Last night was an evening largely about unlocking content. As part of the post 80 sequence of events there are two new dungeons to unlock. The first can be found in the Crystarium and the second is in Eulmore… but you have to exit the main city area to see that it is available. Both involve a very short amount of questing before you get the unmistakable instant unlock sound. Both are required for doing expert roulette, which is a thing I plan on doing at least nightly for the bonus bookrocks.
Last night I set about working on my gear situation as a whole. When you level by only ever running main story quests and generally speaking doing dungeons once before moving on… you sorta end up with a mishmash of gear. Since gear in Final Fantasy XIV is largely just a case of stats being stuck on an item, rather than the items themselves having much in the way of differentiation… I tend to take a fairly structured approach to gearing. Essentially I seek out whatever item is my lowest and replace it… eventually trickling upwards into replacing items that have barely any gain.
In running the two dungeons last night that needed to be unlocked I managed to get several pieces of the jewelry at level 430… so a neck, wrist and earrings. My current lowest items were my rings and my belt so I spent bookrocks judiciously on upgrading each of those slots. Now I really need a ring to drop in the 80 dungeons so that I can jettison my 415 that I am holding onto as the previous best in slot. I think my next bookrock purchase however is going to be saving up the 500 to get the slightly better weapon. Now however the benefit is diminished as other than one ring I have 430 or better in every slot for a cumulative score of 430.
What I really care about is survivability and not necessarily gear score… so after the weapon upgrade for damage output, I will probably be focusing on the two more expensive slots which are chest piece and legs, as they tend to have more stats on them. With one of our healers I feel perfectly fine right now. however since I did nothing but solo-queue all night long… with PUG healers I felt really squishy. Now of note… all but one of those healers were scholars which now have to fiddle with the pet instead of it being an optional mini-game. As such it could just be people getting adjusted to the new playstyles, because the time I was healed by a White Mage felt perfectly fine.
In other semi-related news… I am on my nonsense again. Robosquid Armada is somewhat become our particular brand for anytime we are doing stuff that we probably shouldn’t be doing. It all started in World of Warcraft when we were attempting to run all of the content in the game level locked and undergeared. The whole level scaling system patch broke this concept but since then we have recycled it particularly anytime we were going to do some grouping with people not necessarily in the Guild/Free Company structure. With the loosening of the restrictions on the Cross-Realm Linkshells, I decided to remake Robosquid Armada in Final Fantasy XIV.
In theory this will be a launchpad for linking up people on the Aether data center for filling slots in groups and eventually in raid content. Since Final Fantasy XIV is still somewhat archaic in the way invites work, it means that we will have to be online at the same time… which last night was the core problem. I have a list of various people on Aether that are not on Cactuar that I attempted to contact last night but failed miserably. If you are a regular on the blog or on my various social media channels ping me in game on “Belghast Sternblade@Cactuar” and I can arrange an invite to these here shenanigans. Right now it is full of people from Cactuar so it isn’t very properly cross-realm as of yet.