Destiny of Poppy
Apparently this week some craziness happened in League of Legends with the team Unicorns of Love. It seems as though they broke one of the taboos of the game and played Poppy in competitive play More so than that they seemed to dominate a match with her. We talk about the ramifications of this and get into an offshoot discussion about what happens when something is toxic for a game. When a game changes the class or mechanic that you love, what do you as the player do? I know a good part of why I wont be playing Warlords of Draenor, at least not at launch is the fact that Blood Deathknights “feel wrong” in ways I cannot quite quantify.
Of Tidal Bardings
Since the last three days have been spent working on my Easing Into Eorzea guide series, I have not really posted much that was actually about me or my endeavors. In fact this morning it feels more than a little weird to not be working on the next segment of that guide. I guess in part I wanted to get some of the most basic information out there especially since I have a good number of friends either just starting the game or considering starting it. One of the problems with Final Fantasy and just how content dense it is, is that it has so many different systems that it just expects you to know how to use. I remember when we first started playing, it took me weeks to figure out what everything did and even to this day I am still finding systems that I knew nothing about. So my goal was to try and flatten this learning curve by discussing things from the perspective of a player who is used to playing traditional western MMOs.
However this does not mean that I stopped doing things while writing these guides. One of the most exciting things from the past week is that I managed to get Tidal Barding. The entire reason why I was going for Turquoise color with my chocobo, was that it would match the Leviathan bardings perfectly as seen in the picture above. Leviathan has been my favorite summon since Final Fantasy IV and as a result I knew when I saw this that I would have to get it for my chocobo. The problem is that it involves getting a rare drop from Extreme Mode Leviathan, when I have not done any of the Extreme primals leading up to that. The other issue is that it is a three star armorcrafting pattern, meaning it takes an extremely well geared crafter.
This is the point at which my good friend and awesome cosplayer Spiral Sun rides in to the rescue. It turns out her Free Company leader could make the barding, so I shopped around on the market and managed to piece together all the bits needed. All told I think I spent around 150,000 gil to gather up the bits, which is a significant discount over what the completed barding had been going for on the market boards. Last night I checked it was still floating around the 500,000 mark. So thanks to Spiral I am now sporting my spiffy barding, and with the Turquoise color it works almost perfectly. The barding and bird kinda meld together perfectly and it feels like I am in fact riding around on a tiny Leviathan.
Of Animus Books
The other thing I have been working on in Final Fantasy XIV is my Animus Weapon. Late last Sunday I managed to wrap up my Atma grind and I was able to convert my Bravura Zenith into a Bravura Atma. The problem is the Atma step is basically a “half step”. While the weapon is in fact ilevel 100 instead of ilevel 90… the stats of it remain the same. You power up the Atma weapon by completing a series of books, each one giving your weapon a stat boost. To complete the weapon you have to do this 9 times. Each book costs 1500 tomestones of mythology and requires you to kill 100 mobs (10 each of 10 types), run 3 specific dungeons, complete 3 specific fates, and complete 3 specific guild and company leves. Throughout the day yesterday I knocked out all of the steps for my current book other than the three dungeons.
So today at some point I plan on running the three dungeons which are… Tam-Tara Deepcroft Normal, Stone Vigil Normal and Lost City of Amdapor. I figure I will ask in guild to see if anyone needs these dungeons before running them, because I would far rather complete them with a guild group. After turning in the book I will get +2 strength to my current Atma weapon and it will put me one step closer to the finished Animus. Then it begins the process all over again of grinding up 1500 tomestones of mythology for the next book. My guild thinks I am mostly insane for this, but at least Cylladora and Warenwolf are doing it with me as well. I believe Cav is maybe on the same step also. Essentially the fastest way to get the mythstones is to grind hunts, and as of yesterday Waren is now in the most popular of the hunt groups, so hopefully that will help things out a bit.
With the 2.35 patch Final Fantasy XIV introduced ways to dye your Chocobo unlike quite any other dye system I have encountered. Generally speaking in other games, you buy a dye or you pick a color from a selector and you end up with your color relatively simply. It might be cost prohibitive to get the color you want, but there is very little guess work. Final Fantasy XIV on the other hand introduced a system that is sheer madness. First you have to purchase seeds for various fruits that can be found on vendors. The seed is then grown in your garden and over the course of two days ripens. You can shorten this time by doing various things and the yield can be increased based on the type of soil that you use and the fertilizer. Where the madness goes into play is that these seeds increase or lighten various color sliders starting from the base yellow.
