Hidden Gorge

Last night I spent the majority of my evening hanging out with Grace and Mor in Final Fantasy XIV. First I have to give a massive shout out to Thalen who crafted a full set of Samurai gear and had it waiting on me in the mailbox by the time I logged in for the evening. Other than the fact that he is just an amazing human being, I think he was wanting to quell any possible excuse I had for not playing. In the past I have talked about hitting walls where I just don’t have the gear level to be able to complete the next story dungeon. In one quick motion, Thalen wiped all of these excuses off the table.

In part I came back specifically last night because there is an event happening that I have missed out on the last two times it has been in place. Essentially Yoshi-P and crew are exceptionally good at bribing people to do content that might be less than popular. Essentially you are rewarded for running less popular Dungeons, Raids and PVP Activities with special tomestones that you can then turn in for a number of cosmetic or non-game-play impacting items. These include some pretty rare chase mounts and as a result it seems way easier to grind out some bookrocks rather than hoping and praying for a drop to happen. I started the evening with Grace and I running Praetorium for xp and the 10 Irregular Tomestones of Law that you get for completing it.

From there at the suggestion of Mor I wound up trying out some PVP in the form of the Hidden Gorge map. This is effectively Summoners Rift or whatever it is called in your MOBA of choice, as you protect minions as they attack towers. If you take out two towers you can effectively assault the “Nexus” and win the match. The match itself is constrained to twenty minutes and you will be rewarded 5 special bookrocks and 50 poetics per completion as well as 500 wolf marks for a lose and 1000 for a win. So it seems like a pretty chill way to sit back and get your event currency while also racking up marks that you can spend on some of the sweet PVP cosmetic sets.

I can’t say that I actually did a great job, but I did manage to effectively hold my own. This is probably where I am going to be living for the next bit because it also seems to be a reasonable way of leveling alternate jobs. I spent the majority of the evening working on my Bard and managed to get it to 73 before the evening was over. Between running a Praetorium and a bunch of Hidden Gorge matches, I should be able to rack up some of those mounts in relative short order. Does this mean I finally have traction in Final Fantasy XIV again? Quite possibly… but I still have yet to finish up the main story quest which I will likely be doing in between PVP matches.