A Proper Paladin

Capitalism Ho!

This morning I am getting around a bit later than normal.  I am not sure why exactly I slept in so late.  I got up to go to the restroom at 6 am, and then next thing I know my wife is getting up at 8:30 telling me that her tummy is grumbling.  I apparently took from 8:30 until 9 to actually raise myself from the stupor.  I showered and got dressed and wandered out like usual to find some breakfast.  When I got to the QuikTrip just down the street from my house it was absolutely packed with people.  When I exited the car I immediately realized why.  Across the street is the high school and I was confronted with a barrage of the sound of that can only come from a dozen marching bands warming and tuning.

Since there were band parents and potential competitors wandering in and out of the store, I half expected that everything would be picked over.  However it seems like they were prepared and pretty much everything you could want was in stock.  I ended up getting my traditional Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Roll, and for my wife a chocolate long john.  For the moment life is good as I have consumed my breakfast and am now writing for you lovely readers.  It was around this point that I remembered that my friend Kodra and fellow host of AggroChat was planning a stream this morning.  If you catch this post early enough you should totally tune into his Hitbox stream and watch him attempt to date birds.  We have been joking for a few weeks that he needed to play this game… and the subsection title comes from a comment he just made over the stream when he was offered to get a job.

All Grown Up

ffxiv 2014-09-26 14-44-58-894 Yesterday I was feeling absolutely like crap.  I woke up and it felt like someone had filled my head with concrete over the night, and took after my throat with some sandpaper.  I struggled around yesterday morning trying to get psyched for work, and it just wasn’t working.  I texted one of my co-workers to make sure he was in the office, and that things were going smoothly.  After reporting back in that all was well I decided to just stay home.  I stayed remoted into work most of the day, working on this and that but took breaks to work on leveling my paladin.  Considering I technically took a sick day, I didn’t feel bad at all about doing this.  They were essentially getting free work from me as it was, and I was mostly just dealing with little issues as they came up, and responding to email.

After doing my daily low level dungeon roulette and getting Haukke yet again… I decided to pull everything in the zone and skip nothing.  The boost of XP managed to take me through the rest of 48 and halfway through 49.  I didn’t really feel like tanking another low level dungeon considering my precious bonus was gone, so instead I went out to Mor Dhona and worked on some leves.  It is almost as though they had intended folks to do just this because all but one of the Leves spawn in exactly the same corner of the zone.  So I could run to the vendor get four quests, complete all four and just say no to the free teleport between them.  It took a couple of rounds of this to get close, but what actually dinged me was completely the “do 5 different types of leves” challenge log entry.  Those things are worth a truly prodigious amount of experience.

The awesome thing about having so much Syrcus tower and Weathered gear, is that all of it is dual class for both Warriors and Paladins.  This means the second I dinged 50, and bought 3 pieces of ilevel 90 gear from the hunt master… I was sitting at I think ilevel 89.  My weapon and shield being the only thing dragging down my overall score.  The problem is I had glamoured most of the hideous looking Syrcus tower gear to look like the default warrior set, and class specific glamours won’t show up when you equip it as another class.  Instead I opted to go for a mix of the chain tunic I loved so much, and some of the heavy allagan bits I had managed to connect.  For the paladin I keep the golden crown, and for warrior I use the bunny samurai hat.  So far I am digging the look.

A Proper Paladin

ffxiv 2014-09-26 18-53-46-632 Yesterday afternoon and into the night, my mission was to push through the Relic Reborn quest line and become a proper Curtana wielding paladin.  One of the unintended consequences of the Nexus relic system, is that folks tend to be ONLY farming whatever happens to be the dungeon or trial that gives bonus light.  Players have figured out there is the equivalent of the “Hot Zone” that Everquest and Everquest II used to have.  Where if you run that one thing, you get a significantly boosted amount of nexus light.  The result is that it took absolutely forever to get most of my primals done.  I think at this point folks are still busy farming nexus light, and not working on alts… which I think is what keeps the group steps for the relic moving along quickly.  You would figure as a tank I would get damned near instant queues… but unfortunately that was not the case.

ffxiv 2014-09-26 16-03-37-980 I spent large blocks of time dancing in various places.  Here I am dancing for two NPCs in Uldah… both of which seem thoroughly unimpressed by my skills.  I think a rundown of the waits looked a little something like this…  Chimera took around 45 minutes to finally pop and when it did I was the most seasoned tank so ended up tanking it.  Hydra on the other hand took only about 25 minutes… and the other tank a Cat Girl in a Bikini wielding a huge axe rushed in and tanked it.  For Ifrit it was more like a 15 minute wait, and oddly enough once again a Cat Girl in a Bikini tanked it, but from what I can tell it was a different one.  Finally we come around to Garuda and it was almost instant pop.  It turns out that I lucked out and hit a spot where Garuda was the Hot Zone… and as such it was the fastest Garuda run I have ever experienced.  Folks were ignoring all of the mechanics and pretty much just burning her.

ffxiv 2014-09-26 17-49-49-518 That just left Titan, and after another fifteen minute run I was volunteered to be the primary tank.  This is fine because really as far as fights go Titan is one of the easiest fights to tank.  For the most part you just stand in one spot occasionally shifting slightly to either be next to the red line or to avoid a bomb.  Like every titan I have seemed to be in ever… it took a couple of wipes and echo stacks before we finally pushed through.  On the time we won we were down to a single Scholar healer and a few dps and me.  This seems to honestly be easier than trying to keep alive eight people on this fight.  Sure it was a pain in the ass and took a really long time, but you reach a point where the healing and movement is manageable and you just keep repeating the same loop.  With that I had my Curtana and shield.  Moments later I had upgraded it to Zenith level and finally felt like a real paladin tank.  This makes level 50 job number four and my fourth Relic Zenith.

#FFXIV #Paladin