Friends… I am standing in a Marauder occupied Everfall and I have some feelings about that. Making it worse it was claimed by “Run It” which were effectively the slumlords that already held Monarch’s Bluffs and were not keeping that terribly well maintained. The positive is that so far they have left the tax rates completely untouched, which is good because Everfall was extremely profitable with some of the lower taxes in the game. What I did not expect however is how much not seeing the purple banners of Apex Fishing flying over the town would impact me. I’m among the most PVE of Carebears but over time I had begun to gravitate more and more towards Everfall with it sorta being the unofficial capital of the purple empire. In fact I was planning on buying my third home there and going all in on a Tier 4 house at some point. The irony is that the entire time I have played on Minda, Windsward has been held by the Marauders and I have still continued to more or less have that as my primary base of operations.

What a difference a few days makes in the fate of the server. On the 21s server transfers were open and I was making a stump speech to have people migrate to the server and join me. At that point Syndicate held seven territories including the deeply unprofitable and disconnected First Light. Over the course of the weekend First Light was more or less allowed to fall because it was a losing proposition. Everfall was defended successfully, put into conflict again, and finally lost last night. Now there are upcoming wars for Mourningdale and Restless Shores by Covenant forces and an attempt by Syndicate to flip Reekwater to purple once more. So one of the things you have to understand is that I have never really felt faction pride before and could not have cared less about the whole Alliance versus Horde debate. I’ve also never felt anything about a sports team and I thought maybe just maybe I did not have whatever it was in me to care about being a spectator. However with this whole Everfall thing… I think maybe I finally understand how a sports fan feels on the day after their team lost.

One of the defenders that goes by Soju streamed the War and I can finally see what people have been talking about regarding lag and warfare. I assumed that it was just the normal sort of “too many things happening and the game feels like molasses” style lagging, but this is more insidious. It appears that the green side utilized a tactic known as “Lag Capping” or “Freeze Capping”. Essentially the idea is to go to a point and get it moving in your direction and then start bombarding that one location with as many ice attacks as possible. If you watch the VOD, you can see that the end result is that it locks up the game for players causing their actions to not really have much impact, but at the same time the capture continues ticking down as though things were normal. This would have been a close match regardless because the sides were stacked with best players Purple and Green had to offer. However this tactic I think made the difference and caused the zone to flip against our favor.

I am certain that we will flip the zone back because a fire has been lit under purple to reclaim their capital city. I will say that in the meantime… it is going to feel a little bit less like home when I am doing the over-encumbered walk of shame back to it. I also have a sudden desire to spend a bit more time in Brightwood which I think now becomes our capital city for the time being. If it were not so late already I probably would have joined in the effort to flip back Everfall into conflict so we could declare war. If there is a directed effort happening tonight then I will probably flag up and join in the questing. That is a new experience for me because this weekend was the first time I had ever been purposefully flagged at all in New World.

I spent most of Friday night and part of Saturday running PVP faction quests in Reekwater. This is one of the easier places to go in order to have low effort faction currency because until recently… no one gives a shit about Reekwater. Friday night as multiple wars were waging, I was slowly flipping the zone a little purple with my activity which I believe accounted for around 5% in total. Over the two days I farmed up the 100,000 tokens needed to buy the full set of heavy armor and I have to say… now that I own it… I am a little unimpressed. Stat wise it is completely great but having gone through this I would never suggest someone do it because not only did it take the 100k tokens but it also cost 3000 gold. Eliyon spent about 1000 gold after dinging 60 and is already way more kitted out than I am. Additionally I have to say the armor looks kinda dumb for something that is supposed to represent “Heavy” armor. The set on the right is the low level faction armor and I loved it. Now instead I am just going to rock the Halloween skeletal armor until I get something more appropriate.

Lastly I did manage to get my shit together and actually log in for a maps night in Final Fantasy XIV. There was much cognitive dissonance as I got readjusted to the controls of FFXIV but it was nonetheless enjoyable. All in all it was pretty successful with I think only three of the maps being duds and not spawning a portal. There is talk about farming up level 70 maps and trying our hand at those since they have completely different drops. I guess I need to pop in every day this week and farm up a 70 map then so I can be stocked for shenanigans. We have just over three weeks until the head start for Endwalker and I am very much ready to get back in the swing of things properly. In the meantime however I am loving New World and want to get into a much better position gear wise before I ultimately put it on the back burner.

Well friends… I have officially dinged level 60 in New World and with it opens up all of the early phases of the endgame. I had heard a whole number of things that were rumored to happen in the end game, some of which are partially true and others are complete nonsense. The first thing that I had heard is that enemies dropped coin more often and this so far is universally false. Encounters have always had a random chance of dropping some coin and thusfar it seems like my experience has not really changed much and when I do see coin drop it is usually in the range of 6 to 9 coins at a time. What has changed is that I am killing more stuff and by reference seeing more coin drops on average. However the killing more stuff comes from the other big change that I had heard rumored.

Another thing that I had heard is that when you hit level 60, your weapon experience gains are the same across the board and killing a level 5 mob rewards the same as killing a level 60 mob. This is also completely false, but there is some nugget of truth in the concept. When you ding 60, your weapon experience gains are increased wildly but there are still wide variations to that experience. So I can run around and kill level 5 wolves for around 18 weapon experience per pop and make pretty significant progress especially if I can find an area with fast enough respawns that allow me to get a bonus multiplier for killing something before the previous experience notification fades. Killing silver elites tends to reward something in the neighborhood of 60 weapon experience and killing gold elites more in the neighborhood of 120 weapon experience each.

What this means in practice is I am running around and killing everything in my path because it all is granting what FEELS like good weapon experience. I put on two levels of Great Axe last night for example and I think ultimately I am going to try and find some location that still has that near instant spawn rate and pour through some of the weapon levels. Ultimately I want to have Hatchet, Warhammer and Great Axe leveled to 20 seeing as that is more than likely going to be the trio of secondary weapons that I swap between. Thankfully Sword has been capped for a very long time so it gives me one fully built out weapon for when things start to get dicey.

Speaking of things getting dicey… those highest level areas of the game hurt a lot. I had been leveling with what was a pretty even split between Strength and Constitution giving me around 3 pips in each of them. This was fine and it was tanky enough to be able to handle most things… but I also knew if I was going to become an endgame tank I needed to go with a full constitution build. Essentially I have learned that I should have done this ages ago because there isn’t a lot of difference in damage between half strength/half constitution and full constitution. Before the respec I was hitting Wolves in Brightwood for 838 damage per hit. After the respec I was hitting those same Wolves in Brightwood for 738 damage per hit, which means I lost 100 damage by dropping all of that strength. However I gained over 3000 hit points in the transition which tells me that Constitution gives you way more hit points than Strength gives you damage.

My goal right now is to complete the faction upgrade quest and start purchasing the faction token armor to begin rounding out my gear set. My goal tonight is to finish the Trial of the Alchemist and start buying my first pieces of gear, likely beginning with the chestpiece and working out from there. The quest will reward 12k faction tokens, which means I am going to need to spend down to give myself a buffer so that I don’t lose tokens. While the cap while the cap will be raised… if you were capped going into the quest it means you will just lose those 12k tokens. It works that way for each of the faction quests so I highly suggest spending down your tokens just ahead of any turn ins. If you need something to buy material convertors are always helpful especially now that the windfall of resources has been nerfed a bit. I did pick up a handful of items from the market and ended up spending around 800 gold total in upgrades to make myself a little bit more viable going forward.

I am really not sure how much further I am going to make it progression wise before the rest of the crew catches up to me. I still need to run The Depths, because I am stalled out in the story until I reach that point. I am hoping that we get to run this over the weekend and if not I am just going to pug the remaining spots to get through it. I know there will be later dungeons that I need to do in order to get caught up with the story, so while working on faction tokens my hope is to work my way through the zones. I’ve gotten a few 500 item level drops, which means my snapshotting process begins in earnest. I started a spreadsheet so I could keep track of the highest item level I have received for each slot. I may have hit my head on something… but I am even considering signing up to be part of a territory defense or doing some of the PVP faction questing to help flip zones.

First off I need to open this post with an apology. Apparently yesterday’s post gave folks the impression that I was shopping for another server. I am not at all. I am very much committed to staying on Minda, and as a result I have branched out and started to make contacts within other Syndicate guilds on the server. Yesterday’s post was basically that there are problems with this server, but I think that there are problems with every server and that greener pastures don’t really exist elsewhere. Sometimes I am part of a server that I am wholeheartedly recommend without any reservations like Cactuar in Final Fantasy XIV. Minda is a server that I still recommend but that comes with some reservations namely that there are some not great people here. However that said my friends list is filling up daily with awesome people that I happen to meet along the way.

That said last night server transfers opened and we had a few people transfer over to Minda from elsewhere. If we are friends, then you are absolutely welcome to join us. We have around thirty players and I expect in the coming weeks as folks transfer to the server that number will grow. I think there are a number of folks who will wind up on Minda as the dust settles. In fact last night a group of players that Zelibeli had been leading started transferring in as well… though I believe they plan on staying team Covenant. Since we are largely PVE players, that means we have more folks to run dungeons and such with. I wish the social systems were a bit stronger, but at least now the Mute/Block sections seem to stay collapsed allowing me to shuffle the bad actors down into the dregs of my list never to be seen again.

Since the last thing anyone needed was a whole new server just for one game, we instead opted to build out a New World section of the Super Dungeon Friends discord. Once you land on the server head over to the Role-Assignment section and choose New World and your faction in order to get specific channels for those. I am currently working on overhauling the discord to make it easier to support additional games in the future. So for the moment it is fairly FFXIV centric, but I am working on carving up segments for each new game since the general mission of having Low Pressure grouping friends should be able to easily expand to almost any game.

Last night Minda became actively better for Syndicate players because our territory expanded. Mourningdale in the northeast corner of the map had been held by Jade, the single territory holding Covenant company. However Jade was not well loved by their own faction, or the rest of the server for that matter and was the perfect example of a group that allowed a territory to rot. The machinery in town had downgraded and no active projects had been running there for the better part of a week. Last night Cozy Cafe made a bid for taking over the territory and it seems like Jade just threw the match. I know for certain that a large number of level 60 Covenant and Marauder players signed up to defend the territory, but instead Jade (which is also the name of the leader as well as the guild) packed the roster with level 20-30 players that had no chance of defending. If you are curious at all the War was streamed by one of the leaders of Cozy Cafe and it was a bloodbath.

So in the end that gives us cheap teleports as Syndicate players to seven zones around the map with six banks connected allowing transfers of material between them. Right now there are wars coming up against Everfall and First Light. The best and brightest on the server will defend Everfall because if there is such a thing as the Syndicate Capital… it is absolutely that town. Now that we have Mourning Dale I could almost see allowing First Light to go to Green. The second company of the Spartan Legion is the one planning to take that territory, and I gotta say I would largely be fine with that. Spartan Legion has held Windsward the entire time I have lived there and have for the most part been good Stewards of the territory. Sure I would love to see the entire map be purple so that I could cheaply teleport anywhere and have ALL the banks connected, but I don’t think that is ever going to happen really.

As it stands I am four bubbles into 59, and really need to spend the rest of this level capping out my faction so that I can do the next upgrade mission shortly after dinging. I really want to focus on working on getting the full 525 faction gear set, which will serve as a good starter place for the endgame. Over the last few days I have rocketed ahead in level and quite honestly it is shocking just how brain dead and simple it was. Since the beginning of the game I have heard from so many players how good the experience from Town Board quests are, and the fact that I was 54 on the 19th is proof of this. It truly is complete nonsense how fast the progress has gone and I could very easily push up to 60 if I really wanted to, but instead really need to eek out a bit more faction before doing so.

Ultimately for those who are not familiar with these, I am talking about the board full of quests near the town hall in a given territory. Ultimately what I was focusing on were the various smithing related or material turn in quests. What I did at the beginning of this entire roller coaster was gather up a bunch of Iron Ore, Hemp Fibers, Rawhide, and Green Wood and carry it around with me. I would then convert those materials into whatever was needed by a specific quest or for example in the case of Stone Blocks above I would harvest the resources near town. By the time I finished gathering things up to knock out some of the easier quests the next batch would be available after I did a turn in… and the process could start all over again. Essentially I would clean out as many easy crafting quests as I could, pick up as many kill X animals quest and then move on to the next town.

Specifically I avoided the following:

• Potion quests unless I just happened to have enough of a given potion on me. Potions require too many reagents to make this quick and easy.
• Cooking quests unless I just happened to have enough material on me. Most cooking requires a lot of ingredients which slows you down.
• Fishing quests are a huge trap. Saying you need to catch 3 Large Salmon seems easy enough… until you actually sit down to try and do it. Fishing is slow and trying to catch specific fish is even slower.
• High Level Materials. I was fine with turning in Iron Bars or Steel Bars… but Starmetal or Orichalcum bars while a massive hit in XP just takes too much time and resources.

Ultimately I rotated between Weavers Fen, Brightwood, Everfall, Windsward, and Cutlass Keys because those are all territories that were active. I checked Monarch’s Buff and First Light a few times but the companies that controlled those territories were not maintaining the Town Boards very well and keeping a supply of fresh quests. However rotating through five territories gave me a constantly flow of easy to complete quests and has rocketed me through five high levels in three days. I have so many world quests still left out there, but right now I have gotten to a point where I just want to push across the line so I can start building a more permanent set of items. I will happily mop up all of those quests when I hit sixty.

However once again I want to leave you with a final statement. We are staying on Minda and if you are looking for a permanent home in New World we would love to have you. Server transfers are now available through the in game shop, and when you join the server look up Belghast and I will get you invited to the company. We are all Syndicate so of course before you can join the company you will need to be team purple given that guilds in this game don’t span factional boundaries. We can however still do content with the other factions. I’ve run a few dungeons with mixed teams and it worked just fine. However given how much territory purple holds, if you are a purely PVE player then the only logical choice is to join the purple empire.