Final Fantasy XIV Archives - Page 33 of 118

Capped for A Day

December 3, 2018 by Belghast

Morning folks… I am struggling today. Both in the waking up department because there is simply not enough coffee in the world… and in the illness department because I seem to be coming down with whatever the hell is going around the office. I’ve yet to decide if I can make it to work today, so we will see what happens between now and finishing this post but I am taking a breathing treatment as I type. As far as the weekend I did a bunch of assorted gaming because that seems to be how I roll right now. Instead of focusing hard on one thing I seem to be splitting my time between a bunch of things, and as a result I spent a good deal of time making tiny images and updated my “Recently Playing” sidebar. It mostly follows the post I made last week with the major exception of me apparently forgetting to include Elder Scrolls Online which I still dip my toes into occasionally.

In the Destiny 2 front I spent a good deal of the weekend knocking out anything that could get me a Powerful/Prime Engram and wouldn’t you know it… I reached 600 light the current cap. This is a cap that I will enjoy for another whole day…. because when the black armor DLC releases on December 4th the cap is going up to 650. The truth is I am fine with this.. because the last cap was quite the stretch to get to from the levels I was sitting at when Curse of Osiris released, which is unfortunately the last time I really seriously played the game. Sure I got in and did the Warmind story content and a little bit of planetary stuff but I really was not pushing myself to cap out at that point. Additionally Forsaken made it way easier for someone to play casually and reach the cap, so I am looking forward to Black Armory and some of the new open world “Forge” content as I have always dug things like the Blind Well or Archon’s Forge and Court of Oryx from Destiny 1. I need to get serious about trying to wrangle folks for the purpose of having a raid night… Squirrel keeps volunteering himself but at my count that still leaves us down four people. So if you are interested in that sort of nonsense on the PC platform drop me a line.

Since this is the first post of December I thought I would talk a bit about InPiPoMo which just finished. For years I had not joined in because I largely considered my blog cheating given the nonsense number of screenshots that I post. I apparently have a problem because the goal was to hit 50 “pictures” during the month of November to parallel NaNoWriMo and its 50,000 word count goal… since a “Picture is Worth a Thousand Words”. During the month without really attempting to do so I posted 93 screenshots if my quick count was correct, so yeah… that is a thing I do. Like this morning I had a screenshot of Diablo 3 on the Switch that I wanted to post but nowhere really to post it so I sort of shimmed it into this paragraph. Huge thanks to Chestnut for keeping this going this year and you should totally check out her blog Gamer Girl Confessions.

Over in Monster Hunter World the Winter Star festival is going on and with it a set of gear that you can farm. For both PC and Console players this also means that almost every event that has ever been active is active once again allowing you to farm anything you might have missed. That list is considerably smaller for PC players unfortunately, but it does let you get things like the Wyvern Ignition Great Sword and cosmetic nonsense like the Wiggler head. From what I can tell the only event that is not active is the Code Red event tied to the Devil May Cry cross over potentially because it just ended right before this event. You can however farm Kulve Taroth again until your heart is content. There is a set of lackluster armor that you can craft, or you can do what I did and cash in your tickets towards the layered armor set so you can make ANY gear look like Santa Claus. I plan on farming up enough tickets to also be able to purchase the super adorable Snowman Palico outfit… or Snow Woman in the case of Kenzie who regardless of the game is canonically female.

I’ve talked about how awesome the screenshots are at the end of fights, because they always capture you doing something interesting. In this case it is me dodge rolling out of the way of a line of lightning while everyone else is apparently downhill engaged with the monster. When you hit Hunter Rank 49, in order to make forward momentum you have to face this monster in particular… Tempered Kirin. It took me forever to manage to get this on the console and in truth it was probably only because I was getting carried super hard by Shiana that Ashgar and I wound up getting it at the same time. On the PC I’ve been dipping my toes into these waters for awhile now, and I have reached the point where it is not me that is fainting and causing us to fail… but regardless still end up failing out most of the time. Monster Hunter does this thing where the screen freezes and it can mean either you beat the encounter or someone other than you got carted and caused the whole group to fail. When the screen froze at this point… I just assumed we failed it… but in truth it turns out with one life left to go we managed to take down Tempered Kirin. I will probably NEVER fight this again… that is unless someone who has recently started the PC winds up needing help to get through it. Super happy to be moving again on the other side… which caused me to instantly shoot up to 58.

I also spent a good chunk of the weekend fiddling around in Final Fantasy XIV… which frustratingly has started doing this thing where it does not exit cleanly and strands a black fullscreen window that seemingly has the power to block task manager. This is really only a problem for me personally… since I have been streaming every bit of gaming recently from gaming desktop upstairs to my laptop downstairs. When this happens I have to go upstairs and fiddling with it in order to restore functionality, which can be a bit maddening considering how regularly I am hopping games in a given evening. Regardless I have reached my first wall gear wise in the Main Story Quest and it requires me to get to 335 I believe which means I either need to buy my way out of that hole or start doing enough content to farm up some gear. I am probably going with the later given that I never was rich in Final Fantasy XIV terms. In the meantime however I have decided to revisit my old friend the Palace of the Dead to push my Dark Knight up high enough to be able to do the Heaven on High content the rest of the way to 70. Probably a significant amount of my time will be spent catching up classes so that they are ready when Shadowbringer releases tentatively next summer.

All Things Geekery is a great podcast by my friends Detached and Victus that among other topics tends to be a great source of Destiny 2 related conversations. They have been doing this thing recently where they highlight a member of the community at the beginning of their show, which I thought was a really great idea when they started this concept with the very amazing Chestnut. However I am now starting to question their mental state because apparently they saw fit to include me in this construct as well. This week I apparently am leading off the show, but really you should probably just fast forward past that and listen to their interesting discussion of Red Dead Redemption 2… a game I am super interested in but waiting to see if it releases on the PC given that is my platform of choice and I have a bad habit of rebuying games for it. You can find the podcast at…

Finally there is of course the podcast we recorded this weekend where we talk about Final Fantasy XIV, Monster Hunter World Winter Star event, what happens when MMORPGs close down, Tetris in Virtual Reality and a few other topics shimmed in between. I tend to be really bad about promoting the thing that I actually do, so I should get in the habit of talking about it more on this blog so there is some cross pollination. I am still shocked anyone reads this thing… let alone listens to me ramble on the other thing. At this point I have decided to stay home and crash this morning because I had very few things on my calendar for today. If I had a packed day of meetings I might have struggled through it and probably infected the rest of the office. Now I am going to get in some fuzzy pants and forget the world exists.

Lurk Longsword

November 21, 2018 by Belghast

This morning is a little bit odd given that I am not at work, but also had to get up at 5:30 like normal. I guess I technically didn’t but I still have things that need to get done. My mother in law is going into the hospital today for a lung biopsy, so I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, prayers or just general good vibes channeled her direction. Our hope is of course that it isn’t anything serious, but just the act of taking a biopsy from your lungs is fairly serious. A few days ago I wrote about how hardcore mobile gamers can be, and I guess further evidence proves that even more true. Yesterday I booted up Walking Dead Our World while waiting on a meeting just to check and see what objectives I should be focused on… and found that I had been kicked from the group that I wrote about. It seems as thought a group leader can see various stats about the players, and it appears that it is common place to purge anyone not killing at least 200 walkers a day.

I am WAY more casual than that… and I had apparently somehow avoided notice for a few weeks before the hammer dropped down upon me. I don’t even really know the people in the clan, but it was surprising how much it generally bummed me out. I’ve since joined another group, but I have to say… the drive to play is largely gone. Previously I felt like I was working towards something with a bunch of other players, but now I mostly just don’t care as I have to get acclimatized to another group of randos. I’ve contemplated forming my own group and calling it something along the lines as “Casual AF” and just seeing what sort of players I get to join. The clan size is limited to 25 players, so if you are in a group of high achievers I totally get why they might want to punt casuals. The objectives are things like kill 300 armored walkers with a specific character, and in a given encounter you might come across two of them… meaning at that rate you would have to take out 150 of these randomly occurring encounters to get the objective. The game is balanced for hardcore players, so also maybe not balanced for me personally. It was interesting while it lasted.

One of the things I love about the Kulve Taroth event is the random weapons that you end up walking away with. Generally speaking there are a few gems scattered in amongst the dross… and one of them is this longsword. The base damage is a little low, but it makes up for it in the utility of having a longsword with fairly reasonable paralysis on it. Ultimately I have been using this a lot as I have been taking on the Devil May Cry event quest where you fight four different monsters, and this ends up giving a fairly early proc of paralysis to help out the burn phase. It also works shockingly well on Kulve Taroth itself, which is goofy given how damned big that is to see it paralyzed. It does allow for a lot of good burn time whenever it happens which makes me heavily favor the weapon, and if I shifted out my item build a bit I could get quite a bit of white sharpness on it.

I also spent a good deal of time last night playing Final Fantasy XIV and managed to get off high center in the quest chain. There was a very specific quest that I was struggling with, that involved killing a bunch of mech suits that cast self destruct. This stupid thing took me roughly four attempts to finally get through it, and is one of those fights where the NPCs are vulnerable to death… and if they die you instant fail. I finally figured out exactly what I was supposed to be doing and on the last attempt it felt way less arbitrary. I will say this is one of the frustrations at times with Final Fantasy XIV… is that for all of the really good visual messaging… there are at times in the solo quests that they don’t give you much of an explanation of what you are supposed to be doing. My hope however is that this gets me unstuck and I can continue questing my way through all of the Main Story Quest content that I had missed.

Tiny Samurai vs Eureka

November 20, 2018 by Belghast

One of the things that happened over the weekend that we did not talk about on the podcast, nor have I mentioned on the blog… was the reveal of the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion Shadowbringers at the Las Vegas Fan Fest. I mentioned Fan Fest when I was talking about BlizzCon and how they only hold one when they have a big announcement to give us information about. As such you go into the experiencing knowing you are going to see something really cool, and while the trailer for Shadowbringers is cool… it was not the big reveal of the weekend. That said I do find it interesting that we are not going where I thought we were going at various points in the Stormblood storyline. It seems like in order to restore balance… we are to become the Warrior of Darkness.

The more important reveal however was that of the Blue Mage… aka the MMO class that I questioned if was even possible to do in a multiplayer game. With it they are introducing this concept of “Limited Jobs” and by that they mean Jobs that you can do… but are purely solo/open world only. Blue Mage will launch with 4.5 and be locked to a maximum of level 50 in progression. Like a Blue Mage in any other Final Fantasy game, you will not learn new skills by leveling up and instead learn them by fighting the monsters that perform certain abilities. So to learn Bad Breath you will need to fight a Morbal and watch it do that move… or similarly you will need to watch a Sabotender do 1000 Needles to be able to pick it up and start doing it yourself. I really dig this concept because it allows them to do this class with all of its flavor and power… without having to worry about balancing it against any other class. Level 5 Death would have been super hard to balance around… and I am wondering if they will start bringing other challenging classes in to the game under this Limited Jobs banner.

All of this thought about Final Fantasy XIV lead me to patch it up, and attempt to figure out where the hell I left off in the Stormblood post expansion main story quest. I bounced very hard on Stormblood and I am still not entirely certain why, but after leveling the Warrior and then grinding up the Samurai… I just ran out of steam. I’ve made a few attempts to get engaged again and similarly bounced out. Hell recently there have been a few times I logged into the game and then right back out when I wasn’t exactly sure what I needed to do in order to gain traction. All of this time however Sol has kept Greysky Armada active and there is a group of folks that do a cycle of regular events. Last night was Eureka night and I decided to log in and join the shenanigans.

Ultimately it was myself, Mor, eventually Neph and a character that I have seen around but can’t really place a person to… being babysit by Pix who deserves a hero medal for easing us all into the concept of Eureka. I remember when this first opened I spent some time solo grinding and managed to make it to level 2 just by killing random stuff. It seemed insanely grindy and a love song to Final Fantasy XI which itself was effectively the Japanese version of Everquest. Soloing it was miserable but with a group of friends it felt an awful lot better. Even more so once we started gathering up the materia shards that effectively gave us a 60% damage boost. I entered the night at level 2 and managed to push through to level 8 before we finally called it because it was getting late.

Seriously Pix deserves massive thanks at herding us around Eureka and helping us get the objectives we needed to get knocked out. Effectively he was out of group and AOE taunting everything onto him… while we sat there killing it down as fast as possible. As a result I spent most of the night as Samurai and while it took me a bit to remember how to play the class it eventually came back. When Neph joined us I feel like she went through the same thing with Machinist… which I guess is to be expected for as long as we have been gone. I know they have other themed nights, like one in which they do crafting maps… so for the time being I am probably going to be logging in and doing those activities at least until I get my bearings. I had an awful lot of fun, and I most of it was due to the fact that I was getting to hang out with a bunch of friends that I had not hung out with in a really long time.

Bunny Fail Tank Returns

March 2, 2018 by Belghast

I’ve talked about this a bit in the past, but I have struggled with Final Fantasy XIV since finishing the Stormblood main story. I am not exactly sure why, but after leveling my Warrior through the questing process… and then grinding up a Samurai I bounced. When I say I bounced… I bounced hard. I just stopped logging in entirely and even didn’t care enough to log in for most of the major holiday events that have gone on. At one point I made an attempt to get back into the game and pushed through the new MSQ content right up until I reached the Drowned City of Skalla. I could not bring myself to tank that with a random group and I told myself… I would wait until I had friends around to run it with me. That event never happened and I got distracted by a bunch of games in the meantime.

The problem with this is that it sort of set up an artificial barrier between me and the content. It was as though I had some sort of a mental block preventing me at just throwing myself at content the way I used to be willing to. I knew I needed something severe to get me off high center and back into caring about what was going on in Final Fantasy XIV. There used to be a time when I willing to log in each night and run experts with completely random groups of players from the roulette system. However I developed some sort of barrier against doing that… one that I think was slowly chipped away given how freely I am willing to do my “SOS Roulette” nonsense in Monster Hunter World.

Watch Sleep Deprived Bel tries to remember how to Fail Tank in FFXIV from Belghast on www.twitch.tvAs a result last night I used the presence of an audience as a bit of a kick in the butt to get me back into Final Fantasy XIV and doing dungeon content again. I streamed for a little over two hours and in that time I believe I ran four dungeons and made some progress in the MSQ afterwards. In truth were it not for the MSQ slowing the pace down significantly… I might have streamed longer throwing myself at more dungeons for gear currency. I managed to pick up a chestpiece with tokens and now feel like maybe I can do this thing and catch my gear levels up to something reasonable. At the start of the night I was 313 item level and by the end I edged it up a bit to 315. Skalla and the next set of patch dungeons all drop gear that is an incremental upgrade, as well as some tasty tasty currency. Basically at this point I need to reach a state where I can start doing expert roulette again to play catch up.

After taking a break from streaming and FFXIV I hopped over to Monster Hunter World for awhile and spent some time running nonsense with Grace. I have been mostly running hammer when we are doing stuff, because it is a weapon that I like quite a bit… and one that I want to get better at using. There are definitely times when I am fighting something that it feels like having something more than a longsword in my arsenal would help greatly. We took down a Squirrel Blimp and I managed to unlock the third of my elder dragons while she ran around trying to find the Great Girros. I was not in terribly long as I was already in a fairly sleep deprived state from the previous nights fragmented sleep schedule due to the launch. All in all though it was a pretty great night and I want to thank everyone that stopped by to tune in and chat with me. Also huge thanks to Solaria who actually joined my discord and hung out with me while I eased my way back into Final Fantasy XIV. It’s fun lobbing comments at text messages scrolling across twitch chat, but it is even more fun when you have someone hanging out in chat to talk to over voice as well.