my jam and this is probably going to be worked up slowly similar to Dragoon as a soak for any content that I don’t want to partake in on a given focused character. Once I get the Scholar up and gear, I will probably start running up another DPS. So that leaves either Monk or Black Mage, both classes that I find enjoyable in their own way but I do not love. Black Mage is very immobile and wants to stand still and cast spells which I find distasteful. Monk on the other hand has the opposite problem of being very mobile and needing to move around the target so that you can fire off specific positional attacks focused on either the back or sides of the mob. Neither is really my jam, but I am rapidly running out of things to level up that is pure joy for me. I enjoy Dragoon and I enjoy tanking… so I am rationing those classes as a way of making the rest of the grind feel a little better.

In other news… I said I was quitting the house search and I apparently lied. I am continuing to low-key chase houses as they open and the truth is something is opening up almost every day. Generally speaking, I go hang out near the placard while queueing for activities and then click it while waiting on the queue to pop. I still feel like I don’t have a shot in hell at getting a home prior to Ishgard’s opening and the lottery system going in. The problem there however is that it is highly unlikely that Ishgard will open in the Endwalker launch patch. What is more likely is that it will come with the 6.1 patch that usually lands three months after the launch of the game. That means the .1 patch is likely going to land sometime around February putting the Lottery system roughly six months away. This at least gives me a chance, albeit a very slim one.

We have been doing this thing where on Sunday nights we gather up all of the level 80 maps that we have access to and then run through them for prizes. These can be extremely lucrative, and this past Sunday for example I cleared about 500k gil in cash drops alone. We still struggle a bit in organizing the people and getting everyone online in a timely manner, but we have been shooting for starting around 7 pm CDT. If you happen to be on the Cactuar server at that time hit me up and we may have an opening. This past week we only had one map NOT open a portal. We didn’t make it terribly deep into many of them, and our best attempts were booted on the 4th step, but we did manage to fight a large number of Elder Summons. This meant we got a few more people the Frog minions and several of us walked away with the paint emotes. I love this chill activity at the end of my week.

In the last bit of news, it seems as though the server congestion has gotten to the point where Square has completely shut off the ability to create new characters within the Aether data center. That means if you were hoping to either move to Cactuar or roll an alt there, your window has closed and I am doubtful it will open again until well after the Endwalker launch. Over the last few weeks a number of friends have relocated to our server, but for now, it appears that is completely off the table. The end result is that we are going to have to ultimately wait for world travel between data centers before anyone can hang out with us Aether folk again. I do greatly appreciate the way that Yoshi P addresses the players and if you want to read the full statement you can check it out here. The positive is however it seems that all of the Crystal data centers has been flagged as preferred and that means buffs until you reach level 70.

Good Morning Friends! I come to you with a glad heart because I have once again finished another new job. For the past week I have been working on Ninja and last night I managed to push it across the line and ding level 80. I’ve not spent a significant amount of time gearing it, but I did grab the artifact gear set and snag the resistance weapon from Gangos. This puts me somewhere in the neighborhood of 450ish with the gear I currently have equipped, which is not phenomenal but good enough for the moment. When I started down this path I did not fully appreciate Ninja as a job, but over the course of the last thirty levels, I have come to appreciate just how good of a class it can be. Granted I am nowhere near as competent as your average Ninja Main, but I took to heart some advice that I should focus on debuffing the target. The thing is… that seems to make a massive difference in how fast targets go down.

If we go to the character sheet that means I have finished leveling all of the classes that utilize dexterity as the main stat. This means that not only can I get rid of any unneeded Bard/Machinist/Dancer gear but that I can also get rid of any dexterity-focused jewelry. This leaves Monk and Dragoon as the last physical dps classes that I have yet to finish. I’ve largely left Dragoon open as a soak for any available clan hunts that I happen to have on a given day and am in no real rush to push it across the finish line. Monk is going to be an interesting journey because I do not love positional combat. What I feel like I need to work on instead is some of my healers because of all of the jobs in my list, those are going to be the largest lift for me on a personal level.

Something that you need to understand, is that I began my life in MMORPGs as a healer. I played a Dwarven Cleric main pictured above in Everquest, and technically this is the second rendition of this character after rerolling on a brand new server. Playing a cleric in Everquest left some permanent scarring I am afraid and I am not sure if it was the complete heal rotations, not being able to progress other than slow prodding root and nuke gameplay, or the fact that I would quite literally get called at all hours of the night to log in and come resurrect someone so they would not lose a level. Whatever the case I have avoided playing healers in any game moving forward apart from a brief stint in Everquest 2… also playing a Cleric, more specifically in Inquisitor.

A good portion of my time back in Final Fantasy XIV has been about breaking down mental blocks. Over the years I had built up this mental block against tanking for strangers, but the difference there is tanking is a role that I knew in my heart that I was good at. Healing is one of those things that I have long decided I was shitty at, and have thus been unwilling to put myself in the position of having the lives of the party in my hands. Granted as a tank I also very much have the lives of the party in my hands, but for some reason it feels differently. I’ve thusfar leveled Scholar through Palace of the Dead but in order to make my way through the level 60 plus grind… I am going to need to be willing to do the thing that I have been avoiding. That is queuing to heal random strangers. I know once I put myself out there I will do fine and start to feel my “sea legs” as it were, but it is really hard taking that first step.

So my goal for the weekend… queue for leveling roulette and try and make that work.