Roulettes A Plenty

Good Morning Friends! This morning I have promised a Blaugust preview to some folks that are anxiously awaiting information, but first, you have to wade through a Final Fantasy post. Last night I hit level 77 on my Paladin job and I have been focused on leveling it before really spending much time catching up on the MSQ. I could have easily ground this job to 80 by now, but I am trying my best not to actually mindlessly grind. Instead, I am zipping around the world doing a bunch of different activities, all of which slowly contribute to my leveling process. My working theory is if I can approach the game in a non-frenetic manner and focus more on community interaction, that it might just build the recipe for staying power in the game. The times I have been the happiest in Final Fantasy XIV are the times when I was not focused on a specific goal, but just sort of hanging out and letting the game pull me in this direction or that.

Whatever mental block I had about doing the roulette seems to have passed and pretty much every day I do at least three of them. The first that I get out of the way is the PVP Frontlines Roulette and while I have begun to grasp how each of the maps works… it is in truth just a rapid dose of experience that I am concerned about. From there I tend to do a leveling roulette, which often produces the least predictable results because there is such a wide range of leveling dungeons available. Lastly, I queue for the 50+ dungeon and one of the things that I am marveling at is just how many dungeons there are in this game that is still relevant. I am also shocked at just how fast I remember the specific boss mechanics of a given dungeon. I just start pulling and before long I am back in the flow of doing the dungeon and even remembering where most of the chests are. I do however think they might have removed a few chests at some point because I pulled back to a location that I am almost certain a chest used to be in Amdapor Keep.

The other thing that I have been doing a lot of is Hunt logs for Sacks of Nuts. I noticed the other day that there was some gear on the Hunt vendor that was ultimately a significant upgrade to my previous level 80 warrior tanking gear. So I am slowly acquiring pieces of that set through doing the daily hunts, which do not inconsequentially add up to a sizeable amount of free gil. The other focus that I am doing each day is my Beast Tribe dailies. I have wrapped up all of the ARR tribes other than the Ixal and have moved forward to finishing up the Vanu and starting the Vath. I am still doing at least three quests a day for Ixal, but I find the crafting dailies to be the most taxing and try my best to spend the rest of my allowances elsewhere. I will end up with a level 50 carpenter as a result of the Ixal quests, but that entire process of crafting is more than a bit draining. I realize there are easier ways to level but I honestly prefer to brute force craft than to drag it out forever.

Another thing that has happened is the release of the Endwalker Benchmark. You can download the Benchmark and it serves as a way to do a few different things. Firstly you can test out your gaming rig to determine how well it is going to run Endwalker when it releases. Secondly you can play with the character creator and save appearances that you can then load later in the full game, which allows you to really devote all the time you need to making sure you craft the perfect Bunny Boi. I crafted a Bun, and while I was surprised that I could have facial hair, it is still not really my jam. It is going to take an awful lot to pry me away from that Lala Life. I cranked all of the settings up to the maximum and ran the test at 4k and it came out as “Very High” with an average FPS of 98 which seems perfectly cromulent for Endwalking.

Over on the Blaugust discord there has been discussion about wanting details surrounding this years Blaugust. I am not quite ready to announce everything, but I thought I would at least give folks a preview of the calendar. This year is a reversion back to the more traditional pre-pandemic Blaugust as well as shortening the whole thing to largely take place within the month of August. Thursday July 15th I will be making the official “Announcement” post with all of the details contained within, but this calendar image should at least give you some idea of the plan. If you have ever participated in a Blaugust it is going to feel fairly familiar with no wild deviations this time around.