Killer Riffs

Every so often I get something stuck in my head and am forced to push forward with it. This week it has been leveling more characters to 71, and the present fervor has largely been focused on the Bard. I spent an excessive amount of time in Heaven on High either solo or with some FC friends, and managed to finish off the ascent to 70 last night. I’ve been going around since then unlocking the various spells for the quests that I completely ignored during the process of leveling. This is a weird place to be in because the game will even let you drag an ability to the hotbar… but you can’t use the spell until you have completed the quest.

The other thing I have been doing an awful lot of is Main Scenario Roulette, which effectively is always going to be either Praetorium or Castrum Meridianum… aka the last two raid like dungeons required as part of the ARR main story quest. In both cases they have now disabled the ability to skip any cut scenes, which means you will be surrendering 30 minutes of your life. However this proposition becomes well worth it when you consider that doing this scenario at level 70 will pretty much make you instantly level 71. Even at level 79 when I completed this while working through a gap in experience to the next level… it was worth almost 75% of a level.

One of the things that Final Fantasy XIV is excessively good at is incentivizing content that no one wants to run. These were painful at level and continued to be a painful process to get through as a fledgling player who was trying to random queue for them. Now they become an experience in watching how players have figured out how to optimize the process to take the least possible amount of time in doing so. Sure the player gets to watch every single cutscene, but they also will get lost in a heartbeat if they are unable to keep up with the optimized routing through the place.

I did some experimentation and they are absolutely not chain running, as I maybe got 10% of a bar filled when I was not getting the Roulette bonus. This has become a ritual for me pretty much every night to get one free level on one of my alts and then go on about my business. I am absolutely now using this as a way of jumping across the gap at 60 or 70 to fix those missing runs on the latter that I talked about the other day. In truth I really liked both Praetorium and Castrum Meridianum because they felt extremely epic when we ran them with a full party of 8 players. Now it feels sorta like going back and soloing Molten Core.

Blaugust Stuff

• Naithin – Time to Loot – Participant
• Aywren – Aywren Sojourner – Mentor
• Bhagpuss – Inventory Full – Mentor
• Dan/Magimos/Magi – My Indiecator – Participant
• Syp – Bio Break – Mentor
• Paeroka – Nerdy Bookahs – Mentor
• Stargrace – NomadicGamersEh – Mentor
• Shintar – Going Commando – A SWTOR Fan Blog – Participant
• Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril – Mentor
• Izlain – Me vs. Myself and I – Mentor
• Wilhelm Arcturus – The Ancient Gaming Noob – Mentor
• UltrViolet – Endgame Viable – Participant
• AvvaN – TechJoy2Day – Participant
• Kaylriene – Kaylriene – Newbie
• Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut – Mentor

As far as Blaugust goes… the sign-ups are starting to trickle in and I have been transferring them from the private sheet over to a more public listing. Additionally if you read this post early in the morning you may have missed that I added a Media Kit page that was requested. As time allows I will be moving some more of the event information over to that page so that it is kept in one spot. Additionally I want to go back and stub in data about the previous runnings of the event.