Month: July 2019

of Serialized Content

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No one really wants to see another post about my leveling the Dragoon in Heaven on High. Admittedly I find the Deep Dungeon systems to be some of the more relaxing gaming in Final Fantasy XIV as it allows me to chill out in a rogue-like setting while listening to the amazing soundtrack. Instead this morning we are going to talk about some event related stuff. Blaugust has always been a blogging thing, but I am wondering if I should have changed the branding this year. Over the years I have attempted to make this a more relate-able process given that maybe writing big chunks of text is not really your thing.

Sure it is my hope it keep text based media alive and well for the foreseeable future, but I realize that while I bemoan the lack of written guides that have been replaced by video guides… YouTube can be a much more tactile format for interacting with your fans. Similarly while I am not the type to hang out on Twitch, Mixer or your streaming platform of choice… for some folks that is absolutely a community that they feel extremely welcome in. In the end what is really important is the serialized content aspect of this upcoming month. The concept of picking a thing that brings you joy and doing it over and over for an entire month until you reach a point where it feels unnatural to not do the thing.

After doing this daily blogging thing for years, it feels extremely awkward when I decide that I am too busy or otherwise engaged and cannot make a post. My morning posts are a long extended albeit mostly one sided dialog that I am having with you my readers. I think there is something deeply therapeutic about sharing your thoughts openly with the world in an uninterrupted manner. There was a time when the default method of long range conversation was to sit down and write a letter, that then could be read and re-read to digest its meaning. On some level I view my blog as me sharing a long extended open letter with you all.

However if traditional blogging is not your thing there are a lot of other methods for serialized content that could also be equally engaging with your readers/viewers. This morning I am going to throw a few ideas out there.

  • A Tumblr where you share a sketch every day and maybe post a few lines about your inspiration for it.
  • Stealing this directly from Grace, an project blog where you commit to working on something fairly daunting in scope and take us along for the journey as you post progress shots. This would be truly awesome for cosplay folks especially as you could see how the costumes are put together.
  • A nightly twitch stream where you treat it as though it were a talk show and either cover topics that you want to talk about or invite friends on to have discussions.
  • A micro-podcast where you release rapid-fire five to ten minute clips about something that happened that day or something that was on your mind.
  • Posting a recipe a day to social media and talking a little bit about the end product.
  • While still a blog, just talking about your media viewing habits… what you are enjoying watching and what hasn’t sat that well with you.
  • Posting a photo every day to Instagram visually illustrating your travels or the day to day flow of your life. Each time throwing a few words along with the photo to help us understand what is going on.
  • Releasing a song or a snippet of a song to SoundCloud every day and maybe talking a little bit about your inspirations behind it.

Basically all of those things are completely valid ways to approach Blaugust along with hundreds more that I am not even thinking about yet. I give you the freedom to take this concept and run with it and remake Blaugust in your own image. While yes I like the revitalization effect of this thing that I do, I think it is more important that it be treated as an event focused on self expression and the serialized nature of doing a thing multiple times during a single month. Get creative and impress us all by doing a thing that we never would have thought of.

While I decided to do this thing several years ago… it is now as much yours as it is mine.

Nerfed I guess

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Last night I could have done a bunch of things, but instead of doing something productive… I piddled around on alts. Timing and a last minute run to Walmart made me unavailable to run content for Thalen which bums me out a little bit. My focus was largely to get the Dragoon to 61 and capable of starting in on Heaven on High. I noticed that Main Scenario Roulette even had DPS as the bonus role, so I decided to roll the dice and give that a shot again. What I ultimately needed was just a little over half of a level to hit 61.

Since I talked about this yesterday, this time around I managed to pull Praetorium and even with adventurer in need bonus… I just managed to get slightly more than half of a level. I am thinking at some point they stealth nerfed how much experience this was giving out during the 5.01 patch making it significantly less rewarding. Maybe they saw the numbers that told them that people like me were using it to fix gaps in the MSQ while leveling in Shadowbringers and they wanted to nip that in the bud. Regardless it is still a viable way to bridge the gap but it now takes two days worth of runs instead of a single day.

I will likely keep doing this thing given it is a really low pressure way of getting across that chasm. Sadly I think I am out of level 60 characters apart from the Gunbreaker, and I am doubting that I want to tank Castrum/Praetorium on a class that I have barely played at all. I could in theory start up a Dancer and push it across to Heaven on High levels. More likely I will start mixing up HoH and PotD runs and pushing some of my 50s to 60s to start this process all over again. I have no clue at all why I am suddenly obessed with leveling all of the things, but I apparently am.

As far as Eden goes I still have not touched it. Right now I know Warenwolf and Thalen both will need it and we are tentatively making plans for Friday night pending on a bunch of variables. Today is effectively my Friday this week, as I am taking tomorrow off to deal with a bunch of errands that need to be taken care involving locations only open during the 8 to 5 window. So in theory I probably will have some time to push characters between those activities. We had an installer reschedule us for 8:30 in the morning so it is my hope that we have our afternoon completely free.

As far as Blaugusty things… we continue to pick up steam as we roll towards the official start in a little less than two weeks. Timing this thing is always a challenge because I don’t want to make the announcement too far ahead of the event that we lose steam before it has officially started. Last year I posted on I believe the second week of July which seemed maybe a bit too early. I effectively waited a week later and so far it seems to be providing enough of a reminder and catalyst to get people engaged.

So far we are up to 29 official sign-ups with still a few more who will likely be buzzer beaters that I know are planning on participating.

I will also likely keep providing a daily summary of links for latecomers to have a quick way of onboarding.

A Little Poker

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First off we are going to start with a bit of a retraction. I am not sure if it was me, or a situation of circumstances or the difference between two dungeons. Yesterday I said that Main Scenario Roulette was a great way to jump across the gaps in Final Fantasy XIV. Yesterday we also had a patch, 5.01 with some tweaks applied. Yesterday I said that Main Scenario Roulette should be worth a full level, and that had been my own experience when I took my Bard from barely into 70 all the way to 71 in a single run. However last night… it was not my experience.

There are some variables at work that might account for it. Firstly I have been getting Praetorium a lot more than Castrum Meridianum of late which is a longer and more major boss laden dungeon. All of my “oops a full level” experiences that I recall were with Praetorium and last night I drew Castrum from the hat. The end result is that my fresh level 60 Dragoon only managed to get just shy of a half level. Still worth the time, especially considering that Castrum is a way faster run than Praetorium… however I was really hoping for that full level so I could start Heaven on High. I will of course be running it again tonight and will report back the results if I manage to pull Praetorium.

The big thing that went in with the patch was Eden in a new location called The Empty, which I went through the motions of unlocking last night. This is supposedly the Alexander/Omega style raid made of up four parts. I had a fairly shitty day yesterday and didn’t really feel like I had raiding in me, and as such I lost out on running with the rest of the Free Company. I will likely pug this either tonight or later this weekend to gather up at least one piece of gear for the week.

I have no earthly idea where the above image came from, so apologies for the lack of attribution. However it seems as though Eden has a fixed drop pattern which is a huge improvement over a specific boss being able to drop a handful of things but a random assortment each time. Next it seems like Eden is way more generous with 8 fixed drops each time you run a given floor. For reference you need the following pieces to turn in for a finished piece of gear.

  • Helm – 2 Items
  • Chest – 4 Items
  • Gloves – 2 items
  • Belt – 1 item
  • Legs – 4 items
  • Boots – 2 items
  • Accessories – 1 Item each

What is interesting about this system is that never before could you get your chest piece or your legs in a single week. However with this… that is absolutely doable pending you keep holding your roll for a specific floor and only spending it on a specific slot. This could get super grindy, but would allow you to have more specific control over which items you are getting rather than hoping on random chance to complete something.

I mostly spent the night screwing around on the Bard again, and even if Main Scenario potentially got nerfed… it is still an excellent source of poetics. You get 600 of them in a single go from completing the duty, which I have been using to kit out the Bard in gear… which in its upgraded form lasts quite a ways into the Shadowbringers content. I am one run away from getting my Trust their first level up, which still seems like a nonsense amount of time needed to level them. I feel like it is worth my time considering the vast stable of alts that I would like to push up so I can piddle with them as well.

On the Blaugust front we are up to 20 sign ups and I know of a handful more people who intend to but have not actually filled out the form. One thing I thought I would address is that the form collects your email address, not because I intend to use it for nefarious purposes but I have had situations in the past where I needed to reach out to a participant about something but had no stable means of doing so. We’ve had scenarios where companies have ponied up prizes to be distributed, which is not necessarily something I have actively courted… but just in case it happens again I feel like I need a reliable method of communication.

The list of participants is currently looking like this:

You can view the full post if you want details but for those not wanting to bounce back and forth a bunch here comes a quick summary.

Killer Riffs

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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

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.