September 2013 - Page 4 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Stalwart Locusts

September 18, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in digital land. I am having one of those mornings where I am questioning why exactly I put myself through this every day. Not to be an intentional bummer, but this takes a lot of fortitude to keep doing this every single morning regardless of if I have something to say or not. I am just afraid if I stop it, for even one morning I will slip back into month long absences. I feel like I need the routine to keep me moving forward. I would really like to get a full year of daily posts, so for now that is my goal.

I’m a Jerk

I have to say, lately I have been feeling progressively worse about myself, so maybe this is just a downer of a post. Primarily the source of my lament, has been that I have been essentially non-existent over in Rift. I put all this effort and time into building an amazing instance of House Stalwart over there… and now so many of us are playing Final Fantasy XIV that it has almost over night become a ghost town. I feel like each and every one of us still like Rift and still enjoy it, we are just wrapped up in the thrall of the new shiny object in front of us.

To make matters even worse… Fynralyl and Psynister are being their amazingly awesome selves like normal… and ended up pushing the guild bank fund over the top and we were able to afford the third guild vault tab. However being the absentee leader like I have been… it took me a few days to pop in and purchase it, then forgot to give anyone access to it. I apparently did a piss poor job of promoting them to officers, only hitting a handful of characters for each of them. So generally I have been a pretty lousy person of late.

I feel generally conflicted. Firstly I still love Rift and enjoy it, and want the guild to be doing awesome things. Much like Everquest 2, Rift is one of those games that I have always cycled back to… and since the release of the game there is only a three month stretch where I have not been playing it. So I guess in the back of my mind I know it will always be there waiting for me. The problem is… the people currently playing it may or may not. Even if I am not around much, I still think breaking out and forming a permanent House Stalwart guild was a good thing for those times when the guild is super active.

Stalwart Locusts

The sad truth of House Stalwart is it is really a tale of two guilds. The first is a group of WoW players that have remained thoroughly devoted to that game since release and continue playing it or returning to it. The second guild is the large roaming band of “content locusts”, that consume the content in a game only to move on to the next tasty field when it presents itself. So as a result this guild is this massive amorphous war band that roams across the countryside pillaging things in our wake. It might not be the most pleasant metaphor, but considering we now have about 30 people in Final Fantasy XIV whereas we had around 30 active people in Rift previously… it seems appropriate.

In part this is my fault, but in part this is just the nature of most “post-wow” players. Once we dissolved the ties to one game, it changed the way we viewed games in general. The fact that Stalwart is so large and so broad and ever changing… means we always have a group of people playing whatever game the people seem to want to be playing. So when a new game comes out there are always a dozen or so people amped and ready to play it. It doesn’t so much feel like we are jumping games, but more than we are just continuing the same ties we have always played with… somewhere else.

For me personally… leaving WoW changed my perspectives a lot. Essentially I made a promise to myself that I would play whatever happened to be the most enjoyable for me at any given moment. As a result I have played a ton of cool games, and met an ever expanding cast of characters in the process. I now have so many life long friends that I have today, that I NEVER would have had if I had not given in to my wanderlust and experienced new worlds with different groups of new people. But all of this said… I still feel like an ass when I am off playing something other than a fragment of Stalwart is playing.

Big Apology

I guess in part, today’s post is a huge apology to those playing Rift that have noticed the active player base in the guild shrink significantly over the last few weeks. I don’t think any of us are “done” with Rift, this is just something that happens from time to time with Stalwart. We find a new shiny and go off and play it together. I have a years subscription to Rift, so I won’t be going anywhere forever, I just have so many things that I want to do in Eorzea. So many new sights to see, experiences to experience and adventures to conquer.

I still plan on trying to marshal the troops to logging back in on Wednesday nights for dungeons or rifts or whatever happens to occur. My hope is to single that out on the calendar as “Rift night”. Additionally as the leveling curve winds down a bit in FFXIV, I hope to push my rogue up on the weekends… because quite frankly leveling in Rift is a relaxing experience for me. Most of the time in FFXIV has been a LOT of dungeon running, and since I am one of two tank mains… I feel deeply obligated to all the friends that are playing the game.

This is ultimately what always complicates my gaming experience. The feeling of constant split loyalty… since there has never been a period of time when ALL of my friends happen to be in the same place at the same time. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on your point of view… I am the leader of House Stalwart agnostic of whatever game folks happen to be playing. It has and likely always will be a multi-gaming community, more so than just a single gaming guild. As games come and go the important thing to me is the community of players that we have cobbled together. That is what is eternal, and so long as we remain friends there will always be another opportunity to play together around the corner.

Wrapping Up

Sitting down this morning I had no intent of writing a post like this, but I guess it has been weighing heavily on my mind. Hopefully it was not too big of a downer for the majority of my readers. It still feels odd most of the time that anyone reads these ramblings. I will be over in Rift tonight, trying to dislodge anyone I can from FFXIV in the process. I have no clue at all what we will be doing, but I figure some opportunity will present itself. I hope you all have a great week, and those of you who are playing it… I hope I see you in Rift tonight.

Tips For Eorzea: Part 2

September 17, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people in internet land. I had another wonderful night of not being able to shut off my brain… and as a result getting to sleep well after midnight. As was posted as a comment yesterday, I had been considering Melatonin for some time… just was not sure if I wanted to cross that threshold yet. However it is beginning to sound like something I need or want to do. Sleep should not be something you have to struggle to get right?

Lowbie Dungeons

I have two friends that have just started out in the game recently, and have reached the point in the main story quest where they begin entering a series of three dungeons. Lethbridge is playing a Gladiator tank, and Cylladora is playing a Thaumaturgist… so since I almost always play a tank I needed something else to run with them. As a result yesterday I pushed my Archer up to level 16 so I could ride along for the fun. Essentially I have been trying to level Pugilist and Archer so that I could start getting rid of all the low level disciple of war gear that I had laying around and lining my vaults. My hope is to push both up to 20ish soon, which will greatly reduce the amount of gear I have laying around.

Leth had already run Sastasha before, but to pick up Cyl in the chain we started back with that one again. After that we continued the storyline into Tam-Tara Deepcroft, but as it was getting late we decided to save Copperbell until tonight. All in all they were really smooth runs. I snagged Warenwolf to heal and he decided to use the opportunity to push up his Arcanist a bit. The gear that dropped seemed almost tailor made for our party, and both Leth and Cyl walked away with a ton of upgrades for their class. Once again the Foestriker chest has eluded our groups, as to the best of my knowledge it has never actually dropped for anyone.

Tips For Eorzea

Yesterday when I was writing out the various tips it felt like I had a limitless font of them… this morning not so much. Lets see if I can dig into my bag and find something worth sharing with the class.

Quest Sparingly

One of the awesome things about this game is that you can play every class, every craft, and every gatherer on the same character. Meaning that while you are running this dungeon you can snap up drops for a class you might play later on instead of letting them rot. The problem with this is however you have only one set of quests to get you through the levels. As a result most of our guild is suggesting that you do as few quests as needed to get to your level. Focus on the main storyline quest, and then supplement it with FATEs and Levequests to get through the levels.

This is an noble goal, and one I have not followed myself. I am seeing the negative results of having absolutely no quests to support me as I level my various alternate classes. The only problem is that in the late 30s and 40s this concept seems to completely break down. There are simply not enough quests to level your character by quests alone throughout the Coerthas region. So get familiar with FATE grinding, and do it whenever possible.

FATE Contribution

FATEs are random spawning world events much like Rifts or the events in Guild Wars two. As a result you are competing with other players to receive a good contribution score. You are ranked based on a “medal” system of Bronze, Silver or Gold. There are all sorts of strategies you can employ to help out your chances of getting high marks. Firstly if you have an AOE spell that tags lots of mobs at the same time… this is almost certain to result in a good score. This is why Thaumaturgists seem to do so well with their spamming of Ice 2.

However Raw dps isn’t really the answer per say. The Contribution score seems to be highly based on your unmodified threat values. As a result, tanks and healers do extremely well in getting high contribution. As a tank you can spam your AOE threat abilities and since Flash is cross class, it is totally a valid technique to add it to your bar as a dps that does NOT have a high threat AOE ability. I plan on doing this for my pugilist since at low levels they struggle in FATEs quite a bit. The caveat here is to make sure you can handle the attention. I would only Flash spam a FATE that has high participation.

Main Story Locks Content

This is a concept I noticed early on. Essentially if you are not keeping up with your main storyline quest, you will reach a point where you are unable to get any quest in an area other than Levequests. Each storyline quest acts as a threshold to unlock a new set of zone quests. The game intends you to do the three dungeon crawl of Sastasha, Tam-Tara Deepcroft and Copperbell Mines starting at level 15. If you are past that level and you have yet to do those dungeons… chances are you are going to get content locked before long. After completing that story arc, you will suddenly have access to hundreds of quests that you simply did not know existed before. There will be multiple points in the storyline where this occurs. Just be aware of it and stay always focused on the main storyline.

Quest Direction

It took me an awfully long time to figure this one out, and honestly had a guild member not pointed this out I would have never noticed it. In the on screen quest tracker, if you click on the name of a quest it functions much like you would expect and opens your quest journal for that quest entry. However if you click on the quest text it opens your map… and tells you exactly what zone you need to be in to complete the quest. From this map screen if you drill down into the zones it will show you exactly which quest markers are related to the specific quest. Additionally if a quest requires you to do something like use an item on an object in the world… there will be a little item use icon in the quest tracker as well. You can target the item in the world and then click the icon in the quest tracker to use it.

Hunt Log

If you hit H in the game interface it will bring up your hunt log. This is probably one of my favorite features in the game. Every 10 levels of a specific class you get a new log to work on. Essentially you complete your log by hunting specific critters scattered throughout the world. The first two logs will primarily be in whatever region of the world you started, be it Noscea, Thanalan or the Shroud. This will involve some searching because some of the mobs on the list are pretty rare or only found in specific camps. However for completing each step in the log you get a massive experience boost. I tend to use these as a way to smooth the transition between levels, as focusing on the hunting log is certain to provide a much needing xp boost.

Grand Companies

At a specific point in the storyline you will be asked to pick a Grand Company. Each of the three major cities are represented by a Grand Company. In Gridania you have the Order of the Twin Adder, represented above by the member decked out in yellow. For Uldah you have the Immortal Flames, represented by the member in dark green. Finally in Limsa you have the Maelstrom, represented above by the member in deep red. While your starter city is determined by your class, you can freely choose which Grand Company you wish to tie your allegiance to and as a result which city you will be spending a large amount of your time in.

While you are get to Halitali before you open up your Grand Company… I would highly suggest against it. Just like each class has a hunt log, so do Grand Companies. A large number of the monsters needed for these hunt logs occur in dungeons, and the first entries of such seem to be Halitali for all of the different companies. Additionally once you have joined a company you begin collecting seals, which are the currency for rank promotions and gear. You can earn these by completing your companies hunt log events, by doing special grand company leves, or from random FATEs out in the world.

Promotions are available in multiple tiers, with three sub promotions per tier. Each tier unlocks access to a new hunt log, and a new level range of gear. So make sure you are not neglecting your promotions as you level. Grand company gear is some of the best gear you can get at any level. The weapons tend to be 2-3 steps above a similar item that you could get from crafting or a dungeon. If you are spending any amount of time doing FATEs you should have plenty of seals to go around and spend on promotions and gear.

FATE Grinding

Running FATEs back to back is hands down the fastest way to level. When working on my Dragoon I managed to do 22 to 32 in a few hours time by hanging out in the South Shroud and hitting all the various FATEs that occur there. The thing that you will learn is that not all fates and zones for that matter are created equal. There seems to be certain areas that are simply better for running FATEs and as a result have a higher density of players running them… which in turn causes them to spawn faster. Really solid FATEs are available in almost every zone… and there is reason to go visit most of the zones because there is generally something special that drops in each from a fate… usually pets. However here is a basic list of what zones you should be in if you are wanting to power through a good number of FATEs.

10-20 – Aleport – Western La Noscea
18-32 – Quarrymill – South Shroud
30-38 – Costa Del Sol – Eastern La Noscea
38-43 – Dragonhead – Coerthas Highlands
43-50 – Revenant’s Toll (Mor Dhona)

These are the zones that generally have the highest density of players. There are various other zones that seem to have a really good FATE range… like East Shroud around Hawthorne’s hut… but it has the same basic level range as Aleport. Additionally I have spent a good amount of time running fates out of Camp Drybone in Eastern Thanalan. So please know that the above list is just a golden path, there are lots of other zones and lots of other fates that are worth doing.

Wrapping Up

Well I managed to ramble on at length again and fill up another list of tips about Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. I am not sure if I have enough left in me to do a part three… most likely not immediately following these first two. At this point I feel as though I have put on a ton of levels in the game. Right now Belghast Sternblade is a 41 Warrior, 33 Dragoon, 23 Gladiator, 18 Archer, 16 Puglist, 8 Thaumaturge, and finally 10 Miner. Currently my next mini-goal is to get Archer to 30 and pick up the Bard job as well. I hope you all have a great day, and if you end up trying out the game make sure you try character creation in the morning. The vast number of servers seem to be unlocked them, but locked during prime time hours.

Tips For Eorzea: Part 1

September 16, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning all you happy people in digital land. I am fairly sleepy this morning, as last night I had to resort to some Motrin PM to shut my brain off. I really hate Sunday as a construct… I always have trouble switching back over to week day mode after the freedom a weekend brings. My brain is never quite willing to give up its freedom, and as a result always ends up fighting me a bit… namely in trying to keep me awake rather than sleeping. Unfortunately having to resort to a minor sleep aid like I did last night also means I am going to be overly groggy in the morning.

Cactuar Returns

For the last several weeks since the release of Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn, the server we all play on has been locked down tight from new character creation. After the Wednesday/Thursday maintenance this eased up a bit… but only briefly. Right now it appears like character creation is open early in the morning for most of the US realms, but locks down tight again as the day goes on. Over the weekend we managed to get five new players that had been waiting to create characters into the game and onto our server.

One of them I was scared had messed up. They decided they did not want to start the class they started, so as a result they deleted the character to create a new one. When they did this the list showed that Cactuar was still open for new character creation. However by the time they redesigned the character and went to create it… it was locked down tight. Essentially locking them out of being able to play at all Friday evening. Luckily however at 5 am the next morning they were able to get in, create the character and get going again.

Tips For Eorzea

I thought today I would take a few minutes to rattle on about various tidbits I have either learned or wish I had known before I started my characters. None of these are rocket surgery, but various little things I have picked up along the way. I am going to try my best to make them spoiler free, however I cannot guarantee there won’t be any tidbits of information that are mildly spoilery at least in the general flow of the game.

Aethernet

In major hubs there are Aetheryte crystals. These allow you to teleport back and forth between them. In the three major cities, there are also smaller Aethernet crystals as well. As you roam through the city, make sure you attune to each of these. When you have collected a full set for a city, it additionally unlocks teleports to the major gateways into the city. This becomes super handy as you are questing and need to go back out into the world to one of the specific destinations. Generally speaking these teleports will take you to each of the various guilds and locations in the city, as well as the exits to the various zones that connect to the city.

Favored Destinations

When you attune to the Aetheryte crystal network, it allows you several options. One of these is to set it as a favored destination. Doing this greatly reduces the cost of teleporting to that location. Your teleportation cost is based on a number of factors, but is primarily based on how far away you are from the zone. What I generally suggest is that you favorite the three hub cities Gridania, Limsa Lominsa, and Uldah. Once you have unlocked the ability to travel between them, you will spend quite a bit of your time late in the game popping back and forth between the various areas of the world. Once you reach the hub, you can usually travel to whatever zone you need to go to via the Chocobo network.

Set Nearby Home Point

Death in Eorzea tends to come swiftly and unexpectedly. Almost all of the deaths I have taken that are not inside of instances, have been because I got suddenly and unexpectedly overwhelmed. When you die, you get teleported back to your home destination. At the beginning this will be your home city, however as you move throughout the world you can set your bind point to any of the large aetheryte crystals that are located in major cities… at least one per zone. I would highly suggest that you bind wherever you happen to be hunting. That way when you die you return to a place nearby and not someplace you will have to teleport out of to get back to doing whatever you needed to do.

Starter Gear

One of the key features that sets Final Fantasy XIV ARR apart from other games is the ability to literally do anything in the game on one character. You can be every class, job and trade profession. You enter the game in a set of gear that is based on your races native appearance, that can be equipped by any class or trade. Don’t make the mistake I did and sell this… because each time you pick up a new class you start back at level 1, and therefor can only equip level 1 gear. You can repurchase this gear from the independent trader (name varies per town) in your starter city, but it is just easier to say for the first little bit don’t sell ANY gear you might get.

Armoury Chest

Any equippable items you pick up get saved into a special inventory called the “Armoury Chest”. This allows you to carry quite a bit of gear with you at any given time. You have 25 slots available per individual armor type… that means 25 chests, 25 gloves, etc. The gear you collect in one class may be useable by other classes so as you decide to multi-class you have lots of resources to draw upon. Later on you will be able to break down spirit bonded items into Materia, which will become important for outfitting your gear and improving it. As a result I highly suggest you do not sell gear, but instead save it until you have the ability to break it down.

Trade Coins

Almost every quest you complete in Eorzea gives you the option of receiving items or trade coins. Now the game never refers to them by the term trade coin, but that is essentially what they are… so I have begun referring to them that way. Essentially you have various types of Allagan coins… these come in various denominations Tin, Bronze, Silver, Gold… and there might be higher ones that I have not encountered. They all have a base value on the vendor, Tin 10 gil, Bronze 100 gil, Silver 500 gil, Gold 2500 gil. The gear you get from quests is exactly the same as what you can get from the market. Often times you can get a piece of gear far cheaper than the amount of gil offered by completing the quest. As a result keep tabs on the prices for the gear for your level range. In most cases I would highly suggest taking the trade coins in lieu of gear. You will almost always be able to purchase the items cheaper.

Levequests

Very early in the process of the story, you will unlock the Levemete NPCs. They offer a type of quest called a Levequest. These can be used to level crafting, tradeskills… and later on you can get special versions of them that will raise your standing with the various grand companies. You get an allotment of 6 per day, and these stack up until you have reached 100. They are an amazing source of gil, and oddly enough really solid source of gear. Since I just suggested that you take the trade coins over the items in a quest… usually the same type of item is being awarded as a bonus for levequests as well. So make sure you do the quest to unlock each areas Leves as you travel around the world. Often times you can pick up gear for free by completing these. Additionally if you scale up the difficulty level by one step, you are almost always rewarded a bonus chest, and these have a chance at Aetherial versions of the normal crafted items. Ultimately these will be your best source of upgrades for some time.

Guildhests

Do not neglect Guildhests, I am finding this out the hard way. Around the same time as you unlock Leves in general, you unlock a special multi-player version of a Levequest, called a Guildhest. These are essentially small dungeon like encounters that are designed to teach players the mechanics needed to succeed in Eorzea. They start at around level 10, and will offer two new Guildhests every 5 levels. The gotcha here that I am finding out, is to continue progressing you must have done all the previous ones. As a result my lovely guildmates helped catch me up by running level 10-30 last night. Once you reach the 40 quests, they start being 8 man instead of 4 man. So I highly suggest you do these as part of your normal questing rotation. They reward massive amounts of xp if you are doing them at the level they are offered.

Wrapping Up

I can already see this is going to have to be a multi-part post as I have a ton more things to write about… and have run out of my allotted morning writing time. Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn is a deeply nuanced game, and with that there are lots of little pitfalls alone the way. I will be trying to collect the various bits of information and sharing them in these bit info dump posts. However now I need to go pack up my laptop and get on the road. I hope you all have a great day and that it goes extremely smoothly. I have numerous things waiting on me at work, so I figure I better get on with that.

Gallivanting

September 15, 2013 by Belghast

Ohman… it is morning and I am legitimately typing a blog post like I am supposed to on a weekend! Apologies again for the huge lag in getting yesterdays post out the door. Unfortunately from time to time I get busy… and I really don’t like pre-writing a post very much and setting an embargo date. I tend to keep my blog posts fresh and reactional in that I just blather on about whatever happens to be in my mind at the time. I can tell that this is not everyone’s cup of tea as my subscriber base has pretty much been stable and unchanging for some time now.

I Love my Grandma

The title of this sub-section will make absolutely no sense to anyone… but I am chuckling immensely. Dates back to High School Spanish 2… when I kid pestered me for a translation of what was written on the board. I told him it was “I love my grandma” and I don’t remember what it was honest at this point… only that I told him a completely laughable translation. Sure enough the little slacker got called on to provide the translation, and he proudly strode to the front of the class with all the cocky confidence you would expect of someone who was dead certain of the answer. He delivered his response and immediately riotous laughter spread throughout the room. I just shrugged and said “you should do your own translations from now on, my Spanish is a bit rusty”.

Though I really and truly do love my grandma… and this week was her 84th birthday. We had all intentions of going up on Wednesday night to see her, but for starters my wife got home extremely late from work that night. After calling up she was not feeling great after having oral surgery the day before, so we opted just to talk to her for a bit on the phone and come up Saturday to see her. The above card is me being bored while waiting on my wife and freehanding something with a bunch of sharpies. I thought it turned out fairly well and Grandma seemed to like it.

We went up yesterday and hung out with her for about an hour or so before my parents arrived, which lead us to spend another hour or so catching up with them. She is looking pretty good and my mother took the opportunity as always to take a large number of photos. We have finally weaned her off using a standalone point and shoot camera and just taking photos with her Galaxy S4. Cool thing about that is it let us grab her phone and text the best of them to ourselves. I have to say they are some of the best family style photos we have had in awhile. I would post them, but I am not sure if I am quite ready to post photos of myself online.

Gallivanting

After leaving my grandmothers, we set out on a cross country trip of some hardcore gallivanting. Essentially from my hometown we went over to Bartlesville first. Recently all of the stores surrounding us have had some massive clearance sales, which I think are essentially the “lets clear everything out so we can stock up for christmas” sales. So far we have found all sorts of things, namely school supplies and Legos. Since we really had no plans yesterday we decided to roam around the surrounding area checking various stores… namely all the different Wal-mart super centers.

It has admittedly been a really long time since I have spent much time in a Wal-mart store. Like I will pop in and get ONE thing at a time, that only they carry… but I have not really spent a ton of time “shopping” in one for some time. We saw several funny things along the trip yesterday that I just have to share. Firstly is the image at the beginning of this section. Apparently you can get a wedding set at Wal-mart for around 10 dollars. They are as fake as is humanly possible… but at first glance they totally pass as the real thing. I didn’t even know that was a market, that folks needed cheap fake rings… but apparently like always they are filling a perceived need.

Next up over right justified we have the adult women’s… super girl footie pajamas. Just not the type of thing I expected to exist at all… let along be proudly displayed for sale at the local Wal-mart. The funny thing is they come with a little velcro cape that attaches to the back. The best ones I didn’t see until later in the day at another store, were the batgirl pajamas. I tried to convince my wife to buy a pair. I could totally see her loving a pair of footie pajamas… but she thought they would simply be too damned hard to get out of when she needed to pee in the middle of the night. Probably best to air on the side of caution there.

Half a Tank of Gas

The above image is a screen cap of the route we took yesterday. Nowata to Bartlesville to Muskogee to Wagoner to Pryor to Claremore and finally back to Owasso. We ended up burning through half a tank of gas, and hit a ton of stops between. Did we find much of anything in the grand scheme of things? Not really… but it is mostly the thrill of the hunt. The entire event started in part because a few weeks back we had found all sorts of cool stuff at the clearance section of the Muskogee Wal-mart. I had opted not to pick a few things up, as had my wife and we had been kicking ourselves ever since. So from Bartlesville we decided to head over to Muskogee and see if they still had it.

I have to say we struck out 110%, because not only did they not have what we were wanting… they had zero signs of ever having this massive clearance section in the first place. I wandered around the store trying to find any place it could have gone… but I am guessing more than likely after two weeks they had shipped it all off to be written off by Wal-mart… which is essentially how Sooner Surplus gets all its stuff. While we were in town we ran by there as well, but there was nothing really new to look at, and since we didn’t need mens suit coats or scooters… their newest acquisitions… we went on our merry way. It was at this point we got the brainstorm to meander our way back to Owasso through all the towns along the way.

What was fueling my wife in this endevour is visions of school supplies dancing in her head. Friday night we had to run out to the Owasso Wal-mart for something… and back in the home and garden section they had all of their back to school leftovers piled up in a huge heap and discounted down to truly silly prices. As a result we ended up with 20 index card boxes for 10 cents each, 40 plastic rulers for 10 cents each, 6 packages of her favorite flair clone markers for a quarter a piece, 11 really nice 8 pocket file folders for a quarter a piece, misc notebooks for around a quarter, gluesticks 4 for a quarter, and a really nifty storage ottoman for the loft for 5 bucks. All told we walked away with a massive amount of stuff for less than 40 bucks.

Quality not Quantity

While I did not necessarily find a huge stockpile of stuff in our trip, I did find some definitely awesome items. Friday night at Target I did one of my routine trips through toys to look for clearance, and found they finally marked down the Fury starfighter from Star Wars the Old Republic. This is the one that comes with the Darth Malgus mini-figure and is the same star ship that Sith Inquisitors and Warriors pilot in the game. Of all of the Lego sets that have been on the market, this is hands down the one I have wanted the most. The problem is it debuted for like $120 and there was no way in hell I would ever purchase that. However target had it marked down to $60… so I snapped that puppy up.

While on our whirlwind trip of Wal-mart clearance, I did encounter one really nice thing in Wagoner. When the Hobbit movie sets were released, the on that I knew I immediately had to have was the Unexpected Meeting set that included a model of Bags End. I have always loved Hobbit architecture and the Baubleshire was hands down my favorite area of Everquest 2. So since a Hobbit hole existed… I had to have it. This set originally debuted at around $60, and Wal-mart had it marked down to $25 so it was a completely no brainer to pick it up for that.

So while I did not find a large volume of sets, I got two of the ones that I had been wanting the most, so I call our half tank of gas a complete success. My wife on the other hand picked up a handful of things, included several scarves that she had been hunting for at the Claremore Wal-mart. The thing we keep marveling at is just how grossly inefficient the pricing is. We would see the exact same product on clearance at three stores… and in each case it would be a completely different price. There were several cases where we might have picked an item up at another store… had it been priced the same way it was at a previous store. I remember seeing the same action figured priced for $7, $5, and $4 at three different stores in the clearance bin.

I am assuming this is because each store has a certain amount of autonomy in their pricing practices. However as a consumer, I find it all a frustrating mess. Granted I am likely exploiting the hell out of these practices by hitting multiple stores in the same day and sampling the best prices at each. I just find it humorous that I never see this level of chaos at say a Target, where everything is marked down in a neat and orderly fashion based on a specific patterned schedule. If you see something for sale at one store, you can go to any store in your area and are almost always going to find it the same price.

Wrapping Up

Even though we did not necessarily find a ton of items, we had a fun time wandering around the state looking for things. It was a nice drive, we just wish we had brought our cameras for it. Today on the other hand I hope we pretty much just chill out close to home. My allergies are still killing me, especially after being exposed to that much “outside” along the tip. I am just about to get up and take something, and hopefully that will make things better. I hope you all have had a great weekend and that you have a good start to the work week.