Passport to the Crags

by

This past weekend was a weird mix of extremely busy periods and extremely languid gaming stretches. On Friday itself we went through a whirlwind of activity where we got a ceiling fan installed in the bedroom, went and got copies of our birth certificates, found a place to do passport photos on zero notice and managed to talk an appointment only passport application location to see us as a walk in because they were thankfully not busy. However the whirlwind of activity meant that I will not have to take a day off work in the future to try and wrap things up. I personally found the whole process of applying for a passport to be exceptionally stressful given that neither of us have had one before.

Saturday I managed to get in on a run clearing Eden with nearly a full free company group, and I joined while downstairs which means I was not on voice chat. That is probably not something I will repeat again because I more or less felt lost the entire time. However I managed through it enough to finish… with Meca-Titan and Hydra-Leviathan being the hardest fights to adjust to. I do think it is sorta badass that we are seemingly on a path to repeat much nastier versions of all of the Primals we fought before. I also think I will be trying to get in on a guild group on the night this opens from now on, rather than waiting as late in the week as I did.

My main project for the weekend was getting the Dragoon leveled to 71 so that I could start doing Trust content with it. It is weird the way I think of the various jobs as though they are different characters, even though technically it is all the same Lala Bel each time. Through all of the running of content I managed to collect enough poetics to deck the Dragoon out in most of a full set of Scaevan gear, and the pieces that I didn’t pick up on the right side of the gear screen were augmented by items picked up in the first Trust dungeon.

Another side note is that I managed to pick up another full set of barding, this time the Expanse barding originally from Bismarck. I actually managed to pick up two full sets of it, and the second of which I gave to Ashgar who happened to be standing there at Heaven on High as well. I mean I could sell stuff on the market place but would ultimately rather find most of it a home amongst my friends. Some of the things that are dropping in the dungeon have to have wreaked havoc on the prices as all of the Thavnarian gear seems to drop there as well. It is a nice bonus incentive for leveling in this fashion however to pick up previously hard to get items.

I should have in theory taken the Dragoon as a win for the weekend… but instead I started pushing up the Red Mage in Palace of the Dead. It is weird going from Heaven on High bad to PotD, because it is very clear that they learned several lessons between the two designs. PotD seems actually a much harder dungeon experience than HoH, and I actually managed to wipe out completely on the third floor of a run last night. In part this is due to a bunch of tanks starting to try pulling everything to the portal and waiting for folks to burn it all down… which sorta works at times in HoH but does not work at all in PotD. It is still a much better leveling experience for dps than pretty much anything else available in the game. Largely I like the fact that I do not need to give a shit about gear in the least, and I get to run dungeons while listening to random tracks from the amazing FFXIV musical back catalog.

It was a good if not busy weekend, but we got a lot accomplished in the real world as well as me ticking a bunch of boxes in the virtual world. On the Blaugust front people continue to trickle in and we are up to I believe as to the time of writing this 34 entrants. There was apparently a problem with some of the links on the previous list. They came directly from the sign-up sheet and a handful were missing the scheme part of URI… aka the https:// bit. This should be updated and the new list of folks looks a little something like this.

Once again a reminder that you still have plenty of time to sign up and participate in this years running of Blaugust. Here again is the summary of links with pertinent information related to that.