Alternatives to Azeroth

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Good morning friends. We find ourselves in really difficult times, more specifically for those players who had a deep connection to World of Warcraft. One of the most interesting aspects surrounding the Warcraft universe is that there are so many players that were happily plugged into Azeroth without knowing much about the larger MMORPG scene. The game had a unique way of spreading from spouse to partner or to family members or maybe even to coworkers. The end result is that it created a large number of “Blizzard Gamers” that had never really played much prior to the game nor played much in addition to it. This morning’s post is specifically for the members of the Warcraft community that now find themselves in a troubling situation. For many playing Warcraft right now feels tainted, but at the same time the game became part of their self-care routine as a way to alleviate the stresses of the world.

Please note this is not a post telling people to abandon World of Warcraft. That isn’t something that I can tell anyone to do. Personally, I just can’t touch Blizzard products right now. Maybe if the systemic change goes into place and it seems like the company is on the right track again I can return, but for now, I am distancing myself. If you are feeling the same way, but also struggling to know what to do with your gaming time… this morning’s post is specifically targeted at you. As a long-time “WoW Tourist” I have played almost all of the MMORPGs that have come out throughout the years and I have great news for you. While Warcraft was consuming all of the discourse, there were a wide number of games that have quietly been gaining steam in the background. This morning I am going to talk about the games that I think specifically would be easy to move over to after coming from a World of Warcraft background.

The Lord of the Rings Online

This is one of the older games on this list and it is impossible to talk about without also talking about Lord of the Rings as a whole. This game was released on the heels of the extremely popular series of movies and had the challenge of creating a world that felt like said movies, but also had none of the licensing rights to the movie imagery. It is also very much a game of its era and if you were a huge fan of the way that Vanilla Warcraft and Burning Crusade felt, then you might possibly feel at home roaming this vast world. Enjoyment of the game however is greatly enhanced if you have a love of Tolkien because so many little details of the books are lovingly placed or recreated in this setting.

The story of Lord of the Rings Online is set as you being a contemporary of the Fellowship. This means throughout the course of its long tale you will be crossing paths with various members of the larger story. This gives the game leverage to let your character stray from the text, but still has a larger context of the events of the story we know so well. There are a number of extremely interesting character classes and rich crafting system and a functional but not phenomenal housing system. I think more than anything I fell in love with the world itself because it makes for an extremely interesting backdrop to your own character story. The game is showing its age, but especially if you were a classic player it might feel like home.

There is of course a free trial that lets you get in and start playing the game with an albeit limited set of character options and only the base content available. It has one of the more complicated pricing models in that each expansion is purchased separately, but there is a version of the game that includes the first six expansions for $59.99. If you choose to subscribe to unlock additional features it comes in at the standard $15 a month.

Star Wars the Old Republic

Did you ever want to play World of Warcraft circa Wrath of the Lich King but in a Science Fiction setting? Gratz then Star Wars the Old Republic is probably just the game for you. If you ever played through the much acclaimed Knights of the Old Republic RPG by Bioware, this game is set further down in that same timeline and as a result, references a lot of events from that KOTOR 1/2 setting. The only negative about Star Wars the Old Republic is that at this point in its lifespan it is largely a single-player MMORPG and has been retooled to support that playstyle. It features some of the deepest and most engaging storylines I have experienced in an MMO with each of the eight classes having its own completely unique character arcs that play out over the course of the base game.

It adds a lot of interesting things to the genre, like a Starfox-style arcade space combat mode and a deep companion system allowing you to customize them and augment your play. For example, if you are a squishy DPS and struggle while questing, then bring a healing companion or a tank companion to come to make that questing go a little bit more smoothly. There is a fairly rich crafting system, but it feels like it was largely abandoned once you left the base game. The game veers sharply into a completely single-player narrative once you reach the expansion content, but is still very much worth experiencing for yourself. It featured some really interesting group content at release but has been tuned in a way that most people just solo it these days.

There is a free trial that unlocks a limited subset of content and character options. One of the interesting things about Star Wars the Old Republic is that if you pay for a single month at $15, it permanently unlocks all of the expansion content and a number of the missing character options. Even more interesting about this game is it supports a $60 two-month subscription that does not renew, which tells me that Bioware fully understands that this is the type of game that folks dip their toes back into every now and then for a month or two at a time. There are ways to buy the game outright for $30 featuring all of the expansions, but really the better option is to simply pay for a single month of subscription time.

Neverwinter

Neverwinter is a bit of a mixed bag, but I feel like it is worth talking about nonetheless. The first two games in this sequence started their lives as a subscription model game and then were later converted over to free to play when the market proved that there could only be one “WoW”. Neverwinter on the other hand released as a purely free-to-play vehicle… and as a result, I would classify it as very “freemium”. You are going to be deluged with a bunch of nonsense that is associated with paid unlocks and priced-to-own features… including so many varied currencies that it is difficult to keep track of. if you can ignore all of this, the core gameplay loop is extremely enjoyable and it offers a more action roleplaying game take on what is the tried and true World of Warcraft formula.

The game releases content at pretty regular intervals and the moment-to-moment gameplay is enjoyable. Trying to sort out what it actually costs for anything from the store is completely incomprehensible. If you are looking for a fun game to get in and play for a while but don’t plan on it turning into anything more serious then Neverwinter might just be the ideal fit for you. It requires setting up an ArcGames account, which means that you are going to have to deal with Perfect World nonsense, but pending again that you can overlook that I’ve personally had a lot of fun with it. This is a game that I don’t see recommended as very awesome because you need to be willing to overlook a lot of those free-to-play flaws to find the diamond among the trash heap.

Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 is without a doubt the best deal in MMORPGs. I can say that statement without irony or subterfuge because the game legitimately is a “buy the box” and play the game type experience. The only caveats that I need to include with it, is that the game itself is vastly different from any other MMORPG on the market in the way it feels and the types of content that is available to the player. If you were a loremaster in World of Warcraft and got joy in ticking things off a list, then this might be the perfect game for you. If you loved World Quest content, then again this might be the ideal experience because pretty much the entire game is the equivalent of a World Quest. Guild Wars 2 presents you huge maps with lots of activities on them and reoccurring group events that you get credit for as you move your way towards “map completion”.

The game also does an excellent job of making sure there is always some objective that you could be working towards, presenting you with a menu of different achievements and collections to go out into the world and complete. It has an extremely rich crafting system and instanced nodes so you are never actually competing with players for resources. The gameplay itself however is a bit of an acquired taste with a character being made up of not only the class you choose but also the specific weapon combination you choose to go with it. I have to admit I have played a lot of Guild Wars 2 in spite of the fact that I still don’t really get the core draw of the experience. It has rich and acclaimed story content, that I have largely bounced off of, but those who love this game they are extremely devoted to it.

If you were a big PVP player in World of Warcraft this game is known for its rich Realm vs Realm vs Realm gameplay. Essentially think Alterac Valley, but something that people actually queue for and participate in as you have a big epic battle with other players over resources. Never really been my cup of tea but I know there are a good number of players that play Guild Wars 2 almost exclusively for this content.

Essentially as it stands right now there are two ways to buy into the experience. The first is an edition that includes the base game and the first two expansions for $29.99. If you are willing to spend a bit more you can buy a new multi-pack that includes the upcoming End of Dragons expansion releasing in February for $49.99. In addition to this, there is of course a cash shop with a large amount of account unlocks and cosmetics, that are in truth purely optional content. Some of the things like unbreakable harvesting tools are the awesome quality of life improvements but provide no real benefit over the base breakable tools in the game. Well worth giving a shot if you have never played before because it might just be the game you have been looking for.

The Elder Scrolls Online

Now we are getting into the games that I assume anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time knows I will be recommending. Something you need to understand about this game is that I love Elder Scrolls Online. I was a friend and family alpha tester, have two characters named after me, and have played it off and on since it was released. I am more than a little biased about this game, so you need to understand that going into this discussion. ESO was a critically panned game that managed to gain traction and absolutely mail a regular cadence of content releases. Essentially each year there is one large expansion and three smaller content drops, essentially meaning that every 3 months or so there is something new and exciting to engage within the game.

Classes in Elder Scrolls Online are more suggestions than actually locking you down to playing a specific role and if enough time is spent in the game you can earn more than enough points to buy your way into multiple functional specs. I personally main a Dragon Knight, and I can play that as DPS, Healer, or my role of choice Tank. The crafting system is probably my favorite from any MMORPG and the content is laid out in such a way that effectively all of it remains evergreen. Each zone drops specific gear sets and you can take a blue item and upgrade it all the way to the highest tier. This means players are always out in the world participating in content regardless of the zone, making the entire world feel vibrant and alive.

If you were a PVPer in World of Warcraft, this also might be a landing place for you given that it has an entire game mode centering around huge battles to seize control of Cyrodil. Three factions vie for control over Forts and Keeps, all while trying to earn the right to conquer the Imperial City in the center of the map. These campaigns come in seven days and thirty-day flavors and involve players needing to not only take territory but organize the holding of territory during off-hours. For those who are not into the big campaign, Cyrodil still serves as an interesting but dangerous land to explore and well worth doing so for all of the sky shards and little mini-dungeons found there.

Pricing for Elder Scrolls Online gets a little bit contorted. Essentially things are divided into two categories, Expansions which add large new areas to the world along with a new starter experience, and DLC which adds dungeons, raids, and smaller areas. There is an expansion every year and it comes with a standard new game price tag associated with it. DLC is purchased through the crown shop and is somewhere in the $15-$20 price tag depending on how elaborate it is. Alternately you can pay a $15 a month price tag which unlocks all DLC for the game along with your “ESO Plus” subscription. I keep this active if I am playing because it also gives you an unlimited crafting inventory allowing you to harvest until your heart is content without ever worrying about bag space. There is a multi-pack that includes Morrowind, Summerset, Elseweyr, Greymoor, and Blackwood for $59.99 which is the ideal way to buy-in.

Final Fantasy XIV

We have reached the point in this post where we finally get to the game that you all expected me to talk about before you clicked on the link. Final Fantasy XIV is one of the best games on the market and also one of the most endearing comeback stories the games industry has ever had. I say this with no hyperbole intended, this is probably the best MMORPG on the market and it is for a lot of reasons. This game is still a passion project of the team responsible for turning this game around from abject failure to overwhelming success, and for the most part, all of the key players are still actively engaged in creating new content. This team also sets the bar for transparency in information and honesty with its player base about what is going to work and what is not going to work. Players don’t always get what they want, but we often get a better understanding of why exactly we are not getting it.

The challenge with Final Fantasy XIV however is that it feels very much like playing an alternate universe version of World of Warcraft. There is no denying the influence that Warcraft had on Yoshi P while working on this game, but also at the same time there are just a lot of things that work completely differently coming from the Everquest derived lineage of Final Fantasy XI. Additionally, this is a game that was designed with the limitations of the PlayStation 3 in mind, so a number of the systems just don’t work quite in the same ways that a PC-focused MMORPG gamer would expect them to. Then there is the story gating of content that I talked about yesterday, and even though the said story is phenomenal… you cannot progress through good chunks of the game without making your way up to a specific point in the Main Story Quest or MSQ.

The reason why I love this game and keep coming back to it though is the community. There has been a careful focus by the team working on the game to lay the groundwork of shared struggle and kindness throughout the game. There is subtle social pressure to do good and be friendly, in the hopes that maybe just maybe at the end of a group activity you get a commendation from your players. Like it sounds silly, but in practice ends up curbing a lot of the animosity and toxicity that I have seen in other games. The content is also structured in a way so that doing older content is both enjoyable and rewarding and when you have a brand new player those rewards are increased. This has created an effect where running with a brand new player is actually sought after, rather than something you fear. Sure you need to spend a bit more time explaining mechanics, but you are going to get more of the end game currency you are chasing as a result to make it worth your while.

That is not to say that the game does not have its low points as well. Casual PVP is great and I find it very enjoyable, but I am not the traditional PVP player. From what I understand it is nowhere near as highly tuned as other games and as a result those who are more focused on that gameplay get frustrated by it. Housing in the game is one of the coolest systems, but because of the way that it is structure it is prohibitively expensive and just plain unavailable due to demand for most players. Apartments and Free Company rooms exist, but they feature a limited subset of the options that a traditional house would include. One of the huge benefits of the game is the ability to play every single job on a single character, but this is also somewhat of a double edged sword. Leveling your first job comes extremely quickly as you follow the MSQ, but alternative jobs are left hanging forcing players to significantly slower ways of leveling them.

All of that is pretty manageable, but without a doubt the most frustrating part about the game is the account system. Square created a system that would have felt needlessly arcane during the Web 1.0 days and now feels just painful to interact with. Those of us who have been around awhile understand the ins and outs of it… but account creation is the first real hurdle any new player might encounter. It also has a weird pricing model with subscriptions having a good number of asterisks out beside it. The game is $13 a month if you only one one character per server with a maximum of 8 characters in total. $15 a month gets you up to 8 characters per server (which honestly alting is a trap) and a maximum of 40 in total. Then you can pay an additional $2 per month to gain additional retainers or an addition fee to gain use of the mobile app that lets you play the market boards aka auction house remotely.

Right now the game is being deeply discounted due to a sale that is taking place. You can pick up the Complete edition that includes the base game, Heavensward, Stormblood and Shadowbringers expansions for $23.99 or the non-sale price of $59.99. Then come November if you are at that point in the game you will need to purchase the Endwalker expansion for $39.99. The Free Trial gives players access to the base game and the Heavensward expansion or the first 60 levels of the game, but comes with a bunch of restrictions limiting the player to 300,000 gil and cannot join Free Companies or send public messages like Shout, Yell or Tell. They are also now restricted with a longer queue time than paying customers. That said it is well worth trying the game for free in order to determine if it really is for you.

One of the things I realize upon making this post, is that I am going to have folks asking “What about X game”. The truth is there are literal hundreds of MMORPGs currently available, each with their positives and negatives. This is my personal take on the games that I think a World of Warcraft exclusive player would fit into most easily. If you have your own opinions for what you feel like are a better fit, as always feel free to leave a comment below. Once again this is not me trying to tell players that they need to leave World of Warcraft, but if you too are struggling with engaging with Blizzard right now… here are some alternative places you could find shelter in for the time being.

Maybe Don’t Skip the Story

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Good Morning Friends! So for the last month and some change I have been enjoying the heck out of Final Fantasy XIV. I have to admit that I rode the wave of nostalgia to get back engaged with the game and have seemingly grabbed hold with both hands. Maybe it has grabbed hold of me instead… whatever the case I am having a blast. I have also managed to get over a severe mental block that I had built up for myself over the course of the last three or four years against doing group content with strangers. The thing is… there are a lot of strangers in the game. Right now the game is flush with brand new players experiencing content for the first time and it is exceptionally easy to blend in with that crowd.

I never really sat out to make content for the purpose of new players, but then I started the whole Super Dungeon Friends thing and find myself in the position of answering a fair number of questions. There is one point that I keep seeing asked in various places, and I thought I would talk a bit about it. Final Fantasy XIV has a copious amount of content, and by copious, I am meaning several hundreds of hours worth of story content. One of the interesting choices that the developers have made is that you are required to get the “Main Story Quest” in order to unlock several bits of content along the way. For example, you cannot ride a mount until you have reached a certain place in the story. Additionally, the vast majority of dungeons and trails will unlock as you wind your way towards them as part of the overarching narrative of the game.

The above image is an infographic that Redditor Cyberfunk3 created showing all of the quest content in the Main Story Quest (MSQ) and other key story content in the game. One of the delightful things about the game is that it has released content over the years with a predictable cadence. Essentially with each expansion, you have the content available at release and at the end of that, you see a game credits screen. Then there is a large amount of content that is patched into the game finishing out the central conflict and setting up the events for the next expansion that represents roughly half the story of the initial release. Once you finish this you get a second credits roll and the events of that sequence lead into the opening moments of the next expansion.

When you spread the content out on an infographic it represents a shocking amount of content. Over the years Yoshi P and crew have greatly streamlined some of this content in order to make it flow better but it still will represent several hundreds worth of hours of work to see the final credit roll. Truth be told I am level 80 and happily playing the game and still have yet to quite catch up on the most recent patch content. One of the truths that I am going to share with you, that you need to keep in the back of your head as you approach Final Fantasy XIV. It is a game about the journey and not the destination. There is no mythical place at the end of the content where “the real game begins”. The story content and all of the little vignettes of action along the way are the real game. There is not a second game that unlocks when you have collected enough unobtainium in order to bypass some gate-check at the end.

Many of you that are arriving on the shores of Eorzea will have likely been playing World of Warcraft, and I think it is important to understand that you are entering a different sort of game. Right or wrong over the years, the Warcraft team has positioned that game in a way so that only the last 5 to 10 levels worth of content are actually relevant. Often times this is even more limiting with only the last patch or two actually bearing any relevance on the day-to-day lives of the player base. There are probably thousands of hours worth of quest content available in World of Warcraft, but the team is only actually focused on the most recent content.

What this means in practice is that a player can comfortably boost a character all the way to the beginning of the latest expansion and not really feel like they actually missed anything. In truth old content is often buggy because he had been abandoned by those who update things long ago. You encounter NPCs that no longer make sense within the context of the current story arc, and in truth, everything you are doing is funneling you into the “Endgame”. So it is easy to understand where this feeling that we as players need to rush our way through the content as fast as we can in order to start playing the actual game located just behind the final level of content.

One of the most curious things that Square Enix does is allow players to skip the story entirely for a fee. They understand how daunting it is trying to play through all of that content and I believe these were originally designed for players who wanted to start a second character on a new server but didn’t want to have to push through multiple hundreds worth of stories to get to where their other characters were. However, it seems the mindset that World of Warcraft has instilled in us as players, is catching new players in a trap thinking that they can skip straight to the endgame and be instantly relevant. Please understand that this is a massive mistake and if you choose to do this… you will never understand any of the subtlety or nuance of the storytelling that is happening.

Final Fantasy XIV is a game where every moment, every morsel of content is being placed in a very specific manner and often times gets referenced later. You will see NPCs that you maybe have not seen in thirty levels showing back up and treating you like old friends. You will see moments that happen in the first seconds of the game, referenced again later for emphasis. The story that is woven in Final Fantasy XIV is deliberate and has a slower pace but it also has managed to deliver some of the most shocking and unexpected moments of storytelling I have ever experienced in a game. So often players are spending so much of their effort trying to catch up or “waiting for it to get good” that they end up squandering the moments when the game is trying its best to ease you into this world.

The content difficulty is additive in Final Fantasy XIV and I spent some time over the weekend pondering this point. There are several fights that I have experienced recently that at the time it was released I thought were some of the hardest mechanics I had ever encountered. The thing is… I’ve gotten used to them and seen them so many times at this point that a certain level of “muscle memory” has been developed allowing me to now navigating them with ease. FFXIV is exceptionally good at building player skills through throwing very clearly delineated mechanics at them and always using the exact same indicators so that you can look at an attack and know exactly what it is going to do.

For example, almost always the first attack that a boss throws out is going to be the “tank buster” or the attack that the tank is going to need to apply some sort of mitigation to in order to smooth incoming damage. Knowing this means you can watch the cast bars of the boss and understand when exactly you are going to be taking a significant spike in damage. It also lets the healers know what they should be managing around in order to top that health back up. This education starts with the first dungeons you encounter and continues to ramp up difficulty and number of mechanics as you make your way through the content. Skipping ahead means you are also skipping all of this time spent training that muscle memory. Folks don’t spend a lot of time explaining mechanics in dungeons because FFXIV has taught them a very specific encounter language throughout those hundreds of hours worth of leveling.

It is a phenomenal time to start playing Final Fantasy XIV. Currently, the game is available with a massive discount so that you can get all of the content currently available for only $24. The thing is those story skips are also heavily discounted and you can pick one of those for $18. I would caution you against doing that because ultimately you are robbing yourself of the experience of playing Final Fantasy XIV. I get that there is that drive to catch up to your friends who have been playing for years, but the thing about this game is that no content is ever outdated. Yoshi P and crew understand that it is important that players are running content from all levels of the game in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and as a result, you never really say goodbye to a chapter of the game. I queued for leveling roulette over the weekend and got thrown into Sastasha, aka the very first dungeon the game has, and honestly had a great time experiencing that content over again.

What you are getting with Final Fantasy XIV is a game where pretty much all of the content in the game remains viable. Gearing exists in this realm where there are heavy catch-up mechanics and it is a token-based system that allows you to save up for exactly the item you need. This means they can attach the awarding of that currency to things like duty roulettes and have you run what is effectively ancient content and make it still feel rewarding. The other aspect of the game is that most of the fights, especially trials and just plain fun to experience. The high-end content is a dance that you perform with your friends and not a wall that you bash your face against. Sure learning that dance is hard sometimes, but once you have the patterns committed to that muscle memory it is shocking just how easily it comes back.

I talked about this in yesterday’s post, but I spent a decent chunk of the weekend going back into old extreme trials with my friends looking for rare drops. It was a lot of fun and while we were doing it with four players rather than eight players… the challenge was still there enough to keep it interesting. We still had to pay attention to the mechanics and still had to perform things in a certain manner in order to get through the encounters. The dance came back as we made our way through it, and so often while I am doing roulettes I get thrown at a dungeon that I have maybe not run in years. It is fun to dust that memory off and experience it fresh with brand new players. However that whole experience is additive and without having gone through all of that content leading up to it, you will be at a disadvantage.

For me at least, it seems the surest way that you will bounce off of Final Fantasy XIV is to boost your way through it. There are characters in this game that I love and I feel a deep lasting attachment to. The reason why is because I have lived with them for eight years. We have gone through high points and low points and so many side adventures that they feel like living breathing beings to me. I reached that point however because of all of the story this game provides and the excellent storycrafting. That is not to say that there are not plenty of super cringe moments, but the cumulative total of the experience is phenomenal. Final Fantasy XIV is about the marathon and not the sprint. It is a tale told in hundreds of hours and not a rush to the most current content in order to stay relevant. The story skip will rob you of that experience, and it is highly unlikely that if you didn’t like the story… that you will find something that keeps you engaged.

No Season but Much Fun

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Good morning friends. So it isn’t so much that I want to talk about the horrific situation with Blizzard this morning, and more that I feel like I can’t really talk about my weekend without doing so. For those who have been reading this blog for a long while, you will know that I love Diablo 3. More importantly than loving Diablo 3, is the fact that I love doing seasonal starts with my friends. I go so far as to completely arrange my calendar around the fact that the Friday night a season opens, we are going to be spending that evening grinding until we fall asleep. Admittedly as we are aging… the point of falling asleep at the keyboard comes a long earlier than normal. Diablo 3 Season 24 started on July 23rd and we had been making plans to do our normal grind… right up until the point that the news broke last week.

Do you know what I didn’t do Friday? I didn’t play Diablo 3 because I just cannot bring myself to participate in anything Blizzard-related right now. This is not me telling you that you should boycott Blizzard, because for starters gamer boycotts never actually work. Gamers will talk a big game, but when it comes to actually miss out on something that they enjoy… those words never really translate into actions. Even then a potential boycott feels super bad for other reasons, namely that I still have a large number of friends who are currently stuck dealing with this situation from within the walls of the company. My not supporting the games that they create is actively harming people that I care about deeply. When I say I am not playing, it is very much a personal decision that I cannot separate the game that I love from thinking about the scope of the harm that was caused.

What I did instead was screw around in Final Fantasy XIV and eventually had my friends Grace and Byx join me for some nonsense low level content. I think we all realized that the ritual of playing Diablo 3 was more a ritual of hanging out together and shooting the shit for several hours rather than the game that we were actually playing. Byx had only a level 30 character on Cactuar, so we did a lot of lower pressure content in order to have a thing that we were all participating in together. The truth is I had a delightful evening and I am super glad that we still did something. Even if none of us were really in the position mentally to be doing the thing we had originally planned on doing. Friday evening did serve as the gateway to what was an excellent weekend of group activities in Final Fantasy XIV.

At the close of the evening, Grace and I ran a few extreme primals as she needed two more ponies in order to get Kirin. We killed two primals, got two ponies… and this intense luck streak gave me an artificial feeling of how difficult it is to get a specific pony to drop. So much so that I volunteered that we get my friend Sparkz her mount as well. For a specific chunk of Saturday afternoon, I was throwing myself at primal encounters and when I left we managed to get Ramuh and Garuda to drop. This bolstered Sparkz confidence and she managed to get Leviathan and Titan on her own, and then struggled a bit with Ifrit. It was around this point that the rest of the FC stepped in as I was busy and managed to get her the Ifrit whistle on their first kill. So that is two Kirin mounts achieved in a single weekend, which seems pretty solid to me.

This lead to Rae, Thalen, Waffles and me to have several impromptu groups over the weekend. The next set of mounts are the lanner whistles, that we more or less collectively refer to as “birbs”. To the best of my knowledge the only one that actually dropped last week was off Nidhogg and Rae managed to win the roll. We also made a number of attempts on Sophia, which was its own battle just to learn the fight… or more so re-learn the fight. Throughout the course of late Heavensward and Stormblood there are a good number of encounters that I unlocked but never actually completed. Sophia Extreme was absolutely one of these and I think we only actually downed the boss twice before needing to take a break. The vast majority of that time was spent learning the mechanics of the fight, because raid wipe mechanics are still raid wipes even though we overgeared the content.

Lastly we closed the weekend of fun with a planned night of treasure maps. Right now we are pulling together maps somewhere around 7pm CDT on Cactuar in the Aether data center. We start filling the group with the Free Company and then reach out to other folks who might be available until we hit 8 slots. It took a little while to get the group rolling, but were able to include Sparkz who had never seen any of this content. It is complete luck that we managed to get a portal on our very first map, but that is when tragedy struck. I am guessing the server was deluged at the very moment that portal open because we started encountering an error anytime Rae attempted to transfer us into the dungeon. The portal eventually timed out, and we ran another map as a test to see if it was endemic of larger server problems or just a glitch.

Something we did not realize is that when it timed out the portal… the map itself was returned to Rae’s inventory. Opening clicking on the map again… it just straight up reopened the portal allowing us access to our first dungeon of the night. I think in total we did something around six or seven different dungeons, including one that we managed to get all the way through without being ejected. That was the first time we had actually managed to do that as a group. I love maps night largely because it is just good silly fun, with content that is just challenging enough to be interesting, but not so challenging as to feel like we are grinding our faces against anything. What I was not prepared for really is just how lucrative these maps end up being. There was one chest we opened that dropped 100,000 gil by itself and all told I probably cleared around 500k gil for the evening.

The weekend had a bit of a rough start, in not knowing exactly what we would do in place of the Diablo 3 seasonal start. However it ended up phenomenal as I got to spend a lot of time doing things with my friends and I am extremely happy I chose to come back to this game. Sure it was nostalgia that got me to return, but I somehow managed to break what had been a three or so year long mental block against doing group content with strangers. Now I queue for dungeons every single night and enjoy my time spent greatly. It feels like I have repaired some rift in my psyche that now allows me to appreciate just how good it feels to do group content again. I am really wanting to figure out a time and a place to at least start dipping my toes into doing raid content again. I am not yet sure what night would work for me, but I will probably be reaching out to some of the usual players to determine what might even work as a schedule.

Mixtape Mondays: Tides of War

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Good Morning Friends! I hope that you had a sincerely good weekend and that it was restful in the right ways. It is the start of a brand new week and I hope it is a most excellent one. Later this week Blaugust 2021 officially begins and I am looking forward to seeing all of the participants posting away. For those of you readers who might be finding my blog for the very first time welcome. Mixtape Mondays is a series that I have been doing each Monday for a few months now. As a kid, I loved making Mixtapes for my friends and now that I don’t really use physical media I was missing that experience. After getting heavily into Spotify, I realized just how well the Mixtape format translates, and as a result each Monday I post a new mix with new album art.

Tides of War

I think every generation goes through a period of time where they heavily engage with the music of their forebearers. For me, that time was late middle school and early high school and I am not entirely certain what triggered it. I do know that in 1990 when the massive Led Zeppelin Boxed Set was released I was already bought in and fully engaged. My personal musical explorations were largely contained to the genre then termed “Classic Rock”. It does make me wonder if that moniker is a sliding scale that changes meaning as the music ages. Does that mean that Nirvanna is now considered to be “Classic Rock”? Regardless this is also music that I deeply associate with Vietnam and post Vietnam era thanks to Hollywood choosing to populate the soundtracks of these films with large swaths of these songs. It has become a cliche that if you want to set a war film in the 70s, it needs to include the song “Fortunate Son”. The thing is I get it because that track is an absolute banger.

Track List

  • Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin
  • Paranoid – Black Sabbath
  • Dream On – Aerosmith
  • Sympathy for the Devil – The Rolling Stones
  • Behind Blue Eyes – The Who
  • Limelight – Rush
  • Radar Love – Golden Earring
  • People are Strange – The Doors
  • White Room – Cream
  • Fortunate Son – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • You Really Got Me – The Kinks
  • Revolution – The Beatles
  • Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Bob Dylan
  • All Along the Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix
  • Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd

Listen On Spotify

Listen On YouTube

Listen On Tidal

Well, friends that brings to a close Mixtape number thirteen in the series. As always I would love to hear your thoughts below. If you are tuning in late to the entire series you can find the archive page linked below. I hope you have a most excellent week and if you are so inclined, check out the information about Blaugust 2021 and maybe sign up.